Fairy tales, those bright cheerful stories of our childhood upon which Walt Disney built an empire, once you get below the gloss tend to be on the dark side. But then, most fairy tales started out as folk tales, and fold tales have always been dark. Stories told around the fire on those long winters nights. Storytelling is a dark profession by its very nature for so much of its subject matter is darkness. What lays beyond that ring of fire light. What moves in the forest. What awaits you in the depths of inky pool.
Why do storytellers tell tales of the darkness? Well that is simple enough to understand, because the darkness is the unknown and humanity has ever been fascinated by the unknown and the unknowable. Fascinated and afraid, it makes the blood quicken, and the only thing better than explaining what lays in the darkness, is not. So storytellers back from those days around the campfires, to the first writings, to novels and movies have always dwelt a little in the darkness because they know there audience. Its the dark stories that people crave. But there are two sides to that coin….
“It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.” ― Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla
Darkness can only exist as a concept because of light. If there is never any light, if all there is is the darkness, if there is no campfire to huddle around, then the dark is no longer the unknown, it is everything.
What i am saying here is not that endings need to be happy, or good needs to defeat evil in the end. God forbid that all stories ended happily. Sometimes the big bad wolf needs to eat little red. Sometimes the wood-cutter never comes. And sometimes even when the darkness is pushed back by the light and the hero wins out, its is just a respite, an the darkness still lurks, because the storyteller needs the darkness as much as his audience does. The darkness left hanging, the threat remains…
However, all that said,
Something very much on my mind this afternoon. I’m wondering is 2020 is paying attention…
Its fair to say that of all Lovecraft’s stories Call of Cthulhu has had the greatest cultural impact in the zeitgeist, but in terms of over all impact and inspiration At The Mountains of Madness probably tips the scales. Of all of Lovecraft’s writings it impact is spread further and deeper than any. The long trek across Antarctica and back through the pre-human history of the planet has been inspiring other writers and film makers for nearly a century now. Echoes of the images and ideas within this long novella can be found in films and books like John Carpenters The Thing, Alien vs Predator, Heart of Ice, and many many more. Its a story that has gripped the imagination with its core idea of alien civilizations on earth millions of years before humanity’s rise is a beguiling one and the idea that dangerous remnants of those civilizations could still exists in far flung parts of the world, not quite dead, and far from benign…
As ever, because old tentacle hugger knows no other way, the story is slowly narrated and builds in layer upon layer, but unlike the last story, despite it’s length the story builds in stages that draw the reader in and onward. There are several stages to the novella, which is recounted by William Dyer a geologist and one of only two survivors of an ill-fated expedition to Antarctica composed of scholars from Miskatonic University. The expeditions aim was among other things to drill for rock samples, determine the age of ice sheets and other such scientific endeavours and is the largest of its kind ever sent to earths most remote continent.
Things start to get strange when an advance party led by professor Lake discover the frozen remains of various prehistoric life forms deep under the ice. Reports of these discoveries reach Dyer at base camp via radio, with Lake’s reports becoming steadily wilder as his team examine there finds, then suddenly contact is lost with the advance team, as a blizzard sets in and never re-established. Eventually Dyer and Danforth, one of his graduate students, fly to the advance camp in the hope of re-establishing contact, assuming simple equipment failure to be the cause. What they find however is a blood bath. Both men and sled dogs have been brutally murdered. Some showing signs of dissection, only one man is unaccounted for, and Dyer suspects the man has gone insane and is responsible for the murders as it seems the only logical conclusion.
What they do find is Lakes notes and the strange six sided mounds of ice from which the strange specimens were extracted, the best preserved of which have vanished. Among lakes notes they discover the advance team had found evidence structures in the mountains, where no human structures could be. Dyer and Danforth decide between them to fly on to these structures and investigate further, partly in the hope of locating the missing man, partly out of scientific curiosity. What they find there however defies reason. The remains of a lost civilisation of Elder things that existed millions of years in the past. Murals tell of the history of that civilization, its rise and decline, and of other things across a million years of history.
