Just received a circulated update from John and Kathy Pelan about the current state of their publishing company Midnight House/Darkside Press.
The important part of the message for me is this:
"Apologies! It’s been a rather ghastly year for us as I’ve had to sit out a no-compete agreement which has severely curtailed my abilities to earn a living in the mundane world, with a very significant negative impact on our book production. However, I’m back at work now and we expect to (finally) get the third Clifford D. Simak book to press in the next month or so. On the Midnight House side of things we have both Uel Key’s The Broken Fang and Richard Gamon’s The Strange Thirteen ready to go. Expect both by the end of summer.
More new books! This fall should see publication of David Riley’s Lurkers in the Abyss from Midnight House and the long awaited “Best of” William F. Temple from Darkside Press (along with the fourth Simak collection."
The full message reads thus:
"A Note from the Darkside
Apologies! It’s been a rather ghastly year for us as I’ve had to sit out a no-compete agreement which has severely curtailed my abilities to earn a living in the mundane world, with a very significant negative impact on our book production. However, I’m back at work now and we expect to (finally) get the third Clifford D. Simak book to press in the next month or so. On the Midnight House side of things we have both Uel Key’s The Broken Fang and Richard Gamon’s The Strange Thirteen ready to go. Expect both by the end of summer.
More new books! This fall should see publication of David Riley’s Lurkers in the Abyss from Midnight House and the long awaited “Best of” William F. Temple from Darkside Press (along with the fourth Simak collection.
As mentioned, this last year I was unable to work in my chosen field but there was a silver lining to this particular cloud… I was able to tackle a rather large number of projects, including Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle and Masters of the Weird Tale: Frank Belknap Long for Centipede Press. Both can be ordered from Jerad at www.centipedepress.com I’m just finishing up the introduction for The Hour of the Oxrun Dead by Charles L. Grant ad the book should be out in a couple of months. We’re hoping that I can finish Masters of the Weird Tale: Arthur J. Burks in time to have the book ready for World Fantasy Con. Certainly one of the biggest books I’ve ever worked on. It’s looking to come in at over 1200 pages with over sixty stories, most novelette length.
Do check out Altus Press for their edition of The Curse of the Harcourts by Chandler H. Whipple. This would have been a Midnight House book, but Matt beat me to it, and not wanting to see my research go for naught, he was nice enough to invite me to write the introduction. This episodic novel appeared in Dime Mystery Magazine in 1935 and has never been reprinted. It’s a historical supernatural gothic spanning 900 years amd three continents in the telling. A fabulous piece that would have fit in at Weird Tales and certainly stands comparison with works such as H. Warner Munn’s The Werewolf of Ponkert and Tales of the Werewolf Clan. The Curse of the Harcourts ought to be out in time for PulpFest. Altus Press has some other neat offerings including lost race novels, and pulp reprints. Among other volume, they’ve collected all five Dr. Death novels in two volumes and have embarked on a multi-volume set collecting all of the Secret Agent X novels. I consider both to be absolute “must haves”.
Later this year, Mythos Books will be issuing my story collection Darkness, My Old Friend with a stunning cover by Allen Koszowski and introduction by Ramsey Campbell. The collection is a retrospective of my first decade writing and the time elapsed between initially writing these pieces and the publication of the book has given me the opportunity to make little tweaks here and there and correct some errors that initially made it past the proofreaders and myself. The result of this extra work means that these are truly my preferred texts of the stories and hopefully all annoying typos have been fixed. Here’s what a couple of colleagues have had to say about the book:
“John Pelan is one of our most distinguished keepers of the flame. His richly varied work epitomizes everything that brought us all into the genres in the first place. In his oeuvre we find fearless imagination, hallucinatory vision, and a marvelously varied palette of verbal tropes that puts the essential music in the madness, that lilt that lifts us up into his vision. Mr. Nightmare strikes again!”
