Adieu, Weird Fiction Publishers List

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Starting in 2015 I maintained a list of publishers of weird fiction, literary horror, or mainstream fiction that occasionally handled either. That list stayed current for a few years, but updates gradually became less frequent, and it became ever more out of date. Many people have used it over the years, but my interest in refreshing it has gone. If you’d like to save the links I had posted for your own purposes, there’s a copy over on the Wayback Machine.

These days, seems like more people get their market info from social, or from those folks who do regular submission roundups, like Eric J. Guignard or Gwendolyn Kiste. Likewise, check out Ralan.com, lists from writer’s organizations (SFWA, AWP, etc.), The Grinder, etc. Cheers!

Recent Publications

Halloween 2015 marked the launch of Thinking Horror, a new non-fiction journal co-edited by s.j. bagley and Simon Strantzas, which focuses on horror and philosophy. The first issue is themed “Horror in the Twenty-First Century,” and I’m delighted to have an essay in it. My piece is entitled “Against Nature,” and is about the sorrows of naturalism and the merits of flash fiction for horror, touching on fiction by Thomas Ligotti and Laura Ellen Joyce, as well as art by Amy Bennett and Gregory Crewdson.

Frankly I’ve been excited ever since Thinking Horror was announced. It’s right up my alley as a reader, and it features a ton of articles and interviews that look outstanding.  Even better news for all interested in such things, this journal is the initial offering of TKHR, which will be publishing a variety of works on contemporary horror, from further themed projects to other delights that are yet to be revealed. You can purchase a print copy of Volume One from Amazon, and an electronic version is just around the corner.

September saw the release of Weirdbook 31, the first issue in the revival of Weirdbook, a classic publication. I aspired to publication in its pages during it’s previous run, and I’m delighted to appear in this magazine now. It’s chock-full of good horror, fantasy, baroque fantasy, weird horror, etc., including (if I may be so immodest) a fable of my own devising, entitled “Wolf of Hunger, Wolf of Shame.” While this is “issue 31” of a magazine, note that it’s 160 pages, almost all of which are fiction, so it can hang with plenty of anthologies out there! You can pick up a copy at Amazon, or directly from Wildside Press.

Of late I’ve been busy enough that under-the-radar has been more necessity than convenience, but I have been reading various things. I’d like to point your attention to Orrin Grey’s new short story collection, Painted Monsters. It’s a fine book, and I hope to post a writeup down the road. I’d also like to highlight Molly Tanzer’s forthcoming novel, The Pleasure Merchant, which I had the pleasure of hearing an excerpt from earlier this year at World Horror. It’s gonna be fab, and I can’t wait to read it.

Further Insight into Basic Mysteries

This weekend I read an essay by Andrew J. Wilson in Pulp Fiction of the ’20s and ’30s, a volume in the Critical Insights series: “The Last Musketeer: Clark Ashton Smith and the Weird Marriage of Poetry and Pulp.” I read it partly as potential grist for something I’m working on, but also simply because I was curious to read more criticism of Smith, an author of weird fiction and poetry who continues to be read, but who has received little critical attention when compared with the likes of Chandler or Lovecraft. Wilson inserts a quotation from Smith’s “notebook of ideas” that resonates with the thinking of any number of  people in the pulp era, weird fiction writers or otherwise:

The weird tale is an adumbration or foreshadowing of man’s relationship—past, present, and future—to the unknown and infinite, and also an implication of his mental and sensory evolution. Further insight into basic mysteries is only possible through future development of higher faculties than the known senses. Interest in the weird, unknown, and supernormal is a signpost of such development and not merely a psychic residuum from the age of superstition.

About that List of Weird Fiction Publishers

A little over a month ago, I assembled and posted a list of weird fiction publishers. I shared it widely at the time, and in turn it’s been shared and reposted in a number of places, including Reddit. It’s gotten traffic most every day since then, and the overall number of visits here has risen to (for now) a steadily higher level than in past:

 

 

My process for assembling the list was fairly straightforward. I reeled off a list by memory, took a quick-but-not-exhaustive look at my bookshelves, looked at websites of high-profile writers of weird fiction and link lists from high-profile publishers of weird fiction, and trawled social media. As such things inevitably do, all of that took longer than I’d planned. Originally I’d intended simply to do a list of names & links, but the speed with which the list grew, along with comments from a bunch of people, led me to organize it a little bit. Maybe not surprising for a librarian.

The list serves my original, stated purpose: a list for me and the world to use in order to find publishers of weird fiction. That said, lately I’ve been reading about the history of publishing, as well as literary sociology, and because I tend to overthink things, and because I’m having an especially ruminative year, I started pondering where this fits into the list of literary activities that are not creative writing: readings, social media, agenting, editing, reviewing, criticism, publishing, awards, conventions, conferences, affinity groups, etc. I don’t have any grand conclusions to articulate here, other than that I feel like the list is an attempt on my part to engage a little more fully with and contribute to the Weird-o-sphere.

And on the off chance you’re reading this and don’t know what weird fiction is? Here’s Stephen Graham Jones‘ Flowchart of the Weird [BoingBoing; Weird Fiction Review; flickr]:

Stephen Graham Jones’ Flowchart of the Weird

For Your Listening Enjoyment: The Outer Dark

Do you like weird fiction? The odds are reasonable if you are reading this that you do, and the odds seem conversely small that, if you do, you haven’t heard about Scott Nicolay‘s new radio show, The Outer Dark, [Project iRadio][iTunes] where he interviews leading lights in the Weird. If you haven’t, however, check it out!

Thus far I’ve only listened to his interview of Livia Llewellyn, but it was a corker. Livia says miscellaneous interesting and horrifying things, and Scott interviews her from a position of real knowledge about the Weird, which not every interviewer has. This week’s interviewee is Mr. Gaunt himself, John Langan, and previous interviewees have included S.P. Mikowski and  Jayaprakash Satyamurthy. I have a lengthy patch of home improvement looming in just a couple days and expect to catch up with the rest of the interviews then.