Wormfood Island is the story of a family on the verge of collapse who win a trip to a hedonism resort. Hoping for a chance to save their marriage, they instead must deal with an infestation of parasitic worms that cause the infected to gain monstrous sexual appetites…which quickly turns to an appetite for living flesh.

According to author Ken La Salle, part of the reason the book was written was to add to the origins of zombie literature.

“One thing that always bugged me about zombie stories was how the infection was spread,” said La Salle. “It’s usually explained as a type of viral infection or sometimes a curse. Outside of movies like 28 Days Later, which had a great disease to explain it with, it gets pretty vague. So, what I wanted to bring to the genre was a new zombie “origin” while respecting such elements as Romero’s zombie logic.”

While Wormfood Island has something new to fans of zombie fiction, it also has a load of great action, gore, and suspense that are hallmarks of the survival horror genre. It is a zombie book that has a little something for everyone.

“The best zombie tales use the plague as a backdrop for a larger story and, I think, Wormfood Island does this very well,” said La Salle. “It takes the story of a family on the brink of survival, the connection between a father and son, and what it means to have to fight for that. Wormfood Island brings a great combination of action, gore, and sex. In Wormfood Island, people spread the infection like an STD and it ramps up their appetites until they are feasting on human flesh.”

The book will be released in summer 2011, in hardcover, trade paperback, and digitally. Wormfood Island is part of NFP’s move from an anthology-only press in its first year to a more robust product line in its second.

“I’m obviously very excited to sign with Northern Frights Publishing for publication of Wormfood Island,” said La Salle.”It’s a strange irony that in the present economical situation everyone faces, I’ve found this opportunity to bring this passion that I’ve followed for that past thirty years to the next level.”

***

Northern Frights Publishing is a Canadian Indie publisher specializing in quality horror and science fiction. Past releases include Shadows of the Emerald City and the Wells Unleashed Series of anthologies based on the work of H.G. Wells. www.northernfrightspublishing.webs.com

Ken La Salle is an author from Anaheim, California. His blog can be seen here: http://kenlasalle.blogspot.com/

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MONTAG PRESS welcomes the submission of unsolicited manuscripts from authors around the world. Original, unpublished fiction and drama/plays may be submitted by mail throughout the year.

Of primary interest are the following genres and sub-genres:

• Speculative fiction
• Horror fiction
• Subversive fiction
• Utopian and Dystopian fiction
• Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic fiction
• Experimental fiction

MONTAG PRESS produces both original mass-market paperbacks and trade paperbacks.”

For more info, go to Montag Press Submission Call!

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For submissions guidelines go to Fourth Horseman Press.

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…We are only interested in quality works from serious authors. Every manuscript is individually reviewed by the selections director and members of the consulting editorial staff. A thorough review is a time-consuming and, upon occasion, costly procedure. Therefore, we do not review manuscripts that have been simultaneously submitted to multiple publishers.”

For more info, go to Bold Strokes Books.

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• Antho: Alien Horror Anthology
• Publisher: Grand Mal Press
• Editor(s): Steve Pasore
• Pay Rate: $25
• Response Time: 30 days
• Deadline: Oct 1Description: POD horror anthology with aliens as the focus
• Submission Guidelines: www.grandmalpress.com

NOTE: Author D.L. Snell conducted the following interview to give writers a better idea of what the editors of this specific market are seeking; however, most editors are open to ideas outside of the preferences discussed here, as long as they fit the basic submission guidelines.

THE SCOOP
1) What authors do you enjoy, and why does their writing captivate you?
Joe R. Lansdale, Dan Simmons, Stephen King, Tim Lebbon, Douglas Winter, Raymond Chandler, Michael Marshall Smith, Chuck Palahniuk…to name a few. I like any writer who mixes good prose with well developed characters and original stories, no matter the genre.

2) What are your favorite genres? Which genres would you like to see incorporated into submissions to this market?
We’re trying to keep this pretty streamlined. We’re not that interested in humor but just about anything else goes. I’m a big fan of films such as Alien, Predator, Event Horizon, Signs, Pandorum, etc. I have not read Cowboys and Aliens but the idea of a western alien horror story is right up my alley. For the Hard Boiled Horror antho, I am looking for anything horror-related with a mystery to it. You know, if Chandler and King put their heads together. I love noir fiction but it can be a mix of genres as well…western, sci fi, war, etc. I’m hoping writers will surprise me.

3) What settings most intrigue you? Ordinary or exotic locales? Real or fantasy? Past, present, or future?
Any setting works for me if the story works within it. Right now though, fantasy (i.e., sword and sorcery) settings would be a very hard sell.