Then things get really bad, they realise the city is waking up, that the remains found by lake were hibernating creatures not dead as Lake assumed, and it was these creatures which destroyed lakes camp and killed his team. These elder things returned to there ancient city only to fall victim to something even worse reawakened by there presence, the shoggoth’s which had once been slave workers of the elder thing civilization but had rebelled against there masters. And of course lastly, the giant blind albino penguins which once served as domesticated cattle…
Yes, I know, the penguins…
I’ve always had a problem with the penguins, they seem somewhat frivolous against everything thing else. A strangely off key addition to what is otherwise a very dark intense story. Perhaps it’s because growing up in the late twentieth century penguins are inherently funny so its hard to take the idea of giant blind albino penguins seriously.
Aside the penguins however this tale is beautifully ominous and brooding. It steadily layers on stranger and darker ideas while the strange history of the earth before mans rise to prominence as Dyer discovers it is perfectly toned and doesn’t bog the reader down. Its a long read but a great one, and one that has seldom been matched by anyone, it is At the Mountains of Madness that really hold the mythos of Lovecraft together and I would posit the story more than any other that made Lovecraft more than just another long forgotten pulp scifi/horror writer from the age of pulp magazine.
Also unlike other Lovecraft stories there are few if any troubling aspects to this one in terms of the unpalatable aspects of Lovecraft’s fiction (its not the star spawn horrors that horrify, and make uncomfortable, modern readers of Lovecraft as much as his politics, racism and sexism). Perhaps simply because this story doesn’t have the problematic aspects of some of his other fiction this is more enjoyable to read and remains popular, and on occasion inspiring to other writers. This is Lovecraft you can enjoy without been remined what a shit the writer was.
That’s probably also why more than one filmmaker has tried to get a movie of this novella off the ground, the most notable and recent attempt being by Guillermo Del Toro which sadly failed to get off the ground, though he has been trying to get the project funded for over a decade. Del Toro is one of my favourite filmmakers, particularly when he has been allowed to make his vison and not tied by a studio so I hope one day he will. Until that hopefully happens there are other short film version of the story, some noticeably closer to the original than other, among the best of these (to use the word loosely) is a low budget student project film by Matt Jarjosa made as his final student project in 2017. All things consider its a fine effort on a budget not so much shoe string as sandal toe loop… I stumbled across it last year, its only has a few hundred views and deserves some wider recognition despite its obvious limitations, its a shadow of what Del Toro would could have achieved with a Hollywood budget of course, but its wonderful all the same. So give it a watch and enjoy the shoggoth…
At The Mountains of Madness is Lovecraft’s tour de force. It has much to unpack not least an entire pre-history mythology for the earth on which much of mythos of the wider Lovecraft universe is built. It’s a story that writers, artists and game makers keep going back to, a deep well of strange weird brilliance.
As for tentacles, well it has them in abundance but gets six from me, and always will because this is Lovecraft at his best without any of the problems he normally brings along with reading him.
Its been a while since I wrote about Lovecraft, my original plan to read and blog every Lovercraft story in a year is somewhat behind schedule as I started it way back in January 2017. But there are still plenty of Lovecraft story’s to cover, and some of the most famous among them. But before we make our way to the mountains of madness, Innsmouth, the witch house and other delights we need to tackle ‘The Whisper In Darkness’.
As an early unexpected spring warm snap creates a flood of meltwater from the Vermont mountains local newspapers report strange things seen floating in bulging rivers, Albert N. Wilmarth, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University becomes embroiled in a controversy regarding the reality and significance of the sightings. The academic at first sides with the sceptic’s, blaming hysteria fed by old Vermont legends about monsters living in uninhabited hills. But when he receives a letter from the ponderously named Henry Wentworth Akeley who lives in an isolated farmhouse claiming to have proof of the creatures’ existence, Wilmarth sets off to the backwaters of Vermont to investigate.
As set ups go, this is a familiar one, sceptic academic, remote countryside, ponderous names, a truth to be revealed… This is Lovecraft 101 in many ways and draws a lot on the similar set up of The Dunwich Horror, its also longer than Dunwich (which was ponderously long for a short story), indeed its a true novella at 26000 words, which should be no surprise as at the time Lovecraft was writing a lot of his longer fictions. Much like Dunwich however this suffers from Lovecraft’s somewhat laborious style by this point in his writing career. Its a story that ten years before he would have written in full but half its length. It feels slow and is somewhat methodical, but that is trademark Lovecraft horror, a slow relentless build up of incremental plateau’s of tension and looming madness… The trouble is that while this technique works so well in his short fiction struggles to hold the interest of the reader in longer works.
