First up, Mark Watson of Best SF takes a look at Stephen Baxter’s XeeLee novella Starfall; there’s a fair bit of plot summary there (so possibly best avoided if you’re the sort who doesn’t like spoilers), but that seems to be an indication that he enjoyed it a fair bit, prompting the following comments:

Baxter is virtually unparalleled in the way he does far future, hard SF, and space opera. [...] Baxter’s official website has a Timeline, which serves as an indication of the breadth of scope of Baxter’s stories, and makes this reader wonder whether he has two or more brains in his head! If people of my age are ever allowed to retire from work, I’ll be setting out a couple of months to pull all the stories and novels together and work my way through this timeline!

It has to be said, the Baxter back-catalogue does grow at an alarming rate – a few years ago it felt like I’d read the bulk of ‘em, but looking at the list now it feels more like I’ve read less than half! Would that I had the time to do a catch-up binge, as Watson suggests… which is the lament of readers the world over, I guess. :)

Next up is a review from another Mark – this time it’s Mark Graham, veteran book reviewer of the Rocky Mountain News, guest-posting at Tor.com and waxing lyrical about Joe Hill’s Horns, before coming to the following conclusion:

The transitions between the present and the past are handled so deftly that they are almost seamless. Hill sprinkles a multitude of demonic references through the narrative: names, music, places, everyday items and more, and he uses horns in a variety of ways. I don’t want to mention any of them here and spoil the fun.

While the conclusion of the novel is a bit over the top, Hill somehow manages to make a protagonist with horns and supernatural powers seem not only acceptable, but normal. Horns is an addictive read. Plan on a couple of late nights glued to it and checking the mirror in the morning to make sure that nothing weird is sprouting from your noggin.

There already is something weird sprouting from my noggin… but I’m pretty sure my Mad Max crowd-scene-extra’s barnet isn’t concealing anything more demonic. Well, not yet…

Our third and final link for the week isn’t to a review as such, but Tangent Online’s list of recommended reads for 2009 contains – among dozens of other excellent stories from all sorts of venues, print and online alike – a generous handful of PS publications:

• “In Winter” by Nancy Kilpatrick, “The Hungry Heart” by Michael A. Arnazen and “Devil’s Arcade” by Mark Charan Newton, all found in Darkness on the Edge
• “The Red King Sleeps” by Marly Youmans and “The Portrayed Man” by Justin Cartaginese from Enemy of the Good (Postscripts #19)
• “The Healer” by David Hoing, “Black Fragmentaria” by Michael Cobley and the title story “Edison’s Frankenstein” by Chris Roberson from Edison’s Frankenstein (Postscripts #20-21)
• Gilbert & Edgar on Mars by Eric Brown
• Cast a Cold Eye by Derryl Murphy and William Shunn
• Shaka II by Mike Resnick

A pretty respectable showing, I think… certainly far superior to the British team’s honours list in the Winter Olypics, eh? ;)

Remember to click on the cover art (or listed links) to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.

And don’t forget that we’ve capped our postage rates, and that all top state pre-orders go postage-free!

Have you read a PS Publishing book recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

So it was no great surprise to me when Pete told me PS Publishing would be running an anthology of stories based on Springsteen’s output… in fact, I was surprised to find no one else had done it before. But to the best of my knowledge, this is the first: Harrison Howe has spent much time and love putting together Darkness on the Edge, and it finally sees the light of day this month. It’s the perfect gift for the fiction-reading Springsteen fan in your life… even if (or perhaps especially if) that person happens to be you.

Contributor John Palisano has put together a little video trailer for Darkness on the Edge, by the way:

Aren’t you tempted now? Go on, give in and treat yourself – click through below to pre-order a copy:

• Darkness on the Edge by Harrison Howe (ed.) – unsigned edition (£20)
• Darkness on the Edge by Harrison Howe (ed.) – traycased signed edition (£50)

As I write this (3rd March), the weather here on the Yorkshire coast is enjoying a fourth day of clear skies. It’s still cold but there are finally some signs that we may be moving–albeit slowly–out of winter. Let’s hope so.

It’s just three weeks away now from the World Horror Convention in Brighton and to say things have been hectic would be an understatement. But we’re pretty much on track to have all of our promised new titles available at the Con, with all pre-orders going out by the middle of April. That’s the plan, anyways… and it’s always good to have a plan.

Stanza Press poetry – introductory offers

But let’s celebrate the clement weather with a couple of special offers — first off, this:

Stanza Press

• Off The Coastal Path edited by Jo Fletcher (£15)
• Not Quite Atlantis by Donald Sidney-Fryer (£12)
• Halloween in a Suburb by H. P. Lovecraft (£12)
• Song of the Necromancer by Clark Ashton Smith (£12)
• The Singer in the Mist by Robert E. Howard (£12)

And as a special introductory offer to Stanza Press poetry books, you can buy all five titles above for £60, post-free.

Six-of-the-Best bargain bundles

Secondly: with all the other new titles about to hit us, we need to make sure we’ve cleared some space. Thus, at the end of March, we’re cancelling the old Anniversary Gift Boxes and replacing them with a new quartet of Bargain Bundles under the collective title of ‘Six Of The Best’.

And better still… the great news is that, until 1st April, we’re running both deals – that’s the four Anniversary Gift Boxes and the four Six Of The Best Bargain Bundles – side by side. You already know about the Gift Boxes, so here’s the lowdown on the Bargain Bundles.

First off, unlike the Gift Boxes (which apply only to pre-2009 titles), the Bargain Bundles include all PS titles (except Secret Histories) published before this year.

Here’s how it works:

• Six randomly-chosen trade novellas (originally published at either £10 or £12) – £30 plus postage, for a saving of up to £42;
• Six randomly-chosen jacketed novellas (originally published at £25) – £75 plus postage, for a saving of up to £75;
• Six randomly-chosen trade novels (originally published at either £20 or £25) – £60 plus postage, for a saving of up to £90; and
• Six randomly-chosen slipcased/traycased novels (originally published at £35-£75) – £120 plus postage, for a saving of up to £330.

(Don’t forget we’ve also capped our postage rates, so your total postage fees will be either £6 if you live in the UK or £12 if you live elsewhere, no matter how many books you buy.)

Now, maybe a word on the debut project for our new PS ArtBooks imprint…

Tomorrow Revisited: The Complete Frank Hampson Story

This has not been the smoothest of rides, but we’re nearing a point where we just need to press the start button and printing commences. But first, the final negotiations with the Dan Dare Corporation… so why not get your advance orders in while we’re dotting the Is and crossing the Ts?

PS ArtBooks

• Tomorrow Revisited – bookshop edition (£29.99)
• Tomorrow Revisited – slipcased edition (£69.99)
• Tomorrow Revisited – deluxe leatherbound traycased edition (£295)

Order now for a 10% discount on the listed prices!

New releases for March 2010

And now it’s time to remind you what’s coming out this month… though don’t forget you can always take a look at our forthcoming titles section at the PS Webstore to see what’s coming down the pike.

First, the two late-comers:

• Postscripts # 20/21: Edison’s Frankenstein – traycased signed edition (£30)
• The Night Cache by Andy Duncan – signed edition (£15)

Now the rest of the new stuff:

• A Web of Black Widows by Scott Carter – unsigned edition (£12)
• A Web of Black Widows by Scott Carter – signed edition (£25)
• One For The Road by Stephen King – slipcased signed edition (£175)
• One For The Road by Stephen King – unsigned edition (£75)
• Horns by Joe Hill – slipcased signed edition (£75) (Please note, these are the last few copies; the traycased edition is already sold out)
• Darkness on the Edge by Harrison Howe (ed.) – unsigned edition (£20)
• Darkness on the Edge by Harrison Howe (ed.) – traycased signed edition (£50)
• Long After Midnight by Ray Bradbury – unsigned edition (£20)
• Long After Midnight by Ray Bradbury – slipcased single-signature edition (£50)
• Long After Midnight by Ray Bradbury – traycased two-signature edition (£95)
• Escher’s Loops by Zoran Zivkovic – unsigned edition (£20)
• Escher’s Loops by Zoran Zivkovic – traycased signed edition (£50)
• Black Wings by S. T. Joshi (ed.) – unsigned edition (£25)
• Black Wings by S. T. Joshi (ed.) – traycased signed edition (£60)
• What Will Come After by Scott Edelman – unsigned edition (£15)
• What Will Come After by Scott Edelman – traycased signed edition (£35)
• Pelican Cay by David Case – unsigned edition (£25)
• Pelican Cay by David Case – traycased and multiple-signature edition (£60)
• Darkness, Mist & Shadow Vol. 1 by Basil Copper – unsigned edition (£35)
• Darkness, Mist & Shadow Vol. 2 by Basil Copper – unsigned edition (£35)
• Darkness, Mist & Shadow by Basil Copper – slipcased and multiple-signature two-book set (£100)
• Literary Remains by R. B. Russell – unsigned edition (£15)
• Literary Remains by R. B. Russell – traycased signed edition (£35)
• The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe – single-signature edition (£30)
• The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe – slipcased two-signature edition (£65)

But don’t worry… we’ve got another 35-40 titles scheduled for the rest of the year. Arrrrghhhh!

February giveaway winner

Paul Eke, proprietor of thecomicbookshop.co.uk, was the lucky recipient of a rare proof copy of our forthcoming Black Wings anthology of new Lovecraftian horror. And if you’re signed up to receive the PS Publishing newsletter emails by 16th March (meaning you get an update just like this one once a month), you could be the winner of an equally rare physical ARC of Scott Edelman’s collected zombie tales, What Will Come After – so what are you waiting for?

And that’s all for this month, I think. Look after each other… and happy reading!

Pete

These stories are disturbing, but they can also be called hopeful. In my opinion this is quite an achievement, because it isn’t easy to combine hopefulness and disturbing things – Scott Edelman has managed to do this and he’s done it amazingly well.

The first story, What Will Come After, is a surprisingly tender, but shocking story about love, life, death and life after death as a zombie. It’s a fine example of what a good writer do with words. The other stories are also well written, but I especially liked the Bram Stoker Award nominated stories (Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man and A Plague on Both Your Houses).

I can recommend What Will Come After: The Complete Zombie Stories of Scott Edelman to all horror readers, because it’s worth reading. If you like good zombie stories, these stories will charm you.

Four out of five stars – that’ll do nicely!

Number two, Tangent Online sets Kathleen M. Kemmerer on Postscripts #20/21: Edison’s Frankenstein. As explained before, the traditional Tangent formula with anthologies is to examine each story in turn, so excerpting isn’t very easy – but if you want to test my assertion that it’s a generally very favourable review, feel free to pop over there and check. Put it this way: the review concludes by saying “[t]his is a collection to savor. Nearly all readers will find something to love here.” Our work here is done. :)

Remember to click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.

And don’t forget that we’ve capped our postage rates, and that all top state pre-orders go postage-free!

Have you read a PS Publishing book recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

[ * That's 'shorts' as in short stories, not short trousers. For the record, I have no idea whether or not Mr Edelman possesses any zombie-related clothing. Though now I find I kind of hope he does. ]

You can find CD and cassette collections of those old radio shows (we used to call them ‘wirelesses’ in those strange bygone days) and, of course, you can buy compilations of Dan Dare’s adventures all over the place — and well worthy of your attention they truly are. But while we were treated several years back — a quarter century, as it happens — to Alastair Crompton’s The Man Who Drew Tomorrow celebration of Dan Dare creator Frank Hampson, there were more gaps in the story than was deemed ideal. And the complementary material was sparse… and where such material was included, it was in black and white.

Well, we’ve gone and added another new imprint to the PS stable — PS ArtBooks — and we’ve negotiated with Alastair Crompton (plus Hampson’s son, Peter and Colin Frewin, President of the Dan Dare Corporation) to fill in those gaps, expand that original story and add in a veritable feast of supporting material… much of it never seen before… and all of it in full colour.

Titled Tomorrow Revisited, this exquisite book will come in three states:

• a regular bookshop edition priced at £29.99;
• a 250-copy slipcased edition signed by the author and artist Andrew Skilleter, and featuring a special Dan Dare illustrated homage by Skilleter, priced at £69.99; and finally
• a 100-copy deluxe leatherbound edition in a special leather traycase, and featuring a certificate of authenticity signed by Crompton, Skilliter and legendary Eagle artist Don Harley, who will be providing a one-off personalised illustration for each copy. This one comes in at £295.

All three are currently featured on the website at the special pre-order prices of £26.99, £62.99 and £265.50, all plus postage – follow the links above.

Interest in the deluxe edition has already been high so I’m advising you to place your order right away. If you’re not sure, then I’d suggest you watch this little extract from British Pathé News, originally broadcast to cinema audiences in 1956:

My, but you’ll need to be either strong of stuff or hard of heart to ignore that. Or this, for that matter…

See you on the Space Lanes!

Horns is out now as published by William Morrow in the US, and hits the UK via the good offices of the people at Gollancz in September… but we went and bought the limited edition rights for PS, because we know that Joe Hill is a writer whose books are well worth collecting, especially for connoisseurs of genre fiction – and that’s what we’re all about, after all. :)

Indeed, we’re all sold out of our luxury traycased edition, but you can still snag one of the limited slipcased hardbacks – signed by Mr Hill himself, no less – for just £75. So what are you waiting for?

Anyway, blather aside, it’s reviews time here at PS Towers, so let’s see what we’ve got in the virtual mailbag…

First of all, Black Static’s Peter Tennant tucks in to two recent titles in their latest issue (print only, web-heads!), with high praise for Rick Hautala’s Reunion:

There are no mixed feelings about this novella [... It’s] pretty much good enough reason to slaughter a metaphorical fatted calf or two. My only problem is that it’s ruddy awkward to review without giving away the main plot twist. I can’t even see a way to touch on the theme of the book, which is so eloquently pinned down by F. Paul Wilson in the afterword (and there’s a reason it’s an after- rather than a foreword), without slipping in a horrendous plot spoiler.

[...]Reunion is perhaps more SF than horror, but it’s a beautifully written story that manages to draw from the deepest wellsprings of human emotion to deliver a tale that is rich with melancholy and sadness for lost opportunities and wasted lives, that manages to be minatory and yet without any real sense of menace, no monster but life itself. It kept me reading to the very end in anticipation of how it would all turn out, even though I felt I already knew. Yes, there is a predictable element to the narrative (perhaps ‘feel of the inevitable’ would be a more accurate description) but that isn’t really a concern, as the tale’s chief value and appeal doesn’t lie in any plot twist, but with the things it enables Hautala to say about the human condition, of how so often in our lives wisdom speaks in a vacuum.

If you haven’t read Hautala before, start here. Start now.

That’s about as unambiguous as it gets, no? Tennant also feels good about Cast A Cold Eye by Murphy and Shunn:

This short novella does many things right. For starters, its setting is immaculately captured on the page, with a real sense of rural Nebraska in 1921 coming over thanks to a wealth of tiny details, such as the ins and outs of photography or a look inside the house of a wealthy widow. There’s a strong emotional grounding too, for both Luke and the society in which he is placed, an aching sense of despair undercut with a feeling that perhaps the worst is past, so people can look to the future with hope, an optimism confirmed in its denouement. Characterisation is spot on, with no-one who can be considered either evil or a criminal, just ordinary men and woman with all the flaws and virtues that implies.

[...]

The supernatural side of the story is suitably understated, so that we believe but also take on board the possibility that the ghosts could only exist inside the hearts and minds of the people who see them. With a subtext suggesting that the spectral world is just another aspect of life, wishing us neither good nor evil, but just there, a case could be made for Luke as the ‘I see ghosts’ boy from Sixth Sense picked up, rather like a reverse Dorothy, and put down in rural Nebraska, but that might be stretching things. In any event, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and recommend it without reservation.

That’s two in the bag, then. Next up, Gnostalgia investigates The Night Cache by Andy Duncan, calling it…

… a diminutive 42-page ghost story that is told from the perspective of a young lesbian woman named Jenny. Jenny is a cashier at “Yarns Ignoble” (Oh come on Andy!) who is looking for love. She meets Destiny Creech, a young geocacher, and the two become a couple.

One does not need to be a prophet to anticipate what will happen to Destiny. I guess that was Destiny’s destiny. After Destiny’s quietus, Jenny is led on a series of geocaches and codes. Is Destiny speaking from the grave?

Nice cerebral ghost story with a cool ending.

Horror Drive-In’s Andrew Monge seems quite keen, too:

The thing that jumped out at me as I read THE NIGHT CACHE was how well Duncan captured the personalities and voices of the two girls. Destiny is portrayed as a free-spirit, always full of energy and on the lookout for her next adventure, whereas Jenny is left in awe of her new friend and tries her best to keep up as she’s swept along. Despite the girls’ brief time together, their relationship and conversations felt authentic and were enjoyable to read.

The other aspects I liked were the descriptions of geocaching and the various cryptography methods used to find the treasure. At various points in the story, Duncan shows the reader charts, codes, etc to illustrate what the girls are analyzing along the way. These sections get the reader more grounded in the girls’ world, and even allows him or her to take a crack at breaking the codes.

Mass Movement Magazine’s Jim Dodge Jr., however, could only get beyond the fact that the book features (gasp!) lesbian sex for long enough to describe it as…

… a little bit ghostly, a little bit erotic and quite a bit of fun to read.

Mister Dodge does better with details for less titillating fare, however, with the following tantalising summary of Scott William Carter’s Web of Black Widows:

A small town sheriff wanders onto a scene where one man is surrounded by two dead bodies and there is blood in the surf. The lone survivor is holding a shotgun. This sounds pretty straight-forward doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. It’s a little bit crazier than that.

