The cutting room, p.39
The Cutting Room, page 39
Forthcoming are The Doll Collection.
She's won multiple World Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, Shirley Jackson Awards, and 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"; has been honored with the Life Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association, in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career; and has just been awarded the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award for 2014, which is presented annually to individuals who have demonstrated outstanding service to the fantasy field.
She lives in New York and co-hosts the monthly Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at KGB Bar. More information can be found at www. datlow.com, where she occasionally blogs. You can also find her on Facebook and on Twitter under the handle @EllenDatlow.
Stephen J. Barringer’s first publication was the short story “Restoration” in the Canadian SF magazine On Spec; he has since won first and second prizes in the long-running Toronto Trek/Polaris media convention’s short-story competition and has written several gaming products for various RPG systems as well as a radio-play adaptation of E. F. Benson’s “The Room in the Tower” for Canada’s Dark Echo Productions. His story “Necessary Evil” will appear in Kaleidotrope sometime in 2015. A lifelong resident of Toronto, he is married to Gemma Files.
Laird Barron is the author of several books, including The Imago Sequence, Occultation, The Croning, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year, Blood and Other Cravings, and Lovecraft Unbound. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in upstate New York.
Gary A. Braunbeck is the author of twenty-four books, among them the acclaimed novel In Silent Graves, first novel in the ongoing Cedar Hill Cycle. His fiction has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, and German. More than two hundred of his short stories have appeared in various publications, including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He was born in Newark, Ohio, the city that serves as the model for the fictitious Cedar Hill in many of his stories. As an editor, Gary completed the latest installment of the Masques anthology series created by Jerry Williamson, Masques V, after Jerry became too ill to continue, and also co-edited (with Hank Schwaeble) the Bram Stoker Award–winning anthology Five Strokes to Midnight. Gary’s work has been honored with six Bram Stoker Awards, an International Horror Guild Award, three Shocklines “Shocker” Awards, a Dark Scribe Magazine Black Quill Award, and a World Fantasy Award nomination. Visit him online at www.garybraunbeck.com.
Edward Bryant began writing professionally in 1968 and has had more than a dozen books published, including Among the Dead, Cinnabar, Phoenix without Ashes (with Harlan Ellison), Wyoming Sun, Particle Theory, Fetish (a novella chapbook), and The Baku: Tales of the Nuclear Age. He initially made his reputation as a science-fiction writer (winning two Nebula Awards for science-fiction short stories in the late 1970s), but he gradually strayed into horror and mostly has remained there, writing a series of sharply etched stories about Angie Black, a contemporary witch; the brilliant zombie story “A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned”; and other marvelous tales.
Dennis Etchison’s stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies since 1961. He is a three-time winner of both the British Fantasy Award and the World Fantasy Award and served as president of the Horror Writers Association from 1992 to 1994.
His collections include The Dark Country, Red Dreams, The Blood Kiss, The Death Artist, Talking in the Dark, Fine Cuts, and Got to Kill Them All & Other Stories. He is also a novelist (Darkside, Shadowman, California Gothic, Double Edge), editor (Cutting Edge, Masters of Darkness I–III, MetaHorror, The Museum of Horrors, Gathering the Bones), and scriptwriter. He adapted 150 episodes of the original Twilight Zone television series for radio in addition to writing original scripts for The New Twilight Zone Radio Dramas and Fangoria Magazine’s Dreadtime Stories, and he wrote Christopher Lee’s commentaries for more than two hundred episodes of Mystery Theater.
Forthcoming work includes a career retrospective from S. T. Joshi’s Masters of the Weird Tale series (Centipede Press) and a volume of new short stories, A Long Time Till Morning. Much of his backlist is currently available as e-books published by Crossroads Press.
“Deadspace” was originally published in Whispers V, edited by Stuart David Schiff.
Gemma Files was born in London, England, but is a Canadian citizen who has lived in Toronto, Ontario, for her entire life (thus far). She has been a film critic and a teacher of screenwriting and Canadian film history. In 1999, her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Fiction. She is best known for her Hexslinger series of weird west novels, A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns, and A Tree of Bones (all from ChiZine Publications), but she has also published two collections of short stories—Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart—and two chapbooks of poetry. A Book of Tongues won the 2010 Black Quill Award for Best Small Press Chill (both Editors’ and Readers’ Choice) and was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in the Best First Novel category. Five of her short stories were adapted as episodes of the 1998–1999 U.S./Canadian horror television series The Hunger, for which she also wrote two screenplays. She is currently hard at work on her next novel.
Daphne Gottlieb is the author of nine award-winning books, most recently the nonfiction title Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in Her Own Words (with Lisa Kester) and the poetry collection 15 Ways to Stay Alive. She lives in San Francisco, where she works with the casualties of America’s class war.