This is actually the reason it has taken me seven months to get back to this project, because every time I have picked up my bumper books of tentacle hugging goodness to read this story I’ve lasted about a third of its length then decided to go read something else. It’s not that I have a problem with Lovecraft’s style as such, I just don’t have a patience for this story. Unlike most of his longer fiction , Mountains of madness, call of Cthulhu etc. the story is not cut down into acts that make it palatable to the reader. All of which is a shame, as there is a lot in this story which is good.
Lovecraft more or less invented yet another scifi/horror trope with the brain a jar which is ultimately revealed. There is also a lot of links to the wider mythos too, as well as Lovecraft’s own brand of fanboyness in this passage.
I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connections—Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L’mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum…
While you will recognise the mythos refers in that passage, there are also refences to the writings of Lord Dunsany and Robert E Howard in that list. As for Magnum Innominandum its a carefully crafted joke as in Latin it means ‘the great not-to-be-named’, admittedly as jokes go its dry to the point of arid, but its a joke none the less.
The are also some of Lovecraft’s most creative otherworldly horror here with plutonian fungi and strange alien technologies. But its all wrapped up in such a trawl that its hard to enjoy it, which is probably why I didn’t and never have. Even the ending has a predictable reveal that the reader can see coming a mile away, if they manage to read all the way to the end. Which I did, finally, about a month ago, yet it still took me a month to get around to talking about it.
All that said, plenty of people believe this is a good story, not one of his best but far from his worst. In fairness I agree to an extent, but mainly because his worst is bloody terrible as a rule. This isn’t terrible, its just not very interesting despite having all the elements it needs to be a great story. Had it been tightened up and been shorter it could have been so much better, but perhaps that’s just me.
If you want to read the complete works, you need to read this one, if you want to read just the important mythos stories, then you should probably also read this one, but if you want to be entertained, I’d give it a miss. but on the bright side At The Mountains Of Madness is next, as without giving away any spoilers, its easily the best of all Lovecraft’s long fiction… But for this a mere three somewhat begrudging tentacles is all the whisper gets.
I have, you may of noticed, been extolling the virtues of Harvey Duckman for a couple of years now. I will admit some personal interest as I have stories in every edition. But if that’s not enough to tempt you, each volume has at least fourteen other writers as well as me, and somewhere in the region of sixty authors have written for the series so far. From established names in the indie writing scene to entirely new voices who have first had works published within the pages of the series. More than one of whom has gone on to publish novels and other works beyond Harvey.
Harvey is one of the most fun, entertaining and rewarding things I have ever been a apart of. Which is why I put so much effort into talking about it here. (did you notice the ten post series for the latest Harvey offering that I have just finished? You didn’t, well go back and read them now… )
The Harvey team are always on the look out not just for readers but for new writers too, and they have just released a new website where you can read about Harvey editions, Harvey’s growing stable of writers, and even join the stable yourself by submitting a story and joining me and the rest of the Harvey writers, all of whom are talent individuals.
The website is new, and expanding, soon to include a wiki for every writer and every work featured in the books. So take a look, bookmark it , and go back again every now and again.
If however you haven’t read a Harvey yet. Why? You don’t know what your missing… Go take a look, and don’t worry if this seems like a lot, you can read them in any order. So Come, Welcome to our worlds…
Avast M’hearties Pirate Day be a’coming. So batten down y’hatches. Splice the main sails. Steer with the wind, and damn y’eyes, for that callow cove Captain Duckman will keel haul the lot of y’ if y’nay pay him some mind…
International Talk Like A Pirate Day is on the horizon, and with it comes the release of Harvey Duckman Presents, The Pirate Special.
Just like the main series of Harvey Duckman Anthologies this is a collection of fifteenth exciting new writers and established independent authors of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, horror and Steampunk. To celebrate this I’m running a feature for the new few weeks on the authors and stories featured in this edition, cause Captain Duckman made me and there was mention of rum…
Mostly because of the rum…
Few people in the world would happily say they are a Muppet. Certainly in the vernacular of modern Britian and one assumes elsewhere, calling someone ‘a Muppet’ is a soft insult implying they are somewhat foolish. R.Bruce Connelly, on the other hand, is a Muppet, professionally. Which is to say he is the actor behind the mask, or full length Muppet costume. He is also a writer of somewhat chilling fiction, a regular contributor to the Harvey stable, and an all-round nice guy.
