YE STRANGE DARK ONE & OTHERS

Strangely, I am now almost finished with a new book, The Strange Dark One and Others, which I hope will see publication next year if Mythos Books can fit it into their publishing schedule. I worked, this week, on completely rewriting an old story, "Immortal Remains," which has not seen republication since its appearance in Sesqua Valley & Other Haunts. I wanted to stress the story's connection to Nyarlathotep, and I wanted to switch the character of the wee child with that of my dear daemonic Simon Gregory Williams, a character I so love writing about. Thus it is almost a completely new tale.

This is a book that I have had in the back of my mind for some time -- a collection of my tales of Nyarlathotep, who is my favorite of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. I now have one final story to complete, the title story for the book, and then I will turn in the collection to David Wynn. I really want to explore the legend of Nyarlathotep and tie him absolutely to Sesqua Valley; & I have long wanted to write something of a semi-sequel to my favorite H. P. Lovecraft tale, "The Haunter of the Dark." So I feel that this new story, "The Strange Dark One," can be of considerable length and (hopefully) substance.

Ye Contents of Ye Book:

Introduction by myself
"The Audient Void"
"Immortal Remains"
"One Last Theft"
"Some Bacchante of Irem"
"The Hands that Reek and Smoke"
"To See Beyond"
"The Strange Dark One"

"The Audient Void" is rather a crummy tale and I wasn't going to include it, but then I thought, "What the hell, let my early stuff be seen once in a while without being touched up," so I'll have it as the opening tale. Like Lovecraft, I am always rewriting my early work, expanding the initial inspiration of theme or visual motif or whatever, as HPL did, after writing "Dagon," then revisioning it as "The Call of Cthulhu." "Some Bacchante of Irem" was published last year in the wonderful magazine, Dark Discoveries, and it was given a honorable mention by Ellen Datlow. "To See Beyond" is my sequel to Robert Bloch's "The Cheaters," and will see its first publication in this book. It will be a wee book, aye, but one that has been on my mind for some few years, so it will be nice to see it actually published.

Comments

Popular Posts