David A. Riley's Blog, page 87

First stories accepted for Kitchen Sink Gothic

We have already accepted three stories for our forthcoming anthology Kitchen Sink Gothic due to be published by Parallel Universe Publications next year.

SUBMISSIONS

Parallel Universe Publications is now accepting submissions, either original or reprints, for an anthology of stories inspired by the classic British cinema/theatre phenomenon known as kitchen sink drama. 

What Culture described it as: "A determination to examine the lives of the working and dispossessed classes in a non sentimental way...The movement began in the late 1950s and has survived to this day with the oeuvre of Ken Loach and films such as Nil By Mouth. Tackling thorny themes is a trademark of the Kitchen Sink drama. Abortion, divorce, homelessness, single motherhood, inter racial sex, poverty and homosexuality were all ripe topics to be examined. There was also the advent of The Angry Young Man – usually working class men railing against everyone and everything."

That fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, describes it as: "a term coined to describe a British cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays, whose 'heroes' usually could be described as angry young men. It used a style of social realism, which often depicted the domestic situations of working-class Britons living in cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore social issues and political controversies.
The films, plays and novels employing this style are set frequently in poorer industrial areas in the North of England, and use the rough-hewn speaking accents and slang heard in those regions. The film It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) is a precursor of the genre, and the John Osborne play Look Back in Anger (1956) is thought of as the first of the idiom.
The gritty love-triangle of Look Back in Anger, for example, takes place in a cramped, one-room flat in the English Midlands. The conventions of the genre have continued into the 2000s, finding expression in such television shows as Coronation Street and EastEnders .[1]
In art, "Kitchen Sink School" was a term used by critic David Sylvester to describe painters who depicted social realist-type scenes of domestic life.[2]"

We look forward to tales of darkness and horror, of the supernatural and the weird within the overall framework of the social realism of the kitchen sink drama. 

Please send your submissions to rileybooks@ntlworld.com headed "Kitchen Sink Gothic" as an attachment in either doc or docx. We welcome either new stories or reprints. If a reprint please add details of previous publication. We have no firm maximum length though obviously the longer the story the better it will need to be to be accepted.

Payment will be £5 per thousand words and a contributor's copy of the book.

Parallel Universe Publications has a Facebook Page

We now have a dedicated Facebook page for Parallel Universe publications. Check it out on www.facebook.com/paralleluniversepublications.

We are already starting to receive submissions for our Kitchen Sink Gothic anthology. Details about submissions are here.

The Queen and the Iron Throne

Strange to see our Queen gazing at the Iron Throne from Game of Thrones. Link.

Black Ceremonies - a collection of stories by Charles Black

Parallel Universe Publications will be publishing Charles Black's collection of short horror stories, Black Ceremonies, in October this year.

The book will include:

The Coughing Coffin
Call of the Damned
To Summon a Flesh-Eating Demon
The Revelations of Dr Maitland
Face to Face
A Fistful of Vengeance
The Obsession of Percival Cairstairs
Tourist Trap

The book's cover is by Paul Mudie, well known for his striking covers for the Black Books of Horror. The accompanying illustration is an unfinished glimpse of it.

Scardiff - 19th October

With the convention we would normally attend looking less attactive at the moment for a variety of reasons, Lin and I are seriously thinking of going to Scardiff this year. Our friend, Charles Black, already has a dealer's table booked for his fantastic Mortbury Press, not to mention Steve Upham's Screaming Dreams.

Although it's only a one day event, it looks packed with activities and has an interesting array of guests. Plus, I have never visited Cardiff before and perhaps it's not before time.

Nice 5-star Review for The Return

Pleased to see another reader who really enjoyed The Return.

Click here to see the review.

Kitchen Sink Gothic - an anthology

Charlie Creed-Miles in Wild Bill (2011)
Parallel Universe Publications is now accepting submissions for an anthology of stories inspired by the classic British cinema/theatre phenomena known as kitchen sink drama. 

What Culture described it as: "A determination to examine the lives of the working and dispossessed classes in a non sentimental way...The movement began in the late 1950s and has survived to this day with the oeuvre of Ken Loach and films such as Nil By Mouth. Tackling thorny themes is a trademark of the Kitchen Sink drama. Abortion, divorce, homelessness, single motherhood, inter racial sex, poverty and homosexuality were all ripe topics to be examined. There was also the advent of The Angry Young Man – usually working class men railing against everyone and everything."

That fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, describes it as: "a term coined to describe a British cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays, whose 'heroes' usually could be described as angry young men. It used a style of social realism, which often depicted the domestic situations of working-class Britons living in cramped rented accommodation and spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore social issues and political controversies.
The films, plays and novels employing this style are set frequently in poorer industrial areas in the North of England, and use the rough-hewn speaking accents and slang heard in those regions. The film It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) is a precursor of the genre, and the John Osborne play Look Back in Anger (1956) is thought of as the first of the idiom.
The gritty love-triangle of Look Back in Anger, for example, takes place in a cramped, one-room flat in the English Midlands. The conventions of the genre have continued into the 2000s, finding expression in such television shows as Coronation Street and EastEnders .[1]
In art, "Kitchen Sink School" was a term used by critic David Sylvester to describe painters who depicted social realist-type scenes of domestic life.[2]"

I look forward to tales of darkness and horror, of the supernatural and the weird within the overall framework of the social realism of the kitchen sink drama. 

Please send your submissions to rileybooks@ntlworld.com headed "Kitchen Sink Gothic". Please send your story as an attachment in either doc or docx. 

Payment will be £5 per thousand words and a contributor's copy of the book.

Interview for Blood Bound Books about The Return

I have just completed an interview for Blood Bound Books about my novel The Return as part of their promotional campaign.




1.  Tell us a little about The Return.


The Return is the culmination of a number of stories I have written about Edgebottom and its notorious area of Grudge End over recent years (Lock-In, The Fragile Mask on his Face, Old Grudge Ender, The True Spirit, The Worst of all Possible Places). For a long time I had also been interested in the idea of merging the crime genre with Lovecraftian horror. I didn't want to write another pastiche of the Cthulhu Mythos. With Gary Morgan I had a protagonist who is the antithesis of the normal Lovecraftian hero, a tough, no nonsense professional hitman on the run after carrying out a gangland murder in London, who makes the one mistake of returning for what he thinks will be a last, almost nostalgic look at his old hometown. To his increasing horror he soon finds that its violent, diabolical past is even more dangerous than the criminal world in which he has lived for the past few decades.


I wanted to blend the dark atmosphere of crime noir with the even darker atmosphere of a Lovecraftian horror story, whilst making the novel as grittily realistic as possible in an almost kitchen sink kind of way.


2.   The Return  is a story about returning home. Is there anything mysterious or diabolical about your hometown? Any reasons you may not want to go back ?


I have never lived all that far from my home town of Accrington, other than when I moved to Blackburn after I got married, five miles away. I lived there for seven years. 


Of course the most notorious event in the history of this area concerns Pendle Hill, which rises ominously to the west of Accrington only a few feet shy from being a mountain. It was the home of the infamous Lancashire Witches who were tried and hanged at Lancaster in 1612. Their story has featured in several books, from Harrison Ainsworth's The Lancashire Witches, Robert Neill's Mist over Pendle and, more recently, Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate, soon to be filmed by Hammer. (http://www.pendlewitches.co.uk/) Many of the descriptions for Edgebottom are based on my hometown - and on other Lancashire towns as well; I've cherrypicked the features that suit my vision of Edgebottom the most. If you look at the history of many places in Lancashire most are filled with violence, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when rioters, like the Luddites, were fired on by troops, and the surrounding moorlands were plagued with footpads and highwaymen. 


Although most were shut down years ago, it's an area that was once justifiably stigmatised for its "dark satanic mills", which dominated most towns in the industrial parts of Lancashire, something I have highlighted with Malleson's Mill in my novel.


3.    The Return focuses on Gary Morgan who is a gangster. In America we tend to think about New York's Five families, Chicago's Al Capone, etc.Who are a few of your favorite historical gangsters? Are there UK equivalents to these US gangsters? 


The UK has certainly had more than its fair share of real life gangsters - and still has! In writing The Return, the ones that were influential on me were two of the most notorious: the Kray twins in East London and, more particularly, the Richardson brothers, who were malignantly powerful in South London in the 1960s. The Richardsons were infamous for holding mock trials during which victims were tortured and sometimes killed. Though both the Krays and Richardsons are long gone, gangs in the UK still exist, possibly even more violent than they used to be. They certainly use guns more often than in the past even though they are illegal here. 


Fictionally, Ted Lewis's outstanding novel Jack's Return Home, more well known as Get Carter from the classic crime thriller starring Michael Caine, was influential when completing The Return. One reviewer actually described it as Get Carter Meets Cthulhu!

In the Flesh series finale

Last night I watched the final two episodes of the second series of In the Flesh on BBC3. The story continually improves and it's great to see a truly original zombie series set in Lancashire. I can't claim that I didn't see one of the tragic twists happening beforehand (brilliantly well handled and shocking though it was), but I did not foresee what would ultimately happen at the very end - showing that a third series must surely be on the cards.
All credit to the writers of this series and the actors too, who gave great performances. 

Fantastic animated cartoon for Superman's 75th Birthday

I came across this brilliant cartoon on facebook, celebrating 75 years of Superman. Whether you are a fan of the Man of Steel or not, I'm sure you'll appreciate the cleverness of it.