Exclusive Short Story: Peter Orullian
Peter Orullian is one of Terry’s friends. You may recognize the name if you’ve read Bearers of the Black Staff; two elf brothers bear the last name Orullian, a name Terry loved and asked permission to use. Peter is not only the basis for a Shannara last name though. He is a debut fantasy author whose first book, The Unremembered, was published earlier this week.
Terry read it a year ago and to help Peter get the word out about The Unremembered, Terry has allowed Peter to post an exclusive short story on Terry’s website! More after the jump!
Suvudu » Science Fiction and Fantasy Books, Movies, Comics, and Games
Horror Short Story Collection: Vigilantes of Love
Today is a bonus horror short story collection post.
Yesterday John Everson announced that the price of the ebook reprint of his second collection, Vigilantes of Love, was now 99 cents for both Kindle and Nook formats — but only for a short time.
Known for his intense stories of erotic horror, John Everson shines in this collection forcusing on dark fantasy.
If you’ve never read any of John’s stories before, this is a great book to start with and now its available at a great price.
Still on the fence? In the book’s summary below you’ll find links to John’s website where you can read three of the stories in Vigilantes of Love for free. Try tem and see if this collection isn’t the one for you.
If you’re interested in a book, click on the icons below the summary to order it from an online bookseller. This is not an affiliate link.
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Vigilantes of LoveAuthor: Everson, John |
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A woman whose life is shaped and doomed by the “Calling of the Moon” . . . A girl who learns the secret powers of the “Seven Deadly Seeds” . . . A boy who finds that the power of music can open a hidden world thanks to a flute hidden in the attic . . . A man who learns the meaning behind the voodoo curse that brings the “Vigilantes of Love” from the hearts of the New Orleans swamps to punish the adulterers under the light of the full moon . . . Vigilantes of Love offers these and nearly a dozen more tales of dark magic, the macabre and things that happen when you go one step beyond. John Everson’s second book-length collection of short horror and dark fantasy fiction was originally issued in 2003 by Chicago-based Twilight Tales, and focuses more on dark fantasy than the more extreme erotic horror of his first short fiction collection, Cage of Bones and Other Deadly Obsessions. Vigilantes of Love includes 15 dark fantasy and horror tales, from the “Twilight Zone”-esque “Preserve” one of Everson’s earliest tales to “Calling of the Moon,” which received an Honorable Mention in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology, to “Lovesong” a 5th Place winner in the 2000 World Horror Convention Fiction Contest. In addition to new stories, it also features tales reprinted from the anthologies Transversions and Freaks, Geeks and Sideshow Floozies and the magazines Sirius Visions, Crossroads, Eulogy and Plot. Extra: Read “Hard Heart”, “Christmas, The Hard Way” and “Vigilantes of Love” online. Table of Contents:
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April 2003 (Hardcover — Twilight Tales)
April 2003 (Hardcover — Twilight Tales)
December 2010 (eBook — John Everson)John’s Story Teasers:
- Calling of the Moon She answered the calling of the moon. But not before he felt its touch.
- Lovesong She lured him into the arms of alternative music. He lured her to face the room at the top of the stairs.
- A Time for Music A fairy flute can make dangerous music.
- Trick and Treat All he wanted was a little company for the holiday.
- After the Fifth Step Sometimes, walking the tightrope isn’t just a balancing act.
- Seven Deadly Seeds Bellinda liked to plant things. And Penelope was happy to give her the seeds.
- Preserve “I don’t kill, I preserve,” the taxidermist said. But Richard wanted to die.
- Hard Heart Sometimes, wearing a heart on your sleeve can be tough. But giving it away can be even worse.
- Frost When David left the plane to live with the frost sprite, he thought his problems were over.
- Anne’s Perfect Smile She’d disappeared without a trace. And then he found the post-it note.
- A Lack of Signs If you really know what you want, sometimes, you can find it.
- Christmas, The Hard Way There’s a reason for every tradition, even if you have magic.
- The Humane Way Christmas dinner can lead to unsavory philosophical debates.
