Categories
California fantasy fiction short stories

more stories

I am delighted to report that my romantic little story of a boy and a dog (and, too briefly for Charlotte and Jane’s liking, an irascible cat), “Shep: A Dog,” will appear early next year in Cleis Press’s annual Best Gay Romance, edited for 2014 by Timothy J. Lambert and R.D. Cochrane.

I’ve known about the likelihood of this for some time but held off on the announcement until Lambert and Cochrane could finalize the anthology’s table of contents. And here it is:

Introduction • Timothy J. Lambert
Strange Propositions • Eric Gober
My Adventure with Tom Sawyer • Jameson Currier
True In My Fashion • Paul Brownsey
Sight • Jordan Taylor
Falling • James Booth
Thanksgiving • Shawn Anniston
The Invincible Theatre • Felice Picano
Carver Comes Home • Rob Byrnes
Spill Your Troubles On Me, Love • Georgina Li
Quality Time • Lewis DeSimone
Brooding Intervals • Kevin Langson
Dandelions • Tony Calvert
Shep: A Dog • Alex Jeffers
There’s No Question It’s Love • N.S. Beranek
Save the Last Dance for Me • David Puterbaugh
Afterword • R.D. Cochrane

Besides my own and the editors’, I only recognize two names. Yet another proof of how underread I am these days.


In other, more discomforting news, the long story “Lamp Night,” which I reported being thisclose to completion a few weeks ago, proved too complex and difficult to bring off so easily. As is often the case, alas. And so it has been set aside to stew in its own iftar-feast juices for a bit. I have two or three other stories in the works but, with that bad example in front of me, will refrain from talking about them yet.

Categories
fantasy fiction historical fantasy magical realism novelette short stories spec fic

stories stories

Parts of June 2013 have been intensely unpleasant but July is my birthday month so it’s got to get better, no? At any rate, I have three original stories and two reprints scheduled for that fateful month.

First, going live at GigaNotoSaurus.org on Monday, 1 July, “A Man Not of Canaan.” This is a work of (not terribly rigorous, I fear) historical fantasy set primarily in the days preceding and following the Bronze Age volcanic eruption of Thira—AKA Santorini—in the Cyclades. Archaeologists presume that catastrophe spelled the end of Minoan civilization and that tales of Thira’s destruction form the foundation of Plato’s Atlantis. “A Man Not of Canaan” reveals for the first time that the eruption was not natural. Rather, it was the deliberate, malicious elimination of a cyclopean city in the depths of Thira’s harbor. I will not (nor will the story) directly reveal the cosmic entity responsible for the eruption but any reader familiar with H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos can probably figure it out…and berate me for taking liberties with the canon.

giganotosaurus

Second, already glimpsed in the wild (a Philadelphia-area Barnes & Noble) by its editor, Bad Seeds: Evil Progeny is apparently available early from Prime Books. Although I’ve not yet received a contributor’s copy. My story “You Deserve” is narrated by teenage Max, recently adopted by Stuart Ackles-Echeverría and Esteban Echeverría-Ackles and visiting for the first time their vacation cottage on a Massachussetts lake. Here he develops a crush on Rory, another summer visitor, and…bad things happen.

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Third, another Steve Berman production—this time from his own press—Where Thy Dark Eye Glances: Queering Edgar Allan Poe will go into general release around mid-month. Often truncated on line due to an early editorial misstep, the full title of my story therein is “A Portrait in India Ink by Harry Clarke”—Clarke being an Irish illustrator of the early twentieth century known for (among others) the drawings he made for a 1916 London edition of Poe. In an advance review at Ideomancer, Claire Humphrey writes: “Alex Jeffers’ ‘A Portrait in India Ink by Harry Clarke’ is as gorgeous as the picture to which the title refers, limning a young man’s sexual awakening in the fascinating lights of a migraine aura.”

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And the reprints. For Best Gay Stories 2013, Berman selected my “Wheat, Barley, Lettuce, Fennel, Salt for Sorrow, Blood for Joy,” previously reprinted in You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home, originally published in Boys of Summer. One reviewer of the collection took me to task for stating flat-out on the back cover that Luke, Our Hero, “meets Adonis on a sailing cruise off the coast of Turkey.” Sorry about that, Sirius. Let’s clarify: Luke encounters variations on and memories of the myth of Adonis, and a young man who may (or may not) embody aspects of that handsome demigod. My contributor’s copy has not yet arrived but I believe the anthology is available for purchase.