He has had four stories in his ‘Bike Cycle’ series published in Harvey Duckman Present… Volumes 1-4, plus a short story in Harvey’s Christmas Special, 2019, and a fantasy story in Harvey Duckman Presents… Vol. 5.
Of his story in the HD pirates special he says:
“This story was inspired by a substitute teacher I had in elementary school. Some nights I still awaken in a cold sweat thinking she’s in the room, although she never is. Just the Dawes 5 speed, and who would be scared of that? I have included three shout-outs to Sir James Barrie, who first brought the world of piracy to my knowledge. Two are obvious. The third refers to one of the funniest incidents in children’s literature. Let me know if you find it!”
We will Bruce, we will
Another of the stable of repeat offenders (by which I mean Harvey authors who appear in most editions) is Peter James Martin. Creator of Brennan and Riz, a pair of supernatural folklore investigators/troubleshooters, one of which isn’t a rat… Actually I’m far from sure the rat is really a rat either but that’s by the by. A Harvey Duckman anthology without a Brennan and Riz story would be a strange animal.
Peter James Martin is an author who knows a thing or two about talking rats, namely that they’d make terrible pets. Nestled in the North East of England, on the banks of the River Tees, he lives with his family and two Shih Tzus.
In this edition the pair encounter The Flying Dutchman, things do not go will for Brennan…
If you want more Brennan and Riz? Then you can follow them on Twitter at @Brennan_and_Riz where Peter posts mini adventures of the duo through the #vss365 tag. While his blog features short stories and folklore galore over at his https://tstpjm.blogspot.com/
The Strange Tales of Brennan and Riz is available in paperback and in E-book, there is also a review of the first book I did a couple of years ago here, a new novel is due early next year.
And finally… having spoken of the flying Dutchman , by strange coincidence our last writer in this edition is a Dutchman, and if you think that seems a bit contrived on my part, the Dutchman in question is Nils Nisse Visser who is a descendant of Piet Visser who wrote the original Dutch telling of the tale of the Flying Dutchman a fact he discovered while researching the original story for a updated steampunk version of the tale set on an airship… Neither Peter, nor the editors were aware of this connection… And unless they read this they will remain so, I however am amused…
I have a little culpability here, as I have been badgering Nils to write a story for Harvey for over a year now. This is because Nils is one of the best authors I have discovered over the last couple of year, and coincidentally one of my favorite humans as well. I’ve reviewed several of his novellas in the past couple of years, though in all honesty I have merely scratched the surface, I’ve put links in the extensive list below for the books I have read and reviewed. But for the moment I’ll let Nils speak for himself through the medium of his HD bio.
Told once too often that he spends too much time in his imagination, Nils Nisse Visser finally got the hint and moved there on a permanent basis, having located it in Brighton, Sussex. His wisdom in life choices is best demonstrated by deciding to move to the UK just in time for the Brexit referendum, so the future is as uncertain as could be. He’s embarked on a rather insane quest to retell old Sussex folklore (and some Dutch sealore) within several different genres. Entering his fifties, Visser hopes to become a pirate if/when he grows up.
Sanctuary Asylum Festival introduction to Smugglepunk:
The Harvey Pirates Special comes out on International Talk Like A Pirate Day on the 19th of September and will be available in paperback and on kindle, the kindle version is available for pre-order now… So get it or I’ll make yer walk the plank…
And with that my days of piracy are done… normal blog service of weird and wonderful stuff ( and me wittering on a bit) will resume shortly.
Avast M’hearties Pirate Day be a’coming. So batten down y’hatches. Splice the main sails. Steer with the wind, and damn y’eyes, for that callow cove Captain Duckman will keel haul the lot of y’ if y’nay pay him some mind…
International Talk Like A Pirate Day is on the horizon, and with it comes the release of Harvey Duckman Presents, The Pirate Special.