Read the full interview at D.L. Snell’s Market Scoops!

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NOVEL
Winner: BIG MACHINE, Victor LaValle (Speigel & Grau)
Finalists:
Last Days, Brian Evenson (Underland Press)
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters (Riverhead)
The Owl Killers, Karen Maitland (Delacorte Press)
The Red Tree, Caitlin R. Kiernan (Roc)
White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi (Nan A. Talese)

NOVELLA
Winner: Midnight Picnic, Nick Antosca (Word Riot Press)
Finalists:
The Language of Dying, Sarah Pinborough, (PS Publishing)
“Sea-Hearts,” Margo Lanagan (X6, coeur de lion)
Shrike, Quentin S. Crisp (PS Publishing)
Vardøger, Stephen Volk (Gray Friar Press)
The Witnesses are Gone, Joel Lane (PS Publishing)

NOVELETTE
Winner: “Morality,” Stephen King (Esquire)
Finalists:
“Catch Hell,” Laird Barron (Lovecraft Unbound, Dark Horse)
“Each Thing I Show You Is a Piece of My Death,” Gemma Files and Stephen J. Barringer, (Clockwork Phoenix 2, Norilana Books)
“Lonegan’s Luck,” Stephen Graham Jones (New Genre 6)
The Night Cache, Andy Duncan (PS Publishing)

SHORT STORY
Winner: “The Pelican Bar,” Karen Joy Fowler (Eclipse 3, Night Shade)
Finalists:
“The Crevasse,” by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud (Lovecraft Unbound, Dark Horse)
“Faces,” Aimee Bender (The Paris Review, Issue 191, Winter 2009)
“The Jacaranda Smile,” Gemma Files (Apparitions, Undertow Publications)
“Procedure in Plain Air,” Jonathan Lethem (The New Yorker, April 5, 2010)
“Strappado,” Laird Barron (Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Solaris)

SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION
Winners (Two Winners): Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, Kevin Wilson
(Harper Perennial) & Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, Robert Shearman (Big Finish Productions)
Finalists:
Everland and Other Stories, Paul Witcover (PS Publishing)
Fugue State, Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press)
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (Penguin)
Zoo, Otsuichi (Haikasoru/VIZ Media)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY
Winner: Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Ellen Datlow (Solaris)
Finalists:
Apparitions, edited by Michael Kelly (Undertow Publications)
British Invasion, edited by Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon, and James A. Moore (Cemetery Dance)
Exotic Gothic 3: Strange Visitations, edited by Danel Olson (Ash Tree Press)
Lovecraft Unbound, edited by Ellen Datlow (Dark Horse)

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In addition to Necrophilia Variations, Supervert has also written Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, Perversity Think Tank and introductions to several works, including a new edition of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. The following conversation revolves around anonymity, art and the nature of perversion. Enjoy.

_________________

How did the name Supervert come about, and what does the 32C signify?

Prior to founding Supervert in 1999, I collaborated with my close friend Eric Swenson on an enterprise we had named Necro Enema Amalgamated. Together we produced a successful series of art CD-ROMs called BLAM!, the last of which was released in the fall of 1998.

As the collaboration neared its end, I realized that it had taught me a great deal. First, I learned that I liked working under a pseudonym. It was liberating because it prevented me from feeling any obligation to synthesize the various factions of my personality. Instead I could splinter them off, give them names, allow them to pursue their varied courses. Second, I learned that a pseudonym was useful as a brand name, an identifier, a hook. Third, I learned that I was ambivalent about fame. I didn’t like being recognized on the street. I liked being anonymous because anonymity safeguards your freedom — disinvites interruption, surveillance, and self-consciousness. Fourth, I learned that it is practical to have a business structure behind one’s creative endeavors. It helps with distributors, taxes, and so on.

For these reasons, I wanted to continue as an impersonal entity — a nom de plume, a brand, a business. I loved the name Necro Enema Amalgamated, but it would have been wrong to transform NEA into a vehicle for the things I wanted to do on my own. “Supervert” seemed like the perfect moniker and perhaps even a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What is your background?

I was born in 1967. I went to college at New York University then lived in Paris for a bit (on the rue des Mauvais Garçons — Bad Boys Street). I returned to attend graduate school at Yale, where I earned a master’s degree in the history of art before dropping out of the PhD program. For a few years I wrote art criticism for the New York glossies. I cofounded Necro Enema Amalgamated in 1991 and then moved on to Supervert. My plan has been to write six Supervert books — I’ve now done three — then retire with my obsessions.

Have you always been interested in things that are generally seen as depraved?