BGS2013

And for Wilde Stories 2013: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, the indefatigable Berman chose “Tattooed Love Boys,” likewise reprinted in You Will Meet a Stranger, originally published (in slightly different form) at GigaNotoSaurus in March 2012. A story Berman has loved excessively since I wrote it way back in 2009, in which vacationing Emma and her elder brother Theo get caught up in the schemes of three uncanny, immortal entities who may (or may not) be angels.

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(Yes, the weather warmed up and I cut my hair in the two or three weeks between this snapshot and the one above.)

Looking ahead, Prime Books will release Berman’s Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages in August—which is to say, it will probably go into distribution in mid to late July. That mammoth volume includes my “The Hyena’s Blessing,” a tale of an assassin, a caliph, and the shambling undead in eleventh century Cairo. I’m not permitted to speak about another story in Zombies to which I have a troubling connection.

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Finally for today, lest you think (as I far too often do) I’ve given up entirely on writing new stories, I will state for the record that I’m presently thisclose to completing a draft of “Lamp Night,” a fearfully long story about heretics, saints, and angels that takes place on Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power, in contemporary Pawtucket and Providence, Rhode Island.

Categories
California fantasy fiction short stories

5,000 words

The upper word-count limit for submissions to a very great many short-fiction venues is 5,000 words. Of my list of places I’d quite like to be published, probably a third are no-exceptions absolute about it while another third express a strong preference for 5K and under. Interestingly, most of those are online publications: buying into the myth of the internet attention span?

At any rate, an unfortunate balk in the way of my getting into those  estimable venues because 5K words is a limit I almost always exceed. Glancing back at the twenty or so stories I’ve written since 2009, I think only two were sub-5K.

Very early this morning, I thought I’d managed the trick. Yes, surprise, so very soon after the tardy first, I completed a draft of a second 2013 story. In fact, I wrote it in about forty-eight hours (with heartfelt thanks to SB for the inspirational spur—what shall I write about?this, and this). That draft was a paltry few round-uppable words under five thousand. Unnecessarily, in terms of the market it’s aimed at, which is happy to consider stories up to 6,500 words.

In the twelve-ish hours since, revision added another five hundred words to “Shep: A Dog”—so much for that. Oh, well.

As well as being the second completed story of the calendar year, “Shep: A Dog” is my second nostalgia-fuelled story of 2013. “A Portrait in India Ink by Harry Clarke” was set in a doubtless romanticized version of Co. Waterford, Ireland, where I lived in the mid-to-late 1960s. “Shep: A Dog” starts out, and remains for half the story, on Carmel Beach.

I was born in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California—literally within the city limits, although Community Hospital moved to Monterey a few years later—and didn’t definitively leave the area until I was twenty-seven. For the next three years I lived in San Francisco, a hundred twenty-five miles north, but visited almost monthly. Since, though, I can count my trips back on a hand and a half, most recently a flying visit eight years ago. It isn’t a place I think of as having much hold on me now most of my family has also left and the town itself continued its inevitable evolution from tourist trap masquerading as funky bohemian artist colony to enclave of incalculable, unjustifiable, unsustainable wealth masquerading as tourist trap. Bitter, me? Plus the climate is life sapping for a tender hot-house flower like myself. At least New England has hot summers most years.

Another thing: It’s not a fact I go out of my way to broadcast but it is relatively common knowledge that my grandfather was Robinson Jeffers, misanthropic bard of the Central California coast, and my childhood home was the stone house he built, mostly with his own hands, just southwest of Carmel-by-the-Sea proper on Carmel Point. Outside California, it’s a generally meaningless datum, thank merciful and compassionate God, but in state—particularly on the Monterey Peninsula—the shadow of that man is thick and dense and choking, like the legendary Carmel Bay fog.

So it is perhaps no wonder that, while California shows up all over my own work (usually as a place to be escaped from), Carmel and its environs are not to be found. The closest I’ve got in anything published, I think, is Santa Cruz on the north shore of Monterey Bay, a minor setting in Safe as Houses.

I’m not at all certain why I chose finally to exploit Carmel in fiction. If I’d started instead of finished the story today I might point at a link one of my sisters posted on Facebook this morning: a 1967 telefilm on Robinson Jeffers produced by a San Francisco station. But that’s just a creepy coincidence and I haven’t brought myself to watch the video yet.

