A New Collection Coming
As 2011 rapidly lurches towards its end, I’m delighted to be able to say that if everything happens as it’s supposed to I will have not one, not two, but three new books out in 2012.
You already know about one, my novel Lullaby for the Rain Girl, coming from Dark Regions Press. (And if you don’t know about it, you have but to scroll down these blog entries to be enlightened.) I’m not quite ready to start talking about another, except to say that it will be a New & Selected Poems volume-more on that soon….
But today I can reveal a bit about the third. Titled Herding Ravens, it will appear in mid-2012 from Bad Moon Books, the multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning publisher of such fine genre writers as Clive Barker, Gene O’Neill, Mike Arnzen, Lisa Morton, and many more. Herding Ravens is something unique-the first-ever collection of what I call my “bon-bons,” very short, very strange little tales, usually under a thousand words each, which do things and go places my other fiction doesn’t.
What kind of story am I talking about? Rather than try to describe them, maybe I should just show you an example. Here’s one that appeared in the Dark Discoveries anthology The Bleeding Edge.
The Town Elders
copyright © Christopher Conlon
In their wisdom the town elders decreed that an ice skating rink would be built, and it was. Hundreds of happy skaters, loving couples, single men and women, teenagers, families with small wobble-walking children, came from miles around bundled in their snow clothes to enjoy gliding about on the ice under blue and white winter skies. Unfortunately the rink had been built, for reasons only the town elders might have been able to explain, over the top of a small lake, and as the weather turned from winter to spring skaters began to notice cracks which were at first no more than tiny pencil-scratches in the ice but which soon expanded to highly dangerous crevices and chasms. Skaters began to disappear under the ice into the lake, at first occasionally, and then on an alarmingly regular basis.
When blossoms began opening all over town and the weather had turned the warm of sandals and shorts, the ice rink was dismantled entirely and the same persons who had enjoyed the winter skating, that is, those who still survived, came to the lake, disrobing almost completely and allowing the sun to bronze their skin for hours on end. They ate from picnic baskets and cooked hamburgers on small barbeques. Many of them swam delightedly in the lake, paddling this way and that and playfully splashing each other. One problem, which the town elders failed entirely to solve, was that at times corpses left over from the fiasco of the skating rink would suddenly surface, and at the most inopportune times. It became an embarrassment and something of a public relations problem, never more so than when a young woman dragged a male corpse to shore, proclaiming it to be what remained of her first and indeed only true love, thereupon carrying the disintegrating thing over her shoulders to the local courthouse where she demanded that the town elders allow her to marry it. She was informed that the law did not allow for the marriage of woman to corpse, and this created a small but similarly embarrassing civil rights kerfuffle. The woman ultimately decided to cohabitate with her dearly beloved, a decision which generated some controversy in itself-but not, the town elders were certain, on the level that would have occurred had they allowed the two of them to enter into the state of holy matrimony.
One odd aspect to this entire problem of the corpses in the lake was that the lake never seemed to tire of disgorging corpses onto the shore. After a time it became embarrassingly apparent that far more deceased persons were washing up onto the sands than had vanished from the ice rink during the winter. The town elders formed a committee to study this apparently impossible problem, but no final report from this committee is known to have been issued, or if issued, it appears to have been lost.
In the meantime winter came again and the lake was once more crusted over with smooth, inviting ice. Again came the young lovers and the men and women and the families with their small wobble-walking children. But now some noticed odd round bumps appearing on the surface of the ice, bumps which slowly split the ice in places through which strange things, at first unrecognizable, began to grow. Some persons believed that the growths might be some new strain of cauliflower or tomato, but soon enough it became apparent that the growths were in fact human beings. One would see the clear ice-encrusted outlines of a forehead, a temple, a set of ears, frost-filled strands of hair. This for the town elders was the ultimate humiliation, and it was quickly decided that something would have to be done. Fortunately there was a course of action readily and even obviously available to them, and they took it. The town elders began to cultivate this unprecedented winter crop. One would see them late at night in their heavy coats tilling the ice rink with shovels and hoes, always careful to smooth the ice again after pulling nature’s peculiar yield from the ice. Eventually the story, which was true, went around that the crops were in fact delicious to eat when prepared properly, and soon the townspeople themselves were tending what was now less a skating rink than a glorious winter garden. Neighbors laughed and joked about this unexpected bounty and exchanged recipes enthusiastically. If you ever decide to go to the town, by all means do so in the depths of winter. Buy one of the readily-available cookbooks for sale at various shops near the garden. And then go and collect some winter crops for your own dinner. There’s more than enough for everyone. Indeed, the supply is ample and even, at times, overwhelming. The heads of teenage girls are said to be especially succulent when stewed for several hours with carrot and onion in chicken stock. Or snap off some baby fingers, which are simple to gather and requite no preparation at all. The town elders assure us that they are delicious straight from the ice, sweet and with an unexpected tanginess.
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A handful of my bon-bons have been published here and there, but the vast majority of them have never been seen anyplace-making Herding Ravens an almost all-new collection of my fiction, a collection totally unlike my previous ones.
But what really excites me about Herding Ravens is that Bad Moon has commissioned a wonderful artist, Daryl Earnest, to provide an illustration for every story-some 26 in all. Here’s his rendering (not done specifically for my book) of a certain gentleman whose spirit looms large over the stories in the collection.
I was lucky enough to be able to briefly interview Daryl just after he received news that he would be doing the art for Herding Ravens. Here’s our exchange:
CC: Daryl, what is your background in art, and how does that connect to your interest in horror and fantasy fiction?
DE: I have just your standard school art education, just to high school and no further. This is probably unique to me, but I didn't do well in the structured classes I was a part of; I spent most of my time rebelling against the whole concept of "to be artistic, you have to draw the same still-life, use the same colors,” etc. I suppose I drove my teachers as crazy as they drove me!
I was just always drawn to the horror/dark fantasy side, probably because I was a Bernie Wrightson FREAK as a kid...still am, for that matter; it's just now I've had a chance to see more and develop more influences, people like Franklin Booth and Virgil Finlay, and many more. Plus, one of the earliest books I ever remember reading was Stephen King's The Stand;I was obviously WAY too young to fully understand it, but I loved what I DID get...plus, it had some great Wrightson art! And lastly, I can't forget those great old Weird Tales and EC comics reprints I got my hands on..."A little irony's good for the blood", indeed….
CC: You've mentioned to me that you've wanted to break into book illustration for a long time. Can you talk about that?
DE: Again, this goes back to when I was growing up, but you always want to do what you love, and I always loved those WILD panels and covers I saw in the books I read; to the point that I made up my mind one day that I'm good enough to do this...and here we are!
CC: How do you do your work as an artist? What's the process from the start to the finished piece?
DE: I guess that since I'm not "formally" trained, I probably have a pretty unorthodox approach to my work. Basically, when I get an idea, I grab a stray piece of paper and scribble something somewhat rough out, sort of a "proof of concept,” and if I like where's it's going, I grab my sketchpad and pencil and proceed from there. I think I'm one of the lucky few who has a solid idea from the get-go, so I don't usually make many changes from when I start to when I finish.
CC: Thanks for your time, Daryl-I know your art for the collection is going to be great!
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I’ll post updates on Herding Ravens as events warrant. In the meantime, please check out Daryl’s Facebook page for many more examples of his fantastic (in both senses of the word) art.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002237918033#!/profile.php?id=100002237918033&sk=info
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