Search Results for: Laird Barron

Best of the Small Magazines: The Digest Enthusiast #11, Pulp Modern: Tech Noir, and Weird Fiction Review #9

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Covers by Rick McCollum, Ran Scott, and Colin Nitta One of the great pleasures of the science fiction and fantasy genre is the fine selection of small magazines, covering a wide range of specialty interests. It’s only the sheer size of SFF fandom that allows these magazines to exist, and for like-minded communities to form around them. Here’s a few of my recent favorites. The Digest Enthusiast was founded by Arkay Olgar in 2014, and has been published every six months by…

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New Treasures: Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors, edited by Doug Murano and Michael Bailey

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Cover by M. Fersner/HagCult Oh my goodness, this looks like fun. Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors is a brand new anthology from Doug Murano and Michael Bailey, and the small press Written Backwards. It’s packed with original fiction from many of the most important writers in horror today, including Michael Wehunt, Brian Hodge, Josh Malerman, Ramsey Campbell, Victor LaValle, Laird Barron, Scott Edelman, Lucy A. Snyder, Usman T. Malik, Stephanie M. Wytovich, Theodora Goss, and many others. It also has interior…

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Future Treasures: Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell by Nathan Ballingrud

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In his enthusiastic review of Nathan Ballingrud’s first collection, James McGlothlin wrote: Ballingrud’s fiction is an amalgamation of some of the best elements of current dark fiction. The stories of North American Lake Monsters are poetic and literary (think Kelly Link or Caitlin Kiernan), forbidding and nihilistic (think John Langan), very real and raw (think Nic Pizzolatto), while also scaring the bejesus out of you (think Laird Barron). Ballingrud’s 2015 novella The Visible Filth was filmed as Wounds, directed by Babak Anvari…

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New Treasures: Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume Five edited by Robert Shearman and Michael Kelly

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We’re almost at the end of our 2018 coverage of the annual crop of Year’s Best anthologies, and today’s title has traditionally been one of the highlights — Undertow Publication’s Year’s Best Weird Fiction. The series is edited by Undertow publisher Michael Kelly, side-by-side with a different guest editor every year. Past editors have included Laird Barron, Kathe Koja, Simon Strantzas, and Helen Marshall. This year it’s Robert Shearman, author of the celebrated collections Remember Why You Fear Me (2012)…

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New Treasures: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2018 edited by Paula Guran

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We’ve just about wrapped up the Best of the Year season, the summer/fall period when eight publishers and a dozen editors collaborate to produce ten volumes gathering the best short science fiction, fantasy, and horror of the year. We’ve had eight so far, from Neil Clarke, Jonathan Strahan, Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, David Afsharirad, N.K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams, and others. But we’re not done yet — and in fact, this week two of my favorites landed on the…

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Con Report: International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts 2018

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My day job is being an academic here in Minneapolis, where I mainly teach philosophy and theology. So when I attempt to go to academic conferences I tend to go to cons related to either of those subjects. But a couple of years ago I went out on a limb, academically speaking, and sent a paper proposal to a literary conference. Why? Well, I had a “literary” idea for a paper. Oh, and the conference was taking place in Orlando…

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Check out the Table of Contents for The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume Four, edited by Helen Marshall and Michael Kelly

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It’s always a delight when The Year’s Best Weird Fiction arrives, as I consistently find it one of the most eclectic and eye-opening of the Year’s Best volumes. All of them introduce me to new writers and fiction venues, but I don’t think any do it with the same regularity as Year’s Best Weird Fiction. The series is edited by a different guest editor every year; Canadian author Helen Marshall is at the reins for 2017. The series editor is Undertow’s…

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Paperbacks From Hell: An Interview with Author Grady Hendrix

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Grady Hendrix is a man who knows his horror. I saw him speak about horror paperbacks from the late 60s through the early 90s at the Fantasia International Film Festival, where he previewed his then-upcoming book Paperbacks From Hell. His passion and knowledge were clear at once. So was his wit — he clearly took these books seriously, but also knew when to take them lightly. His presentation was a powerful and slightly manic guide to a weird world of…

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July 2017 Nightmare Magazine Now on Sale

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The July 2017 issue of Nightmare is now available, with original fiction from Caspian Gray and Caroline Ratajski, and reprints by Stephen Graham Jones and Cynthia Ward. Here’s Valerie A. Lindsey from Tangent Online: “Promises of Spring” by Caspian Gray opens with Cody asking his high school friend, Tay, to help him stop some high school kids from summoning the witch that granted three of them their desires during a bloody ritual. Gray illustrates the high cost of making wishes…

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in February

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Back in December, Derek Kunsken’s enthusiastic review of Star Wars: Rogue One, “I Am One With the Force and the Force Is With Me,” shot up to #2 on our monthly traffic chart. Last month he claimed the #1 slot, and he didn’t need a blockbuster film to make it happen — he did it the old fashioned way, with a book review. The book in question was Thrill-Power Overload: A History of the British Comic 2000 AD, a detailed history…

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