Category: fiction!

“GIRLIE” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

AHMM-JANFEB-2016This month saw my second collaboration with the late Steven Utley hit stands in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. “GIRLIE” is a noir-ish Caribbean hooker novelette, started by Steven under the working title “Flying Dutchman” and sent to me as a very rough story kernel of a few hundred words. After Steven’s sudden passing in January of 2013, my sorrow over his loss inspired a scribbling frenzy to complete this story, which quickly blossomed into a novelette. What with the infamous hurry-up-and-wait pace of publishing, “GIRLIE” arrived in my mailbox nearly exactly three years after his death.

Here’s to you, Mr. Utley. You are missed in the world.

 

Interview: Blurring the Line

blurring the line
includes “A Peripheral Vision Sort of Friend”

I recently read my short story “A Peripheral Vision Sort of Friend” at the monstrously fun Lovecraft Festival in Portland.

To celebrate the release of the Australian dark fiction (and fiction plus!) anthology Blurring the Line in which my story appears, Alan Baxter is putting up a series of contributor interviews. One question in particular is something I’ve pondered aloud and in virtual space and on the written page for a while now: “What does horror mean to you?”

My response to this and Other Things over on his site.

 

“All the Layers of the World”

Somehow this one slipped by me, unremarked. Here’s an attempt to rectify.

breakoutLovely and talented author Steven Utley passed away January of 2013. At the time (and at his urging — he loved to collaborate) he and I had been working on two stories, long distance and in a highly sporadic fashion. We’d each emailed the other a story fragment well over a year earlier. Mine had originated after a visit to the Bastrop County, Texas museum, which used to be in a rinkydink little corrugated building sliding off the edge of a steep incline into the sandy bottomed Colorado River (which some summers in those parts is more of a Colorado Creek). Looks like they’ve found new digs since then. Steve added some amazingly insightful and gorgeous passages to what I’d written, making it a much better piece all round. He urged me to drive it into “Turn of the Screw” territory, and I think we did, by the end. I had to look up Henry James to discover what the hell he meant.

The fragment Steven sent me to work on was completely different. Like mine, it wasn’t originally based in any fantastical realm or premise. Also like mine the protagonist was a young woman venturing deep into unfamiliar territory. But though the first ended up playing more to the weird-fiction streak in both of us, the second piece seemed to be heading more in a mystery/crime direction.

Then Steven died rather suddenly. In a fit of what I suspect was a complex sort of grief I dropped everything else I was writing and threw myself into finishing the two stories we’d been working on. Maybe I felt I owed it to him to get these things out in the world as fast as I could. The museum fragment quickly grew into the very short story “All the Layers of the World.” This bit of surreal weird fic came out earlier this fall in PS Publishing’s Postscripts anthology, BREAKOUT.

The other story, a crime piece set in the Caribbean (my heritage!) ballooned under my intense Utley-driven writing spell into a novella-length caper of stolen money and quasi-prostitution and island kingpins.  My agent says the contributor copies have just hit her office in New York.  As soon as they get here, I’ll post a pic.

…in which I audio-ize over at 3LBE Magazine

...in which Alex C. Renwick reads Kristi DeMeester's "The Marking" for 3LBE
…in which Alex C. Renwick reads Kristi DeMeester’s “The Marking” for 3LBE

If you enjoy a deep eerie sadness in your dark cosmic fiction and you like free audio, give a listen to my recent reading for Issue #27 of the dark-lit magazine Three Lobed Burning Eye.

And for those so inclined, here’s a direct mp3 link to Alex reading “The Marking” by Kristi DeMeester.