A fungus amongus from Crone Girls Press

 

By Rachel Brune

On March 19, 2020, I hit “publish” on an anthology of horror fiction.

Coppice & Brake: A Dark Fiction Anthology was the second anthology Crone Girls Press published, and it was also almost the last. Although there are many horror fans who dug into the genre during a global pandemic, it still wasn’t the best timing.

Still, deep in the dark void space that passes for my soul these days, I knew that if I kept publishing the dark, the creepy, and the liminal, our audience would find us, following the trail of moldy breadcrumbs to the feast of fear and terror that we’ve been serving up for eleven publications so far.

Speaking of mold, have you heard about what we have planned for our twelfth, full-length anthology?

So many stories to tell…

Our first volume of quiet horror, Stories We Tell After Midnight, Volume 1, brought readers a selection of stories I like to refer to as the anthology that would happen if Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark grew up and got depression and a mortgage. The stories within are a selection of tales that draw heavily on the tricks the mind can play on you, the evil hiding in plain sight, and the horror that can stem from the selfishness of a young child.

For three volumes, Stories We Tell After Midnight has followed the same idea as a series—find and publish the quiet horror, the terror that screams in your mind, even when your throat can’t make a sound.

For the fourth volume, we wanted to do the same—but different.

Mushrooms, spores, fungi…all the things that grow in the rot.

Thus Dark Spores: Stories We Tell After Midnight 4 popped out of our brains like a fairy ring of white mushrooms in your lawn after a suspiciously out-of-season thunderstorm. Carol Gyzander, my long-time writing and publishing colleague and now co-editor and associate publisher, joins me in this venture.

What inspired this, our first themed anthology? It’s hard to say, but when Carol suggested mushrooms as a theme, I looked around my kitchen, saw just how many mushroom-emblazoned items I had on the counter (I mean, who can resist a coffee mug with a mushroom on it? Definitely not me!) and said: “Of course!”

Like many small presses, we are endeavoring to invite people to become part of the project by chipping in through a Kickstarter campaign. This will allow us to offer not just your regular pre-orders, but also prizes and rewards like a mid-campaign backers’ Zoom party, with author readings and door prizes. If you like eating mushrooms as much as reading about them, we have a kitchen witch cooking up a custom recipe, which she will share through a Zoom cooking lesson.

And the authors within these pages? How do these names sound? Nicholas Kaufmann, Gabino Iglesias, Randee Dawn, Lee Murray, Angela Yuriko Smith, Gwendolyn Kiste—and those are just the authors we’ve announced so far! Tomorrow (May 14th) we will announce another slate of writers we love who have agreed to share their fungus—er, their fungus stories—with us.

In addition to the stories, a number of authors are contributing some rewards of their own. We have several books for your TBR pile, as well as the chance to die a grisly death (or, roll the dice, maybe you’ll survive!) by Tuckerization in one of our other author rewards.

How do I get in on this sporiffic campaign?

Easy! Check out the Dark Spores: Stories We Tell After Midnight 4 Kickstarter campaign. We’ve got backer levels designed for people who like digital books, readers who like paperback books, and readers who want a copy of the paperback book but only to put it on their shelf because they read everything on their e-reader. Yes. We see you.

We hope you’ll check it out! And in the meantime, I want to give a quick shout-out to Elizabeth Donald and The Literary Underworld. She contributed a story to that very first Stories We Tell After Midnight volume, followed by another in Coppice & Brake. She’s been a supporter of Crone Girls Press since the beginning, so if you happen to see her at an event, tell her we said hello! (And then buy some books…)


Rachel A. Brune graduated from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts in May 2000, and was immediately plunged into the low-stakes world of entry-level executive assistantship. Her unexpected journey out of that world and into the military is chronicled in her self-published book Echoes and Premonitions. Rachel served five years as a combat journalist, including two tours in Iraq, and a brief stint as a columnist for her hometown newspaper. After her second tour, she attended graduate school at the University at Albany in NY, where she earned her M.A. in political communication, and her commission as a second lieutenant in the military police corps.

Although her day job has taken in her in many strange, often twisted directions, Rachel continues to write and publish short fiction. She released her first novel, Soft Target, in early 2013, and other books have followed. In addition to writing, she is the founder and chief editor at Crone Girls Press and edits the Falstaff Dread line of horror fiction at Falstaff Books.

Twenty years of fever dreams

By Elizabeth Donald

Harlan Ellison once asked me, “How many stories have you sold?” Nervous, I flubbed the question, because the answer certainly was “far fewer than you, sir.”

My first short story published for pay was “Vertigo,” a weird Twilight Zone-esque piece set in the middle of a campus shooting. It appeared in DogEar Magazine in 2002, and while I’d played around with the freebie sites beforehand, it was the first time someone paid me money for my fiction.

