Three new publications & an unrelated photograph

Photo by me.

Peters went to the forest to shake off a darkness. He had dreamt of ancient woodland, of forest unknown, unknowable and complete.

Hot on the heels of Nubbins, I have two more stories in Interzone, in the very nice print edition of #295 and as an ebook bonus novelette accompanying the issue.

The novelette, The Window in the Forest, I wrote nine years ago, while desperately avoiding the dissertation I had to write for my M.A. in Photography at the University of Brighton. I also wrote quite a lot of it while working admin jobs in the council, so thanks go to Brighton & Hove City Council for that one.

An interesting & insightful review of my story Hand-me-Down over at Strange Horizons expressed dissapointment in the ending, which utilised the cursed-potato trope made famous by one of my favourite films. That story was borne of a desire to write a kind of homage to that film and that type of story. The Window in the Forest follows in a similar vein insofar as it was borne of a desire to write a very particular type of horror story, the cabin-in-the-woods horror story. (Even if the film of that name is terrible.)

Every publication is a pleasure, of course, even if it induces a certain panic: if I start to reread something once it’s out in print, I’ll find the spelling errors and bum notes immediately. So it goes. I’m particularly pleased with this one, though, as, like Nubbins, it had accumulated quite a few very nice rejections, and I was close to permanently retiring it from the rejection circuit.

On the third day of lockdown, Maria’s mother died.

Plague Dream I wrote in that weird interregnum between UK lockdowns, sometime in August 2020. At that point it really felt like the lockdowns would never end even though everyone was pretending otherwise. Perhaps we’re still pretending otherwise.

Of course the real threat is never where you think it is.

I have another story, due next month from a British publisher I’ve long admired. They publish very, very nice books, and their magazine is great. I’m excited. It’s another lockdown story. All of a sudden I feel quite prolific. More on that one soon.

In between writing the above paragraph and returning to this post, the publisher announced the line-up on Instagram, so I’m also pleased to say that my post-lockdown story Digging will appear in Cōnfingō 20, guest edited by the brilliant Nicholas Royle. I’ve loved Royle’s work since first reading The Obscure Bird in the 18th issue of the much missed Black Static, thirteen years ago (fucking hell!)

*

Subscriptions to Interzone are available here.

Subscriptions to Cōnfingō are available here.

Some back issues of Black Static are still in print here.

The ebook editions are inexpensive on Amazon. Here’s issue #18.

They’re also available at Weightless Books, though I couldn’t find #18.

The photograph from the top is unrelated to anything in this post, I just quite like it. I took it in 2014, I think, in one of the projection rooms of the Odeon branch on West Street in Brighton.