Something Wicked Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Unknown

  Ultimately, we hope, they will live with you – in your memory and your imagination.

  Thank you.

  Joe Vaz

  16 April 2013

  Cape Town

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  James Bennett is a British writer of fantasy and horror. His debut novel Unrequited was nominated by the Lambda Literary Foundation for Best Debut Novel in 2007 and his mini novella “Practical Devil Worship (For All the Family)” for a British Fantasy Award. Since then, he’s had several short stories published on both sides of the Atlantic. “Dead Man’s Handle” is a nightmare born from too many late shifts and is his first story published in South Africa, where he spent his teenage years. James Bennett currently lives in England and is working on an urban fantasy novel. Please feel free to join him on Twitter: @jamesbennett72

  F.L. Bicknell’s work has appeared in a wide range of genres and publications such as: Would That It Were, Touch, GC, and Ohio Writer Magazine, as well as publications in Canada and Turkey. Under her now-retired pseudonym, Molly Diamond, she was a regular contributor to Gent and Ruthie’s Club and has had fiction published in Hustler’s Busty Beauties, Penthouse Variations, and Twenty 1 Lashes. Ms. Bicknell is the author of several e-book and print titles, also writing as Azura Ice, Amber Redd, Cutter Phoenix, and Kiyara Benoiti. She has served as co-editor and managing editor for three different publishing houses. She is represented by TriadaUS Literary Agency.

  Dan Campbell’s poetry has appeared in Stone Telling, Goblin Fruit, Niteblade, Fantastique Unfettered, and Mythic Delirium, while his fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction and is forthcoming from Conjurings and Kaleidotrope.

  He edits poetry for Bull Spec magazine in Durham, NC.

  Natural Philosopher and Raconteur Peter Damien bestrode the world in the late 1800s, a famous fighter of men and lover of women, until he was bitten by the Tsetse fly and became fatally ill. A revolutionary medical procedure caused him to be perfectly frozen, moments before death, with instructions to be revived in the distant future. He was thawed in the mid 1980s, but the procedure was only a partial success and very little brain function ever returned. His crude writing abilities are the result of galvanic currents, applied liberally to the muscles. He is maintained in a Medical Marvels museum in Washington, primarily to frighten children. For those with sturdy constitutions, more information about the so-called “freezer-burnt man” can be found on twitter, under @peterdamien

  K. A. Dean is a writer trapped in the body of a research scientist. “Concerning Harmonies and Oceans” was his second work of published fiction. Several of his works of short fiction have since been published by numerous webzines, with one produced as an audio podcast by Pseudopod.

  Recently afflicted with “novelist syndrome”, his output of short fiction has suffered, though his discomfort at describing himself in the third person remains undimmed. He lives in the south-east of England with two cats and a human. Sometimes there is coffee; sometimes there is tea.

  Glasgow-born and Southampton-raised, Grey Freeman now lives, works and writes in London. He has had several short stories published in Electric Spec, Abyss & Apex and RevolutionSF. At the time of writing this he is concentrating on writing novels and wooing literary agents.

  In real-life, he lives with his girlfriend, who fell in love with him after reading an early draft of “Promises”, and works in publishing, promoting authors much more successful than himself. Not that he’s bitter.

  You can catch more of his thoughts on his blog: http://greyfreeman.blogspot.co.uk/ or his Twitter @GreyFreeman

  Aaron J. French (a.k.a. A. J. French) is a member of the Horror Writers Association. He edited Monk Punk, an anthology of monk-themed speculative fiction, as well as The Shadow of the Unknown, an anthology of nü-Lovecraftian fiction. His latest anthology, Songs of the Satyrs, will be published in 2013-14. Aaron’s recent article on Thomas Ligotti appeared in issue #20 of Dark Discoveries magazine, where he is also an associate editor. Aaron’s fiction has appeared in many publications, including Dark Discoveries, Black Ink Horror, Something Wicked, After Death... Bedlam, Tales of Obscenity, and The Lovecraft eZine. Look for his zombie collection Up From Soil Fresh from Hazardous Press, and read his novella “The Order” in the Dreaming in Darkness collection, about a Lovecraftian secret society. He is also the Reviews Coordinator for Hellnotes.

  C.S. Fuqua’s books include Rise Up (short fiction collection), Big Daddy’s Gadgets (satirical SF novel), If I Were (children’s poems), Alabama Musicians: Musical Heritage from the Heart of Dixie, Trust Walk (short fiction collection), The Swing: Poems of Fatherhood, and Notes to My Becca, among others. His work has appeared in publications as diverse as The Christian Science Monitor, Naval History, Main Street Rag, and Year’s Best Horror Stories. For more info, free offers, music, and more, please visit http://csfuqua.comxa.com.

