Postscripts to Darkness

Dec 19 2013

Interviews

An Interview with Amal El-Mohtar

Rhysling winner Amal El-Mohtar is the author of the acclaimed “The Honey Month.”

Our poetry editor, Dominik Parisien, chatted with author Amal El-Mohtar for our first issue, way back in 2011, about faery, uncanny beauty, the fantastic, and the Middle East. We are very pleased to make this one available online at long last.

Amal El-Mohtar is the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of 28 different honeys, and co-editor of Goblin Fruit, an online quarterly devoted to fantastical poetry. Amal has won two Rhysling awards, and her short story, “The Green Book,” was nominated for a Nebula. Her work has appeared in Apex, Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, Mythic Delirium, and a host of anthologies.

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Nov 22 2013

Interviews

An Interview with Michael Cisco

Michael Cisco won an International Horror Guild Award for his novel "The Divinity Student."

Michael Cisco won an International Horror Guild Award for “The Divinity Student.”

Shortly after NecronomiCon 2013, Founding Editor Sean Moreland chatted at length with author and professor Michael Cisco about Kafka, Tolkien, Poe, Lovecraft and Deleuze, among other things. Strap yourselves in.

Michael Cisco is one of the most innovative and influential creators of dark fantastic fiction writing today. His novel The Divinity Student (1999) won the International Horror Guild Award for best first novel, and his novel The Great Lover (2011) was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award, and was named Best Weird Novel of 2011 by the Weird Fiction Review. His short fiction has appeared in collections including The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, Leviathan III and IV, and Album Zutique, while a selection from his novella The Genius of Assassins was included in the compendium The Weird. Cisco is also a professor of English literature and a translator. He lives in New York City.

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Nov 16 2013

Anthology Contents

Our Review Process

We often get asked (as all publishers do) how we clear the lists of untold hundreds of submissions. Our review process is fairly standard because it’s simple and efficient; many editors reading this will nod heads in recognition. Simple as it is, however, it’s still a tournament of favourites, champions, bated breaths, clenched fists, wins, and losses. A great candidate inevitably goes down. So it goes.

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Oct 16 2013

Interviews

An Interview with Lee Thomas

Lee Thomas won Lambda Awards for “The German” and “The Dust of Wonderland”

The following interview with Lee Thomas first appeared in PstD Volume 2. Contributing editor James K. Moran chatted about conventions, zombies, and queer horror with Thomas in 2011.

Lee Thomas knows monsters, whether they’re in the closet or out. The Austin author has been transfixed by monsters since he was a child watching Boris Karloff in Frankenstein. In one iconic scene, the monster turns from a doorway to face the viewer — the effect on Thomas was visceral. He wanted to write so he could recreate a similar shocking effect. Thomas wrote for fun while growing up near Seattle, but it wasn’t until 2000 that he tried publishing his work. A public relations consultant in New York City, he joined a science fiction writing class taught by Terry Bisson. Bisson encouraged him to submit his stories to prospective markets. The aspiring author sent out six pieces. Four were accepted. Thomas claims he had beginner’s luck.

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Oct 12 2013

Events

Volume 4 Launch: Toronto

Hayden Tremholme reading for Tony Burgess

Hayden Trenholm reading for Tony Burgess

The official launch of Postscripts to Darkness Volume 4 in Ottawa (October 8) went very well indeed. Matt Moore and ChiSeries were phenom hosts, the readings were memorable, and we sold out of the new issue (fortunately we have more back at the ranch). Contributors Lydia Peever and Kate Heartfield were in fine form as they read their respective Volume 4 tales, Matt Moore teased the crowd with a great reading of John F.D. Taff’s “The Night Moves,” and Hayden Trenholm of Bundoran Press (fresh off his Aurora win for Blood and Water) mesmerized the room with his take on Tony Burgess’s “Soft Shell Story.” Volume 4 was also on offer at Can-Con, Ottawa’s annual spec fic convention (October 4-6), and the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair (October 12), so it’s been around town quite a bit this past week.

Now it’s Toronto’s turn. Join us at the ROUND Venue, 152A Augusta Avenue, on Friday, October 25, at 6:30pm, and grab your copy in person. PstD friend Michael Kelly of Shadows & Tall Trees will be on hand to read, as well as three Volume 4 contributors: Albert Choi, Laura deHaan and Graeme Lottering. We hope to see you there, and we promise to bring extra copies to the event this time.

Oct 03 2013

Press

Interview with PstD 4 Contributor Kate Heartfield

The Fulcrum gave some space to the talented Kate Heartfield, fiction writer and journalist whose short story, “Six Aspects of Cath Baduma,” is featured in Postscripts to Darkness Volume 4. A nice gift indeed for all involved on the eve of the issue’s unofficial proto-launch at Ottawa’s 2013 Can-Con. From Heartfield’s tale of warrior goddesses: The rest of us got better-looking when Cath gave us our powers. Well, better isn’t quite the word. The hues of our skin were just slightly off anything found in nature. Our eyes were just a little too big for our faces. The wind that blew our hair blew for no one else. That kind of thing. But the Washer looked like a woman, an ugly woman. She was pale, her eyes dark pits behind lank hair. She went naked above the waist in all weather, her dugs puckered in the cold, her long skirt dark with water and mould.

