By John McFarland

It looks like 2024 may be my biggest year ever. Early last year, German publisher Wandler-Verlag caught wind of my work through my association with T.E.D. Klein, horror icon, former editor of The Twilight Zone Magazine, and early champion of Ramsey Campell. Michael Schmidt of Wandler contacted me and asked permission to publish a chapbook featuring a story of mine and one of Mr. Klein’s.

Amazingly, my publisher rejected this idea at first. I managed to talk her into it, as the deal promised to make money for Dark Owl Publishing. Also, of course, it brought some prestige to her small publishing house.

Wandler produced the small book, featuring the most reprinted tale I have ever written, One Happy Family with TED’s story The Ladder. To my surprise, Michael informed me that my story was printed in a collection in Germany before, in 1985, without my knowledge or permission!

Five hundred copies of our chapbook were printed and they sold out. With that success and having purchased my story collection, The Dark Walk Forward, on Amazon, Michael sought permission to publish the collection also. Having seen illustrations I have done for my Bigfoot kid book, Annette: A Big, Hairy Mom, Michael asked if I could illustrate the collection too. That book will appear in May. He also wishes to publish Annette this year or next.

Like most writers, as soon as the first collection was out, I started work on the second. It’s looking like 100,000 words. Stories that continue the sad tale of Ste. Odile, and more. Each story has a title page with an illustration. It’s an old-timey touch that I like. I may do that from now on. The cover was done by the incomparable dark artist and native of Brazil, Gabriel Augusto and like my other books, I am satisfied that the cover is a real attention-getter. Blurbs have generously been provided again by the inimitable T.E.D. Klein, Dacre Stoker, best-selling novelist and great grandnephew of Bram Stoker, and Michael Schmidt. There is a lot of advance interest and the book drops June 1.

Getting your work out there is essential and sometimes it helps to know people, as they say. I am now friends with an Irish expat living and working in Seville, Spain, Joseph Dawson. I had happened across Joseph’s work online because he is a book illustrator in love with horror. His work is amazing. He contacted me through facebook saying he had read my historical horror novel, The Black Garden. He expressed praise for it a writer seldom hears. He loved it and said it changed him in some ways.

It turns out one of the houses he illustrates for is Zagava in Dusseldorf, Germany, who produces leather-bound, illustrated collectors editions of special books. Joseph asked if he could recommend The Black Garden to Jonas, the publisher at Zagava. Jonas loved the book too, Joseph is illustrating it and it will be out later this year.

Also later this year, possibly in summer, the sequel to Annette, entitled Annette: A Big, Hairy Grandma will be out too, as will my story The Testament of Cleander in the collection Alone On The Borderland from Belanger Books.

In my experience, the best way to sell these things are book fairs and comic-cons. I already have one under my belt for 2024; next is Beltane Bash in Champaign, Ill., always a good one; the Bigfoot Festival in Sutton, W.V.; Dark History, also in Champaign; a book festival in Washington, Mo. and various book events in Illinois and St. Louis.

JOHN MCFARLAND’S first novel, The Black Garden, was published in 2010, and the story continues with Mother of Centuries. 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 has written extensively on historical and arts-related subjects and has been a guest lecturer in fiction at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a lifelong Bigfoot enthusiast, and Annette: A Big Hairy Mom is his first novel for young readers.

Check out John McFarland’s work on the Literary Underworld!

by John S. McFarland

As a kid in St. Francois County who already loved history, learning about Ste. Genevieve, Mo. was the treat in the Cracker Jack box. Even in my earliest years of elementary school in a small mining town that no longer exists, I was fascinated by the past. I loved historical movies, not yet suspecting how grotesquely inaccurate they mostly were, and reading stories set in historical times. I was a bit frustrated by how brief the history of the United States was, at least from a Hollywood-inspired Euro-centric perspective. We had no castles, no dolmens or Roman ruins, no walled towns and no sunny islands populated by sirens and Greek monsters. But then I discovered we had Ste. Genevieve.

I heard of it long before I visited it. It was sort of a legendary “old town” on the nearby Mississippi, a remnant of the French-controlled great river, the enormous diocese of Quebec from the 18^th century. On my mom’s side of the family, there were old stories of an ancestor who was “raised by Indians” but my grandmother and her sister knew no more about the story than that. But my grandmother did know that I loved history, and feeling some vague connection to Ste. Genevieve, apparently, she and my grandfather took me there.

I was amazed, at age ten or so, that there was something so reminiscent, I imagined, of old Europe so close to my home town. A French town with 200+-year-old buildings where French was spoken, primarily, until sometime in the 19^th century. There was also, when I imagined it, a sense of old world decadence out of place, out of time. It was a little slice of the French Quarter in southeastern Missouri.

Eventually I found out more about that mysterious ancestor. It turns out the old story was essentially true. He was a child of English settlers in Pennsylvania, age three or so, taken, along with his infant brother when his parents were killed in an Indian raid in the early 1750’s. The infant brother died of a fever soon after, but my ancestor, my great grandfather five times removed, survived with the band of raiders as they moved west to the Mississippi Valley. The group was on Kaskaskia Island on a day when the parish priest at Fort de Chartres nearby, Father Callet, was ministering to his second flock there.

Callet knew the boy was white, though he had little left of his English language by then. The priest bought him from the raiders for five barrels of whiskey and renamed him Hypollite Robert. Hypollite went on to become one of the patriarchs of old Ste. Genevieve and to father twelve children. Over time the name Hypollite was corrupted to Politte, which was my grandmother’s maiden name, she being a descendant of Hypolitte’s son Charles.

In my late teens I discovered the work of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. I was struck by how the fictional inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha County and northern Georgia in these writers’ work were people I had essentially grown up with and known all my life. As Jane Austen had found the whole world in a few counties and a smattering of families, so too had these American writers, working in a fictional field called “regionalism.”

My love of horror was at least as foundational to my development as was my love of history. In my mid-twenties I discovered H. P. Lovecraft. Here was a different kind of regionalism: an infernal one scattered with rotting gambrel roofs and cosmic terrors. One evening a light switched on in my head. I hit on the idea of creating a fictional Ste. Genevieve, an accursed, forgotten village with a dark history and tentative future.

I wanted to re-name the town. I wanted an unusual French name and oddly, I wanted the name to begin with the letter ‘O’. On many visits to the old graveyard in Ste. Genevieve, I kept coming upon the name Odile. That was perfect. Ste. Odile it was. I drew a detailed map of the town, keeping some landmarks that existed in the real location, and changing most others. Then I started thinking of a story, a dark narrative to cast a pall over my newly invented region.

I wanted all the classic elements of 19^th century horror which I had enjoyed in my youth. I needed an ancient evil, a crumbling mansion, a forgotten village populated by a closed, unwelcoming citizenry. The result, after years of research and writing, was my novel The Black Garden.

The book was well-received. All reviews were good from the UK to India and beyond. The novel gave rise to a sequel, The Mother of Centuries, which resolved the life narrative of one of the essential characters of the first book. It also inspired my story collection The Dark Walk Forward, soon to be republished in German. At this moment I am at work on a second collection of Ste. Odile stories, Baby Monster which will appear later this year.

There may be one or two of my readers who wonder when I will move on and leave old Ste. Odile behind. It has happened intermittently. I am producing some tales now that have nothing to do with the crumbling village. Still, ideas keep popping into my head that include foreboding mansions, well-kept secrets and a cursed, forgotten old town.