Steven Langdon is a tattoo artist running from his grief. When he stops to eat at a diner in the middle of nowhere a pregnant housewife approaches him asking for a tattoo. She’s willing to pay whatever he asks for just one little spider on her belly. He says no. He tells her that he can’t, that he doesn’t do that anymore. She pleads. She begs. Finally he agrees, telling her to disappear when he’s done. Instead…well instead of leaving as she’s asked she becomes one of the three main characters in this sordid tale.

You may ask, who do the dead bodies belong to? Who is left holding the shotgun? Who’s the third person on the beach? You’ll have to read the story Scott William Carter has woven for us. It’s a shame to waste such a well spun yarn.

And he even has a soft spot in his heart that only Scott Edelman’s zombie stories, as collected in What Will Come After, can truly touch:

The stories collected here are sad. They’re full of tragedy and despair. Though these tales are chock-full of survivors they still manage to be really, completely…well…sad. I can’t say I’ve enjoyed anything zombie-related as much as Scott Edelman’s newest PS Publishing release but I will say I needed to make sure I got some sunshine when I was finished. He really pulled the old heartstrings with this book and I loved every minute of it!

Zombies pulling on your heartstrings… now that’d make for an interesting orchestra. :)

Last but not least, The Mad Hatter joins the chorus of praise for Beth Bernobich’s Ars Memoriae, calling it…

… a subtle Science Fiction story, which falls into place with an unexpectedly sweet and romantic ending. Adrian’s spy tactics are well thought-out, but the story meanders a little too much during his initial investigations causing a very slow start. Once another pivotal character is introduced the speed bumps even out to a strong and climatic ending. There is a steampunk/dieselpunk aspect, but it is little exploited in this novelette for me to get a grasp on, but there is quite a cool device that turns up at one point.

Fans of Kage Baker and other time twisters should definitely take note of Ars Memoriae and its associated stories.

And that’s all the reviews for this week, I’m afraid, unless there are some that my intertube spymonkeys have failed to inform me of… stupid monkeys. Always gossiping behind my back. Feh.

Remember to click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.

And don’t forget that we’ve capped our postage rates, and that all pre-orders go postage-free during February – so only four days left!

Have you read a PS Publishing book recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

I first came across Terry’s work in a collection entitled Twilight Beach, and fell head over heels in love with the story “Larrikin Wind”. So, as soon as I had a suitable anthology project on the boil, I lost no time in contacting Terry for a new story — the result was “The Maiden Death” in Destination: Unknown [1997]. Unsurprisingly, when the opportunity arose for PS to publish Terry’s first full-length work there was absolutely no hesitation. And that was even before we’d read it. Now that we have read it, I can only say this: it’ll be an absolute ground-breaker.

Don’t just take my word for it, though; here’s what senior PS editor Nick Gevers thinks of it.

Clowns at Midnight is a masterpiece of suspense – a suspense that is multiplied, rendered all the more terrifying, by the brilliantly constructed ambiguity of the plot. This is the territory of John Fowles’s great novels, The Magus and A Maggot: a psychological landscape in which the reliability of perception, of memory, and of narration is interrogated to its uttermost limits. And Terry Dowling’s fine prose is quite the equal of Fowles’s in the bargain. Editing this novel has been a very great pleasure indeed.

Dowling was influenced early by writers such as Ballard, Vance, and Bradbury as well as by surrealist painters such as Dali, Delvaux and Ernst. In addition to writing many short stories, he has co-edited The Essential Ellison, The Jack Vance Treasury, The Jack Vance Reader and Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF.

Clowns at Midnight will be published in June 2010, with pre-ordering possible in March*. This one won’t last long on the stockroom shelves, so we’re recommending you don’t hang around – click that BUY button as soon as it appears in order to avoid disappointment.

[ * Don't forget that postage is free on the top state of any and all titles pre-ordered before publication for the foreseeable future... - PGR. ]

Certainly not! So I’ll direct you to the Zeno Agency blog, where John Berlyne announces that later this year we here at PS Publishing will be doing a limited special edition of Wake Up & Dream, the new novel from Ian R MacLeod, whose Song Of Time (also a PS publication, fact-fans!) took the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award last year.

Here’s what PS boss Pete Crowther had to say:

“After the wonderful smorgasbord of emotion that was the multiple-award-winning Song Of Time, Ian Macleod could have gone two ways: the familiar and workmanlike approach of not taking any chances, or the bold sweeping-clean of the planning table in order to come up with something set to blow readers totally out of the water. Well, Wake Up And Dream is that latter…  in spades. It’s alternate reality Hollywood steeped in film noir, Dick meets Hammett…  a truly mesmerising word-trip that melds science, history and fantasy in  equal parts — and you know, you just can’t see the joins. We’re thrilled that Ian has allowed us to publish it — it’s a book that will take the genre’s readers by storm.”

More news on Wake Up And Dream as we have it, folks. :)

Another review for Rick Hautala’s Reunion is first on the list, courtesy of Shroud Magazine’s reviews blog, which says it is…

… a bittersweet coming of age tale that strikes just the right notes. Though it vibrates with the melancholic truth that childhood eventually ends and that everyone changes – even beloved friends – it still holds out the hope that we can change our lives for the better…if we really want to.

[...]

It’s hard to find the right balance between too depressing and too contrived, but Hautala does it well here. His rich narrative voice gives substance to the very adult fear of leaving the best days behind us, but he doesn’t inspire hopelessness, rather a determination – however resigned – to push forward. Also, the plotting of “Reunion” is neat and tight, clever also. As a side note, like all PS Publishing titles, “Reunion” is a thing of beauty, featuring jacket art by Tomislav Tikulin.

We do our best to make the physical item as lovely as the story it contains – it’s nice to have that recognised, and get a shout-out for one of our favourite cover artists to boot. :)

Next up, a brace of brief reviews from new blog-on-the-block Gnostalgia, according to whom Scott William Carter’s Web Of Black Widows showcase collection is…

… is as powerful as a package of dynamite.

“Front Row Seats” is a must read. I know that I will think about that story the next time that I go to the movies.

I give it 4 stars out of 5.

… and who effortlessly spots the contemporary symbolism of the undead in literature while reading the complete zombie stories of Scott Edelman, What Will Come After:

What Will Come After is a collection of nine zombie short stories. No, I don’t mean the evil talking heads that you see on tv shambling from interview to interview mindlessly regurgitating their party’s talking points. I mean the type of zombie that tries to rip your brains out; although, I can see where you might be confused.

Of those stories, “What Will Come After”, “A Plague on Both Your Houses” and “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” are must reads.

I give it 4 stars out of 5.

And finally, an imminent review from the hallowed pages of long-running genre fiction periodical Fantasy & Science Fiction, as Charles De Lint takes a peep at PS head honcho Pete Crowther’s very own Darkness, Darkness: Forver Twilight Vol. 1:

This is an old-fashioned story written with a contemporary sensibility. Old-fashioned, because there’s a slow build, with time taken for us to get to know the characters and setting before the real drama sets in. There’s also a mood, an eerie, creeping air to the proceedings that you just don’t get in modern stories, certainly not modern horror stories where it’s one slash scene, then cut and zip on to the next one.

But it’s written in a contemporary style — tight, third person points of view that really allow the reader into the head of the character. And while there’s ample description, there’s not too much, and a brisk pace keeps the story moving.

[It's ...] a nice change of pace for Crowther in terms of setting. And the packaging is terrific. Go check out the cover online. Whenever I see a scene such as the desolate, small-town Main Street depicted here, I just know I want to read the book.

That’s two complimentary mentions for our packaging in one week! Man, anyone would think we specialised in luxury limited editions or something… ;)

Remember to click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. And don’t forget that we’ve capped our postage rates, and all pre-orders go postage-free during February!

Have you read a PS Publishing book recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

I have been reading back through all the accepted stories as I start to put the book together and can now announce that the provisional running order is as follows:

1. Introduction by Allen Ashley
2. “Fade” by David Gullen
3. “A Hard Place” by Carole Johnstone
4. “Up” by Andrew Hook
5. “Steven’s Boat” by Billie Bundschuh
6. “Noose” by Adam Roberts
7. “Check” by Robert Guffey
8. “Something for Nothing” by Joe Essid
9. “The Phoney War” by Nina Allan
10. “Happy Ending” by Simon Clark
11. “Nanoamerica” by David John Baker
12. “Pixels on a Screen” by Patrick Shuler
13. “Scalped” by Jet McDonald
14. “Gravity Wave” by Douglas Thompson
15. “In The Face of Disaster” by Ian Sales
16. “Trouble with Telebrations” by J. B. Harris
17. “The Long Road to the Sea” by James L. Sutter
18. “Crashes” by Stuart Young
19. “Hapless Humanity” by Brian W. Aldiss
20. Brief Author Biographies

That’s a really exciting list and we are still on course to launch the book at Fantasy Con 2010 in Nottingham, with lots of the contributors expected to be present and ready to sign the book, talk about their story, accept the offer of drink, sign a 5 book deal before anybody else snaps them up, etc!

Cheers, Mr Ashley!

It’s been interesting for me to follow the progress of Catastrophia at one remove like this, and I hope you’ve found it interesting too; maybe we’ll do more of it in the future! In the meantime, we’ll keep you updated on this project as further news arrives.

First of all, a couple more reviews for Beth Bernobich’s Ars Memoriae, which seems to be our most fêted title of the moment in the eyes of the public. Carole Ann Moleti of Tangent Online had this to say:

Ars Memoriae, Beth Bernobich’s complex but flawlessly told tale, blends mystery, crime fiction, and political intrigue with steampunk and alternate history. Éireann, an Ireland who successfully resisted English rule, finds itself enmeshed in political conflicts in the Balkans during the late 19th century. Ms. Bernobich even adds a dash of magical realism, with balloon flights to transport Commander Adrian Dee, the agent of Queen Áine Lasairona Devereaux, to sort out a messy situation.

[...]

The cleverness of this gritty, realistic novella extends to the nuances of Latin translation. Ars Memoriae could mean “a trick of memory,” “way of memory,” “realization of memory,” or “way of history”[...]

Some other excellent alternate histories and counterfactuals I’ve read include “Counterfactual” by Gardner Dozois (Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 2006) and “His Master’s Voice” by Mark Rigney (Talebones #34, Winter 2007). In these, the authors succeed in making the reader believe that events are not only subject to re-interpretation in the bright light of historical examination, but also to manipulation by forces we can only imagine, devices and abilities that push the limits of what seems possible.

I add Ars Memoriae to the list.

And esteemed veteran critic Pete Tennant is also full of praise for Ars Memoriae in a recent Interzone review:

… this is a gripping adventure story from first word to last, chock full of incident and set in a world that is a convincingly detailed distortion of our own. And, as ever with alternate history, much of the fun is in guessing at points of departure and seeing how famous characters from our past fared in this reality. There are tantalising hints, places where events seems to overlap or reverberate – echoes of the Irish Troubles, and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand – but Bernobich is too canny to be pinned down on specifics, and so we are left to our own imaginative devices. And if we don’t get scientific romance as such, there is romance of the more mundane though no less glorious kind, as Dee forges an alliance with a lady scientist, who has the potential to be so much more to him than fellow righter of wrongs.

More than anything else this book, with its Machiavellian twists and turns, reminded me of Moorcock’s novel Glorious Albion, with the added bonus of a narrator who, if not exactly unreliable, is subject to lapses in memory and confusion. Of course this is an occasion where the reader knows more than the protagonist, in that we suspect Dee’s false memories are but echoes of some other reality, just as his world is an echo of our own, wheels set within wheels.

Our third and final mention for this round-up comes from Colin “Tales From the Black Abyss” Leslie, who fell head over heels for Reunion by Rick Hautala:

The feeling that the endless summer of youth is in fact reaching a conclusion, that the freedom and carefree world of young boys is about to be lost pervades the book with a rich intensity. The only comparison I can draw on is the power of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine which has a similar tone. It’s a tone that seems to intensify with the readers age as the yearning for those nostalgic summer days increases. Given that Dandelion Wine is one of my favourite books then any book which aims for that standard is a huge success for me, when a book like Reunion not only aims for that standard but reaches it then we are in a whole new territory.

Rick Hautala has produced a deeply moving piece of work and has shown how horror has moved on in the last few years both thematically but also in the standard of the writing. I’m a fan of the ghost train full of monsters and gore as much as the next man but books like Reunion show that in the hands of a skillful writer, a few characters and a lot of emotion and the ride can be equally intense. Highly recommended.

And that’s your lot!

Remember to click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. And don’t forget that we’ve capped our postage rates, and all pre-orders go postage-free during February!

Have you read a PS Publishing book recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

Well, enough retrospective self-justification on my part – let’s see what reviewers have been saying about PS Publishing titles in the last week.

Beth Bernobich’s Ars Memoriae is everywhere, or so it seems. Here it appears at Mass Movement, for example:

A finely woven tale of the mysteries surrounding the political ties and the unrest present among several nations. Commander Dee is an interesting, conflicted character. He is a man who was well educated and traveled quite a bit before apparently losing his mind, afflicted by “false” memories. After some time in an institution and under the care of a therapist in the hopes of eradicating the nightmarish visions of that untrue past, his Queen asks him to be a traveler once again. This time he will be her spy, seeking answers to the apparent conspiracies gripping Eireann and the surrounding countries.

[...]

Bernobich does a great job of building the suspense in the story. I did not think it was all that suspenseful until I realized my muscles had tensed up and I found myself wishing I had taken that mail-order course in speed reading! Although Ars Memoriae is short, the plot and character development are greater than some books several times its length. I am impressed by Bernobich and would like to read more of her work.

A copy of Ars Memoriae is doing a sort of blog tour of its own, landing on desks for review and being passed on once finished; there’s a few brief mentions here and here, plus a longer consideration from Michelle Muenzler, aka Fluffy Bunny of the Apocalypse:

You can feel the pieces of history peeking between the cracks of words, slipping between the pages and onto your fingers. The book is brimming with little tidbits that both steady this alternative reality and make me more curious of the multitude of stories which must exist within it already. So interesting are these glimpses into the greater world, that I actually found myself slightly disappointed that the book was not longer and more all-encompassing of all the smaller stories we seemed to pass by. This is especially true of Commander Dee’s odd false memories, which add such lovely flavor but feel as though they ought to have played a stronger part in the narrative. That’s a small quibble, though, in what is a very entertaining book full of political intrigue, second-guessing, and enough twists and deadly consequences to keep even the intelligent and canny Commander Dee struggling to stay ahead.

Last but not least, one Sherwood Smith (aka Oached Pish on LiveJournal) has an Ars Memoriae review/interview combo:

I compare it to Shostakovich’s 11th–deceptively slow beginning, as Dee waits upon the young queen with whom he has some sort of past, and visits each member of her inner council. Then he travels to Europe, using disguises and code words set up according to diplomatic useage . . . which gets him into trouble. Somewhere along the line, he’s been betrayed. He has no idea if he’s been sold out locally–or back at the capital, so he can trust no one. Communicate with no one.

As he travels on, using his wits and experience, he’s still pestered by weird memories. The story builds to a crashing crescendo, like the Shostakovich piece, which was inspired by politics at that very time.

There is easily enough material here for a full novel; readers might wish the climax was explored more fully, but overall I am left longing for more about this world, how it works, and above all, more about Commander Adrian Dee.

Elsewhere, Yvette Tan (presumably no relation to prodigious reviewer and commentator Charles “Bibliophile Stalker” Tan, though I may be wrong) tucks in to Rick Hautala’s novella Reunion:

Reunion starts off pleasant, two boys enjoying the last few weeks of summer, interspersed with an old guy trying to get to a party. Once you hit page 37 though, you won’t want to put the book down (I have Reunion to blame for my eye bags). This is when everything starts to make sense, everything clicks into place. And while you think you know what’s coming, you find yourself turning pages faster and faster because it’s the journey that’s fun and not the destination, and Hautala does have a way of taking a classic concept and telling it in a way that is his own.

Reunion is a different sort of coming of age book. It doesn’t so much serve you a happy ending as kind of a hopeful one. It concludes satisfyingly enough, though I couldn’t help wishing that it had gone on much longer, except to do so would probably work better on film than on paper.

Meanwhile, in the sixth issue of Dead Reckonings, Hank Wagner takes a look at three recent PS titles in order to question whether the novella is the ideal length for horror fiction. First of all, the already much-lauded Sarah Pinborough novella, The Language of Dying:

Pinborough’s tale of a daughter’s experience of her sickly father’s last days is by far the most ordinary of the lot, at least in terms of its premise, which finds the narrator tending to her father, aware that he is slowly dying and that his time is short. Her tale is a requiem of sorts for the man, and her relationship with him, darting between the past (relating events from her childhood and her abysmal marriage) and the present (where she is visited by her sister and three brothers). At the core of her story is a macabre vision she once had, which she has come to associate with death, and of which she has recently caught glimpses.

Then there’s Terry Lamsley’s R.I.P.:

Conrad has a friend, Gwillam, who tries, though computer-aided research, to learn more about the nature of death and what exactly is on the other side. Although initially supportive of Gwillam’s pursuits, Conrad soon withdraws, out of fear. When Gwillam vanishes, Conrad hires a no-nonsense investigator, Mrs. Greta Holwig, to
look into his friend’s abrupt disappearance and the mysterious inhabitants who have replaced him in his apartment. When Mrs. Holwig’s inquiries stir those tenants up, the pair find themselves squaring off against eerie foes with origins beyond the grave.

And Joel Lane’s The Witnesses Are Gone:

Lane’s tale is one of paranoia and dread, as its narrator, Martin Swann, describes a growing obsession with a film that may or may not exist. The story begins as Swann moves into an old house, discovering a box of videocassettes hidden in an old shed. One of them contains a bootleg copy of a disturbing, oblique film by a little-known French director, the enigmatic Jean Rien, a.k.a. Juan Nada (his name alone should provide an idea of the direction this story takes readers). Swann feels compelled to search out other works by the director. His search for the film alienates him from friends, family, and lovers, and leads to encounters with equally obsessive devotees and naysayers; physically, he travels to Paris, where he has a drug-induced epiphany of sorts, and finally to southern Mexico, where he hopes to meet the director himself.

