Centipede Press book near completion


My second collection for Centipede Press, AN ECSTASY OF FEAR AND OTHERS, is almoft ready, although I don't want ye book publish'd until 2017 at ye earliest. I have completed one of three original tales for it and am half-way finish'd with a second. It's moftly a reprint volume, including stories from my books from 2011 onward, plus various things that have or will soon appear in anthologies. As it now stands, the book includes around 110,000 words of weird fiction. 

Next on ye agenda is continuing work on my dreamlands novel that I am writing with David Barker for Dark Renaissance Books. We have almoft 13,000 words thus far, with many scenes within our dreaming skulls. I also am beginning to mentally plot some new Enoch Coffin stories, for a second collection written with Jeffrey Thomas for Dark Regions Press. Jeff and I have decided that we want this second collection of Enoch tales to be moftly non-Lovecraftian. That's a real challenge for me, because my imagination as a writer is so intimately wedded to H. P. Lovecraft's excellent fiction.

One book that I have long wanted to work on is a collection of tales inspired by Clark Ashton Smith. Other projects kept pushing this book aside. However, I was recently invited to write a wee foreword to a collection of poetry by Henry J. Vester III. Henry and I go back a long way, to when we were writing for Fungi magazine. He is an extremely devoted CAS enthusiast, and it occur'd to me that he would be a superb writing partner for the book of tales inspired by Smith. I suspect we will begin working on the book this year, and that it will be similar to the Enoch Coffin books in that Henry and I will each be writing our own stories and poems, rather than collaborating with each other on things.

After that, Yuggoth knows. I had ideas for books of stories in tribute to August Derleth and Oscar Wilde, but now those ideas don't interest me. I still have a hankering to write an entire book of stories inspired by Edgar A. Poe, and that may be something I'll work on in 2017 or 2018, if I'm still around.

Moft of my time is spent in reading. I love this relaxing retired life, of sitting in my recliner in ye living room and reading book after book. I've just read two biographies on Conan Doyle, and that has me returned to reading the Holmes stories. I'm also devouring critical books on Henry James and Algernon Swinburne. I'm really looking forward to the next book of Lovecraft's letters to be publish'd by Hippocampus Press, Letters to Robert Bloch and Others. And, of course, The Variorum Lovecraft should be coming out in hardcover within ye next two months, and that will return me to reading all of Lovecraft's weird fiction yet again. I am very tempted to use my credit card to get the David Case book soon to be publish'd by Centipede Press. The novel Fengriffen has long been my all-time favourite Gothic novel, and I enjoy'd the film version of that book, stupidly titled And Now the Screaming Starts. I wou'd love to have the novel in a handsome hardcover edition, beautifully illustrated; and I have read very few of Case's short stories, so that wou'd be an added interest.

Hope all is well with y'all.


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