The ground in a circle around Shell Oak, stretching out ten feet on each side of its shattered shell, was black with soot. A web of charred marks. Charops wiped ooze and ichor from her eyes, and then collapsed.
“I weakened the shell. I let a little anger into it. Sorry if it was too much. Was it too much? Are you all right?” Ichneumon leaned in close over Charops like a doctor observing a corpse that can no longer bite, her red clothes splattered with slime.
“No.”
Recommended Reading List
The following is by no means an exhaustive survey of the field, but simply represents some favorites of both the editors and contributors. The cosmic horror elements range from the fleetingly light to the overt and overwhelming, with the one common element being they are all worth checking out.
Comics
Berserk
Claymore
Conan
Heavy Metal
Oglaf
Orion
Rat Queens
Red Sonja
“Sword of the Reanimator” by Junji Ito
Fiction
Far Away & Never by Ramsey Campbell
The Necromancer Chronicles series by Amanda Downum
Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology edited by Milton J. Davis and Charles R. Saunders
The Night Land by William Hope Hodgeson
Nameless Cults: The Cthulhu Mythos Fiction by Robert E. Howard, as well as plenty of individual stories, such as “The Slithering Shadow” and “The People of the Black Coast”
The Heretic Land by Tim Lebbon
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series by Fritz Leiber
“Masquerade of a Dead Sword” by Thomas Ligotti
The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft
The House of Cthulhu by Brian Lumley
The Throne of Bones by Brian McNaughton
The Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock
Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore
Sword and Mythos edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula Stiles
A Land Fit for Heroes series by Richard K. Morgan
Imaro by Charles R. Saunders
In Yana, The Touch of Undying, and the Nift the Lean books by Michael Shea
The Collected Fantasies 1-5 by Clark Ashton Smith
Darkness Weaves, Bloodstone, and Dark Crusade by Karl Edward Wagner
Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
Magazines
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Innsmouth Free Press
Strange Aeons
RPGs and Board Games
Carrion Hill (Pathfinder Module)
Cave Evil
Chaos in the Old World
Cthulhu Invictus (Call of Cthulhu supplement)
The Complete Dreamlands (Call of Cthulhu supplement)
The Dying Earth
Swords Against the Outer Dark
Video Games
Black Knight Sword
Bloodborne
Crawl
Darkest Dungeon
Demon’s Souls/Dark Souls series
Diablo series
Dragon Age series
Eldritch
Heretic/Hexen series
Inquisitor
Lords of the Fallen
Planescape: Torment
Shadow of the Colossus
Author Biographies
Natania Barron is a word tinkerer with a lifelong love of the fantastic. She has a penchant for the speculative and has written tales of invisible soul-eating birds, giant cephalopod goddesses, gunslinger girls, and killer kudzu, to name just a few. Her work has appeared in Weird Tales, EscapePod, Steampunk Tales, Crossed Genres, Bull Spec, and various anthologies. Her debut novel, Pilgrim of the Sky, was called “... a lush, dreamy fable — both vintage gothic, and modern mystery ... lovingly laced with magic and darkness from start to finish” by Cherie Priest. When not venturing in imagined worlds, she can be found in North Carolina, where she lives with her family.
Eneasz Brodski lives outside Denver with his wife and their two dogs. He was raised in an apocalyptic sect of Christianity, which has heavily influenced his writings. He produces a podcast of Rationalist fiction at hpmorpodcast.com, and blogs at deathisbadblog.com. His short work has previously appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, and he is currently working on a novel based upon this very story (“Of All Possible Worlds”).
Jesse Bullington is the editor of the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated anthology Letters to Lovecraft, and wears the influence of the Gentleman from Providence on the pages of his fiction. Under his own name he has published the weird historical novels The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, The Enterprise of Death, and The Folly of the World, and under the pen name Alex Marshall he has released A Crown for Cold Silver and A Blade of Black Steel, the first two volumes in his epic dark fantasy trilogy The Crimson Empire. He has published numerous short stories, some of them Mythos-themed, as well as various articles and reviews; a full bibliography can be found at jessebullington.com.
