Nature needs no touch-ups - Here thrive coral fungi

Ramaria ochraceosalmonicolor

See also the much better images of many beautiful and strange species in:
Fungi - Australian Rainforest curated by Black Diamond Images

Every dog has his story

THERE WAS A MAN who had a dog who had–for the good part of every day–never heard of H. P. Lovecraft, though this dog enjoyed his Will Cuppy, always licking his chops over the line, “The nuthatch cannot sing and does not try.” . . .

out today in the newest issue of the daringly heretical Lovecraft eZine

TABLE OF CONTENTS for Issue #13 - April 2012

Ecstasy of the Gold
by Stephen Mark Rainey

Scale Hall
by Simon Kurt Unsworth

The Dog Who Wished He’d Never Heard of Lovecraft
by Anna Tambour

The Ourorboros Apocrypha
by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

Over the Hills
by Victor Takac

This Inscrutable Light: A Response to Thomas Ligotti’s “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race”
an essay by Brandon H. Bell

Lovecraftian Art
Eric Lofgren & Jonny Christopher Ledford

CREDITS

Co-editor: A.J. French

Kindle version: Kenneth W. Cain

Issue cover: Ronnie Tucker (text: Stjepan Lukac)

Story illustrations: Nick Gucker, Robert Elrod, Galen Dara, Steve Santiago

Story readers: Justin Zimmer, Morgan Scorpion, Bruce L. Priddy, David Binks

Publisher & Editor: Mike Davis

The stories are beautifully set, the artwork is delicious, and zounds! Each story is also presented in an audio version. "Ibsen" highly approves of Bruce L. Priddy's reading of "The Dog Who Wished He'd Never Heard of Lovecraft", and who am I to disagree?

Thanks, Mike, for giving me the opportunity! Writing this was so much fun, it must be illegal.

"French crabs" and conchoidal fractures

The "French crab" tree being now 20 years old, finally decided to come out in her first fruiting. A rather enormous crop, too.

A Pippin of a Question
I always wanted French crabs, and put the question to all who know: What are these? For surely, if they are French crabs, I'm Dame Lobster Ther M'Dore, which reminds me to post this scrap here: "[A]n oyster long out of his shell (as is apt to be the case with the rural bivalve) gets homesick and loses his sprightliness"

The so-called "French crabs" posing with a Smyrna quince

Technical description: Many of these apples have stems that look like outie belly buttons

I'm not complaining, mind you. These are apples as apples should be, cracking with a sound like the earth breaking in half. These apples are so hard that one could be tempted to look for a Mohs Hardness rating, but that would be wrong. Mohs Hardness (not named after Mr Moh but Mr Mohs, who was born to be difficult) rates the resistance to scratching, and everyone who knows anything fun about MH knows that diamonds, which cream the competition when it comes to MH, can be smashed with a hammer. These apples would just laugh. You need your teeth for these gems, or a chisel.

The taste is so rich that the mouth is overwhelmed with appreciation.

Conchoidal fractures

"There were jellies, which had been shaking, all the time the young folks were dancing in the next room, as if they were balancing to partners. There were built-up fabrics, called Charlottes, caky externally, pulpy within; there were also marangs, and likewise custards,—some of the indolent-fluid sort, others firm, in which every stroke of the teaspoon left a smooth, conchoidal surface like the fracture of chalcedony …"
— Elsie Venner by Oliver Wendell Holmes (this is also the source of the oyster truism)

"It Should Happen To You!" - deserves fame in our time

"What is this craze to get well known?"

What a screwy question.

Gladys Glover wants to "be somebody", and is, once she pays for her name to be on billboards.

"It Should Happen To You" has similarities to "Diary of a Nobody" which was also, it must be said, a satire.

"Have an opinion"
- Step 3 in WikiHow's How to Become Famous Using Social Media

Yellow jelly and the ear that won't be lent

Thanks to rain, the leeches gallop and the fungi fruit.

Jelly fungus of a type that I wouldn't dare pin down

Not just wet behind the ear

Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear - antho to blast in June …

or earlier. Edited by Edwina Harvey and Simon Petrie, and with cover art by Les Petersen, this anthology from fresh young publisher, Peggy Bright Books, has such an intriguing title that part of the fun will be what that gun cotton did to these imaginations:

Joanne Anderton - 'The Bone Chime Song'
Adam Browne - 'The D____d'
Sue Bursztynski - 'Five Ways to Start a War'
Brenda Cooper - 'Between Lines'
Katherine Cummings - 'The Travelling Salesman and the Farmer's Daughter'
Thoraiya Dyer - 'Faet's Fire'
Kathleen Jennings - 'Kindling'
Dave Luckett - 'History: Theory and Practice'
Ian McHugh - 'The Godbreaker and Unggubudh the Mountain'
Sean McMullen - 'Hard Cases'
Ripley Patton - 'Mary Had a Unicorn'
Rob Porteous - 'The Subjunctive Case'
Anna Tambour - 'Murder at the Tip'

This year, the trees weren't parsimonious with persimmons

There can never be too many, though they ripen on every sill. How to stretch out the enjoyment? Slow-dry them in a warm oven. When they're hot, they're delicious as 'roasted' fruit. When they're cold, they're chewily scrumptious. And their looks separate the medlar-lovers from the common crowd.

