A quiet week.

I was going to do some writing on the train this week on my journey to and from London for my real job, but I was too tired so I didn’t. I did, however, have a nice conversation with two ladies who saw me proofreading Gary McMahon’s Different Skins and wanted to know was I doing it for a job, or because I was a pedant! It’s not work, replies I, it’s a pleasure – and I am a pedant, but that’s not why I’m doing it… I spend a good journey essentially trying to convert them to being fans and trying to persuade them to go and buy some of my stuff, or the stuff written by my friends. Dunno what the outcome will be – the two ladies (who I think were in a relationship with ech other, lest you start to accuse me of some underhand chattery-uppery - I’m a married man, you know!) were going to London to see one of their dads getting an OBE, so they had other things on their mind besides listening to a fat horror author engaging in the hard sell…

Not much else to tell – Jason vH has said I may see some very draft cover ideas soon, and Chris Roden is proofing Lost Places at the moment, so I may see the galley soon. Can’t wait, on both counts… It looks increasingly likely that there’s going to be a big launch/signing event at World Horror Convention 2010, with six Ash Tree Press authors present, which should be excellent. I’ve bought a new shirt in readiness…

Reviews: This week, I watched the remake of The Fog. Oh, John Carpenter, how could you let them? The scriptwriter and director seem to have completely missed what made the original Fog such a good movie: we don’t want to see the backstory played out in front of us, and we certainly don’t want a heroine (the drippy Maggie Grace) who has some bizarre psychic link to the doomed lepers. Apart from one or two nice images, this was an entirely expected disappointment. I shall no more about it except this: Selma Blair, you are a good actress but your voice is about 1/100th as sexy as Adrienne Barbeau’s, and she shall forever be Stevie Wayne for me. Accept no imitations!

Also read two Brian Keene novels, Ghost Walk and Castaways. Entirely brainless, not particularly well written, mostly cliched but still a fun way to spend a couple of hours. Don’t buy them, but maybe borrow them if you can be bothered…

Right, that’s your lot. Later, Lords and Ladies!

A good week.

A bit of history first: when it was clear that the Ghostwriter thing wasn’t happening for the many and varied reasons I have blogged about already(incidentally, fact fans, Ghostwriter have pretty much said that they’re concentrating on Chapbooks as opposed to proper books now – go figure. I wonder how those authors whose novels GWP have been saying they’re going to release for over a year now feel about that?) and I moved over to Ash Tree Press, I started to think about what to do next. It’s always seemed to me that I came at this whole writing thing ass-backwards in some way – my first story was published in a high-end anthology, nominated for a World Fantasy Award and taken for reprinting in both the Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and the Very Best of Best New Horror, my second story was in another high quality anthology, my third is in Ellen Datlow’s latest, and so on. It’s odd, but I began to worry that I’d not put enough time in at the coalface, as it were – it might not make much sense from the outside, but I began to think that I needed to go back and plug a gap or two, the main one being that I’d never had a story published in a magazine. Rejections from magazines, yeah, loads of them - but no acceptances. Consequently, my main aim became to have a magazine publication, and I started to think about what to send, and where to send it. My first submission was a story called The Knitted Child which I sent to Black Static. This week, I heard back from Andy Cox, the editor, and guess what? He likes it and has accepted it for publication!

Yay me!

Of course, with that aim dealt with, I have to decide what to do next. I’m still enjoying writing the short stories, and may well have enough new stuff to think about a second collection soon, although I have no ideas about who to pitch it to or who might want it. The novel is still in limbo – I’m not writing any more on it until I hear back as to whether the publisher actually wants it or not because I don’t want to commit to a big project without a solid reason. I’m convinced that the novel is a good one (good central idea and story, lots of action and horror), so I’m hoping it’ll be received favourably and that it’ll find a home soon, but until then, it can stay in limbo and percolate.

The other writing-related news from this week is that I spent a pleasant 45 minutes talking the Jason Van Hollander about my cover. It was another of those moments that make me feel like a fake and that at any moment someone’s going to tap me on the shoulder and say, Okay Unsworth, the game’s up… I mean, here’s a world fantasy award-winning artist with hundreds of excellent books covers under his belt, and he’s talking to me about my cover and apparently listening to my responses! What? Eh? How has that happened? How has no one noticed that the world has gone madly out of kilter? However, until they do, I’m just going to roll with it and keep my head down… Jason outlined some of his ideas for the cover, all of which I loved (but which I’m not going to tell you – you can just buy the book when it comes out!), so now I simply have to wait and see what comes out of Jason’s pen. The suspense is killing me!