Yes, always. When I was being pushed out the birth canal, I managed to lift my head and give my mother a chomp on the clitoris. Nothing has changed since.

How have your friends and family reacted to your work?

Friends have been very supportive — but this worries me and I privately wish that they would be more critical. A writer, like a criminal, should be wary of his accomplices. Their praise is likely to be exaggerated and their criticism softened. Their motives may be good for friendship but it’s bad for art.

As for family, I imagine that few writers address their works to their parents, siblings, or children. Perhaps one function of writing is to serve as a line of flight from the nuclear family. Arthur Rimbaud wrote his way out of his mother’s clutches, and Sylvia Plath abandoned her children not just through suicide but through poetry.

How much time do you spend researching a subject before writing your fiction?

I’m not sure I would call my work “fiction,” but that’s not an answer to your question.

The idea for Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish had germinated in my head for a long while. For years I would note references to alien life in the philosophy I was reading. Once I decided to write the book, I supplemented these notes with additional research. This was before the advent of tools such as Google Scholar and Amazon’s “Look Inside the Book” functionality, so I had to read a lot and scan even more. Ultimately I was disappointed not to be able to include Nietzsche and Heidegger, but otherwise it was a decent roster of philosophers that I marshaled into the book.

Necrophilia Variations only required research of the heart. Perversity Think Tank springs from research that I performed with no intent to gather it in a book. After a while, I realized that not just the research but the experience of blogging about sexual perversion on a daily basis demanded a synthesis or a broad view. I wasn’t happy to remain mired in the details of individual acts of perversity. I wanted to understand perversity as such.

When and why did you come up with the idea of creating a compendium of unorthodox sexual acts as reported by news sources?

PervScan was born in 2003 when I realized that a blog could be something more than a personal diary. I had been reading technology blogs, and it occurred to me that I could dedicate a blog to sexual perversion. I envisioned it as running log of case studies, a work-in-progress psychopathia sexualis. At the time, this was a novel concept — there were few sex blogs — and I worried about finding enough content.

As it turned out, there was an overwhelming amount of content, hundreds of sex crimes a day. This became a problem in itself. First, it could be difficult to find “good” or novel stories among the common ones — rapes, indecent exposure, gays arrested for cruising in public places, and so forth. Second, there was a constant risk of desensitization — another guy arrested for fucking his neighbor’s dog? Yawn. Third, it was dispiriting to see how much real human suffering lay behind so many sex crimes. Sometimes I would receive emails from people who had been involved in incidents I had written up. It was impossible not to be moved by these outpourings, which were often accompanied by pleas for names or entire posts to be removed from the site. Caught between desensitization and commiseration, I sometimes felt like the narrator of Nathanael West’s brilliant novel Miss Lonelyhearts.

Of all unusual and unpopular practices, why did you choose exophilia and necrophilia?

It is difficult to articulate the “why” of a choice to write about something. A few nights ago I had a dream in which a friend confessed to some eccentricities in her sexuality. She was seeking some sort of approval, which I gave her. I then informed her about a sexual pathology called “anusitis diametes” — a made-up condition, fabricated in the workshop of sleep. When I woke up, I marveled that my brain had invented this scientific-sounding term without my having the slightest idea what it meant.

Writing is a similar process. Something appears in my head and a book is the record of my attempt to fathom it. This was especially true of Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish. I didn’t choose the subject so much as it forced itself on me. I made up the term “exophilia,” but it was to describe something already flourishing like a tumor in my brain.

I saw an “alien” blow-up doll at Adult Mart one time. Do you think Mercury de Sade would have been happy with that, or would it not have been authentic enough for him?

Human or alien, a doll is a poor substitute — unless one has a fetish for dolls.

I also saw a blow-up sheep once, but decided that was just not something I wanted to ruminate on. Do you ever find yourself shying away from writing down a particular idea or utilizing a particular theme, and if so how do you get beyond that?

There are several types of ideas that are, so to speak, unthinkable. There are ideas that bore — we shy away from them because they offer nothing, like a blank canvas. There are ideas that repel — we shy away from them because they disgust, like snot or excrement. Then there are ideas that threaten. This is a special category because these ideas have a certain intensity, they seem to be personalized for us, speak directly to our fears, pose a danger to our beliefs, our self-conception, our sanity. These are the ideas that psychoanalysis confronts (“So you want to sleep with your mother or father, hm?”) and that writers and artists often tackle in their work. I presume this is the sort of idea to which your question refers — a dangerous idea.

No, I don’t shy away from these. To be clear, though, my work does not attempt to shock (i.e. explore ideas that threaten society) or to plumb my own psychopathologies (i.e. explore ideas that threaten me). My work attempts to fathom ideas that force themselves on me. I can’t shy away from them. I can only exorcise them.