Besotted with Persimmon! Previous Medlar Comfits posts:
The fruit for people who don't eat fruit
Cut persimmon
A persimmon calyx

Warning: CRANDOLIN to be served up by Chômu Press

To be released in time for the feasting season: my novel CRANDOLIN.

"A fairy tale Dostoevsky would have liked … It's like it was written by a demented chef"
— David Kowalski

The fit with Chômu Press is so perfect that I have hesitated to say anything here, for fear the feasting season will fall off the end of Time, or the End of the World will come at 2:00 the day before the release. So I hereby invoke the Writer's Prayer:

Please, Fate(s) or Who(m)ever,

Let The End of the World come the day after the release of my Important novel.

Chômu Press doesn't publish me-too fiction that you've read somewhere before wrapped in another title. They do publish the most intriguing and readable stuff. And they care about presentation. The productions are luscious, partly because they get some of the best artists involved as well as the superb designer, Anil D.Nataly. And mostly because they do insane amounts of work themselves.

Sure, I could have gotten CRANDOLIN published somewhere, but I have wanted the best, and the context I can put this press into, to show that I really do admire what they do as well as their guts, is to say that they're the Blaft of the UK. And anyone who's followed my love affair with Blaft knows that they're my favourite publisher in the world.

Quentin S. Crisp as editor is just what I always wanted for CRANDOLIN, and me! He's like a rain of vinegar hitting the mountain of me, a pile of bicarbonate of soda. He's what all great editors are — insidious drugs. I've been tripping for weeks. (And if you haven't read Crisp's own fiction, you're missing something major. He's a writer of classics, given the readership. I've just finished Shrike, and think it should be rereleased as a Popular Penguin, though it's hardly been read by anyone yet.)

Finally, CRANDOLIN is too original for agents to have been any more use than a sautéed umbrella. And I wouldn't have approached Chômu Press though it looks mouthwatering, because I grew too cynical about the whole fiction scene. So thank you, dear Starburst Poet (Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.), for not only picking me up from the muck of my own depression, but for being yet another wonderful editor; and then, after that, for turning out to be a big hairy yenta — a meddling matchmaker!

Of course, there are other brave readers to whom I am also indebted. They donated their blood to CRANDOLIN and their shoulders (at least) to me, without ever charging me for their earplug expenses. I shall reveal them as the novel turns.

Bloody Fabulous, Ekaterina Sedia's next anthology - TOC announced

Shove jingly toes up fashion's nose, and twirl your handkerchief!

As the editor, Ekaterina Sedia, has just posted,
BLOODY FABULOUS, the anthology of urban fantasy about fashion, now has a Table of Contents!

“Coat of Stars” Holly Black
“Savage Design” Richard Bowes
“Bespoke” Genevieve Valentine
“Dress Code” Sandra McDonald
“The Anadem” Sharon Mock
“The First Witch of Damansara” Zen Cho
“The Faery Handbag” Kelly Link
“The Truth or Something Beautiful” Shirin Dubbin
“Waifs” Die Booth
“Where Shadows Meet Light” Rachel Swirsky
“Capturing Images” Maria V Snyder
“How Galligaskins Sloughed the Scourge” Anna Tambour
“Avant-n00b” Nick Mamatas
“Incomplete Proofs” John Chu

What a party! I feel pinching-myself lucky.

As with other stories in this anthology, "How Galligaskins Sloughed the Scourge" is a reprint, but you probably haven't read it. HGStS was first published in Andromeda Spaceways edited by (the great fun to work with) Mark Farrugia.

As for Ekaterina Sedia, she isn't just an editor with excellent taste, as she proved with Paper Cities.

She is one of the most powerful fiction writers today, whose works are now breaking through English, and into fine editions like this one.


Get her latest novel, Heart of Iron.

Morley's "tin toys" that you can covet

Carrying on from yesterday's "For the child inside all of us": False Childhood Memory Syndrome by Lewis P. Morley

"For the child inside all of us": False Childhood Memory Syndrome by Lewis P. Morley

Utterly enchanting


and as unnecessary as laughter.

A few years ago I ran a feature and interview in my 'favourite artist' series — Lewis P. Morley's Tin Toys that Never Were.

