Stephen Mark Rainey's Blog, page 26

Coming Soon — The Canterbury Nightmares

The Canterbury Nightmares is a new anthology of short stories inspired by — you guessed it! — the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by David Niall Wilson.

“Eleven travelers head out to visit the Grand Canyon, all motivated by their own powerful, personal reasons. All have suffered profound losses; all harbor secret but consuming agony. An old man taking a long-promised journey with his wife. A congregation that has lost its way. Individuals of different backgrounds and cultures, all dealing with grief, loss, and isolation. In The Canterbury Nightmares, you will be led not only to the soaring precipices of the Grand Canyon but also into deep, dark, unimaginable recesses.”

The book is now available for pre-order — and the advance price for the Kindle edition (here) has been dropped to $2.99.

Table of Contents:
“The Old Man’s Tale” – Steve Rasnic Tem
“The Liberation of Brother Buffalo” – Michael Boatman
“Think of the Family” – Ai Jiang
“To See Her in Sepia” – Scott J. Moses
“The Preditor's Tale” – Terence Taylor
“The Wife of Wrath’s Tale” – John B. Rosenman
“The Secret Place: A Knight’s Tale” – Stephen Mark Rainey
“The Sacred Clarion” – S.A. Cosby
“The Tour Guide's Tale” – Anna Tambour
“Every Form of Person” – J.A.W. McCarthy
“Vending Machine Girl”– Eric LaRocca

Pre-Order The Canterbury Nightmares from Amazon.com here

Another Fun Visit with Penny Dreadful

Author/Editor Katherine Kerestman and I dropped in on Penny Dreadful ’s Terror at Collinwood podcast the other day, and the episode has now been posted for your frightful pleasure. We talk about Dark Shadows , of course; the upcoming The Weird Cat anthology, edited by Kathrine and S.T. Joshi, which features short fiction by both Katherine, me, and a ton of noteworthy authors; Deathrealm: Spirits , my new anthology, due in October; plus all kinds of other fun stuff. Mind you don't get seduced!   No... wait... go right ahead. Get seduced. Try it, you'll like it.   PS: Frazier likes Dark Shadows and makes a guest appearance.

Release Day: Dark Corners of the Old Dominion

It’s release day for Dark Corners of the Old Dominion from Death Knell Press. This one features my story, “Doom at Dragon’s Roost,” which is gonna scare the pants off of you. It will too!

What’s so scary about Virginia?
From Edgar Allan Poe’s Ragged Mountains to the shores of Tidewater’s Seven Cities… From the blood-soaked battlegrounds of the Civil War to the shadowy political arena of the D.C. Beltway.

We have four hundred years’ worth of ghost stories, folk horrors, small-town terrors, urban legends, backwoods monsters, otherworldly secrets, and down-home Southern Gothic.

Within this idyllic landscape, there are many dark corners. Within these pages, Virginia authors explore twenty-four dangerous destinations, myths and monsters from the commonwealth’s past, present, and future. Read on, if you dare.

Dark Corners of the Old Dominion is edited by Joseph Maddrey and Michael Rook, with a foreword by Brian Keene. Every author in this anthology has strong ties to Virginia and it is clear in the stories and poems they’ve created. They are steeped in the salty waters of the Chesapeake Bay, pulsing with the thrum of the beltway, and bleeding from old battlefield scars. 

Foreword by Brian Keene. Proceeds for Dark Corners of the Old Dominion go to the Scares That Care charity.