  Fiction writer R.W.W. Greene lives in New Hampshire, USA with wife Brenda, their son Devin, a hive of bees, and two cats. “It Pays to Read the Safety Cards” grew into a novel called Leaving Home, which spawned the short story “Grandma’s Redemption”, later published by Mused Online in September 2012. As of this writing, Greene is seeking an agent to rep the novel. The short stories are apparently doing just fine.

  Greene grew up with a head full of Heinlein and Asimov and has since added to that brain stuffing with a mélange of William Gibson, Richard K. Morgan, Cory Doctorow, and Margaret Atwood, among others. He teaches creative writing and journalism at a large public high school and serves on the board of the New Hampshire Writers Project. Greene blogs about writing, teaching, and the twenty-first century at RWWGreene.com and Tweets about those things - plus his profound dislike of Ryan Seacrest - at @rwwgreene.

  Abi Godsell has been writing SF, horror and urban magic short stories since 2006. She has had several stories published in Something Wicked and in 2011 she won the South African Science Fiction and Fantasy’s South African division of the Nova Short Story contest for her SF piece “Taal”. She also moonlights as a university student.

  She believes that a society that has forgotten how to dream is not a society that will survive very long in the zombie apocalypse.

  Novelist, journalist, satirist, Bruce Golden’s short stories have been published more than 100 times across 11 countries and in 15 anthologies. Asimov’s Science Fiction described his second novel, “If Mickey Spillane had collaborated with both Frederik Pohl and Philip K. Dick, he might have produced Bruce Golden’s Better Than Chocolate” - and about his novel Evergreen, “If you can imagine Ursula Le Guin channelling H. Rider Haggard, you’ll have the barest conception of this stirring book, which centres around a mysterious artefact and the people in its thrall.” You can read more of Golden’s stories in his recently-published collection Dancing with the Velvet Lizard. http://goldentales.tripod.com

  Summer Hanford grew up on a dairy farm in Upstate New York. After graduating from Marcellus High School, she went on to complete an undergraduate degree in psychology, followed by two years each of graduate and doctoral work in behavioural neurology. Her fantasy novel, Gift of the Aluien, was released in October of 2012, launching her Thrice Born series. Shorter works appear in several anthologies as well as magazines such as Aoife’s Kiss and Something Wicked. She is also coauthor of research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes.

  Summer is currently writing the second novel in her fantasy series, as well as providing content for and managing several websites. In the past, she was a research assistant at American University and at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Realizing her true passion was writing, Summer said goodbye to long hours spent in laboratories. She now lives with her husband in the Blue Water region of Michigan, where she writes full-time. To learn more about Summer and her work, visit www.summerhanford.com.

  Taylor Hanton is a former Navy Diver. He is a severe atheist, and enjoys summer evenings, a glass of Pimms, and the works of PG Wodehouse. His A
rnold Schwarzenegger impersonation is second to none.

  Cat Hellisen once tried to catch a piece of the ocean in a bucket and hold it to ransom but things kept crawling out at night. Deep-sea things that flopped around and made the house stink. In the end she had to pour the stolen ocean back and mop the floors with bleach.

  Now she tries to remove pieces of her own brain without letting herself know what’s going on. It’s tricky, but she thinks it’s working.

  William Ledbetter lives near Dallas, Texas with his family and too many animals. His great love, after his wife of course, is reading and writing speculative fiction. He is a recent winner of the Writers of the Future contest and runs the annual Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest for Baen Books and the National Space Society. He is also an editor at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. More information about William and his writing adventures can be found at www.williamledbetter.com

  David McCool was born in Liverpool, England, in 1981. “Billy Bogroll” was his first published story. Other works include the short “Nothing but Silence”, as well as a number of poems that have appeared in 4 and 20 Poetry. In 2010 he wrote the English-language version of Frederic Chopin: Musical Genius, a biography by the renowned Polish music critic Boguslaw Kaczynski.

  David has recently completed the novella “Sparks”, and is currently in the latter stages of developing his first feature screenplay, The Postcard, which is to be helmed by British director D. James Newton.

  You can contact David directly via twitter.com/David_McCool, or at facebook.com/ DavidMMcCool. He would love to hear from you.

  Mel Odom lives in Oklahoma and writes in several genres, including science fiction, horror, suspense, fantasy. He has written several tie-in novels that include Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, as well as movie novelizations of xXx, Blade, and others. He’s a contributor to the Rogue Angel, Rancho Diablo, Fight Card, and other series. He teaches professional writing at the University of Oklahoma, and blogs at www.melodom.blogspot.com. He is also a reviewer of books, movies and video games. You can read his book blog at www.bookhound.wordpress.com.