Beyond that, I’ve done very little this week. With it being Halloween, I did hope that the TV stations might make an effort, but no. We get a repeat of Halloween (and before you start, it’s a marvellous film and my joint first favourite slasher flick along with Black Christmas, it’s just uninspired programming) and The Host (which is good but I’ve seen). However, it was fun to see my friend Stephen Volk on television on Tuesday talking about his seminal TV ghost story Ghostwatch, and more fun to see clips of the various great TV ghost stories – it reminds me of why I like supernatural stories so much in the first place, and gives me high targets to aim for. Onwards and upwards, friends…

Reviews: Rogue is a killer crocodile movie by Greg Maclean, who directed Wolf Creek. It was made a couple of years ago but has only recently come out on DVD in the UK, and it’s great fun. It’s not as good as Alligator (the benchmark against which all crocodile/alligator movies must be judged), but it’s certainly better than the other killer croc releases recently (Black Water et al, all of which I suspect were cheap rip-offs made to cash in on Rogue and which made it out faster than it did). Rogue is smart, fast, jumpy and tense, and despite a silly ending, it’s well worth watching. The special effects are good, the acting good and it manages to catch the humid atmosphere of the outback excellently. Recommended.

The Scream by John Skipp and Craig Spector is about 21 years old now, and it shows. I remember reading this at the time it came out and liking it, but now it seems too loud and in-yer-face. The story concerns the battle betrween good and evil (embodied by a literally demonic rock band and groups of extreme Christians) and the people that get caught between them and although it’s got some powerful bits, it’s a disappointing reread. Partly it’s becaue books and stories about rock music never capture the primal power of music (and always write really bad lyrics for their rock songs!), but it’s also because Skipp and Spector’s rather casual, matey style of writing (clearly iunfluenced by Stephen King) simply grates after a while. The story itself seems disjointed and although the characters are drawn with depth, there’s often too much time spent on their backstories rather than moving the action along. It’s not bad, exactly, but it isn’t the rush I remember it being at 14… At some point I’ll reread The Light at the End, but I bet that hasn’t aged well either. Oh well…

The Changeling: Great late 70s ghost story starring George C Scott, made at a time when heroes of films were allowed to be sedentary, fat and wear cardigans without any apparent sense of irony, this is a chilly, tight movie that everyone should hunt out and watch. There are lots of genuinely spooky moments, some real depth of emotion in the acting and the best sceance put onto film. Recommended with bells, and still available on DVD.

Nothing. Nada. Zip.

Got a polite rejection, wrote another story, drank too much, slept not enough. Typical week.

More next week, assuming something happens worth talking about.

A quiet, contemplative week.

As I currently have no deadlines to aim for and not commitments to fill, my writing recently has been entirely for pleasure. Sort of. This week, I took Traffic Stream to my writer’s group and their feedback, along with the feedback from others in my critical circle, helped me to sort out the 3rd and final edit of it (bar tweaks or sudden flashes of inspiration!).  I have absolutely no idea what to do with it, where to send it or even whether to bother sending it out at all, but it’s been fun writing it. I hope it’ll find a home one day…

I also took the plunge and risked reading The Thirteen again, which I’d been avoiding doing. It’s odd, but every time I thought about this particularly story (short novella, really) it popped up in my head as needing lots and lots and lots of work, so every time I thought about opening the file, I’d find an excuse not to…. I couldn’t put it off any longer, however, so this week I risked having a look, fully expecting to have to  spend ages reworking, adding, deleting and generally buggering about with stuff, but you know what? It wasn’t that bad! I don’t know why it had taken on such a flawed view in my mind – I think it’s something to do with just how long the story’s been hanging around waiting to be finished, and it’s length (there’s more room for error in 14000 words than there is in 3000!). It’s by no means perfect, but most of my fears were, I’m glad to say, not proved real – The Thirteen is not too bad. I pulled together a second draft (third, really, after the initial ‘finished it, oh no just had another idea for it’ moment a couple of weeks ago) which I’m surprisingly happy with. It’s being sent out to those people who have the time/inclination to read something that long and comment, and then I’ll see what I can do with it.

So, what’s next? Well, I need to try to get some feedback about the novel chapters I sent in, to see if it’s worth carrying on with, so I’m going to chase that soon. In the meantime, however, it’s another story: something about a house that appears and disappears in the rain, I think…

Holding my contributor copies of Lovecraft Unbound. Note At The Mountains of Madness hoodie...