Commenting on all three books, Wagner says:

Each of these tales is well constructed, well written, and well executed; Pinborough, Lamsley, and Lane show great mastery over their prose, carefully considering the effect of each word, wringing maximum tension from every sentence. All ground their work in a painful but familiar reality, all the better to rock readers when things start to get strange, which they quickly do. In each, the horror is understated, but the unease that these tales creates is palpable.

[...]

Additionally, each provides further proof of Peter Crowther’s sure instincts as an editor, publisher, and, most importantly, as a reader and fan—he knows what scares us, and he recognizes quality.

Ah, Mr Wagner, we know you speak the truth, and from the heart… but please take care, lest we’ll never be able to get Pete’s head through the stock-room door. ;)

Last of all, I hope you’ll forgive us for mentioning a different sort of accolade, namely a number of our titles that appeared on this year’s Locus Recommended Reading list – including mentions for Robert Wexler’s The Painting & The City (novels); Gwyneth Jones’ Grazing the Long Acre, Paul Witcover’s Everland, The Very Best of Gene Wolfe and the just-released Viator Plus from Lucius Shepard (collections); Postscripts 20/21: Edison’s Frankenstein (original anthologies), Powers: Secret Histories (non-fiction); and a bunch of short stories, too.

They’re all in very fine – nay, august – company, and if you’re looking for a guide to some of the most popular and lauded genre books and stories of the last year, the Locus list is one of the best places to start. We’re proud to see our output there. :)

Remember to click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. And don’t forget that we’ve capped our postage rates, and all pre-orders go postage-free during February!

Have you read a PS Publishing book recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

First of all, a belated happy new year one and all. May 2010 be filled with good health, happiness and prosperity for you and yours… and may it leave you in such a state of near lysergically-enhanced merriment and bonhomie that all you crave is to buy more and more books (particularly those with the little PS logo on the spine!).

New Gene Wolfe novel The Sorcerer’s House; available for postage-free pre-order now!

In fact, perhaps the first such purchase could be Gene Wolfe’s remarkable new novel The Sorcerer’s House, intro’d by Tim Powers and boasting magnificent cover art from the incomparable Dirk Berger?

There are just 400 copies available (300 signed by Gene @ £37.50, and 100 signed by both Gene and Tim @ £75) and then they’re gone so don’t delay — and as a special incentive, we’re reducing those prices to £30 and £65 respectively (and offering free postage!) until actual publication (first week of March).

• The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe, signed hardcover – £30 pre-order
• The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe, signed traycased hardcover – £65 pre-order

Bargain bibliography; prices slashed on Powers: Secret Histories

And talking of Tim Powers, we’d like to free up some storage space… so for those folks who have not yet availed themselves of John Berlyne’s magnificent Secret Histories opus (which is to bibliographies what World War II was to schoolyard disagreements) we’re offering the trade edition (signed by Tim) and the two-book slipcased set (signed by all contributors) for the special prices of £25 (instead of £40) and £99 (instead of £195) plus postage. Buy now, before we change our minds!

• Powers: Secret Histories by John Berlyne, signed trade edition – £25 special offer
• Powers: Secret Histories by John Berlyne, signed 2-volume slipcased set – £99 special offer

We’re looking to come up with a special offer that’s available only to newsletter subscribers, so watch this space.

Special editions – production update

It’s now time is to thank customers awaiting the deluxe editions of various recent titles for their fortitude and perseverance — they’ve shown almost biblical patience, for which many thanks are due.

I’m pleased to say that the traycased edition of Steve Erikson’s Crack’d Pot Trail is now in, as is Uncle River’s Counting Tadpoles. We’re expecting the top states for John Gribbin’s Timeswitch and Lucius Shepard’s Viator Plus this week… and I just heard that the final two signing sheets (out of 6!) for Postscripts 20/21: Edison’s Frankenstein are winging their way to our printers. So it’s probably fair to say that all orders will be with customers well before the end of the month.

New titles to launch at World Horror Con

Right now, we’re chin-deep in preparations for the upcoming World Horror Convention in Brighton, where we should have (please, God!) copies of the following titles for your delight… but they can all be pre-ordered now, and all pre-orders go post-free until the end of February!

• Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Complete Macabre Short Fiction of Basil Copper, two massive volumes lovingly edited by Stephen Jones;
• Pelican Cay and Other Disquieting Tales by David Case (also edited by Stephen Jones);
• Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror edited by S. T. Joshi;
• Darkness on the Edge: Stories Inspired by the Work of Bruce Springsteen edited by Harrison Howe;
• What Will Come After, the complete zombie stories of Scott Edelman;
• Literary Remains, a collection of moody supernatural stories from R. B. Russell; and
• Escher’s Loops, another collection of off-the-wall tales from the Master of the Strange, Zoran Zivkovic.

Also, we’ll be launching the first titles from our new poetry imprint, Stanza Press, kicking off with Off the Coastal Path: Dark Poems from the Seaside, edited by Jo Fletcher and illustrated by Ben Baldwin, featuring contributions from Ray Bradbury, Donald Sidney-Fryer, Neil Gaiman, John Gordon, Ursula K. LeGuin, John Kaiine, Joel Lane, Tanith Lee, Brian Lumley, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, T.M. Wright, Dana Gioia, Weldon Kees and many others.

There’ll also be two new Weird Tales poetry books by H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, both of them edited by Stephen Jones, and Not Quite Atlantis: A Selection of Poems by Donald Sidney-Fryer with cover artwork by Les Edwards.

Before then, of course, we’ll have Joe Hill’s Horns (just waiting for the signing sheets now) and Stephen King’s long-awaited One For The Road ready for shipping.

Postal rates capped – maximum £6 UK, £12 international

One housekeeping message: we’ve made some changes to our postage charging system, with the new rates ensuring that UK customers will pay a maximum of £6 while our chums outside the UK will pay a maximum of £12. Here’s how it’s going to work:

• If you live in the UK, postage on the first book will be £2.49. It’s the same on the second book — so if you order two books, it’ll cost you £4.98. But if you choose a third book, it’ll be just another £1.02 . . . because the maximum postage charge on an order is now £6. So that goes for any number of books above three. The most you’ll pay is £6.
• It works exactly the same with non-UK customers. Postage for the first book will be £4.99. And £4.99 again for the second book — so two books will set you back £9.98. A third book will be a further £2.02 bringing the total to £12. And that’s the maximum. Even if you order 20 books (please… look into my eyes… ), the postage charge will be just £12.

But we’re also maintaining the system we’ve had in operation this past few weeks of making all pre-orders for the top state (note: not the ‘trade’ state) of each title completely post-free… no matter *where* you live.

And better yet, until the end of February, all pre-orders — for all states and editions — will be post-free.

Newletter giveaway winner for December

Congratulations to Tomás Sánchez Tejero of Spain, a self-described bibliophile and sf book collector who should by now be in receipt of his copy of Eric Brown’s Gilbert & Edgar on Mars; December’s other randomly-picked email address wasn’t responded to, sadly,

And there are no more roll-overs – we’ll pick a new prize every month, whether they get claimed or not! All you have to do to qualify for our free draw is be signed up for the email versions of these newsletters… and this month’s lucky winner could be getting their hands on a super-rare proof copy of Black Wings, our forthcoming anthology of Lovecraftian horror, edited by Lovecraft scholar supreme S T Joshi. We’ll pick the winning address on Monday 15th February, so keep an eye on your inbox!

And that’s about it. We’ve bought some new titles (as always) but we’ll hold off on those for another time.

There’s still damn snow on the ground here at the seaside so let’s all of us be careful walking as well as driving. Until next time, look after each other… and happy reading.

Best

Pete

Mass Movement’s Jim Didge Jr. seems pretty impressed by Mike Resnick’s alternate future history, Shaka II:

We have a winner, folks! It involves the future and the rise of the Zulu Nation! In the pages of Shaka II you’ll find ruthless executions, political intrigue and battles in space. This isn’t a book, more like a long short story, so I don’t want to give away all the fun but I will say that this tale grabbed me and held on like a crack whore waiting for her next rock.

[A somewhat gritty metaphor, perhaps, but flattering nonetheless...]

Tchaka is a Zulu, he wants to conquer, not just Earth, but also the known universe. Emotionless and effective, he turns aside the governments of our home planet repeatedly in order to achieve his goals. His subjects are safe from invasion but they’re not safe from the whims of their self-appointed king who is just as likely to order them impaled as to walk past them as if they don’t exist. They live every day in abject terror. And that’s just the way he likes it.

Next up, Ken of NethSpace heaps high praise upon Steven Erikson’s snarkily-dark Malazan comedy Crack’d Pot Trail:

As I see it, the most effective way to describe what Erikson is doing with Crack’d Pot Trail is to be blunt and a bit foul. Erikson has balls – balls that Steven Colbert would envy. Erikson has a lot to say on story telling, artistic integrity and intent, fandom, and criticism – and at least some of what he is saying is something of a big FU to his fans and critics alike. As the artists (generally poets and other verbal storytellers) tell there tales in defense of literally being eaten for dinner, the audience often interrupts and questions the artist – why are you talking about that, get to the details, more sex, more violence, etc. Additionally, there is one professional critic among the audience (literally a judge at the contest the artists are ultimately traveling to) – a critic who often jumps in and demands more details and explanations – often about completely inane aspects of the story. The picture painted isn’t pretty…and then it gets nasty.

[...]

Erikson has written something I think all authors dream of writing at one point or another but are either too scared or too smart to actually put on paper. Well, as a fan, a critic, and a far from noble knight, I have to say that I loved every juicy bit of Crack’d Pot Trail – I think I’ve developed a taste for it. 9/10

And finally, three reviews from Stephen Theaker of Theaker’s Quarterly. He compares our very own Pete Crowther’s Darkness, Darkness: Forever Twilight Vol. 1 to the highest of genre fiction benchmarks:

For me Ian Watson nails it when he says [in the cover blurbs] it “reminds me … of Stephen King’s novella ‘The Mist’”. This could easily be read as a very well done pastiche of Stephen King. The small group isolated at a radio station is reminiscent of The Fog, while the mysterious disappearance of the rest of the world and the tension between safe-in-here and dangerous-out-there reminded me of “The Mist”. Add a dash of 1950s sf cinema (think Invaders from Mars) and you have a tasty concoction.

Eric Brown’s Gilbert & Edgar on Mars presses all the right po-mo/retro buttons:

This very enjoyable little book sees G.K. Chesterton, having been mistaken for H.G. Wells, abducted by Martians. An energetic and rather unpleasant Edgar Rice Burroughs rescues him and the two head off into the Martian wilderness to find Edgar’s good friend, John Carter, dodging dinosaur attacks and battling alternative realities along the way…

This makes a nice companion piece to the same publisher’s Planet of Mystery by Terry Bisson, in which astronauts found themselves on a hallucinatory Burroughsian Venus, but where that could have been drawn from the pages of New Worlds, this is much more traditional, and slightly old-fashioned. That makes it no less enjoyable, though.

After all, this is a book which sees John Carter pointing a ray-rifle at Professor Challenger – what’s not to love?

And his reaction to Stephen Baxter’s Starfall is short but very sweet:

I’ve got about a dozen Baxter bricks on my shelves, all of them sadly unread. I really appreciated the chance to read something of his without having to dedicate an entire month to it. I thought this was fantastic, a magnificent, epic story in a mere ninety pages. I really need to make time for his other books!

So, that’s all for this week – stay braced for a new newsletter at the turn of the month as PS shakes off the holiday downtime and comes out swinging with fresh new titles for you to covet!

Remember to click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. And don’t forget our three-for-two offer on all current titles, which ends on January 31st!

Have you read a PS Publishing book recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

Not only could you bag yourself copies of Matthew’s new Henghis Hapthorne novel Hespira, but some deluxe rarities from Subterranean Press and ourselves, too – like a slipcased copy of the wonderful Template! Considering the price of entry is the time it takes to type out a short email, it’s too good a prize to pass up – so get on over there and enter, why don’t you? :)

First of all, a couple of reviews from Adam Groves of Fright.com, who is intrigued and unnerved by the unreliable narrator of Ramsey Campbell’s Creatures of the Pool:

The first-person point of view is that of the jittery Gavin Meadows. He gives guided tours of the titular “Pool,” specifically Liverpool, which ultimately plays a more important role in this odd tale than Gavin himself. Gavin, like Liverpool native Ramsey Campbell, knows the locale inside and out, and his knowledge extends to the legends and folklore of the area–which, as he gradually discovers, may not be entirely legendary.

But then again Gavin could well be losing his mind, judging from the spectral forms he always thinks he’s seeing (“Does it send a mouse fleeing into the wall,” Gavin wonders upon opening a door, “or just a trick of light and shadow?”) and the ceaseless water imagery that pervades his reality. Everything Gavin views appears to be dripping and/or waterlogged, and the wetness comes to take on an increasingly sinister aspect, intimating something dredged up from watery depths.

Nobody does this sort of hallucinatory inversion of the ordinary like Ramsey Campbell, and the constant reality displacement is unnerving – particularly since, this being a first-person account, we have no way of objectively gauging how reliable Gavin’s viewpoint is. Obviously his paranoia, suspicion and employment hassles aren’t enough to sustain a novel, whose main thrust is provided by the disappearance of Gavin’s eccentric father. Even this development, however, is open to interpretation: is the old guy truly lost/kidnapped or is this another of Gavin’s delusions – or are they delusions?

Groves also grasps the surreal scratchings of Paul Jessup’s Glass Coffin Girls Showcase collection:

I’ll have to say that based on the nine bizarre tales collected in Glass Coffin Girls, Paul Jessup definitely has the touch. Each story reads like it was plucked directly from its author’s subconscious, with prose that’s crisp and direct. Reading this book, which its author calls “a shadow volume whose pages were written in the cracks of ancient cities and long since forgotten,” is at times akin to having one’s eyeballs scraped, but I’d say that goes with the territory. Lines like “At night, the ink on the paper crawled together, the words hooking into figures of people. Then they wandered in the literary city, taking to one another” may seem a bit clumsy (if that description was intended as a metaphor it’s an overwrought one), but for the most part the book is literate, energetic and in its own way quite readable.

Elsewhere, I E Lester recommends Mike Resnick’s Shaka II, which is…

… [s]et in the medium distant future. Mankind has started to expand into the galaxy but is far from a united race at home.

Robert Ole Buthelezi is a Zulu, one who feels that power has been away from the Zulus too long. So he sets out from very humble beginnings to gain power and through a series of clever political maneuverings (yes you can read assassinations) he gets it. But control of a small part of one continent on Earth is not enough for him. He has eyes on the stars.

Wonderful, wonderful writing. Okay, I have to admit to being a total addict of Mike Resnick’s writing here so this might be biased. He writes with such a swift pace. Even in his longer novels everything zips by. You rarely find passages which drag in his writing.

And to close, another brace of mentions at the newly-revived Tangent Online, with Lyndon Perry praising Rio Youers‘ Old Man Scratch:

“Old Man Scratch” is not a complex tale, but it is a nicely developed one. It is a slightly speculative but immanently human story of love, hate, relationships, frustration, and revenge. The mental slide from law-abiding citizen (and loving husband – the romantic element is sweet without being sugary) to murder-contemplating criminal is masterfully chronicled. Youers kept the story moving and gave the plot as many words as it deserved.

Also, Maggie Jamison dissects Postscripts #19: Enemy of the Good on a story-by-story basis, describing David Abraham’s opener “Balfour and Meriwether in the Adventures of the Emperor’s Vengeance” as a “no-holds-barred romp through Victorian London”, and suggesting that Marly Youmans’ “The Red King Sleeps” “will seize anyone with a taste for the dark and surreal.” There’s more analysis in the review, but it’s capped off with the following:

Postscripts #19: Enemy of the Good is a full and heady collection of fantasy, science fiction, and horror short stories.

We can’t argue with that. :)

Remember to click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. And don’t forget our three-for-two offer on all current titles!

Have you read a PS Publishing book recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

… but hey, you have to work with what you’re given, after all. So enough chit-chat about the weather – let’s have a look at this week’s selection of reviews and mentions for PS Publishing titles, shall we?

First of all, Jim Dodge Junior of Mass Movement Magazine is wowed by Derryl Murphy and William Shunn’s Cast A Cold Eye:

Luke Bryant is growing very tired of being stared at. By statues. In the graveyard. Near the graves of his parents. His aunt and uncle are raising him the best they know how to but life is one chaotic event after another. Being chased by bullies into the grave yard where statues stare at him and ending up near his parents’ graves really doesn’t cap his day off very well.

Annabelle Tucker is a photographer; a spiritual photographer. She’s rolled into town in her garishly painted truck to take pictures of the local ghosts. After making a deal with Uncle Roy, Luke becomes Annabelle’s assistant. When she realizes he has a great eye for photographing ghosts she turns most of the operation over to him. Together they search for Annabelle’s dead husband and a way to end the haunting of Luke. Yes, it’s easy to say I enjoyed reading this book. A lot. [...] Getting to read new releases from PS Publishing makes this whole ‘book reviewer’ gig really great!

Next, Michael Matthew of Belletrista casts a warm eye on Gwyneth Jones‘ short fiction collection, Grazing the Long Acre:

The stories share [Jones'] novels’ clear, chill view of human weakness, particularly of sexist oppression—a take reminiscent of stories by the late, and better‒known, Alice B. Sheldon. Avoiding easy resolutions, challenging the reader, Jones’ storytelling is subtle, indirect, dense. Crucial details can slip by in an aside for the reader to spot later, or never. Her characters are usually displaced from everyday life by travel, duty, or calamity as they move through our world, imagined futures, or to distant planets.

