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Thursday, November 5, 2015

Campaign Exclusive E-copies of "Dreams from the Witch House" have been sent!


Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror Ebooks have E-mailed to all Backers!

Attention Dreams from the Witch House campaign backers: we are happy to report that we have e-mailed each and every backer the download links for both the EPUB and MOBI editions of the ebook with instructions on how to open/use the files.

If you did not receive this e-mail, please let us know at: darkregions.help@gmail.com

Trade paperbacks will be entering production by November 10th, meaning fulfillment of the paperbacks should begin by early December. Of course, we'll keep everyone up-to-date on this process as the paperbacks get closer to the fulfillment stage.

Deluxe hardcover editions are still in pre-production and not expected to enter production until December/January due to signature sheets needing to be circulated.

For now, we hope that everyone enjoys the ebook editions of Dreams from the Witch House. As you'll notice, every story is accompanied by a full page color illustration by Daniele Serra, thanks to you guys, our backers, for unlocking multiple stretch goals.

Thanks again to all of you for your patience and support, and please make sure to e-mail us with any questions or concerns at: darkregions.help@gmail.com

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Book Review: The Monstrous

Edited by Ellen Datlow
Publisher: Tachyon Publications, 2015

“Knowledge comes at a price, my mother would have said, and often that price is our sense of well-being. Or our innocence. Or our ability to sleep without nightmares.”

“The Beginning of the Year Without Summer” – Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Monstrous

Beautiful Monsters.
We love them, most recently evidenced by TV shows like Dexter and Hannibal. It’s the vicarious thrill of experiencing the human grotesque at a safe distance. To this end, I have noticed a trend in both television and horror films of late where two things are very obvious: (i) we are the monsters and (ii) we cannot escape the monsters.                                                                  

This is a trend I'm happy to say is also beginning to infiltrate mainstream horror fiction and a significant number of stories in Ellen Datlow’s latest offering are either obviously such stories or can be read as such.


The stories included in The Monstrous are diverse enough to create a collection that will appeal to a number of literary tastes. Yet like many superior anthologies, together, they still provide readers with a cohesive whole. Some stories are quiet and catch you by surprise, such as Glen Hirshberg's "Miss I'll-Kept Runt", which begins innocuously with summer wind and Pudding Pops, but slowly and menacingly devolves into what must surely be a parent's worst nightmare come true. Not so quiet in its terror is "The Last, Clean, Bright Summer" by Livia Llewellyn. The title of the story should serve as a fair warning to anyone lulled into a false sense of security by the dulcet intimations that such a title might infer. Llewellyn’s story is ruthlessly brutal|, the resulting imagery shockingly intoxicating; like some horrific nightmare that cannot be escaped until it finally runs its course.

"A Natural History of Autumn" by Jeffrey Ford is a dreamlike narrative that evokes Hayao Miyazaki – strikingly surreal images and descriptions that deliver terror in the way otherness bleeds into what we view as our everyday reality. Many of the stories collected here subverts our ideas about what is ‘normal’ or ‘reality’, a tactic used to good effect to introduce the reader to the disconcertingly close relationship we have with the Other. This thing we think we know nothing about turns out to be something we know very well. A young child (flesh of our flesh), stories that we’ve known all our lives as myths but ended up being true (do we birth the monstrous?), abuse at the hands of those who are meant to protect us (nothing – and no-one is what it seems). In Caitlin R. Kiernan's "The Beginning of the Year Without Summer", nothing and everything matters. Our lives exist on a precipice, awaiting the next roll of the dice. And if the call is a bad one, we might just discover what we are truly capable of.

The 20 stories collected here do not set us apart from the notions of horror contained within it. I hope this is a trend that continues. Perhaps it’s the result of a world becoming more self-aware (here’s hoping!); regardless, with The Monstrous, Ellen Datlow has once again delivered a collection of high-quality fiction that’s sure to please a wide variety of horror readers.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

dream space

In a dream last night, I saw a photo of myself in a magazine doing something in a previous dream that I'd had several months ago. I immediately recognised the photo and the place at which it had been taken (not as having been a dream within the dream, but as part of my overall dream reality).