Nathan Carson is a writer and musician from Portland, Oregon. He is a founding member of the internationally touring doom metal band Witch Mountain. When not on the road, Carson’s byline can be found in Willamette Week and Noisey. Decades after discovering Lovecraft through the early eighties roleplaying scene, he has recently sat on panels at NecronomiCon, Cthulhucon, Bizarro Con, and Living Dead Con. His weird fiction has been published by Word Horde and lauded in Rue Morgue. A debut novella, Starr Creek, will be published in 2016 by Lazy Fascist Press.
Michael Cisco is the author of many novels, including The Divinity Student, The Great Lover, and The Narrator. His stories have appeared in The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, Blood and Other Cravings, Lovecraft Unbound, Black Wings vol. 1, and Aickman’s Heirs, among other titles. His latest novel is Animal Money. Michael Cisco lives and teaches in New York City.
Andrew S. Fuller grew up climbing trees and reading books, later dabbling in archery, occult studies, paleontology, theater, and heavy metal. His works include fiction in the magazines On Spec, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, The Pedestal; the anthologies FISH, Bibliotheca Fantastica, and A Darke Phantastique; the novelette The Circus Wagon; and the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival awardee screenplay Effulgence. He’s edited Three-Lobed Burning Eye magazine since 1999. He lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. You can find him online at andrewsfuller.com and Twitter @andrewsfuller.
A. Scott Glancy had played the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game for decades before co-authoring Delta Green, a gaming supplement that marries the gritty spy thrillers of John le Carré with the cosmic horrors of H. P. Lovecraft. He joined Pagan Publishing in 1998 to work full-time developing new Call of Cthulhu products. Delta Green remains his first love. Little is known of Mr. Glancy’s career plans prior to his joining Pagan Publishing, save for his cryptic references to the collapse of Soviet Communism as “the day those drunken Bolsheviks fucked my employment plans into a cocked hat.”
Orrin Grey is a skeleton who likes monsters. He’s also the author of Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings and Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts. His stories about monsters, ghosts, and sometimes the ghosts of monsters, have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year, and he (ir)regularly writes about horror movies and other nonsense at orringrey.com. When he was a kid, he read every Choose Your Own Adventure book he could get his hands on. This may have had some effect on him...
Jason Heller is the author of the alt-history novel Taft 2012; the Goosebumps tie-in Slappy’s Revenge; and the Pirates of the Caribbean tie-in The Captain Jack Sparrow Handbook. He’s the former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld and won a Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine as part of that editing team. His science fiction/fantasy/horror short stories have appeared in Apex Magazine, Farrago’s Wainscot, Sybil’s Garage, Expanded Horizons, and others, and he’s the co-editor of Hex Publishers’ Cyber World antholo
gy. He’s a 2009 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and he writes about genre fiction for NPR, Clarkesworld, and The Onion A.V. Club (where he’s a Senior Writer). His writing on speculative fiction has also appeared in Weird Tales, Entertainment Weekly, at Tor.com, and in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Traveler’s Almanac. Jason lives in Denver with his wife, Angie.
Jonathan L. Howard is the author of the Johannes Cabal, Russalka Chronicles, Goon Squad, and Carter & Lovecraft series. He is in no way haunted by horrors beyond the Abyss, and there are perfectly good reasons why he is usually to be found sitting in darkened rooms, speaking in a buzzy voice. He just doesn’t care to go into them right now, that’s all. He lives near Innsmouth with a pack of Deep Ones. He lives near Bristol with his wife and daughter. He did live in York for ten years and nothing supernatural ever happened there. Except that one time.
John Hornor Jacobs is the author of Southern Gods, This Dark Earth, The Twelve-Fingered Boy, The Shibboleth, The Conformity, The Incorruptibles, and Foreign Devils. He makes his home in the South of America. You can learn more about him at JohnHornorJacobs.com or on Twitter @johnhornor.
John Langan is the author of two collections of stories, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (2013) and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (2008), and a novel, House of Windows (2009). With Paul Tremblay, he has co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (2011). Forthcoming in 2016 is a new collection, Sefira and Other Betrayals. He is one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards, for which he served as a juror during its first three years. He teaches classes in creative writing and Gothic literature at SUNY New Paltz. He lives in upstate New York with his wife, younger son, a trio of ambitious dogs, and a trio of suspicious cats.