Three years later, the amazing Frank Fradella founded New Babel Books and came to me with an idea for a collection. Setting Suns collected all my published short stories and a handful of new ones written just for that volume, and it won the Darrell Award for best short story and stayed in print for more than 15 years.

I’ve had several books go out of print over the years, and some have been reissued by other presses, while others have quietly gone on into obscurity. But Setting Suns is a book that many of my readers continue to cite as their favorite, and I have a particular fondness for the old girl. It was not my first book – that distinction belongs to Nocturnal Urges, an ebook released in 2004 by Ellora’s Cave Publishing – but Setting Suns was the first time I opened a box of books and saw my own name on the cover. Ask any writer about that moment, and see the look in their eyes when they answer.

While I was thinking about this, I realized I was coming up on my anniversary: it’s been 20 years since my first paid fiction sale. That’s a nice round number, and I wanted to commemorate it somehow.

Thus was born the anniversary edition of Setting Suns, to be released this spring. It includes a bonus short story and a new afterword from me reflecting on the last twenty years and how damn lucky I am to have the career I have. After all, Harlan didn’t ask me how many stories I thought about, or plotted in my notebook, or even how many I managed to scribble out over the last 20 years… he asked how many I sold, and that ever-changing number is due to your support and continued willingness to plunk down your cash for my fever-dreams.

I’m very pleased to be able to offer this book, with my thanks for the past twenty years. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I enjoyed walking through its garden of shadows.

To add to the fun: I’ve recently gotten a handful of books back from a store that had them on consignment, and to my delight, there are three out-of-print rarities among them! I now have two copies of Dreadmire and one each of Setting Suns (original edition) and Blackfire to find homes.

So we’re running a contest! To get an entry, you should:

Sign up for my newsletter!

Subscribe to my Patreon!

Preorder Setting Suns!

Each of these gets you an entry in the contest, and three winners will be randomly selected to receive one of the out-of-print rare books, signed upon request. Spread the word!

Elizabeth Donald is a dark fiction writer fond of things that go chomp in the night. She is a three-time winner of the Darrell Award and Mimi Zanger Award for fiction, finalist for the Prism and Imadjinn awards, author of the Nocturne vampire mystery series and Blackfire dark fantasy series, as well as other novels, novellas and stories in the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres. She is the founder of the Literary Underworld small-press cooperative; an award-winning journalist and essayist with more than 25 years in journalism; a nature and art photographer; freelance editor and writing coach. She is currently completing two masters degrees at Southern Illinois University Edwardville and teaches news writing, composition and editing at SIUE and St. Louis University. She serves as president of the St. Louis Society of Professional Journalists and the Eville Writers, and is a member of the national SPJ Ethics Commission, AEJMC, Sigma Tau Delta, Editorial Freelancers Association and belongs to more writing and trade organizations than is healthy. She lives with her family in a haunted house in Edwardsville, Illinois. In her spare time, she has no spare time. 

Preorder your copy now! Available soon at Literary Underworld. 

Setting Suns Anniversary Edition

Setting Suns Anniversary Edition

$15.00

Buy now

New: The Dark Walk Forward

A new dark-gothic collection from acclaimed horror writer John McFarland is out just in time for the holidays! McFarland is a long-time member of the Literary Underworld, with work ranging from dark fantasy like The Black Garden to offbeat children’s books like Annette: A Big Hairy Mom.

Now his new collection has been praised by Publisher’s Weekly! “McFarland tempers his frights with the mercy of familial love and sympathy for outsiders and victims. Horror readers will be riveted.”

Q: What was your first paid published work?

A: Actually my first paid published work were drawings, not writing so much. In the 1970’s surrealistic drawings by an artist called B. Kliban were all the rage. He published several books, which were the precursors of Gary Larsen’s Far Side, including several about cats. I did a parody of Kliban’s cat books called Kill A Cat and sent it to The National Lampoon. P. J. O’Rourke, the editor at that time, loved it and paid me the princely sum of $750. Scheduling mishaps at the magazine kept pushing the publication date back until the subject was no longer timely, and it never appeared. They never asked for their money back, though.

Q: Who are your favorite writers?

A: Like most boys who turn out like me, my favorite writers as a kid were Poe, Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, but also the likes of Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Hitchens. In college I discovered James Joyce (of Dubliners), William Faulkner and especially Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor’s work was a revelation to me, small town country boy that I was. She seemed to know every one of my relatives and she has had a lifelong effect on my work. I visited her childhood home in Savannah, Ga. and Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, where she did her mature work. I am fortunate enough to own a signed first edition of The Violent Bear It Away, and a series of watercolor concept are studies for covers for her books.

Q: What are you doing next?

