Glowing Review

SFSignal: 5 stars for "Lotophagi" in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year 2

"Excellent... Dense, psychedelic, the kind of piece you'll want to read twice."

---Laird Barron, multiple-award-nominated author of The Imago Sequence

WAR OF THE WORLDS: FRONTLINES

Just got the final proof today for "News On The March", a short-short story which will appear in:
WAR OF THE WORLDS: FRONTLINES.

Stay tuned for further messages from this station. It doesn't look good, folks. I am hearing something about a heat ray, whole blocks of buildings reduced to ash. This is a bad time to be in Jersey...

"Lotophagi" in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror Of The Year, vol.2, from Night Shade Books

It's out. Here. (LGT cover, which was just released)

I am swooning. I've blogged way too much already about my childhood romance with OMNI magazine. It was thus the honor of my life to take a turn in the cybernetic editing dojo with Ellen Datlow, who is the best there is. Surprisingly, when we finished on the mats I was in one piece, and Sifu was pleased. As am I. Only minor corrections for continuity in the beginning of the piece, which Ellen caught. This ended up fomenting an additional, truly horrifying paragraph tossed offhandedly over my shoulder at me by Serena while I was working on "Lotophagi" out loud.

The story deals with a fictional collective farm at the western edge-tip of Felony Flats in Portland, right out where the tentacles of forest begin to snake from Ross Island to Milwaukie. Once you get out around Johnson's Creek, you start seeing horse barns.

I juggled the geography slightly so that the collective farm in question would not be mistaken for the one I was reading about in the weeklies, which I will not name. Those people sound like good folks, not at all like the broken douchebags in my story.

No, those came from a nasty squat-house where I used to live, presided over by an even nastier human being. I imagined what it would be like if this character was in charge of a collective farm, grafted two old ideas together (with massive blasts of inspiration from the works of fellow Lovecraftfest regular Laird Barron, whose story "Strappado" also graces the anthology) and the story wrote itself.

I imagine there's something in there to offend everyone. Yet it is works such as these that sell. Every time I pull out the stops and tell a story the way I want to tell it ("Write what you feel like writing," as another great editor, Jetse de Vries, continually exhorts)... it is those that actually get looked at. For some reason, most of them turn out to be horror or alternate-history. Don't ask me. I just work here.

I wanted to write that story because everyone at that squat was creepy and noble in their own ways, its Fagin the most of all. Problem is, absolute creepiness and absolute nobility do not make for a fun time to be around. He had the potential to be a holy goof, an accidental shaman. The problem was, he had no boundaries at all and he was what they used to call a sociopath, which I term him for convenience. Current psych vocabulary would probably be "borderline."

I don't think he ever killed anyone, and certainly wasn't in league with some prehuman race, but it was very hard to get to sleep in that house on a dark winter night. I forgive him, and I feel sorry for him, but I'd still cross the street to avoid him. I wrote about him so I could move on.

In the process, this wild Dantesque tale emerged about the rest of the people there. I realized that "Deuce" was nothing but a bit player the whole time. The horror inherent in that situation was inherent in each and every one of us. Apart from the countercultural fetish-commodity titillation factor, I think that's what got the story the notice it did, a quality that one collaborator identified as brutal honesty. Heavy on the 'brutal.'

Must get back to work now, just lagged too hard on putting the picture up. More news as things develop...

GO EAST, YOUNG MAN, GO EAST*

In EVERYDAY WEIRDNESS, a neat little flash-fiction website that throws you a new fictional curve ball every day of the year. I've noticed a lot of Absurdism, Horror and convoluted SF, all very fun to read just to see what nugget of back-handed wisdom that day has coughed out at you. These are good people, and this was a good idea.

The days have been flying by. I barely remembered it was the 27th of August when "Go East" came out. There have been a whirlwind of incredible things and incredible projects going through here. Many wolves to feed when some of those projects start becoming paying ones, starting with the biggest wolf that has been sitting on my chest for ten years. (Hell hath no fury nor Dante such sweet revenge as, 'Here's your check. You ruined my life. Now fuck off.')

But even that wolf was never that big. It all depends which one you feed. I learned how to feed the white one a long time ago, so the Churchillian-black one now looks kind of like the scavenging mutt it always was.

I can't talk about the big projects here yet, just a few more weeks. But I can say that Crooked Man 5 is half-done as a first draft, about four years ahead of schedule. On June 17th, I walked away from a wreck that should have ended my life. No power on Earth can keep The Rest Of This from happening. The Green Man has touched me this summer, and everything is coming up the same color. Now for Harvest Time, very soon...

"The Weapons Shop" in 'Featured Stories', SpecFicWorld.com

http://specficworld.com/fiction/DVSHORT.aspx?Id=41

In my own reading, Spider Robinson was the first SF writer to point out the particle-beam weapons system that Nikola Tesla tried to sell to both FDR and British Prime Minister Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. One huge Spider fan I know is CBS radio's own Big Jim.

Jim advanced the idea you are about to see. I find it truly horrifying in a way... but in a way, I kind of wish it would happen.

I wrote a lot of cynical things during the Bush Administration. I was sure it was Game Over. Game On passes strange, many times, but the winds have begun to blow hard out here. Hopefully, I too can get a job picking up the downed branches from the storm of the previous regime. Or at least mucking biofuel someplace.

In any case, "The Weapons Shop" was inspired by a great painting by Kenn Brown (http://www.mondolithicstudios.com .) Kenn told me he titled the painting, in turn, from A.E. van Vogt's SF chestnut 'The Weapons Shops of Ishtar."

Completely off-topic, but I finally get to nod three hands away at that old Dutch master, whose story "The Enchanted Village" was the best damn piece of SF I was ever exposed to in elementary school, period, with the exception of "Night of the Cooters"...

Anyway, enjoy. More on the way. ---ed/

Pseudopod 106

Pseudopod 106
"Jihad Over Innsmouth"