Angela Slatter's Blog, page 95

SF Signal reveiws The Bitterwood Bible

The wonderful Haralambi Markov has reviewed The Bitterwood Bible over at SF Signal.

MY REVIEW:

PROS: Exquisite prose; a shared world where the stories bleed into each other to establish a vibrant and sprawling mythology; complex portrayal of women as protagonists and antagonists; the breathtaking pen-and-ink illustrations by artist Kathleen Jennings.

CONS: The collection ended. Honestly, I could read at least three more volumes with tales in this world.

BOTTOM LINE: It’s among the strongest short story collections on the market and it will fill your heart with darkest wonders.

The rest is here.

In the mail: Zombie Apocalypse! Endgame

Can you hear the happy squeeeing? I love these projects because they are like proper artefacts.

Mr Jones blends all his authors’ voices into a coherent whole, while still maintaining their individuality. Reading these mosaics actually feels like you’re reading an proper account of an apocalyptic event written by the dead and the survivors.

A big thanks to Mr Robert Hood, who allowed me to namecheck his character, Lynda Russo, from one of the earlier ZA volumes.

And my cousins will note that Dr Maisie Perry is a nod to our beloved grandmother (I conferred on her an honourary medical degree).

Goodreads Giveaway: The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings

So, if I’ve done things correctly, there will be a giveaway thingy appearing on Goodreads any old day now.

The prize consists of a signed copy of The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings and one of the gorgeous totebags I had made with Kathleen Jennings’ cover art on the front.

Click here.

Love and Other Poisons by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Not content with being a most excellent editor and publisher, Silvia Moreno-Garcia insists upon being a kick-ass writer as well. Here she talks about her collection Love & Other Poisons. Check out the Innsmouth Free Press site.

1. So what should new readers know about Silvia Moreno-Garcia?

I’m a writer and editor. My debut novel Signal to Noise, about sorcery, music and Mexico City, is out in February. My first short story collection This Strange Way of Dying was a finalist for the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.My second collection is called Love and Other Poisons. The latest book I edited was Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse. I am also the publisher of Innsmouth Free Press.

2. What can readers expect of Love and Other Poisons?

For one reason or another I was not able to fit all the stories I wanted in This Strange Way of Dying. Which is fine. Thematically it forms a unified whole. So Love and Other Poisons is kind of a companion volume. Ideally I’d love it if people would read both collections because it would produce the effect I’m looking for.

Anyway, Love and Other Poisons works around the theme of, you guessed it, love and poison. Not just romantic love but friendship, family and even enemies (that love-hate thing). Relationships and their complexities. While my first collection was very grounded in Mexican folklore, this one wanders around a bit more. There’s a story inspired by Poe, one by Stoker, so it’s not just rooted in Latin America. But there are some very Latin American pieces.

Three of the stories are brand new, never published before and of those I’m most enamored with “Sublime Artifacts,” which is my anti-steampunk story.

3. When did you first decide you wanted to be a writer?

I wrote since I was a child but I didn’t take it seriously until 2006. At that point I decided I was going to take an organized approach to “making.” I suppose it worked since I have a novel coming out.

4. How do you balance being an editor and a writer?

I’ve perfected the art of not sleeping. Joking. I bounce from one thing to another depending on how I feel. Sometimes I’ll be tired of writing so I switch do doing some of the editor stuff and then back. I am scaling back my editing and publishing stuff, and also scaling back my short story writing, to try and focus more on novels. But I don’t think it’s that inherently difficult to manage more than one thing at the same time. I would resent having to focus on a single activity, such as writing, without any other outlets. That’s also why I like my dayjob, which is a great job, and why I’m pursuing a Master’s degree part-time right now.

5. What scares you?

Lack of money. I have a very I’ll-never-be-hungry again Scarlett O’Hara mentality. Also, my own mortality, although I suppose that’s a universal thing.

6. What made you choose to publish The Nickronomicon?

I like Nick’s stories a lot. They’re ironic, witty, and he knows a lot about literature. And it just seemed natural to try and collect his output in a single volume since he’s been rather prolific in the Lovecraftian scene for the past few years. Also, the title. I just couldn’t resist that title. The project sells itself. At a practical level it happens to be the perfect project for a small press. It’s not the kind of thing a large imprint would be interested in, but Nick has enough of a reputation in Lovecraftian circles to ensure we sell enough copies of the book. Financially, artistically, it just fits well with us.

7. Name five people you’d like to have dinner with? Dead or alive (keeping in mind that the dead ones will be cheaper dates).

Lovecraft! That’s an obvious one. I’m not sure what he’d think of me, he might like me because I’m Canadian and therefore a citizen of the crown. Tanith Lee, because I love her books. I did interview her one time, by the way, but it was through mail. Ann Boleyn. I find her a fascinating historical figure at a pivotal moment in time. Charles Darwin, because I’ve been reading his papers and letters lately. Daphne du Maurier. Not only do I love her work but I think she was a fascinating person. And my great-grandmother. I miss her very much.

8. What interests you in Lovecraftian fiction?

Everything? Is that an answer? Right now I’m completing my Master’s degree in Science and Technology Studies. My thesis proposal is about Lovecraft and eugenics, specifically degeneration issues. So I’m very interested in looking at how he translates issues of reproduction and inheritance into horror fiction, and how society is absorbing those same issues at the time.

