I haven’t posted much lately because I haven’t had much to post. I had a bit of a dry year in 2015 as far as writing goes, but am now fully back in the flow with a couple of pieces looking for a home and another on the way.
Anyway. News.
I was chuffed, thrilled and flabbergasted to see that Ellen Datlow has given an honourable mention to my story McBirdy in her Best Horror of the Year Volume 8. Seeing my name on the same list as Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Aickman is something I can’t get used to and I’m not sure I ever will. Well flattered.
This caps off a very nice little life for McBirdy. Des Lewis called the story ‘deeply disturbing’, saying it ‘gives a dark obsessive coda to this wonderfully cohesive anthology’. Risingshadow.net commented on the ‘disturbing’ ending, saying McBirdy is an ‘excellent and memorable’ story. Ellen Datlow, writing on the SFEditorsPicks Twitter account, also described the story as ‘a disturbing tale’. (I think people found it disturbing.) And Peter Tennant in Black Static had this to say: ‘It is a story in which the outré elements barely impinge and yet are central to the story, one in which nothing supernatural takes place and yet the whole is imbued with a sense of the weird.’
You can still buy Strange Tales V direct from Tartarus Press.