Today Snuggly Books revealed the front cover art for Harlem Smoke, my upcoming horror novel (which is due to be published in January 2019).
They also released the official description for the novel:
"A gay, black antinatalist, Isaac Grimalkin isn’t your typical H.P. Lovecraft fan. Back in 1996 Isaac was the sole member of the Dunwich Posse, an experimental Lovecraftian horrorcore hip-hop act that released Harlem Smoke, a groundbreaking album chronicling the gruesome exploits of its titular monster. But when his album began to inspire real-life copycat crimes, Isaac abandoned his musical career at the height of his fame.
Flash-forward to 2015. Once again living in the city of Providence, Rhode Island, Isaac, now 38, has reinvented himself as a Pickman-esque painter of the morbid and the macabre. He wishes to forget his past; but his life gradually takes a hellish descent when an interview with a music magazine resurrects public interest in the Dunwich Posse. Meanwhile, local women are being murdered in a variety of grotesque scenarios that seem directly inspired by the lyrics of Isaac’s old, cursed album. As police suspicion mounts, Isaac begins investigating his family’s sinister history, in search of answers for just who (or what) the elusive Harlem Smoke actually is: an interior quest that could lead to his own annihilation.
Set in a social realist modern-day Providence where paradoxical dimensions of cosmic horror are only a stone’s throw away, Harlem Smoke is a creative re-imagining of the artistic potentialities of the Lovecraftian novel."
Flash-forward to 2015. Once again living in the city of Providence, Rhode Island, Isaac, now 38, has reinvented himself as a Pickman-esque painter of the morbid and the macabre. He wishes to forget his past; but his life gradually takes a hellish descent when an interview with a music magazine resurrects public interest in the Dunwich Posse. Meanwhile, local women are being murdered in a variety of grotesque scenarios that seem directly inspired by the lyrics of Isaac’s old, cursed album. As police suspicion mounts, Isaac begins investigating his family’s sinister history, in search of answers for just who (or what) the elusive Harlem Smoke actually is: an interior quest that could lead to his own annihilation.
Set in a social realist modern-day Providence where paradoxical dimensions of cosmic horror are only a stone’s throw away, Harlem Smoke is a creative re-imagining of the artistic potentialities of the Lovecraftian novel."
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Now that the Harlem Smoke project is nearing its publication date, I have to figure out what to do with Last Dark Ride, my 3rd short story collection. As it stands I have about 10 stories in it ready to go (originally it was 11 but one of them, "A Gig at Thanatos," was cut recently: that same story was also cut from my first collection, though it had a different name then, which should tell you all you need to know). But I haven't begun the process of sending it around to publishers yet, for the simple reason that one of its stories will be published separately as a chapbook next year, and I'll have to wait until at least a year afterwards before it can appear elsewhere. One thing I'm considering is just cutting that latter story out of the collection as well, and replacing it with something else, but not totally sure... after all, that would entail writing another story, something I'm loathe to do... or maybe I can just be patient and wait it out.
I also need to figure out what I'll be doing with my novella The Tangled Light, which I wrote last summer/fall. That's kind of an odd one (and I don't think I've even mentioned it much on here) but it's a semi-autobiographical (and also semi-fictional) account of the time I played a vampire doctor for a Halloween play in the 4th grade, in 1989. I say it's an odd book because I tried really hard in it to not mention Lovecraft once (ditto for Kenneth Grant, though I did nick the novella's title from the working titles of one of his own novellas).
Actually, what I REALLY need to do is figure out what my next major project will be, period, but that's a whole other issue!