News and Reviews:

Lovecraft Unbound is picking up lots of positive reviews! In fact, I haven’t read a negative comment about it yet, so I’d suggest that those of you who are Lovecraft fans might want to consider picking it up… Of course, the fact that none of the reviews have picked out my story for comment is a bit disappointing, but at least they’ve not been saying things like “…only let down by Simon Kurt Unsworth…” or “…the weakest tale in the collection is by Simon Kurt Unsworth…” so thank heavens for small mercies! The november issue of Dead Reckoning magazine calls it “…a sterling Lovecraftian anthology that surely ranks with the best in the field” and Kelly Shaw, in her blog review, calls it “…very well rounded collection [that] offers a wide range of stories”

Other stuff: my friend, the excellent poet Norman Hadley (www.normanhadley.com) launches his new collection, Stinging the Sepia on Saturday, 07 November 2009 15:00 at Corner Bookshop, St Thomas’ Weind, Garstang. I can highly recommend Norman’s work, so I urge you (as well as picking up Lovecraft Unbound to get this or any of Norman’s other work. Trust me on this.

Okay, that’s pretty much it. I do have novel and movie reviews to write up, so when they’re done, I’ll post them here. Coming soon, I’ll pass comment on an Ellen Datlow anthology about cats, a Skipp and Spector novel from about 1989, the enormous crocodile movie Rogue and (possibly) the aforementioned Lovecraft Unbound. Until then, Lords and Ladies, so long!

A quiet week.

I’m in a lacunae (I’m such a writer!) at the moment where the writing’s concerned. This week I managed to write the first draft of a short, odd story called Traffic Stream which I’m pleased with but I know needs some work. I don’t have a place in mind for it, so I’ll see when it’s finished where I feel like sending it. Assuming I decide it’s any good, of course. This week, my plan is to sort out final drafts of The Thirteen and Traffic Stream, so that the decks are cleared for whatever comes next. I also heard about two anthologies that I may be able to submit to, one of which will need me to write something new I think. The other I can send an existing story to which will save some time. Wish me luck…

Lovecraft Unbound

The only other thing that happened this week was the arrival of my two contributor copies of Lovecraft Unbound! Very exciting! I haven’t managed to actually read any of it yet, but it’s a good looking book, and the table of contents contains some excellent authors. I mean, who’d imagine that I’d end up in a book with Michael Chabon? Or Joyce Carol Oats? Not me! I’ll let you know what I think of it when I read it, and hope to post up a picture of me holding the books (not because I’m vain enough to think people will want to see me and the book, before you ask, but because Ellen Datlow, the editor, has asking that we do it if we can, and who am I to refuse?).

Right, that’s your lot. Told you not much had happened. More next week, and some reviews. Promise. Probably.

Later, Lords and Ladies.

One rejection, one honourable mention and one personal victory.

Let’s start with the rejection: I heard this week that a story I submitted for consideration for an anthology called Cthulhu 2012 was rejected. It’s a shame, but it’s not all bad news – the editor said that the story was well written and unique, but didn’t contain enough of an apocolyptical theme specifically linked to 2012 for him to accept it. h well. The story is one that I think may be submittable elsewhere, so we’ll see what comes about with in it. In the meanwhile, onwards and upwards…

…to the Honourable Mention (technically, Honourable Mention (Longlist)). Ellen Datlow has posted the list of honourable mentions from her first Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology. Now, I’m not in the book itself, but my story Old Man’s Pantry (from the Ash Tree Press anthology Shades of Darkness) was given an HM on the publisher’s website – along with another 530 excellent stories (I haven’t read them all – I’m trusting Ellen on this one that they’re excellent!). It’s nice to know that OMP didn’t vanish completely without trace…