[...]

Some of these stories share characters and setting with some of Jones’ novels ‒ the award-winning White Queen, Divine Endurance, and Life. Grazing the Long Acre can be enjoyed without having read the novels, but the reader will want to move on to the novels anyway after this selection of stories by Gwyneth Jones — a writer who deserves to be much better known.

And to wrap up, a couple of best-of-2009 lists featuring PS titles have passed over the transom. Jason Pettus of the Chicago Centre for Literature and Photography ranks two PS novels in their “best experimental novels” selection; there’s Robert Freeman Wexler’s The Painting & The City:

Like John Crowley or Tim Powers [...] Wexler uses this milieu not to write a thriller but rather to craft a subtle, slow-moving story, in which we slowly get glimpses of an entire alternative existence that might or might not be surrounding us at all times without most of us knowing; and along the way he throws in some really inspired touches, for example like making Charles Dickens an adventure-seeking character within the actual story, who just happens to be visiting New York during the time of these events and manages to get sucked into them. One of my favorite genre authors out there right now, and it’s a shame that he’s not as well-known yet as many of his peers.

And there’s Sebastien Doubinsky’s Babylonian Trilogy:

Doubinsky essentially reimagines New York for these stories, as a place similar to but slightly more fantastical than the real thing, and including such alt-history touches as an American military quagmire in Cuba instead of Vietnam; he then sets a series of noir tales within such an environment, only with most of them containing the kinds of magical-realism details you would expect from such a project. Subtle in its otherworldliness, this is the type of genre project perfect for those who don’t read much of it, people who are perhaps fans of shows like Lost and authors like Michael Chabon, and I have to admit that this was one of my favorite fantastical reading experiences of 2009.

Doubinsky’s novel also takes pride of place as Best Novel in Charles Tan’s best-of-2009 round-up, which also features a number of other accolades and mentions for PS titles… including Sarah Pinborough’s The Language of Dying as Best Novella (followed closely by Joel Lane’s The Witnesses Are Gone).

Furthermore, Paul Witcover’s “Everland” gets an honorable mention under Best Short Story, and the collection that bears the same name takes second place in Best Short Story Collection. Charles is a voracious reader, and we’re very proud to see so many of our publications left a mark on his mind over the last year.

So maybe you’d like to let us leave a mark on you, too? In that case, why not click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. And don’t forget our three-for-two offer on all current titles!

Have you read a PS Publishing book recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

But enough chatter about the weather – let’s see what’s been said about PS Publishing books in the last week or so, shall we?

First of all, Ben Cooper of the Innsmouth Free Press finds himself a bit baffled by Paul Jessup’s Glass Coffin Girls Showcase collection, though he can see where Jessup was going with it:

This was a hard collection for me to review, hence my lack of focus on many of the stories. Such writing has to be experienced first-hand, and I don’t think it lends itself to analysis, at least not by myself and not within the constraints of this review. I would be doing the work a disservice. As I stated at the outset, surrealist fiction does very little for me and I often have the feeling that it is wilfully obtuse, designed for an in-group to enjoy and pat each other on the back at how clever they are. However, there’s no doubt that Jessup can write; he has genuine skill and I didn’t get the feeling that these stories were written to exclude readers, but instead to try and open their minds.

Next, Bill Capossere of Fantasy Literature describes Steven Erikson’s Crack’d Pot Trail as “a Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales from hell”…

Erikson’s humor shines through here more fully than it does in the larger works and varies from slapstick to witty wordplay to social and artistic satire or sometimes all the above (not to mention one of the funniest sex scenes you’ll ever read). Sure, at times Erikson hits a bit too obviously, but mostly you’re just having a ball and imagining he had the same while writing it all.

[...] between the laugh out loud moments, the sly wordplay, the usual great Erikson characters (concisely drawn as fully as each needs to be), the examination of the relationship between the artist and the audience, or art and the public sphere, zombies (did I mention the zombies?), and even a bit of suspense over who gets eaten and what will happen at journey’s end, Crack’d Pot Trail was a thoroughly enjoyable trip, one might even say, a delectable one. Highly recommended.

Andrew Wheeler turns his attention to an older title and has high praise for Matthew Hughes‘ Template:

Hughes’s work often tends towards the Vancean, and Template is firmly in that mode; it’s set so far in the future that the planet called “Old Earth” may not even be the one we’re on now, and in a society where humanity has spread throughout an entire arm of the Milky Way. It’s a slightly old-fashioned future, pre-Sterling and Vinge, in that all of those humans are apparently physically identical to humans today, and their divergences — which are many, and one of the underlying themes of Template — are entirely cultural, not physical.

[...]

Hughes’s writing is both supple and subtle here; his dialogue is allusive and amusing in that dry, understated style that he shares with Vance, and his descriptions are precise and specific. Template isn’t a long novel — it tops out at 250 pages — but it’s full of wonders and thrills, deeply amusing and thoughtful in turns, a fine mature work from one of the best writers that SFF has today. I can only hope that his audience will increase; we need more Hughes novels, and a world with a legion of Hughes fans would be a wonderful thing.

And finally, Tangent Online’s C L Rossman is impressed by Darkness on the Edge, Harrison Howe’s forthcoming anthology of stories inspired by the songs of The Boss, Bruce Springsteen.

Rossman runs through each story individually, but ends his analysis thusly:

Overall I have to say this is a most unusual collection of tales based on how one man’s music has affected a generation. The writers excellently evoke for us those memories of the dark towns of our past, where muscle-cars roared, and the silent factories overhung our future. A superb anthology, with even the cover especially well drawn to reflect riding the road to the future, with the past forever lurking in our rear view mirrors.

Something to bear in mind as a unique surprise for the music fan in your life, perhaps? :)

As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. And don’t forget our three-for-two offer on all current titles!

Have you read a PS Publishing book recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

Anyway, I’m sure you’re busy, so let’s get on with this week’s reviews round-up – starting with two mentions at the newly-reanimated Tangent Online webzine. First of all, Steve Fahnestalk gets busy with Eric Brown’s Gilbert & Edgar on Mars:

… it’s a fun little book comprising one novella about the aforementioned writers [G. K. Chesterton and Edgar Rice Burroughs] and their adventures on a Mars that owes more than a little to the second author. I’m not giving anything at all away when I say you’ll get that within a couple of pages of beginning the story; in most cases, SF readers are way ahead of the writers anyhow.

Seems that there are some Philosophers on Mars who are kidnapping Earthly writers and reading their minds; not harming them in any way, but copying their dreams out of their heads in order to have what in Star Trek would be holodeck adventures—making their books into a 500-mile radius zone of what would be called “virtual reality”—except that it’s not virtual, it’s real.

[...]

Along the way from GK’s kidnapping to his eventual return to Earth, he and Edgar have adventures involving more than one reality, meet John Carter and Dejah Thoris, and even bump into Professor Challenger! All in all, a satisfying little romp. I can heartily recommend it as a light, quick read.

Next, Carl Slaughter sings the praises of Mike Resnick’s Shaka II:

Shaka II has an ambitious and increasingly sophisticated plot.  It also has well-built, consistent character development.  The writing style is clear, so the confusion level is zero.  In this reviewer’s opinion, the best feature is in Resnick’s gift for dialog.  Some conversations consume most of a chapter.  The banter is crisp and insightful.  Although I was disappointed with the lack of creativity in an early section of this novella, I was still impressed with the writing.

Shaka II is a masterpiece and I look forward to getting caught up on Resnick’s other work.

You can’t say fairer than that!

No links for the other brace of reviews, I’m afraid, but that’s because they come from the December issue of the esteemed Locus Magazine. First, Rich Horton has a high opinion of Beth Bernobich’s Ars Memoriae:

… a novella set in her somewhat steampunkish alternate history in which Queen Aíne rules in Éireann, a version of Ireland that occupies more or less the place of England as something like World War I looms. Commander Adrian Dee, still tortured by memories of another past, is sent by his queen on a mission to Central Europe to uncover plots that may lead to a war involving the Prussian Empire, Austria, Montenegro, all this involving revolutionaries in Montenegro, a traitor in Éireann, and, naturally, a strong beautiful woman whose loyalties Dee cannot at first know. It’s fun stuff [...] Bernobich remains one of the most exciting newer writers we have.

And finally, Stefan Dziemianowicz takes a stab at Terry Lamsley’s R.I.P.

R.I.P. is [Lamsley's] latest, and it’s bound to make his fans lament the infrequency of his appearances. Although less in the style of M.R. James, and other classic ghost story writers, whose influence his early supernatural stories reflected, it’s a fairly original riff on an old horror theme that can be traced back at very least to Edgar Allan Poe: the desperate need for the living to establish the existence of an afterlife.

[...]

Consistent with Lamsley’s previous work, there are no real shocks to this story; just a cumulative sense of uneasiness as the story builds to a crescendo of dread. Lamsley’s rendering of the afterlife and its prisoners is highly original without being a complete departure from familiar Gothic treatments. Above all, it conveys that unsettling conviction that is the bedrock of so much horror fiction that tries to convey the overwhelming incomprehensibility of the supernatural to those of us working from strictly human frames of reference. In Conrad’s words: ‘‘The dead are everywhere. There are untold billions of them… We the living, are just a tiny, insignificant minority.’’

Wise words indeed… and a great review to end the year with. I sincerely hope you’ll be popping back in 2010, because we’ve got more great books in the pipeline, and we’d love for you to read some of them!

In the meantime, allow me to wish you a happy new year on behalf of the whole PS Publishing gang – have fun, and I hope the hangover wears off quickly. :)

As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.

Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

First of all, Richard Dansky at Green Man Review raves about Darrell Schweitzer’s Living With The Dead:

If you run into Darrell Schweitzer at a convention, you can be fairly certain that he’s going to try to sell you a book. If the book in question is Living With the Dead, I’d advise you to let him succeed.

[...]

Living With The Dead is a weird tale in the truest sense, a phantasmagoria described in dream-language. There are no explanations to be had — no lengthy exposition as to why the corpses are delivered here, or where they come from, or why they never rot — nor do there need to be. It is enough that they are there, and that the citizens of Old Corpsenburg must deal with them in their own way, and when they rise and start to dance, it is — but perhaps I’ve said too much already. Sold in a gorgeous hardcover from PS Publishing with a stunning Jason Van Hollander cover, the book also sports an introduction from Tim Lebbon. It’s a slender volume, only 65 pages, but it offers more than many books ten times its length.

Then there’s a review of Patrick O’Leary’s collection The Black Heart, at no less esteemed a publication than the Financial Times (whose target readership should doubtless be fully conversant with black heartedness, ho ho ho):

… The Black Heart plays on psychological imbalance and nightmarish imaginings. In “What Mattered Was Sleep”, a father surrenders his son to the government because the boy has tested positive for some kind of disease. What disease? What becomes of the boy? O’Leary never reveals the answers but the doom-laden, fatalistic tone of the story suggests we are better off not knowing. Similarly, “The Me After the Rock” consists of a dialogue between two quarantined astronauts who’ve returned from a mission to Mars where something went badly wrong. We’re given only teasing glimpses as to the nature of the mishap. However, the revelation that we are reading a transcript of their conversation is a chilling clue.

The flinty brilliance of The Black Heart lies in a willingness to leave its stories open-ended and ambiguous. O’Leary, a Detroit resident and former creative director of an advertising agency, hints that life today is so bewildering that it should not be entirely decoded in fiction.

Should not, or could not? ;)

The last of this week’s hat-trick sees Marly Youmans‘ Val / Orson picked as best book of the year by John Wilson of the Christianity Today website:

I quote from Catherynne Valente’s excellent introduction to this novella: “It is Shakespearean in its sensibility, with its enchanted wood, its twins, its doubling and quadrupling of couples and families, its fairy brood. It is difficult to say that it is a fantasy novel, and difficult to say it isn’t.” The word “magical” has been overused and misused to such an extent that it has perhaps lost its potency, but this tale, set among the redwoods of Northern California, is truly magical. I’m sorry it is not as easily obtained as the others on this list, but I can attest—having ordered it from the UK myself—that it is by no means inaccessible. And you will be amply rewarded. More than any other book I read in 2009, this one insistently came to mind.

So there you go! By my reckoning, we’ve one more Wednesday before Christmas… which means it’s probably high time I finished my present shopping! Hopefully the above will have given you a few ideas for last-minute gift choices of your own… and don’t forget our three-for-two offer on all current titles. As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.

Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

But better late than never – so here are the latest reviews of our titles from the far reaches of the digital domain!

First of all, the second instalment of SF Signal’s best-of-the-year round-up features (in addition to yours truly chuntering on about marginally related media, though please don’t let that put you off) two valedictory mentions of Powers: Secret Histories. Scott A Cupp says:

… I was unprepared for how complete this book is. It’s massive and heavily illustrated and a joy to behold. [...] Heavy paper, large pages, tons of pictures, more detail than you could ever really want to know about his (and, by virtue of their long association, Blaylock and Jeter’s) career. Expensive, even in the cheap edition, and beyond expensive for the truly desirable limited editions I found it to be heaven!

And Cheryl Morgan’s opinion is that…

… if you are a fan of Tim Powers then you will want a copy of Powers: Secret Histories [... it] contains everything you might want to know about Tim’s books. The appendices are about twice the length of the main text, which should tell you just how magnificently obsessive it is.

Magnificently obsessive, indeed, and a true labour of love by John Berlyne… you really have no concept of what geekdom is until you’ve spoken to him about Tim Powers.

Meanwhile, Richard Marcus of BlogCritics and EpicIndia has been dissecting Steven Erikson’s Crack’d Pot Trail and finding that there’s more to the innards of this comic fantasy than you might expect:

It’s on the pilgrim path, the Crack’d Pot Trail, that we meet up with the heroes and the others making the trek through the harsh wasteland laying between the Gates of Nowhere and the Shrine of the Indifferent God. Aside from the above named there are amongst them a mysterious noblewoman who remains enclosed within her carriage the whole time, her manservant, a rag-tag collection of poets making their way to attend the Festival of Flowers and Sunny Days to vie for title of “The Century’s Greatest Artist” awarded there each year, and one Sardic Thew who proclaims himself to be host of this erstwhile band of travelers.

[...]

Crack’d Pot Trail is a great piece of social satire which takes no prisoners, from the pompous poets who proclaim their greatness only to be revealed as thieves who’ve never written an original thought in their lives, to the warriors against evil who don’t have a problem with forcing their companions to compete against each other in order to avoid being eaten. By the end of the story the so-called villains of the piece come out looking a lot better than their reputations would have you think when compared with those who hunt them and the reader is left to ponder the exact nature of good and evil.

And last but not least, Adam Groves of Fright.com takes on two of our newer titles, finding them to be sterling tales despite some minor flaws. First of all, Cast A Cold Eye by Derryl Murphy & William Shunn:

A good book, this: well written, solidly characterized and imaginative. It’s a period novella set during an important but little-explored stretch of American history. I wasn’t too impressed by the final pages, which take the tale in a predictable and overly pat direction, but overall I like Cast A Cold Eye a fair amount.

The time and setting are well rendered and specific: rural Nebraska circa 1921, a region devastated by Spanish flu. Among the flu’s victims are the mother and father of the story’s protagonist, 15-year-old Luke Bryant, who’s having trouble adjusting to life as an orphan. He suffers from anger issues, is bullied incessantly and, worst of all, always sees graveyard statues open their stony eyes and watch him whenever he sets foot within. Luke’s mental state isn’t helped by his employment as an apprentice to Annabelle Tupper, a half-blind spirit photographer.

And Rick Hautala’s Reunion:

The tale begins simply enough in a small Northeastern town. It’s the end of August, and the introspective Jackie and his troublemaking buddy Chris are about to start junior high school. On Chris’ suggestion they set off to crash a nighttime high school reunion at a nearby country club, where Chris figures they can mooch food and beer. Jackie is apprehensive for reasons he can’t put his finger on, but Chris is insistent, and precipitates a nightmarish, danger-filled trek through the woods that comes to entail many life-changing epiphanies.

Also afoot in the area is the fiftyish John, who’s traveled all the way from California to attend the reunion. It’s clear from the start that John’s intentions involve Jackie and Chris, both of whom he somehow knows intimately. John is also aware that the boys happen to be lurking in the woods nearby.

To reveal any more would ruin the surprises that are a large part of what makes this story so effective. John, it turns out, has a definite connection with Jackie and Chris, and the year in which the tale takes place (which isn’t immediately specified) is also important. What ultimately occurs is scary, sad and thought-provoking, with a not-inconsiderable emotional impact.

And that’s all for this week. Don’t forget that Secret Histories and Cast A Cold Eye are both current titles, and hence covered by our current three-for-two offer - so get clicking to take advantage!

As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.

Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

I’m writing this the day after Thanksgiving – between turkeys, in other words… seeing as our US chums had theirs yesterday and, here in the cosy heart of PS Towers, we’re having ours in just a few weeks. And by that time, we’re aiming to have what seems to be another heap of books available.

Imminent releases: Erikson, Shepard, Resnick and more

Heading this way are Steve Erikson’s Crack’d Pot Trail, John Gribbin’s Timeswitch, Edison’s Frankenstein (the first of our bumper 150,000-word Postscripts volumes), Lucius Shepard’s Viator Plus, Uncle River’s Counting Tadpoles, Mike Resnick’s Shaka II, and Rick Hautala’s Reunion. Yeah, so what am I doing talking to you? you may well ask. Good question.

But, hey, it’s almost Christmas… a time of joy and fun and festivities. And books — let’s not forget books.