Table of Contents:
• “The Bride of Dream Lake” —Catherine Kuo
• “Keep ItCivil” — Clay McLeod Chapman
• “A Holler You Can’t Call Home” — Paul Michael Anderson
• “Doom at Dragon’s Roost” — Stephen Mark Rainey
• “The Woods Behind My House” — Sonora Taylor
• “Room 1968” — Nicole Willson
• “By a Thread” — Querus Abuttu
• “Notches” — D. Alexander Ward
• “New World Order” — Ella B. Rite
• “Chesapeake Bait and Hook” — Sirrah Medeiros
• “The Girl Who Sleeps in the Room Next to Me” — Charles E. Wood
• “Cave Kisses” — William R.D. Wood
• “In the Mountain Mist” — Margaret L. Carter
• “The Wrong Time” — Ivy Grimes
• “The Flooded Man” — Michael Rook
• “The Bunnyman of Clifton” — Brýn Grover
• “The Song Between the Songs” — J.T. Glover
• “A Mischief in Gordonsville” — Valerie B. Williams
• “Lost Soul” — María Badillo
• “Odditorium” — Sidney Williams
• “This is How Your Garden Grows” — Joseph Maddrey
• “Beach House” — Bryan Nowak
• “A House’s Tale” — Brad Center
• “The Path to Freedom” — James L. Hill Order Dark Corners of the Old Dominion

The House of Haunted Hill

Just hung several paintings by Charles Hill, respected artist and longtime friend going back to elementary school.

Top left: Widget, my mom & dad's little dog back in the 80s and 90s; Top right: the view from Charles's front yard; Bottom left: my dad walking Widget from the early 90s; Bottom right: my daughter, Allison Hiiri Rainey, about age 8, running along the banks of Lake Lanier, just down the street from here.

Charles also provided several damn scary pieces of art for Deathrealm magazine back in its day, including this one, which served as an illustration for Elizabeth Massie’s story, “No Solicitors, Curious a Quarter”:

What’s So Scary About Virginia?

Author/Editor Red Lagoe has posted on HorrorTree some nice, brief author interviews by contributors to the upcoming Dark Corners of the Old Dominion anthology, due very soon from Death Knell Press.

An example of one old dude’s responses:

Q: A paranormal investigation team has only one night to spend in a Virginia location. Where would you send them and why?

A: St. Albans Sanitorium in Radford, I expect. It’s reputedly the most haunted site in Virginia, and though I’ve not yet visited the Sanitorium itself, I know the area well from many sojourns in Blacksburg, Christiansburg, and the surrounding vicinity. The haunted vibe in this part of the state is near and dear to me, as the southwestern Virginia mountains serve as the backdrop for a significant amount of my fiction. The Sanitorium is on my bucket list of sites to visit, and I reckon I’d be obliged if investigators were to check it out in advance.

Q: Without giving away any spoilers, where does your Dark Corners story take place and what inspired the idea?

A: “Doom at Dragon’s Roost” is set in the mountains of southwest Virginia, very near the real-life location known as Dragon’s Tooth in the Catawba Valley, northwest of Salem. Over the years, I’ve created a fictional corner of the state — sort of “tucked into” the mountain region between Martinsville and Blacksburg. Many of these stories involve several families over a long period of years. Although it is a standalone story, “Doom at Dragon’s Roost” could be considered a chapter in the ongoing saga of the fictional Sylvan County. Many of my stories — including this one — involve music as a means of bridging the gaps between natural and supernatural realms.

On a perhaps less scary note (unless you happened to cross my path), I woke up to a beautiful morning, so I decided to take a walk around nearby Lake Lanier before the heat and humidity set in. There were a good many people out walking and a few boating and fishing on the lake. It’s gonna be another scorcher today, so that was probably the extent of my outdoor activities today.

Be goot.

Read “What Are the Scariest Places
in Virginia” Here. A purty view of Lake Lanier from the Blue Heron Trail

The Faux Frontier?

Back in July, around the anniversary of the first moon landing, I read a bunch of articles about Apollo 11 and the space program in general.

Since then — shock of shocks — my social media news feeds are almost all space stuff. Some is just clickbait, but I’ve also come across some cool and informative stuff.