…unlike my story The Thirteen nearly did. The Thirteen was first conceived and started almost 5 years ago, and the first part was written at the time, but then it stalled. At irregular intervals, I’ve revisited it, trying to work out a story block in the middle – I’ve always had a beginning and an ending, but bridging the gap between the two has proved problematic. For a long time, I thought this was a dead story, and that I’d never get past the issue of how I got my hero from the initial encroaching of the supernatural to the dramatic climax in his office, but recently, and couple of new things occurred to me and it started to feel more like a living thing again. Over the past two weeks, The Thirteen has revived itself and has finally been finished, with the final word typed late on Friday night. And then a funny thing happened…the story changed. All these years, I’ve been treating it as a fairly simple (although hopefully scary!) ghost story, and about fifteen minutes after I finished it, an idea occurred to me that changed it a lot. I spent a frantic few hours on saturday rewriting and adding, and have now finished the first (very, very rough) draft. It’s got a much bleaker tone, I think, than the original version, but I like this one much more. It’s also far longer than I expected, with the first draft checking in at just shy of 14,000 words. I’m sure it’ll trim in the edits, but I’m enormously pleased that it’s finally done. It’s always felt like a story I wanted to finish, I’ve just always been missing a critical piece of it until recently. Plus, now it’s done, it’s one less thing off my Work In Progress list (currently standing at an unmentionable amount of stories). So, now it’s on with another story. Something about vehicles, I think…

Later, Lords and Ladies.

Aaah, FantasyCon!

Last weekend, I attended my second British Fantasy Convention (FCon to those of us who are confortable with the parlance of the knowing, oh yes), and I had a whale of a time. At last year’s FCon, I was involved in the signing for the Mammoth Book of best New Horror 19, but seeing as I didn’t make the cut for Mammoth 20, and seeing as the launch of my Ghostwriter Publications collection fell through, this year I wasn’t involved in any ‘work’  so I was able to just enjoy myself.  And boy, was it fun!

Me and Ramsey Campbell get writer's cramp for the sake of our art!

Highlights of the weekend included going for a curry on the Friday night with Mark Morris (who really, really needed to go to bed and get some sleep!), Stephen Volk, Tim Lebbon, Rob Shearman and 14 other horror luminaries. Both the food and company were great, and the beer flowed… On Saturday, I ended up doing some real work, signing 250 sheets for the forthcoming limited edition of the Very Best of  Best New Horror (sitting next to Ramsey Campbell in the main bar). As well as writer’s cramp (I thought it’d take about 10 minutes but it took me almost an hour!), Steve Jones bought me a drink and Ian Watson, the Master of Ceremonies, brought me a glass of sparkling wine. Not bad for a Saturday lunchtime. Shortly after, I did a reading of my stories The Knitted Child  and The Baking of Cakes, which seemed to go down well. By this time, Steve Duffy had turned up so I finally got to meet the great man, which was excellent (and reassuring – it’s always slightly worrying meeting someone you’re friends with online in case they’re a dick in real life, which Steve most assuredly isn’t). I also managed to see Gary McMahon and John L Probert’s joint reading – Gary’s farting ghost story was moving, funny and disgusting and John’s story (performed with gusto and relish) was another of his superb, blackly hysterical tales. I went to the signings of the Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20 and the BFS 2009 yearbook (getting personalised signatures in my books at both of them – nerd? yep.)

Saturday night, and it was more curry, this time with the mob from the Ramsey Campbell message board (again, about 19 of us!) and then it was back for the BFS awards where we watched Allyson Bird win for best collections (hurrah!) and the Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19 win for Best

Would you buy a used horror novel from this man? Jospeh D'Lacey drinks his cocktail with clear signs of enjoyment.

Anthology (double hurrah!). Then it was to the bar, and the evening gets hazy…I remember regaling Ray Russell with tales of IVF, and Joseph D’Lacy trying to persuade me to try a weird cocktail (I resisted, dear reader, sticking with the far more sensible option of Jack Daniels and ice). The evening ended up in Sunday morning, with a crosswise stagger back to my hotel and far too little sleep before the last day of FCon arrived.

Sunday was a subdued affair, and a chance to have a last catch-up with friends new and old. I spent some time with Stephen Volk and Allyson Bird and a bunch of other people before taking my goodies and sloping off for the train. FCon 2009 was as much fun as 2008, and once again the thing that made it special was the sheer niceness of everyone I met. I caught up with old friends (Stephen Volk, Mark Morris, Ray Russell, Rob Shearman, Gary McMahon and all the others I forgotten to name, take a bow) and made some excellent new ones (Steve Duffy, Allyson Bird, Joseph D’Lacey, Matthew Riley (who had the good taste to introduce himself to me by saying “I’ve been watching your career with interest”!), Mick and Debbie Curtis, Emily McMahon, all the others who I’ve also missed, it was great to meet you!). I bought some stuff (although not much – I was being restrained), drank some stuff (mostly guinness – and I wasn’t that restrained!) and basically, had a blast. Roll on World Horror 2010 and FCon 2010, I say!

