The Unspoken

It looks like The Unspoken, a charity anthology in aid of cancer research, edited by Willie Meakle, has been dropped at the last minute by Dark Continent Publishing because of "internal changes" and because "they have overextended themselves."  Though this is devastating news at this stage, Willie is determined to find a new publisher. Good luck to him!

That this has happened is a great shame as Willie has assembled a great lineup, which includes:

Ramsey Campbell - Introduction
Tim Lebbon - Just Breathe
Simon Kurt Unsworth - Photographs of Boden
Steven Savile & Steve Lockley - The Last Gift
John Shirley - Where the Market's Hottest
Stephen James Price - Pages of Promises
Stephen Volk - Bless
Scott Nicholson - Heal Thyself
William Meikle - Metastasis
Nancy Kilpatrick - Alien Love
David A. Riley - A Girl, a Toad and a Cask
Allyson Bird - Oyster Pink
Johnny Mains - The Cure
Guy N Smith - The Big One
Pete Crowther - Cankerman
Steve Duffy - X for Henrietta
Gary McMahon - Bitter Soup

My review

Okay, I'll do it. This is what I wrote about Wine and Rank Poison, before I decided not to use it.

Bull Running for Girls won accolades and a BFA. In many quarters a second collection from Allyson Bird was looked forward to with some eagerness.

Now I don’t know how long Allyson spent writing the stories in her first collection. Several years I presume. There was definitely an impression some time had been spent writing and rewriting them till they had been honed as good as the author could make them.

The stories in this slim volume, bulked up by a big extract from her soon to be published novel, Isis Unbound, have a raw, unfinished feel about them, of having been rushed. The writing is minimalist at times and awkward at others, with characters that are barely sketched in, who rarely, if ever, come alive. Which is a shame, as some of the stories, given more work, had potential. As it is, apart from the overlong, oddly-written opening story set in Russia during the early years of Communism, they barely gripped this reader’s attention and I had to struggle with most of them. Perhaps, in all fairness, she was set a tight schedule to have this collection ready, hence the use of twenty-odd pages of Isis Unbound to pad it out. I don’t know. Perhaps with no back catalogue to draw from for this second volume, and with a novel to be finished, it would have been better to have left this collection till such time as the stories in it had been made ready for publication. As it is, I don’t think this has done anything to help Allyson Bird’s reputation. If you haven’t read any of her stories yet, seek out Bull Running for Girls first. It’s a much better book.