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Police Chief Elizabeth "Izzy" Morris enjoys keeping the peace in the small town of Kinsey in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. But when her seventeen-year-old daughter goes missing after a school dance and the mutilated corpse of the girl's date is discovered in the nearby woods, Izzy's police skills are stretched to their limits.

 

Her only suspect is a stranger, a mysterious black man with no known past. When a second stranger appears, the investigation stalls. People she once trusted turn against her. The local banker's autistic son begins to know things no one else does.

 

And now something unspeakable prowls the woods.

 

Joined by three friends and the man she once considered her enemy, Izzy races to find her daughter-and ends up trapped in the middle of a war between an ancient evil and the man who has stood in its way for nearly two thousand years.

 

One novel, five short stories, two poems, this collection holds a looking glass that unhinges reality in the wee hours; roads that hold with needful, unloving arms; the miasma of damp, autumnal leaves that cling to your heels and follow you home, promising the whisper of darker things still yet to come as your eyes begin to close.

 

Yes, this is horror, the creeping kind, the kind that lingers and sticks like tombstone mosses, promising cold, dark, ethereal depths. You will face your darkest reflections in the stories bound between these pages. May you delight in the shivers. Don't forget to look over your shoulder; while you do, you won't be watching the shadows to your periphery, or what waits just ahead in the nebulous dim, its teeth sharp, its intention deadly.

 

SPACE ELDRITCH 

 

Space Eldritch

Cold Fusion Media
D.J. Butler, Michael R. Collings, Nathan Shumate, David J. West, Carter Reid, Brad R. Torgersen, Robert J. Defendi, and Howard Tayler
eBook $5.99, paperback $13.99
248pp. 2012
Review by Andrew Byers

 

I have always thought that H.P. Lovecraft's nihilistic vision of the universe fits very well with science fiction. Why do Lovecraftian horrors and Things Man Was Not Meant To Know lurk only inside dank basements, dusty tombs, and forbidden tombs? Aren't the depths of space, alien vistas, and the bleak frontiers of other worlds also fair game for the kinds of horrors imagined by Lovecraft and his many imitators? The authors collected in Space Eldritch certainly think so. In addition to a Foreword by Larry Correia discussing this unholy mixture of Lovecraft and space opera, Space Eldritchcontains seven novelettes and novellas. The stories are:

• "Arise Thou Niarlat From Thy Rest" by D.J. Butler
• "Space Opera" by Michael R. Collings
• "The Menace Under Mars" by Nathan Shumate
• "Gods in Darkness" by David J. West
• "The Shadows of Titan" by Carter Reid and Brad R. Torgersen
• "The Fury in the Void" by Robert J. Defendi
• "Flight of the Runewright" by Howard Tayler

To read the full review, click on the title link above. 

 

 

FUNGI 

 

Fungi

Edited by Orrin Grey & Silvia Moreno Garcia
Innnsmouth Free Press 2012
Hardcover $28.00, 342 pages
Paperback $ 15.00; e-book $ 8.00
ISBN 978-0-9916759-1-3
Review by Mario Guslandi

 

If you're wondering about the title of this book then you're probably not familiar with the seminal story by William Hope Hodgson "The Voice in the Night" and all the subsequent works of horror and SF where fungi, mould, mushrooms and yeasts had a pivotal role (for an exhaustive list see the appendix at the end of the present volume). Editors Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno Garcia must be congratulated upon their excellent and original idea of assembling a hefty collection of twenty-six stories along that line, mostly constituted by brand new tales.

 

John Langan sets the tone with "Hyphae," a terrific and terrifying piece where a man goes back home to find his father transformed into a living horror. Kristopher Reisz provides "The Pilgrims of Parthen" a SF tale about hallucinogen mushrooms able to transport people to an imaginary city belonging to an alien world.

 

To read the full review, click on the title link above.

 

Jonathan Maberry at the ALA convention in Seattle holding a copy of his shared world anthology, Limbus, Inc.

 

JournalStone Publishing (JSP) President, Christopher C. Payne is pleased to announce the commencement of its third annual Horror Writing Contest. The contest is open to all authors.

 

Submission Requirements: Submissions must be at least 75,000 words or more in length (no exceptions) and must be sent in a Microsoft Word document in Times New Roman 11-point font, single line spacing to joel@journalstone.com. In the subject line you must put 'JournalStone's $2,000 Advance in 2013'. You must include your name, address and e-mall address with the submission. Take credit for your work - please don't force us to investigate who you are or what entry goes with some cryptic e-mail address. If you use a pen name, please also include your actual name as well (it will be kept confidential if you so request it.)

 

To read the full article, click on the title link above.

JournalStone Publishing President, Christopher C. Payne and Dark Discoveries Magazine Managing Editor, James Beach, are pleased to announce that the magazine is again open to short fiction submissions until June 1, 2013. The magazine will be paying Pro Rates of five cents ($0.05) per word for all accepted fiction stories. Full Submission Guidelines can be found at http://darkdiscoveries.com/submission-guidelines/.

