World Fantasy and British Fantasy Award winner Steve Rasnic Tem’s latest novel is Blood Kin, a Southern Gothic tale of the supernatural from Solaris. His latest collection is Here with the Shadows from Swan River Press. 2015 will see publication of his novella In the Lovecraft Museum from PS Publishing, and from Centipede Press Out of the Dark: A Storybook of Horrors: 225,000 words of previously uncollected horror short fiction.
Andrew Hook has made over 120 short story sales since he began writing, with recent appearances in Black Static, Interzone, Postscripts, and La Femme. His most recent novel is The Immortalists (Telos Moonrise) with a sequel, Church of Wire, appearing soon. His fifth collection of short stories, Human Maps, will be published by Eibonvale Press in 2015. He is co-editor of irrealist magazine Fur-Lined Ghettos, and can be found at www andrew-hook.com.
Jacurutu:23 is a ‘scissorman’, who cuts up and reassembles sound, video, art and reality itself to suit his own means. He is a professional wrestler and an audio-informant with numerous releases (as Jacurutu:3). He founded the Life-power Church as a pro-wrestling faction, built upon the ideas developed in his first book The Scissor Bible (2009), which has been reprinted as part of his biography I HARDLY KNEW ME. He works closely alongside Genesis P-Orridge and together they founded the One True Topi Tribe. He has written storylines as well as performing for numerous professional wrestling organisations, including his own, Tribute Championship Wrestling.
John Howard is the author of The Defeat of Grief and Numbered as Sand or the Stars, and the short story collections The Silver Voices, Written by Daylight, and Cities and Thrones and Powers. His collaborations with Mark Valentine have appeared in The Rite of Trebizond and Other Tales and The Collected Connoisseur. His essays on various aspects of the science fiction and horror fields, and especially the work of Fritz Leiber, Arthur Machen, August Derleth, M.R. James, and writers of the pulp era, have been gathered in Touchstones: Essays on the Fantastic.
Elise Forier Edie is a playwright and author. Her most recent publications include a dark fantasy story, ‘Leonor’, in Penumbra magazine, the fairytale ‘Black Dog’, in The Enchanted Conversation and the full-length play, The Pink Unicorn, by Indie Theater Now. Her first novella, ‘The Devil in Midwinter’ was released in 2013 by World Weaver Press. When she isn’t writing speculative fiction, Elise teaches classes in writing and theatre arts at West Los Angeles College.
Douglas Penick wrote the award-winning Canadian NFB’s series, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Leonard Cohen, narrator) and libretti for King Gesar (Sony CD) and Ashoka’s Dream (Santa Fe Opera). With a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, he wrote three book-length episodes from the Gesar Epic. Short pieces have appeared in, among others, Cahiers de L’Herne, Parabola, Bombay Gin, Agni, Hyperallergic, Descant, BODY, Tricycle, Publishers Weekly, Shambhala Sun, and The Chicago Quarterly. Publerati published his novel, A Journey of the North Star. Dreamers and Their Shadows appeared in 2013.
Paul Bradley lives and works in North Wales. He has a son, Oliver, who is a student at Cardiff University. Paul enjoys cycling, swimming, hill-walking, reading and writing in his spare time. His favourite authors include Richard Yates, Charles Bukowski, and Stan Barstow. Paul has had a number of stories published in the small presses and has written a collection of short stories that he is currently editing with a publisher. The genre that Paul enjoys writing within is realism but he enjoys the occasional leap of imagination into the world of fantasy or magic realism. ‘Beatrice Faraway’s Christmas Story’ was written for his nieces, Rachel and Ellie, as a special Christmas present.
David Rix is an author and publisher. He runs and creates the art for the specialist Eibonvale Press. His published books are What the Giants Were Saying and the novella/story collection Feather, which was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. In addition, his shorter works have appeared in various places, including many of the Strange Tales series of anthologies from Tartarus Press and Monster Book for Girls, from Exaggerated Press. As an editor, his first anthology, Rustblind and Silverbright, a collection of Slipstream stories connected to the railways, was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award in the Best Anthology category.
Mark Valentine’s stories have appeared most recently in Seventeen Stories (2013) and Selected Stories (2012), both from the Swan River Press, and his tales of occult detectives can be found in Herald of the Hidden (2013) and The Collected Connoisseur (2010, with John Howard), both from Tartarus Press. He has written biographies of the Welsh mystic and supernatural fiction author Arthur Machen and the diplomat and fantasist Sarban. He edits Wormwood, a journal of the literature of the fantastic, supernatural and decadent.
Yarrow Paisley lives in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, USA. His fiction has appeared in Shimmer, Sein und Werden, and Dadaoism: An Anthology (Chômu Press), among others.
Tara Isabella Burton writes for National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, the BBC, and more. Her fiction can be found at Arc, Shimmer, PANK, and Daily Science Fiction. She is doing a doctorate in fin de siècle French decadence at Trinity College, Oxford.
Andrew Apter is a psychologist whose professional experiences in the institutionalised world of insanity, bizarre behaviour, drug addiction, multiple personality, malingering and psychotic self-abuse have made him particularly sensitive to the foibles of humankind. He transmutes his professional experiences into weird fables for the sake of entertainment. He counts as his guides Freud, Wilhelm Fliess and the nineteenth-century tradition in psychiatry. He understands, however, that no matter how fantastic his stories, nothing can quite match the mad ferocity of reality.
Nathan Alling Long grew up in a log cabin in the Appalachian Mountains. His work has appeared in over 100 anthologies and literary journals, including Tin House, Glimmer Train, Story Quarterly, and The Sun. He has been a seven-time finalist for the Glimmer Train short story award and has won a Truman Capote Literary Fellowship, a Mellon Foundation Fellowship, and a scholarship to Bread Loaf Writers Conference. His collection of short stories, Everything Merges with the Night, is currently seeking publication. Nathan lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and teaches at Stockton College.
When not mowing, strimming, planting and hedge-cutting for his local council (not all of those things at the same time), Tom Johnstone writes tales of haunted gardens and other green spaces, such as the one published here, and others published elsewhere. He also writes weird fiction in other settings, and co-edited Horror Uncut (Gray Friar Press, 2014) with the late Joel Lane.
David McGroarty is a Scottish writer of strange and fantastic fiction. His stories have recently appeared in the anthologies Sensorama, Caledonia Dreamin’, Rustblind and Silverbright (Eibonvale Press) and Astrologica (The Alchemy Press). David was shortlisted for the James White Award in 2012. He grew up near Glasgow and now lives in London with his partner and their two sons.
Contents
CONTENTS
Strange Tales V Page 28