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of thirteen novels and four collections. Most recent are Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth, The Least of My Scars, and Flushboy. Up soon are the novels The Gospel of Z and Not for Nothing and the collection of flash fiction, States of Grace. Jones has had some one hundred fifty stories published, many included in Year’s Best collections. He has been a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, a Bram Stoker Award finalist, and a Colorado Book Award finalist, and he has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction, and an NEA fellowship in fiction. He teaches in the MFA programs at CU Boulder and UCR Palm Desert. Find out more at http://demontheory.net or by following him on Twitter (@SGJ72).
Garry Kilworth has been writing fantasy and science-fiction stories for almost forty years, and he still gets a kick when a fresh idea jumps into his head. Attica, his fantasy novel set in an attic the size of a continent, with three adventurers on a quest through a dangerous land terrorized by animated junk, is in production with Johnny Depp’s movie company, Infinitum Nihil. The Fabulous Beast, his latest collection of short stories, has recently been published by Infinity Plus, and Poems, Peoms and Other Atrocities, a poetry collection created in a collaboration with his departed friend Robert Holdstock, is available from STANZA (PS Publishing).
Joel Lane was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, critic, and anthology editor. Although most of his short fiction could be categorized as dark fantasy or horror, his two novels, From Blue to Black and The Blue Mask, were more mainstream.
He received the World Fantasy Award in 2013 for his most recent collection, Where Furnaces Burn, and he won the British Fantasy Award twice. His short stories have been collected in five volumes. He died in 2013.
Gary McMahon is the acclaimed author of nine novels and several short-story collections. His latest novel releases include Beyond Here Lies Nothing (third in the Concrete Grove series, published by Solaris), The End (an apocalyptic drama), and The Bones of You (a supernatural mystery), and his short fiction has been reprinted in various Year’s Best volumes.
Gary lives with his family in Yorkshire, where he trains in Shotokan karate and likes running in the rain.
Read more about him at www.garymcmahon.com.
David Morrell is the critically acclaimed author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo first appears. He holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from Penn State and was a professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa. His numerous New York Times best-sellers include the classic spy trilogy The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for the only television miniseries to premiere after a Super Bowl), The Fraternity of the Stone, and The League of Night and Fog. An Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity awards nominee, Morrell is the recipient of three Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers Association as well as the prestigious lifetime Thriller Master Award from the International Thriller Writers Organization. He has also been nominated for two World Fantasy Awards. His writing book, The Successful Novelist, discusses what he has learned in his four decades as an author.
You can find out more about David and his work at www. davidmorrell.net.
Steve Nagy lives and works in Michigan. He spends his days providing phone support to newspapers throughout the United States and overseas. His evenings belong to his family. The dark hours after everyone goes to bed belong to his muse. His stories have been reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.
He maintains a website at http://stephenwnagy.wordpress.com/, where he usually blogs about writing and how it influences his life.
Kim Newman was born in Brixton (London), grew up in the West Country, went to university near Brighton, and now lives in Islington (London).
His most recent fiction books include Where the Bodies Are Buried, The Man from the Diogenes Club, and Secret Files of the Diogenes Club under his own name and The Vampire Genevieve as Jack Yeovil. His nonfiction books include Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books, Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Stephen Jones), and a host of books on film. He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines and has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, including scripting radio documentaries, role-playing games, and TV programs. He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Critics Award, the British Science Fiction Award, and the British Fantasy Award. His official website, Dr. Shade’s Laboratory, can be found at www.johnnyalucard.com.
Nicholas Royle is the author of First Novel as well as six earlier novels, including The Director’s Cut and Antwerp, and a short-story collection, Mortality. He has edited numerous anthologies, including Darklands, Murmurations: An Anthology of Uncanny Stories about Birds and three volumes of The Best British Short Stories (2011–2013).
A senior lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks, and works as an editor for Salt Publishing, where he has been responsible for Alison Moore’s Man Booker–shortlisted The Lighthouse and Alice Thompson’s Burnt Island, among other titles.
Robert Shearman has written four short-story collections, which collectively have won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edge Hill Readers Prize, and two British Fantasy Awards. The most recent, Remember Why You Fear Me, was published by ChiZine. But he is probably best known for his work on the television revival of Doctor Who, bringing back the Daleks in an episode that was a finalist for a Hugo Award. He has also written extensively for radio and theater. He lives in London.
Lucy A. Snyder is the Bram Stoker Award–winning author of the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, and Switchblade Goddess and the collections Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Hell-bound Hearts, Dark Faith, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
She currently lives in Worthington, Ohio, with her husband and occasional co-author, Gary A. Braunbeck. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com.