Among the most ubiquitous “stuff” I see on the subject would be the thundering chorus of voices railing about how the moon landings — even the space program itself — were all a big hoax. These are inevitably pitched with the same fervor (and credibility) of the Flat Earthers. Clearly, there have been conspiracy theories of this nature since before Neil Armstrong even set foot on the lunar surface, but I confess I’ve actually been surprised by how pervasive this nonsense has become (and I’m generally pretty hard to surprise when it comes to the pervasive tentacles of the Idiocracy).

No doubt, a huge percentage of this shrillness comes from mere trolls, whose rate of reproduction on the interwebz rivals the world’s busiest rabbit hutch. Trolls in any field will latch onto almost anything to justify their otherwise meaningless existences. Still, the apparent genuine belief in such conspiracies far exceeds what I might have otherwise guessed, even in the present-day world of a la carte conspiracy theories for each day of the week.

Most telling, almost without exception, the “proof” that these adherents cite for their belief is “Go look it up for yourself! You’ll see!”

Yeah. Over my many, many years as an avid outer space nut, I’ve looked. And looked. And looked. It goes without saying that the preponderance of evidence is so heavily weighted to the landings’ veracity that even scratching its surface fills volumes (and the opposite is true; I’ve yet to find any sufficiently compelling contradictory evidence; such outlets for such “evidence” typically offer all the credibility of BuzzFeed or InfoWars). So much evidence in the “FOR” column, physical and otherwise, has been verified by non-NASA sources, particularly internationally (for God’s sake, the Soviets acknowledged it when acknowledging such a defeat was, for them, all but unthinkable) that evidence in the “AGAINST” column would have to be pretty staggering. If you can point me to it, have at it.

One of my favorite articles on this phenomenon that I came across is “How Stanley Kubrick Staged the Moon Landing” in The Paris Review. Informative and fun.

Anyhoo, since the July 20, I’ve been on a pretty good space movie kick. 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010, Apollo 13, Apollo 18, Europa Report, and others — not to mention keeping up, or trying to, with all the Star Trek and Star Wars spinoffs. I might even work in Capricorn I if I can stream it for free somewhere.

The Final Frontier?

Back in July, around the anniversary of the first moon landing, I read a bunch of articles about Apollo 11 and the space program in general.

Since then — shock of shocks — my social media news feeds are almost all space stuff. Some is just clickbait, but I’ve also come across some cool and informative stuff.

Among the most ubiquitous “stuff” I see on the subject would be the thundering chorus of voices railing about how the moon landings — even the space program itself — were all a big hoax. These are inevitably pitched with the same fervor (and credibility) of the Flat Earthers. Clearly, there have been conspiracy theories of this nature since before Neil Armstrong even set foot on the lunar surface, but I confess I’ve actually been surprised by how pervasive this nonsense has become (and I’m generally pretty hard to surprise when it comes to the pervasive tentacles of the Idiocracy).

No doubt, a huge percentage of this shrillness comes from mere trolls, whose rate of reproduction on the interwebz rivals the world’s busiest rabbit hutch. Trolls in any field will latch onto almost anything to justify their otherwise meaningless existences. Still, the apparent genuine belief in such conspiracies far exceeds what I might have otherwise guessed, even in the present-day world of a la carte conspiracy theories for each day of the week.

Most telling, almost without exception, the “proof” that these adherents cite for their belief is “Go look it up for yourself! You’ll see!”

Yeah. Over my many, many years as an avid outer space nut, I’ve looked. And looked. And looked. It goes without saying that the preponderance of evidence is so heavily weighted to the landings’ veracity that even scratching its surface fills volumes (and the opposite is true; I’ve yet to find any sufficiently compelling contradictory evidence; such outlets for such “evidence” typically offer all the credibility of BuzzFeed or InfoWars). So much evidence in the “FOR” column, physical and otherwise, has been verified by non-NASA sources, particularly internationally (for God’s sake, the Soviets acknowledged it when acknowledging such a defeat was, for them, all but unthinkable) that evidence in the “AGAINST” column would have to be pretty staggering. If you can point me to it, have at it.