I have places, whole buildings that remain the same and that I often return to in my dreams. But this kind of dream reflection was a first, at least, that I can remember. So that was cool.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

WIP

Inside, Astrid and I waited in the old Dutch house's enormous lounge. The floors were darkwood, covered in expensive-looking rugs. Klaas and Thabo had made us wait while they prepared...something. 

"Where do you think they are now," Astrid asked, "the people who used to live here?"

"Who knows and who cares. Probably locked away behind a six-foot wall in Sandton, bankrupting their insurance provider."

"You're kind of defensive, you know."

I didn't want to get into an argument and to be honest, I was curious about what KIaas and Thabo wanted to show me. Also, I can admit to myself that I was enjoying it out here, away from the city. I had been trapped there so long, so constantly, that I had forgotten any goddamn sense of normalcy. Right now, even with three people I barely knew, out on a once-thriving wine farm that had been abandoned and reposessed by a boertjie and his Zulu boyfriend - it felt like the most normal thing in the world.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

Huzzah for getting fitter

Bought a bike, second-hand, took it for a spin. Didn't keel over and die. Hurray!

Repeat.


Thursday, September 24, 2015

Sad face post

I've been putting off writing this post for months, because it makes me sad to think about it, and once you write something down it becomes concrete and there's a kind of finality to it. But for whatever reason, today - today is the day, then.

Over the past year, I have been slowly making peace with the fact that I am beginning to move away from collecting hard copy books. There are a number of reasons for this, and let me stress here that these are personal reasons and I am not trying to convince anyone of anything.

Firstly, for environmental reasons. I realise that deforestation for the feeding of cattle is a much bigger problem than pulping for making books - hell, if people read as much as they ate meat, I reckon we'd have a much better society overall. But the paper industry is also a pollutant, but I am not getting into that here.


Secondly, I want to travel more, and have been steadily pulling myself from a life in which material possessions restrict me from doing so. I realise that things can be put in storage, but without going into long, boring-ass details about why I would rather not do so, I'll just say that I think this is my next phase in the Campbell/Jungian cycle and leave it at that.

ZEN, BITCHES.

I still have a small collection of books (see the pics here) and I'm not sure how many of them I will actually be able to get rid of. Probably none. I need some physical books around me as a buffer against the outside world.


Do I believe we should entirely switch to digital books? Emphatically, NO. I do not nearly trust digital mediums the way I trust inked text on a piece of paper - and here I am talking in the context of cataloguing. I also do not at all believe that printed books' days are numbered. Dark Regions Press, for example, just completed a tremendously successful Kickstarter funding a new collection of short fiction HERE. In short, the campaign required 25K and raised 41K. People clearly still want to read physical books.

This has in no way been an easy decision for me. Books have been integral to my life for as long as I can remember - more so than people, in a sense. I smell books. I put other things on top of a book if it unnerves me because I believe in their power.

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Good reads

The Red TreeThe Red Tree by Caitlín R. Kiernan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Some of the most beautifully uncanny prose I have read this year. America's haunted past comes to life to sink its claws firmly into the present, reminding us that some things are too powerful to ever run away from.

View all my reviews

Thursday, August 27, 2015

I watched Jurassic World and it was awful

Twitter, like, read each block from top to bottom for chronology, eh?










Wednesday, July 15, 2015

SATAN! ISM!

This entire thread.
That is all.

Moron marked in black.



Wednesday, July 8, 2015

How to NOT write a good short story

This is so ridiculous, I don't even.

"It's possible to write about anything in the world, but the slightest story ought to contain the facts of money and blood in order to be interesting to adults. That is, everybody continues on this earth by courtesy of certain economic arrangements; people are rich or poor, make a living or don't have to, are useful to systems or superfluous. And blood – the way people live as families or outside families or in the creation of family, sisters, sons, fathers, the bloody ties. Trivial work ignores these two facts."

