Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the novella The Warren (Tor.com) and story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press). His story collection Windeye and his novel Immobility were both finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann’s Tongue. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. His work has been translated into French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Slovenian, and Spanish. He teaches at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles.
Vince Haig is an Oxford-based illustrator, designer, and author. As Malcolm Devlin his first collection, You Will Grow Into Them, is forthcoming in 2017 from Unsung Stories. You can visit Vince at his websites: barquing.com and MalcolmDevlin.com.
L.S. Johnson lives in Northern California, where she feeds her cats by writing book indexes. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Interzone, Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, and other venues, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and longlisted for the Tiptree Award. Her first collection, Vacui Magia: Stories, is now available. Currently she’s working on a fantasy trilogy set in 18th century Europe. She can be found online at traversingz.com.
Michael Kelly is the editor of Shadows & Tall Trees, and Series Editor of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction. His fiction has appeared in Black Static, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Weird Fiction Review, and others. As editor he’s been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Fantasy Society Award.
Rebecca Kuder’s essays have appeared in The Manifest Station, Jaded Ibis Press, Lunch Ticket, and The Rumpus. She has an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and has taught undergraduate- and graduate-level creative writing classes. Besides writing fiction and nonfiction, she makes one-of-a-kind sock monkeys (www.sanitycreek.com). She lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with her husband, the writer Robert Freeman Wexler, and their daughter. Rebecca blogs at www.rebeccakuder.com.
Tim Lebbon is a New York Times-bestselling writer from South Wales. He’s had over thirty novels published to date, as well as hundreds of novellas and short stories. His latest novel is the thriller The Family Man, and other recent releases include The Silence and The Rage War trilogy. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson Awards. Future books include The Rage War (an Alien/Predator trilogy), and the Relics trilogy from Titan.
The movie of his story Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, was released Hallowe’en 2015, and other projects in development include Playtime (an original script with Stephen Volk), My Haunted House with Gravy Media, The Hunt, Exorcising Angels (based on a novella with Simon Clark), and a TV Series proposal of The Silence.
Find out more about Tim at his website timlebbon.net.
Reggie Oliver is an actor, director, playwright and author of fiction. Published work includes six plays, two novels, six volumes of short stories, including Mrs Midnight (2012 winner of Children of the Night Award for best work of supernatural fiction), and, the biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed (Bloomsbury 1998). His stories have appeared in over fifty anthologies. The Sea of Blood, selected stories including some new, was published by Dark Renaissance in 2015 to great acclaim. To be published shortly: The Boke of the Divill, a novel (Dark Renaissance) Holidays from Hell—a new collection of stories from Tartarus, and The Hauntings at Tankerton Park and How They Got Rid of Them—a children’s book with over 80 illustrations by the author (Zagava Press).
Lynda E. Rucker grew up in a house in the woods full of books, cats and typewriters, so naturally, she had little choice but to become a writer. She has sold more than two dozen short stories to various magazines and anthologies, won the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Short Story, and is a regular columnist for Black Static. Her first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange, was released in 2013 from Karōshi Books, and Swan River Press published her second, You’ll Know When You Get There, in 2016. Also in 2016, her short play “#goddess” ran on London’s West End for two weeks as part of a larger anthology of horror plays.
Robert Shearman has written five short story collections, and between them they have won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edge Hill Readers Prize, and three British Fantasy Awards. His plays for the theatre have won the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the World Drama Trust Award, and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. He is a regular writer for BBC Radio, and his own interactive drama series The Chain Gang has won two Sony Awards. But he is probably best known for his work on Doctor Who, bringing back the Daleks for the BAFTA winning first series in an episode nominated for a Hugo.
Christopher Slatsky is the author of Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales (Dunhams Manor Press, 2015). He currently resides in the Los Angeles area.
Simon Strantzas is the author of Burnt Black Suns (Hippocampus Press, 2014), Nightingale Songs (Dark Regions Press, 2011), Cold to the Touch (Tartarus Press, 2009), and Beneath the Surface (Humdrumming, 2008), as well as the editor of Aickman’s Heirs (Undertow Publications, 2015), a finalist for both the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards, and the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He also edited Shadows Edge (Gray Friar Press, 2013) and is co-founder and Associate Editor of the non-fiction journal, Thinking Horror. His writing has been reprinted in Best New Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and published in venues such as Cemetery Dance, Postscripts, and the Black Wings series. His short story, “Pinholes in Black Muslin”, was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award, and his collection, Burnt Black Suns, a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives with his wife in Toronto, Canada.
Genevieve Valentine is the author of the novels Mechanique, The Girls at The Kingfisher Club, Persona, and Icon, and over sixty short stories. Her essays and reviews have appeared at The New York Times, the AV Club, and The Atlantic, among others.
Beatriz Martin Vidal was born in Valladolid, Spain. After studying law for a time and then Fine Arts and Illustration in Bologna, Italy, she now works in her home city as a prize-winning fine artist and illustrator. She has had several exhibitions of painting and has recently illustrated Ovid’s Metamorphoses and a book of classic Russian tales, published in Spain. Beatriz Martin Vidal is a professional illustrator, and has one of those collections in which it’s easy to become absorbed for hours. Her drawings and paintings depict a world that’s just slightly magical, where the butterflies on a child’s dress can come to life and birds act as guides. Her subjects are mainly children, which she draws in a way that avoids ‘cute’ and truly reveals the beauty of children and the way they view the world.
