(Image accompanying Quintus Erectus by Ajvaz, photo of Caplin Rous.)

We’re very pleased this week to feature the brilliant Czech writer Michal Ajvaz on Weirdfictionreview.com, with an interview and two pieces of fiction. Please go check it out–direct links below. “Quintus Erectus” and the interview are exclusive to WFR.

The Miraculous Side of the Universe: Interview
“I was accused of being too weird by critics who were proponents of the realistic story. And I can imagine a book that is really too weird: a book whose weirdness doesn´t come from the soul of its author and which substitutes this absence of true weirdness (which doesn´t need to be too weird in many cases) by piling up superficial effects.”

“Quintus Erectus”
“The quintus was extremely cuddly; but I must confess that its cuddliness wasn´t pleasant for me. When it tenderly nuzzled my face with its false face, where a tongue of an animal suddenly appeared in an improper place, and when the quintus began to lick me with it, I didn’t feel good.”

“The Secret War”
“The Europeans continued to hold to mathematics, even after they began to perceive mathematical equations and calculations as bizarre dramas, as evidence of the work of the same blind forces as those that cultivated logical deduction and flowed through ma­chines, forces which drove an unceasing, monotonous division and unification. The Europeans were made nauseous by multiplication because now they perceived it as a diseased swelling, a proliferation anterior to any kind of sense and order, a growth which had arisen by the dull repetition of the same numbers and their resigned coa­lescence in the whole.”

Just a bit of official news: Ann and I are now represented by Sally Harding from the Cooke Agency. I’m happy to forward any inquiries about book rights or new projects to her, but the international rights division can be contacted at rights at cookeinternational.com and the Cooke Agency’s general email is agents at cookeagency.ca. We’ve known Sally for awhile, referred writers to her, and we are happy to be represented by her. (Also thrilled that her clients include Karen Lord and Jesse Bullington.)

With The Weird anthology having taken up all of our time, we’ve been between projects, but I can say that Ann is beginning preliminary work on two anthologies she will be editing solo, we’re sending out the bestiary antho soon (mentioned on this blog in the past), and we are together working on the ultimate, huge time travel fiction anthology, mostly reprints. In terms of my own fiction, I’m continuing on the Journals of Doctor Mormeck, finishing up Borne, and beginning to collaborate with Karin Lowachee on another project.

In addition, The Situation web comic with Eric Orchard is in the final stages of lettering, and will go up on the Tor.com website soonish. My other project with Eric, Bellysnatcher, is about one-third completed, and is based on a notebook of paintings and drawings he sent me. I also expect art from Richard A. Kirk in the next few months to start on Fungicide: New Tales of Ambergris.

Wonderbook: The Essential Illustrated Guide to Writing Fantastical Fiction, for Abrams Image, is now scheduled for spring 2013, giving me a little more time to finish it off. John Coulthart is the designer on that project.

Meanwhile, Weirdfictionreview.com has turned out to be a big success and will be a nexus for our other efforts over the coming years. This week we’ve already posted work by Leena Krohn and the latest episode of the web comic. Tomorrow, Michal Ajvaz, with Kafka on Wednesday.

As Ann and I go forward, we are eager to balance and realistically pursue our various passions, which basically take three forms: to be of use in preserving the history of fantastical fiction and adding to a general understanding of it, especially the weirder stuff, to continue to write the fiction that is most personal to me in conjunction with Ann’s love for finding and publishing great fiction, and to be of use to the future of this kind of fiction through efforts like the Shared Worlds SF/F teen writing workshop.

Obviously, this is all a lot of work and a lot of things to keep balanced, and we’re indebted to the wonderful people who have been willing to help us with much of it. This has made it a lot easier to make various efforts a reality, and we’ll be specifically mentioning people soon.

One casuality of other projects, however, has been the Last Drink Bird Head service awards, which we simply were not able to get off the ground this year. We promise to find the resources to resurrect it next year.

Over at Weirdfictionreview.com we’re running a little weekend contest. Go check it out and give us your choice for where you’d like to go to school…

Meanwhile, Des Lewis and Maureen Kincaid-Speller continue their explorations of The Weird compendium.

Next week I’ll return with more of my serialized novel, The Journals of Doctor Mormeck and news about the US publication of The Weird (next year).

(Sneak peek of next week’s “Reading the Weird”–catch up on episode 1 and episode 2 before part 3 runs next week.)

