#julia august

It's July and I'm back in my favourite zine with a story (science fiction, very rare for me) about a dam and the problem of power transmission. It's called Transmission Systems.

Top-secret corporate communications, report the secret police to their superiors. Highly suspicious, most likely an attempt by the opposition to influence the election, and the military security man, filing his report on the secret policemen rather later, remarks that: José is cheating on his mistress with Aníbal’s wife who is certainly blackmailing him for our eastern quadrant comrades. Recommend to keep under observation. But none of them stay long enough to see the message divide...

There are so many other great pieces in this issue. Look at the table of contents!

Not an April Fool’s! It’s ‘Charybdis’, a fun bouncy story about working in customer service, when all your customers are the supernatural type:

I was sitting at my desk with my feet up, filing my nails, when Martin Josephs walked in. Big man, black, probably a shifter with those eyes, probably a bear with those shoulders, he was looking around the dingy Victorian hall as if he might be trying to find the town council, then saw my desk under the pale fluorescent light and headed for me instead. I’d pegged him for a client straight away and you only get one chance to make a first impression. Unfortunately, I plumped for Cherry. He hesitated, and I swung Cherry’s legs down from the desk with aggravating slowness and gave him a bored pink lipstick smile. “Hi,” I said. “This is the Old World Advice Bureau. Can I help you?”

A tiny new departure for me. I have written three poems since I was eighteen; the third of them is in this month's issue of Fantasy Magazine, available to subscribers here. It will go online later this month, but of course you should subscribe and get the whole fantastic issue right now.

My piece is called The End of Little Dreams and it is a poem for anyone getting through the day by thinking very, very hard about the place they are definitely going to have sometime:

I am so late to this, but I had a story in the September issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly: 'Tyger, Tyger', about a big cat in a concrete jungle, and being so bored you burn your own life down, and of course there's some William Blake hiding in there too.

Wednesday morning, eleven a.m. There’s an abstract depiction of hell splashed across the lobby. Nick looks once, sees immortal souls arrayed in burning torment, looks twice and realises it’s a tapestry, red blurring into yellow blurring into infernal murk. The symmetry is upsetting, like one screaming face flung endlessly between two fragmenting mirrors. “Can I take your coat?” the girl says. “I’ll show you down.”

I have a tiny story in this month's Fantasy Magazine! It's about labyrinths. Did you know the Cyprus government gateway portal is called Ariadni? You do now.

After Naxos, Ariadne moved to Nicosia and built a new labyrinth online. Here she sits and smiles and buries her bullish secrets: where to buy building permits and apply for trademarks and government grants and benefits. How to join the fire service. Authenticating seafarers. “That way leads to an external labyrinth,” she says pleasantly. “Oh dear, has the roof fallen in? I’ll send someone down to dig it out later.”

26 authors, 26 locations, 347 pages, 100k+ words; original horror stories from many of the genre’s darkest minds. Nightmares imagined into real places; from Nigeria to Japan, North America to Australia. Locations the authors have inhabited and imbued with the sinister–hiking trails, haunted lakes, relics of faded industry, and even a Hawaiian volcano!

I have a piece of London weird in this anthology. Real places featured include:

Aviation House

Lincoln’s Inn

Maughan Library

the Waterloo Underpass

and the Puppet Theatre Barge, which everyone should visit whether they have kids or not. (Go now! They’re currently moored down at Little Venice.)

It has now been six months since I’ve seen any of those places (thanks, 2020!) so I’m delighted to revisit them in print.

(If you think £20k is a lot to spend on a sofa, so did I. But I had only been in London for a month or so, back when I was eavesdropping on that particular conversation, so I kept my mouth shut.)