Possibly it was an extension of the nostalgic impulse that placed “A Portrait in India Ink” in Ireland. Also, though, as the title makes clear, “Shep: A Dog” is a story about a dog (named Shep), and I walked so many dogs on Carmel Beach, Jeffers bulldogs and whippets and mutts, that the notion of dogs is inextricably tangled in my mind with beach walks and beach walks with that particular beach, a five-minute amble from Tor House. One of several tragedies in the short life of Mustafa, the puppiest puppy ever and model for every dog I write, was his never getting to gambol on any beach. (A year or two after Mustafa’s death, his great good friend Duncan did visit Carmel but the silly boy was afraid of the Pacific.)

Also also, “Shep: A Dog” is a deliberately fluffy, lightweight, feelgood story. I don’t know that I could set any other kind of story in a place I clearly have such strong feelings about still. A kind of trivializing magic. The first draft contained several pointed class-war references to the transformation of Carmel I watched happening in my youth, further witnessed in jarring intervals since leaving, into a falsely eccentric wonderland only the 1% can or would wish to live in. Most of that got edited out (not all the revision was adding stuff), but it might be noted that neither of the story’s protagonists—upper-middle though their families are—live in Carmel proper: one in Mission Fields, an unincorporated community southeast of town that was, in my childhood, as near to trailer trash as one got south of Monterey; the other in Pacific Grove, north over the hills from Carmel, a solid, friendly, burgherly little city in my recollection.

All that unloading over (nearly a thousand words), I’ll simply note that I’m quite happy with “Shep: A Dog”: a fantasy of young love that makes me feel good. It has been submitted to the market I intended it for a few days before deadline and perhaps in a month or two I’ll be able to announce its sale.

Categories
Deprivation fantasy fiction magical realism

publication day

Deprivation; or, Benedetto furioso: an oneiromancy is today officially in print. Hard copies can be purchased at Amazon, if not today, soon. Jumping the gun a bit, e-books have been available a few days already: at Amazon for those who reside in the Kindle’s walled garden, at Smashwords in many other formats (try this discount coupon-code that may still be good: AJ87V), probably other places I don’t know about. </e-book skeptic>

And here’s a pleasant pub-day review:

To call Deprivation a romance or coming-of-age story would certainly be accurate but not entirely true and a criminal understatement. This latest novel from Alex Jeffers, author of Safe as Houses and the story collection, You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home, follows a young man’s arduous quest to find his place in this world and someone to love amidst economic hardship, family drama and pervasive delusions resulting from an alarming lack of sleep.

Chris Verleger for Edge Atlanta

Deprivation

As promised, another excerpt! Considerably longer and somewhat less painterly than the previous one. Contextual note: The scene is Cambridge, Mass., January 1991. Neddy is a bike messenger in downtown Boston by day, a freelance illustrator otherwise. Ben has just been laid off from his job at a temp agency.


Neddy before their shower smelled rich and strange, dense, layered tropical odors of sweat and exertion with citrus undertones of aftershave and deodorant, chalky traces of baby powder. In the bedroom, the lights on, voracious, Ben held Neddy tight, before beginning to strip off the layers of his clothing. Pinned to the walls, sketches and finished drawings regarded the two live men dispassionately. In the corner under an angled lamp stood Neddy’s easel bearing a large, nearly finished canvas. This depicted the head and torso of a person wearing polished plate armor, heavily ornamented and gilded—show armor, useless or dangerous in practice, even for the ceremonials of a chivalric tourney. The crested helm was held in the crook of an arm. Behind the figure, men and women in Renaissance court costume dallied in an idyllic glade. Anachronisms abounded: the painting was an Arthurian or operatic (or Ariostovian) fantasy. Ben looked away from the androgynous figure’s piercing green eyes and pulled Neddy’s sweater over his head.

They had gone through the apartment to the kitchen, where Eric, fully dressed, was stirring a pot of every mother’s meat-and-tomato spaghetti sauce. Eric’s boyfriend, a burly, bearded man in his thirties, was there as well. “Oh, hi, Tony,” Neddy had said, and introduced Ben, and given Eric a comradely kiss. He fetched two bottles of beer from the refrigerator. “Do we have time for a shower before dinner, Eric?”