L. Lark is a writer and artist living in Portland, Oregon, who is prone to daydreaming and sunburns. She especially enjoys writing about ghosts, old houses, and all manners of eldritch abomination. Links her to projects and publications may be found at l-lark.com.
Remy Nakamura grew up in Greece, the United States, and Japan, near the graves of young people felled by spear, handgun and atomic bomb. He has dressed a body in burial clothes and handled the burned bones of his grandfather. He writes about foodie zombies, mushroom maidens, and Prohibition-era witch hunters. He is currently trapped in the terrifying suburban mass of Orange County, California, just a few miles from the so-called "Happiest Place on Earth."
Carlos Orsi is a Brazilian writer and journalist. His horror and sf short stories have won some of the major awards for speculative fiction in his native country. In English, his work has appeared in places as diverse as Crypt of Cthulhu and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. He lives in the state of São Paulo with his wife Renata and Violet, a big, mysterious cat that probably hails from Ulthar.
M. K. Sauer lives in Boulder, Colorado, where she owns a coffee shop and spends entirely too many hours of the day caffeinated. She received a degree in Russian Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Believing that everyone should have at least one party trick, she has finally decided that hers is talking about Stalin for three hours straight. She has self-published her novel Star-Crossed: The Confounding Calamities of Byron the Cad and Marietta the Zombie; you can find it on her website mksauer.com.
A resident of the dark and frozen reaches of northern England, Ben Stewart is an aspiring writer who cites the pulp greats like Howard, Lovecraft, Wagner, and Burroughs as his main influences. He is an inveterate geek with a love of Japanese kaiju movies, superhero comics, and miniature wargaming, but despite this he’s somehow married with three kids. Ben has had a handful of his short stories published in various anthologies, though his ultimate goal of actually completing a novel-length work still eludes him.
Molly Tanzer’s debut novel, the steampunk weird western Vermilion, was an NPR Best Book of 2015. She is also the author of the British Fantasy and Wonderland Book Award-nominated collection A Pretty Mouth, the cocktail-themed collection Rumbullion and Other Liminal Libations, and the historical crime novel The Pleasure Merchant. She is also the co-editor (with Nick Mamatas) of the forthcoming flash fiction and cocktail recipe gift book Mixed Up!, due out in late 2017. Molly lives in Boulder, Colorado, where she mostly writes about fops arguing with each other. She tweets @molly_the_tanz, and blogs — infrequently — at mollytanzer.com, where her full bibliography can be found.
E. Catherine Tobler has never banded together with other lady fighters to put down or accidentally free an ancient evil — unless it was on a D&D board. Her fiction has appeared, among other places, in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and on the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award ballot. You can find her online at ecatherine.com and @ecthetwit.
Jeremiah Tolbert is a writer, web designer, and sometimes photographer. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife and son.
Laurie Tom is a third-generation Chinese American. She was introduced to the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms via the video game series, and only read the book much later. She apologizes to Zhuge Liang for never defeating Wei in the Northern Expeditions, as her player avatar had other ideas. Laurie’s fiction has appeared in other anthologies, including Streets of Shadows and The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk.
Carrie Vaughn is the author of the New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty. She also writes for young adults (her novel Steel was named to the ALA’s 2012 Amelia Bloomer list of the best books for young readers with strong feminist content), for the Golden Age superhero series, and other contemporary fantasy novels. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared-world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin, and her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. She’s a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, and in 2011 she was nominated for a Hugo Award for best short story. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado, where she lives with her fluffy attack dog, a miniature American Eskimo named Lily. Visit her at carrievaughn.com.
Wendy N. Wagner is a Hugo Award-winning short fiction editor, as well as a writer. Her short stories have appeared in over thirty publications, including the anthologies Cthulhu Fhtagn!, She Walks in Shadows, and The Way of the Wizard, and the magazines Farrago’s Wainscot and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She is also the author of Starspawn (August 2016), the sequel to Skinwalkers, both Pathfinder Tales novels. She lives with her very understanding family in Portland, Oregon, and you can keep up with her at winniewoohoo.com.
Caleb Wilson’s stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Ironic Fantastic, and Horror Without Victims. He also designs and writes interactive fiction. He and his wife live in Illinois.
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