Peter Straub is the author of eighteen novels, including Ghost Story, Koko, and Mr. X; two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House; and his most recent, A Dark Matter. He has also written two volumes of poetry and two collections of short fiction. He edited Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists, Library of America’s H. P. Lovecraft: Tales and American Fantastic Tales, and Poe’s Children. He has won the British Fantasy Award, nine Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, and three World Fantasy Awards. In 1998, he was named Grand Master at the World Horror Convention. He has also won WFC’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. The University of Wisconsin and Columbia University gave him Distinguished Alumnus Awards.
Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award for first fantasy novel. Her second, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, was recently published by Atria. Her short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Fantasy, and Tor.com and in the anthologies Federations, After, Running with the Pack, Teeth, Willful Impropriety, Nightmare Carnival, and others.
Her nonfiction has appeared at io9.com, NPR.org, Lightspeed, and Weird Tales, among other venues, and she is the co-author of Geek Wisdom, a book of pop-culture philosophy from Quirk. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog, genevievevalentine.com.
Howard Waldrop, who was born in Mississippi and now lives in Austin, Texas, is one of the most iconoclastic writers working today. His highly original books include the novels Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs and the collections Howard Who?, All about Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Night of the Cooters, and Going Home Again. He won the Nebula and World Fantasy awards for his novelette “The Ugly Chickens.”
Waldrop continues to work on the novels The Moon World and I, John Mandeville.
British author Ian Watson published his first story in New Worlds in 1969 and his first, award-winning novel, The Embedding, in 1973. His many novels of science fiction, fantasy, and horror include The Martian Inca, Miracle Visitors, The Fire Worm, The Flies of Memory, and Mockymen. Among his twelve story collections are The Very Slow Time Machine and The Great Escape. He also wrote the first four novels to be set in the Warhammer forty thousand universe. His most recent major novel was the historical medical thriller Waters of Destiny, a collaboration with Andy West.
Watson has twice won the British Science Fiction Association Award and has been shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula awards.
In 1990, he worked with Stanley Kubrick on what became A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), completed by Steven Spielberg after Kubrick’s death.
Two collections The Best of Ian Watson and The Uncollected Ian Watson, were recently published.
F. Paul Wilson is the award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of forty-plus books and many short stories spanning genres including medical thrillers, science fiction, horror, adventure, and virtually everything between. More than nine million copies of his books are in print in the United States, and his work has been translated into twenty languages. He also has written for the stage, screen, and interactive media.
His latest thriller, Dark City, starring the notorious urban mercenary Repairman Jack and is the second of The Early Years Trilogy following Cold City. Fear City, the last in the trilogy, is about to be published.
He currently resides at the Jersey Shore and can be found online at www.repairmanjack.com.
Douglas E. Winter is a writer and lawyer. He is the author of the novel Run and several critically acclaimed short stories and novellas.
Winter edited the horror anthologies Prime Evil and Revelations as well as the interviews collection Faces of Fear. His other nonfiction works include Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, Faces of Fear, and Clive Barker: The Dark Fantastic.
A. C. Wise was born and raised in Montreal and currently lives in the Philadelphia area. Her fiction has appeared in such publications as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Apex, and The Best Horror of the Year Volume 4, among others. In addition to her writing, she co-edits Unlikely Story, an online magazine publishing three unlikely themed issues per year. You can find her online at www.acwise.net.
Extended Copyright
“The Cutter” by Edward Bryant. Copyright © 1988 by Edward Bryant. First published in Silver Scream, edited by David J. Schow, Dark Harvest. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Hanged Man of Oz” by Steve Nagy. Copyright © 2003 by Steve Nagy. First published in Gathering the Bones, edited by Ramsey Campbell, Jack Dann, and Dennis Etchison, Voyager, Australia/Tor Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Deadspace” by Dennis Etchison. Copyright © 1985 by Dennis Etchison. First published in Whispers V, edited by Stuart David Schiff, Doubleday. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Cuts” by F. Paul Wilson. Copyright © 1988 by F. Paul Wilson. First published in Silver Scream, edited by David J. Schow, Dark Harvest. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Final Girl Theory” by A. C. Wise. Copyright © 2011 by A. C. Wise. First published in Chizine issue #48. Reprinted by permission of the author
“Lapland, or Film Noir” by Peter Straub. Copyright © 2004 by Peter Straub. First published in Conjunctions #42, Spring 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Thousand Cuts” by Ian Watson. Copyright © 1982 by Ian Watson. First published in The Best of Omni Science Fiction No. 3, 1982. First collected in Sunstroke and Other Stories, 1982; available electronically from the Gollancz Gateway, www.sfgateway. com. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Occam’s Ducks” by Howard Waldrop. Copyright © 1995 by Howard Waldrop. First published in OMNI Magazine, February 1995. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Dead Image” by David Morrell. Copyright © 1985 by David Morrell. First published in Night Visions II, edited by Charles L. Grant, Dark Harvest Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.