His expression between genial and lascivious, Eric glanced pointedly at Neddy’s crotch and turned to Tony. “Neddy’s always coming up with new euphemisms for fucking. You’ve got all the time you want, darling: this can sit here for weeks without damage. If Tony and I get hungry before you’re ready, we’ll just boil up half the pasta.”

Neddy had hardly reacted, not even a blush, only thanked Eric sweetly. In his room, the door closed on them, he kissed Ben and said, “I don’t like eating early anyway.”

The sweater came off, the several shirts, and then Ben warmed his palms on Neddy’s chest for a moment, plaques of compact muscle coarsened by the veil of hair. This lust was surprising: it had qualifications, accouterments. He felt he wanted to make love with all his clothes still on, but Neddy naked. Naked and helpless—helpless in a false sense, for Neddy was bigger, stronger, unless Ben were to tie him down. But the bed was simply a mattress and box spring on the floor, there was nowhere to anchor the ropes. At the same time, he wished Neddy to be savage, to rip the shirt from his back, scattering buttons over the floor. Not to rape but to overwhelm him. There was something domineering in Neddy he wanted properly to let loose. Yet, again, there was something hardy that was also sentimental and melancholy and wanted fostering. Picking at the knotted drawstring of Neddy’s tights, clumsy, Ben muttered, “You smell like a high-school locker room.”

Neddy pushed Ben’s hands away. “Shoes off first.”

Obedient, Ben knelt and untied the laces of the black leather sneakers. Far overhead, Neddy reached to undo the clip on his ponytail, shook his hair out, raked the fingers of one hand through. He lifted his feet by turns so Ben could remove the shoes, the socks. In the shiny black skin of knitted Lycra, his calves were heavy, the bones of his shins long, ruled lines. His hands were on the drawstring, but Ben said, “No, that’s my job.”

But as Ben rose to his feet, Neddy covered his crotch with his hands and stood back. He stared at Ben. “You don’t have a job. Remember? Take off your clothes.” The line of his mouth was cruel, his eyes hard. Abrupt, he turned away and went across the room to the stereo. His bare feet made small slapping sounds on the floor. Streaks of light glistened on his legs, his buttocks, in his hair tumbling between the shoulders. As if he knew precisely the music he wished to play, he snapped open a CD’s jewelbox, stabbed the power and open buttons, and dropped the glittering disk in place.

Appalled, Ben stared after him. “That’s not fair.”

Fast, violent noise thrust out of the speakers, pounding on a deep bass more rapid than a panicked heart, programmed drums playing faster than any human could manipulate the sticks, electric guitars shrieking with feedback, synthesizers and sequencers producing grating, anguished, industrial clamor. Deep in the mix a thick metallic voice vomited excoriations. “Take your clothes off,” Neddy said again, his voice reasonable with threat, and turned up the volume.

Clumsy with adrenaline, Ben pulled off his tie, unbuttoned his shirt. Neddy moved quickly around the room, lighting more lamps, adjusting their shades so all the illumination was focussed on Ben’s figure. By the time Ben stood naked, his clothes strewn around him, he had lost his erection, his heart was hammering in a vain effort to match the furious bass, and he felt giddy, ill, angry and afraid, exhilarated in a way that was sexual but admitted no sexual response. Standing in the glare, defenseless, trembling, he was dazzled.

Opening a closet, Neddy removed a blue plastic case with a handle and chromed latches. He was graceful, easy, as he moved through the vicious torrent of the music, but the impossible rhythm set up a strobing effect in Ben’s perceptions so he saw Neddy in flickering, jerky flashes, mechanistic. Carrying the box, Neddy approached and crouched before him. “Don’t move.” Now his tone was kind or abstracted. He stroked Ben’s thigh, against the grain, and brushed his palm cruelly over the genitals. “No hard-on,” he observed.

He snapped the latches. As the lid was raised, a kind of gantry lifted two interior trays and set them, step-fashion, in line with the shallow interior. Each tray held a row of paper-wrapped crayons, their waxy, greasy tips a spectrum of potent colors. Still crouched down, Neddy chose a glistening, grassy green. He scribed a line down the crest of Ben’s right instep, over the knuckle of the big toe. The slippery feel of it, the slide of the crayon over the skin, had a lubricious tactility, and the stripe left on Ben’s foot glistened wetly. Neddy held up the crayon and lifted his chin. Sure Ben was watching, he drew it around his mouth as though it were a lipstick. “Non-toxic,” he said. “Water based. Fully washable.” He smeared it with the back of his hand, then leaned over the display and chose a poisonous carmine.

