By Angelique Fawns
Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award winner Mary Robinette Kowal is one of my favorite author/teachers in the speculative world today. I’ve taken a few of her courses and been blown away by her insightful approach to storytelling and unique ways of dealing with hiccups in the creation process. She agreed to talk to me about her book, The Spare Man, a 2023 Hugo Award Finalist sci-fi mystery.
Andrew Najberg enjoyed a successful 2023 with not one but two outstanding novels from Wicked House Publishing, Gollitok and The Mobius Door.
Released in November, Gollitok earned Amazon’s coveted #1 New Release banner in the Occult Supernatural category. Set in post-nuclear Eastern Europe, Gollitok follows a government official as he joins a survey team to inspect the report of a disturbance at the abandoned Gollitok prison. The Mobius Door, released in April, is a novel of supernatural terror about dark forces freed by a curious young boy who opens a one-sided door in the woods.
The year 2024 is also shaping up to be another banner year for Najberg with two more major releases, The Neverborn Thief, a novel from Olive-Ridley Press; and In Those Fading Stars, a collection of short fiction from Crystal Lake Publishing.
Najberg, a teacher for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a senior editor for Symposeum magazine, agreed to an exclusive email interview with Lionel Ray Green for The Horror Tree.
“Horror Tree was actually a huge place in getting me into the modern horror market,” Najberg said.
“I’m a sucker for great folk horror, and Residents of Honeysuckle Cottage nailed it. Elizabeth is such a wonderful talent, and this was so different from so much I’d been reading. The book has such a strong seventies vibe to it that I fell in love with it right away. I knew I had to publish it.” – Robert P. Ottone, Publisher, Spooky House Press
Jacque Day: There is so much about Residents of Honeysuckle Cottage to savor. Beautifully written and characterized, an idyllic setting, the mysterious folklore (but is it?) rooted in a rural community. A couple, Laura and Monique, retreat from the city to Honeysuckle Cottage with their cat, Amelia, for a fresh start in life. We’ll come to their relationship, the setting, and the folklore in a moment. But first I’d like to linger on the opening scene, which begins with a soft warning from a local, Dougal, who tells them, “It rises like water, see, over your feet and into your shoes, and the cold starts.” This eerie sensation of cold contrasts with the heat of a bonfire: Laura and Monique are burning the history of the property they’ve recently acquired, including, as we soon learn, Dougal’s grandfather’s armchair. Why was it important for you, as a storyteller, to enter the story in this place, in the presence of chill and fire (and, in the subtext, erasure), with these specific words from Dougal?
By Angelique Fawns
James Davies had some big news to tell his family – four feral humans and fourteen well-mannered hens – he is a winner in the Writers of the Future Contest, and his story “Ashes to Ashes, Blood to Carbonfiber” will be published in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 40.
This means he is off to Hollywood for a gala this April, and winning this contest should be a big boost to his writing career!
Davies is a member of the Wulf Pack and one of my writing cohorts. Wulf Moon’s writing group is specifically geared to helping authors win this contest.
In each installment of this author series, we begin with a mini-Q&A with Spooky House Press publisher, Robert P. Ottone.
Jacque Day: The Disappearance of Tom Nero is a novelette of eighty pages with a distinctively surprising design. TJ Price himself intimates it could be a challenge to market. Why was it important for you to embrace this book and give it a home?
Robert P. Ottone: I like a challenge, but more specifically, I like to be challenged. Marketing isn’t a problem if the author pushes themselves, so I wasn’t worried there. The work speaks for itself; it’s a fantastic, intelligently designed piece of work brought to life not only by TJ’s masterful writing, but by Alexis Macaluso’s fantastic interior design.
JD: We’re not to be fooled by the length of Tom Nero—it is an intense book, and its impact far outlives the time it takes to read. How did you react to the manuscript when you first read it, both as a publisher and a reader?
RPO: I smiled, nodded, and knew I wanted it. I was very lucky in that TJ was kind enough to trust us with the book, so I was just filled with excitement about it. Still am. We didn’t execute everything I wanted to, vision-board wise, solely because my time has been focused in so many different places and on so many projects, personal and for Spooky House. But in the end, I think we have a fabulous book that I hope TJ is proud of.
Stacey Thomas is a contributor to Bad Form Review. She is an alumna of the Curtis Brown Creative novel writing course where she was awarded the Clare Mackintosh Scholarship for Black Writers. In 2021, she was announced as one of the three winners of HarperCollins’s inaugural Killing It Competition for Undiscovered Writers.
The Revels is her debut novel.
Below, you can watch the second part of our interview with Stacey:
(more…)
By Angelique Fawns
Max Blood is creating a new home for horror, and this venue is not squeamish.
“We’ve read it all before and will read it all again, so send us something that will really set us back on our heels. Terrify us. Make us squirm. Send us the best of your worst.”
Max Blood’s Mausoleum is a paying market, offering $30 per piece, and is planning to publish quarterly issues.
Max Blood says he “specializes in the weird, the cosmic, and the monstrous. With a passion for turning cryptid stories into positively horrific monsters, he has created many tales of monster horror. He has also dabbled in ghost stories and body horror.”
I’m working on a Halloween-themed story with Max Blood called “The Matron of Hawthorne Hall”, that will be used in his third issue which should be published around Halloween 2024.
Stacey Thomas is a contributor to Bad Form Review. She is an alumna of the Curtis Brown Creative novel writing course where she was awarded the Clare Mackintosh Scholarship for Black Writers. In 2021, she was announced as one of the three winners of HarperCollins’s inaugural Killing It Competition for Undiscovered Writers.
The Revels is her debut novel.
Below, you can watch the first part of our interview with Stacey:
(more…)
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