- The Right Instrument Jack’s career as a jingle writer was on the deep skids after his breakup. But Eddie knew, all he needed was the right instrument.
- Vigilantes of Love They came in silence from the swamps by the light of the full moon. They left only bloodstains on the sheets. Ribaud knew that it would take a voodoo queen to reverse the curse.
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Horror Books with the Undead Rat
Horror Short Story Collections: Gleefully Macabre Tales Revisited
Yesterday Jeff Strand knighted me for posting about a pair of his ebooks.
So, today I intend to curry favor and try for a kingship. I’ll do that by revising and republishing a post I did last August on Gleefully Macabre Tales by Jeff Strand.
Genius, no?
Jeff Strand’s Gleefully Macabre Tales is “Most of” collection of mostly but not completely humorous horror stories. Get it? No? Read the introduction. It’ll make sense.
Originally published by Delirium Books, the second edition was brought out by Dark Regions Press in both trade paperback and ebook formats — containing additional stories including Disposal which weren’t in the original.
The novella Disposal was originally published in a limited edition hardcover with ten forewords by other horror authors by Biting Dog Press. Although you don’t get the forewords in Gleefully Macabre Tales, you do get the story.
Read Gleefully Macabre Tales. You’ll never look at wiener dogs the same way again. . . .
And the ebook is cheap. Not 99 cents cheap but cheap enough.
Remember, if you are interested in this book, click the mouse on the book cover to order it from an online bookseller through an affiliate link.
Hey, did you notice all that product placement up there? I’ve got the golden subtle touch.
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Gleefully Macabre TalesAuthor: Strand, Jeff |
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Nominated for the 2008 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Collection Cemetery Dance magazine says that “No author working today comes close to Jeff Strand’s perfect mixture of comedy and terror.” Gleefully Macabre Tales compiles 32 of his most twisted blends of cringe-worthy horror and ghoulish humor, with a couple of serious pieces thrown in just to mess with you. This collection includes tales from his three chapbooks (Two Twisted Nuts, Socially Awkward Moments With An Aspiring Lunatic, and Funny Stories of Scary Sex) and numerous other stories both popular and obscure, including “Really, Really Ferocious” (the one with the wiener dog), “High Stakes” (the one with the slot machine), “Roasting Weenies by Hellfire” (the one with Satan), “The Bad Candy House” (the one with a very unpleasant old man at Halloween) and “The Socket” (the one with the eyeball socket). It also includes two of his entries in the World Horror Convention gross-out contest. But you don’t want to read them. So if you’re looking to laugh, gasp, gag, or do all three at the same time, making sort of a weird sound that hurts your lungs and elicits odd glances from nearby pedestrians, don’t miss Gleefully Macabre Tales! Partial Table of Contents:
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2009 (Trade Paperback — Dark Regions Press)GOS Multimedia created the trailer for Gleefully Macabre Tales.
It’s a great video and allows me to mention Gleefully Macabre Tales one more time. Clever thinking like this will get me that kingship.
And because I wouldn’t be Sir Undead Rat (I was knighted, remember?) without a way oversized picture of the book cover — I doubt anyone can make out that 185 x 280 pixel book cover above — here is the bigg’en.
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Horror Books with the Undead Rat
Story Prize Finalist (2010) — Death Is Not an Option
There are all sorts of reasons to love The Story Prize. It promotes the art of the short story collection; director Larry Dark always puts together a first-class team of judges and does his legwork; and it’s completely possible to read all of the finalists between the time the shortlist is announced and the award ceremony itself. Three is a nice, doable number. So this year, Like Fire decided to put up or shut up, and we’re taking an in-depth look at each of the contestants. On February 11, Daniel Nocivelli reviewed Anthony Doerr’s Memory Wall, on the 18th Lisa Peet looked at Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and today, just to shake things up a bit, the two of us are having a conversation about Suzanne Rivecca’s collection, Death Is Not an Option.