The next track on the CD maintained the punishing bass and drum attack, but played against it an annoyingly melodious guitar riff and ethereal, whining soprano vocalise that did not add up to any kind of language. Ben closed his eyes. His heartbeat was slowing. It seemed he was to stand here as long as Neddy wanted, to feel the crayons like greased fingers travel over his skin, and not to know. He clenched one fist for a moment, then the other, then the muscles in his groin.

Where his skin was hairless or nearly, the color glided on, frictionless—he hardly felt it—but where the hair was thicker or when Neddy drew against the growth it slithered, and it almost seemed Ben could sense the faint twitch in the follicle as each hair was caught, then released. Neddy covered the foot, then moved up the front of the leg, stroking, daubing, stippling, efficient and impersonal. Trying to distinguish the patterns from within, Ben seemed to move his attention, his consciousness, into the surface of his skin and only to his leg—he discarded any awareness of his other limbs, his spine and torso and head—but he could not predict where the crayon would strike next nor envision what the illumination might reveal.

And the disk kept spinning, hurling its unending abuse, here a sustained diapason so deep you heard it through the soles of your feet, there a distended crunch as of crumpling metal, then a piano figure distorted into noise or a flurry of gun shots or an angelic choir. Shrill electronic tones bounced between the speakers, but turbulent drums and the bass were always balanced, produced within your own skull.

The programming on a CD generally lasted forty-five minutes or an hour. By the time it ended—the last track as vehement, propulsive, detestable as the first—Neddy had finished with both of Ben’s legs and moved to the torso. He had worked in spirals of a sort, covering the legs front and back and also incising unknown patterns on the buttocks. Unable to keep his eyes shut the whole time, Ben had blinked from time to time but couldn’t bear to look down, to view what he was becoming. He would glance edgewise at the top of Neddy’s head where the black hair maintained a state between being groomed, gelled—the tracks of a comb’s teeth molded and frozen—and tangled as a thicket. Or he would focus for a few minutes on one of the drawings hung on the walls or the painting on its easel, or stare into a high-wattage bulb until he was dazzled. If, from the strain of being held rigid, a muscle twitched or cramped, Neddy would cuff him lightly in a place that hadn’t yet been decorated and say “Relax” or “Loosen up” or “Be still.” These were the only words either spoke. No conversation could have been conducted through the interference of the music, even if Ben had been able to think of anything to say. The music was horrible, horrifying, but increasingly difficult to resist: when it ended without warning Ben felt his heart plunge a great distance.

Neddy worked on into the sudden silence for a minute—he was performing a delicate operation around the center point of Ben’s navel—and then laid down his crayon and stood up. His face rose into view, features compressed with concentration. Green smears around his mouth made the face frightful. Gentle, he placed his palms on Ben’s shoulders and kissed him lightly. “I’m not done yet.” He shook out his shoulders, reached overhead to clench and unclench his fingers. “But you can stretch if you want, if you’re careful. This stuff smears easy. You can look, too, I don’t mind.” He headed toward the stereo.

“Could we have something more humane?” Ben asked, tentative. He was afraid to look at his illuminated limbs.

“You don’t like techno?” Taking out the disk, Neddy put it back in its case and looked over his other selections.

“It’s hateful!”

“Well, it’s good to dance to. But here’s an old chestnut for you.”

Musically ignorant though he was, Ben recognized the Baroque when he heard it and inclined his chin slightly in gratitude. The solo violin, the tinkly harpsichord continuo and massed subsidiary strings—he might not have chosen it himself, but you could listen to it. Then there was a voice, a bright contralto—no, an alto, a countertenor taking the castrato rôle, singing in brilliantly ornamental Italian. Ben couldn’t concentrate sufficiently to take in the sense of the aria.

But Neddy, turning from the controls, put his hands on his hips and, narrow-eyed, gazed at Ben. “But I don’t know if I can work to it.”

“Why?”

Dismissive, Neddy ran his fingers through his hair, reaching above and behind, lifting it into a crest. “Too brittle and brilliant and stylized.”

“Not that.”

“I’m marking you, Ben.”

“But why?”

