This week my vocation and my avocations synchronized perfectly when Charles Vess came (back) to Richmond to speak at an event hosted by the library where I work. He spoke at the Grace Street Theater to a large, enthusiastic crowd of people from around Richmond and the region. He talked about his development as an artist and illustrator, his loves and taste as a reader, his time as a student at VCU, the joys and pains of making art before you become successful (and what happens when you do), working with Neil Gaiman, and many more things having to do with making art.

The talk was accompanied by a wide array of images, some of his work and some of his past; my favorites were his personal work, blown up to screen size. I love seeing the work of artists in their full power listening only to their muse. Afterward I bumped into a friend who said that it was the best lecture he’d ever seen at VCU. While I haven’t been a student there, I’ve seen many lectures, and his conversational, open, and direct style of address made for a great evening.

Questions from the audience included such topics as how one can succeed as an illustrator, his favorite Miyazaki films, what he finds inspirational or restorative, the nature of contemporary illustration, and more. I asked about his views on drawing from imagination versus drawing from life. I’d misunderstood something he said about using the real world in his work (some leaves, etc.), and he said that he does not, in fact, draw from life. He studies and is inspired by nature, but he doesn’t want to get all of the information onto the page. This was a comfort to me on many levels.

Over the last year I’ve been studying painters and draftsmen who most work from the model or direct observation, have been taking art classes that revolve around the same, and have been reading art instruction material that slants that way, too. That actually goes double for fantasy illustration. In an effort to bring naturalism to their work, many illustrators and artists of the fantastic use techniques that are closely tied to academic painting and 20th century illustration practices. This is all well and good, and I appreciate those methods and the works produced using them, but I do sometimes get restless working from observation. The painting I’m working on right now is in some measure an homage to Erol Otus, and while I could use maquettes, lighting, etc., I’m mostly painting from my imagination.

I had the pleasure of speaking briefly with Vess before the event, and I did my best to say concisely what his work has meant to me. Long story short, aside from appreciating his work for many years, I ran across photos of his studio on Terri Windling’s blog at a time when I was doing (same as it ever was) too much soul-searching about writing vs. making art, and how to integrate the two. Seeing photos of his studio was like a swift kick in the ass from a monk at the end of koan, reminding me that the two need not be separate. I bought a pile of books at the event, having forgotten to bring Sandman, etc. stuff along, and he was kind enough to inscribe & draw on the flyleaf from Drawing Down the Moon.

Inscription & drawing on the flyleaf of Drawing Down the Moon

Never Bet the Devil, by Orrin Grey

Once upon a time, monsters were monsters. They were, by and large, not objects of sympathy. Whatever Count Dracula or Larry Talbot or your unfriendly neighborhood ghoul may have suffered, however tragic they might have been, we were all quite clear on what they were. Genre fiction has undergone sundry transformations under the hand of Postmodernity, and many are the monsters who now seem more subaltern than Satanic, but in his first short story collection, Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, my friend Orrin Grey has managed a neat trick. He’s taken the ghost story through the thickets of self-reflexivity and produced tales that are both nuanced and human… but also traditional in the sense that they use creatures from myth, folklore, and literature to hair-raising effect.

Orrin’s taste as a reader informs his fiction: rarely have we ever discussed an author, book, or film even tangentially related to monsters of which he’s unaware. I say “rarely” because “never” is an unlikely and fate-tempting proposition, but that’s probably closer to the truth, especially as he continues his lifelong project of consuming monster-related material, from truly obscure Victorian ghost stories to the sketchbooks of illustrators with a lech for liches. Given the monsters in general, why are these ghost stories? Reader, you will have to taste them yourself to understand, but they feel like ghost stories. “Supernatural” or “occult” are terms that might also be invoked, and they’d often be correct, but this is by and large a book about people who are and have been haunted.

To recount each story and creature you’ll meet in Never Bet the Devil would spoil the fun, but here are a few of the waypoints you’ll encounter. “Black Hill” is the story with the longest shadow, having appeared twice in print, and once in a sanity-destroying audio edition. It’s a tale about death and the secret history of oil fields, and its concluding lines are memorably effective. “The Mysterious Flame,” the novella that anchors the collection, deals with the doings of necromancers, among other things, but read it for the golem. Said golem is not the Golem of Prague, nor the Golem of Chelm, but is instead a sort of Everyman among constructed creatures, and his tale illustrates how monsters can, in their way, be haunted. “The Devil in the Box” is my personal favorite of the lot, a tale of haunted artists, and the power of a paint brush to still or loose inner demons. Finally, the allusion-rich “The Seventh Picture” blends Gothic formulae with found footage to creates a rich, multilayered story that feels the most contemporary of the lot and deserves, in my estimation, to be reprinted and keep infecting finding new readers.