- Michael Shea (Multiple World Fantasy Award Winner)
Renowned author and editor John Pelan relishes the macabre and the transgressive. Darkness, My Old Friend is a gripping foray into the shadowy frontier of mysticism and dread. An assured storyteller, Pelan knows how to make you squirm like a worm on the hook." --Laird Barron, author of The Imago Sequence & Other Stories
Wow, that makes me want to buy a copy… ;-)
I’ve also launched my own imprint under the Ramble House umbrella… For years I’ve been trying to figure out how to produce smaller print runs of titles that would be obscure even by Midnight House standards and would still be affordable. I think we’ve done it with Dancing Tuatara Press. We have trade paperbacks ($20.00 retail with a full 40% discount) and there is a signed, limited hardcover at $45.00 and a trade hardcover at $35.00 (both are offered at 40% discount. Here are the titles available with direct links to the full descriptions. Retail customers can use their shopping cart function for all but the limiteds. If you want the signed limiteds, e-mail Fender or myself as those orders need to be processed manually. Dealers, for all states e-mail Fender directly to get the best possible rate, (wholesale orders have to be processed manually.) These are books that might have not quite fit with the type of material that you’ve come to expect from Midnight House, or were authors that perhaps didn’t have a broad enough appeal to merit a 500 copy print run (Mark Hansom, for example). There’s definitely going to be a focus on material from the weird menace pulps, with at least five collections by John H. Knox and at least three from Wyatt Blassingame. We’ve also reprinted Richard Goddard’s bizarre classic The Whistling Ancestors, which I recommend most highly. Goddard always promised a sequel, (which never materialized), so I’ve taken it upon myself to write it! The sequel will tie-in characters and locations from such diverse sources as the novels of Walter S. Masterman and Mark Hansom, “The Colossus of Ylourgne” by Clark Ashton Smith and feature Dr. Nikola, Mr. Chang, Dr. Death, and Dr. Yen-Sin teaming up with Caspar Pettifranc (from The Whistling Ancestors) to make the world a better place by killing off just about everybody. ;-) Keep watching our news page for more details.
Now here’s the links:
Beast or Man? – http://www.ramblehouse.com/beastorman2.htm
The Whistling Ancestors – http://www.ramblehouse.com/whistlingancestors.htm
The Shadow on the House – http://www.ramblehouse.com/shadowonthehouse.htm
Sorcerer’s Chessmen – http://www.ramblehouse.com/sorcererschessmen.htm
The Wizard of Berner’s Abbey – http://www.ramblehouse.com/wizard.htm
Coming Real Soon:
Walter S. Masterman – The Border Line
Arlton Eadie – The Trail of the Cloven Hoof
*Day Keene – The League of the Grateful Dead
John H. Knox – Reunion in Hell
Wyatt Blassingame – The Tongueless Horror
*What isn’t on the site yet is perhaps the most exciting series for mystery fans to come along in years: Day Keene in the Detective Pulps. Along with Jim Thompson, John D. MacDonald, and Harry Whittington Keene was one of the mainstays of the paperback original crime novel in the 1950s. However, he had developed his chops a decade earlier as one of the most prolific (and best) of the contributors to Dime Mystery, Detective Tales, and other magazines. During the decade of the 1940s there was at least one Day Keene novelette published in one of the mystery magazines every month. Most of these stories have never been reprinted and certainly no attempt has been made to collect them (until now). Day Keene in the Detective Pulps will run to over thirteen volumes and will be published in the same format as other Dancing Tuatara Press books, with one notable difference… The signed limiteds will feature a different guest introducer for each volume. Some of the biggest names in modern mystery fiction will be included. More information is available from me or e-mail Fender@RambleHouse.com
VERY IMPORTANT: NEW CONTACT INFORMATION
General E-mail: DarkMidHouse@Yahoo.com
Orders: DarkMidHouse@Yahoo.com
John: Jpelan13@Gmail.com
Please do not use the old e-mail addys, messages have a real good chance of not getting through. Until June, we’re up in the mountains of New Mexico with the tarantulas and skin walkers and have to rely on web-based e-mail.
Cheers,
John & Kathy"
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