D.P. Watt is a writer living in the bowels of England. His collection of short stories An Emporium of Automata was reprinted by Eibonvale Press in early 2013, and his second collection, The Phantasmagorical Imperative and Other Fabrications, was published in 2014 with Egaeus Press and is now available in a paperback edition. He won the Ghost Story Award 2014 for his story “Shallabalah” published in The Ghosts and Scholars Newsletter, no 26. His third collection Almost Insentient, Almost Divine was published in 2016 by Undertow Publications. You can find him at The Interlude House: www.theinterludehouse.co.uk.
Michael Wehunt grew up in North Georgia, close enough to the Appalachians to feel them but not quite easily see them. Robert Aickman fidgets next to Flannery O’Connor on his favorite bookshelf. His short fiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, The Dark, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, Aickman’s Heirs, Shadows & Tall Trees, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror
, among others. His debut fiction collection, Greener Pastures, was released in 2016.
Alligator Tree Graphics (www.alligatortreegraphics.com) is run by writer and designer Robert Freeman Wexler. As a book designer, he has created cover and interior designs for many works of weird and other fiction, including works by Lucius Shepard, Steve Rasnic Tem, T.E.D. Klein, Joe Hill, Ramsey Campbell, Graham Joyce, Ian R. MacLeod, Dennis Etchison, and a hundred more, for publishers including the University of Iowa Press, PS Publishing, Subterranean Press, Tachyon Publications, and of course Undertow Books.
As a writer, his stories have appeared sporadically in various magazines and anthologies, including Polyphony, Postscripts, The Third Alternative, Electric Velocipede, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Books include novels The Painting And The City (PS Publishing 2009), Circus Of The Grand Design (Prime Books 2004), novella, In Springdale Town (PS Publishing 2003 and reprinted in Best Short Novels 2004, SFBC, and in Modern Greats of Science Fiction, iBooks). He has recently finished a new novel, The Silverberg Business. He lives in Yellow Springs, OH with his wife, Rebecca Kuder, who has a story in this anthology.
Marian Womack is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop (2014), and of the Creative Writing Master’s at the University of Cambridge (2016). She was born in Andalusia and writes in English and Spanish. Her fiction in English can be read in Apex, SuperSonic Mag, Weird Fiction Review, and the anthology Spanish Women of Wonder. She has contributed translations to The Apex Book of World SF (vol. 4) (ed. Mahvesh Murad) and The Big Book of SF (ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer). She co-runs Ediciones Nevsky/NevskyBooks, a Madrid-based small press specialising in European & Spanish slipstream in translation, and can be found with different degrees of regularity around London and Cambridge. She tweets as @beekeepermadrid and her website is marianwomack.com.
Copyright Acknowledgements
Foreword © 2016 Michael Kelly
Introduction © 2016 Simon Strantzas
“The Strangers” by Robert Aickman. First published in The Strangers and Other Writings.
“Rangel” by Matthew M. Bartlett. First published in Rangel.
“Little Girls in Bone Museums” by Sadie Bruce. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2015.
“Violet is the Color of Your Energy” by Nadia Bulkin. First published in She Walks in Shadows, Silvia Moreno-Garcia & Paula R. Stiles, eds.
“Fetched” by Ramsey Campbell. First published in Horrorology, Stephen Jones, ed., as “Nightmare.”
“Guest” by Brian Conn. First published in The Bestiary, Ann VanderMeer, ed.
“The Marking” by Kristi DeMeester. First published in Three-lobed Burning Eye #27.
“Seaside Town” by Brian Evenson. First published in Aickman’s Heirs, Simon Strantzas, ed.
“Julie” by L.S. Johnson. First published in Strange Tales V, Rosalie Parker, ed.
“Rabbit, Cat, Girl” by Rebecca Kuder. First published in XIII: Stories of Transformation, Mark Teppo, ed.
“Strange Currents” by Tim Lebbon. First published in Innsmouth Nightmares, Lois H. Gresh, ed.
“The Rooms Are High” by Reggie Oliver. First published in The Sea of Blood.
“The Seventh Wave” by Lynda E. Rucker. First published in Terror Tales of the Ocean, Paul Finch, ed.
“Blood” by Robert Shearman. First published in Seize the Night, Christopher Golden, ed.
“Loveliness Like a Shadow” by Christopher Slatsky. First published in Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales.
“Honey Moon” by D.P. Watt. First published in A Soliloquy for Pan, Mark Beech, ed.
“The Devil Under the Maison Blue” by Michael Wehunt. First published in The Dark #10.
“Orange Dogs” by Marian Womack. First published in weirdfictionreview.com
“Visit Lovely Cornwall on the Western Railway Line” by Genevieve Valentine. First published in The Doll Collection, Ellen Datlow, ed.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three Page 36