Things Of The Week 3rd June 2019: Dennis Etchison, Kirkus Reviews, Weirdbook and The Harrowing

Dennis Etchison. Photograph by Lisa Morton.

There was sad news this last week, with the passing of Dennis Etchison, one of the finest short story writers the weird fiction field has ever produced. I've been rereading his short story collection The Dark Country over the past few days, and remembering why, with stories such as 'The Dead Line', 'You Can Go Now', 'Sitting In The Corner, Whimpering Quietly' and 'Daughter Of The Golden West.'
I didn't know Etchison at all personally, and met him very briefly once, at World Horror Con in Brighton in 2010. I'd meant to sign up for his Kaffeeklatsch, but left it too late. I had a copy of The Dark Country that I'd picked up in a Brighton charity shop for about 50p, but I'd forgotten to bring it with me to be signed. I found a copy for sale at the convention and bought that instead - the same edition, but it cost £10! He came into the bar at one point, looking for a carrier bag with some items of his in it. I found it, and asked him to sign my book. He did...

....And that's my Etchison story, unfortunately. But I'd read and loved many of his stories, and he was one of the great writers in our field. Lisa Morton knew him considerably better, and has some words here.

On a happier note, it's been an eventful week here at Castle Bestwick.

And Cannot Come Again is a Kirkus Reviews pick for June, alongside Georgina Bruce's This House Of Wounds and Songs For The Unravelling Of The World by Brian Evenson.

And, after a looong drought on the acceptance front, I finally sold a story this year! 'Whitsun' will appear in Weirdbook #46, released in mid-2020. Many thanks to Douglas Draa for giving it a home.

The latest instalment of my mediaeval horror story The Harrowing is up on my Patreon page. I'm making Book One of the serial free to readers for June as well - feel free to check it out, and if you enjoy it and want to follow Godric's journey across the devastated North, you can do so for only a dollar a month.

Nearing The Halfway Point

Current mood.

We're almost at the end of May (both the month and the Prime Minister.) Not halfway through the
year yet, but getting there. So, not a bad time to take stock of where things are.

Healthwise, it's not been the best year. I spent the first couple of months of it virtually bedbound with agonising knee pain (and with codeine medication for it leaving me wiped out half the time and with my sleeping patterns completely banjaxed), and been off work with anxiety for the last week. As a result, I've piled on a lot of the weight I lost last year. Next month, I'm heading back to Slimming World, where I'll start to put the damage right.

Not been a great year story submissions wise either - in fact, I haven't had a single acceptance all year, with stories I was very pleased with repeatedly knocked back. But that has had the effect of making me reflect on what I write and why, and made me determined to strive for excellence in my work. The last couple of years have also reminded me, very strongly, that I do what I do because I love it. And if I don't love what I'm doing, I shouldn't be doing it.

I hit a crisis point last year, where I realised I'd lost all sense of direction in terms of novel writing - the old, perennial trouble of trying to write what I thought was popular instead of what I needed to write. Two things helped me resolve it. One was realising that the projects of mine my agent was the most excited about were the ones I'd written out of sheer love and passion - the ones I'd thought no-one would be interested in. The second was asking myself one very simple question:

"If you could only write one more novel, what would it be?"

As it turned out, the answer was the novel that I'd been writing - but very differently from how I planned it. What was to have been a bog-standard psychological thriller became something else - a ghost story, a love story, a horror story... it's very rough at the moment (and not even fully typed up from Dictaphone notes) but it's something different.

I've written two novellas this year, as well, while also working on The Song Of The Sibyl, the huge

quarter-million word epic. There has been a shedload of work to do on that (two novels' worth, effectively!) but it's close to being finished and sent off to The Agent.

In addition, my Patreon is running and bringing in a stream (well, trickle) of income, featuring the ongoing serial The Harrowing.

One thing I was determined to do in 2019 was to write a screenplay; I've been working on something, a little bit of a time, in between work on the novel; slow going, but it's taking shape.

So, a lot of work, that will hopefully pay off in the future.

But there are also good things happening this year.

The big one, of course, is And Cannot Come Again, due out from ChiZine Press soon, complete with an Introduction by Ramsey

Campbell and blurbs from Angela Slatter, Reggie Oliver, Gemma Files and many, many more. The paperback will be released on the 11th July; if you can't wait that long, the ebook version will be available from the 18th June.

July will also see the release of A Love Like Blood, consisting of my novelettes Fitton's Ghost and Burns The Witchfire, Upon The Hill. It'll be launched at Edge-Lit in July - and who knows, there may be some copies of And Cannot Come Again available too.

Another good thing happened a couple of weeks ago, when Ellen Datlow's anthology The Devil And The Deep, featuring my story 'Deadwater', won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology. Congratulations to Ellen and the other contributors!

Well, that's all the news that's fit to print so far. Now on with the rest of the year.

The Harrowing

Something new's starting on my Patreon page: I'm going to be writing a story in daily instalments, in real time. Straight from my brain into my Patreon posts. It'll be available to all Patrons, and you can become one for just $1 a month.

This is something brand new - and I have to admit it's a bit scary - but the plan is that every morning I'm going to spend 20-30 minutes writing a new Patreon post, which will be the next instalment of an ongoing serial called The Harrowing. It's a horror story with a mediaeval setting, taking place in the winter that followed the Norman Conquest. I think I know where this story's going, but there are a lot of questions that will need to be answered along the way.

Hopefully it's going to become part of a bigger project called Ravenshore - which I'll telling my Patrons more about soon, along with the historical background to the story - but in the meantime, the first instalment will be up at 11 o'clock this morning GMT.

Hope to see you there.

Here's a quick taste of what to expect:

Twenty of them moving over a dull winter beach of muddy, rusty brown. A few men - two or three village greybeards and half-a-dozen monks in hoicked-up robes - and the rest women and children. Two monks pushed a handcart, bent double by weariness and hunger.

Above, against the empty white sky, crows wheeled. Inland, plumes of smoke hung black above the land. A bitter wind blew in from the sea.

A horse nickered, and hooves drummed. Out of the woodlands that lay up ahead broke a dozen horsemen; they spurred their mounts along the flat beach towards the procession.

Foam flew up in short-lived crystal white webs from where the horses tore through the grey-brown surf.

The group stopped. One of the younger monks stumbled forward and drew himself up, arms outspread to make himself a futile shield for the rest. One of the horsemen brayed a laugh; it echoed briefly, metallic and cruel, above the clamour of the hooves.

Then there were only the hoofbeats, and the brittle crash of the waves upon the strand. The line of men and women didn't move; the two who'd been pushing the handcart leant on the handles, heads bowed, as if taking pleasure in a rest that would soon become eternal. They'd all been marching a long dark time, seen friends and family slaughtered, homes burning, fields sown with salt. All that, and worse: it seemed a time of beasts and devils, from which death could only be a release...

To read the rest, click here.