Full Article: How to write a great short story

AYFKM?

I would laugh about statements like the crap above, if not for the fact that it has the potential to do aspiring writers an enormous amount of damage. 

I have had it up to my nostrils with New Zealand publishers' rejection of genre fiction. I'm currently putting together an anthology of genre fiction that includes Joyce Carol Oates and Caitlin R. Kiernan, among others (as well as fiction by New Zealand writer Tamsyn Muir), a pitch I once again had to sell to an American publisher because of the lack of support for genre writing in NZ.

The worst of it? People like Paula Morris are teaching Creative Writing courses at university level (Auckland University, in this case). Can you imagine the limitations being imposed on writers in such an environment? "Write about family and money." 

...

It's only 12pm and I already need a shot of tequila just to wash down the bad taste in my mouth.




Monday, June 15, 2015

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

currently reading ...




















If you have any interest in H.P Blavatsky or Theosophy (or the occult in general), this is an illuminating and well-written account of her life and the people and places that influenced her. I have another lined up after finishing this (by Marion Meade) - should be interesting to see how they compare and if they focus at all on different aspects.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Monday, May 4, 2015

Story acceptance - wahey!

My short story "In Bloom" will appear in Black Wings of Cthulhu V, edited by S.T. Joshi. Below is the complete TOC:


  •     Plenty of Irem  -  Jonathan Thomas
  •     Diary of a Sane Man -  Nicole Cushing
  •     The Woman in the Attic -  Robert H. Waugh
  •     Far from Any Shore -  Caitlín R. Kiernan
  •     In Blackness Etched, My Name  -  W. H. Pugmire
  •     Snakeladder -  Cody Goodfellow
  •     The Walker in the Night  - Jason C. Eckhardt
  •     In Bloom  - Lynne Jamneck
  •     The Black Abbess  -  John Reppion
  •     The Quest -  Mollie L. Burleson
  •     A Question of Blood  - David Hambling
  •     Red Walls -  Mark Howard Jones
  •     The Organ of Chaos -  Donald Tyson
  •     Seed of the Gods -  Donald R. Burleson
  •     Fire Breeders  - Sunni K. Brock
  •     Casting Fractals -  Sam Gafford
  •     The Red Witch of Chorazin -  Darrell Schweitzer
  •     The Oldies -  Nancy Kilpatrick
  •     Voodoo  - Stephen Woodworth
  •     Lore  - Wade German

Friday, April 10, 2015

Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror

I am thrilled to announce a fantastic line-up for the Dreams from the Witch House anthology, forthcoming from Dark Regions Press.

TOC:

Shadows of the Evening by Joyce Carol Oates

Untitled (forthcoming) by Caitlin R. Kiernan

The Woman in the Hill by Tamsyn Muir

The Body Electric by Lucy Brady

The Child and the Night Gaunts by Marly Youmans

But Only Because I Love You by Molly Tanzer

Dearest Daddy by Lois H. Gresh

All Gods Great and Small by Karen Heuler

The Face of Jarry by C.L. Hellisen

Every Hole in the Earth We Will Claim As Our Own by Gemma Files

Pippa's Crayons by Christine Morgan

Eye of the Beholder by Nancy Kilpatrick

All Our Salt-bottled Hearts by Sonya Taaffe

From the Cold Dark Sea by Storm Constantine

Spore by Amanda Downum

The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette

Down at the Bottom of Everything by E.R. Knightsbridge

Mnemeros by R.A. Kaelin

Cthulhu's Mother by Kelda Crich


Daniele Serra has begun creating  artwork for the stories. My thanks to everyone who submitted stories for consideration. Watch this space for updates!

Thursday, April 2, 2015

RE. Queries for WITCH HOUSE Submissions

I've had several people contact me via my blog about whether their submissions for Dreams from the Witch House had been safely received.

