It's Here!!! (New OSJ Book)

[OSJ]

My brothers & sisters, the long wait is over...  I just received a case of these... Retail is $34.95, but if you get one from me it's thirty bucks postpaid in the US (overseas, add appropriate postage, (Yes, Roman, I'm looking at you ;-) ) PayPal to [email protected] (obviously, you gets a signed copy!) You want more details PM me or visit the Fedogan & Bremer website.

 

[OSJ]

Ya know, y'all can actually make comments or ask questions and stuff. I don't bite (very often). I see a whole bunch of people have looked at this, but no one is saying anything. Pro or con, say something!

[Roman]

Congratulations on the new publication, OSJ! I'm infinitely jealous of you; it's been a dream of mine since childhood to write and publish just one book, but I lack the discipline to put in the proper time and energy. And here you go, writing and writing and writing.

Do lay aside a copy for me. The missus and I have sworn to not buy any more books at all until we've read fifty books we already have waiting for us to make a small dent in our 'to read' hillocks. It was getting a little ridiculous. We're a little over halfway, so we're doing our best -- and we've been surprisingly faithful to the concept. Be assured, however, that I'm going to contact you as soon as I'm off the leash to acquire a copy. Hopefully that'll be before the summer's out.

I've just read the DreamHaven information and the different titles themselves make me salivate: An Antique Vintage, Old Songs Waken, Mystery of the Worm, Out West... I love the sound of those already. Instead of asking you a specific question, I think it'd be a lot more interesting if you told a little bit about the book that you want us to know, or that you simply want to share. So, have at it. You have a captive audience here.

[The Unholy Dragon]

Is this classic weird fiction type stuff? If so I may need to grab a copy for my friend who's both a huge buff and writer of the genre. 

[OSJ]

Wow! Sorry guys, for whatever reason I didn't see the replies until today, you must think I'm a totally rude prick... Anyway, "classic weird fiction"? Well, in the introduction Ramsey Campbell calls me "Prince of Pulp" and nothing could make me happier. See, I grew up in a time warp... In 1970 I had just discovered Lovecraft and Weird Tales. That would be in junior-high (8th grade to be exact), imagine my surprise when one day in the school library I spot this other kid reading an issue of Weird Tales!!! I asked him if there was a Lovecraft story in that issue and one thing led to another and I got invited to his house. Turns out his father had owned the first SF specialty bookstore on the west coast and was a First Fandom guy who had been collecting since the 1940s. 

Their house was filled with complete runs of every major pulp in the genre, all the early Arkham House books etc. (When he closed the store he just took everything home and added it to his collection... So on one hand I was reading the "New Wave" of SF and on the other I was going through the 1930s Weird Tales and Astounding Stories issue by issue. That's gonna leave a mark. Rich Chizmar (publisher of Cemetery Dance) calls my stuff "throwback", (as in modern stories with a pulp magazine vibe, not as in things that you want to throw back) ;-) 

I'm not specifically a Lovecraftian writer, but I've sort of turned over his sandbox and played in it a bit. Of the titles mentioned, the first is a nod to M.R. James, the second (which I'm very proud of) a tip of the hat to Arthur Machen. As to why I'm proud of it, it's set in Wales, where I've never set foot. After writing it I sent a copy to my mate Tim Lebbon (a Welshman) to see what I'd got wrong and he told me I'd nailed it... "Mystery of the Worm" is from the anthology that Michael Reaves and I did mixing Sherlock Holmes with the Cthulhu Mythos, and finally "Out West" is gangsters running afoul of minions of the Great Old Ones. 

I hope that you guys have as much fun reading these pieces as I did writing them. (Well, actually more fun, because I'm one of those guys who really does not enjoy the act of writing. Don't get me wrong, I love "and having writ", but the act of writing the way I go about it can be a tedious chore. I outline everything, so there's none of this "surprising myself" that I hear colleagues babble about. I know exactly what's going to happen and when almost to the line. The downside is that after the outline, I feel like I'm done when the real work is just begining. There's ONE story in the book that was written without an outline. A special prize to anyone that can figure out which one it is. It was the weirdest thing, I got the idea waiting for the bus after work, got home sat down and two hours later I was done. Since I've sold the story for reprints a bunch of times, I have to conclude that others have found it to be good. Damn, I wish they all came that easily...

[OSJ]

Well as my friends across the pond would put it, I'll be chuffed as fuck... Got reviewed in Publishers' Weekly...

" These 18 tales of horror were all published within the past two decades, but Pelan’s first solo collection regularly reflects antiquarian themes and sensibilities. In “An Antique Vintage” and “Old Songs Waken,” mythic survivors from the past add auras of menace and wonder to old houses. More than a third of the stories unfold in the venerable pub the Smoking Leg (a nod to John Metcalfe’s classic horror story of the same name), a repository of tall tales and stories told to a friend of a friend, including “Spider,” about a horrifically animated tattoo, and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” an homage to Robert Hichens’s “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” that goads its amorous ghost to jealous desperation. Pelan’s no-frills storytelling style is direct and effective, steering the reader straight to endings that sometimes have twists and invariably provoke chills. Illustrations by Allen Koszowski evoke the ghoulish physicality of the stories’ horrors. (Sept.) "