One last thing: although it hasn’t marred my FCon experience, a couple of things have caused some ripples since it finished – the discussion  around the ommission of women writers from the new BFS In Conversation book and some of the online debate around Allyson Bird’s win for best collection. The former was a clear error, but Guy Adam (BFS Preseident)’s apology is, I think, entirely appropriate and should close the matter down. The attitude to Allyson Bird’s win, as expressed on the Vault of Horror board, is less easy to forgive – whilst I didn’t like the way the original post described Bull Running for Girls, it was at least simply an opinion on the book. However, Mark Samuels’ subsequent posts moaning about BRFG’s win being down to pressure from the publishers rather than people simply liking the collection are at best unprofessional (so you lost; grow a skin and deal with it) and at worst offensive and condescending both to the author and to the readers who enjoyed and voted for her collection (who, according to Mark, clearly can’t make their own minds up and have allowed themselves to be forced by external pressure to vote for a book that he clearly believes was less worthy of victory than his own tome). The post FCon world seems to be a bit tense and aggressive – calm down, I say! Life’s too short…

Oh yeah – writing and reviewing? Nope. Not at all. Try again next week.

Well, the Ghostwriter thing is finally sorted, in that my outstanding items arrived – I got back from work to find 26 chapbooks waiting for me. I’ll never get the other things I still believe that I’m owed (and there was no sign of the royalties Neil had mentioned to me), but never mind, at least this way I get to walk away without having any further links or dealings with a company that I have ceased trusting or respecting. And that, my friends, is a result of sorts – it may have ended up as a disappointment in some ways, but it’s taught me valuable lessons about how I should deal with companies and individuals. And besides, who wants extra copies of a book riddled with typos? Not me! It also means I can finally put all my concentration into Lost Places, the forthcoming Ash Tree collection which I guarantee will be a thing of beauty and, of course, will have excellent content!

Not much has happened this week – I’ve been working away from home and my original plan was too do some writing, but when it came down to it, I simply couldn’t be bothered so I gave myself a week off. I did revise the swearing story, which (thanks to the harsh but fair criticisms of my friend Will) has been tightened and improved (I think). I have absolutely no idea what to do with it, but it’s been fun writing it. As for what’s next, I don’t know – there are a few stories bouncing around in my head, so I’ll probably pick one of them and crack on with it. It’s FCon next weekend, and it looks like I’m out for a curry every night, so God only know what I’ll look and smell like by Monday morning – I may be craving greenery and be prepared to eat the shrubbery by then…

Right, that’s your lot for this week. Short but sweet, friends!

Oh, no, wait – one more thing: I now have copies of my two chapbooks Button and Marley’s Haunting (both, I hasten to add, without typos!) to sell. Both stories have received good feedback and there won’t be any more of the chapbooks made, so these are genuine rarities – once these copies are gone, that’s it. If you’d be interested in purchasing a signed copy of either for only £1.75 including postage, email me and we’ll sort it out.

Not much has happened this week. After the excitement of the last few weeks, and the ups and downs of the situation with Ghostwriter and the subsequent excellent Ash Tree Press developments, I’ve been glad of the rest to be honest.

The Ghostwriter situation, incidentally, is in a holding pattern. Neil still hasn’t sent me the stuff he has agreed he owes but the date I gave him by which I expect the items to arrive hasn’t come yet, so I don’t suppose the items will arrive until then. September the 11th is their due date, so we’ll see what happens.

The Ash Tree Development (can you hear me smile? can you? can you? I am, you know! right across my face) is still great, but hasn’t moved on any further (not that I’d have expected it to). We’re into the period of finetoothcombing and proofreading, so it’ll be awhile before I have anything worth reporting, I expect. Soon as I know, you’ll know. Well, maybe a bit after I know, but you get my drift.

I wrote another story this week, but feedback on it has been mixed so I need to make some changes to it – in particular, I have to stop one of my characters talking like “someone out of an Ayn Rand novel”. Hmmmm. Tough gig… I have a couple of long train journeys over the next week (plus some time in hotel rooms) so my hope is to beat it into shape, as well as trying to complete another couple of stories on the Work In Progress list. We’ll see how it goes, given that I also have proper work to do which sadly has to take some precedent. Apparently, if people pay me, they expect me to do a good job! Weird, huh?

