The fifth volume of the award-winning Strange Tales series of anthologies, edited by Rosalie Parker, from Tartarus Press, will be published on 9 April, and features my story McBirdy.
McBirdy is a sliver of suburban strangeness, like my earlier stories The Prize and Mary, Thomas and Joe… but quite a bit darker than either of those. It also, I think, just barely qualifies as speculative fiction. I hope I’ve infused the story with a sense of the supernatural without making the supernatural elements the whole point of the story. It’s a story about the weird and terrifying experience that is adolescence, and about how people recover from it, or don’t. It’s about memory, and loss, and trauma.
Volume 1 of Strange Tales won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology in 2004, and the series has consistently featured work by some of the most interesting new and established writers of short speculative fiction. Tartarus also happen to produce the most gorgeous books. I remember drooling over them at the World Fantasy Convention a couple of years ago. Needless to say, I’m very excited to be involved in Strange Tales V.
I just read this story and thought it was absolutely brilliant, my favourite in the anthology to be sure. I will be tracking down the rest of your published stories, and am happy to discover that I already own a few of the anthologies that they appear in, though unread, of course. I hope you publish many more such fabulous tales in the days to come!
Gosh – thanks Alexandra! I’m so glad you enjoyed it.
David McG