Categories
fiction short stories

ssshhhh

I had an irresistible notion. And researched and wrote a story around it in four days. (Four days during which I also put together an entire book, interior and cover layouts, and input the author’s corrections to another.) Quite a short story, possibly the shortest I’ve written in living memory, but still. Submitted it. Revised it to the editor’s satisfaction. Sold it.

And may not talk about it in public until after it’s published next year under an inside-joke pen name. State secrets.

But I felt it deserved a post since, if I’m calculating correctly, it’s the seventh story I’ve completed in calendar year 2012. I remember (not fondly) years when it was a major accomplishment to finish one. Of the seven, only two have not definitively sold yet (one already published)—and one of those two is kinda sorta half sold, just not to the point the deal can be announced.

It is also a wonder to me that I have, a month before year’s end, four stories already scheduled for first publication in 2013, plus one in 2014.

  • [obscured and unacknowledged story, some month or other, I’m not telling]
  • “A Man Not of Canaan,” GigaNotoSaurus, April or May
  • “You Deserve,” Bad Seeds (Prime Books), July
  • “The Hyena’s Blessing,” Zombies (Prime Books), August
  • “The Oily Man,” Handsome Devil (Prime Books), February 2014

And two reprints, which I haven’t mentioned previously though I’ve known about them for a while. My 2012 American-teens-on-vacay-in-Europe stories “Tattooed Love Boys” and “Wheat, Barley, Lettuce, Fennel, Salt for Sorrow, Blood for Joy” will reappear in, respectively, Wilde Stories 2013: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (July) and Best Gay Stories 2013 (August). Yay.

Categories
BrazenHead fantasy novella

dispatch from the unholy head of brass

The third novella from BrazenHead, The Grigori by Joshua Skye, has gone to press. The book-book should start showing up for sale in the usual on-line places within a week or so, while the e-book will take a little longer.

Mr. A lurks in the derelict grand hotel, a haunt of junkies and their dealers, hustlers and runaways, petty criminals.

On a night like any other, a man, a notorious family-values politician, dies in the hotel’s ruined lobby. Suspended from a splendid chandelier, the body is bound with duct tape as if for some sordid S&M scene gone terribly wrong. The man has been disemboweled, intestines spilling from the gash in his belly to the dusty floor. Mr. A is watching, watching.

“You know, everyone seems to think that angels are these cute little innocent baby-looking m*th*rf*ck*rs but the Bible describes them very, very differently… Angels are angry, crazy and mean as hell. They have four faces and only one of them is human. Their primary job isn’t to save our souls or help us find love. They like to kill and they’re good at it.”

Who is Mr. A? Mr. A is death. Mr. A is salvation. Mr. A is love.
MR. A IS THE GRIGORI.

The Grigori answers the question, ‘What would happen if we met an old-school angel?’ That it happens in Pittsburgh amid a wasteland of hustlers and drugs does not diminish either angel’s—or this story’s—reckless dominion.

—Steve Berman, editor of the Wilde Stories annual anthology series


I’m disappointed Publishers Weekly elected not to review Joshua’s book, breaking BrazenHead’s streak. Even a negative review might have been better than resounding, brazen silence. But these things happen and I remain proud to publish The Grigori. It’s a thoroughly chilling little story that offers a bracing corrective to the contemporary notion of angels as benign, wispy entities rather than the stern, awe-inspiring, and terrible beings reported in all the Abrahamic traditions. As a writer myself, too, I’m startled and shaken by Joshua’s inspired vision of methamphetamine as well as his deft deployment of physical passion. (In plainer words, there’s hot sex. If that isn’t a recommendation I don’t know what is.) Go. Buy. Read.

Categories
fantasy short stories spec fic

demon child

Of the four anthologies Steve Berman is currently putting together for Prime Books, I was to begin with only confident of producing a story for one: Handsome Devil (despite what the announcement on the far side of that first link says, the book was represented to me as concerning incubi). And so I did, “The Oily Man,” a long tale from the subcontinent.

The other three…as noted last week, horror fiction just doesn’t interest me. Ghosts, zombies, evil children, bleah. I refused flat out to consider Shades of Blue and Gray (the mythologizing of the US Civil War, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, strikes me as problematic). Ultimately, Steve badgered me into writing “The Hyena’s Blessing” for Zombies—a zombie story I suspect no self-respecting horror aficionado will embrace as true-blue horror, though I hope they’ll like it anyway.

Nevertheless, during the four-month struggle to produce “The Oily Man,” I also put a good deal of work into another subcontinental tale, “The Cat in the Moon,” aiming it at Bad Seeds. It grew very complicated. The current draft is hovering around 9,000 words and the evil children have yet to make a proper appearance.

Not precisely despairing of “The Cat” (but not precisely hopeful about it either), in September I put it aside for a bit and started an entirely different subcontinental tale, also to involve evil children, “The Tale of the Ive-ojan-akhar’s Death.” That one’s at 4,500 words around now and, again, the bad seeds are more hinted at than apparent.

Actually despairing by this point, in early October I started a third evil-child subcontinental story, no title yet, which got to 900 words and stalled out. This one I have small expectation of ever completing, a thought that does not leave me distraught. “The Cat” and “The Tale,” though: those I intend to finish one day now that the pressure to make evil children their focus is off.

Because over the two days last week of Hurricane Sandy’s battering at my windows I wrote “You Deserve,” a 6,000-word story set in our own world (it squeaks by as dark fantasy, I think, though not horror), which—after some negotiating and testy revising—Steve has purchased for Bad Seeds: Evil Progeny, to appear from Prime Books next July.

Gasp.

The title is quoted from the lyrics of “Deserve,” a lovely, melancholy electropop track by The ¥oung Professionals, which coincidentally popped up on my iTunes just as I commenced this paragraph.