Booklife

Jesse Bullington, the mad prophet of the North Florida woods, has done it again.  The Enterprise of Death, the follow-up to Bullington’s debut The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, has finally hit the shelves in all its lush, folkloric perversity. 

If you’re not familiar with Bullington’s work think… Jim Thompson egging a young Cormac McCarthy to write novels set in Renaissance Europe.  By the time you get the novels home from the bookshop, the pages are still wet with ink, sweat, and gore.
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Novelist J. M. McDermott lives in the future.  He writes on his smart-phone, archives his work across multiple e-mail addresses, and he use electronic spreadsheets to pre-write in various ways.  Yet, there is nothing mechanical or digital-feeling or… cold about his recently reprinted novel, Last Dragon.  If anything, McDermott’s prose is as tactile as silk and spider-webs, cured bamboo and tempered steel, flesh and bone.  You can hear the brush moving ink across the page:

Esumi, my love, come to me.  I will take care of you…  I will hold you close.  I touch this vellum parchment and remember your rough skin.  My stylus scratches into the page, and I remember my fingernails across your back.

Last Dragon is the intricate story of revenge and justice–character-rich fantasy that is both hard to categorize and harder-still to put down.  Originally printed in Wizards of the Coast’s now-defunct hardback Discoveries line in 2008, the novel has been rescued from the limbo of Wizards’ dead line by Apex Book Company and Jason Sizemore.
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Kenneth Hite’s living the dream.  He stays up all night.  Wakes at 1 PM.  Only wears pants when—if–he leaves the house.  Of course, he’s also written about 60 books, so it’s not as though he’s slacking. 

As a full-time freelancer, Hite is almost constantly stumping new clients, tending to current clients, and playing whack-a-mole with deadlines.  Spend 20 minutes talking to Hite and you won’t know whether you should take notes or run screaming into the night.  Or both.

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Angry Robot Books has opened the doors to unsolicited manuscripts for March.  That’s right, they’ve put out an open call.  This month.  There’s only one week left, so hurry, hurry, and read the submission guidelines.

Angry Robot is an England-based, global imprint specializing in “modern adult science fiction, fantasy and everything in between.”  (It’s that “everything in between” that gets me excited.)  Their roster includes Dan Abnett, Guy Adams, Lauren Beukes, Maurice Broaddus, Aliette de Bodard, Matt Forbeck, J Robert King, Chris Roberson, Gav Thorpe, Lavie Tidhar, and Kaaron Warren.

I am irrationally excited about Angry Robot’s open call, not because I plan to send in a manuscript, but because I’ve yet to read an Angry Robot book that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy.  Likewise, I’ve yet to even see an Angry Robot book that I did not want to snatch up, rush home, and read.  Right then.  Right now.

A couple of days ago, I got in touch with Lee Harris, an editor at Angry Robot, and asked him why Angry Robot was opening the doors to unsolicited manuscripts.
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Jason Sizemore is the owner and operator of Apex Publications.  I first encountered Jason at a   bookstore in Lexington, KY.  I sat behind him in the audience at a fiction reading.  I knew Sizemore as “the guy who does the horror magazine” and I’d wanted to tell him how much I admired his work, but there was too much of a crowd.  I figured he was probably a pretty interesting guy—people who are that into horror fiction usually are.  So are people who start magazines.  Usually.
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Mark Allan Gunnells was in a dry spell.  He’d gone a year without selling a story.  He was getting discouraged, but he kept writing horror stories, novellas, and gay fiction.  Gunnells’ dry spell broke, finally, this winter with the acceptance of not one, not two, but three books! 

Gunnells’ zombie novella, Asylum came out last December from Apex Book Company’s relatively new imprint, The Zombie Feed.  Then came Whisonant/Creatures of the Light, two novellas in one binding, from Sideshow Press.  Pre-orders are open for Gunnells’ third book, Tales from the Midnight Shift, Volume 1, which takes its name from Gunnells’ day job as a security guard. 

For the last seven years Gunnells has maintained a steady output.  His secret?  He writes while at his day job.

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