Thus, in a blatant effort to remove any money you may have left — and maybe provide a timely solution as to what to buy for someone who truly loves the very best in horror, fantasy and science fiction, we’ve come up with this:

Three-for-two on all current titles!

Yes, in a dizzying fit of seasonal generosity, we’re giving you — for two whole months, right through to the end of January — a special offer to end them all! For the next seven or eight weeks, all current titles (ie. not forthcoming titles) will be available as three for the price of two… with the cheapest-priced item being the freebie. (But do please note that postage will be charged as usual on the third book.)

There’s no special button to press. Just place your order and then, when you get to the bit where you pay, the cheapest title will automatically register as postage-only — so £2 if you live in the UK or £4 if you’re outside the UK. And if you decide to take six books then the cheapest two titles will be free, with just postage to pay; nine books and, yes, you guessed it… three freebies; twelve books and… well, figure it out for yourselves.

If you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to contact us at enquiries@pspublishing.co.uk with your query and we’ll get back to you as soon as we possibly can.

Remembering Rob Holdstock

One piece of sad news at this otherwise joyous time. As some of you may have heard, the wonderful fantasy and sf author Robert Holdstock died in hospital yesterday morning (29/11) after a short illness. His wife Sarah was with him. We send our heartfelt condolences to Rob’s family in this difficult time. Let me just say this: Rob’s novel, Mythago Wood is one of that rare collection of books which should be available on the National Health. If you haven’t read it then I urge you to buy a copy. If you have read it, then buy a copy for someone who hasn’t. It would be great to have him at the top of the bestseller chart over Christmas — spread the word. Rest easy, Rob… and give our best to Ryhope!

Give-away winner for November

Matthew Weimer of Chicago was the happy winner of last month’s free give-away, netting himself a slipcased copy of Patrick O’Leary’s collection, The Black Heart.

As it’s December and we’re in a generous mood, there are two prizes to be won this time around: two randomly-drawn newsletter subscribers will win a jacketed edition each, one of Eric Brown’s Gilbert & Edgar On Mars, and one of Cast ACold Eye by Derryl Murphy and William Shunn. We’ll be doing the draw on Friday 18th December, so you’ve got until then to sign up for our monthly email newsletter and be in with a chance to win!

Okay, that’s it. If we don’t get to speak again before the holidays, seasonal best wishes from all of us and ours – that’s from me, Nicky, Nick, Robert, Mike, Paul and Theresa — to all of you and yours. Have a great time and look after each other. Happy reading!

Pete

I am pleased to announce that Pete Crowther, PS Publishing and I have provisionally agreed a date and venue for the official launch of the anthology Catastrophia. This is scheduled to be on the afternoon of Saturday 18^th September 2010 at the Britannia Hotel in Nottingham, UK as part of the British Fantasy Society’s FantasyCon weekend.

Last year saw the launch of several notable titles at FantasyCon from publishers such as PS, NewCon Press, Constable Robinson, etc. FantasyCon has become something of a “must-attend” for yours truly over the years. As well as book launches, it also features: guests of honour that have recently included Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman and Brian Clemens; art shows; panels and discussions; and the all-important presentation of the annual BFS awards.

It was at FantasyCon a few years back that I pitched the idea of the Catastrophia anthology to Pete Crowther, so it is especially thrilling that we are planning to launch the book at next year’s event. Currently, we are hoping to do a mass signing / dedication session in the main bar area sometime on the Saturday (18.9.2010).

Several of you will have previously attended BFS conventions so won’t really need me to convince you. For those who have been wondering what it’s all about, FantasyCon 2010 is the perfect excuse – come along, meet the editor, meet the publisher, meet the authors, get your book personally signed, and generally have a great weekend. Naturally, there’s no obligation… just a friendly invitation.

Further details can be obtained from the British Fantasy Society web site www.britishfantasysociety.org or you can email fcon@britishfantasysociety.org for more details.

Thanks, Allen! You heard the man… get your holiday booked!

At The Guardian, Eric Brown is unstinting in his praise for Darkness, Darkness by our very own Peter Crowther:

Much recent zombie fiction is merely an excuse for a gore fest, and though there’s gore aplenty in this short novel, it’s balanced by astute characterisation and a keenly observant eye for the details of smalltown America.

[...]

Crowther never loses sight of the fact that it’s the characters that matter, and in Rick, Geoff, Melanie and Johnny he’s created a flawed quartet the reader comes to care about. From its quiet start to its gripping finale, Darkness, Darkness is a riveting read.

Next up, Andrew Monge of Horror Drive-in experiences a wash of memory and feeling from Rick Hautala’s Reunion:

“If I only knew then what I know now…”

This oft-used statement is the basis of Rick Hautala’s long novella, Reunion. It’s a phrase I imagine almost everyone has had roll around inside their heads at some point in their lives. Hindsight has a way of beating people up, making them wish they could go back and alter their decisions in an attempt to right a wrong.

Such is the case for John Stone, a man who is haunted by his past as he makes a trip back home for his forty-year high school reunion. As John gets closer and closer to his destination he begins to wonder if he’s doing the right thing – not only because he feels as if he hasn’t accomplished enough in his life, but also because the trip is continually fraught with problems along the way. The only thing that keeps John from turning around and heading back home is a promise he made to himself, one that he intends to see through to its conclusion.

[...]

Reunion is an entertaining novella that is likely to continue affecting readers once they’ve finished the story – not only because they’re trying to wrap their heads around Hautala’s passionate tale, but also because Reunion is likely to remind people of their own “if only” scenarios. Reunion is one of those rare gems that makes you *feel*, and for that reason alone I think it’s worth tracking down.

Next, the piratically-named Steven H Silver praises Beth Bernobich’s Ars Memoriae at SF Site:

Despite being part of an on-going cycle of stories, Ars Memoriae does not require familiarity with the earlier-penned works for the reader to either enjoy, or understand the world through which Dee moves. For all her ability to bring in events and characters that aren’t germane to the overall plot, Bernobich manages to stay focused on her own story instead of presenting a sort of guided tour of the world she has created.

Ars Memoriae delivers a satisfying mystery in a complex and well-thought out world. Bernobich provides enough hints about this culture to leave the reader wanting to learn more about it while neatly tying up the mystery at the story’s core. Relationships, and characters, change, providing fodder for further exploration of both the world and the characters Bernobich has introduced.

And finally, Nick Cato of the Horror Fiction Review takes a wild weird ride in T M Wright’s Blue Canoe:

Blue Canoe is a trippy, head-scratching excursion into a life that’s either on the verge of Alzheimers, afraid of what waits on the other side, or is somehow penning this memoir FROM the other side (and it may eventually come to light that Wright is telling this from all three sides—only time will tell). Wright’s writing is as sharp and witty as ever, this time sprinkled with more humor than usual. Few writers can make you truly care for their characters; Wright’s ability to create characters who may or may not be real, who may or may not be ghosts, and STILL have the reader believe in them is an amazing accomplishment on its own. But placed in a story this deep and challenging, its pure genius. I read this in two sittings and didn’t want it to end. Highly recommended.

That’s your lot for this week… and it’s high time I started filling cardboard boxes with my own book collection!

As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.

Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

Speaking of being busy, did you know that we here at PS Publishing have been busy reinventing the future? Well, we sure have, along with a bunch of other super-cool independent publishing houses as profiled by big-hitting science fiction blog io9. Go read about the others (but beware the rather creepy opening image… *shudder*).

We can expect to see plenty more “list posts” like that at this time of year, along with the inevitable best-of-the-year (and, this time round, best-of-the-decade) round-up lists. But hey, if we get even a quarter as many books mentioned in them as in Charles Tan’s best-of-2009 list at Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days, we’ll be happy people indeed! Charles has recommended loads of other good stuff there, some of which I know, and some of which I don’t; he reads widely and with eclectic taste, so he’s an interesting man to follow.

And now a couple of reviews, the first of which sees Aimee of the My Fluttering Heart blog impressed and perplexed in equal measure by Paul Jessup’s Glass Coffin Girls Showcase collection:

I would be lying if I said I understood it all. There seems to be more layers to this sort of work than a wedding cake. And maybe it’s a bit Forer Effect, where I’m just seeing the symbolism I like where there might just be randomness. I’m utterly confused, a little bit dazed and a little bit unused to light right now.

Definitely though, there are parts to each story that link up. The cruelty and fragility of human beings, the mirrored halves of the soul. Freedom and domesticity. Animal behaviours and model citizens. Wolves and dogs and rats and foxes. They’re all there.

[...]

Of course, this book won’t be for a lot of people. Some might be a little offended, some might be confused, some might be unmoved. If, however, you like things that are perversely pretty, like I do, then you might find yourself thoroughly enjoying this book, and perhaps even feeling guilty for it. I know, I know, I haven’t given you much to go off. But it really is a collection that deserves to be speak and be discovered for itself. And quite frankly, no matter how hard I try, I can’t explain it. It might be beyond my comprehension.

The best way I can describe Glass Coffin Girls? Like Cinderella walking over the shards of her own glass slipper, broken…the blood looks positively gorgeous against the crystalware, don’t you think?

And to finish off, The Baryon Review recounts an encounter with Gilbert & Edgar On Mars, courtesy one Mister Eric Brown:

Imagine a meeting of three of Britain’s greatest writers, George Bernard Shaw, Herbert George Wells and Gilbert K. Chesterton (GK to his friends) finishing a night of discussion at the Athenaeum and heading home. Chesterton is approached by an autograph seeker and discovers along the way that he is believed to be Wells. He thinks this will be a good story for their next meeting when is apparent something more sinister is afoot.

[...]

This is a very enjoyable tale and would make a great present for your friends who enjoy the pulpish tales of yesteryear.

Indeed – buy now to ensure things arrive in time for the Festive Season! As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.

Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

First of all, Faren Miller of the esteemed Locus magazine takes on Patrick O’Leary’s slippery collection, The Black Heart:

In his introduction to Patrick O’Leary’s new collection The Black Heart, James Morrow refers to some of the more autobiographical stories as ‘‘exotic and uncommon journeys… expeditions the author has mounted into the Orient of himself.’’ In the Author’s Introduction that follows, O’Leary asks three questions: ‘‘What is the story we are telling ourselves? Who is the narrator? Why should we listen to him?’’

Though some of these works first appeared on Sci Fiction, we’re a long way from the realms of space opera and action adventure – often listening to confused, crass, or unreliable narrators talking about their crimes, dreams, and epiphanies. We listen because even the husband who has pornographic visions after a split with his wife in ‘‘Catching a Dream’’ and the ticked-off cello thief in ‘‘Yo-Yo Stradivarius & Me’’ (the two originals in this group of 14 works from the past decade-plus) are driven into eloquence by unexpected encounters with beauty. And his array of ordinary people, skewed self-portraits, and more or less mythical figures all seem to come up with a pungent mix of the skeptical or matter-of-fact and a jolt of wonder, without reaching any trite conclusions.

Then Horrorworld grapples with the equally unconventional Blue Canoe by T M Wright:

Blue Canoe might be the first novel I’ve ever read where I’ve had no idea what was going on while reading it. Even the end didn’t bring a breakthrough for me. The novel is difficult to follow, is repetitive at times, lacks a coherent plot, and it’s not very scary. With all that said the question begs, is Blue Canoe worth reading? The answer is a resounding YES! Because at its heart, Blue Canoe is the most personal of horror tales. It deals with the possible failing of ones mind and it’s up to the readers to decide if the horrors presented to them are real or imagined.

[...]

Happy Farmer recalls and shares with his readers all of those things above, and he takes great pains to let the reader know how important they were in his life. Only to admit later on in the next chapters that he invented them. Only to admit later on in the next chapters, that yes, in fact, they did occur, and then goes into greater detail when recounting them all over again.

Readers will find themselves playing along with Wright and trying to guess the nature of Happy Farmer’s recollections. For instance, is the character he writes about in a story at the end of the novel a young Happy Farmer? Is his constant reciting of the origins of everyday objects his way of staying grounded? Was he a serial killer? Why did his father owe the woman next door to them money?

Elsewhere, genre novelist and voracious reader Ian Sales tackles a title from the back catalogue, namely Lisa Tuttle’s My Death:

The narrator is an American writer resident in Scotland, as Tuttle is an American writer resident in Scotland. Her career has suffered after the recent death of her husband, and in an effort to find a project to pull her life back together, she decides to write a biography of early feminist novelist Helen Ralston. Who was also an American writer resident in Scotland. My Death ends twice – although one feels somewhat rushed – and each end gives an entirely different complexion to the story. Recommended.

And finally, Leona Wisoker of Green Man Review sings the praises for Eric Brown’s retro-tastic Gilbert & Edgar On Mars:

These days, we know that the fantastical Mars presented by Burroughs — among others — is a complete impossibility. That makes books of this sort very difficult to pull off. But the mixture of reality and surreality in this short novella, combined with Eric Brown’s skill with details, written in an excellent reproduction of the way science fiction used to sound, produces a story engaging, amusing, and just the right length.

I highly recommend this story for anyone feeling nostalgic for the “good old days” of science fiction writing, when men wore — and frequently used — swords, and no matter whether the woman was red, green, or blue, she usually jumped straight into bed with the hero (no discussion of “feelings” required first). For those readers unfamiliar with these fathers of modern fantasy and science fiction, I suggest wandering over to the nearest used book store and picking up a wide variety of books by authors such as Burroughs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle before attempting this novella.

And there we have it! As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.

Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

Fresh from a flurry of trick-and-treaters plus the now almost obligatory re-watching of a few fave movies (Forbidden Planet, Hallowe’en, the Disney Something Wicked, the original Thing From Another World plus, of course, the old TV adaptation of M. R. James’s “Oh, whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad”) and then curling up with a couple of volumes of the EC Archives, we’re reluctantly turning on the central heating and at least considering consigning shorts to the drawer until next spring. But the smoky air and short days do so lend themselves to spooky stories that it’s hard to be too fed up. And speaking of spooky stories…

Horns cover art preview – pre-order now to avoid disappointment!

Joe Hill’s epic — and, be assured, it really is epic — second novel, Horns has gone down well with PS punters… so much so, in fact, that we’re now down to just 32 traycased copies not spoken for, plus around 170 of the slipcased edition. I think it’s pretty fair to say that this title will be sold out considerably prior to publication. (Check out Vinny Chong’s first of seven illustrations, below – click through on the image to see it in a larger size).

And Steven Erikson’s Crack’d Pot Trail is heading the same way, so get your pre-orders in as soon as possible… when they’re all gone, they’re all gone!

• Pre-order Horns by Joe Hill – signed traycased edition
• Pre-order Horns by Joe Hill – slipcased edition
• Pre-order Crack’d Pot Trail by Steven Erikson – signed traycased edition
• Pre-order Crack’d Pot Trail by Steven Erikson – hardcover edition

New titles shipping, plus standing order offers under development

Meanwhile, we’ve been chin-deep in mailing out orders for the recent batch of new releases: Creatures of the Pool, Just Behind You, Grazing The Long Acre, Spook City, The Black Heart, Passing For Human, Impossible Stories II, Ars Memoriae, Old Man Scratch, Gilbert and Edgar on Mars and Enemy of the Good (aka Postscripts #19).

The early feedback on our new traycased editions has been unanimously positive — no, nix that: it’s been euphoric. So much so that we’ve fielded several requests from folks who were unable to stump up the financial commitment for the Lifetime Subscriber packages but are now interested in a discounted standing order for our titles — both standard and deluxe editions — on an ongoing basis. It’s a good idea (in fact, why didn’t we think of it?) so we’re busy running up some figures. We’ll look to make an announcement on this before Christmas.

Postscripts to get bigger, go biannual… with no change in subscription prices!

And talking of announcements… after some lengthy consideration we’ve decided on another change for the creature formerly known as Postscripts. Now approaching its seventh year, PS’s flagship publication — having already established itself as one of the premier magazines in horror, fantasy and SF short stories — has settled into life as a full-blown, bona-fide, state-of-the-art, no-questions-asked, tell-it-like-it-is, cutting-edge, where-it’s-at hardcover anthology containing all that’s exceptionally fine in the field of genre fiction.

But putting it out four times a year is taking its toll on us… so we’re going to reduce the frequency to twice-yearly but, at the same time, double the contents. Thus the only thing that readers will be short of is two sets of boards every year. So, starting with the next volume (issues 20/21), we’re dropping Postscripts to two 150,000-word books per year — each one with its own title — instead of four 65,000-word issues. But worry not — it’s not going to cost you any more for your fix.

1,2, 3, 4 and even 5-year annual subscriptions (post & packing included) are available. And while individual copies will cost £30 for the unsigned edition and £60 for the signed traycased edition (yes, the top state will now be traycased), subs will still set you back just £50 and £100 for a one-year commitment, post-free. And, as a subscriber, you’ll also receive our signed winter hardcover chapbook (priced at £15) free of charge. (Past authors in this series are Gene Wolfe, Elizabeth Hand, Joe Hill, Ramsey Campbell and, this year, Andy Duncan.)

Plus, from here on in, subscribers will receive a PS novella — of our choosing — completely free of charge as soon as they sign up. And these books will be one per year of the subscription — so if you sign up here and now for five years then you’ll receive five novellas… unsigned books for unsigned subscriptions and signed books for signed subscriptions.

So what are you waiting for? Click through below and get someone (maybe even yourself!) a Christmas gift that’ll last all year…

• One year Postscripts subscription – unsigned editions
• Two year Postscripts subscription – unsigned editions
• Three year Postscripts subscription – unsigned editions
• Four year Postscripts subscription – unsigned editions
• Five year Postscripts subscription – unsigned editions
• One year Postscripts subscription – signed traycased editions
• Two year Postscripts subscription – signed traycased editions
• Three year Postscripts subscription - signed traycased editions
• Four year Postscripts subscription – signed traycased editions
• Five year Postscripts subscription – signed traycased editions

And please note that if you want to go for five years (£250 and £500 respectively) you’ll also receive a copy of our upcoming lavishly-illustrated hardcover edition of Stephen King’s One For The Road completely free of charge (though please note that the author will not be signing any copies).

