Rabid Transit: Long Voyages, Great Lies

Rabid Transit is a series of short anthologies published by a group of writers who call themselves the ‘Ratbastards’. It began as an outlet for their own work, then began to feature other writers; and has now reached this, its fifth instalment. The six stories in Long Voyages, Great Lies are loosely connected by themes of travel and escape. Let’s take a closer look at them...

Continue reading at Laura Hird's New Review.

Further links:
David J. Schwartz
F. Brett Cox
Heather Shaw
Meghan McCarron
Geoffrey H. Goodwin
Christopher Barzak
Alan DeNiro
Kristin Livdahl
Velocity Press

DH Interviews... Sean Wright

My first interview is now online...

On mapping Jaarfindor:
"The stories that come from Jaarfindor can't be mapped out as a whole, perfect picture. Why? Because I'm in the process of discovering what lurks in the cities and countryside, in the deserts and oceans, meeting new characters in exciting and challenging situations. I'm an artist, and as such I'm obsessed to explore the weird space of my imagination, writing down what I find there, making numerous pen and ink sketches as aide-memoirs. I constantly surprise and worry myself. Every time I venture there I find myself asking a simple yet for me a profound question: are you certain you witnessed that? Much of what I write isn't easy to quantify or label."

Read more at SF Site.

Further links:
Sean Wright

Jaarfindor Remade by Sean Wright

Reality's walls have been breached, and the worlds of Earth and Jaarfindor have become fused. Life in the capital of New Jaarfindor, Queen's Lynn (formerly present-day King's Lynn in Norfolk), presents several challenges: humans rub shoulders with insectiants, and you never know if the person next to you is an android; the mysterious shamutants, living beneath the city, may (it is said) erase your memories if you're not careful; the air is so polluted that decontamination is compulsory whenever you enter a building; and nobody knows what's "Out There" beyond the fog...

Read more at SF Site.

Further links:
Sean Wright
Crowswing

Vellum by Hal Duncan

'A burning map. Every epic... should start with a burning map,' says a character at the start of Hal Duncan's Vellum. Perhaps I'm reading too much into that comment, but it's tempting to see it as a call for the destruction of that most familiar epic-fantasy accessory. Certainly it serves as a warning that this unmapped and perhaps unmappable (in the conventional sense) fantasy does not play by the rules (at least, not by those rules)...

Continue reading at The Zone.

Further links:
Hal Duncan
Macmillan

Gift from the Stars by James Gunn

Aerospace engineer Adrian Mast finds designs for a spaceship in the back of a remaindered book on UFOs -- designs that, to Adrian's trained eye, appear workable. Could the plans be of extra-terrestrial origin? Adrian is determined to find out and persuades the sprightly bookseller Frances Farmstead to help him track down the author of the mysterious book. Naturally enough, they manage to do so, and the plans are genuine...

Read more at SF Site.

Further links:
James Gunn
BenBella Books

The Ephemera by Neil Williamson

The Elastic Press collections are a great way to discover new authors; but they also offer the chance to rediscover authors, to give shape to the styles and concerns of writers you've read maybe once or twice in a magazine, but whose voices have become lost in the din. My reason for wanting to read The Ephemera was Neil Williamson's superb contribution to The Elastic Book of Numbers (which, I thought at the time, was the only story of his that I'd read; though, as it turned out, there had been another). I wanted to find out what the rest of his work was like; I discovered that he has an intriguing and distinctive style that permeates the entire collection without becoming stale or predictable. Like to know more? Step this way...

Continue reading at The Zone.

Two books by Brendan Connell

The Translation of Father Torturo:

The Translation Of Father Torturo is the tale of Xaverio Torturo, seemingly a model of spirituality - pious, learned, and athletic to boot. But he has a dark side: born into a family which has produced (to paraphrase his uncle) its fair share of criminals but no cardinals, Torturo has ambitions towards the latter (and beyond) - and has no qualms about dealing with those who stand in his way. Nor is he above dabbling in the 'supramundane', by stealing saints' relics and having them sewn into his own body - to what end, only he knows...

Dr Black and the Guerrillia:

In the novella Dr Black And The Guerrillia, the good doctor has travelled to San Corrados to study the religious customs of the Yaroa people. Naturally, things don't quite go according to plan, what with Dr Black having all his supplies stolen, becoming caught up in the coils of a snake, and being hauled in front of a firing squad by the local People's Revolutionary Army...

Read more at The Zone.