In reply, if it were a reply, Neddy pulled apart the knotted drawstring and began to peel down his tights. Shifting his weight, Ben took a small step forward. Neddy glared at him. “No, not yet.” Still, Ben watched him remove the tights, the shorts. Nude at last, more naked than Ben in his greasy skin of paint, Neddy scratched at his chest and smiled. Smeary green, the smile was less than reassuring. “Have I frightened you, Benjy?”

Without waiting for a response (no reply could be anything but true), Neddy went to another cupboard. When he turned back to Ben he was holding a camera. “I’m taking pity on you. You’ll just have to remain an unfinished masterpiece.” He held the camera to his eye and spent a little time focussing. “I’ll just take a few pictures first, so I’ll have something to remember you by. Souvenirs. Mementos.”

Apparently the room was bright enough flash was unnecessary: the camera only clicked. As Neddy moved about, snapping pictures from different angles, Ben held himself rigid, still, but couldn’t prevent himself from trembling. The digitally recreated countertenor (it was Orlando, one of the many operas based on Ariosto) discovered Angelica’s name carved into a tree’s trunk hand-in-hand with Medoro’s, and with scary virtuosity and bravura Orlando went mad. Kneeling near Ben’s feet, the camera angled up, Neddy took another photo. “No need to be scared, Ben: it’s only magic.”

“Neddy.” Afraid even to look down, to move that much, Ben stared straight ahead. “I’m not going to California—that’s not home anymore. I’m not even going to look for work in Providence.” He was staring at the face of the armored figure in the painting. The penetrating green, glazed eyes stared back and the lips appeared to be about to draw up in a disdainful smile. The voice too high to be a man’s but expressing a man’s childish outrage kept on, tumbling up and down arpeggios like an acrobat. The words were nonsense. “And, Neddy, listen: I’ll be in Boston all next week, day and night, job or no job.”

“See: the magic worked.” Now Neddy crouched off to the side. “Move your arm a little—forward. That’s it.”

The magic worked. Fear was often at least half fury. “It’s not something that happened just now—it was all planned and confirmed by yesterday morning.”

Complacent and reasonable, Neddy said, “Magic takes no account of time. If I hadn’t marked you tonight, well, who’s to say about yesterday.”

Angrier still, Ben turned his head, away from where Neddy still crouched, focussing. “Then why didn’t the magic stop me from being laid off?”

“Ah, it’s a silly job. You’re better without it.”

“Sillier than riding a bike through the snow?”

Now the click of the camera’s shutter came from behind Ben. “So what are you going to be doing in town all next week, Ben? What about your cat?”

“Can’t the magic tell you that?”

Neddy didn’t reply. He squeezed off three more shots before coming into Ben’s view again. “No more film,” he said, and pushed the film-advance lever several times. Setting the camera aside, he faced Ben squarely, arms akimbo, hands on hips. The orchestra was playing a slow sinfonia. “That’s that,” he said.

“That’s what?”

“Now we have to seal the magic. Then we’ll take a shower—I told you, the stuff comes off with soap and water. Then we’ll have dinner.”

Orlando, presumably, having rushed raving off stage, soprano Angelica and contralto Medoro (a woman in travesty) sang a duet of melting, saccharine devotion.

Seal the magic?”

Neddy smiled sweetly, then pouted his lips. His right hand moved to his crotch. “Get hard, Ben. I laid in a supply of condoms. Like Eric said, we’re going to make euphemisms.”


 

Categories
Deprivation fantasy fiction Italy magical realism

to press

My second full-length novel and sixth book, Deprivation; or, Benedetto furioso: an oneiromancy, has gone to press. The print edition should therefore be available (through Amazon at least) by the official publication date of 28 February. Currently preparing conversion files for Lethe Press’s e-book wizard, in expectation of electronic versions for computers, tablets, e-readers, and—who knows how people read novels these days?—smartphones going on sale right around the same date.Jeffers_Deprivation_hi-res

So how about an excerpt to whet your appetite?

This bit comes late(ish) in the book but, in its way, I think, epitomizes many of the themes and approaches I was aiming to hit.