Now, he's put out the book. It's not only filled with pictures of these fantastic flights into the realms of Wha?, but filled with stories about them. The picture of the cover above doesn't do it justice.

See for yourself, where you can not only buy the book but drool over every page in the preview.

Prizes encourage them - the success of self-loathing

What's more stale than a continental-breakfast roll in a package-tour hotel, less original than a dollar bill, and most deserving of a rubber corndog up each arse as the comfits for the judges?

(in my op.)

However
"It's the best short story of the year by an Australian crime writer," says Nevada Public Radio, "that gives a noirish twist to our fair city - it's a dark tale of hookers and death in the desert". Listen to their interview of the author, A.C. Patric — about this rising star of the Australian lit scene, and his soon-to-be-published collection, Las Vegas for Vegans.

Of course, not everyone has literary/cinematic sensibilities, or can understand the art of creating imitations and of imitating imitators. And like, you know, you don't need to visit the future to write about it. Anyway, some old bat calling herself 'aunty palin' complained: "It really spoils it for me that the author has never visited Vegas.

---

Read an edited version of the story, Fear and self-loathing, in Australia's premier newspaper, the Cultural Cringe Sydney Morning Herald.

The prize this story won is the inaugural Ned Kelly SD Harvey Short Story Award, which might make dead-Ned laugh. His legend is more full of shit than a feedlot.

Freed of a title

"We refuse to be called anything, nor to get manipulated."

So they got their way.

Review of The Company of the Dead by David Kowalski

Newly released in the UK, to be released in a couple of days in the US

I just posted the review below on Amazon UK, but what I didn't say is that I thought so highly of this novel when it was first published in Australia that I bought a couple of copies and sent them to a couple of folks in the US, hoping that they might review them and then possibly, a novel that should be published there, would be. The problem with that, though, is that this is a book for readers, not reviewers (who must look at 800-page books and think I could read 3 to this 1).

It's a meal and a half. So I highly recommend it for all those of us who love to indulge ourselves. Even reviewers!

Oh, and I should say that I did refer to David as 'the author' in the review, but he has become a dear friend over the years. However, his ability to write a novel plotted better than any war-room or cutting-edge motion-capture, and with seductive flow, doesn't mean I won't criticise that which I think he does poorly. When he wears a baseball cap to try to take 50 points off his IQ, it doesn't work.

Onwards!

Every reading will be newly rewarding

I usually hate both mysteries and twisted history because the mysteries depend on overly complex and ultimately unbelievable contrivance -- and the twisted histories, on simplistic and superficial pop myths we hold to be true. And I have also grown to hate novels that you could use as bludgeons.

So The Company of the Dead should have failed on all counts. Yet on all counts, it failed miserably to dissatisfy. It is a quite enthralling page-turner, filled to bursting with mysteries that are as natural to the story as wet is to the sea; action that you can see and can't help hear as you read; places that are so real, you'll probably (as I have) dream you'd been there; and utterly fascinatingly lethal toys-for-boys (and girls! which doesn't decrease lethality one bit). The author steers us through history with expert but unobtrusive authority. Best of all, the depth of story and characters is quite unmodern, in that this is the Great American novel that Michener would have wanted to write and almost did with his first novel; McCarthy has been trying to but hasn't quite reached, I think, because his novels are too one-dimensional emotionally; and Americans sure aren't likely to now, unless they free themselves of the whirlpool of the Iowa Writers' Factory, Tin House -- and all those schools of artificial artsmanship, posed amorality, and characters who can ultimately, only aspire to be handmaidens to an author's ego.

That the author is an ignorant first-time amateur who isn't even American but whose personality is obsessive about anything he gets into, probably saved him as much as (to name a few) Naguib Mahfouz's, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's, E. Nesbit's, Jack London's, H.H. Munro's, Winifred Watson's, James Tiptree Jr.'s, R.K. Narayan's, Raymond Chandler's, Laird Barron's, Jeffrey Ford's, Lucius Shepard's, Steve Aylett's, and (a novelist I have great expectations for) Jennifer Rohn's life experiences made them creators of what great reads can be, reads that are so multifaceted that they become like true old friends -- always well-met, and yet every time, leaving one with a feeling that there's more under the surface that we've still to appreciate.

This novel could have actually been longer than it is, as there is never a padded page. The characters are larger than the book, which itself, is larger than one unforgettable film. That the author assumes that readers are interested in history, place, in depth of character, in questions of what-if that go beyond celebrity and momentarianism, shows a wonderful respect for the public, and an optimism that I hope spreads further in the book and film trades.

~ ~ ~/

Read an excerpt

&
Have fun at David Kowalski's new blog. His first post is a trip into paranoia:

Top 5 Titanic Conspiracy theories…