This time from the wonderful Sharon Ring, deputy editor over at Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics (SFEE for short).

How to Make Monsters review

The book can be ordered online, although there are few copies left…so grab yours before it’s too late!

Purchase How to Make Monsters and make sure to get some light bulbs while you’re at it, as you won’t want to turn the light off again!

"Grants Pass is a remarkable, disturbing, and worthwhile read, and one that is likely to stay with the reader for some time to come. I’m predicting that this anthology will be up for a swag of awards come the next round of Aurealis, Ditmar and Australian Shadows nominations."

The rest of the review is available here: Horroscope review

Grants Pass is now available for pre order in the US. More news on Europe and Australia to follow.

First up is a review of The Even, over at A Writer Goes on a Journey:

The Even

and then we have a review of How to Make Monsters at Horrorworld:

How To Make Monsters
(scroll down for review)

Both reviews are positive and while I am not so sure I agree with the charge of 'less than stellar editing' (from a reviewer who knows not where apostrophes live) and even though I wish the reviewer of How To Make Monsters would work on getting Gary's titles right, it seems these two are rather popular books just at present!

The Even can be purchased here

and How to Make Monsters here

It appears that the authors who will feature in this year’s Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, edited by Stephen Jones, have now had their stories confirmed and will appear in issue 20 later this year.

Note that Morrigan Books author, Gary McMahon, features on the front cover, and his story Through the Cracks, was chosen from How To Make Monsters, (available on our website).

I think the cover for this year’s is fantastic and I’m very much looking forward to reading the collection, with many authors of note, the likes of Ramsey Campbell, Paul Finch and Simon Strantzas (who will all feature in Dead Souls, along with McMahon later this year).

Simon Strantzas has been nominated for best artist at this British Fantasy Awards, for his cover for How to Make Monsters. Gary McMahon has been nominated for best collection for the same book and Chill (taken from the collection). Paul Kane has also been nominated for his short, The Suicide Room, taken from Voices.

A pretty good week all in all and looking forward to Fantasy Con this year, where we will be launching Dead Souls for an unsuspecting public…

Sharon Kae Reamer (author of The Raven's Curse, in The Phantom Queen Awakes) writes:

Jump into the Wayback Machine and turn the dial to the year 50 BCE in Central Europe. The Romans are encroaching. Just about everywhere. What did this mean for the multitude of tribes usually lumped under the heading “Celtic” across the continent? Nothing less than total devastation.

This theme began to occupy my attention as I started writing about a family of Druids living in Central Europe today with all the knowledge and keeping to the ways of their Iron Age Celtic ancestors. Not that there are any, of course, at least any that I know about. (If you are one and are reading this, please send me an email. I have lots of questions I’d like to ask.) But the ‘what if’ of the idea intrigued me to the extent that I just couldn’t let it go. What if a family had survived with all the inherent knowledge from that long ago time? How long ago would it have to be? And what would they be, anyway? Priests, alchemists, scientists, herbal practitioners?

While I hadn’t really intended it at first, as I wrote my way through the better part of three novels, I decided those questions absolutely had to be answered by adding in at least some of a pantheon of Celtic beings. Such is the nature of storytelling that these things have a tendency to sneak up on you (at least for me, the undisciplined writer). And in addition, the story I was trying to tell had to have themes that resonated with those cultures and their beliefs – things like death, transformation, and resurrection. In other words, in order for such a family to have survived over the many generations and centuries, they would have to have a supernatural connection and one relevant to the continental Celts, especially those of a Bretonic character.

My Druids had half of their heritage in Brittany, a part of France that still has a very viable and enthusiastic identification with its Celtic history and half in Germany, in particular near the Rhine River valley, where several Celticized or at least Celto-Germanic tribes had dwelt. The original myths don’t really exist any more since the literature that has survived, as with most things Celtic, has been colored by the influence of two thousand years of Christianity. While such a vacuum is good for writers because we then have all the excuse we need to make things up, for a history buff like me it was frustrating not knowing what I was actually deviating from.

Children’s tales are often the best place to start, and I did find one lovely book with a lot of nicely written stories that I used for a jumping off point. Before I knew it, I had the beginnings of a pretty good tale and – even better – I had acquired a whole shelf full of literature, both in German and English. If I was fluent in French, I could have added even more.

About the same time I had my idea ready and a crude draft of the backstory for my novels written, I saw the call for submissions to The Phantom Queen Awakes anthology. The only problem was one of time, and I frantically mashed the story into coherence in order to send in to Mark on time, hoping that the idea and the writing were good enough to pique his and Amanda’s interest. Luckily for me, they were.

