I have been authorized to share with you the cover of the forthcoming collection Guilty Pleasures, that features a double-drabble of mine.
Guilty Pleasures, the cover
Category Archives: Other People’s Pulp
Guilty Pleasures
New anthology featuring a classic novella by Ramsey Campbell… and a short-short story of mine.
Stay tuned for more news, and join us at the launch party on October the 5th!
Something light: Surprise Package, 1960
I was ten or twelve years old, and I was in bed with a bad case of the flu, and I caught half a movie on the TV one morning – on the old family Zenith black and white television. It was the end of the ’70s – 1977 or 1979. I watched it – there was Yul Brynner in it, and Yul Brynner was the guy from Magnificent 7 and Westworld, and that movie about the Czar’s daughter my mother liked. Yul Brynner was cool.
Later that day, checking the TV listings, I learned the movie was called Surprise Package, and forty years on, last night, I finally watched it form the beginning.
The League of Extraordinary Lady Writers
Looks like I chose the right time to brush up my French: yesterday, French publisher Les Moutons Electrique (which is the French for Philip K. Dick’s Electric Sheep) announced the launch, in March 2020, of a new line of novels, collectively known as La Ligue des écrivaines extraordinaires – The League of Extraordinary Lady Writers, that is: five novels written by five popular French writers, featuring a bunch of popular writers against a bunch of popular creatures of the night, the lot currently open as a crowdfunding.
From Hell they came…
There was a time, more or less when I was in high-school, when horror was big. And I mean BIG. I have this clear memory of the girls in my high-school class swapping big fat books: Stephen King, Peter Straub, Dean Koontz and V.C. Andrews most of all. There was this sort of underground book club going, and there were always new titles coming, mostly from a paperback publisher called Sperling & Kupfer.
Boys did not read, or if they did they went for science fiction or comic books, and fantasy was small and read by both boys and girls, but at least in my biased memory, it was the female of the species that really loved horror novels.
Greetings from Dry Gulch, Colorado
I am pleased to announce that Tales from Dry Gulch, the weird western collection edited by David B. Riley, is available in both ebook and paperback via Amazon.
The volume features my short story Hank’s Ghosts.
Welcome to Dry Gulch, Colorado. The year is 1881 or so, the gold mine has played out, but there’s talk some company from back east is supposedly putting in a zinc mine near town. Folks are friendly in Dry Gulch. Don’t forget to stop by the bakery for a loaf of sourdough bread from Miss Wendy’s secret recipe, then wet your whistle in the saloon next door. Just be sure to tip that piano player. You can get your prospecting supplies from the Dry Goods Store. And you can catch up on Mrs. Duncan’s cat in the pages of the Gazette. Keep an eye out for Henry, the town drunk. He likes to tell folks about the ghosts he sees, if you buy him a drink.Dry Gulch is easy to get to. Just saddle up and take a ride out to the weird, weird west.
As you can see, in my messy and dark workspace, I am well pleased to have my own copy handy.
Arthurian Planetary Romance: Sword of Ages
I have received as a gift the first volume of Gabriel Rodriguez’ Sword of Ages, a big, colorful comic book that lasted me back to the years spent reading Heavy Metal or L’Eternauta, and later 2000AD: science fiction, action and adventure in surreal, exotic locales, beautifully drawn and engagingly narrated.
Karavansara 