Tentacles! Slime trails! Kissing! Oh, the horror. The horrrrrrooorrrrr….
Over at The Arcanist, it’s:
news
Audio release of “The Green Infinity”
Kudzu has fascinated me (and freaked me out) since I saw a short documentary as a kid, footage of an abandoned farmhouse being completely overtaken by the voracious vine in a matter of weeks. Thanks to rapid time-lapse techniques and public television, I experienced the event as happening in a matter of minutes — maybe even seconds. Years later on a road trip across the south I drove through miles of back-country highway shrouded by towering strangled forest, trees dead underneath but giving the semblance of life in a weird kind of vegetal zombification process, a green and vibrant undeath.
Here’s my fiction tribute to this slow-motion strangler of the plant kingdom, now in audio over at new Canadian venture The Centropic Oracle:
Gothic short fiction series
UK’s Gothic series has set loose their Heroic Fantasy volume of short stories, which includes my mythpunk fable “Ravenblack.” They’re running little mini author interviews to go along with the volume’s release. Fun stuff & good times.
“Wine-Dark”
Happy to say a favorite new story of mine, “Wine-Dark” is out in Phobos Four: Deep Black Sea.
The pond behind the house is a well of flat wet darkness. Ludicrous to call this a house, with its listing gothic turrets and crumbling stone walls. She calls it the castle, which I guess makes it my castle.
The surface of the pond shimmers, ripples catching first pink hints of light almost ready to rub the sky with dawn. I tell my husband I come down every morning to feed the fish. There are no fish.
“Did you eat my fish?” I ask as her otter-sleek head breaks the pond’s black mirror.
I love this story so much, I’ve already started tinkering with a longer tale spun off this scene. Haven’t read the whole issue yet, but the lovely cover is a fantastic complement to “Wine-Dark.”
Phobos Issue Four only $6.99 on amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1387045377/
