The Lurkers in the Abyss & Other Tales

My first collection of short stories, most of which were previously professionally published in magazines and anthologies here and in the United States, was set to be brought out by Midnight House. This project is now quite a few years old and, unable to contact John Pelan, the owner of Midnight House, and with its website down for the best part of a year now, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the book is not going to be brought out.

I had already turned down one alternative offer to publish this collection several years ago by Ex-Occidente. Since then, due to the delays from Midnight House, Johnny Mains, owner of Noose and Gibbet Press, has repeatedly urged me to let him publish it instead. Last night, recognising that my original arrangement with Midnight House appears to have died, I agreed. My collection will be published by Noose and Gibbet in the Spring/Summer of next year in hardback.

I am now going back to look over the stories which were originally to be in this collection and I will probably make a few alterations to the line up, probably substituting some newer ones.

I would like to thank Johnny for his kind offer and I look forward to working with him on this project, which I am confident at last will really happen.

The Century's Best Horror Fiction - Cemetery Dance

I was surprised to see that the latest issue of Locus has a review of this two-volume set. Not being a subscriber, though, I haven't yet seen what the review has to say about it.

That the books have finally been reviewed, though, makes it look like they will finally be published. I certainly hope so, as the one chosen by John Pelan for 1970 is my first ever published story, The Lurkers in the Abyss from the Eleventh Pan Book of Horror.

The Lurkers in the Abyss - Midnight House

There has been a long delay in this collection being published. Unfortunately, John Pelan, who is the man behind Midnight House, has had a tough time for the past couple of years. However, I received an email from him today which confirms that publication of my collection will be imminent in the next few months or so.

I know from the quality of those Midnight House books I already have in my collection, that the wait will be more than worth it when Lurkers in the Abyss finally appears. The quality of these books is second to none.

Curiously, one of the stories from that collection, After Nightfall, will be published in The Zombie Archives, edited by Otto Penzler for Random House, while Out of Corruption continually gets republished in Steve Jones's Mammoth Book of Zombies, which has appeared under several variations of that title in the UK, the US, Italy and now Russia! Even the title story will appear in Cemetery Dance's long-awaited Century's Best Horror Fiction sometime soon.

The Century's Best Horror Fiction - Update

This is the latest update on the long awaited 2-volume set for The Century's Best Horror Fiction, edited by John Pelan for Cemetery Dance:

update

"As we mentioned last time, after looking at the size of The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance, and considering that The Century's Best Horror Fiction edited by John Pelan is TWO volumes about that size (706 page and 868 pages), we had a change of heart about not dustjacketing those two volumes. So instead of using Alan M. Clark's incredible paintings as frontispieces, our designer is turning them into dustjackets to protect each book. This will not delay our plans to send the books to the printer this summer."

This is the table of contents:

1901: Barry Pain -- The Undying Thing
1902: W.W. Jacobs -- The Monkey's Paw
1903: H.G.Wells -- The Valley of the Spiders
1904: Arthur Machen -- The White People
1905: R. Murray Gilchrist -- The Lover's Ordeal
1906: Edward Lucas White -- House of the Nightmare
1907: Algernon Blackwood -- The Willows
1908: Perceval Landon -- Thurnley Abbey
1909: Violet Hunt -- The Coach
1910: Wm Hope Hodgson -- The Whistling Room
1911: M.R. James -- Casting the Runes
1912: E.F. Benson -- Caterpillars
1913: Aleister Crowley -- The Testament of Magdelan Blair
1914: M. P. Shiel -- The Place of Pain
1915: Hanns Heinz Ewers -- The Spider
1916: Lord Dunsany -- Thirteen at Table
1917: Frederick Stuart Greene -- The Black Pool
1918: H. De Vere Stacpoole -- The Middle Bedroom
1919: Ulric Daubeny -- The Sumach
1920: Maurice Level -- In the Light of the Red Lamp
1921: Vincent O'Sullivan -- Master of Fallen Years
1922: Walter de la Mare -- Seaton's Aunt
1923: George Allen England -- The Thing from Outside
1924: C.M. Eddy -- The Loved Dead
1925: John Metcalfe -- The Smoking Leg
1926: H.P. Lovecraft -- The Outsider
1927: Donald Wandrei -- The Red Brain
1928: H.R. Wakefield -- The Red Lodge
1929: Eleanor Scott -- Celui-La
1930: Rosalie Muspratt -- Spirit of Stonhenge
1931: Henry S. Whitehead -- Cassius
1932: David H. Keller -- The Thing in the Cellar
1933: C.L. Moore -- Shambleau
1934: L.A. Lewis -- The Tower of Moab
1935: Clark Ashton Smith -- The Dark Eidolon
1936: Thorp McCluskey -- The Crawling Horror
1937: Howard Wandrei -- The Eerie Mr Murphy
1938: Robert E. Howard -- Pigeons from Hell
1939: Robert Barbour Johnson -- Far Below
1940: John Collier -- Evening Primrose
1941: C.M. Kornbluth -- The Words of Guru
1942: Jane Rice -- The Idol of the Flies
1943: Anthony Boucher -- They Bite
1944: Ray Bradbury -- The Jar
1945: August Derleth -- Carousel
1946: Manly Wade Wellman -- Shonokin Town
1947: Theodore Sturgeon -- Bianca's Hands
1948: Shirley Jackson -- The Lottery
1949: Nigel Kneale -- The Pond
1950: Richard Matheson -- Born of Man & Woman
1951: Russell Kirk -- Uncle Isiah
1952: Eric Frank Russell -- I Am Nothing
1953: Robert Sheckley -- The Altar
1954: Everill Worrell -- Call Not Their Names
1955: Robert Aickman -- Ringing the Changes
1956: Richard Wilson -- Lonely Road
1957: Clifford Simak -- Founding Father
1958: Robert Bloch -- That Hell-Bound Train
1959: Charles Beaumont -- The Howling Man
1960: Frederic Brown -- The House
1961: Ray Russell -- Sardonicus
1962: Carl Jacobi -- The Aquarium
1963: Robert Arthur -- The Mirror of Cagliostro
1964: Charles Birkin -- A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts
1965: Jean Ray -- The Shadowy Street
1966: Arthur Porges -- The Mirror
1967: Norman Spinrad -- Carcinoma Angels
1968: Anna Hunger -- Come
1969: Stefan Aletti -- The Last Work of Pietro Apono
1970: David A Riley -- The Lurkers in the Abyss
1971: Dorothy K. Haynes -- The Derelict Track
1972: Gary Brandner -- The Price of a Demon
1973: Eddy C. Bertin -- Like Two White Spiders
1974: Karl Edward Wagner -- Sticks
1975: David Drake -- The Barrow Troll
1976: Dennis Etchison -- It Only Comes Out at Night
1977: Barry Malzberg -- The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady
1978: Michael Bishop -- Within the Walls of Tyre
1979: Ramsey Campbell -- Mackintosh Willy
1980: Michael Shea -- The Autopsy
1981: Stephen King -- The Reach
1982: Fritz Leiber -- Horrible Imagings
1983: David Schow -- One for the Horrors
1984: Bob Leman -- The Unhappy Pilgrimage of Clifford M
1985: Michael Reaves -- The Night People
1986: Tim Powers -- Night Moves
1987: Ian Watson -- Evil Water
1988: Joe Lansdale -- The Night They Missed the Horror Show
1989: Joel Lane -- The Earth Wire
1990: Elizabeth Massie -- Stephen
1991: Thomas Ligotti -- The Glamour
1992: Poppy Z. Brite -- Calcutta Lord of Nerves
1993: Lucy Taylor -- The Family Underwater
1994: Jack Ketchum -- The Box
1995: Terry Lamsley -- The Toddler
1996: Caitlin R. Kiernan -- Tears Seven, Times Salt
1997: Stephen Laws -- The Crawl
1998: Brian Hodge -- As Above, So Below
1999: Glen Hirshberg -- Mr. Dark's Carnival
2000: Tim Lebbon -- Reconstructing Amy

The Lurkers in the Abyss - publication update

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"