Orrin Grey with Bat

Who should read Never Bet the Devil? If Netflix has ever suggested to you the categories “Monster Movies,” “Scary Supernatural Movies,” or “Movies with Protagonists Likely to Be Eaten,” it might be for you. If Hellboy resonates with you, this book might be for you. If you want something dark without hockey masks or hostels gone hostile, it might be for you. If you fondly remember the ghost story anthologies you read by flashlight under blankets as a kid, and you wonder what could give you that same thrill today? It’s definitely for you. Too many authors’ first collections lack flavor and focus. Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings lacks neither. What it has in abundance is all of the spooky and mysterious things that you’ve always loved.

My year’s end thoughts tend to be heavy on things read or watched in the course of the year, new work done, or goals for the coming year. 2012 was a sea change for me on many fronts, and I count just getting through it a victory, even when the swells and waves were good things. What happened?

My mother-in-law passed away after a long battle with cancer. There were multiple concurrent serious family illnesses. There were trips to see my wife’s family and deal with my mother-in-law’s death. All of those took time and energy, and those of you who have been through it know how sad and draining the death of a parent is.

Yard Devastation

We bought a house and moved into it in November. It’s a wonderful little mid-century Cape Cod with nooks and crannies, room to garden, and is spacious on various counts. We’ve been doing all sorts of work on it, as well as being not yet fully unpacked, but here’s a picture of part of the remnants of the work my wife, father-in-law and I did toward the end of last week. RIP. I hated doing it, but the row of a dozen or so pine trees lining the street had been badly topped and were growing (and always going to be growing) into the telephone and power lines. I never expected to spend any substantial amount of time in life using a chainsaw, and yet.

Life was busy at the library as well, with some major changes in our systems, some personnel changes, and several kinds of new work. My “business” as a liaison to humanities departments grew in interesting ways, and 2013 promises to be busy in that regard as well. I also traveled to Anaheim for the annual American Library Association conference, which was illuminating and exciting, especially the digital humanities preconference I attended.

Fungi Cover

My writing life was mixed in 2012. Productivity-wise, I started and floundered on many stories, a novella, and a novel.  By year’s end, I’d completed a bare handful of flash and short stories, though I’m working on something that I hope will turn into a new novel. Publication-wise, I did OK, with one story at NewMyths.com and another in the hardcover edition of the anthology Fungi. I’m still on the hunt for representation for my novel focused on conflicts of memory, ecology, and inheritance in the Pacific Northwest. Here’s hoping 2013 will hold enough peace and stability for me to refocus my efforts on new writing.

Figure Study

One of the unmitigated pleasures of last year was the painting and drawing. I took two drawing classes at VisArts, taught by local artist Tommy Van Auken, and I began irregularly attending a life drawing group. I’ve done some painting during the last year, though my focus has mostly been on improving my drawing skills. I’ve done a mound of work and enjoyed it, with the end results ranging across the spectrum from “useful only for learning” to surprisingly good, at least to judge by viewers’ reactions. I have enjoyed the arts in past–drawing, painting, sculpting, singing, playing instruments–but something about this year’s work was transformative, and I was grateful to have brushes to hand, especially when the words did not come. Here’s the last painting I completed in 2012, which combined a variety of things I learned over the course of the year, as well as helping me figure out what I want to do in the coming year.

What do I have in mind for 2013? Adventure, good work, success, and happiness. I have a plethora of more specific goals, but that’s enough for the Nutshell Edition. Here’s wishing you all the best for 2013.

Innsmouth Free Press has released Fungi, a delightful anthology of the mycological fantastique edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Orrin Grey, the hardcover edition of which includes my short story, “The Flaming Exodus of the Greifswald Grimoire.” You can buy paperback and electronic versions at Amazon and elsewhere, but your best bet for getting a copy of the hardcover is direct from the publisher. Mine is a somewhat lighthearted tale of the occult involving two black-hearted, book collecting brothers, but the collection’s full of a wide range of stories, and the Table of Contents includes a roster of names familiar to anyone who reads fantasy or horror these days, particularly of the dark and/or literary varieties:

