It’s not all chocolates and kittens you know : The FS Book of Love

The book of love is nearly with us and before we launch we thought we would tease you with the contents.

‘These are probably not the love stories you are looking for…..

 

…. but they should be.’

Decomposing Corpses: A Love Story by Douglas J. Ogurek
The Holy Waters  by Dolly Garland
Jixxa, My Love  by Alec McQuay
End Times in Paris by James Bennett
Love in The Age Of… by David Tallerman
The First Day of Khirshi-Da by Joyce Chng
By Blade And Bloom by Xan van Rooyen
The Fine Art of Fortune-Telling by Michelle Ann King
A Curse That’s Not For Breaking by Lawrence Harding
A True Wish by Charlotte Bond
Notes on a Haunting by Kit West
Subatomic for ‘It Must be Love’ by Emma K. Leadley
The Twelfth Day by Ro Smith
The Wind’s Son by K.C. Shaw
Salt Ocean by Lisa Shea
Enchanted Garden by K.A. Laity
Rapture on the Lonely Shore by Jenny Barber
The Whale and the Moon by G. Clark Hellery

FS Book of Love : Cover

Those of you who subscribe to Alasdair Stuart’s the Full Lid got a preview of this, those who don’t well it’s here  and we highly recommend it.

Created by C.A. Yates, Paul Yates and Vincent Holland-Keen the book of love cover is here!

Love. That many-splendoured thing. It can move mountains and make
fools of us all, but what is it? Does it come courtesy of a cherub’s bow? Is it a
battlefield? Endless? Crazy? Only available on a Friday? Well, the answer
might be between these covers. Inside you’ll find stories from fantastical
worlds to fairy tales, from dark places to virtual reality, tales of transformation,
hope, and despair. Above all else, each one is, at heart, about love.

With stories from Douglas J. Ogurek, Dolly Garland, Alec McQuay,
James Bennett, David Tallerman, Joyce Chng, Xan van Rooyen, Michelle Ann
King, Lawrence Harding, Charlotte Bond, Kit West, Emma K. Leadley, Ro
Smith, Lisa Shea, K.A. Laity, Jenny Barber, and G. Clark Hellery.

The Fox Spirit Book Of Love TOC

Well my fair foxes, it’s Valentine’s Day and admit all the chocolate and flowers and hastily purchased garage cards we thought this was the perfect time to announce the contents of our forthcoming FS Book of Love edited by the fabulous C. A. Yates

Further monster blogs and news of other 2021 releases coming soon

Todd & Reynard on Valentines
art by Jenny Haines
  1. DECOMPOSING CORPSES – Douglas J. Ogurek
  2. THE HOLY WATERS – Dolly Garland
  3. JIXXA, MY LOVE – Alec McQuay
  4. END TIMES IN PARIS – James Bennett
  5. LOVE IN THE AGE OF… – David Tallerman
  6. THE FIRST DAY OF KHIRSHI-DA – Joyce Chng
  7. BY BLADE AND BLOOM – Xan van Rooyen
  8. THE FINE ART OF FORTUNE-TELLING – Michelle Ann King
  9. A CURSE THAT’S NOT FOR BREAKING – Lawrence Harding
  10. A TRUE WISH – Charlotte Bond
  11. NOTES ON A HAUNTING – Kit West
  12. SUBATOMIC FOR ‘IT MUST BE LOVE’ – Emma K. Leadley
  13. THE TWELFTH DAY – Ro Smith
  14. THE WIND’S SON – K.C. Shaw
  15. SALT OCEAN – Lisa Shea
  16. ENCHANTED GARDEN – K.A. Laity
  17. RAPTURE ON THE LONELY SHORE – Jenny Barber
  18. THE WHALE AND THE MOON – G. Clark Hellery

A note from the Editor:

I don’t think anyone really knows what love is or where it comes from, but so many of us feel such an extraordinary connection to another person at least once in our lives that it can make us feel and do the most incredible things. I’m not talking about romance, all that hearts and flowers business. There are many people who don’t feel romantic attraction at all, but they experience love. Some people love more than one person at a time; some truly love only one person their entire life. For some, love is platonic, while for others it has to be sexual. There are those for who one glance, one moment, can connect them so deeply to another person they are never quite the same again.

