Tag Archives: horror

Books Deal with Kaaron Warren & Ellen Datlow

by

0

Kaaron Warren & Ellen Datlow taken by Cat Sparks

Ellen Datlow & Kaaron Warren (photo by Cat Sparks)

IFWG Publishing is extremely pleased to have acquired the publishing rights for five titles by Kaaron Warren, one of which is a collaboration with multi-award winning editor Ellen Datlow.

Three Warren titles are transfers of rights from a previous publisher (Slights, Mistification and Walking the Tree) and two are original works: Morace’s Story (a middlegrade novella that closely ties with Walking the Tree, where both will be published worldwide simultaneously), and Tool Tales, a chap-book that will contain original photography by Ellen Datlow paired with micro-fiction by Warren—all associated with images of old tools that are odd, weird, or whose utility are largely forgotten over time. Warren’s prose sources inspiration and stream of consciousness from these images.

All five titles will be published on return to normalcy in the marketplace following the current COVID-19 crisis, but Slights will be available in ebook format in coming months. All three reprints will be augmented with new creative material, notably a bonus related short fiction piece for Slights, and Walking the Tree will be closely associated with Morace’s Story—it will be the same story as Walking the Tree, but through the eyes of a young protagonist. IFWG views this pairing as an exciting project with an original approach to bridging literature across different age groups. IFWG will provide more news on enhancements to Mistification at a later date.

Tool Tales brings Ellen Datlow into the project as an artistic contributor, which contrasts with her usual expert role as an editor. IFWG was approached by Warren and Datlow following their social media success in matching Kaaron’s speculative fiction writing against Datlow’s collection of images of tools, to turn this exercise into a print and ebook collection. IFWG recognised the potential interest in this project in the wider reading community, and also saw it as a superior reference work for writers’ workshops and classes.

IFWG Publishing views these acquisitions as a strong investment, injecting two projects with unique offerings to the market (Morace’s Story’s pairing with Walking the Tree, and the creative collaboration between Warren and Datlow in Tool Tales). Additionally, IFWG values the addition of five titles bearing Warren’s respected name to its current catalogue of two books (the multi-award winning novel, The Grief Hole, and her collection of short fiction, The Gate Theory).

Kaaron Warren’s Bio:

Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She was recently given the Peter McNamara Lifetime Achievement Award and was Guest of Honour at World Fantasy 2018, Stokercon 2019 and Geysercon 2019. Kaaron was a Fellow at the Museum for Australian Democracy, where she researched prime ministers, artists and serial killers.

She has published five multi-award winning novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole and Tide of Stone) and seven short story collections, including the multi-award winning Through Splintered Walls. She has won the ACT Writers and Publishers Award four times and twice been awarded the Canberra Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her most recent novella, Into Bones Like Oil (Meerkat Press) is on the Final Ballot for the Stoker Award, the Recommended Reading List for Locus and the Aurealis Award Shortlist.

Ellen Datlow’s Bio:

Ellen Datlow has been editing sf/f/h short fiction for four decades. She was fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and SCIFICTION and currently acquires short stories and novellas for Tor.com and Nightfire. She has edited many anthologies for adults, young adults, and children, including The Best Horror of the Year series and Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles, and the reprint anthologies Edited By and Body Shocks. She’s won multiple Locus, Hugo, Stoker, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards plus the 2012 Il Posto Nero Black Spot Award for Excellence as Best Foreign Editor. Datlow was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre” and was honored with the Life Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association, in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career and honored with the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention.

She runs the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in the east village, NYC, with Matthew Kressel.

New Release: Drive, She Said, and Other Stories by Tracie McBride

by

0

Drive, She Said Book Cover

It is with pleasure that we can announce the UK and Australian release of Melbourne-based author, Tracie McBride’s collection of short fiction titled ‘Drive, She Said, and Other Stories’. “What attracted IFWG to Tracie’s short fiction,” said Gerry Huntman, Managing Director, “wasn’t just the quality and weirdness/darkness of her narrative. It was the collection itself, that centred female characters in each and every story. Something different, something compelling.” We welcome Tracie to IFWG’s fold, confident that her work will be greeted with a great response to this horror collection.

The magnificent artwork and cover design was rendered by IFWG regular, Keely Van Order.

A collection of horror and dark fantasy short stories.

The themes and settings are diverse, but one common thread runs through the stories—they all feature women.

Women as protagonists. Women as doomed heroines. Woman as villains. Mothers and spinsters, wives and prostitutes, sisters and witches.

And in some stories, monsters in feminine form.

The collection will be released in North America on the 1st April 2020, through our International imprint – it is available for preorder through various outlets.

McBride profile

Tracie McBride

New Acquisition: Bedding the Lamia by David Kuraria

by

0

IFWG is very pleased to announce the acquisition of a collection of four stories by David Kuraria, called ‘Bedding the Lamia’. Two of the stories are reprints (found in Midnight Echo, the other in Dimension 6). “Kuraria has already contributed to a few of IFWG’s anthologies, and has won acclaim in that particular journey,” said Gerry Huntman, Managing Director of IFWG, “and it is wonderful to have the opportunity to showcase his work in a long-fiction collection.”

David Kuraria

Of Melanesian and Scottish heritage, the author was raised by his extended family on the island of Ranongga in the Solomon Islands. He attended Kingsland Intermediate school in Auckland New Zealand before reuniting with his family in the Solomon’s capital, Honiara. To date, David has had just three stories published in Australian Anthologies. His 2018 story Kõpura Rising (published in Cthulhu: Land of the Long White Cloud), describes a malign, marine-dwelling race named Kõpura. That tale was selected as a finalist for the 2018 Australian Aurealis Awards for Best Horror Novella and added to Ellen Datlow’s 2018 Best Horror of the Year recommended reading List. This is his first collection.