If you head on over to Weirdfictionreview.com today you’ll find a great piece on the grotesque in art by Nancy Hightower and an interview with Tanith Lee, on top of a Thomas Ligotti interview, fiction, and much more.

Tomorrow we’re posting a sampling of eerie paragraphs from our The Weird antho and a Miskatoni University feature.

Next week, we have the next installment of our original webcomic, fiction from Finnish writer Leena Krohn, a feature on Franz Kafka, exclusive interview with Margo Lanagan (including an awesome photographed handwritten page with edits from her classic story “Singing My Sister Down”), and essays on Alfred Kubin. In addition, we will have two pieces of fiction (one new, one reprint) from famed Czech writer Michal Ajvaz, along with a new interview. And, to top it off, we’ll feature our managing editor and World Fantasy Award-finalist writer Angela Slatter.

In future weeks, we’ll be running fiction by Tanith Lee and Steve Rasnic Tem, original features on the likes of Michel Bernanos, and more interviews with Lucius Shepard, Stephen Graham Jones, Liz Williams, and more.

Here’s a little snippet previewing next week’s Ajvaz selections…

“The Europeans were made nauseous by multiplication because now they perceived it as a diseased swelling, a proliferation anterior to any kind of sense and order, a growth which had arisen by the dull repetition of the same numbers and their resigned coa¬lescence in the whole; they dreaded division because in it they saw disintegration, made more horrifying still by the unnatural disinte¬gration of wholes into parts of equal size. Addition was yet worse, as it meant a progressive decline in new units, heralding the de¬struction of all divided shapes and the enthronement of One that is nothing, the victory of the monster of the Whole.”

It’s been a weird week—one that started with receiving our The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories and also having my wisdom teeth removed, even as we continued to post a lot of content at our new site Weirdfictionreview.com. Painkillers have left me floaty, drifty, and susceptible to highs and lows, which is only intensified by The Weird itself. This is a project, clocking in at 750,000 words (TOC here), that has consumed our lives for two years. It’s drained us, exhilarated us, left us for dead in pits of despair, energized us, and now it’s real and out in the world. I’ve learned more from compiling this anthology with Ann than any other book we’ve done, and perversely it’s both delayed some of my fiction writing simply because of the work involved and been essential to inspiring other pieces of fiction.

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I am struck, in Maureen Kincaid-Speller’s latest post about reading The Weird anthology, by the sentence “I cannot remember a time I didn’t know this story.” She’s referring to Saki’s “Sredni Vashtar,” but I’m curious, dear readers, as to what story you have known as long as you’ve been alive? Or, at least, it seems that way…

Check out the latest entries posted at Weirdfictionreview.com today, including an extensive interview with weird fiction legend Thomas Ligotti and one of his favorite “under-rated” classics by Jean Ferry in our fiction section.

We’ve also got a post on some heroic readings-in-progress, story by story. As we say there, although there is a lot of coverage forthcoming for The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories in the UK is November 10 (Book Depository has free shipping to the US), in the meantime a couple of intrepid reviewers have already begun to tackle The Beast, story by story: D.F. Lewis and Maureen Kincaid-Speller. This is an act of extreme heroism, as far as we are concerned, no matter what their reactions to the anthology over all and we applaud them for it. Here are the relevant links to their read-throughs:

D.F. Lewis’s “Real-Time Reviews”
(he also coined the term “srednidipity while reading The Weird)

–Post introducing the anthology and covering the stories by Alfred Kubin, F. Marion Crawford, Algernon Blackwood, Saki, and M.R. James.

–Post covering stories by Lord Dunsany, Gustav Meyrink, Georg Heym, Hans Heinz Ewers, Rabindranath Tagore, Luigi Ugolini, A. Merritt, Ry?nosuke Akutagawa, and Francis Stevens thus far, with the post being updated as Lewis finishes each new story.

(Corvus’s page and Book Depository listing with free shipping to the US.)

As you may know from prior entries on this blog, Ann VanderMeer and I launched Weirdfictionreview.com this past week with a great selection of interviews, features, comics, fiction, and art. Week two is no different. Here’s a run-down of what we posted today and, under the cut, previews from the rest of the week…

Excerpt from China Mieville’s Afterword to The Weird compendium:
“These are strange aeons. These texts, dead and/or not, burrow, and we cannot predict everything they will infect or eat their path through. But certainly your brain, and they will eat the books you read from today on, too. That is how the Weird recruits….This is a worm farm. These stories are worms.”