So why create an anthology based on such an unknowable yet ubiquitous creature? Well, I believe love is a power for good. Of course it has its ups and downs; it can be a comfort or a wild ride; it can mean sacrifice or abundance; it can taste of the ripest, sweetest strawberries or turn as rotten as a certain something in the state of Denmark. Whatever it is, I believe it can change the world. Or, at least, it can change yours forever.

 

Eurasian Monsters, coming soon.

Table of Contents – Eurasian Monsters

We are proud to reveal the table of contents for our last volume in Fox Spirit Books of Monsters: Eurasian Monsters!

The series, edited by Margrét Helgadóttir, has dark fiction and art about scary monsters and dark creatures from around the world, seven volumes between 2014 and 2020. The series is our grand world tour and we have so far been to Europe, Africa, Asia, the Pacific region, and Central, South and North America. 

A number of the stories have been award winners individually across the series, many more have picked up nominations, and our editor won the  very first Brave New Words award for her work on Pacific Monsters. These are beautiful books full of incredible tales and monstrous images.

It’s been a hell of journey so far. Sadly, all travels must have an end, and now this series will close with Eurasian Monsters. This December we bring you 17 dark tales from the vast region stretching from the Chinese border (but not including China) to Eastern parts of East Europe. We are proud to tell that we have stories from all over Russia, from Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria.

We have as many as seven translated stories, six are translated exclusively for this book. You will not want to miss this – we have stories from authors who’s never been translated to English before!

 Table of Contents:

  1. K.A. Teryna: Morpheus
  2. Marta Magdalena Lasik: Daemons of their time
  3. Yevhen Lyr: Sleepless in Enerhodar
  4. Karina Shainyan: Bagatazh
  5. Vlad Arenev: Rapunzel
  6. Haralambi Markov: Nine Tongues Tell Of
  7. Maria Galina: The Visit
  8. Alex Shvartsman: A Thousand Cuts
  9. Daryna Stremetska: The Whitest Linen
  10. Shawn Basey: Lysa Hora
  11. Karolina Fedyk: Our Lady of Carrion Crows
  12. Bogi Takács: Veruska and the Lúdvérc
  13. Eldar Sattarov: Mountain Maid
  14. Kat Hutchson: The Housekeeper
  15. Natalia Osoianu: The Serpent
  16. Alexander Bachilo: This is Moscow, Old Man!
  17. Ekaterina Sedia: Sleeping Beauty of Elista

 

The stories will be illustrated by K. A. Teryna, Kieran Walsh, Elzbieta Glowacka, Nata Friden and Vincent Holland Keen.

Daniele Serra is once again providing cover art, which we will be revealing soon.

Editor is once again Margrét Helgadóttir.

Translation by Mike Olivson, Maksym Bakalov, Piotr Swietlik, and Alex Shvartsman

Please can I have a bit more time?

Also more words….

Yes, yes you can. 

Floof Will Out

Over to your editor:

Hello everyone! We’ve had a lot of questions about word counts and many people are feeling pushed by the deadline. Some folks might say that’s what deadlines are for but – HOT DANG – it’s been a weird old summer, hasn’t it? Time has been bendy at best. So, with that in mind, we’re going to extend the submission deadline to September 30th and increase our word count limit to 5,000 words. If you’ve already submitted a piece but think you have something else that’s longer and you like better, then send it along. We’re happy to accept multiple submissions.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to reiterate that, as a publisher, we focus on Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and all the Weird and Interstitial skeins that weave in and around those genres. This anthology is no exception.

Thank you.

 

 

It must be love!

We know you haven’t heard much from us during lock down. My dayjob has been demanding and everything else has been, well, odd and slow and time has failed to respectfully stop it. Overall though we are doing ok at kettutalo and we are gearing up this years fantastic releases as well as this brilliant call for next spring. We also owe a huge shout out to Jenny Barber  who has done a great job with her spotlights on our twitter. – Aunty F

The Call:

The Fox Spirit Book of… Love

Do you have something to say about love?