Just like the main series of Harvey Duckman Anthologies this is a collection of fifteenth exciting new writers and established independent authors of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, horror and Steampunk. To celebrate this I’m running a feature for the new few weeks on the authors and stories featured in this edition, cause Captain Duckman made me and there was mention of rum…
Mostly because of the rum…
Joseph Carrabis first came to my attention in the third Harvey Duckman volume with one of the oddest and in many ways most beautiful short stories I’d read in an age. In this regard he represents all that is great about been involved in the Harvey Duckman Anthologies for me, because they give the reader (and the writers for that matter,) a chance to discover new authors they would never otherwise have come across. He is not alone in capturing my interest, he is one of several authors that I have been lucky enough to discover through Harvey and while not every Harvey author may have become my favorite, every one of them has becomes someones I suspect. Joseph in this regard, is one of mine, (but don’t tell him that…) mainly because I never know what to expect from one of his stories.
His bio in Harvey reads…
Joseph Carrabis’s short fiction has been recommended for the Nebula (Cymodoce, May ‘95 Tomorrow Magazine) and nominated for the Pushcart (The Weight, Nov ‘95 The Granite Review). His work has recently appeared in Across the Margin, The New Accelerator, parAbnormal, serialized in The Piker Press, HDP, and podcasted on Chronosphere Science Fiction. His first indie novel, The Augmented Man, is getting 4 and 5 star reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes&Noble, and others. His two self-pubbed books, Empty Sky and Tales Told ’Round Celestial Campfires, are getting 5 star reviews (and he has more books in the works). Joseph holds patents covering mathematics, anthropology, neuroscience, and linguistics. When not writing, he spends time loving his wife, playing with his dog and cat, flying kites bigger than most cars, cooking for friends and family, playing and listening to music, and studying anything and everything he believes will help his writing.
I reviewed one of Joseph novels ‘The Augmented Man’ back in June the review can be found here.
He has also written ‘Empty Sky’ , and ‘Tales Told ‘Round Celestial Campfires’ which I need to read at some point.
The Harvey Pirates Special comes out on International Talk Like A Pirate Day on the 19th of September and will be available in paperback and on kindle, the kindle version is available for pre-order now… So get it or I’ll make yer walk the plank…
Avast M’hearties Pirate Day be a’coming. So batten down y’hatches. Splice the main sails. Steer with the wind, and damn y’eyes, for that callow cove Captain Duckman will keel haul the lot of y’ if y’nay pay him some mind…
International Talk Like A Pirate Day is on the horizon, and with it comes the release of Harvey Duckman Presents, The Pirate Special.
Just like the main series of Harvey Duckman Anthologies this is a collection of fifteenth exciting new writers and established independent authors of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, horror and Steampunk. To celebrate this I’m running a feature for the new few weeks on the authors and stories featured in this edition, cause Captain Duckman made me and there was mention of rum…
Mostly because of the rum…
Elizabeth Tuckwell ( and I use her Sunday name because I have enormous respect for her writing, which has produced some of my favorite Harvey stories) is a British writer of quirky science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. She currently lives in London, and shares her house with a husband and too many books. (At no point has she ever explained what ‘too many books’ means, as someone living in a library with a house in the middle myself, I’m not sure such a thing is possible, but maybe that’s just me…)
Liz enjoys reading and writing, and cramming as many holidays as she can into a year. She’s a member of the Clockhouse London Writers group. Aside harvey Liz has had stories published in other anthologies such as MCSI: Magical Crime Scene Investigations and the Short! Sharp! Shocks! series, and on the 101fiction and Speculative66 microfiction websites.
Indeed for Liz who manages to produce great works of fiction you can fit in a tweet at times, the short stories in Harvey are almost long form… Which perhaps explains how she managed to make them seem so perfectly crafted.
Christine King, according to her Harvey bio, has always loved telling stories and writing for as long as she can remember, from bedtime stories for her young siblings to fantasy-filled short stories as a hormonal teenager. Growing up, she had a couple of short stories published in a teen magazine of the 1970s called Fab 208 and has a few rejection slips from Jackie which she held on to for years. In 2013 she won a national writing competition with her first novel, The Blade and The Dove, and has gone on to have two more books published, with two more presently underway. She finds her inspiration mainly from walking the hills and coastline of the beautiful North East of England.
Regular readers of these pages may remember I recently reviewed Smugglers Moon one of Christine’s novels, which was a great read and encouraged me to get copies of her earlier novels The Blade and the Dove, Echoes of the Stones despite not generally been a reader of romance fiction.
But as well as romance fiction she writes a little horror as well and it is in this vain that she has had stories in previous Harvey volumes. If there is a link between regency romances and horror fiction (other than pride and prejudiced & zombies) Christine is one day going to find it.
