(My video of Chamblin’s, with voice-over text from my Ambergris stories.)

We made another pilgrimage to Chamblin’s Book Mine in Jacksonville, Florida, this past weekend, this time with Sir Tessa accompanying us. The place is larger than last time—it has to be the equal of Powell’s, and larger than any other used bookstore in the US, for sure. The video above should help attest to that.

We focused on trading books in for a selection of anthologies and author collections to further our research for future projects. This also helped alleviate the burden of books in the house. Chamblin’s cash for books percentage isn’t all that great, but in terms of trade credit, it meant we could acquire everything set out below the break without spending a penny.

I must say, though, their general anthology section hasn’t been touched in years. The amount of dust on our hands by the time we’d finished browsing through them…took a lot of washing off. This truly is a book mine, and even just the mystery section is as big as a normal bookstore. There are also some amusing juxtapositions of rooms, given the way Chamblin’s has gradually annexed additional space around the initial building. Thus this photo, with Men’s Studies sharing some prime real estate…

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Thanks again for keeping up with my serialized novel The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. I’ve now topped 52,000 words. For those who haven’t been following along, the story before the three latest entries can be found here and the most current entries can be found in the archive.

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.

There is a battle on this planet, between the arctic army with its ghost whales and the European interlopers, that marks the culmination of the time-loop, after which as I have described, all recedes to the beginning of the conflict, reset as if solely for the angels’ entertainment. The clash of cultures and weapons occurs again, generals and underlings performing their alloted roles like actors in a play.

But at this point, this battle before the Renewal, as I call it sometimes, it’s almost as if the Grim Lighthouse is there, in the background, and if it were a sentient being it would be snickering at the destruction it has wrought. For surely even if it is not the cause, it gains sustenance from such a spectacle? It’s just a mental construct, I suppose, an intellectual exercise to while away the re-born hours as I surveil, and one that makes me feel as if there is some link between this place and my beloved Marty, that by spying on this increasingly barren landscape, these dying men, I am somehow by some not yet understood process standing beside her, or at least somehow present, wraith-like, in her life.

This battle, which goes nameless because of the re-set, is stranger than anything that comes before it, because the Europeans unveil a weapon that causes true harm to the ghost whales: a flat, angled canon made out of a shiny black metal that fires something more akin to a gout of flame than a cannon ball. These gouts of flame shoot out like miniature comets with a great frictionless bellowing and cut great ungodly tears in the ghost whales. There is no process of attrition as with the Europeans’ other weapons, and so as beneath the whales the two sides founder through cold marsh and ghastly forest, fighting hand-to-hand, running calmly to positions to take aim and fire, to reduce another’s skull to a fragmented mass of brain and bone with some limp skin whispering around the edges…the ghost whales sound out their agony, the comets taking out enormous pieces of them so that they are more empty spaces than ectoplasmic flesh…and at a certain point the whale can no longer maintain its shape, and somewhere in the backlines the handler shrieks, blood explodes from their brain, and the whale dissolves…and in dissolving, into globules that flicker green-and-blue, it becomes in essence a series of plummeting wraith-bombs. Splashed by one as it hits rocks or earth below, engulfed by one, men of either side see things they were not meant to see. For the arctic army, these are at least visions they know of from stories and legends. For the Europeans, it is a horrifying other-ness their brains cannot comprehend, and the haunting take a physical toll, until their flesh is translucent and they are stumbling around, blind and screaming, sometimes all that remains visible, for awhile, is a leg and foot or a head displaying the most terrible rictus of pain and fear. (This is why I evoke the Grim Lighthouse: these soldiers become what I would call localized versions of the Grim Lighthouse, with no illumination to lead them past the shoals.)

It is horrible to watch, but when you have been on surveillance for the time-loop twenty or even thirty times, you grow accustomed to it, as you would almost anything. Is that a human trait or a living mountain trait? I have no way of knowing.

So I took in my disgusting and inappropriate boredom to following the path of each floating whale-drop as it slipped from the disintegrating body and splashed to the earth. It was as if there might be some mystery to be solved just in examining one tiny element of the battle in detail.

And there was, although it did not reveal itself to me until yesterday. For on following one living bomb at the very, very end of the time-loop, I saw it dislodge a pebble as it fell harmless, and that pebble touched another, and for an almost imperceptible moment I saw a kind of temporal fault-line, something that used the natural lines of its environment with such sinister cleverness that it might as well have just been the erosion of the stones, the sharp lines of the blades of grass. But it wasn’t. It was something else. Something that I think holds the answer to the time-loop. Something that I think explains why the time-loop concerns the angels.

I haven’t told Gabriel. I want to watch it again, and again, to be sure, and do some research in the library. To know what I’m watching.

Or who I am watching.

Or what might be watching me.

There’s a lot of nonfiction and fiction today at Weirdfictionreview.com, most of it focused on Michel Bernanos and Jean Ray.