You can read the full interview here.

Sep 14 2013

Events

Volume 4 Launch: Ottawa

Behold the cover of Postscripts to Darkness Volume 4, illustrated by Dutch artist Tais Teng. We’re madly in love with it, and eager to unveil our latest collection on October 8th. Volume 4 is our largest issue by far, featuring 17 weird tales, 17 weird illustrations, poetry by Helen Marshall, and an interview with Tony Burgess, of Pontypool fame. Read our full list of contributors here.

Our launch coincides with ChiZine’s ongoing Chiaroscuro Reading Series, hosted by Matt Moore. This Chi/Scripts mashup is taking place on Tuesday, October 8th at Maxwell’s Bistro and Club (340 Elgin Street, Ottawa). You’ll find us upstairs with books, authors, illustrators, and other sundry talents, at 8pm. Order up a drink, some hors d’oeuvres, and settle in for a night of readings by Lydia Peever, Kate Heartfield, and a surprise guest.

If you can’t make it to Maxwell’s on the 8th, or need a sneak peek ahead of launch, we’ll also be attending Can-Con in Ottawa, Canada’s spec/fic conference, the weekend of October 4th to 6th. You can find us in the vendor’s room with preview copies of Volume 4 hot off the presses, and earlier issues as well. Our founding editor, Sean Moreland, will be speaking on a variety of panels, too. Hope to see you there.

Sep 05 2013

Teasers

A Bit of Burgess

(Image courtesy of National Post)

Attention Tony Burgess fans: Postscripts to Darkness Volume 4 features a new short story by, and an interview with, the man behind one of Canada’s best-loved cult movies, Pontypool (2008, directed by Bruce McDonald of Highway 61 and Hard Core Logo fame). Burgess, who wrote the novel the film is based on as well as the Genie-nominated screenplay, loves to turn smalltown Ontario inside-out like an infected eyelid, and he does it with cutting prose. He’s also the author of People Live Still in Cashtown Corners, The Hellmouths of Bewdley, and Fiction for Lovers: Freshly Cut Tales of Flesh, Fear, Larvae, and Love (to name a few). Here’s a taste of what’s forthcoming between our next set of covers:

My son has just told me that giants came in the night and took the family from the corner house. He said they weren’t impossible giants. They were possible ones. Not mountain sized, just big enough to be called giants. Big enough to pick us up. The little girl, he says, was lifted by the front of her head—her face—and carried like a fish. I don’t believe this but the boy’s details make me shudder and I take to the dining room window where we have a clear view of the corner house. There are bits of glass and sill in the snow. The windows are black and broken. I make for the phone but see my son run into the corner yard. –Tony Burgess, “Soft Shell Story”

Yeah, we’re pretty excited, too. Volume 4 hits our storefront October 8th.

Sep 01 2013

Reviews

Review: The Lords of Salem

A new review by James K. Moran

While House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects had interesting things to say about killer maniacs and their hapless victims, Rob Zombie’s latest effort, The Lords of Salem, fails on nearly all fronts to do justice to its subject: the eruption of old-school Salem witchcraft into the contemporary world. Salem features Sheri Moon Zombie as Heidi Hawthorne, a talk-radio DJ whose work, with the help of her colleagues, consists mainly of deriding and ridiculing guests on her show. When she starts listening to a mysterious record left at the radio station — a scene that echoes the emergence of Black Sabbath and other “music of the devil” bands — Heidi drops into a trance and becomes vulnerable to satanic forces.

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Aug 31 2013

Press

PstD 3 – The Speculating Canada review

The very fine and very kind Derek Newman-Stille of Speculating Canada recently reviewed Postscripts to Darkness Volume 3. Here’s some of what he had to say:

This will be the third Postscripts to Darkness volume that I have reviewed, and it is the best so far. The quality of the writing and artwork is even more impressive than the first two volumes. The stories in Postscripts continue to show their willingness to interrogate the dark, to go to places where other narratives shy away from. Along with monsters, conjurings, altered perceptions, gruesome creations, and horrifying deaths, Postscripts is willing to cast its dark light upon issues like alcoholism, drug addiction, family violence, incest, the death penalty, and other areas that are relegated to the dark or ignored because mainstream society doesn’t want to deal with them or finds them unsavory. Postscripts casts a particularly enlightening form of darkness upon the vision of those who seek to avoid the realities that serve as an undercurrent to their reality, and this particular flavour of horror is well suited for casting readers into a darkness they resist dealing with in their everyday lives.

You can read the full review here.

psssst…..dear darkness….are you there?