The four stories are:

The Gods of Mwaia
A Melanesian farmer and his companions trek to a secretive Solomon Island tribe to beg for land rights for his starving People. They bear gifts of persuasion but become gifts for the dominant tribe’s frightful gods.

And He Shall Suffer for his Art
An artist experimenting with narcotics and obscure occult methods inadvertently calls up an unwelcome muse. The price paid for a favour is bloody and final.

Silent is the River
A war historian, a young New Zealand teacher and an Aboriginal Spiritual man travel up a Northern Australian River on a converted war barge. Here brutal Colonial past reaches out to ensnare modern adventurers on a journey into horror.

The Absurd Quest of Thomas Wu
A survivor of the 2011 Christchurch New Zealand earthquakes takes his deceased grandfather’s diaries to recreate the old man’s 1950s travels around Melanesia. He soon finds himself crossing a borderland into a strange ‘otherworld’, where any action has blackly comical and unpleasant consequences.

IFWG Publishing will release Bedding the Lamia in the first quarter of 2021.

New Acquisition: Coralesque and Other Tales to Disturb and Distract, by Rebecca Fraser

by

0

Rebecca Fraser_Bio Pic

IFWG is pleased to announce the acquisition of the rights to a collection of dark fiction and poetry by Rebecca Fraser, titled Coralesque and Other Tales to Disturb and Distract. IFWG has previously published her young teen novel, Curtis Creed and the Lore of the Ocean, but Coralesque is her first foray into adult fiction (and some poetry) in book form. We are not only pleased with the upcoming publication, but also our extensive track record in supporting Australian female authors, particularly in the dark fiction field (but not limited to just that). And we will continue to do this – watch this space.

Rebecca Fraser is an Australian author whose short stories, flash fiction, and poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, magazines, and journals. Her first novel Curtis Creed and the Lore of the Ocean was released by IFWG Publishing Australia in 2018. Rebecca holds a MA in Creative Writing, and a Certificate of Publishing (Copy Editing & Proofreading). To provide her muse with life’s essentials Rebecca copywrites and edits in a freelance capacity, and operates StoryCraft Creative Writing Workshops for aspiring authors of every age and ability…however her true passion is storytelling. Say G’day at writingandmoonlighting.com or Twitter and Instagram @becksmuse

A surfer who becomes horrifyingly one with the sea. A new mother’s devastating search for belonging.  A stone gargoyle with a violent history.  A fisher boy who discovers the real cost of forbidden love. A farmer whose delight at drought-breaking rain quickly turns to terror. A hedonistic rock star who manifests double trouble. A robotic housemaid with a sinister agenda. A dirty ex-cop with a dirtier secret. An unscrupulous mayor’s solution to rid his city of the homeless …

These are just some of the characters you’ll meet in Coralesque and Other Tales to Disturb and Distract, a collection of dark offerings comprising short stories alongside a smattering of flash and poetry.

Introduced by multi-award-winning author, Steven Paulsen, Rebecca Fraser’s collection brings together an eclectic mix of her published, award-nominated, and prize-winning fiction, embracing a diversity of styles from gothic to cyberpunk, to contemporary horror, fantasy, dystopia…and every dark cranny in between.

From the harsh terrain of the Outback, to the depths of the Pacific Ocean, the wilds of Tasmania,  dystopian futures, enchanted lands, and the familiarity of suburbia, Coralesque and Other Tales to Disturb and Distract takes readers on a journey into unsettling, unforgiving, and unforgettable territory.

Coralesque and Other Tales to Disturb and Distract will be released late in 2020/early 2021.

Cover Reveal: Drive, She Said by Tracie McBride

by

0

Drive, She Said Book Cover

We are excited to reveal the cover of Tracie McBride’s upcoming short fiction collection, Drive, She Said and Other Stories. The artwork and design is by the wonderfully skilled and talented Keely Van Order.

A collection of horror and dark fantasy short stories.

The themes and settings are diverse, but one common thread runs through the stories—they all feature women.

Women as protagonists. Women as doomed heroines. Woman as villains. Mothers and spinsters, wives and prostitutes, sisters and witches.

And in some stories, monsters in feminine form.

Drive, She Said and Other Stories will be released world-wide in March 2020. Preorder facilitates will be available early next year.

New Release: Figments and Fragments by Deborah Sheldon

by

0

Figments and Fragments Book Cover

IFWG is very pleased to announce the world-wide release of Deborah Sheldon’s collection of short dark fiction, Figments and Fragments. “We are so pleased with this title,” said Gerry Huntman, Managing Director of IFWG, ” as it loops back to some of Sheldon’s earlier dark fiction, but also adds new stories – enriching the depth of our catalogue of her short fiction. This book is a celebration of Sheldon’s mastery of the genre.”

IFWG would also like to acknowledge the wonderful cover art and design by Keely Van Order.

Brutal. Compelling. Sinister.

From wheat farms, roadhouses, caravan parks and beaches to quiet suburban streets and inner-city apartments, award-winning author Deborah Sheldon tells distinctly Australian stories about violence, loss, betrayal and revenge.

Figments and Fragments includes three new stories written especially for the collection.

Figments and Fragments is available world-wide in all good online and bricks-and-mortar stores, and also in ebook formats.