S.P. Miskowski's Blog, page 2

Little Visible Delight

Today Omnium Gatherum Media releases the anthology LITTLE VISIBLE DELIGHT.

Often the most powerful and moving stories are generated by writers who return time and again to a particular idea, theme, or image. Obsession in a writer's imagination can lead to accomplishment or to self-destruction. Consider Poe and his pale, dead bride; his fascination with confinement and mortality; his illness and premature death. Or Flannery O'Connor's far less soul-crushing fondness for peacocks. Some writers pay a high price for their obsessions, while others maintain a crucial distance. Whichever the case, obsessions can produce compelling fiction.

Little Visible Delight is an anthology of original stories in which eleven authors of dark fiction explore some their most intimate, writerly obsessions.


Table of Contents

The Receiver of Tales by Lynda E. Rucker
Needs Must When the Devil Drives by Cory J. Herndon
A Thousand Stitches by Kate Jonez
The Point by Johnny Worthen
Calligraphy by James Everington
This Many by S.P. Miskowski
JP by Brent Michael Kelley
Kestrel by Mary Borsellino
An Unattributed Lyric, In Blood, On a Bathroom Wall by Ennis Drake
Black Eyes Broken by Mercedes M. Yardley
Bears: A Fairy Tale of 1958 by Steve Duffy

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

http://omniumgatherumbooks.com/little...

ASTORIA for $1.99

For the next two days my novella, Astoria, will be available in ebook form for only $1.99.

ow.ly/qWsha

Chatting with Angela Slatter

Many thanks to Angela Slatter for this interview, in which we chat about The Skillute Cycle, among other things.

http://www.angelaslatter.com/s-p-misk...

Reviewed by Peter Tennant

"Along with Brendan Connell’s The Architect, I rate Delphine Dodd as the best novella I read in 2012, and Knock Knock as the best book I read in any category."

Thanks to Peter Tennant for posting his Black Static 33 review of Knock Knock and Delphine Dodd at his delightful blog, Trumpetville.

http://trumpetville.wordpress.com/201...

The Gothic Imagination interview

Thanks to James Campbell for interviewing me at The Gothic Imagination. In Part One we discuss influences on my writing, the current small press boom, and women in horror.

http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/an-...

Today ASTORIA is published

"Miskowski further enriches the all-too-real horror movie world of Knock, Knock with Astoria, a novella that is part Hitchcock, part David Lynch, and all Miskowski's distinctive, thoughtfully crafted, slow-burn literary terror." - Molly Tanzer, author of A Pretty Mouth

"S.P. Miskowski has been chronicling the mundane horrors of women’s lives – marriage, motherhood, family, and domesticity – through the lens of the supernatural since the publication of her Shirley Jackson Award nominated novel Knock Knock. Continuing with her related Skillute Cycle of novellas, Miskowski is unafraid to plumb the darkest impulses of the female psyche, and her gift for vivid characterization and naturalistic detail suffuses her fiction with a sense of frightening and devastating reality. In Astoria, a white-knuckle terror trip across the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, the darkness closing in on one woman’s desperate bid to escape the monster she birthed and the life she loathes becomes as palpable as the pages we’re turning; we can bolt the door and turn on the light, but in the end, Miskowski warns us, no matter what we do, our demons are coming for us." - Lynda E. Rucker, Black Static columnist and author of The Moon Will Look Strange

http://www.amazon.com/Astoria-The-Ski...

Why I Wrote a Horror Novel

This brief essay was first published, and was an Editor's Pick, at Open Salon. I think it serves as an excellent introduction to my four-book series, THE SKILLUTE CYCLE.


Knock Knock: On a Long Winter's Night


My supernatural horror novel Knock Knock began a few years ago on a long and sleepless winter's night. We were visiting family in a small town in Washington State. We stayed with my husband's grandmother Karolee, a woman of infinite wit and practicality. Before we finally stopped gossiping and went to bed, she reminded us not to worry if we heard gunfire in the middle of the night.

"Those boys were shooting, one night, up the road."

"Why?"

"Oh," she said. "The heck if I know. I bet they didn't know why."

Late that night, while Karolee slept in her room at the other end of the house and my husband slept soundly beside me, I had insomnia. I could hear every settling wooden beam, each acquiescent grunt of plumbing, but especially the shrubbery that kept scratching the wall outside.

Beyond the bedroom window lay woods, the quiet road, the ink-black darkness I recalled from childhood visits to my aunts and uncles in rural Georgia. Those tales of rivalries, bodies found in abandoned wells, old friends who decided to murder one another, moonshine-running cousins pursued by demons through the Blue Ridge Mountains. If you drew a curtain indoors at night and looked out, the sky was so black you could see only your reflection in the window.

Alone with my thoughts, I wondered: What of this life in the deep, dark woods, where the male neighbors let off steam with beer and rifles and ammo? Where does a woman fit into this place, and what are her thoughts late at night? This wasn't a foreign world. It was my background and my husband's, one of the things we have in common. I could have married a guy with a pickup truck and a gun rack. Easily. And I wondered what my craving for life outside of that world would drive me to do.

I wrote all night. Characters came into being, and their desires intersected and became the first inkling of plot. Some of the characters were observed and some spoke for themselves, at first. It would take an effort to make them fit into one coherent narrative. Naturally, I observed all of these mechanics after the fact. That night I simply wrote everything that occurred to me.

Some weeks later, back in our Seattle apartment with cats and microbrews and takeout food, we watched a Thai film based on a centuries-old legend: A young bride is left at home by her beloved husband, who is recruited and sent into battle. The bride is inconsolable. She feels desperately lonely, living in a village of strangers with no allies, and she is pregnant. Her yearning is so great that it consumes her.

At last the husband is injured and is sent home. He returns to his wife, who has given birth. They live happily ever after--until their neighbors, who keep avoiding the young bride, tell the husband that his wife and baby are dead, that they died during childbirth, and he must look at his wife from outside their home to see what she really is.

If you like ghost stories, you see the appeal of this disturbing legend. It has served as the basis for dozens of stories and films.

I began incorporating a modern version of the tale into my story of longing and grief. Eventually I allowed it to change shape and meld with other elements of my novel. Yet the tale's illusions and the pernicious spirit that will not let go of what it desires, even in death, informed every aspect of Knock Knock. The book follows several women as they try to invent satisfying adult lives, despite the neglect and violence in their childhood and in the world around them.

For a long time I kept trying to marry this story to an odd fact about the place where my husband grew up. For decades no female children were born there, all the women were old or had married into the families on the all-male road. I did eventually build this into Knock Knock but not to the extent I originally intended.

Many drafts have taken shape and have been built up, pared down, and then reshaped. Many new and creepy ideas have found their way to this town that was, in early drafts, called Baldwin. It is now Skillute, Washington: a dying forest, and home to the discontented women of Knock Knock.

Welcome.

ASTORIA

ASTORIA, my second novella and the third book in THE SKILLUTE CYCLE, is now available to pre-order.

http://www.amazon.com/Astoria-S-P-Mis...

My novel might cost you your job

From a new Twitter follower:

"@SPMiskowski's novel Knock Knock is one of the best books I've read in the last few years, horror or otherwise. Check it out."

"@SPMiskowski I almost wanted to sue you for lost wages - I work in a restaurant and I kept screwing up my tables bc my mind was in Skillute!"

My work is done. Well, almost. I'm about to begin writing the final book in The Skillute Cycle.

DELPHINE DODD discount

A Shirley Jackson Award finalist in the novella category this year, Delphine Dodd is available for 99 cents in ebook form, today and tomorrow.

http://www.amazon.com/Delphine-Dodd-e...