Newsletter give-away winner

Last month saw us sending copies of Forever Twilight volumes 1 and 2 to Antti Vaisanen of Finland, who tells us that our email brought a happy ending to a week of battling with swine flu… hope you’re on the mend, Antti!

This month, one lucky newsletter subscriber will net themselves a copy of The Black Heart by Patrick O’Leary, just for the privilege of receiving our monthly emails. We’ll draw the winner on Monday 16th November, so you’ve got until then to sign yourself up (if you’re not already, naturally).

Okay, that’s about it for now. We’re all-hands-to-the-pump preparing our new poetry line and the two massive short story celebrations being helmed by Steve Jones… and, of course, we’ve got a few more surprises up our sleeves.

But more stuff next time, which will be our final newsletter of the year.

Until then, look after each other . . . and happy reading.

Pete

First of all, MonsterLibrarian tucks into Terry Lamsley’s R.I.P.:

Conrad is an elderly man who stands on the brink of something extraordinary – a gateway between life and death. The gateway is a construct of his friend Gwillam’s genius, a theory that has obsessed him, forcing him to give up his family and life.  The payoff is seeing what is on the other side of life. Unfortunately, Gwillam didn’t completely understand everything and the gateway winds up consuming him. As a strange fog thickens in the streets, it threatens to bury everything in Conrad’s little town if something isn’t done about it.

R.I.P. is an intriguing novella that is hard to put down once it is started. Mr. Lamsley draws the reader in with tidbits of information, almost like a mystery novel, until the story is unfolded before him near the end. R.I.P. is a unique ghost story that combines technology with mysticism for a satisfying result. I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a short ghost story that will keep them glued to the pages.

Then Adam Groves of Fright.Com takes a look at PostScripts #19: Enemy Of the Good, finding it satisfactory overall:

The contents are varied enough in style, quality and subject matter that it’s difficult to render any sort of overall verdict–to some of you I’m sure that fact will be off-putting, while others will take it as a strong recommendation. As for me, I’ll say this: I didn’t actively dislike any of the stories, which should be recommendation enough.

Groves picks out some pieces for more detailed discussion, such as Chris Beckett’s story:

“The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolus 9″ [...] concerns a cosmonaut writer who travels to a distant planet whose primitive inhabitants live underground, wherein a series of cave paintings lead to intriguing speculations on the nature of religion and reality itself. I found the story a bit overwritten, but it has a powerfully haunting air.

There’ll be more from the award-winning Chris Beckett here at PS in the near future, by the way – so watch this space, won’t you?

Groves also takes a look at Gilbert & Edgar on Mars by Eric Brown, which…

… begins with [G.K.] Chesterton leaving a meeting with his colleagues George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, and running into an odd little man he takes for a leprechaun. The latter mistakes Chesterton for Wells, and invites him back to his abode, allegedly to inscribe some books. What the man actually leads Chesterton into is a portal that deposits him on the planet Mars.

[Gilbert & Edgar on Mars is] a spirited romp, opulently written and full of old world charm. It references Mars-friendly writers like Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick as well as the fiction of its reality-based protagonists, and does so without sacrificing the sense of fun and adventure that’s part and parcel to all good pulp fiction.

And finally there’s a Ramsey Campbell double-header from Carl Hays of Booklist, who enjoyed Creatures Of the Pool:

For his latest novel, Campbell explores some stranger features of Liverpool’s background in a pleasurably unsettling fusion of fiction and history. Gavin Meadows gives eclectic and occasionally tiresome—especially for disruptive American tourists—guided excursions highlighting Liverpool’s arcane, watery history. During a summer of heavy rains and a renaissance of city construction, Gavin’s research into Liverpool’s underground tunnels begins to reveal some surprising and unnerving information. An excavation for an  office-building foundation, for instance, unearths coffins lined with lead, and postal workers become loath to use a tunnel linked to Lime Street Station. The most disturbing revelation, however, is that underground construction workers are hearing someone running ahead of them in the dark where no one or no thing should live. Another gem from one of the genre’s finest stylists.

Hays also luxuriated in Campbell’s latest collection, Just Behind You:

The 18 [stories] cover the full spectrum of Campbell’s sometimes gruesome, sometimes more supernaturally inclined imagination. An old man mistakenly or deliberately buried alive by his children discovers his cell phone buried with him but can’t get anyone to believe his predicament is anything more than a Halloween prank. A music lecturer takes refuge from a gale in a Liverpool pub and gets lured into a fatal trap by the pub’s musically inclined patrons. In the title story, a teacher attends a party at a school he attended as a boy and encounters the ghost of a child killed in a tragic accident there years ago. As usual, Campbell remains at the cutting edge of the genre’s continuously evolving creativity.

And there you have it – not a bad haul for a fortnight, wouldn’t you agree?

As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.

Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

My perpetual temporal angst aside, this week’s selection of reviews leans toward the spooky and horrific, as if to pre-emptively honour the re-badged pagan festival currently bearing down upon us like a cultural steam-train. So if you’re looking for something spooky to read while cowering from the importuning of trick-or-treating kids, why not grab one of the following?

First of all, Hellnotes is the latest venue to take a shine to Sarah Pinborough’s The Language Of Dying:

Beautiful, haunting, lyrical, painful and unforgettable are just a few of the words that partially describe the emotions and skill brought to bear in The Language of Dying. A review, by its nature, will not truly do justice to this wonderful tale or to Ms. Pinborough’s fine writing skills brought to bear in this excellent selection by PS Publishing since a review reduces the narrative to the bare bones story of a fractured and highly dysfunctional family converging on the old homestead as the patriarch lays dying with a hint of the supernatural thrown into the mix.

Horror abounds as the narrative unfolds but not in the form of boogey men or supernatural entities. Rather, horror is found in the harsh pain of lost love, the cruel punishment of a world stomping down personal ambition and in the terrible trap people set for themselves when stifling their dreams. The reader finishes The Language of Dying moved, changed, and awed my Ms. Pinborough’s skill.

The rest of this week’s reviews come from the glossy and hallowed pages of Black Static, the horror and dark fantasy magazine from TTA Press. Peter Tennant has taken it upon himself to review thirteen novellas for this thirteenth issue of the mag, and a few PS Publishing titles are among his choices.

Tennant appears to be one of the first reviewers to be underwhelmed by Rio Youers’ Old Man Scratch, but has more positive things to say about R.I.P. by Terry Lamsley:

On the surface this bears a passing resemblance, at least as regards theme, to an earlier PS offering, Mark Samuels’ The Face of Twilight, which in turn put me in mind of Japanese film Kairo, but whereas in those works the horror was unleashed on a global scale, Lamsley’s tale is minimalist, its effects played out in the one town and on the one person, as he lays down riffs on the central idea of the dead crossing over from their reality into ours.

The story is competently written, if not exactly notable for its sparkling prose, and there are some decent characters, with the interplay between Conrad and Mrs Holwig a particular delight, albeit at times I found myself thinking, and not in a wholly commendatory way, that there was something of the comedic exaggeration to be found in classic UK sitcoms about them. There are also some good touches of atmosphere, as with the mysterious fog that envelops everything and the hint of strange creatures lurking in it, or the unsettling scene in which Conrad confronts Gwilliam’s desiccated corpse and learns the terrible truth of what has taken place. And the understated ending, with its quiet acceptance by Conrad of the inevitable, worked rather better than anything more histrionic would have.

Tennant is even more complimentary about Darkness, Darkness: Forever Twilight 1 by our very own head honcho Peter Crowther, describing it as “a thoroughly engaging and enjoyable story”:

There are parallels here with both zombies and paranoia films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. While it’s never stated, or even theorised by the characters, it seems obvious that some form of infestation is taking place, with the people taken and enslaved by an alien intelligence of some kind. It’s an intriguing scenario, and Crowther has a lot of fun with it, drawing a solid backdrop of small town Americana in flashback, as his survivors root around in their memories and the ruins of their world, and then turning everything on its head, as former friends and neighbours return as deadly enemies. He presents us with some fully rounded characters, people with a past that they carry with them, as with Rick who is haunted by the deaths he caused, and must confront his own inner demons before he can deal effectively with the rest of what is going down. We can identify with these people and root for them, as they first try to make sense of what has happened, and then simply fight to survive. And having got his pieces in place, Crowther then releases the hand-brake and lets his plot do its stuff, with some fine action sequences and the second half of the book an almost constant stream of frying pans and fires for the characters to jump in and out of, so that we hardly have time to catch our breaths, and the end is reached before you know it, with the reader longing for more.

The same issue also contains an article based around an interview with Joel lane, which also features a review of Lane’s The Witnesses Are Gone:

[It's] Lane’s first novella, and it’s a form he has taken to with ease, deftly manipulating the building blocks of Lovecraftian horror to construct an edifice which is purely his own, even though it bears the mark of much that has gone before.

The joy here, if that is the word, is in Lane’s prose, which brings to life the atmosphere of doom and gloom that permeates the book, the sense of some inchoate threat to the characters. In quiet, measured phrases he makes everything seem somehow matter of fact, but also imbues each act with the most acute significance. Rien’s world view leaks off the cinema screen and into reality, threatening to infect viewers with an inconsolable despair. The scenes Lane gives us from the films are of vague, shadowy things, seen obliquely, and actions that menace and mock through their sheer senseless, the lack of any clearly defined purpose.

And that’s all for this week. As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.

Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

There’s a couple of pieces over at Mass Movement, one about Terry Lamsley’s R.I.P.:

Meet Conrad, an older gentleman who has recently hired a private investigator to find out what happened to his friend because he is afraid to do it himself. Conrad met Gwillam and, once they discovered they both had an interest in what happens to us when we die, they became friends/colleagues, trying to discover the truth.

[...]

An inexplicable fog has recently settled over the city and Conrad must battle this, in addition to his fears, in order to find out what has happened to Gwillam. What he sees and learns is more frightening and, ultimately painful, than his own eventual demise in our world.

If I told you more, it would ruin the details. Suffice it to say this less-than-80 page story packs a powerful psychological punch.

And one about Old Man Scratch by Rio Youers:

Youers does an excellent job of entertaining from a very finite setting, we never leave the two homes by the swamp. The two main characters are very believable. Although the plot is simplistic, you want to keep plugging along until the end.

[...]

Many animals become road kill at the end of the Gregson driveway, where a tight, narrow curb catches people off guard. Johnny dutifully drags them off the drive and to the side of the road, but they are always inexplicably gone the next day. Could the same thing happen to Old Man Scratch? Worse, could the same thing happen to Johnny? What would you give for a good night’s sleep?

And the third of our triumvirate is a review of Matthew Hughes‘ Template, posted to the rec.arts.sf Usenet group by comix author Kurt Busiek:

Put simply, this is the kind of book I’d like to read more of.  A lot more of. It’s got swordfights and spaceships and sea-dwelling clan cultures. It’s got murder and bureacracy and philosophical arguments and ruined castles and robots and masked aristocrats and dancers and secrets and feuds and more.

[...]

All of the Archonate novels have this sense of a richly-textured, decadent setting with engaging human stories, but I think Template is, so far, the strongest of them, the one where the story carries the reader best and most smoothly through a fascinating world.

As the PR guy, I’m not supposed to have favourites among the books we put out… but let’s just say that I concur with Mr Busiek on many of his points there. ;)

As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.

Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

I said I would get back with some information about Billie Bundschuh, author of “Steven’s Boat”. Billie plays bass guitar in alternative rock band Atlas Takes Aim. “Steven’s Boat” is her first accepted story, which is exciting for her and, of course, exciting and rewarding for her editor.

Awww! Ain’t it a wonderful world, folks? :)

First off, Ray Olson at Booklist is utterly unstinting with his praise for the stories to be found in Patrick O’Leary’s new collection, The Black Heart:

To three acclaimed novels (Door Number Three, 1995; The Gift, 1997; The Impossible Bird, 2002), O’Leary adds a book of fanciful to fantastic short stories in various modes. Flat-out stunning are the monologue “Yo-Yo, Stradivarius & Me”—a 50-year-old, newly wife-left classical music fan explains why he swiped a cello—and the two dialogues “The Verge of a Pucker,” in which two guys in a lounge, later joined by a waitress, mull over the love life of one of the guys, and “The Me after the Rock,” the testy, post-landing-quarantine exchange between the first two astronauts returning from Mars. Very funny, very humane, seemingly very performable, these tours de force unambiguously develop personae and immediate situations without using a single word other than those the characters speak. “The Whole Schmear,” cast in the form of diary entries by a preadolescent boy, is another small miracle of character realization through perfectly managed vocabulary and tone. And the other 10 more conventionally structured stories are fresh, frequently surprising essays in humorous horror, surreal fantasy, and satiric sf.

The October 12th issue of Publisher’s Weekly seems quite taken with Ramsey Campbell’s latest novel, Creatures of the Pool:

… Campbell uses his native Liverpool as the setting for this unnerving suspense novel with supernatural overtones. One day, while Gavin Meadows of Liverghoul Tours is guiding a group around the city, his eccentric father, Deryck, disrupts the tour. When Deryck later goes missing and the police show little interest, Gavin undertakes to track Deryck down himself, bolstered by text messages indicating that his father is still alive, somewhere. Gavin’s relations with the official force further deteriorate after he reports seeing a body that vanishes before the cops show up. Various characters explore the theory that Liverpool merchant James Maybrick was actually Jack the Ripper, but this concern with crimes committed in London never fuses satisfactorily with the main story line, which suggests that a hidden truth lies behind Liverpool’s myths and legends.

Keeping the Liverpudlian connection for a moment, wandering reviewer Mario Guslandi finds much to love in Ramsey Campbell’s new collection, Just Behind You, this time reviewed at The Zone:

“Fear The Dead” is a fine psychological study of the effects exerted on a young boy by his grandma’s death, while “Unblinking” is the masterful depiction of the gradual descent of an university teacher into the abyss of paranoia. In the disturbing “Double Room”, a widower experiences unnerving disturbances coming from the adjoining hotel room, whereas in Direct Line a man is tormented by a cell phone which seems to possess a life of its own.

A mobile phone is also involved in “Breaking Up”, a puzzling piece about a failed relationship now lost in the cold of a snowy evening. “Skeleton Woods” is a deeply unsettling tale featuring two quite different brothers whose lives are doomed and linked forever, Laid Down the brief but downright chilling portrait of a very difficult mother and son relationship, and the excellent “One Copy Only” at the same time a supernatural tale and a tribute of love to books and literature.

The superb “Respects” describes how the death of a young car thief chased by the police comes to affect an innocent bystander. My favourite tale remains, however, “Digging Deep”, a great story which already scared me stiff when first appeared in the anthology Phobic, where a man buried alive tries to get rescue by means of his cell phone, while an even worse nightmare is going to reach him.

[ Don't forget that we've got a special offer running all October on Ramsey's latest PS titles, with deeply discounted deals available on both the trade editions and the traycased specials. Place your order now, before Pete sobers up comes to his senses! ]

Meanwhile, over at Strange Horizons, Andy Sawyer takes to Grazing The Long Acre by Gwyneth Jones. As always with SH reviews, there’s lots of detail, which makes it hard to grab an excerpt that speaks about the book as a whole without losing the nuances. But here’s a little snippet:

Reading these stories gathered as a collection, you realise how many of Jones’s characters are on journeys, or travelling. Not just the “Buonarotti device” stories, where space travellers are in flux in a weird limbo between “here” and “there,” but in stories such as “Balinese Dancer”, in which Anna Senoz, later of Life (2004), and her husband and son are driving around Northern France, cut off from home by something which may be a science fiction-like catastrophe or simply mundane industrial/social disruptions; or in the title story, in which an American dropout is cruising the motorways of Poland observing the prostitutes whose life is a much more squalid (and dangerous) analogue of hers.

Luckily, the final paragraph contains the sort of blurb-collector’s gift that always makes my week:

Grazing the Long Acre is a rich, rewarding collection by a writer at the height of her powers.

Badda-bing!

And finally Jeff VanderMeer – the mighty frog-beast himself – has lovely things to say about us at his Amazon/Omnivoracious blog:

… for those in the know in genre, the news just confirmed what many have been saying for years: PS Publishing may be the best SF/Fantasy/Horror publisher you’ve never heard of. Over more than a decade now, they’ve published some extraordinary finds–like the first edition of Joe Hill’s award-winning short story collection. Names like Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, and Gwyneth Jones are typical releases for them, along with many newcomers. Among other strengths, PS Publishing isn’t afraid to take a chance on unknowns.

VanderMeer seems especially taken with Sebastien Doubinsky’s Babylonian Trilogy:

The novel’s chapters rarely are longer than a couple of pages, and the reader has the enjoyable job of piecing together the narrative from these fragments. Because of Doubinsky’s writing style, the variety of characters, and an underlying playfulness, The Babylonian Trilogy is a quick, often exciting read. As Michael Moorcock writes in his introduction, “Doubinsky is…a personification of the best modern French literature.” Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if, just like Hill’s short story collection, The Babylonian Trilogy wasn’t picked up by a North American publisher soon.

And there you have it! As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.

Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

We seem to have been out and about a fair bit recently, first at the ever-wonderful FantasyCon – where we launched eight titles and celebrated PS’s first ten years and managed to pick up the Award for Best Magazine into the bargain (with Steve Jones receiving the Best Non-Fiction Award for his Basil Copper: A Life in Books, a few copies of which are still available) – and then the big multiple-author PS signing at London’s Forbidden Planet store. But, as pleasant as it is, being away from the office takes its toll so we’re going to be tied to the office for a few weeks to try resurrect some semblance of order on the schedule.

