Laird Barron's Blog, page 35

KGB

I’ll be in NYC on Wednesday, the 21st alongside Paul Tremblay for a reading at the KGB Bar. The announcement:

 

Laird Barron & Paul Tremblay, May 21st

FANTASTIC FICTION at KGB reading series, hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present:

Laird Barron is the author of several books, including The Croning, Occultation, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All . His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Fearful Symmetries and Lovecraft Unbound. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in Upstate New York


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Paul Tremblay is the author of five novels including The Little Sleep, Floating Boy, and The Girl Who Couldn’t Fly (YA with Stephen Graham Jones, forthcoming October 2014), and A Head Full of Ghosts (forthcoming in 2015,). He’s the author of the short story collection In the Mean Time and has co-edited five anthologies, including Creatures: Thirty Years of Monster Stories (with John Langan). His fiction and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times and numerous year’s best anthologies.

Wednesday, May 21st, 7pm at

KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.)

http://www.kgbfantasticfiction.org/

Subscribe to our mailing list:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kgbfantasticfiction/

Readings are always free.

Please forward to friends at your own discretion.

Stoker/Norm Partridge

Thank you to the HWA voters for giving The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All a Stoker Award in the collection category. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather.

For my money, Nathan Ballingrud’s collection was the best thing on the ballot. I humbly suggest you make haste to secure North American Lake Monsters asap.

I am chagrined to realize that I neglected Norm Partridge in my acceptance speech, so let me rectify that immediately. Norm provided a terrific intro to my collection. Thank you, Norm. He’s one of the great North American horror writers. Go check him out: 10/31: Bloody Mary

Achilles

A poem I wrote many a year ago.

 

ACHILLES

He does not remember the barbed fence

His civilian mechanisms are fused at the plexus

Pasture grass, ganglion of a dead man of war

Down the funnel of the twelve gauge in his fist

It is always like this; it has always been so

The clock an arc of light that welds

wooden stock, wedding band, and trigger

A silo propped upright by culled earth

Empty as cries for mercy, and in its long slope

Of shadow small animals work between cracks

While dread machinery ticks beneath white tombs

From his window he sees dust slither

Among gunmetal weeds, a trough eaten through the belly

Old scars, a bad ankle, remind him of better campaigns

Gravity is greater in the heartland

The stones here are heavier and numberless

They have beaten his best ploughs, they have broken

The legs of his great horses

Some hold his brave sons at their bosom; a trench

of wildflowers smolders between them

He tastes remnants of fire, and smiles to watch bees

Drift like black ships, flickering yellow before the City

Honorable Mentions for The Year’s Best Weird Fiction

Here are a handful of stories that were in serious contention for inclusion in the Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 1.

 

“Vivian Guppy and the Brighton Belle” Nina Allan, Rustblind and Silverbright

“Americca” Aimee Bender, Slate

“The Sweet Virgin Meat” Kola Boof, Exotic Gothic 5

“The Vast Impatience Of The Night” Mark Fuller Dillon, In a Season of Dead Weather

“Oubliette” Gemma Files, The Grimscribe’s Puppets

“Rocket to Hell” Jeffrey Ford, Tor.com

“The Man Who Escaped His Story” Cody Goodfellow, The Grimscribe’s Puppets

“Diamond Dust” Mike Griffin, The Grimscribe’s Puppets

“Baba Makosh” MK Hobson, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

“Mother of Stone,” John Langan, The Wide Carnivorous Sky & Other Monstrous Geographies

“Interstate Love Affair” Stephen Graham Jones, Three Miles Past

“The Cave” Sean F. Lynch, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

“Hideous Interview with Brief Man” Nick Mamatas, Fiddleback

“In the Darkest Room in the Darkest House on the Darkest Part of the Street” Gary McMahon, For the Night is Dark

“The Design” China Mieville, McSweeney’s 45

“All Your Faces Drown in My Syringe” Ralph Robert Moore, Black Static 37

“Black Hen a La Ford” David Nickle, Chilling Tales: In Words, Alas, Drown I

“The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger” Yoko Ogawa, Revenge

“The House on Cobb Street” Lynda E. Rucker, Nightmare Magazine

“How I Met the Ghoul” Sofia Samatar, Eleven Eleven

“The Painted Bones” Kelly Simmons, Unlikely Story Issue 6

“Touch Me With Your Cold, Hard Fingers” Elizabeth Stott, Nightjar Press

“Abyssus Abyssum Invocat” Genevieve Valentine, Lightspeed Magazine

“The Fox” Conrad Williams, This is Horror

“On Murder Island” Matt Williamson, Nightmare Magazine

 

art by Santiago Caruso

 

John Fultz Interview

John Fultz is a talented author and deserving of more recognition for his work in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. I picked up “The Key to Your Heart is Made of Brass” for the inaugural Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 1.

Check out his interview with Weird Tales.

courtesy Weird Tales

Abysmal Brutes Podcast

Rob Smith and Bill Wertenberger talk about my recent collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. Thanks, gentlemen.

 

Pre-ordering the Year’s Best Weird Fiction

Here’s a note from Michael Kelly about pre-ordering the inaugural Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume 1:

“Hey, gang, there has been some discussion among book-buyers, distributors, and others, about the relative merits of ‘weird’ fiction. So, if you’ve any inclination (or even if you don’t), to buy the inaugural Year’s Best Weird Fiction, edited by Laird Barron, now would be a great time to pre-order. Help a publisher out, and ensure this series continues. Thanks to all who have supported the book, thus far. http://amzn.to/QBtOmb“–Michael Kelly

Fear & Inspiration

I talk weird fiction with Fata Libelli.

 

courtesy Fata Libelli; art by David Ho for The Light Is the Darkness

Weird Tales Asks About the Year’s Best Weird Fiction

What it says on the tin:

 

art courtesy Matt Jaffe

Listen to This: Was it Sacred? Did You Scream Out?

Chris Bathgate is bad to the bone, and so is his album, Salt Year.