The Harvey Pirates Special comes out on International Talk Like A Pirate Day on the 19th of September and will be available in paperback and on kindle, the kindle version is available for pre-order now… So get it or I’ll make yer walk the plank…
Avast M’hearties Pirate Day be a’coming. So batten down y’hatches. Splice the main sails. Steer with the wind, and damn y’eyes, for that callow cove Captain Duckman will keel haul the lot of y’ if y’nay pay him some mind…
International Talk Like A Pirate Day is on the horizon, and with it comes the release of Harvey Duckman Presents, The Pirate Special.
Just like the main series of Harvey Duckman Anthologies this is a collection of fifteenth exciting new writers and established independent authors of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, horror and Steampunk. To celebrate this I’m running a feature for the new few weeks on the authors and stories featured in this edition, cause Captain Duckman made me and there was mention of rum…
Mostly because of the rum…
Anthony Buxton became an author at the age of 22, writing his series The Lost Sons of the West. He currently has two books in the series released and four short stories, in volumes of Harvey Duckman Presents. Anthony also runs a new, modern blog where he shares stories of his personal life as well as in depth information about his book series and his plans for the future.
Anthony’s blog escapades have been quite entertaining.
Loïc Baucherel was raised on a steady diet of sci-fi and fantasy, from Doctor Who through Star Wars and Marvel to the Hobbit. He read the entire Harry Potter series unaided before his 7th birthday to earn the right to watch the later films. During lockdown he learned techniques for plotting and constructing stories from both his school and his drama academy, and started to experiment with scripts and short stories. Jump to the Past is his first published work.
According to his Bio in this latest offering:
Andy did one thing for most of his life, then decided to do nothing. Nothing quickly turned out to be everything and now he’s too busy even to talk to himself. He also writes poetry, which can only be read with a Plutonium milkshake. He is normal. Are you?
Andy has written stories that have featured in previous Harvey’s. These stories were so entertaining and on occasion thought provoking that despite it technically being a violation of my personal religious code, (the third commandment ‘Thou’t shall not suffer to live that which rhymes in couplets’) I bought a copy of his poetry collection ‘I Saw You’.
Even more remarkably I quite enjoyed it.
I did of course shriven myself afterwards, and did penance for my foul deed, so we have no need to talk about it ever again…
Andy also has written the occasional guest blog for these hallowed halls. They have always been interesting, odd, occasionally bizarre, but interesting…
The Harvey Pirates Special comes out on International Talk Like A Pirate Day on the 19th of September and will be available in paperback and on kindle, the kindle version is available for pre-order now… So get it or I’ll make yer walk the plank…
Avast M’hearties Pirate Day be a’coming. So batten down y’hatches. Splice the main sails. Steer with the wind, and damn y’eyes, for that callow cove Captain Duckman will keel haul the lot of y’ if y’nay pay him some mind…
International Talk Like A Pirate Day is on the horizon, and with it comes the release of Harvey Duckman Presents, The Pirate Special.
Just like the main series of Harvey Duckman Anthologies this is a collection of fifteenth exciting new writers and established independent authors of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, horror and Steampunk. To celebrate this I’m running a feature for the new few weeks on the authors and stories featured in this edition, cause Captain Duckman made me and there was mention of rum…
Mostly because of the rum…
When I first met C.G. Hatton she was dressed as a pirate…
(okay that’s probably not strictly true, though there was a little of the pirate about how she was dressed at the time… That meeting is story I have told before, it’s a good story , and you can find it as the foreword of a box set of her novels, because for reasons that still escape me she asked me to write one for her. You can also find it here… )
Amazingly this is only the second time one of C.G.Hatton’s stories has appeared in a Harvey Duckman collection. Something which fans of her work (myself included) probably find a little disappointing. Indeed, one of the few things about the Harvey books I ever find disappointing is the lack of another C.G.Hatton story, which is why this was the first story I read when I got my filthy hands on a pre-publication copy of the Pirate Special. It did not disappoint, but then Gillie never does.