Reading the Weird, Leah Thomas’s original web comic, episode 2:
“The point is it was awful. He liked attributing deep meaning to my brothers’ lazy idiocy.”

Webcomic Creator Leah Thomas Interview, talking about Sandkings, Scary Stories, and More:
“Is there any family that isn’t weird? My parents are both full-time social workers, so ‘weird’ doesn’t really exist for them anymore. In any case, I am grateful that they raised me on a steady stream of strange.”

Classic Algernon Blackwood story “The Willows”:
“But this cry found no expression, for as my eyes wandered from the plain beyond to the island round me and noted our little tent half hidden among the willows, a dreadful discovery leaped out at me, compared to which my terror of the walking winds seemed as nothing at all.”

Coming up Tuesday through Thursday of this week:

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Thanks again for keeping up with my serialized novel The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. I’ve now topped 48,000 words. For those who haven’t been following along, the story before these latest two entries can be found here.

If you like what you’ve been reading, please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial stand-alone book appearance. Donations also keep me writing, because I will have to switch over to guaranteed paid work soon otherwise.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck.

Entry #25 (Mountain)

I have not felt like writing, even here, at the core of me, for several days. There is something about familiar routine that is comforting, and in absorbing my loss of Marty and what Gabriel has told me of how I was raised to be more human than mountain…I just have found it easier to go along with what seems normal. It is as if I have a wound that is taking time to heal, and that somehow I cannot truly think of rebellion until it does. I do not think this is a human feeling. It strikes me more as mountain: to let the seasons add to the dirt on my flanks, to let the plants become ever more overgrown, to study the ghost frogs that still cling to my sides like fleshy balloons, and only after I have let everything wash over me take action. This strikes me on a human level as a form of cowardice. This manifests in part of me as shame. This is a spiral of repetition that leads like roots into the core of me, here in this tiny space I have hollowed out where I need no heart and a tiny avatar of me sits down to write in a microscopic journal, the walls lit by a vague phosphorescent green glow.

I think back now to some of the experiments they had me “lead” or participate in, and I think: how naïve. How naïve to ever think that these beasts humans mistake for angels had your well-being in mind. What chaos within the Grim Lighthouse, what a charnal house…but regimented, orderly, stripped of the randomness, trading the sudden unexpected spray of blood for the formal precision of the scapel…is this any improvement or just an acknowledgment of the former? The times I looked into the depths of some angel-made vortex in the laboratory where spun tiny helpless creatures in a time pool, their flailing bodie no larger than the avatar writing these words. I could say I was a mountain. I could say, “I remove myself to a great height and look down and those looking up.”

But through this smaller me I have a better sense of the scale of the world and my place in it. Even the compression of making such tiny marks on such a scrap of “paper” conveys a sense of this, even as it makes me somehow also more careful and precise. I like this feeling. It makes me believe I am encountering and cataloguing details no mountain could know: the drops of dew plummeting to the soil from a leaf; the cells within me that contain mirror-images of this hollowed-out heart of mine, my avatar bent over a desk, writing these words; the number of angels that could be shoved into the stairwell of the Grim Lighthouse and made to understand what they’d really done.

Perhaps my avatar, bear-eaten, komodo-devoured, knows better now, too…wherever he might be.

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Thanks to those loyal readers who have been keeping up with my serialized novel The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. I really appreciate your support and donations. I’ve now topped 46,000 words and have all of the notes, fragments, and half-scenes necessary to complete this rough draft. For those who haven’t been following along, I’m making it easy by posting the entire draft thus far below the cut, in addition to an exclusive interview with the characters..

I planned to post new material today, but for the past week I’ve been grappling with extreme tooth pain that’s had me working at half-capacity. I go in for surgery to remove all four wisdom teeth on Monday, and thus I don’t think I’ll be posting more Mormeck until next Thursday or so.

So, quite frankly, the donations part of this enterprise is taking on a little added urgency as a result, especially given the amount of time spent on pro bono work for translation efforts and the Shared Worlds teen writing camp recently. If you like what you’ve been reading or what you’re encountering below for the first time, please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial stand-alone book appearance.

What Is Mormeck about?

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck.

Enjoy the story, and the interview!

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