Weird Story

You may be familiar with the Weird classic book, The King in Yellow, if nothing else because of references to it in season 1 of True Detective. I wrote a story riffing off of it. Alphanumeric published that Weird Fiction, Performance of the King in Yellow.

“I never would have taken the summer job doing all the little things, like supplying props, designing the signs, making the masks, and ushering, for the stage play of The King In Yellow if I’d known the rumors of the effects of reading the second act. Not that I believed in the supernatural, but I would have thought few would attend, for fear of being taken down into the depths of psychosis after their last sane intermission of their lives. And I would have assumed the reverse placebo effect would make all involved with the production act out every shadowy wildness in their psyches they didn’t want to take responsibility for.

But I’m a guy who keeps commitments. And I’d signed on to rent a golden-painted attic with a slanted roof and a tiny closet along the floor, which was two blocks from the theater for three months. It took the last of my money, and I had a drawing habit to support, so I had no choice. I decided to embrace the adventure with a sense of glee. It would be macabre fun to watch the world around me go mad. I’d draw the distraught actors, the intrepid director, the fainted audience, and sell the art around Paris to the locals and tourists, as the event would no doubt garner some voyeuristic fame.”

Story in Triangulation: Parch –a little more about it

“An anthology of Short Speculative Fiction” from Parsec Ink. I’m thrilled by the literary quality of this tome. A little more about it:

The slick cover I think looks much better in person than the online image suggests.

The theme is dehydration.

Parsec Ink is a paying market.

The editor is Stephen V. Ramey. Here he blogs about Parch. He’s been published in places like Apocrypha and Abstractions, Every Day Fiction, Cease, Cows, Literary Orphans, Glass Eye Chandelier, Gone Lawn, TJ Eckleberg Review, Polluto, JukePop, The Speculative Edge, Connotation Press, and many others.

Some of the other authors are Fruma Klass, Tinatsu Wallace, Chuch Rothman, Jetse DeVries.

The Mask of Sleep is Horror. It begins:

The man inside the mask can no longer see through the eye holes as the mask’s eyes droop into the last increment in the horrible progression of a month toward closure. It sleeps its wood, paint peeling off the edges of the visible world. He hates the darkness encroaching day by day. He hates the movement toward nothingness, the mask-blindness that makes him think continually about what he did to his tribe. He should never have released the strange perpetually thirsty animal from the wooden pen and let it fly. Once in the air, the creature widened, became soft and white, and turned into a cloud that grew larger and larger and ate all the other clouds in the sky. No rain fell for months.

Speculative Stories

If you’d like to read any of my relatively straightforward SF, Paranormal Fantasy, and Horror stories, many of these below are free to read at online magazines, and others are in anthologies for purchase at these links.

Partly because I like to think outside convention, I’m a lover of Weird Fiction, which originated before genre rules set in. I’ve picked my most traditional Speculative fiction for this post, but still, some of the stories below are on a bit the edge of their genres, and could be labeled Weird as well as the designations I have given them. I have a couple hundred stories published in magazines and anthologies, and a lot are in Interstitial styles, between Speculative and Literary, with elements of both, such as Slipstream, Magical Realism, Surrealism, New Wave Fabulism, and Weird: I link to over 80 of the Interstitial ones HERE. Looking through them might be useful for people wanting to understand those genres better, to get a sense of what they’re like.

I only write to be read, never just for my own enjoyment. A story isn’t a thing until it’s completed by the readers. I always feel gratitude for my narratives’ completion in readers’ brains’.

Ocularity SF

The Coveted General Anzel Smile SF

Origami Mafia Story Unfolds SF

Breaking the Seal SF

Printed People Eaters SF

Eye Poison Horror

Mask of Sleep Horror

Two-Faced Horror

To Explain the Sasquatch Sitter Paranormal

Mirror Tattoo Paranormal

Projection Theater Paranormal

Eye Poison

Weird Horror story, Eye Poison, in No Sight for the Saved Anthology, print and e-book. “”Surreal journeys through landscapes of the angry and abandoned, the lost and lonely and the weak and wounded. These are the realms of the Dead End Collective.” The horror art of Niall Parkinson is used for inspiration for the short stories and poetry included in this anthology. This fully illustrated anthology is a wonderful collection of horror fiction inspired by horror art. Seeing is believing, and horror awaits.”

In the story, the family’s repressions begin to take shape.

Mask of Sleep

Weird Horror story, Mask of Sleep, at Parsec Ink’s Triangulation Anthology: Parch e-book and print.

Two-Faced

I’ve never met anyone with a face anything like Fawley’s. He knew how to use it well, sort of like a parrot or dog learning what reliably produced treats. Big wide nose and and a friendly smile that showed both rows of snaggle teeth. Narrow face, chin that jutted out. It’s a real shame his face was cut off and stuck onto George’s face. I wouldn’t have wanted to be the one coming across them lying there together on the hay bales like a couple of straw men. One with no face and the other with a bloody face stacked on top of his.
Horror Story, Two-Faced at Voluted Tales Darkness Internal.