DN: I thought the first one, the title story, was the best of the entire lot: Students at a Catholic high school are dragooned into attending their senior class retreat. Their conversations along the way are spot-on in the merciless skewering of even the tiniest mote of pretense or sanctimony they detect among their teachers, parents, religion, and especially themselves. Their sense of order and justice is piercingly acute:
Claire is the only one who knows about my Eddie Vedder [crush] because, although she is a psychotic bitch, a hokey part of me is reserved for her, a part I can get out of my system and feel better. Claire is kind of like an enema.
And Emma is talking about a friend! Their immaturity is as hilarious as it is discomfiting (I say that, of course, from the distance of three+ decades). The antic discourse, however, hides very real and tender feelings—the masquerade dance characteristic of adolescence.
LP: There’s so much teenaged push and pull here it almost makes you want to burst into tears yourself, which I think makes it an unqualified success.
DN: Even if high school wasn’t a wildly affirming experience for you (as it largely wasn’t for me), leaving it behind is still a significant milestone, a symbol of larger transformations already underway and those not yet imagined, those still to come. It’s for just such a time in life that the word bittersweet is needed:
Tomorrow night this fucking retreat will be over. In a month and a half I will graduate. In four months I will go to college. I used to comfort myself with that thought, like a nest egg. But now I feel the crying jag starting. I have been here too long; I have grown conditioned; I only know how to interact with human beings who are in direct and antagonistic opposition to me.
Emma’s sense of futility on leaving high school and her known world, and her unnamed fear of starting college hundreds of miles away from home, is precious, in the best sense of that word—the already and the not-yet battling each other across the indefatigable spirit of a teen. Suzanne Rivecca got this one exactly right.
LP: I agree, it’s lovely, and it sets the tone well. The stories in this collection strike me as a set of loose variations on a theme: the desire to be believed, the urge to disclose vs. the wish not to have to disclose, but be understood anyway.
DN: Sounds like my life!
LP: I think it’s everyone’s, to a certain extent. Which in a way works against the stories as a group because it’s so clear when something succeeds or doesn’t. On the other hand, I liked the book a lot for trying, because it’s dealing with such delicate, yet totally relatable, emotion. That temptation to write a long, detailed answer to a question like “How’s your mom doing?” or “What’s up with your job” is so hard to resist when it hits, and you suddenly feel this overwhelming compulsion to connect. I’ve done it. That’s most likely why I blog.
DN: That’s a very interesting insight. I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t really think much about why I blog; I just do it. I should spend some time considering that. I think I’m sometimes in too much of my own bubble while I’m reading and preparing a post—the activity seems to be enough. It’s important to pay more attention to the blogging motivation. It’s OK, certainly, to connect, but a good idea not to lose sight of that need (note to self, and all that).
LP: But I think the activity being enough isn’t a bad thing. It keeps all of this enjoyable, hopefully. That’s something she’s good at picking out, where the desire to make yourself heard leaves off and where the need—the neediness—kicks in. And where it comes from in the first place.
DN: She isn’t shy about taking on very difficult topics, all of them centering around confused desires and an individual’s vulnerability (from Latin vulnus, wound). I was a little taken aback when some of the other stories in the book offered an unblinking glimpse at domestic abuse and silence, domestic abuse and strident intervention, obsession, stalking, the needs of helpline callers and the needs of helpline staff, and even something as innocuous as the hookups of the lonely.
LP: Yes, and while the second story, “Yours Will Do Nicely,” wasn’t one of my favorites stylistically, when the heroine answers her one-night stand’s breezy sweet note with an embarrassingly revealing—and yet totally heartfelt—letter, I winced with recognition:
When you told me about putting the radio collar on the female wolf, I envied you. I want to find a beautiful wild thing and track it, be able to tell if it’s still alive from hundreds of miles away, be able to know I had once touched a killer while she was unconscious, briefly and vulnerably harmless for the first time in her life. I keep thinking of the wolf waking up in the snow hours later like a creature coming out of a spell, feeling that something about her was different, but not knowing why, shaking the snow off her fur and running back into the trees, irreversibly changed, connected to someone now.
It’s the letter you should never write to the first person you sleep with in two years, and the kind of letter that—in one form or another—we all do. Rivecca really does get the permutations of connection. Her success on where she goes with it varies, though.
