Writing Project Updates: Harlem Smoke & Last Dark Ride

First off, a bit of old news (taken from my Facebook page from January 14th of this year): 

"Well, seeing as they've mentioned it on both Facebook and their website, it looks like my novel Harlem Smoke will be published by Snuggly Books at some point in the future. Obviously I'm very excited about this because, as I've said before, Snuggly is certainly one of my favorite modern publishers: I like how they not only put out books by current writers but also reprint a lot of older, more obscure books (such as their Jean Lorrain reprints). More news on this as it becomes available."

Now, as for more recent news:

My third short story collection, Last Dark Ride, is mostly complete. Of course there's still some work to be done on it: some minor rewriting, along with the editing and proofreading, but at least the bulk of the hard work (that is, the actual writing) is done. Hopefully it'll be ready to begin shopping it around to publishers this summer. At first I was worried that it was shorter than my second collection, but in fact, at around 92,000 words (which came to around 220 pages), it actually ended up being around 10,000 words longer.

The table of contents (which may end up being shuffled a bit):

1. Home Invasion
2. The Man Who Murdered His Muse
3. Black Noise
4. The Lovers Reversed
5. XYschaton
6. Epistles From The Sunken Track
7. A Gig at Thanatos
8. The Madonna of the Cobwebs
9. Cannons
10. Snapper’s Salvation
11. Chaoskampf
12. The Lemming Syndrome (bonus)

One thing that differentiates this collection from my first two is that there's no gimmick: unlike GRIMOIRE the stories aren't interconnected to form a larger narrative, and unlike AUTOPSY OF AN ELDRITCH CITY they aren't all set in the same location. For better or worse it's just a collection of short stories, but that's the price one pays when one includes stories that have been published elsewhere, I suppose (as a small handful of these have been).

As the title indicates I pretty much plan for this to be my last pure collection of horror/Weird Fiction stories. I've been writing such tales for almost a decade now (this August will mark the ten year anniversary of the writing of "Mauve Movies," my first true Weird Fiction story), and after two prior collections (plus the upcoming novel Harlem Smoke), I feel that I've pretty much tapped that vein for all it was worth, and no longer have anything to prove to myself. This does not mean I will never write such a story again; it merely means that any future collections I do will be more eclectic in terms of genre/subject matter/themes and so on. Or, to quote Clive Barker from the introduction he wrote for the 10th anniversary edition of his BOOKS OF BLOOD (and which I reuse as the final epigraph of this new book): “I saw myself as a man who runs a freak show, pounding on a drum, summoning up an audience to gawp at my collection of mooncalves and bottled fetuses. That side of my nature has become a good deal more subdued of late. I did my yelling and my drumming, I made my catalogue of excesses, and finally, I suppose, grew a little weary of the show.”