One of my favorite articles on this phenomenon that I came across is “How Stanley Kubrick Staged the Moon Landing” in The Paris Review. Informative and fun.

Anyhoo, since the July 20, I’ve been on a pretty good space movie kick. 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010, Apollo 13, Apollo 18, Europa Report, and others — not to mention keeping up, or trying to, with all the Star Trek and Star Wars spinoffs. I might even work in Capricorn I if I can stream it for free somewhere.

Deathrealm: Spirits Cover Reveal

As promised — the Deathrealm: Spirits cover reveal. Art by J. Edward Neill.

20 all-new stories and poems by the most intense voices ever to weave their way into your waking world. From soft, dreadful whispers to high, chilling screams, these voices emerge from the darkness to lure and draw you back to their hellish home — The Land Where Horror Dwells.

Deathrealm magazine was one of the most celebrated horror publications of the 20th Century, and now its creator brings you a new volume of fiction and verse for the 21st Century and beyond. Deathrealm: Spirits features 20 new ghostly stories (and poems) by some of the best to have ever written in the genre, including...

• Linda D. Addison
• Meghan Arcuri
• Larry Blamire
• Maurice Broaddus
• Heather D. Daughrity
• Timothy G. Huguenin
• Brian Keene
• Ronald Kelly
• Joe R. Lansdale
• Kasey Lansdale
• Eric LaRocca
• Patricia Lee Macomber
• Elizabeth Massie
• Bridgett Nelson
• Errick Nunnally
• Jeff Oliver
• Jessica Amanda Salmonson
• Richard Thomas
• Tony Tremblay
• David Niall Wilson

Check out Deathrealm: Spirits (including pre-ordering) at Shortwave Publishing

Dark Corners of the Old Dominion Now Available for Pre-Order!

DARK CORNERS OF THE OLD DOMINION , coming in September from Death Knell Press , is now available for preorder!

Edited by Joe Maddrey & Michael Rook, this one features my story, "Doom at Dragon's Roost" as well as frightening tales by 22 other Virginia authors. Dangerous destinations, myths, and monsters from the Commonwealth’s past, present, and future lie in wait for you here...

Forward by Brian Keene. Proceeds go to Scares That Care! Pre-order Dark Corners of the Old Dominion at Death Knell Press here!

Coming Soon — The Weird Cat!

The Weird Cat is a new anthology edited by Katherine Kerestman and S. T. Joshi, which features — among a stellar list of both classic and contemporary authors of dark fiction — my short story, “Nimbus.” I do not exaggerate when I tell you that this is one of my most unsettling and emotionally engaging works of fiction. The book, due in October from WordCrafts Press, is now available for pre-order from Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.

“...Cats dwell in a larger world than our own — the gulfs and abysses of which we can obtain but a shadowy glimpse. In The Weird Cat, you delve into that larger realm through more than three dozen short stories, poems, and essays by masters of the craft including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, Mary A. Turzillo, Christina Sng, Darrell Schweitzer, and others.”

Complete list of authors in The Weird Cat:
• Ambrose Bierce • Algernon Blackwood • William Blake • Adam Bolivar • Ramsey Campbell • Lewis Carroll • Frank Coffman • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle • Lord Dunsany • Jason C. Eckhardt • Alan Dean Foster • Brandon R. Grafius • Lafcadio Hearn • Katherine Kerestman • Caitlin R. Kiernan • Rudyard Kipling • Tony LaMalfa • Lori R. Lopez • H. P. Lovecraft • E. Nesbit • Elliott O'Donnell • Manuel Perez-Campos • Michael Potts • Stephen Mark Rainey • Rainer Maria Rilke • Sax Rohmer • Hank Schwaeble • Darrell Schweitzer • Robert W. Service • M. P. Shiel • Christina Sng • Anna Taborska • Mary Turzillo • M. F. Webb • W. B. Yeats