Richard Gavin's Blog, page 25

World Fantasy Convention 2012

For those attending the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto, which runs from November 1st to 4th, I will be taking part in a panel called "Whither the Dark Arts?" which explores the role of occultism in speculative fiction. This panel takes place on Thursday, November 1st at 2pm in the Vaughan West room.

On Friday, November 2nd I will be reading from At Fear's Altar in the King Room. My reading takes place at 4pm, though I strongly encourage attendees to arrive at 3:30 to see the legendary Peter Straub read.

Copies of At Fear's Altar will be available in the Dealer's Room, and both myself and S.T. Joshi will be milling about the convention throughout the weekend.

A full schedule for World Fantasy can be viewed here.

AT FEAR'S ALTAR Now Shipping

I am very pleased to report that At Fear's Altar is now in stock and available for purchase at Hippocampus Press. All pre-orders are in the process of being dispatched, and sometime in the next couple of weeks other online retailers such as Amazon.com will have copies of the book available as well.

Echoes from Hades: Deep Shadows and Numinous Horror

The debut installment of "Echoes from Hades" is now live on The Teeming Brain. Curious about why I always place an initial cap on the word Horror? Find out by reading here.

Echoes from Hades

For some time now I have been wanting to write a series of meditations upon not only the Horror genre, but also how aspects of mysticism, ritual, history and philosophy all fit together under the aegis of Horror. The difficulty with such an undertaking is finding an interested readership. The interwebs has a lot of wordage heaped into it daily. Because I prefer to keep this website as a news resource for my various projects, I did not wish to transform it into a partial-news, partial-musings website. 
Earlier this week the forces some prefer to call "coincidence" (I do not believe in coincidences) converged. I was approached by my friend Matt Cardin, whose work I think very highly of, about the prospect of my writing a series of articles for his ever-fascinating blog The Teeming Brain. How could I resist?
I'm happy to announce that my column "Echoes from Hades" will be appearing at The Teeming Brain monthly beginning in October. Contemplating and planning this ongoing series of essays has also inspired fresh ideas for new fiction as well. I will be posting regular links to "Echoes from Hades" here beginning next month.
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In other news, it is now only a handful of weeks until the release of AT FEAR'S ALTAR. I am anxious to hold this book in my hands and to hear the reactions of readers and critics to it. 
The book and me will be at the World Fantasy Convention from November 1st to 4th in Toronto. The convention's schedule is in the process of being finalized, so keep an eye on this site for my participation at the event.

NecronomiCon 2013

The stars are right...almost.

Next August, from the 23rd through to the 25th, there will be a convention of truly stellar proportions: NecronomiCon. The event will be held at the beautiful and historic Biltmore Hotel in Lovecraft's beloved Providence, Rhode Island. The Biltmore was actually one of HPL's favourite buildings.

The focus of NecronomiCon 2013 will be "The Rational and the Supernatural." Panels will examine both the art and the science that informs not only the Cthulhu Mythos, but cosmic fiction in general.

I am truly honoured to announce that I will be among the Guest Authors at next summer's gathering. The lineup is already stellar, including such weird luminaries as Caitlin R. Kiernan, S.T. Joshi, Laird Barron, W.H. Pugmire, Joseph Pulver Sr., Robert M. Price and many more.

More information about NecronomiCon may be found here.

Ia-Ia!

AT FEAR'S ALTAR - Table of Contents

I'm pleased to now rend the Veil and reveal the contents of At Fear's Altar...

*Prologue: A Gate of Nerves
*Chapel in the Reeds
*The Abject
*Faint Baying from Afar; An Epistolary Trail after H.P. Lovecraft's "The Hound"
*The Unbound; A Meditation upon H.P. Lovecraft's "The Unnamable"
*A Pallid Devil, Bearing Cypress
*King Him
*The Plain
*Only Enuma Elish
*The Word-Made Flesh
*Annexation
*Darksome Leaves
*The Eldritch Faith (a novella)

The book will be available this October, courtesy of the perennially excellent Hippocampus Press. Pre-orders may be placed here.

AT FEAR'S ALTAR Now Available for Pre-Order

Hippocampus Press has peeled back the wraps on At Fear's Altar. Not only can you now get an eyeful of the book's stunning cover by the legendary Harry O. Morris, you can also pre-order the book, which will be released this October. 