Jennifer Lawrence (author of Washerwoman, in The Phantom Queen Awakes) writes:

I’ve mentioned in my last post that I already knew of the Morrigan from a life-long love of mythology.  When most people say they know a bit about mythology, they generally refer to Greek and Roman myths, often picked up from required reading in grade school.  Or they might have been required to read the Iliad or the Odyssey in high school. 

Not a lot of people are familiar with Celtic mythology, despite the big craze for all things Celtic during the 90’s.  Celtic mythology can be a peculiar thing.  It’s nowhere as neatly ordered as Greek mythology—no single god of the sun, god of war, or king/father god.  Sure, the Tuatha de Danaan had a king god in Nuada.  Then he lost one of his hands in battle, and the taboo the pantheon had which said that a king must be physically perfect kicked in, and he could no longer be their king.  Leadership of the Tuatha passed to Bres, who was a perfect tyrant, favoring their foes, the Fomorians.  When Dian Cécht, the god of healing for the Tuatha replaced Nuada’s missing hand with one crafted of pure silver, he became their king again—until he died, at which point, the kingship passed to Lugh, god of generalities.  After Lugh, the Dagda became king, and then another and another.

This multiplicity of roles is common among the Tuatha de Danaan.  Both Brigid and Goibhniu were considered smithing deities; Brigid also shared the area of healing with Dian Cécht.  The ancient Irish had both a god of love, in Aengus, and a goddess of love, in Áine. In like manner, there is no single deity who rules over death.  The Morrigan is considered the goddess of death, especially on the battlefield, but Manannán mac Lir is the Psychopomp for the pantheon, conducting the souls of the deceased to islands of the dead. 

Some folks might think that difficult to remember, in comparison to the neatly-ordered spheres of influence of the Greek gods.  The ancient Irish certainly did not seem to, however; aside from the better-known deities I’ve listed, they had dozens, perhaps hundreds of others, both major and minor—everything from the great mother goddess Danu, who gave her name to the pantheon (the Tuatha de Danaan, or ‘children of Danu’) to countless gods and goddesses of fields, rivers, and mountains, many of whose names and histories have been lost to modern time.  The ancient Irish, unlike the Greeks and Romans, didn’t start writing down their histories and tales until well after the advent of Christianity in that country.  As you might imagine, the monks weren’t whole-heartedly interested in preserving the stories of the land’s pagan, pre-Christian gods.  But some of those stories did get written down, and if more was lost than kept, we are still the richer for it today.

Jennifer Lawrence (author of Washerwoman, in The Phantom Queen Awakes) writes:

When I heard there was a call for submissions for an anthology centering around the Morrigan, I did a little dance. I’m familiar with the Morrigan from a life-long love of the different mythologies of the world, which had its roots in another source. It seemed like the call for submissions was tailor-made for me, except for one little catch.

I found out about it less than a week before the deadline.

That didn’t leave me much time, if I wanted to submit a story. Generally, my writing starts with two things pretty much simultaneously, the characters and the plot.  The characters were the easy part here; at least one of them had to be the Morrigan herself. The story had to be set during ancient Celtic times, so that set limits to the plot.

The Morrigan has many facets: war-goddess, death-goddess, goddess of prophecy, triple-goddess, fertility goddess, goddess of sovereignty. But who else would be sharing the story with her?  I didn’t want a battlefield epic, full of blood and gore (indeed, the submission guidelines gently suggested they’d rather not have a story overflowing with the red stuff, a la the Hostel and Saw movies). I knew less about her aspects as goddess of fertility and sovereignty.

That left prophecy, didn’t it?

Those who have studied the Morrigan know that she can predict the deaths of men on the field of war, but that’s not the only way her gift of prophecy manifests. In one way, she’s almost like the bean sidhe, the ancestral ghosts of so many proud Irish families, that scream the night before a member of the family is due to die. Legend states that, if you see the Morrigan washing your clothes in a stream, your death is fated to come soon.

But if I wrote that into the story, whose death was she predicting?

In the end, it wasn’t a soldier, a nobleman, a druid, or a king. It was an old woman, not all that different from the crone that the Morrigan is sometimes portrayed as, washing her family’s clothes at the stream the morning after overhearing an ugly family conversation between her son and his wife. In the end, the story isn’t about absolutes, but about how fate and destiny can sometimes be more flexible things than you’ve been taught.