As a writer, I’ve often said “this is the last Lovecraftian story I’m writing” and then I surprise myself by finding something new to respond to.

9. Your favourite heroine? Your favourite villain?

Emma Bovary, although she’s an anti-heroine. I’m fond of that devious rascal Tom Ripley. But I change my mind about these things all the time.

10. What’s your next big project?

 

My debut novel is coming out in February so I expect and hope a lot of my time will be spent promoting that. My agent has my second novel, Young Blood, about vampires and drug dealers in Mexico City. I’m hoping that sells, too. And then it’s off to complete my third novel, which is set in the Jazz Age, in the north of Mexico.

Editing wise I’m reading submissions for She Walks in Shadows, the first all-woman Lovecraft anthology. So a lot of reading. Oh, and my thesis work. I have a prospectus due this month.

Letters to Lovecraft: a review

And here’s the first review of the Letters to Lovecraft anthology edited by Jesse Bullington and published by Stone Skin Press.

I have a story in it called “Only the Dead and the Moonstruck”, and there are also excellent tales by Jeffrey Ford, Gemma Files, Molly Tanzer, Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones, and other luminaries.

Only the Dead and the Moonstruck by Angela Slatter addresses the following quote:

Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.



With inspiration from that quote she created a story with the idea that children are afraid of the dark and are more sensitive to those hidden and fathomless worlds, but that it is a good thing sometimes as they’re more perceptive to the danger that adults might try and explain away.

The rest of the review is here.

Publishers Weekly reviews Bitterwood

My third starred review from Publishers Weekly – a cause for dancing if ever there was one!

The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings

Although set in a fantasy world full of sorcery and enchantments, the 13 expertly wrought stories in this short-fiction collection feature characters driven by the all-too-human motives of revenge and frustration with the miserable circumstances of their lives. In “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter,” a woman spurned by the daughter of the house whose dead patriarch she is burying stealthily sows the seeds of her next job. “By My Voice I Shall Be Known” concerns a wronged lover who saves the essence of her nightmares to force a hideous fate upon the woman who supplanted her. Perhaps the story that best conveys the sense of a weird world in thrall to the dark side of human nature is “St. Dymphna’s School for Poison Girls,” about an academy where young girls are trained as assassins to kill on their wedding nights grooms from families who wronged their own decades—and even centuries—before. Slatter (Sourdough and Other Stories) has written these stories like somber fairy tales, humanizing the traditional nobles, stepparents, witches, and common folk with vulnerabilities of the flesh and spirit, and she unites them through allusions to characters and events across the stories into a loosely woven tapestry that maps a world that exists both geographically and psychologically. Her complex characters, employing the deceptions and subterfuges that they must in order to survive, express how, bearing out the observation of one such character, “we make our tales as we must, constructing our stories to hold us together.” The text includes 86 illustrations by Kathleen Jennings. (Sept.)

The original appears here.

Spectral Book of Horror Stories: new review

A new review over at This is Horror by Ross Warren of The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (Mark Morris, ed.). In a fit of self-centredness, I shall tell you only what is said about my story, but all the other excellent tales are discussed here.

‘The October Widow’ by Angela Slatter maintains the high standard with a richly detailed tale in which the mysterious Mirabel Morgan, the October Widow of the title, moves in to town and begins to assert quite a pull on certain young men of the area. On her trail is a grieving father left with questions to be answered by the woman he holds responsible but also desires. A story all the better for not providing any conclusive answers.

Over at StarShipSofa …

… my story “I Love You Like Water” (which first appeared in the anthology 2012 from Twelfth Planet Press) has been podcasterised. It’s a word. It was also reprinted over at Cosmos Online.

There’s also a terrific tale by Matthew Sanborn Smith.

Go here for listening pleasure!

The Female Factory: wrap!

And here’s the full wrap-around of the cover. Available for pre-order here.

Twelfth Planet Press: Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction 2013

I’m very happy to announce that my story “Flight”, which first appeared in Paula Guran’s Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales, has been selected for the new TPP Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction for 2013.

Huzzah!

Table of Contents

Selkie Stories Are For Losers  –  Sofia Samatar

By Bone-Light  –  Juliet Marillier

The Myriad Dangers  –  Lavie Tidhar

Carpet  –  Nnedi Okorafor

I Gave You My Love by the Light of the Moon  –  Sarah Rees Brennan

57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides  –  Sam J. Miller

The Minotaur Girls  –  Tansy Rayner Roberts

Not With You, But With You  –  Miri Kim

Ghost Town  –  Malinda Lo

December  –  Neil Gaiman

An Echo in the Shell  –  Beth Cato

Dan’s Dreams  –  Eliza Victoria

As Large As Alone  –  Alena McNamara

Random Play All and the League of Awesome  –  Shane Halbach

Mah Song  –  Joanne Anderton

What We Ourselves Are Not  –  Leah Cypess

The City of Chrysanthemum  –  Ken Liu

Megumi’s Quest  –  Joyce Chng

Persimmon, Teeth, and Boys  –  Steve Berman

Flight  –  Angela Slatter

We Have Always Lived on Mars  –  Cecil Castellucci

Available for pre-order here.