Shriek: an Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer

This novel marks a return to Ambergris, the setting of Jeff VanderMeer's story collection City Of Saints And Madmen (though you don't need to have read it to understand and enjoy Shriek). One of the novellas in that earlier book took the form of a historical pamphlet, The Hoegbotton Guide To The Early History Of Ambergris by Duncan Shriek. This volume is presented as a biographical afterword to the 'Early History', written by Duncan's sister Janice after he has disappeared - or so she thinks, because Duncan has found her manuscript and made his own annotations...

Continue reading at The Zone.

Who Needs Cleopatra? by Steve Redwood

In the not-too-distant future, the inventor of time travel (known only as 'N') is visited by three beautiful, but dangerous-looking, women from the Time Police. They claim to be historians, wishing to record for posterity the story of N's journeys through time with his (now deceased) travelling companion, Bertie. N isn't fooled by this ("If these women worked in the records department, then I felt sorry for any filing cabinets which happened to get in their way"), but has no option other than to play along for the time being. What follows is the tale of a romp through history, with all the twists and turns you'd expect (and some you wouldn't). However...

Continue reading at The Zone.

Strange Tales, ed. Rosalie Parker

I wouldn't normally dwell on a book's packaging and presentation in a review, but I must make an exception for this, because the hardback edition of Strange Tales has obviously been made with loving care and attention. This volume is a beautifully presented object, right down to the thickness and smell of its pages (not that I make a habit of smelling books, but it's something that I couldn't help noticing). What's more, I gather that all Tartarus Press books are like this (I can't say from personal experience, as I've only set eyes on one other title of theirs before). In any case, its production values certainly lead one to expect great things from the book's stories.

Strange Tales appears to be something of a mission statement for Tartarus Press, comprising as it does 'fourteen new stories that represent, in our view, the very best writing in the fields of supernatural, fantasy and horror fiction; (says Rosalie Parker in her introduction). As the book's title suggests - and as its introduction confirms - it's also an anthology of 'weird fiction'. And, although we can all probably agree broadly on what that means, it can be quite a slippery term - as evidenced by the best two stories on offer here.

'Mr Manpferdit' by Tina Rath takes us to 18th-century London, where Dr Johnson and James Boswell are setting out to meet one Mr Manpferdit, who claims to be a centaur. Now, generally speaking, I don't care for stories where modern-day authors adopt an 'archaic' writing style, as Rath does here; but she tells her tale with great verve and humour, which made the whole thing highly enjoyable. And that's not to mention the marvellous ending... but that would spoil the story for you.

Dale Nelson's 'Shelter Belt' is a very different proposition: a subtle and evocative story about a young boy in small-town America whose mother falls in love. There is barely a hint of anything supernatural here; but be that as it may, 'Shelter Belt' thoroughly deserves its place in the anthology. These two stories are not the only good ones in Strange Tales, but they are the pieces I enjoyed the most; and they illustrate the diversity of the range of stories on offer.

Several of the pieces in Strange Tales tend towards quite a florid use of language, which is one thing that can put me off this kind of fiction: it often seems to get in the way of the storytelling. And these stories span the full range of success: 'The Descent of the Fire' by Mark Valentine and John Howard, in which 'The Connoisseur' investigates mysterious goings-on in a Shropshire village, didn't engage me at all. Quentin S. Crisp's contribution, 'Cousin X', the dark story of young Sasha and her enigmatic cousin, is more effective, but suffers from being overwritten in places. 'The Itchy Skin of Creepy Aplomb' by Rhys Hughes is also somewhat over-done, but its bizarre combination of formal language and slang forces the reader to approach the story on its own terms - and the story succeeds admirably. But I won't attempt to synopsise it; it's a story that truly deserves to be described as 'weird'!

Of course, judgements like these are more personal than most: someone else might like the use of language in a story that I dislike, or vice versa. The same goes for levels of gore in a story. There is plenty in a few of the tales in this book; and, once again, some are more successful than others. 'The Maker of Fine Instruments' by Brendan Connell tells the story of Willi, the pupil of one Charles Martens, who does indeed make the finest instruments - out of animals, that is. Connell makes his story compelling as well as grotesque, which is no mean feat. In contrast, Adam Daly's 'The Self-Eater', in which a man does exactly what that title suggests, is just unpleasant.

So, do the stories in Strange Tales live up the promise of the volume's appearance? As is so often the case with anthologies, some do and others don't. The best stories here are very good indeed; the worst don't have much to recommend them at all. That said, there are many stories in this volume which have something good (or more than good) about them; so, yes: Strange Tales is worth investigating for yourself.

This review first appeared in The Alien Online.