Everybody dies eventually.  And sometimes you realize that being fated to die doesn’t necessarily mean immediately.

 Peter Bell (author of The Trinket, in The Phantom Queen Awakes) writes:

I’d decided that death was going to be the central feature of my short story.  The Morrigan, though powerful and mysterious, was just the delivery system; death itself was to be the true monster, with my poor Roman legionary left to suffer its consequences, alone in a hostile land.

And what better way to deal with the silent, smothering, omnipresent influence of death than in the preparations for a funeral?

The simplicity of the idea appealed to me – my legionary would keep a vigil over the body of a fallen comrade, protecting it from the greedy eyes of the three carrion crows watching from a nearby rooftop. In the morning, the body will be taken out and buried. Meanwhile, my legionary is left to ponder his fellow’s dying wish, to be buried along with a curious medallion of Celtic origin that he was wearing when he was cut down. What are its origins? What is its power? And... what if the surviving legionary were to keep it for himself?

It was great – brooding, atmospheric and tightly wound. It was also extremely dull.

Dead bodies, by definition, are not the liveliest of souls and I quickly found that my plan to draw this second character as an empty space – as an absence of the person he used to be, which is all death is, in the end - was backfiring. I had left myself with practically no narrative drive, no conflict, no interaction. My legionary sat there, alone and in silence, thinking for the entirety of the story. The concept might have been a good one, but it would take a better writer than me to make it work and, after several abortive drafts, I finally admitted defeat.

Life continued for a few weeks.

And then, when I was busy with something else entirely, it came to me – a new angle, a stronger story and, just to get the ball rolling, the opening line. I rushed it down onto a scrap of paper and, within a few hours, had most of a workable draft on my hard drive.

It was rough, ungainly and meandering; certainly not the sort of thing anyone would pay good money to read. But that’s where a writer turns to his editor, and I have one of the best in the business – my wife, Anna. I know they say you should never show your work-in-progress to friends or family, but Anna is a discerning enough reader that she won’t let little things like marital harmony get in the way of honest appraisal. Of course, that doesn’t make it any easier to take.

“I think you should structure it like this,” she said, handing me a page of notes. I spluttered and protested. Who was the writer here? But I slunk away and made the changes anyway, suspecting she was on to something. She was. The story had pace now; it ducked and weaved, it kept the reader in suspense. And I was starting to have fun.

There was a rush to meet the deadline. Any time not spent in work or asleep was sacrificed to the writing. But I tightened it and tuned it and polished almost every word and I’m happy with the finished result. In many ways it accomplishes much of what I was aiming for with that first, abortive effort. Death may not take centre stage any more, but it skulks around the periphery; a constant presence, insatiable and unpredictable.

And dancing to the tune of the Lady Morrigan.

(Peter Bell's work can also be found in the anthology: Leaps of Faith, published by the Writers Cafe Press, coming 8th in the recent Preditors & Editors poll for best anthology!)

 Peter Bell (author of The Trinket, in The Phantom Queen Awakes) writes:

 I’m not usually a character-led writer.

That’s not to say I don’t appreciate just how vital a strong, multi-faceted character is to good story telling but, more often than not, it’s the plot that comes to me first while the characters tend to drift in later, seemingly of their own accord. By the time I’m half way through working my rough outline into something resembling a finished structure, they’ve generally settled into their various roles and are acting as though they’ve been there all along.

This was not the case with “The Phantom Queen Awakes”. Instead, one particular sentence in the submission guidelines leaped out and grabbed me: “All stories must be set in the world of the Celts”. And there he was - a grim faced Roman of the Second Augustan Legion, knee deep in Welsh mud while the freezing rain drummed a relentless tattoo on his helmet.

A bit specific, you might think, and hardly Celtic. But then I grew up a pilum’s throw from Caerleon, which was founded by the Legion about 75 years after the birth of Christ, and which still manages to feel as much Roman as it does Welsh. It’s home to the most  complete Roman amphitheatre in the British Isles, along with the extensive remains of barracks, a bath house, and a string of fortifications. (Check out the excellent (and free!) National Roman Legion Museum if you’d like to find out more: http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/roman/)

The Celts left their own, more elusive marks; in songs, in tales of Arthur and Merlin, and of course in the lingering traces of the Welsh language itself.

So for me, the two civilisations have always been inextricably intertwined.

But what to do with my legionary, now that he had announced himself? I spent a while turning the question over while I acquainted myself with my leading lady - the Phantom Queen herself.

