Big news! For several months now, I’ve been working on a second, definitive edition of my short story collection, Grinning Cracks, and I’m delighted to say it’s now available in print (with a delightfully gritty new cover, to boot)! Kindle edition is forthcoming next week.
This new edition collects thirty-five pieces, primarily flash and short fiction, as well as a couple of poems. Some of these pieces have never before been published, though some have appeared elsewhere and gone out of print.
From the back cover blurb:
Thirty-five short works filled with the upsetting and uncanny, from the author of the urban fantasy Sam Brody series (Alliteration Ink) and the horror novella We Shadows Have Offended (Etopia Press). This newly revised and updated second edition includes eight pieces not found in the first release, featuring the never before published stories “The Apple Box,” “Colleagues,” and the poems “Floater” and “Il Necromantiosmo.” Taylor reimagines both classic, familiar fairytales and superstitions (“Abaddon,” “The Apple Box,” “Rabbit Rabbit,” “Trichotomy”) and a sequence of Breton folk stories (“The Ankou,” “Bugul Noz,” “Dahut and the Destruction of Ys,” “Gradlon,” “Iannic-ann-ôd,” “The Korrigan,” “Les Lavandières,” “The Lovers,” “The Morgen,” and “Yan-Gant-Y-Tan”). She experiments with surrealist science fiction (“Alter Ego,” “Arcus Senilis,” “Encounter,” “Eden”) as well as gruesome body horror (“Ornithology,” “Pseudanor”), crime noir (the multi-chapter “Christmas Wrapping”), and a literary fiction cycle based on the concept of the four humors of Hipprocratic medicine (“Choleric,” “Melancholic,” “Phlegmatic,” and “Sanguine”). Every story deals with the gray zone between wonder and disaster and people on the fringe of society, magic, or their own damaged psyches.
If you like liminal, cross-genre fiction that’s hard to define; if you like surrealism; if you like horror that’s more of the psychological sort, then you will likely enjoy this collection. It also makes a great gift for the speculative fiction fan in your life, if you’d like to start your holiday shopping a little early!
News on the Kindle edition when it’s available. Ordering directly from Createspace earns me a little extra royalty, but it should show up on B&N in the next 3-5 business days and is now also available from Amazon, should you prefer to use a loyalty/Prime membership or need gift wrapping.
Some other perks of this collection:
- Several stories feature cats, either magical ones or completely normal and adorable ones, and nothing bad happens to any of them, even in the scary stories.
- If you like “The Three Little Pigs” but think to yourself with any frequency, “I wish instead of pigs these were Brat Pack-style yuppy triplets who commit fraud and encounter werewolves,” then you will definitely enjoy the story “Trichotomy.”
- If you wonder what I Love Lucy would be like if it starred Lana del Rey and was set in the Twin Peaks universe, you’ll enjoy “The Apple Box.”
- The expanded second edition now features 23% more noir crime stories with dark fantasy undercurrents!*
So what are you waiting for? Snap this puppy up! Even if you have the first edition, you’ll want this for its bonus material, and you can now revel in the fact that your first edition is a collectors’ item.
Want to see (or rather, hear) this title in audiobook format? Let me know. I’m planning out my release schedule for 2016 and would love to know if there’s demand.
*Disclaimer: I have not actually counted the amount of noir crime stories with dark fantasy undercurrents in either edition. But, indeed, there is plenty of it here, guaranteed!
K.W. Taylor 