More details about the book are available here.

S.T. Joshi on AT FEAR'S ALTAR

I still harbour a head-shaking disbelief that the esteemed S.T. Joshi edited At Fear's Altar. Here is what he had to say about its contents:

"Richard Gavin is one of the bright new stars in contemporary weird fiction. His richly textured style, deft character portrayal, and powerful horrific conceptions make every one of his tales a pleasure to read. His career will be worth watching in the future." 
--- S. T. Joshi

Further details on the book will be revealed soon.

Ray Bradbury: A Reminiscence

We knew it was an inevitability  Not only because he lived to the ripe age of 91, but also because the man himself spent a good portion of his illustrious career reminding us that death was an unavoidable reality.  Don't squander your time, because you only have a finite amount of it.  You are here and it is now, so Live!

Ray Bradbury certainly did Live, and he infused his work with such unbridled zeal that one can only write the word with an initial cap:

Life.

You could feel it thrumming in the page ink like a live wire, spitting out sparks when you read that scene or met that character, and then all at once you felt as though Bradbury was somehow at your elbow, seeing you and seeing into you.  He lived in the same world you did, only he knew it better than you and had come to show just how rich and chilling and strange and magical Life is.

His words sang. Sometimes the song was akin to Beethoven's Ode to Joy. Other times it was elegiac. But there was always rhythm there, always the emotive power of music that the audience feels. (Feel, don't think was one of Ray's favourite tips).


Almost everyone who reads fiction has a favourite Ray Bradbury story.  Even people whose interests lie well outside genre writing or fandom know of the man, or at the very least know his name. That's because Bradbury's work truly transcended categorization. I emphasize truly because there are scads of writers who think they hover above pigeonholes, but Ray Bradbury actually did. His writing was sui generis.  No one wrote that way before him and any writer who attempted to follow his giant footprints inevitably face-planted in their own pastiche.

My Ray Bradbury was, is, and forever shall be the October Bradbury. The Bradbury of "The Scythe" and "The Jar" and "The Cistern" and "Usher II."  The Bradbuy who manned the black Ferris in Something Wicked This Way Comes and tended the gourd constellations of his Halloween Tree and architected the ghoulish family reunion in From the Dust Returned.  That is my Ray Bradbury.  Not only because in him I found another who loved the autumnal, foghorns, attic dust, mummies, cellars and cold dark lakes as much as I did growing up (and still do), but also because this man wrote paeans to these things.  His Horror fiction did what I later strove to make my own do: chill you, yes, but also show that these atmospheres, these macabre images, are beautiful things.  Magical things.  Things that are often good for you.

Oddly, I am not one of those fans who has a salient memory of the first time they read Ray Bradbury. Even my recollections of how I discovered his work are hazy.  He was just always there, a presence in the world whose name I would see on spines in libraries and bookstores, whose face I would spot on television, whose voice would occasionally filter through my radio. He was Ray Bradbury. Our mythmaker. The Tigris-Euphrates of 20th and 21st Century speculative literature. Ray was our fountainhead, and for seventy-plus years we writers of the dark and the stars and the distant lands acted as water-gatherers who collected Bradbury's runoff and used it to nourish our own blossoming voices.

Yes, he was a presence. And now that presence is gone.

So while we knew it had to come and likely soon (just as our living years are limited, so too is Death's patience), I find little solace in the logic of inevitability. 91 was too soon. Writers die all the time, but Ray's passing has altered the landscape in a colossal way. He was not a pebble in the ocean of words. He was a mountain in whose shadow we all grew up and drew comfort from. Yesterday we woke up and discovered that the mountain had vanished, leaving a massive cavity in our world and in our hearts.

In Ontario, where I live, it rained yesterday afternoon. The storm was brief, but potent enough for the sky to swell with mushrooms of black clouds and flicker with raw lightning. I stopped and I watched it. Bradbury weather.

That's what Ray is to me, will always be to me; a force of nature; something elemental; something that causes me to stop and wake up and look around and Live.

And so I do. As does Ray Bradbury. No longer in flesh and bones, but in words and in the rustle of brown leaves and the scent of woodsmoke and singed jack-o-lanterns.

He is October.

He was October

The tribe has lost its elder statesman.

Live forever, Ray.