• Ann K. Schwader, “Cordyceps zombii” (poem)
• A.C. Wise, “Where Dead Men Go to Dream”
• Andrew Penn Romine, “Last Bloom on the Sage”
• Camille Alexa, “His Sweet Truffle of a Girl”
• Chadwick Ginther, “First They Came for the Pigs”
• Daniel Mills, “Dust From a Dark Flower”
• Ian Rogers, “Out of the Blue”
• Jane Hertenstein, “Wild Mushrooms”
• Jeff Vandermeer, “Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose”
• John Langan, “Hyphae”
• Julio Toro San Martin, “A Monster In The Midst”
• Kris Reisz, “The Pilgrims of Parthen”
• Laird Barron, “Gamma”
• Lavie Tidhar, “The White Hands”
• Lisa M. Bradley, “The Pearl in the Oyster and the Oyster Under Glass”
• Molly Tanzer and Jesse Bullington, “Tubby McMungus, Fat From Fungus”
• Nick Mamatas, “The Shaft Through The Middle of It All”
• Paul Tremblay, “Our Stories Will Live Forever”
• Polenth Blake, “Letters to a Fungus”
• Richard Gavin, “Goatsbride”
• Simon Strantzas, “Go Home Again”
• Steve Berman, “Kum, Raúl (The Unknown Terror) – b. 1925, d. 1957”
• W.H. Pugmire, “Midnight Mushrumps”

The three extra stories included in the hardcover edition are:

• E. Catherine Tobler, “New Feet Within My Garden Go”
• J.T. Glover, “The Flaming Exodus of the Greifswald Grimoire”
• Claude Lalumière, “Big Guy and Little Guy’s Survivalist Adventure”

It’s a pleasure to be sharing a dust jacket with such fine and talented folks, among whom I number friends, confederates, and co-defendants. Rest assured, loyal readers: they’ll never make the charges stick! I’ve not yet met a court that hasn’t accepted my perfectly reasonable explanations (“sacrificial knife aficionado,” “extreme gourmand,” “amateur mortuary chemist”), and I’m sure that my depredations will go unpunished I’ll continue to remain free to inflict further literary injury upon your persons.

Fungi will make you happier, healthier, and wiser. Buy your copy today!

The legend says that Molly Tanzer was born on a starless night in the middle of a battlefield, and that when the sun rose, the ground was carpeted with detached limbs and excavated fundaments. In the middle of this lay a babe, swaddled in black satin, attended by leather-masked beasts with hands of stone and iron. As the sun flew high, reedy pipes wailed and the emissaries of a cult that had long awaited her arrival rode thither out of the east, and strange patterns formed in the dust in the sky.

Now, the legend may overstate the situation, but there’s no question that my friend Molly has written a badass collection of stories with A Pretty Mouth, fit to jump into the ring and duke it out with any other collection out there, whether Nine Stories or Bob’s Iguana Tales. Her stomping grounds? History, tentacles, skullduggery, and sex. She brings the past to life in stories populated with complex, changeable humans–no buttoned-down, ghostly, shadows, but plotting, scheming, friendly people as likely to invoke dark gods as they are to suckle octopi or go to the beach. Or all three.

To dilate too much on the individual stories and titular novella of this collection, founded on the decadence of the family Calipash, would be to rob you of much joy, Reader, but a few comments seem in order. “A Spotted Trouble at Dolor-on-the-Downs” is a riff on Wodehouse’s most famous characters, as seen in the looking glass, and having read it, you’ll always wonder a bit about what lurks beneath the exterior of the world’s most unflappable valet. “The Hour of the Tortoise” is a fiction within a fiction, involving Gothic trappings, strange alliances, and a tortoise that is not what it seems. “The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins” is Molly’s best-known story to date, having appeared twice previously, winning her fans and admirers with its blending of 18th century literary conventions and robust helpings of spite, vice, incest, and madness. “A Pretty Mouth,” the novella that forms the backbone of the collection, is a glorious romp through school in the 17th century, following the eldritch/picaresque adventures of distinctly roguish schoolboys, whose interests range from the arcane to the erotic. Finally, “Damnatio Memoriae” takes another look at the Romans in Britain, a subject well-loved by various Golden Age authors of weird fiction, turning the usual story inside out before inverting it.

Having said it already in more flowery format, I’ll now say simply that Molly Tanzer is the real deal. A Pretty Mouth is a weighty and strange collection, and one that promises to repay more than one reading. From adroit turns of phrase to morally complex characters to simply good stories, this book has much to offer. I weed my bookshelves on occasion, sending away those that have grown stale or faint, and I do not expect that will ever happen to my copy of A Pretty Mouth.

A Pretty Mouth is available from Amazon, from Barnes & Noble, or from your local independent bookseller. If any of what I’ve written here intrigues you, please consider picking this collection up for yourself for the holidays, or asking your local library to order a copy.