As blog comments don't necessarily give me the writer's name/pseudonym, or an email address, these queries are hard for me to follow up on.

Please send all queries to: junonite AT gmail DOT COM

There are only a few submission notifications left to send out.

Thanks!

Saturday, March 7, 2015

“We all float down here!”

Just when you thought you'd finally conquered your clown phobia, they go and decide to remake IT.


And Cary Fukunaga is directing it. 


This will end us ALL.

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Dreams from the Witch House: UPDATE

The Indiegogo campaign for ''Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror" has come to a mega-successful end, thanks to all of your amazing support for the project. With your help, not only were we able to reach our initial goal of $17 000, we extended the campaign beyond three extra stretch goals which, frankly, is outstanding and by default renders everyone who supported us outstanding, too. The final total raised was $28 747.

Here is a quick breakdown of the unlocked stretch goals:

UNLOCKED - Stretch Goal ($22,000) - All interior illustrations by artist Daniele Serra will be created and printed in full color in the book.

UNLOCKED - $23,500 (stretch goal) - Artist Daniele Serra creates another color illustration which will only appear in campaign-exclusive editions of the ebook, trade paperback and digital art book + All campaign funders receive HD Dreams from the Witch House digital art book.

UNLOCKED - $25,000 (stretch goal) - Daniele Serra's artwork will be incorporated into the design of the book with spot illos, chapter headings and design elements + all campaign backers receive $10 in store credit on DarkRegions.com.

The final collection will be something truly special. Take a moment, imagine it. Am I right? Keep your eyes peeled for updates via the campaign page.

There are a lot of people to thank for the success of the campaign. In addition to everyone who backed the project, I want to extend my special thanks to Chris Morey and everyone at Dark Regions Press for their hard work. Furthermore, all the writers involved in the project, who have not only sent me some fantastic stories, but also reposted links and updates. Daniele Serra, whose work is truly something special. Also S.T. JoshiJason V. BrockDouglas DraaRue Morgue and Mike Davis.

I think we can now safely dispatch of two silly notions: (a) women don't write Lovecraftian fiction; (b) readers are not interested in reading Lovecraftian fiction written by women.

I SAID DISPATCH.

Kthxbai and Ftaghn to you all.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

GOTHIC LOVECRAFT TOC


I am happy to announce that S.T. Joshi and I have finalised the TOC for GOTHIC LOVECRAFT, and it's a doozy!

  • Donald R. Burleson, “The Shadow over Lear”     
  • Don Webb, “The Revelation at the Abbey”
  • Caitlín R. Kiernan, “As Red As Red”
  • Jonathan Thomas, “Old Goodman Brown”
  • Lois H. Gresh, “Square of the Inquisition”
  • Mollie L. Burleson, “A Yuletide Carol”
  • John Shirley, "The Rime of the Cosmic Mariner"
  • Donald Tyson, “Curse of the House of Usher”
  • Mark Howard Jones, “The Rolling of Old Thunder”
  • Nancy Kilpatrick, “Always a Castle?”
  • Robert S. Wilson, “Four Arches”
  • Gwyneth Jones, “The Old Schoolhouse”
  • Orrin Grey, “Dream House”
  • Lynda E. Rucker, “The Unknown Chambers"

The anthology will be published by Cycatrix Press later in 2015. Watch this space!

Wednesday, January 21, 2015
















DARK REGIONS PRESS -- PRESS RELEASE:

DREAMS FROM THE WITCH HOUSE: FEMALE VOICES OF LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR

Edited by Lynne Jamneck

Join us for the January 27th Indiegogo campaign launch of our new anthology project Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Lois Gresh and others. If the campaign reaches its funding goal every story will feature an original illustration by artist Daniele Serra.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror

I'm delighted to present the wraparound cover art by Daniele Serra for the Dreams from the Witch House anthology:


























Is it not gorgeous?

Make sure you follow Dark Regions Press of Facebook for all the latest updates on the collection, including news about the Indiegogo campaign launching soon!