To read the full article, click on the title link above.

Courtesy of Knowledge@Wharton

 

Barnes & Noble had a rough holiday season: Same-store sales fell compared to a year ago and revenue from sales of the Nook tablet stalled. Despite a heavy investment in the Nook business, Barnes & Noble is expected to have a three-year cumulative loss of more than $700 million, according to Barclays Capital -- an indication that the bookstore's multi-front war with online retailer Amazon.com doesn't seem to be working.

 

On January 3, Barnes & Noble leadership acknowledged that the firm faces many challenges. The company said its holiday sales for the nine-week period ending December 29 were $1.2 billion, down 10.9% from a year ago. Same-store sales for the period were down 3.1% due to "lower bookstore traffic." Nook product sales fell 12.6% from a year ago.

 

To read the rest of this article, click on the title link above.

Courtesy of Publishers Weekly

Despite an economic backdrop filled with talk of a fiscal cliff and no single hot holiday title like last year's Steve Jobs biography, independent booksellers who took part in PW Daily's Christmas 2012 survey were surprisingly upbeat. "We beat last year and last year was a stellar year. We are very happy," said Dana Brigham, manager and co-owner of Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Mass. Similarly, Suzy Takacs, owner of The Book Cellar in Chicago, which saw 2011 sales rise 38% in the wake of Borders's closing, was pleased to have last year's increase stick. Holiday sales for 2012 were "terrific," she said, "up a whisker." And Michael Boggs, co-owner of Carmichael's Bookstore, with two stores in Louisville, Ky., was satisfied with being down 6% at one store and 4% at the other. "Both were up 38% from the year before. The new level is 30% more than pre-Borders. It's an enormously big figure for a store that's 35 years old to have."

To read the rest of the article, click on the title link above.

JournalStone is proud to be a sponsor of this amazing event hosted by the Horror Writers Association June 13-16, 2013!

 

The Bram Stoker Awards® Weekend 2013 incorporating the World Horror Convention will take place at the beautiful (and haunted) Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans, located in the historic French Quarter.

 

When I was a kid, I hadn't known that I'd want to write horror when I got older, but I did have an early awareness of all things creepy, unusual, or downright frightening. I grew up in a small town where some of the folks there ranged between eccentric to downright creepy. We had a train station with double tracks that saw passenger trains roll in and freights that would fly through with the speed of light. What might be scary about that, you ask? Well, if you were a kid who liked to walk the railroad tracks, especially the railway bridge that spanned between two river banks, its cinderblock posts spaced far enough apart to see swirling deep water below and the ever-present threat of a freight barreling up behind you...you get the picture. I learned at an early age that things like railroad tracks, moody, swirling rivers, shadowed woods, odd folks who lived in equally odd houses that loomed over you, casting their shadow into the street, could bring on the willies. Somehow, all of that kind of stuff fermented into a fascination with stories, especially of the darker, spookier genre. My father was a horror film aficionado. He'd seen these films many times and knew where the scary parts were. Hound of the Baskervilles, Psycho, The Birds, The Haunting of Hill House, Phantom of the Opera...he'd sit beside me and would clamp his hand down on my shoulder at each frightening part, laughing while I screamed and while the grainy black-and-white screen of the television would roll the horror forward. He was a fine mentor. 

Story ideas come from the oddest places. They can be triggered by a stray comment from a loved one, or from a dream, or from a bumper sticker on the car that cut you off during your hour-long morning commute. A lot of ideas bubble to the surface during the endless "what if" games authors play in their heads. ("What if it was Fourth of July in a popular beach town and a huge killer shark decided to take up residence in the nearby waters?") I've even heard of one author who came up with an idea from reading a can of disinfectant. It can literally be anything.

 

For my debut horror novel, the story idea came to me as I was laughing at the radio.

 

Seriously, I kid you not.

 

I was out driving and had the radio tuned to a national news syndicate. This was about a year into President Obama's first term, and the talking heads were still buzzing about his citizenship, his religion, his ethnicity. We had just come out of one of the worst recessions since World War II, millions of people were out of work, and all some people could fret about is getting the president to release his birth certificate.

 

Benjamin Kane Ethridge - Nightmare Ballad - 5/17/2013

Richard Dansky - Vaporware - 5/24/2013

Gord Rollo and Rena Mason - Double Down I - 6/7/2013

Jeffrey Wilson - Fade to Black - 6/14/2013

JournalStone is a small press publishing company, focusing on horror, fantasy and science fiction in both the adult and young adult markets.

 

We are members of & actively support:

 

HWA - Horror Writers Association
WNBA - Women's Nat'l Book Assn.

IBPA - Independent Book Publishing Assn.