  Tom Olbert lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near MIT and Harvard University. Harvard Square is a wonderfully wacky place of music and street performers. The land of liberals. Tom Olbert comes from a very interesting family. His dad is a retired physics professor who fought in the Polish underground during WWII. His mom is a most remarkable lady who is writing her husband’s biography. Tom’s sister is an accomplished artist and devout lover of horses. Tom Olbert’s fiction has been widely published and can be found at Lillibridge Press, Eternal Press and Mocha Memoirs Press, among others. When he isn’t working or writing science fiction and horror, Tom volunteers for progressive political candidates.

  Angel Propps is a musician, performer and an internationally published writer of erotica, horror, poetry, romance and literary tales, most with a Southern Gothic bent. That bent should come as no surprise, given that she grew up with an Irish/Native American mother and Russian/Swedish father, both of whom loved tales of the old countries and all of their demons, fairy folk and gods. After a childhood spent wandering the US her family settled on Stark Avenue in Columbus, Georgia (right down the street from Carson McCullers’s childhood home). After being punished for having a gory comic book she discovered Shirley Jackson, Carson, Flannery O’Connor and the subtleties of psychological, deeply personal horror, which she still loves today.

  Nick Scorza was born in Seattle, WA, and grew up in Washington, DC. He lives with his wife in New York City.

  Clint Smith is an honors graduate of the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago, Le Cordon Bleu.

  A member of the Horror Writer’s Association, his short story, “Dirt on Vicky”, was the 2011 winner of the Scare The Dickens Out of Us ghost story contest. A tale titled “Ghouljaw” received the ‘Best Of Fiction’ award for Genesis Magazine; “Mistletoe” was nominated as a selection for the American Writing Programs Intro Journal Awards competition; and the story “Don’t Let the Bedbugs Bite” earned an Editor’s Choice award for its appearance in the James Ward Kirk anthology Indiana Science Fiction, 2012.

  Other stories have appeared in the inaugural issue of S.T. Joshi’s Weird Fiction Review (Centipede Press, 2011), the British Fantasy Society Journal (2011), Paper Nautilus (2011), Denizens of Darkness (Sam’s Dot Publishing, 2012), I’ll Never Go Away, Vol. II (Rainstorm Press, 2013), and Hell (2013).

  Clint lives in the United States Midwest, along with his wife and two children. Read more at clintsmithfiction.com.

  Chris Stevens was born and raised in Southern California. He’s married with two teenage kids.

  He has been a marine, a cop, a mailman, and he’s currently trying his hand at teaching. He loves horror, hiking, and rock music. In his spare time he writes horror stories and publishes Fantastic Horror. His work has appeared in Something Wicked, Parabnormal Digest, The Absent Willow Review, Demon Minds, and Fantastic Horror.

  Martin Stokes is a twenty-one year old student, currently residing in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has a keen love of literature and fiction, emphatically horror, sci-fi and romance. He has published stories with various anthologies and magazines since 2011.

  Thomas Carl Sweterlitsch lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Sonja, and daughter, Genevieve. He studied creative writing, English and history at Carnegie Mellon University, earning an MA in literary and cultural theory. For the past ten years, he’s worked at the Carnegie Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. In addition to Something Wicked, his work has been published in Mixer and Icarus magazines. His debut novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, will be published by Putnam Books in 2014.

  Nicole Tanquary is a reader/writer in love with fiction, especially ‘speculative’ fiction; she has been known, however, to venture into unknown territories for the sake of a good story. Works of hers have been published by The Colored Lens, Ticonderoga Publishing and Isotropic Fiction, with more forthcoming from Kzine and The Again. She also has a young-adult fantasy novel in the works. She lives in Central New York State with her family, and is currently deciding which college will best fit her semi-insane self.

  Genevieve Rose Taylor lives in what is almost a tree house, in Colorado, with a cat and a draconic amazon. Working as a Paper Goddess and Yoga Break Coordinator for a historic hotel, she runs local history tours on the weekends, supervises Lovecraftian tabletop games in her free time, and invents increasingly convoluted stories for how she got her allegedly-Alsatian accent. She has no fears for the apocalypse, as long as the chocolate doesn’t run out. More of her work can be found at http://genevieverosetaylor.wordpress.com.

  Nick Wood is a South African writer, currently resident in London, UK. Nick has published a YA SF book in South Africa entitled The Stone Chameleon, as well as about a dozen short stories in venues such as Infinity Plus, Interzone, PostScripts, Albedo One, AfroSF and Something Wicked. He has also published and presented on (South) African speculative fiction in general. Nick is a member of the Clockhouse London Writers group and can be found at http://nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz/, where (amongst other things), he is touting his second novel (tentatively titled Azanian Bridges.)