Recommended read: Old Man Scratch by Rio Youers

One of our books that really seems to be kicking up a storm is Rio Youers’s Old Man Scratch, a far-from-everyday tale of lawnmowers, grumpy neighbors and roadkill.

Following reactions to his delightful “This Is The Summer Of Love” in the first new-look Postscripts anthology (#18), we were already expecting big things from Mr. Youers… but the take-up of his new novella at FantasyCon and Forbidden Planet (yes, he flew over just to meet his fans) has surprised even me. Be advised – buy your copy now.

Special offer on new Ramsey Campbell titles

And while you’re in a buying mood, why not treat yourself to one of our two new Ramsey Campbell books – the new collection, Just Behind You, and his latest novel Creatures of the Pool… or even Spook City, for which – in addition to his own stories and tales by fellow scousers Peter Atkins and Clive Barker – the great man penned a brand-new 30-page piece recalling his move to the wonderful city of Liverpool.

In fact, as a very special October Offer, you can buy the trade editions of all three titles and receive 23% discount (that means you’ll have to pay just £50 plus postage instead of £65 plus postage) or order all three deluxe traycased editions and enjoy a 30% reduction (that’s £157.50 plus postage instead of £225 plus postage!). We’ve created a special ordering page to enable you to do just that – see how we’re always trying to make things easy for you?

Prepare to pre-order Joe Hill’s Horns on October 11th!

We’ve got lots more goodies coming up but we’ll fill you in on these as we move along. Dirk Berger is hard at it on the artwork (wraparound cover plus three full colour interiors) for Steve Erikson’s Crack’d Pot Trail (which is available for pre-order right now, by the way) while Vinny Chong is chained to his desk working on Joe Hill’s Horns (two wraparound covers and five interiors).

We’ll show you some progress as soon as we’re able – meanwhile, please note that the order page for Horns will go live on Sunday 11 October 2009 at 6 pm UK time. Remember – there’ll be two states: slipcased, signed by Joe, containing four interior colour plates, plus a deleted chapter, priced at £65 until the end of the year when it’ll go to £75; traycased, signed by Joe and Vinny Chong, containing five interior plates, the deleted chapter plus a little extra something from Joe, priced at £175 until the end of the year when it’ll go to £200.

World Horror by the sea, plus new poetry imprint

Of course, it’s now less than six months to the World Horror Convention, to be held this year in the delightful southern England coastal town of Brighton (for which, I’m sure, you have already booked, yes?!). Well, as usual, we’re going to be launching some great new books there and we’ll pass along progress updates as soon as we have them.

But the big news is that we’re aiming to add a poetry imprint to the PS stable, and we’ll be doing a second launch event specifically for those. The flagship book will be Jo Fletcher’s as yet untitled anthology, a baker’s dozen celebrating the dark side of the seaside.

This will be supported by a triptych of volumes compiled and edited by Steve Jones and containing the complete Weird Tales poetry of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith… and all of them priced at just £9.99 each. Watch this space!

Newsletter give-away: win Forever Twilight volumes 1 and 2!

Of our three randomly chosen email addresses from last month’s list, only David Tubby of Ilfracombe, Devon replied to our congratulatory message, netting himself a rare ARC copy of Spook City in the process. This month we’re going to shake down the roll-overs and start afresh: we’ll pick one winner only, and the owner of that email address will receive a copy of the first two volumes of my Forever Twilight series.

So keep an eye on your inbox – if you miss the email, you’ll miss out on the prize! We’ll do this month’s draw on Monday 19th October, so if you aren’t yet signed up to the PS newsletter, be sure to amend the situation pronto…

More next time. Until then, look after each other… and happy reading!

Pete

… but hey, it’s a good review. In fact, it’s a great review, with Mario Guslandi popping into Rick Kleffel’s Agony Column to praise Joel Lane’s The Witnesses Are Gone:

The Witnesses Are Gone is not only a kind of psychological detective tale where the ending is a predictable defeat, but also the story of an obsession and an overwhelming thirst for knowledge. Much more than that, the quest for the elusive movies of an elusive artist becomes an allegory of the search for the meaning of human existence and of the desire to overcome the reality of everyday life, which, in the case of our hero (and of too many of us) is opaque, disappointing and frustrating. Thus, Lane’s totally fascinating novella is a multilayer piece, the meaning of which is buried among the very roots of man’s never-ending need to discover the ultimate truth.

[...]

It’s very uncommon that a piece of short fiction like this can include so many emotions, meanings and secret keys. You don’t want to miss this extraordinary reading experience.

As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

I am pleased to confirm the final line-up for this forthcoming anthology. Please note that the contributors are listed in alphabetical order and that the running order of the book will be markedly different. So, we have:

• “Hapless Humanity” by Brian Aldiss
• “The Phoney War” by Nina Allan
• “Nanoamerica” by David John Baker
• “Steven’s Boat” by Billie Bundschuh
• “Happy Ending” by Simon Clark
• “Something for Nothing” by Joe Essid
• “Check” by Robert Guffey
• “Fade” by David Gullen
• “Trouble with Telebrations” by “J. B. Harris”
• “Up” by Andrew Hook
• “A Hard Place” by Carole Johnstone
• “Scalped” by Jet McDonald
• “Noose” by Adam Roberts
• “In the Face of Disaster” by Ian Sales
• “Pixels on a Screen” by Patrick Shuler
• “The Long Road to the Sea” by James L. Sutter
• “Gravity Wave” by Douglas Thompson
• “Crashes” by Stuart Young

Plus a short introduction by myself.

This is not the end of the Catastrophia postings as I hope soon to announce a provisional launch date and venue, at which we hope to have many of the authors attending with biro or fountain pen in hand. Also, I will no doubt want to waffle on a little more about how great this anthology is going to be. So, keep checking in!

You heard the man – we’ll keep you posted with further developments.

But while I’m here, have you enjoyed following along with the development of this anthology here at the PS Newsroom? We thought it might be a fun thing to do for future projects, so let us know what you think!

But at least we have the warm glow of good books to keep us happy, right? So let’s see what’s been said about PS titles in the last week or so…

There’s another review from HUB Magazine, this time for Rio Youers’ Old Man Scratch:

Remember when you first discovered Stephen King’s short stories and novellas? Reading Old Man Scratch will take you back. A beautifully-written novella, again telling the story of the loss of a loved-one due to cancer, but told in a much different fashion.

Our narrator – Johnny Gregson – lives next door to “Scratch” Clayton. Old Man Scratch is the coldest-hearted, meanest son of a bitch you could ever hope to meet. Retired, he gets up at 5.00am every day to mow his lawn, taking delight in the fact that it wakes – and annoys the hell out of – his much more reasonable neighbours, who only want to live their own retirement years in peace and quiet.

When Johnny’s wife dies, her final weeks made deliberately uncomfortable by Scratch, Johnny decides to do something about his ornery neighbour, and perhaps the thing that lives at the bottom of the lane can help…

[...]

A highly enjoyable tale of wickedness, and revenge, Old Man Scratch is the perfect introduction to Youers’ work.

Over at Torque Control (where the BSFA editorial team hold sway) Niall Harrison has mixed feelings about Postscripts #18: This is The Summer of Love. Acknowledging that horror fiction isn’t his usual cup of tea, he still finds some stories worthy of acclaim… one of which being the Rio Youers piece from which the anthology takes its name:

… Rio Youers’ “This is the Summer of Love” is also more explicitly than most of the pieces here about love — as an emotion, and as a story humans tell to each other. [...] It is assured and occasionally bold work: the story of Terri and Billy, two teenagers obsessed with classic film who fall in together for a summer.

The most appealing thing about “This is the Summer of Love” is its willingness to be shamelessly intense and [...] to recognize the absurdity of that intensity. It is at times hyperreal, a tale of young love and domestic abuse told with the fevered vision of Hollywood. The highs are very high, the lows very low; and the highs often disguise the lows, like the make-up Terri applies to turn the ghostly image in her mirror into a starlet.

Monica J O’Rourke’s “Cell” also rates highly:

… a story of comparable quality to the work of other newish horror writers such as Joe Hill and M. Rickert. In outline, “Cell” is formulaic: a second-person narrative in which “you” find yourself imprisoned in an unidentified prison, with your fellow inmates being carted off by black-robed folks one by one, or else banging their heads against the wall as a way of committing suicide. Two things make it work: that the narrative doesn’t flinch; and that it is self-interrogative. By the first I don’t mean that it’s graphic, but that it remains tense throughout, and stays true to the totalising, intimidating nature of its premise.

Meanwhile over at HellNotes, Kent Knopp-Schwyn finds much to enjoy in Douglas Smith’s Showcase collection, Impossibilia:

Aptly named, Impossiblila introduces the reader to Douglas Smith’s magical reality where the impossible is readily accepted as normal. A brief introduction by Chaz Brenchly praises Douglas Smith’s range and focus and the three letter perfect stories behind the expressionist cover art admirably display Mr. Smith’s considerably creativity.

“Spirit Dance,” the collection’s only reprint, is an excellent opener to the author’s ability to place the possible and impossible side by side to excellent effect in an action packed story. “Spirit Dance” looks at how were-beasts stay under the radar in a today’s modern, electronic eavesdropping world and what were-beasts do when not in beast form.

And finally, Adam Groves of Fright.com sets sail for an enjoyably odd journey in T M Wright’s Blue Canoe:

T.M. Wright has written many strange books, including The Island, The Waiting Room and Cold House. Blue Canoe makes those novels look downright conventional, being a rare example of Wright at his most unrestrained – in other words, the genre wraparounds of most of his earlier books are absent here. Yet while there may be no ghosts, zombies or alternate dimensions (at least not of the conventional sort), the novel is very much a horror story, albeit of the most unexpected variety.

[...]

If the novel sounds convoluted, inconclusive and scatterbrained that’s because it is. Yet it’s also tight, cunningly structured and streamlined. A contradiction? In most novels yes, but not here. Only in T. M. Wright’s universe could all those adjectives possibly coexist.

So there we have it! As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

This year was the first in which PS has sponsored the Small Press Award, which went to Andrew Hook for the (now sadly defunct) Elastic Press – a well-deserved win, I think we can all agree.

Pete and Nick Gevers took the gong for Best Magazine/Periodical for their work on Postscripts, which continues to gather strength as it mutates from a magazine into a periodical anthology, and we’re also very pleased to note that the Best Non-Fiction award went to Stephen Jones for editing Basil Copper: A Life In Books – a few copies of which are still available on the catalogue.

As always, our hearty congratulations to all the winners and nominees alike. PS is founded first and foremost on a love of genre fiction in all its forms, and it’s wonderful to see the scene still thrives – here in the UK, and across the world – thanks to the hard work of publishers, editors and authors alike, as well as the continued passion of the reading public. Our sincere thanks to you all. :)

First of all, Charles Tan takes on a few recent titles at his Bibliophile Stalker blog, such as the opinion-dividing Billy’s Book by Terry Bisson:

In many ways, Billy’s Book is this weird animal and it’s understandable if it polarizes readers. The book collects Terry Bisson’s “Billy” stories–flash fiction using a young adult tone that recounts the adventures of Billy. Each piece can stand on its own but when reading them all in one sitting, it becomes evident how Bisson builds upon the previous stories in an absurd continuity not dissimilar from the cartoon comedy South Park.

Perhaps the biggest argument against this book is its simplistic plot but that in itself is deceptive. While there’s no denying the relative lightness of each story, it’s also a venue for Bisson to showcase his other talents. His dialogue, for example, remains compelling and upbeat, sustaining the narrative and there’s something bizarre and funny when repetition comes into play.

Charles is more certain in his praise for Sarah Pinborough’s The Language Of Dying:

In the introduction to this book, Graham Joyce makes a daring statement: “This is writing in another league: honest, courageous, startling and absolutely lucid.” This is in reference to the formulaic horror stories out there, whether it’s by other authors or by Sarah Pinborough herself. And yet, upon reading the first chapter, I can’t help but agree. While there are traditional elements of storytelling in play here (the father’s sickness, for example, is an excuse to talk about the rest of the family), a lot of it feels fresh.

There’s the language for example. Pinborough uses the first-person perspective to tell an honest yet haunting biography. She slowly pulls us in and as soon as we grow acclimatised to the “you” in the story, we’ve also been indoctrinated into the vocabulary of the narrator. There are several characters in the narrative and they all come to life in the hands of Pinborough, perhaps not fully explored but hinted enough for us to make our own generalizations. At first glance, there’s a sense of selfishness in the narrator that makes it seem like everyone else is flawed and corrupted, but this paves the way for the revelations at the end.

More certain still are the plaudits for The Language of Dying from Anthony Leigh in the latest issue of HUB Magazine:

The Language of Dying is [...] a marked diversion for Pinborough in terms of both style and subject matter, who admitted that she was worried about the book’s reception as it is so different to the rest of her work to date.

She needn’t have worried. The Language of Dying is one of the finest works I have read this year. As a collector with far more unread books than time will ever allow, it is unusual for me to re-read a book these days. I finished reading The Language of Dying on the train on my way into work, and started reading it again the same evening. It’s that good.

It’s difficult to justify the inclusion of its review in a genre magazine, as it’s not really a genre title. There’s a unicorn, certainly (as you can see from the cover), but the unicorn is a metaphor for loss and new beginnings. It’s not a novel full of magic and wonder, except for the magic and wonder of language, and of families, and of relationships and of resilience.

[...]

This is easily the best thing Pinborough has ever had published, and a great promise of things to come. Absolute, wholehearted recommendation.

Meanwhile, the Speculative Fiction Junkie blog takes a look at the Clarke Award-winning Song of Time by Ian R MacLeod:

The first thing that impressed me about Song of Time was the quality of Mr. MacLeod’s writing. It became obvious very early on that he has the soul of a poet. Additionally, the way he manipulates the two related stories that are being told in this book is masterful. The two stories to which I refer are the personal story of Roushana on the one hand and the larger story of what is happening to the world and to humanity on the other. Sometimes, one of these strands is in focus while the other is distant and other times the reverse is true. But always there is a greater story that emerges from their interplay. While this may be true of many books, Mr. MacLeod is particularly adept at using this dynamic to enhance the overall quality of his work.

[...]

Song of Time is a fantastic book, one that affected me more than most books do. It is not for everyone, but I suspect that those who like it will like it a lot, and it is fully deserving of the awards it recently received. I’ll be reading more by Mr. MacLeod in the future.

And last but not least, Rob of The Fiction Desk takes a lingering look at the short fiction of Zoran Živkovic, up to and including the just-released Impossible Stories II collection:

We have to be careful to whom we give this kind of “Get out of Jail Free” card, and nobody holds onto them forever. Zivkovic currently holds his for two reasons: one is that much of what he writes is excellent, so perfectly formed that, unless he has an intermittent medical condition or is a composite author, it’s hard to believe that there’s less talent at work in his other stories. (Not impossible, though; take a moment here to remember that the author of The Name of the Rose also cursed the world with The Island of the Day Before.) The other is the playful exuberance of his work. Even when his motivations are most in doubt, the pages keep turning. Even the least of his writing is a pleasure to read.

So I’m not sure whether a canon of contemporary European literature exists, or whether we want it too. But if it does, and if we do, then the confident, playful tales of Zoran Zivkovic certainly deserve a place in it. The assessment may be ongoing but then, shouldn’t it always be?

Don’t forget that this is Živkovic Zeptember, too, with our special offer running up to the end of the month: order a copy of Zoran’s latest collection, Impossible Stories II, and you’ll receive a 50% credit on any other PS titles by Zoran which are purchased in the same transaction.

As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

I have now agreed the final four acceptances for this soon-to-be landmark anthology. They are “Up” by Andrew Hook, “Gravity Wave” by Douglas Thompson, “Scalped”‘ by Jet McDonald and, last but not least, “Steven’s Boat” by Billie Bundschuh.

About the authors:

• Andrew Hook will be already familiar to many of you; he has published three story collections, one novel and one novella. He successfully ran the award winning Elastic Press for 6 brilliant years.
• Douglas Thompson has won a couple of writing awards and has published short stories in Ambit, The London Magazine, Chapman, New Writing Scotland, Dark Horizons, and the Subtle Edens anthology of Slipstream. His first novel, Ultrameta, is just out from Eibonvale Press and will be officially launched at Glasgow Waterstone’s on 1.10.09.
• Jet McDonald previously appeared as “Josh McDonald” with a story in the anthology Subtle Edens (editor Allen Ashley, Elastic Press, 2008). He won the art competition at the Subtle Edens launch in November 2008, and he is currently gigging regularly with his band Jetfly.
• Billie Bundschuh – I am still awaiting biographical details from Billie. I believe that she is a fairly new American author, and I will post a short bio at a later date.

Allen’s going to send over a complete Table of Contents listing soon, so we can list everything in one place – keep your eyes peeled!

Yep – in between running PS and editing an alarmingly regular chain of anthologies, Pete manages to crank out some damn fine stories of his own (with, I fully suspect, the help of some time dilation technology that he selfishly yet sensibly declines to share with the rest of us).

Forever Twilight is, in part, Pete’s homage to classic television sci-fi like the The Twilight Zone, but that’s just a starting point – things have a tendency to get very weird very quickly in Pete’s writing, and this is no exception.

So pop over to the Subterranean store and order yourself a copy… and if you’re lacking the first book of the series, don’t forget that we’re carrying a new edition of Darkness, Darkness – designed by Vinnie Chong to match the look of the Subterranean volumes – right here on our subsidiary Drugstore Indian imprint.