DN: Agreed! She is apparently fearless about pushing boundaries and wandering about in fields of gray, but none of the stories match up, I think, to the straightforward clarity of the first one, the book’s title story. A lot of details—too many details, really—weigh down the other stories and end up obscuring our look at the complex issues on display. Lists (and lists and lists) of things running throughout the latter stories drew my attention away from the main action already in progress. I was so focused on not being able to connect with her stories that, to my embarrassment, I’ve completely overlooked the reality that they are about connection itself.
LP: I thought “Look Ma, I’m Breathing,” which I first read two and a half years ago in Best New American Voices 2009, was a very well-put together piece. The two entwined story lines—of Isabel Hyde’s great deception at age nine, when she claimed the Virgin Mary appeared to her and which later provided her with the fodder for a memoir—and a stalker of a potential landlord who sees a connection where there is none—feed each other well. Together they produce a certain logic all their own. When the woman who tells too much and the man who presumes too much meet at the restraining order hearing, there’s a genuinely fluid interplay going on between them:
Most of all she thought of herself as she started to speak, before he had brought out [her] book and shamed her. How she opened her mouth and things came out, elegant and lucid things, and she was like the nightingale in the fairy tale placed in front of the king, watching respect and recognition dawn on the judge’s face—this doll-like girl, she speaks so well!—watching the stenographer look up at her for an instant and grimace sympathetically, that subtle empathy women convey like a shoulder squeeze, and, surrounded by the blank walls of her new apartment, she held the scotch in one hand and knew it was useless, knew that nothing would ever come out of her more purely or clearly than things like this: these distilled episodes, these illuminated lamentations, sculpted in all the right places, these testimonies of harm.
DN: It’s good that these difficult issues are brought up and worked over, made available for reflection and discussion. I think this kind of openness, a more transparent approach in looking at life, is informative and useful. I wish, this time, it had been more direct and not quite so cluttered.
LP: I agree, and I think transformative is a good word (not to mention transubstantiation, which figures prominently in “Very Special Victims”). She takes on some edgy territory and I think she’s skillful with the difficult stuff. It’s weaving that into a well-formed story that can be hit or miss here. In “Consummation,” for instance, she takes on a terrific topic: the persistent but hard-to-quantify emotional abuse that a tyrannical, frustrated father can visit on his family. There’s a lot that can be done with that, but somehow I never quite bought it—the narrator’s father never totally sprang to life. But in a way the story’s inclusion made more sense after reading the next one, “None of the Above.” Again, the subtext there has real teeth. Alongside the dilemma of Alma, a grade-school teacher who suspects that one of her students is being hurt at home, flows a quieter, deeper deadlock—the way histories of abuse become currency. And though the reasons behind her reluctance to call social services are complicated and valid, her boyfriend eternally has the moral upper hand on the subject:
Kurt turned away from her and looked into the sink. His hair stuck up at crazy angles and she wanted nothing more than to smooth it down and hug his body to her like a giant hot water bottle, but she was afraid he would rebuff her. Their arguments always brought her to the same dead end. The dark places in Alma’s own background were insufficient to trump the fact that she had not been beaten. It was like an endless, rigged game of Rock Paper Scissors. Beating crushed everything.”
DN: What struck me this time around, on a reread, were the signals that Rivecca sent out. For me, as I mentioned, I was dazed by her style and all the details by the time I reached this last story. But, now, I see that she told us right away that something else was up—for one thing, Peter’s wound was a “puncture wound,” not the routine stuff of abuse. Had she said, “bruise” or “cigarette burn,” we and the story would have been in a whole different place. Interesting. Also, there are more than enough signals that Alma tends to be rather high-strung. However caring and noble her instincts were, her approach was far more ungrounded and impulsive that I would have liked to see from a third-grade teacher.
So, the first time around, I saw the tiger as yet another detail, somewhat far-fetched, but hey, it’s a big country out there and who knows what goes on behind closed doors? It’s altogether likely that at least one situation like this is playing itself out somewhere in the US right now. Perhaps there is always something like this going on in a household somewhere—like I Love Lucy reruns, still broadcast nearly sixty years later. How would we ever know if it doesn’t hit even the local media?