Review: So, anyway, I finished The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which I can’t recommend highly enough. It’s brilliant, both witty and thrilling, and it’s also unashamedly Jewish. That sounds like a strange thing to put in a review, but it matters – Jewishness is central to the storyline, and fills every sentence. Chabon never once expects anything less of his readers than full attention and understanding, and never ‘dumbs down’, instead expecting his readers to work with him to understand and accept the details of the cultures and religions he describes. There are jokes in the Yiddish, but also a clear sense of another culture, one that’s vibrant, flawed and complex. At its heart, the book is a noir-style police procedural, and it’s important to say that, whatever else it is, this novel has a decent mystery at its centre. Who killed the junkie in the hotel room? Where will all those  dispossessed Jews live? Why the obsession with chess? Read and find out! A definite must-read.

Okay, that’s your lot. I’m tired and I have a week’s work away from home to sort out. Later, lords and ladies.

This last couple of weeks has been a bit of greatness and a bit a crap, if I’m honest.

We’ll do the crap first: I won’t go into any details here, but I’ve been involved in discussions with Ghostwriter Publications regarding what I see as outstanding items owed to me, and the discussions have left a somewhat unpleasant taste in my mouth. I’m sad to say that they haven’t been particularly fruitful from my point of view and whilst I’m relatively sanguine about it all, it has confirmed that my decision to stop working with GWP, and it’s director Neil Jackson, was entirely the right one. It came to the point where I had to make a simple decision:  do I chase GWP through the courts, or do I let it go? Do I have the time or, indeed, the inclination? And even if I have the time , is my time worth wasting in having to carry on dealing with someone I can longer trust. And the answer is no; the situation, apart from being mostly boring, isn’t worth the effort it’ll take, not really, because I have more exciting things to do. I’ll take what Neil has agreed he owes me (assuming it arrives soon) and then I can walk away from this whole sorry mess. So, the final thing I’ll say about it all is this: I appreciate that the situation is specific to Neil and me, and I hope that his relationship and dealings with his other authors don’t turn out like mine and his did, but to anyone thinking of getting involved with GWP I would advise great caution.

On to bigger and brighter things: the cover artist for my Ash Tree Press collection has been confirmed as Jason van Hollander! Jason is a World Fantasy Award-winning artist whose covers have graced a number of other Ash Tree books – his covers for their anthologies are simply stunning. Jason’s website is here: http://www.jasonvanhollander.com/index.html - go and be astounded. At this point I have no idea what Jason will do for Lost Places but I’m absolutely sure it’ll be superb. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to make suggestions, because (let’s face it) when you have an artist the calibre of Jason van Hollander doing your cover, you just basically say “Whatever you want to do. Sir.” I can’t wait to see what he comes up with, and if Jason says he want to draw a picture of a daffodil wearing a trilby, who am I to argue? Hope he doesn’t, though…

Other news: I’ve rewritten the novel chapters and submitted them and I’m much, much happier with them. I editing them down by around 20%, and then slotted in some new supernatural gubbins, and the finished piece flows far better and faster. Clearly, I have no idea if they’re what the publisher’s looking for, but I can hope! I know I’m not going to hear back about them for a while, so I may well carry on with the next chapters, or spend some time with a new story I want to write about a plague of swearing. Watch this space.

Reviews

The first review this week is of the GWP anthology Creature Feature. Now, the first thing to say is that I’m a little biased about Creature Feature because a) I’m in it but b) my relationship with GWP isn’t great. In the interests of fairness, I’ll state straight up that the stories in this anthology are mostly wonderful, smart pulp creature stories that deserve to be read by as many people as possible, the cover’s eyecatching (although it’s slightly grainier than it looked in pictures posted of it on facebook and the GWP website) and it seems well bound. Creature Feature’s big problem is that  whoever proofread  it did a very poor job – it’s got quite a few basic typographical errors in it. The most glaring example occurs in Neil’s introduction, when he talks about Willie Meikle and Guy N Smith and then says that “These three gentlemen…” One might almost imagine that a third person was removed from the intro at the last minute but that no one bothered to read the rest of it to correct it for errors… It’s a shame because these kind of little things can affect the reading of the stories and can be taken to show, I think, a lack of respect for both the paying customer and the authors involved. Still, overall, it’s a good book and I’d certainly recommend it.

Full review next week, but I’m also reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which I’m enjoying hugely. Of course, it has nothing to do with the fact that Chabon and I are soon to be ‘bookmates’, as we both have stories in the forthcoming Lovecraft Unbound anthology…