A: Two novels are in the works. My current publisher, Dark Owl, has shown interest in re-issuing my 2010 book The Black Garden, and then its sequel, tentatively titled Azmiel’s Daughter. I am also working on a ghost story novel, called Phrygia House. Also, DOP has shown interest in publishing my Young Reader series Bigfoot stories, Annette: A Big, Hairy Mom.

Q: Was there anyone who inspired you as a beginning writer?

A: I actually touch on this in my acknowledgements section in The Dark Walk Forward. As a teen, I corresponded with both Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. I asked the usual young admirer dumb-ass questions, but they were both, especially Bradbury, very kind and generous with their responses.

A: Do you outline or fly by the seat of your pants?

A: Both, but mostly seat of my pants. I always have a general idea of where I want a narrative to go, but as the cliche goes, the story seems to take on a life of its own as you go along. I was amazed at this process when writing The Black Garden. Connections, plot points, twists and turns just popped into my head as I wrote. No one was more surprised at how it turned out than I.


JOHN MCFARLAND’S first novel, The Black Garden, was published in 2010. His work has appeared in The Twilight Zone Magazine, Eldritch Tales, National Lampoon, River Styx, Tornado Alley and the anthology A Treasury of American Horror Stories, which also included stories by Stephen King, Richard Matheson and H.P. Lovecraft. He is a lifelong Bigfoot enthusiast, and Annette: A Big Hairy Mom was his first novel for young readers and is in print in three languages. He has written extensively on historical and arts-related subjects and has been a guest lecturer in fiction at Washington University in St. Louis.


The small town of Ste. Odile in America has experienced the Great War in ways that no one should ever have to endure.

Doctors must tend to births and deaths that make their most difficult cases seem benign.

An 1880s schoolteacher is faced with the worst blizzard of her time and must save the children under her charge.

A young man searches for his father the abandoned orphanage the older man owns… and both know they will despair at what they find.

A primitive woman experiences colonization and the stereotypes of men, yet finds her own method of retribution.

John S. McFarland has slogged through his characters’ woes and woven them into sweetly emotional yet acutely distressful tales. We as readers are forced to understand the pain, the despair, and sometimes the hope of his creations.

We realize we are lucky to live in the era we do. We also realize anything can change to tear us apart. Is it fate? Destiny? Or do we bring about these changes on our own? McFarland will let us know.

Preorder your copy today from the Literary Underworld!

Reviews

McFarland’s writing is lush and sensual, filled with textures, sounds, smells, and primal terrors that have lurked beyond the firelight since prehistory. –Kenneth Anderson, editor of Charon II

“John McFarland has a talent for drawing horror from raw human emotion. The Dark Walk Forward is heartbreaking and sad as well as frightening, with characters that linger in the mind long after the pages have turned.” — Elizabeth Donald, author of Moonlight Sonata, Setting Suns, and Nocturne Infernum.

“McFarland tempers his frights with the mercy of familial love and sympathy for outsiders and victims. Horror readers will be riveted.” ~ Publishers Weekly

New anthology for preorder!

We are happy to announce a reprint of one of Underlord Elizabeth Donald’s favorite short stories will appear in an upcoming anthology from Crone Girls Press. 

Now, we know we’re not supposed to have “favorite” short stories, because they’re all our babies. But let’s face it – some stories are just more fun than others. “In Memoriam” features the return of Cat Suarez, the photographer who sees dead people. Apart from her debut novel, Cat shows up in a couple of short stories in Donald’s Moonlight Sonata, which is still in print and available in ebook too (hint hint).

Stories We Tell After Midnight is edited by the indomitable Rachel Brune, and includes stories from Jane Hawley, Adam N. Leonard, Christy Mann and several others.  

A changeling binds a young girl to a mirror and takes her place…

A salesman pursues closing a deal until it costs him everything…

An ancient Duchess graciously invites you on a tour of her orangerie…

This is the world of Crone Girls Press. Here, the shadows keep their secrets and the moon hides from deeds cast in her glow. In these pages, the Fae walk as human, the dead burn with their anger at the living, the creatures that live in the dark places of the wrong zip code creep out of the shadows and into the kitchen. Stories We Tell After Midnight is a collection of short horror fiction from established names in the genre as well as a number of debut authors.

So, how can you get your hands on this awesome collection? You can preorder the ebook from Amazon for 99c right now! After release on Oct. 21, the ebook will cost you $4.99, so preorders are definitely in your best interest. 

The print edition is not yet up on Amazon, but you can preorder that as well from Literary Underworld! Ordering from LitUnd means you can opt to have it signed if you wish. You can also order it as a gift with optional gift wrap.

Will you be at Archon or Imaginarium in the next couple of weeks? So will we… and you’ll be able to preorder Stories We Tell After Midnight at those events as well. Look for it to release on Oct. 21!