In the dream, Ben was walking with a friend. More peculiar than the fact that he couldn’t get a grip on his companion’s identity (his features, if Ben glanced to the side, were lost in a sunny glare, his voice was, in the dream, characterless, his speech had the uncanny quality of being transformed, in Ben’s hearing, instantly from phrase to paraphrase)—even more peculiar was Ben’s certain knowledge of where they were: they were in Italy. Not really, of course (it was a dream), for how could you dream of a place you’d never been? A pastiche Italy cobbled together from his reading—as much Browning or Forster (or Alexandra Benedict) as any native writer, from films and paintings and those volumes of shockingly beautiful landscape photographs he bought off remainder tables, from history, cartography, memoir, occasional essay—all the drugs of the armchair traveller, from imagination, too, and longing. A counterfeit Italy, then, to which you couldn’t attach names from any atlas—and only a province, truly, of the vast Italy of dreams, a tiny territory you could cover on foot in a morning.

They were walking. The narrow lane wound among the foothills of a massy range of which you caught glimpses from time to time, shouldering up into a sky that was, overhead, cloudless and a dry, powdery blue, deepening and greying through imperceptible hazes and washes into and beyond the mountains. Knuckles and fists and elbows of rock, tawny or purple or grey, protruded here and there from the green flesh of the range. Crowning one sheer scarp, a mediaeval fortress raised a beetling round keep and square watchtower built of the same stone so it appeared to be carved from the crag itself. But you’re walking among sloping meadows, through groves leafing out in the spring warmth, in shady, bosky valleys beside clattering small streams. From the mosses at the roots of trees you pluck odorous violets or buttery aconites for your companion. A clearing ripples with waves of creamy narcissi, and anemones with petals like the veined, gauzy wings of insects.

The lane climbs slowly, taking into account dips and swales, but with certain purpose. Angling across a shallow slope washed in sunlight, the roadbed is dusty and flinty, but below you a succulent pasture spreads velvety green skirts embroidered with tiny flowers over the folds of the hillside. On the far side of the broad valley a steeper incline, its verdure blued by the distance, is spattered with small white blots: sheep. In the valley itself, lines of slender trees—cypress, poplar, beech—mark other lanes and roads and the boundaries of cultivated fields. A slow civil river flows through it. Made toylike by distance, the pediment and winged façade of a Palladian villa are reflected in the river’s waters, among the trailing streamers of great willows. The villa’s many green shutters are all closed, the umber stucco patchy, the box-hedged formal gardens overgrown. A chestnut lifts white candles. The plumy silver-green torches of poplars, dark pyres of cypress.

And all the while as you walk, you’re talking, you and your companion, laughing, the easy unmemorable conversation of dear friends on a ramble. You can’t retain a word of it. Once he chases you a few hundred feet along the lane, another time you trip him into a meadow of sweet grass where both tumble end over end a short way down the hillside, breathless. Sometimes you walk hand in hand, or you drape arms over each other’s shoulders and stride lockstep, a single creature whose shadow has three legs and two heads. Or, content, you amble separated by a few feet, where the lane lies sunken a bit below the dry soil of the prosperous vineyards.

And now, over a slight grade, you find yourselves on a crest. Below, the slope falls broken through a deep ravine, and across, where it rises again, less steeply, the buildings of a village or a small town clamber along a bent spine of granite. Somewhat lower than your own position, the town flaunts its pitched, pantiled red roofs, crazily splayed out from their roof beams like the heap of opened books on an invalid scholar’s counterpane. At the tip of the ridge stands the Baroque campanile of a small church. The bells toll noon, bright and hollow across the gulf. The grey stone and ocher plaster faces of the buildings absorb light and heat, inhaling it through thick walls. The glass of many small windows glitters. Down the bluff your paired shadows rush, the negative relief of quicksilver, and one of you confirms the other’s hunger, his agreeable fatigue.

Taking hands again, encouraging each other, they took to the lane again. It headed downhill at an angle to the slope, with long grasses overhanging the path from the bank above, the roots of old olives knitting the bank together and the shadows of their leaves making patterns like dense shoals of tiny fish on the roadbed. As the grade steepened, Ben and his companion walked faster, until near the bottom of the gully they were running, gasping out the names of the dishes that might satisfy their appetites. A swift cold stream was bridged here. They paused to splash their faces, cool their wrists, rinse their mouths, and then they kissed, and then they went on again, upward now.

Even kissing the man, Ben had somehow not been able to make out his face, determine his identity. It hardly seemed to matter, though, for he knew this was (or was to be) his life’s companion, the love of his life. There was the certain familiarity in the ways their hands and lips met, the way the two sides of their conversation met without exception, requiring no explanation, as though there were no barriers. A passion lay exposed between them that need not be iterated for it was expressed in their simply walking side by side, and which, contrariwise, made walking side by side an exercise in revelation: Ben saw everything (if not the man himself) more clearly, as though he was storing up image and incident for the narration of their shared story. And there was a simple friendliness, a kind of joy both domestic or intimate and ecstatic, universal. You felt that here was life’s purpose: a small, manageable objective well within the scope of a man’s ambition.