Love is patient, love is kind, love is blah blah blah. So many clichés, so little time. Everyone wants to tell you what love is, how we should love, who we should love, how long it lasts, but what does love mean to you? What would you do for love? Is it a moment or a lifetime? Does it make heroes or villains of us? What can it cost? What is done in its name?

Here at Fox Spirit we believe love comes in all shapes, shades, flavours, and sizes and we want to hear about it; This anthology initially called for romantic love, but we recognize this is not everyone’s experience and would also like to include aromantic love. Please note, we do not want stories of familial or parental love, how much we love our pets (we do, but not for this book) or similarWe are looking for stories that carry the spark of love, the feeling that can make life seem worthwhile, that can be as simple as a sprinkle of sugar or that gives us meaning and drives us on even when all hope seems lost.. The ending might be bleak (although we don’t mind a happy ending, not one bit!) but the motive is the key. As much as we enjoy them, we’re not looking for erotic trysts or hefty old clichés (unless you’re spinning them); we want to hear stories about love as a force of nature, whether it be a full-blown storm or a breath of fresh air… or maybe even a fetid stench!

No creepers, no peepers, no inappropriate sleazers, no bigots, and absolutely no bestiality. Consent is sexy AF.

We are a genre anthology – fantasy, horror, science fiction and everything inside and around those. We encourage experimentation, poetry, drabbles, flash, short stories. Whatever. We are setting a word limit of up to 3500 words. Get to the point and make it happen!

We absolutely and actively encourage stories outside heteronormative dogma. Love is love.

So, as the Bard once said, PLAY ON.

Update: We had some requests for clarifications 
Reprints – we will consider them but will need to know where and where they were previously published and we are looking for original pieces mainly.
Sexy stuff – It’s not an erotica anthology and that’s not what we want, but sexy stuff that is integral to the telling can be included. 
Multiple subs – you can send us more that one story but we will only include one by an author, with a possible exception around drabbles and other very short works. 

I would also like to add the anthology editor will be blind reading so the stories come into me (Aunty Fox) and I will be putting clean versions (as in no name etc) into a file for consideration. 

The business bit from Aunty Fox:
Accepted stories will get £15 and a print copy of the book (ebooks will also be made available). Exclusivity is 12 months from acceptance, this is so that if for any reason things are delayed you still get your rights back on time.

We won’t be making any decisions until after the closing date of 31st August. Our beloved Rev will then need some time for reading and deciding. Publication will be Spring 2021.

As always Fox Spirit would love to hear from writers of colour, members of the LGBTQ+ community, disabled writers, and other under-represented groups.

Submissions to submissions@foxspirit.co.uk as usual and please check our submission guidelines for standard format and file type information. 

Fox Spirit is Seven! #skulkisseven

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Fox Spirit is Seven! How did that happen?!

Did you know there’s an ebook store right here? And that you can use coupon code ‘skulkis7‘ to celebrate our 7th birthday with 25% off throughout June!! What are you waiting for?

It’s a milestone that makes you thoughtful. Shakespeare talked about the ‘seven ages’ of human life in his ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech. The first is birth which he describes as

At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

Fox Spirit managed to avoid that unpleasantry: it was born with a song in its heart, a laugh in its mouth and a pub on  its mind — the Nun & Dragon. It was meant to be a one off, but here we are seven years later! Which in Bill’s words means:

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

I suppose we can see a little bit of that: hands up skulk members who would rather be writing/drawing/plotting than creeping to our jobs and other duties? Yes, you can put your hands down now. We itch to have the luxury of time, but there are always new responsibilities. In the mean time we can remember that we are yet young and have so many ways to grow.

What will the next anniversary bring? More books? More multimedia efforts? Games? Skulk Island? World Domination?

Time alone will tell — but the skulk has ambitions, you can bet your floof on that. All kudos to our fearless leader Adele!

The Jackal Who Came in From the Cold

Collected by Adele Wearing
Editor Darren Pulsford
Cover Art by Tyler Arseneau and layout by Vincent Holland-Keen

Tales, or tails, from behind enemy lines. Stories of daring and some downright shenanigans. You can wander through wars and stumble on adventures as our brave and sneaky spies conduct their business. This collection of furry shorts brings us a broad range of spy stories and an equally ranging look at Furry literature.