Is there anything that does personally offend you?

Bad manners. Nietzsche defined philosophy as the ability to reverse perspectives, and the same could be said of courtesy. It is a matter of thinking the thoughts of others — the people around you, their needs, their movements, their reasons for doing what they do. A philosopher who lacks such an ability to get outside his own head can’t be much of a thinker, thus courtesy is a good indicator of a genuinely philosophical temperament.

Supervert’s books are extremely attractive in their simplicity, so much so that every design choice seems to have some sort of methodically chosen significance. Is that all done in-house, or are there editors, artists, etc brought in to pull everything together?

Yes, there is method to the madness, and everything is done in-house. Supervert’s books are conceived, written, designed, funded, and distributed by a lone individual. For better or worse, this gives them a certain authenticity. No Supervert production has been compromised by editors, marketers, focus groups, or Hollywood backing. Each book represents the most I can possibly put into it — which is another way of saying that it’s the only way I can empty myself, exorcise the impulse behind the book, arrive at a sort of serene blankness untroubled by ideas.

What do you think about the American culture of celebrity worship? Would that be classifiable as a perversion?

Celebrity worship is very much the norm. Perversity is to turn away from it, to eschew the spotlights in favor of the obscure and the shadowy.

While reading ETSF, I was impressed with how you applied mathematics to human sexuality. How did the idea of sexual preferences as sets come about, and should I feel dirty for having that null set tattoo, seeing as how I’m not actually a part of the set it represents within the context of the book?

That is a funny question, and you know that I’m enamored with the thought of your null set tattoo. You should send me a picture of it.

As for set theory and its function in Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, I can only say that it seemed like a perfectly logical way to approach fetishism. It is unfortunate that the demands of scholarship discourage real mathematicians from examining the perversions from the unique vantage points of their specializations. I often think, for instance, that to contemplate perversion is like trying to determine the value of pi: no matter how far you carry the operation, you never quite reach the end of it. Henry Miller once wrote that “we are the last decimal point of sexual calculation” — but clearly he wasn’t thinking of the perversions, which may well be incalculable.

What do you like to read for pleasure?

Over the years, my reading has been annexed by my writing. What I mean is that I have come to find it difficult to read in a disinterested way, with no object other than pleasure. The writer in me is always there, on the lookout for knowledge or inspiration. I do derive pleasure from texts, but I derive the most pleasure when I learn something or when I find myself roused to stop reading and start writing. It’s sort of like reading is porn and writing is sex. The first can be fun, but it’s a poor substitute for the second.

For fans of your work, what would you recommend as further reading?

I would recommend the authors from whom I have derived much inspiration: the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud, and William Burroughs.

Among contemporaries, I would recommend my friend Carl Weissner’s Death in Paris, which is freely available at RealityStudio.org, as well as the work of Savoy Books, particularly David Britton’s Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz. Recently I also read Stéphane Velut’s novel Cadence, which is an excellent book — Kafkian in its style and lurid in its subject matter. Velut is a neurosurgeon who leaves one thinking that every writer should approach his words with the precision required to operate on the brain.

_________________

Supervert’s main page can be found at Supervert.com, with links to his various works.

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Last Rites Publishing is located in upstate New York surrounded by the ghosts of British and American soldiers who fought during the American Revolution. Last Rites Publishing will debut in mid-October, 2010. We aim to specialize in publishing horror fiction, columns, and reviews. Regardless of your stature in the horror genre, we want to read your work.”

Read more at Last Rites Publishing.

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The topics here can vary greatly. We’re looking for vivid atmosphere, scariness, a general mood of unease and a punch at the end…The deadline has been extended to December 31st, 2010 or until filled.”

Full flash anthology guidelines at Flashes in the Dark.

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This contest is open to all writers, published or unpublished.

The story style does not matter. It can be anything from a slasher type story (although we have to admit right up front, those are not our favorites) to a humorous tale or anything in between. But most importantly, it must be an entertaining horror short story. We must want to turn that page to see what happens next in the story and how things end. Oh, and don’t forget scary. That is, perhaps, the most important consideration.

Here are the rest of the rules:

* DEADLINE: There is no contest deadline. Stories will be reviewed as they are submitted for future issues of the quarterly publication.
* PAYMENT: Selected stories will receive a copy of the issue of DARK MOON DIGEST in which your story appears.
* ENTRY FEE: There is no entry fee for this contest…”

More info go to Dark Moon Digest. They’re also looking for Lovecraftian fiction and vampire stories.

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