On the second read, when I was paying attention to the tiger, I thought, “Oh yes; good for you.” I appreciated the subtleties in the story that I hadn’t really seen before. Having it end the way it did was just the right touch—and doesn’t devalue at all the issues of abuse and just general family functioning that are woven throughout. Nicely done.
LP: I almost loved this one. Maybe I did… I’m still thinking about the end, whether it was ingenious or somehow anticlimactic. And if so, how exactly was she supposed to resolve it? Still, it took the story’s trope and tossed it on its head, and I like that. She certainly isn’t being glib there.
DN: I think your way of reading both stories together enables them to stand together and make much more sense than as separate pieces.
LP: That’s always the question with a series of short stories that aren’t obviously linked—to what extent are they expected to stand alone or reinforce each other? I’m not sure what Suzanne Rivecca would say about these.
I do know this: Although Death Is Not an Option may be uneven, it’s extremely thought-provoking. I’m still mulling over several of the stories days later, and the ways in which she brings her art to a number of hot-button topics and makes them reverberate in a fresh way. Of all three Story Prize finalists, I’m glad we chose this book to have a public conversation about, Daniel.
I’ll be covering the Award event on Wednesday, March 2, and—especially after spending so much time with the entries—I’m very much looking forward to it.
Anthony Doerr Wins the 2010 Story Prize
Last night’s award event for The Story Prize couldn’t have been less of a sure thing, which made for an exciting contest and some very good readings and discussion. Anthony Doerr’s Memory Wall, Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and Suzanne Rivecca’s Death Is Not an Option were strong contenders with clear, singular voices—if it’s possible to have been rooting for them all, I was.
Anthony Doerr was up first and gave a lively reading from his title story, yanking the auditorium full of listeners out of a wintry New York evening and throwing us into a rainy night in Capetown. Doerr, whose collection skirts the edge of speculative fiction, is unabashedly pro-nerdiness. His mother was a science teacher, and he believes that science and literature are both ways to examine why we’re here. “It’s still a human story even if an element is magical,” he asserted, and added that writing what you know isn’t necessarily the same as writing characters who are like you.
Yiyun Li started off by reading the opening passage from William Trevor’s novella Nights at the Alexandra, the inspiration for her lead story, “Kindness.” The two pieces did indeed “talk to each other,” as Li said; her homage was both heartfelt and skillfully done. One of her main motivations as an author, she explained, is to speak to other writers. She noted that what her characters have in common, different as they are, is a stubbornness in the face of the flow of China’s political current, and perhaps the accompanying wish for stillness. And while her work is contemporary, “in China,” she said, “you can never say when the story starts”—an event may have happened last year, but it also began a hundred years ago.
Suzanne Rivecca, reading from part two of “Very Special Victims,” reminded me why I like to hear authors read out loud. The story, “Uncle,” gained a new degree of gravitas and dark humor in her voice. Rivecca wanted, she said, to write the book about young women’s lives that she wished she could have read. She spoke of her interest in confronting thorny issues, of “mystery, demystification, and monsters,” and of her regard for Tatiana, the San Francisco Zoo Bengal tiger who fought back. Interestingly, she was the second woman I’ve heard in the past month describe the images she requested not appear on her book cover—the first was Hannah Pittard, author of The Fates Will Find Their Way, with an almost identical list: no legs from the knees down, no women gazing into middle distance, no gauzy dresses. (Both writers got what they wanted, which is encouraging.)
At the evening’s end, the three judges—bookseller Marie du Vaure, writer, critic and Granta editor John Freeman, and author Jayne Anne Phillips—awarded the seventh annual Story Prize to Anthony Doerr. He takes home ,000 and a handsome engraved silver bowl; the runners up each receive ,000. The rest of us get some insight on the work of three talented short fiction writers; Story Prize director Larry Dark says, “I’m looking for stories that deliver something I wasn’t looking for.” That’s not a bad prize either.
(Photo of Anthony Doerr by Shauna Doerr.)