But there’s also Scott Nicolay’s Dogme 2011 for the Weird. It’s basically one writer’s credo about what he thinks will keep his weird fiction more original and unique.

You might or might not agree with it, but I think it’s useful to think about. It’s a list that most if not all of my own fiction adheres. In thinking about what weird fiction is, and how engages with the reader, it’s absolutely right to put forward, for example, the idea of not using werewolves, vampires, or zombies. Nothing can ever stop being innovative or fresh in a good writer’s hands, but the field is so overcrowded with these archetypal monsters that the effects created in fiction using them are not really part of the weird. They belong to horror or other types of fiction. There cannot be the frisson of discovery or of encountering the unknown crucial to the weird, due to the baggage these monsters bring with them. They have been overly contextualized.

Anyway, love it or hate it, I suggest you go check out Nicolay’s points.

Thanks again for keeping up with my serialized novel The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. I’ve now topped 51,000 words. For those who haven’t been following along, the story before the three latest entries can be found here and the most current entries can be found in the archive.

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.

Dear Pavlov:

I am writing another of these letters I am not sure I will ever send…but it makes more sense to write to someone than to just keep a diary. I feel the need for what I write to be intended for someone else, to have some sense that there is another who knows what I know.

This place in the hills skirting the vast forests is strange and unsettling. I know why, because I have been traveling for so long—headlong and in secret, with so many encounters along the way. To now stop, to be in one place? It feels unnatural. I already feel a restlessness deep within me that I quell with long walks that erase the boundary between day and night. Because I know it would be best to stay here, to guard that which I sought until the right moment arrives. (I know some of this will sound like I speak in vague riddles, but I am trying, in my way, to be honest with you.)

After some thought, I have taken on the disguise of a doddering old man, using an old photograph of Tolstoy that I saw on my travels as my model. Surely, some half-recognition even among those who have never read or seen him may create for me some sympathy? Or perhaps not. Now it seems like a risky model, and that someday I may hear from behind me “Tolstoy!” and suffer unforeseen consequences. But it is too late to change, I think.

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Over on Weirdfictionreview.com, we’ve gone “Kafkaesque,” posting the entire introductory essay to the new anthology by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly, along with an appreciation of Alfred Kubin. (And don’t miss fiction from Leena Krohn, interview and two pieces of fiction from Michal Ajvaz.)

Meanwhile, my co-editor on The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories will be appearing in Amsterdam on December 8th at the American Book Center to do an event in support of the anthology.

Weirdfictionreview.com now has a regular book reviewer, too: Maureen Kincaid Speller. For information on how to send her books, click here.

Finally, both Maureen Kincaid Speller and Des Lewis have continued their story-by-story reviews of The Weird compendium, with Maureen’s latest here (the sidebar used to have the other entries, but you may have to search for them). Des, meanwhile, is up to posts Five and Six.

Interested in more on The Weird?

Or check out Weirdfictionreview.com…

I’ll be freed up for taking on more fiction critiques to commence December 1st. If you’re interested, contact me at vanderworld at hotmail.com for rates and more information. I’m equally at home with stories as with novels, and I also am experienced with all types of fiction except Westerns, so…

The full critique service provides you with handwritten specific comments on the manuscript itself and an email of comments that apply not only to your story or novel but also your writing in general. Usually, I provide a summation and then also a break-down into elements like Characterization, Dialogue, Setting, etc. My goal is not to get repeat business because I give you something comprehensive that carries forward into your future fiction.

For those coming here for the first time, I’m a World Fantasy Award-winning editor and writer who has edited several critically acclaimed anthologies and made the year’s best lists of Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, and more. I’ve taught several times at the Clarion Writers Workshops, once at Odyssey and at the Hugo House, Brisbane Writers Festival and other international events, and done mainstream literary workshops as well as focused on fantastical fiction.

Thanks again for keeping up with my serialized novel The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. For those who haven’t been following along, the story so far can be found here and the one additional entry since then 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.

“The smallest variation, the tiniest echo of a change would mean everything,” Gabriel said to me about the new alt-Earth he had tasked me with placing under surveillance. This place where the people of the Far North had finally come down to drive out the European invaders. They followed the path of ancient glaciers, in numbers, set in their purpose, floating above them the vast, the luminous apparitions that were the ghost whales tethered to the minds of the spirit walkers. Made manifest to others through the strength of the connection. Walrus riders and a huge species of yak that had crossed the Bering Strait in this reality. Polar bears trained as soldiers. It had all been in place for some time; the question had simply been what forces would drive rival factions together into common cause and under a common leader.

Invasions, in my experience, usually did it. An invasion could be as initially benign as a trading mission or emissaries of some far-flung foreign religion. But little by little something in the intruding mindset could not let go of the strong impulse to impose, to intervene, to transform.

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(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.”

(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.”