It’s amazing this is only the second time Gillie has had a story in a Harvey edition, not only because of the joy and strength of her writing, but because she and husband Andy are the driving forces behind Harvey Duckman. Gillie is editor in chief, while Andy keeps her supplied with rum (he does other things as well, but the rum is the important things here). She is therefore the one person who should be in every edition, yet she gives up her own slot to fresh new writers time and again. While giving her time and energy freely to the project, for which every writer to appear between the folds of a Harvey paperback owe her a debt.
But, editor or not, the stories in any Harvey edition have to be worthy of there place. There is always competition for slots and if Dimarco was not worthy of its slot in the Pirates special, it would not be there. But its a C.G.Hatton story, so there is no doubt at all it is worthy of its slot. A wonderfully atmospheric piece about an aging freebooter come pirate, sat trying to wash away bad memories and haunting images of blood and fire at a bar, when a mysterious man in a corner booth presents him with an offer, if he’s willing to take a gamble that could cost him everything.
Its dark, insightful, multilayered, full of looming threats and dark hints to the wider Thieves Guild universe. Much as you would expect from one of the best voices in scifi.
Kheris Burning (Thieves’ Guild Origins: LC Book One)
Beyond Redemption (Thieves’ Guild Origins: LC Book Two)
Defying Winter (Thieves’ Guild Origins: LC Book Three) is due out in 2021
The Harvey Pirates Special comes out on International Talk Like A Pirate Day on the 19th of September and will be available in paperback and on kindle, the kindle version is available for pre-order now… So get it or I’ll make yer walk the plank…
Avast M’hearties Pirate Day be a’coming. So batten down y’hatches. Splice the main sails. Steer with the wind, and damn y’eyes, for that callow cove Captain Duckman will keel haul the lot of y’ if y’nay pay him some mind…
International Talk Like A Pirate Day is on the horizon, and with it comes the release of Harvey Duckman Presents, The Pirate Special.
Just like the main series of Harvey Duckman Anthologies this is a collection of fifteenth exciting new writers and established independent authors of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, horror and Steampunk. To celebrate this I’m running a feature for the new few weeks on the authors and stories featured in this edition, cause Captain Duckman made me and there was mention of rum…
Mostly because of the rum…
Melissa specialises in fantasy writing, ranging from mythical to urban. She loves reading about different folklore and myths, especially Arthurian, and always has music on when she’s writing. She loves nature and the land, especially Wales where she is from originally. She writes both short stories and novels, bringing something different to them with her dyslexia. She’s had many short stories read on radio and published in anthologies. She wrote her first proper short story at the age of eighteen, and through serendipity it was promptly broadcast.
She was also one of the winners of Writing Britain 2015 with her short film script about Aspergic women, ‘Unbroken’, which was shown at cinema screenings of short films in Hull and Leeds in 2017. It is now available to view at: https://studio12.org.uk/2020/07/14/unbroken/
This is Melissa second outing in Harvey Duckman, her short story, Heta’s Journey, appeared in Harvey Duckman Volume 3.
Reino has dabbled with writing for a number of years and across a number of genres from sci-fi to thriller to fantasy to steampunk to the just plain weird, and when once asked, “Why do you write?” replied, “To get rid of the voices, of course. What other reason is there?”
Reino previously appeared in the first every Harvey Duckman Anthology, where his unique approach to story telling, and insights into the inner workings of government, drew many plaudits among the drunk, destitute and morally ambiguous members of her majesties civil service, or as they are otherwise known the home office. Perhaps the voices were quiet for a while afterwards which is why it has taken so long for him to return to the hallowed pages of Harvey. One suspects he will return again when the voices get too much…
Mark Sayeh refuses to be drawn on question of whether he truly exists or whether is he is a cunningly created pen name that is impossible to decipher. What is known is that he has previously written about the experience of becoming a fan of Middlesbrough football club in the 1990s. This was possibly a cunning fiction, much like his name, no one knows for sure.
This is Sayeh’s first outing in a Harvey, a story of treasure, betrayal, and tattoos.
The Harvey Pirates Special comes out on International Talk Like A Pirate Day on the 19th of September and will be available in paperback and on kindle, the kindle version is available for pre-order now… So get it or I’ll make yer walk the plank…
Regular readers may wonder why I did three in one go in this post, it may be because two of the writers only technically exist in an alternative universe, but mainly its because there are seventeen writers and stories in the pirate special and I needed to cram a few together about whom I had less to say… Unlike the next writer I will be featuring about which I can seldom say enough…
The Passing Place 