If the truth be told, she had me worried - I’d never even heard of her before reading Mark and Amanda’s submission guidelines, which insisted she play a pivotal role in my story, so much of the narrative would depend on how I approached her character. In short, if I couldn’t write the Morrigan, I couldn’t write my story.

Luckily, the storytellers of ages past had made sure she was a nebulous, fluid character, never quite the same from one tale to the next. She was a maiden, a crone, a trinity, a lover, a sister… But there was one thing common to all these disparate depictions, binding them together like a dark and tantalizing thread; her association with death.

And just like that I had the beginnings of my story. Better yet, I had another major character, who would prove to be every bit as influential as the Morrigan herself. There was just one problem; by the time I wrote him down, he was already dead.

To be continued…

(Peter Bell's work can also be found in the anthology: Leaps of Faith, published by the Writers Cafe Press, coming 8th in the recent Preditors & Editors poll for best anthology!)

“Voices” is a nice collection of horror stories that deals more with the supernatural and paranormal aspects of the genre and less or almost not at all with the gory and macabre part. Also the anthology edited by Mark S. Deniz and Amanda Pillar presents new or established authors of the genre and I personally discovered through “Voices” a few names that stirred my interest.

Read the review over at Dark Wolf

And you can always buy the book at the Morrigan Books site!

x-posted from morrigansnews - make sure you add the community (as it will be replacing this journal)

martyn44 (author of The Good and Faithful Servant, in The Phantom Queen Awakes) writes:

Many years ago I was in the Reference section of Acklam branch library (as I often was). I put aside Colonel Churchward’s wonderful farrago concerning the ‘lost continent’ of Mu and picked up a book on folklore. Shortly afterwards I was reading about Ori and Nori, Oin and Gloin. Having been recently so spellbound by the BBC radio production of The Hobbit (with Paul Daneman as Bilbo) that I bunked off school to listen to it I immediately recognised the names, and all the others in the list. ‘Perfesor, you’re not playing the game,’ I thought. ‘You’re supposed to make up the names!’ That Tolkein was a distinguished academic is incontestable, (I’ve always had problems with his declaration that he wrote Lord of The Rings to fill the void that was the mythology of Albion, and he’s never been particularly high on my personal scroll of heroes.) and I dare suggest he believed he was adding at least a veneer of academic respectability to his story by using ‘real’ dwarf names.

Only dwarves aren’t real. They are imaginary, works of fiction along with Cyclops, dragons and the Kraken. Antique works of fiction, to be sure, but fiction nonetheless (I will accept correction if someone cares to introduce me to a dwarf, or the Kraken) Just because they are out of copyright doesn’t make them sacrosanct, and an author up for being sneered at because their take on a character/theme/scene doesn’t chime with whatever version of canon the critic reveres. Which is why I had to bite my tongue when Guinevere appeared as a lightly coloured servant girl in the recent television Merlin rather than the Celtic princess she was. Because she never was. And even if she was, that doesn’t mean later generations cannot reimagine her.

I mean, do you really believe Achilles looked like Brad Pitt?

But what about ‘real’ people? Can we play fast and loose with them? Authors have been seeking to add verisimilitude to their work by descriptions of real places, biographical details of ‘real’ people for quite some time now. Are there limits beyond which we cannot go? Patricia Cornwell accused Walter Sickert of being Jack the Ripper (breezily ignoring his background as a police artist that gave him the material for ‘that’ painting) and could get away with it because Sickert is dead and you cannot libel the dead (presumably the reason for Mohammed al Fayed getting away with his accusations against Prince Philip – the undead in Buck House!) This is an area of potentially very thin ice, but I believe the dead are as fair game as the fictitious. This could be because my current WIP plays somewhat fast and loose with such ‘real’ people as Herbert (Oh, call me George, do) Wells, Superintendent Frederick Abberline and Sir Charles Warren, as well as that other very ‘real’ person, Jack the Ripper. The question is not can we, or should we, but how far should we go?

That, I leave to each of us. What I will say is that ‘reality’ in fiction must fulfil its fictive purpose. Unless it is dramatically, emotionally true, that it ‘really happened’ doesn’t matter. All observers are partial and unreliable, except for us. In our stories we do know our world as well as god knows this one (to borrow a phrase from Bob McKee) If we don’t we short change our readers, who exchange their immediate reality for our imagined ones. They deserve more than tax deductible tourist descriptions and quotations from a dictionary of biography. They deserve the truth.

Just that truth is not necessarily factually true.