Contents:
Introduction by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen
A Treacherous Thing by C. A. Yates
Survivors of the Holocene by Madison Keller
Starlight and Thorn by K. C. Shaw
The Man in the Background by Miles Reaver
Dirty Rats by Jan Siegel
The Sentinel by Will Macmillan Jones
Pay the Piper by A McLachlan
The Long Game by Neil Williamson
Agent Friendzone by Kyell Gold
Big Bird by Frances Pauli
The Off Air Affair by Huskyteer
Game of Shadows by  H. J. Pang
The Winged Fox by K. R. Green
Le Chat et la Souris by Tom Mullins

New Release! The Jackal Who Came in From The Cold

Fox Spirit’s first foray into an entirely Furry anthology is now live! 

Tales, or tails, from behind enemy lines. Stories of daring and some downright shenanigans. You can wander through wars and stumble on adventures as our brave and sneaky spies conduct their business. This collection of furry shorts brings us a broad range of spy stories and an equally ranging look at Furry literature.

 

Cover Art by Tyler Arseneau and layout by Vincent Holland-Keen

Introduction by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen
A Treacherous Thing by C. A. Yates
Survivors of the Holocene by Madison Keller
Starlight and Thorn by K. C. Shaw
The Man in the Background by Miles Reaver
Dirty Rats by Jan Siegel
The Sentinel by Will MacMillan Jones
Pay the Piper by A McLachlan
The Long Game by Neil Williamson
Agent Friendzone by Kyell Gold
Big Bird by Frances Pauli
The Off Air Affair by Huskyteer
Game of Shadows by  H. J. Pang
The Winged Fox by K. R. Green
Le Chat et la Souris by Tom Mullins

Available in print from Amazon (ignore the out of stock, it’s a quirk of Ingram and Amazon’s relationship)

Coming soon as an ebook available direct from our estore in mobi and epub, to suit most readers.

Countdown to Christmas Day 7

Please send in your reviews to submissions@foxspirit.co.uk for inclusion in our Christmas Countdown. 

***

“All the Fabulous Beasts” by Priya Sharma

I first had the pleasure of reading Priya Sharma’s work when I was a judge for the British Fantasy Awards in 2016, where she won Best short story for her tale “Fabulous Beasts” and I’ve been hooked ever since. So it was with bated breath that I waited for my copy of her debut collection “All the Fabulous Beasts”, and it was well worth the wait. Alongside the beautiful artwork, which Undertow Publications is renowned for, Priya’s stories manage to weave the mundane with the magical, the ethereal with the horrifying, and she has managed to produce an unnerving collection of some of the most exquisite literary horror to date.

Priya’s writing focuses on the uncanny in everyday situations, revealing the darkness and beauty that are so intrinsically a part of life, and showing us that in order to live we inevitably have to die. From the unbreakable bond between a mother and her child in “Egg”, to the heartbreaking story of loss and bereavement within “The Sunflower Seed Man”, Priya shows us the wondrous which lingers underneath the veneer of our humdrum lives.

Identity and family also plays a huge part in Priya’s stories, her best known piece within the anthology “Fabulous Beasts” is a poignant and hard hitting story which grabs you by the throat and makes you look at the horror that can occur to those who live just round the corner; whilst other tales are set in more exotic locales such as India “The Englishman”, Hong Kong “The Absent Shade”, or even in an alternate history of Liverpool “Rag and Bone”, this distance from the horror doesn’t allow you any moment of reassurance, or an opportunity to think of her protagonists as an “other” someone far-away, different, troubled by issues that would never affect yourself. As Priya paints such a vivid imagery of the place that you see the colours that her characters see, and smell the fetid dirt under their fingernails, as cobbles form under your feet and dust prickles at your nose.  

The strength of Priya’s writing and the beauty of the tales transgresses all boundaries, she manages to convey a depth of emotion and understanding for her characters no matter how flawed they may be and it’s that understanding of humanity and all its intrinsic strengths and flaws which make this such a well rounded book. Because it isn’t just a collection of horror stories, or a debut of literary delights; it is much more than that, it’s a book about life; our life, the lives of those who mean so much to us, and the lives of those that we may wish in our weaker moments were dead. An exquisite collection that will delight all readers.

By Penny Jones