First up, a couple more reviews of Lawson and Utley’s Passing for Human anthology. There’s one at SF Crowsnest:

The collection relies heavily upon the work of masters of the trade, who for the most part are all saying the same thing. I’m not sure I would have included all these stories, except for the fact it’s hard to resist names like Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Donald Wollheim and Robert Silverberg to name just a few. The newer and lesser known authors will definitely benefit by their association.

To my surprise, the stories that really stood out weren’t always by the afore-mentioned masters.

And another at BookGeeks:

The idea that aliens live among us masked as human beings is not new and has been fascinating both writers and readers of SF and fantasy for decades, inspired by antique myths of gods and supernatural creatures taking human form to alter and influence the fate of mortals. It was high time to assemble in one volume the most appealing stories devoted to such a captivating subject.

Praise then to PS Publishing and to editors Michael Bishop and Steven Utley for taking on such a burden.

This reprint anthology collects sixteen tales penned by famous authors such as Ray Bradbury,Robert Silverbeg, Barry N Malzberg, Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree Jr, Paul Di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer. [...] Even for those who, like me, are not SF fans the volume is well worth reading, thanks to the excellent quality of most of the stories included.

Meanwhile, Andrew Monge of Horror Drive-In is quite taken with Old Man Scratch, the debut novella from promising new discovery Rio Youers:

… what makes the book shine is its study of the human heart. From the start, Scratch is portrayed as a cold and heartless man who has no consideration for anyone, while Johnny is shown to be a caring, loving husband who tries his hardest to deal with the problem in a civil manner. However, as the story progresses, we see Johnny’s countenance begin to devolve. He begins to fall deeper and deeper into his anger, bringing him to the brink of becoming everything he hates about his neighbor…and maybe worse. We as readers are left to wonder: given a similar situation, how close would we ourselves come to that brink? It’s an interesting question, one that will haunt each reader as they progress through the story.

And finally, I E Lester of the Internet Review of Science Fiction looks at four PS titles in a review/feature called “Long Live the Novella”. The books in question are Uncle River’s Camp Desolation and an Eschatology of Salt:

Of PS Publishing’s recent novella releases, [this] is perhaps the most bleak. Set in Earth’s near future after the downturn has proven long-term, it describes the life, actions and death of one young woman. Shandra Stuart was a terrorist. She attempted to explode a nuclear device in the Panama Canal. Or at least that’s how she’s been portrayed.

[...] this is definitely the right length. A short story would not have allowed Uncle River the space to fully flesh out his fictional argument but over a novel’s length its cold, detached tone would have ultimately proven a turn-off. He’s judged this perfectly and produced a compelling, if a little odd, novella.

Stephen Baxter’s Starfall:

This book’s great strength is due to its adherence to scientific accuracy. A series of events taking place over distances as great as these, without superluminal travel, is going to be slow and bitty. To enhance this, Baxter has broken his narrative into a series of short chapters, separated by months or years. This is a plot long in the telling, even if one short on words. Each scene advances the story succinctly, without fuss or unnecessary background detail, before jumping forward to the next scene.

[...]

This is another story that suits the novella, but for a different reason. Here the reason is plot, not style. Stretch this basic concept to a novel length and it would feel thin on substance. This is not saying it would become a dull story, but it could only have reached this length by adding in wallpaper. With Starfall Baxter has shown that less can truly be more.

Alex Irvine’s Mystery Hill:

… an off-the-wall, aliens-on-earth novella in the style of Paul di Filippo or Robert Sheckley.

Ken Kassarjian has spent the past three decades running Mystery Hill, a tourist attraction where pendulums do not hang vertical and water seems to flow uphill. It’s not exactly what you would call a classy place—it has a mini-golf course. It is also a place that attracts weirdos—alien chasers, conspiracy theorists and folks who believe pretty much any old rubbish.

[...]

This is another perfect novella. It’s too out-there to make it to novel length and lacks the type of pay-off ending you would want for making the reading commitment to the longer length. But it’s enchanting, and likely to make you search out other stories by Alex Irvine.

And last of all, The Witnesses Are Gone by Joel Lane:

… perhaps the most mundane but most surreal of the four. It’s not true science fiction, nor is it really fantasy or horror, although it has elements in common with all three. (Horror is perhaps the best fit.)

[...]

At sixty-four pages it is the shortest of the four and the one with the loosest conclusion. It’s a book that stops more than ends in a traditional narrative sense. But this brevity actually helps. Too much more of Swann’s malaise could become depressing and spoil what is an impressive story. Its unending conclusion actually combats the lack of extra pages. You are left to consider what happens in the subsequent unwritten—and for this book, unnecessary—extra pages.

As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

So, if you’re a fan already, it’s the perfect excuse to take advantage of our Živković Zeptember offer – order a copy of the latest collection, Impossible Stories II, and you’ll receive a 50% credit on any other PS titles by Zoran which are purchased in the same transaction*.

And if you’re not a fan already, maybe now’s the time to give him a try and see what all the fuss is about? :)

[ * Due to the way our webstore works, we have to do the credit after the initial transaction has gone through; sadly, the system doesn't quite have the flexibility to work it all out in advance.

However, if you're at all concerned about making an order, please drop a line to 'enquiries [at] pspublishing [dot] co [dot] uk’ and we’ll take you through the process to assure you that everything is legitimate. ]

They’re also starting to do videos, the first of which is of an interview with Kaaron Warren and our very own Robert Freeman Wexler after their recent appearance at a KGB Fantastic Fiction reading event in New York City. The sound isn’t too great, but they’ve captioned the video to make up for it. Take a look:

For those who prefer old-school text, there’s a transcript at Genreville, too.

A longer newsletter this time, so put the kettle on!

FantasyCon and Forbidden Planet launch events

Life goes on here at PS Towers, with the summer nearing its end and autumn approaching – which means, of course, FantasyCon (18-20 September). This year’s event promises to be a cracker for us and for all lovers of great books, with the launch of no fewer than four new titles:

• Ramsey Campbell’s new novel, Creatures of the Pool,
• his latest story collection, Just Behind You,
• Rio Youers’s Old Man Scratch novella, and
• Angus Mackenzie’s Spook City anthology (featuring work from Peter Atkins, Clive Barker and that man Ramsey yet again… plus an intro from Doug “Pinhead” Bradley).

Plus there’s the first title from our new Drugstore Indian Press imprint, yours truly’s Darkness, Darkness: Forever Twilight Book 1.

And we’re repeating the excitement the following week with a mega-special signing event on Saturday 26th September at London’s Forbidden Planet store – details of this free shindig are available on Facebook and elsewhere. We’ll look out for you at one or both of those gigs – come and say hi!

Zeptember Zelebrations

And there’s even more fall fun this month, with the official re-naming of September to Zeptember to celebrate Zoran Zivkovic’s new collection, Impossible Stories II.

Yes, we’re going to give a big push to PS office favourite Zoran with a super-duper special offer: order the new book and receive a 50% credit for any orders for earlier PS Zivkovic titles you make on the same order form.

Yes, we know… totally crazy – but that’s the kind of people we are. Just go ahead and list the Zoran titles you want in your order and make the full payment. When we send you the books, we’ll include a PS credit note for half of the amount charged for all titles except Impossible Stories II.

On the dilemma of Horns

No, it’s not another of PS’s famous goofs… you read it right. We’ve had a few enquiries following an announcement on Joe Hill’s website so we may as well come clean. We will be doing a 500-copy limited edition of Joe’s second PS novel, Horns – there’ll be 300 slipcased copies signed by the man himself, and 200 traycased copies signed by Joe and artist Vinny Chong.

The slips will feature a wraparound dust-jacket cover (with the cover art also on the actual boards) plus four interior colour plates. The trays will feature a different dust-jacket (though the boards will still have the artwork from the slipcased edition) plus an additional interior piece… which will complement a deleted chapter from the book (note: the deleted chapter will feature only in the traycased edition).

We’ll be putting up the order page as soon as we get some artwork in from Vinny. The book is currently scheduled for February 2010, and the prices will be as follows:

• 300 slipcased copies signed by Joe, with wraparound cover A (on both the boards and the dust-jacket) and four interior colour illustrations – £75 [$125 approx. at current rates of exchange]
• 200 traycased copies, signed by Joe and Vinny Chong, with wraparound cover B on the dust-jacket (and cover A on the boards), with the same four interior colour illustrations PLUS a deleted chapter AND an extra colour illustration – £200 [$330 approx. at current rates of exchange]

And get this: once the order page is up, all copies ordered before the end of 2009 will feature a reduction of £10 for the slips (to £65) and £25 for the trays (to £175)… and that’s in addition to the usual pre-publication free postage offer (which will run all the way through to the day finished copies are received from the printers).

Please also note that customers who bought Gunpowder may request the same number for Horns; this will also apply to any future books or novellas from Joe.

And finally, the person ordering the first traycase on the ordering page will receive #1, as will the person ordering the first slipcase. (Please note that we will be strictly limiting copies to one per person, whatever the combination of slips and trays.)

Crack’d Pot Trail – Bauchelain and Korbal Broach return!

Another one to watch out for! Steven Erikson has now handed in Crack’d Pot Trail, his new novella (50,000 words!!) featuring that loveable duo, Bauchelain and Korbal Broach. The catalogue pages are now up for pre-orders, so check ‘em out:

• 300 traycased, signed and jacketed hardcovers with colour plates – £50 [$80 approx.]
• 700 unjacketed and unsigned hardcovers – £15 [$24 approx.]

Like all of Steven Erikson’s stuff, these are going to sell like hot cakes – so order now to avoid disappointment!

Midsummer Madness Mayhem!

Now, on to our summer sale. The PS Midsummer Madness extravaganza (announced last month) was kind of the best of times and the worst of times… and, all in all, maybe not our finest hour. Why? Well, first off we screwed up with the price of the slipcased edition of Ramsey Campbell’s The Grin of the Dark, listing it as £5 instead of £20 – heck, the actual slipcases themselves cost us considerably more than £5!

But what made it even worse was that Mike, our webstore manager, had high-tailed it to France the day after the sale details went out to the intertubes… so we were unable to change the details on the site. And even more worse, as the orders flooded in, we couldn’t get into the site to mark items as sold out. (Note to self: never do another sale unless Mike is chained to his desk with life-support back-up in place.)

But we managed to muddle through and, with just two exceptions (both of whom I finally managed to win over), everyone was very sympathetic and supportive. The orders were processed in the strict sequence of their arrival here and folks who missed out on certain titles either received a refund within just a few days of placing their order or just went ahead and suggested an alternative book. All’s well that ends well, eh?

Special offer – the Black Static foursome

We were so bowled over with the Black Static reviews of The Language of Dying, Val/Orson, The Painting & The City and Shrike that we’ve made it very easy (and affordable) for you to see for yourself what all the fuss is about; full details can be found on the PS Newsroom blog.

Postscripts – two issue merger ahead

Now, a word or two about Postscripts. With the best will in the world – and, believe me, we have that in spades here at PS – there’s no way we’re going to get out three more volumes this year.

So, instead, we’re going to do the regular-sized #19 (Enemy of the Good, which is just waiting for the return of the second batch of signing sheets) and then we’re going to merge numbers 20 and 21 into a truly bumper collection entitled Edison’s Frankenstein, bringing it out just before Christmas as the Autumn/Winter volume (with subscribers also receiving Andy Duncan’s The Night Cache free of charge).

Please note that subscribers whose sub runs out with issue #20 should not be concerned: you’ll receive the double-size book anyway, along with a sub renewal form to start again with #22. Paul will post the complete ToC for Edison’s Frankenstein on the Newsroom in the next few days.

Newsletter give-aways roll over once again

Finally, we’ve had another roll-over month on the newsletter give-aways front, with last month’s three winning email addresses all failing to reply to our messages. So, the same three prizes are still up for grabs this month: the Michael Coney duo (Hello Summer, Goodbye and I Remember Pallahaxi) and two rare physical ARCs of Spook City will each go to a randomly selected email address from the newsletter subscription list. Provided they actually answer our emails, that is – so keep an eye on your inbox!

And that’s about it. We’ve bought other new books and several stories… but let’s leave something to tell you about another time, eh?

Until then, look after each other… and happy reading!

Pete

I am pleased to announce the fourteenth acceptance for the anthology. The story is by James L. Sutter, is approximately 7500 words long, and is called “The Long Road to the Sea”. James lives in Seattle and works for Paizo Publishing. Ahead of his appearance in Catastrophia, look out for James’s anthology Before They Were Giants, due from Paizo Publishing USA in Summer 2010. This book features reprints and interviews around the first published stories of authors such as William Gibson, Larry Niven and China Mieville.

I’m told that the book is now nearly full; Allen will let us know about the final few stories soon.

First of all, the Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf blog has some love for Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition, produced in partnership with our good buddies from across the pond, Subterranean Books:

With more than 50 stories, essays, introductions, and two full-length screenplays by Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition is a volume destined for the display shelf. It will proudly sit there shouting to all who enter my library area that this is one of the best books of its kind, ever. As soon as I opened the package I was blown away by its sheer size, weight, and completeness. I immediately starting reading the introductions and found myself reading the majority of the original story and than thumbed through many of the unpublished short story gems, which would be worth the price alone for the true Bradbury die-hards. However, this is no single sitting book, but one to be savoured and reread for years to come.

[...]

If you are a Bradbury fan or have a deep love and remembrance for The Martian Chronicles I highly recommend you get a copy from Sub/PS while they are still available. The publishers have truly done justice to Mr. Bradbury and the stories. Also, if you haven’t ever read The Martian Chronicles or haven’t in a long time go pick-up a copy. You won’t be disappointed.

Next up, Joe Sherry tackles Sarah Pinborough’s The Language Of Dying:

As Graham Joyce points out in his introduction, Sarah Pinborough is best known as a horror writer, but here the horror is not the supernatural. The horror is what we will all have to face eventually and in a variety of ways. The horror is the personal horror of waiting while a loved one dies slowly.

The Language of Dying is a beautiful, painful, stunning story. It doesn’t do anything so cliché as pluck at heartstrings. It is a realistic portrayal of a woman and a family dealing with her father dying slowly in her house. It’s not easy, but damn is this an outstanding story.

He also has good things to say about Stephen Baxter’s Starfall:

Beginning with an interstellar war as distant colonial star systems intend to wage war back on the home Sol System for their independence, Starfall is a tense and exciting novella. It is a story which spans decades, from the first wave sent out to attack Earth to the battle itself, and the aftershocks of the war. The details about the background of this future galaxy is fascinating and begs further exploration. For all that this is a novella of fewer than 100 pages and not a 800 page gargantuan Hamilton-esque novel, Starfall is a story rich with detail and history. Starfall is as fully realized as any longer novel, it’s just all compressed into a smaller package. There’s technology, wormholes, sentient computer viruses, interstellar war, scientific future history, time travel, and it’s all told in a smooth, but fast paced manner.

I want more of it.

The Baryon Review tucks in to the Passing For Human anthology, which is:

[...] filled with terrific stories that cover the many eras of science fiction from the 1940s up until today. “Mimic” by Donald A. Wollheim, “The Man Upstairs” by Ray Bradbury and “The Reality Trip” by Robert Silverberg. Other outstanding tales come from Paul Di Filippo, Howard Waldrop, James Tiptree, Jr, John Kessel, and Lisa Tuttle.

There are other stories here as well to show how some beings go about Passing For Human [... and] there is plenty of good reading for everyone. Kudos to all involved.

And last but by no means least, Regina Schroeder of Booklist takes a look at Gwyneth Jones‘ long-awaited Grazing The Long Acre collection:

Jones’ stories are lyrical and strange, containing many versions of the Other and how people deal with them. Capable of opening windows into spectacular worlds and weird situations, Jones leaves the reader haunted by the characters’ fates and reactions. These stories were first published between 1985 to 2007, and several haven’t previously been collected. Lending its title to the volume, “Grazing the Long Acre” is about an eastern European runaway who has a brush with someone who might be the angel of death. In the collection opener, “Gravegoods,” a group of people whose craziness is particularly suited to interstellar travel and the loss of their physical bodies encounter actual aliens. “The Fulcrum” offers an entertaining snippet of space opera. In the book-closing “In the Forest of the Queen,” two wealthy tourists drive through a part of France ravaged by the Great War, in which the population never quite recovered and roads into the forest lead somewhere that might be the future and might be fairyland.

As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for the book in question, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse. Have you read a PS Publishing title recently? If so, let us know so we can link you back from here!

If you’ve forgotten, fine things were said about Sarah Pinborough’s The Language Of Dying (“highly recommended”), Robert Freeman Wexler’s The Painting And The City (“uniquely his own”), Marly Youmans’ Val/Orson (“lucid with intelligence”) and Shrike (“the landscape of a mind”).

Well, it turns out that PS head honcho Pete was pretty stoked too… stoked enough to put together a special package deal on the books in question, no less. Take it away, Mr Crowther:

We’re so bowled over with the reviews of these four titles that we’re making it very easy for you to see for yourself what all the fuss is about.

Under normal circumstances, the trade editions of these four titles would cost £54 plus postage (£2 per book inside the UK or £4 elsewhere) — that’s an additional £8 in the UK (£62) or £16 outside (£70).

In this special offer, the price if you buy all four together is just £45 post-free in the UK or £50 post-free outside. So don’t delay — order today!

You heard the man – click on through and place an order before he sobers up changes his mind! ;)

I have just taken story number thirteen for the book. And this one comes with added excitement and intrigue. Why? Well, I have accepted a story called “Trouble with Telebrations” which purports to be by a late, famous British catastrophe author – let’s call him J. B. Harris. If genuine, this may be the biggest coup yet for Catastrophia. If not genuine, this is still a piece which bridges Golden Age catastrophe fiction and our more sophisticated, twenty-first century take on the subject.

J. B. Harris, eh – I wonder who that might be? ;)