8/5/26
22 new items up for bid in Vortex’s eBay store, including a SIGNED advance reader copy of Fireworks by James A. Moore. Check them out here.
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Yesterday, around 4:30pm, while sitting alongside the river and reading John Langan’s latest collection, it occurred to me that this time next year, I’ll be retired and reading books in a different place — a 40-acre retreat deep in the mountains of West Virginia, on land that has been in my family since the days of my great-great grandparents. Subscribers to my Patreon know that I’ve been slowly moving stuff to three storage units in West Virginia. That pace will pick up come September. I expect we’ll be done by end of October.
My reading spot, by the way, will be on the back porch, in a red metal glider that is older than I am.
Of course, writers don’t retire. They just die. But I’ve been working very hard the last fifteen years of this thirty year career to get to a point where I can slow down — a point where I don’t have to worry about deadlines or writing to market. A point where I can count on monthly royalties from a thirty year backlist of still-in-print books and some good investments to cover the monthly bills, so that I’m not spending 8 hours a day hunched over a keyboard, and can instead spend maybe 2 to 4 hours a day hunched over a keyboard and spend the rest fishing or reading or whatever else I feel like doing.
That is what I mean when I say retirement.
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Before people start asking, yes, I am aware there is some new controversy involving the HWA and AI, but I don’t know the details because I am not an HWA member. I will say that if an organization — ANY ORGANIZATION — consistently doesn’t align with your values, needs, or goals, then the best way to change that is to stop supporting the organization financially, be it through paying membership dues or paying for annual conferences or official events. Yelling about it online doesn’t accomplish anything except contributing to the further decline and decay of society.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 95
Dark Spores: Stories We Tell After Midnight Vol. 4 edited by Carol Gyzander and Rachel A. Brune
Enter the dark, mycelia-laden world of mushroom horror:
A food blogger hunts for a killer recipe.
Ceaseless rain drives a lonely man into his fungus-covered town.
A grieving son purchases a kit to regrow his dead mother.
This anthology explores the mysterious world of fungi, spores...and things that dwell in the dim forest under the rotting leaves. Here you'll find 31 stories and 5 poems of quiet, cosmic, and body horror-plus subtle humor. Works examine themes of loneliness, desire, consumption, and connection with what lurks in the shadows.
Edited by Carol Gyzander and Rachel A. Brune, Dark Spores is the fourth volume in the Stories We Tell After Midnight horror series. Devour these stories-before they devour you!
Featuring works by Meghan Arcuri, Rachel A. Brune, Samantha Bryant, R. E. Carr, James Chambers, Rick Claypool, Randee Dawn, Teel James Glenn, Maxwell Ian Gold, Timothy Granville, Rob Grimoire, Carol Gyzander, John Hartness, Pedro Iniguez, Jo Kaplan, Nicholas Kaufmann, Ariana Khaim, Gwendolyn Kiste, Nicole Givens Kurtz, Jamie Lackey, Gordon Linzner, M. Lopes da Silva, Lee Murray, Victoria Nations, Candace Nola, Gregory Norris, Tonia Ransom, Daniel Roop, Jef Rouner, Rebecca Rowland, Sumiko Saulson, Shannon Scott, Angela Yuriko Smith, Sara Tantlinger, Elizabeth Twist, and L. Marie Wood.
With a special foreword by Clay McLeod Chapman
Historically, one of the signs that Horror — as a literary genre — is doing well is when there are a lot of anthologies being published. Sadly, the downside of that is invariably there will be a glut of anthologies, which can weaken the overall market as readers have a finite amount of dollars to spend and too many options to possibly purchase them all. This downside holds particularly true when the anthologies are the same themes we’ve seen repeated ad nauseum — zombies, vampires, evil children, etc. That’s why non-themed anthologies (such as the seminal Dark Forces or the more recent The Rack) and themed-anthologies that think outside the box (the seminal 999 or more recently, Strange New Moons or Fragile) are vitally important to the genre and industry’s overall health and well-being.
Dark Spores is such an anthology. Don’t let the Volume 4 throw you. You don’t need to have read the previous books to read this one. This is a stand-alone anthology with the theme of fungal horror — something that doesn’t get spotlighted nearly enough in horror, but has always been with us (William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the Glenn Carrig, Brian Lumley’s Fruiting Bodies, F. Paul Wilson’s “Soft”, and Stephen King’s “Weeds” are wonderful examples).
Gyzander and Brune have assembled a thoughtful and exciting slate of authors to write about mushroom horror — from veterans such as Meghan Arcuri, James Chambers, Nicholas Kaufmann, Gordon Linzner, and L. Marie Wood, to current superstars such as Gwendolyn Kiste, Lee Murray, Candace Nola, and Rebecca Rowland, to up-and-comers such as Maxwell Ian Gold. It’s an impressive line-up. Plus, that cover by Lynne Hansen is worth the price alone.
Dark Spores: Stories We Tell After Midnight Vol. 4is available in paperback and eBook from Crone Girls Press.