Maybe I’ll toss up another excerpt on the day itself….

Categories
fantasy fiction short stories

covers, covers

Prime Books has posted cover designs for two forthcoming anthologies in which I have stories. Behold: 8433494454_af8ce60f8e_bBad Seeds, forthcoming in July and containing my story “You Deserve.” (Note that the cover displayed at that Amazon link has been superseded by the above, more effective, less cliché-horror-story image.)

8432066183_a4f1c3a26b_bZombies, forthcoming in August and containing my story “The Hyena’s Blessing.”

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.

Categories
fantasy fiction novelette Tales from the Subcontinent

further news from the subcontinent

Actually news from Aveng, a small country on the far tropical southeastern coast of the great continent from Fejz—birthplace of the mother of “Two Dead Men”’s narrator and the site of his decade’s exile.

Last evening I wrote the last line of a draft of “The Oily Man.” My third subcontinental tale turned out somewhat longer and quite a bit stranger than I had envisioned when I set out in response to an invitation: stories of incubi for a forthcoming themed anthology. That was in May, when I began. Four months. Four months.

At any rate, I completed the draft and e-mailed it off with grave misgivings to the editor who had said he wanted it by early July. I expected him to say the first two thirds were bloated, the conclusion unexpected, unjustified, inconclusive, ambiguous, and odd, the whole probably salvageable with a good deal of work.

Next thing I knew I was downloading a contract.

Ha-hrrm. Well. Shows how well I judge my own work. A few little bits he wants expanded—he objects to late-Regency/early-Victorian euphemisms (he’s correct, too; if the story’s a period piece the period is at least two centuries earlier)—wouldn’t bleach be anachronistic? (yes)—if I can get it up from 9,100 words to an even 10,000 he’ll be just as pleased. But I’m meant to understand “The Oily Man” will appear in a volume working-titled Handsome Devil due from Prime Books late next year. Steve tells me Handsome Devil will also include a fine tale by Tanith Lee, who gave You Will Meet a Stranger Far from Home such a spectacular blurb.

The narrator of “The Oily Man” is the disappointing youngest son of a merchant family of Trebt. In the latter years of that world’s Age of Discovery, Trebt is one of the subcontinental states to have established trade concessions with the queen on the Jade Stool of Aveng. After a scandal, the narrator is packed off on a seven-month voyage to the Avengi port of Folau. An elder sister he hasn’t seen for a decade is already established in Folau, married into a local family.

Within a month of arrival, the young man finds himself surrounded by incomprehensible political maneuvering. The merchant-adventurers resident in the subcontinental enclave at Folau are friendly rivals but rivals nonetheless. Offshore in quarantine are representatives of subcontinental superpower Sjolussa, late to the southeastern sea trade and jealous of the smaller nations’ privileges. (It’s not a spoiler to note that Sjolussa will annex Aveng and its neighbor states about a century later.) The queen in the capital three weeks’ trip away bestows her favors capriciously. Adherents of the throne-sponsored religion quarrel with followers of enigmatic philosopher-saint the Kandadal.

Then our narrator is surprised in his bed by an amorous demon, who may have been set upon him by an enemy. Or a friend.

Also there’s a duel. A courtesan of ambiguous gender who knows things. A shipwreck.

The theme song of “The Oily Man” is this track from Ivri Lider’s Mishehu Paam, a song that gives me the shivers.

Now back to work on the fourth tale from the subcontinent…. Oh. Wait. A collection of stories to lay out and two novel MSs to copyedit. Dammit.

No. Wait. Time for bed.

Categories
BrazenHead fantasy novella spec fic

Time Will Be! declares the Head of Brass

An unveiling: The cover of the third BrazenHead novella, due this November, The Grigori by Joshua Skye.

The Grigori is a chilling dark fantasy set in contemporary Pittsburgh, where a good cop and a teenage runaway encounter something, someone, awe-inspiring and terrible in the ruins of a derelict hotel. After reading Josh’s haunting tale, you’ll never feel the same way again about e-mail forwards of saccharine angels or news reports about meth addicts.