Burly Tales
Page 23
I have found that joy while reading Tolkien’s own work and in much of the fantasy and speculative fiction I’ve relished, both in books and on television and movie screens. I’ve found it here, gleaming like red-gold rings in these stories, after a long, dark year of global pandemic. I hope you’ve glimpsed some flicker of that joy in this volume as well. My guess is that you have.
—JEFF MANN
Pulaski, VA
March 2021
Artist: Jazz Miranda
About the Storytellers
EVEY BRETT is a queer writer who lives in Southern Arizona with a three-legged Carolina dog and some cats that like to interfere with her writing by jumping or sleeping on the keyboard. She’s had numerous short stories published with Lethe Press, Flame Tree Press, three Darkover anthologies, and elsewhere. She’s attended Clarion, Taos Toolbox, and the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBT Writers, and is a first reader for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Visit her online at eveybrett.wordpress.com.
B.J. FRY grew up on the hill of a repurposed rock quarry, near a local nuclear power plant. After she moved, graduated from college, and stopped glowing at night, she started an exciting career reading insurance policies. She’s married to her own Prince Charming and together they have two sons, a streetwise dog, and a totally not obscene number of cats. Inspired by her spare-time hobbies of reading romance novels and playing video games, she began pursuing her interest in writing by focusing on short stories that titillate and entertain.
JOHN. T .FULLER hails from the north of England. He works with computers by day, writes by night and enjoys walking, real ale and hair metal. You can pick up a copy of his novella When the Music Stops or his short story collection The Trojan Project (jointly authored with Richard Rider) online. He hangs around on Twitter as JohnTFuller and cannot promise not to put sausages on all of his book covers.
JOHN LINWOOD GRANT is a professional writer/editor from Yorkshire, UK, and has had some sixty short stories and novelettes published during the last few years in venues such as Lackington’s Magazine, Vastarien, Weirdbook, and Space & Time, and in several award-winning anthologies. He writes dark contemporary fiction and period supernatural tales, both queer and straight. He is also the editor of Occult Detective Magazine and various anthologies. His first collection, A Persistence of Geraniums, was set in the Edwardian era, and a further collection of his weird fiction, Where All is Night, and Starless, will be out from Trepidatio in 2021. He is ageing, sarcastic, and has his own beard.
JONATHAN HARPER is the author of the short story collection Daydreamers (Lethe Press), a Kirkus Review’s Indie Book of the Year for 2015. His writing has been featured in such places as The Rumpus, The Rappahannock Review, The East Jasmine Review, Chelsea Station, as well as numerous anthologies. He is currently at work on a novel. Visit him online at thejonathan-harper.com.
ALYSHA MACDONALD is a writer, birder, and New Englander living in Germany with a semi-feral cat. She received her bachelor’s in English from Suffolk University and, like many of her fellow graduates, works in a field unrelated to her degree. You can find her on twitter @AlyshaMac_ or at alyshamacdonald.com.
JAMES K. MORAN’s speculative fiction and poetry have appeared in Icarus, On Spec and Glitterwolf, among other publications. Moran’s articles have appeared via CBC Radio, Daily Xtra, where he wrote for over 16 years, and Rue Morgue: Horror in Culture & Entertainment. Lethe Press published his horror novel, Town & Train. Moran’s first short-story collection, Fear Itself, will appear from Lethe Press in 2021. He blogs about peccadilloes at jameskmoran.blogspot.ca and is findable on Twitter @jkmoran.
CHARLES PAYSEUR is an avid reader, writer, and reviewer of all things speculative. His fiction and poetry have appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, and many more. He runs Quick Sip Reviews, has been a Hugo finalist fan writer, and can be found drunkenly reviewing Goosebumps on his Patreon. His collection The Death of Paul Bunyan and Other Strange Stories is due from Lethe Press. When not hunting Hodags across the wilds of Wisconsin, you can find him gushing about short fiction (and his cats) on Twitter as @ClowderofTwo.
Multi-award-winning and best-selling author/editor/anthologist ROB ROSEN (therobrosen.com) is the author of Sparkle: The Queerest Book You’ll Ever Love, Divas Las Vegas, Hot Lava, Southern Fried, Queerwolf, Vamp, Queens of the Apocalypse, Creature Comfort, Fate, Midlife Crisis, Fierce, And God Belched, Mary, Queen of Scotch, Ted of the d’Urbervilles, and Sort of Dead. His short stories have appeared in more than 200 anthologies. He is also the editor of Lust in Time: Erotic Romance Through the Ages, Men of the Manor, multiple editions of Best Gay Erotica of the Year.
MARK WARD is the author of the chapbooks, Circumference and Carcass and a full-length collection, Nightlight. He was the Poet Laureate for Glitterwolf and his poems have been featured in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Skylight47, The Honest Ulsterman, Assaracus, Tincture, Cordite, and many more, as well as anthologies, including Lethe Press’ own The Myriad Carnival, whilst the most recent of which is Hit Points: An Anthology of Video Game Poetry, forthcoming in 2021. He was highly commended in the 2019 Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and in 2020 he was shortlisted for the Cúirt New Writing Prize and selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry, now in its fourth year.
M. YUAN-INNES loves fairy tales in all shapes, shades, and sizes, and has rewritten Cinderella (“Golden Fish, Golden Slippers”) and Little Red Riding Hood (“Sharp Teeth”) in China, as well as Snow White with an anatomical variation (“Death and the Mother”). She writes the critically-acclaimed Hope Sze medical mysteries under the pseudonym Melissa Yi. When she’s not creating new worlds, she hangs out with her currently-bearded husband, their two children, and Roxy the Rottweiler. Find her on Facebook (Melissa Yi Yuan-Innes), Twitter @dr_sassy, and her website, melissayuaninnes.com.
ANN ZEDDIES is the author of the acclaimed Typhon series of novels. Her short fiction has been featured in Boys of Summer, Magic in the Mirrorstone, and Speaking Out: LGBT Youth Stand Up. The editor of this volume believes she is one of the kindest souls in all of existence, and may have written this bio for her.
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MATTHEW BRIGHT is a writer, editor and designer. His short fiction has appeared on Tor.com, Nightmare’s Queers Destroy Fiction, Lightspeed, Glittership, Harlot Magazine, Clockwork Iris, Queen Mob’s Teahouse and others, collected in Lambda Literary Award Finalist and Kirkus Best Indie Books of the Year selection Stories To Sing In The Dark. He is the editor of several anthologies, including The Myriad Carnival, Threesome, Clockwork Cairo and the Lambda Literary Award Finalist Gents. By day, he pays the bills as a book cover designer in Manchester, England.
JEFF MANN, who kindly provided the afterword, is the award-winning author of poetry and gay romance and erotica. He adores men and food, and both in generous proportions. His Salvation: A Novel of the Civil War won both a Lambda Literary Award and the Pauline Réage Novel Award. He has also been inducted into the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival Hall of Fame. Mann teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
STEVE BERMAN has edited numerous anthologies of queer and speculative fiction. He has been a finalist for the Andre Norton, Golden Crown Literary, and the Shirley Jackson Awards. He won the Lambda Literary Award for the unique erotica anthology, His Seed. He resides in Western Massachusetts.
Copyright © 2021
ISBN: 1-59021-084-0
Cover and Interior Design by Inkspiral Design
Published by Lethe Press.
All rights reserved.
All the stories are copyright 2021, as is the intro and afterword.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the authors’ imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or
actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.