Girls and Ghosts, Release Day!

It’s that time of year, Halloween just past and in the UK Bonfire Night is upon us. It’s a time when ghosts may wander abroad and fires offer more than a place to burn the unfortunate Mr Fawkes, they give us safety against the drawing dark and the things that move within it.

So it’s the perfect time to release the Ghosts volume of Anne Michaud’s trilogy of short story collections.

Five Girls, Five Ghosts. Five Tales of hauntings and secrets. In this collection Anne Michaud brings us empathy and horror. Never underestimate the anger of the dead or the resilience of the living.

‘Anne Michaud’s writing is haunting, powerful and often beautiful’ – Amanda Rutter

Get it now
Amazon Canada
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Fox Spirit E store

American Monsters Part 2 – TOC

It is time for the big reveal or our penultimate monsters book. It’s been a hell of journey so far and we aren’t letting up!! Keep in mind particularly with the America books, we are dealing with Continents not countries in these volumes. We will close out the series next year with Eurasia. 

American Monsters Part Two – Table of Contents

Fox Spirit Books of Monsters, edited by Margrét Helgadóttir, has dark fiction and art about monsters and dark creatures from around the world, seven volumes between 2014 and 2020. The series is like a grand world tour and we have so far been to Europe, Africa, Asia, the Pacific region, and Central and South America. The series end next year with Eurasia (including Russia, Eastern Europe and the Balkan).

This November we bring you 17 dark tales about scary beasties and Monsters from North America, including Canada, USA, Mexico and the Caribbean Islands.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Cory Doctorow: Return to Pleasure Island
Kelly Sandoval: It’ll Be Fine
R.S.A. Garcia: Douen Mother
Ernest Hogan: Cuca
Anne Michaud: The River Song
Tobias S. Buckell: Trinkets
Pepe Rojo: On Desire and its Cure
Catherine Lundoff: Hunger
Carmelo Rafala: What Happened to Mrs  Eleonora  Valdemar
Krista Walsh: Not for Amateurs
Tonya Liburd: Mimosa Versus The  Soucouyant
Federico Schaffler: The Fifth Hand of The Ahuizotl
Pedro Cabiya: Lay of The Land, Law of The Land
Charles Payseur: Stitched Together
Mathew Scaletta: The Sound a Raven Makes
Darcie Little Badger: The Whalebone Parrot
Lewis Shiner: Lizard Men of Los Angeles

We will have one translated story in this volume, with translation help from Fabio Fernandes.

Illustrations will be by the artists Kieran Walsh, Lynda Bruce, Soussherpa, S.L. Johnson, Vincent Holland-Keen and Andrea González.

Daniele Serra is once again providing cover art, which we will launch later this autumn.
Margrét Helgadóttir as editor.

Girls And Aliens by Anne Michaud – Available Now

We are delighted to announce the launch of the first book in Anne Michaud’s trio of collections that put girls and women at the fore of their own stories. 

In the first volume our heroines find themselves face to face with alien forces.

Five Girls, Five Aliens. Five Tales of courage and outer space. In this collection by Anne Michaud the lesson is clear, never underestimate the power and resolve of ordinary women in extraordinary circumstances. 
 
‘Anne Michaud’s writing is haunting, powerful and often beautiful’ – Amanda Rutter
 
Contents:
Fix Six
Stardust Motel
Battlefield Lost
Snakes and Ladders
Mercy’s Morgue
 

Stories by Anne Michaud
Cover by Daniele Serra
Edited by Amanda Rutter
Formatted by HandEbooks
Cover layout by Vincent Holland-Keen

You can find the paperback and ebook on Amazon worldwide and the ebook in mobi and epub on our own estore.

Amazon UK Paperback

Reviews are always appreciated, even if it’s just a couple of lines.

Enjoy on us!

There is loads of FREE content for you to enjoy on our website.

At the moment the front page has a sampler of the opening pages of each of our summer releases. 

You can buy Fearless Genre Warriors for £0.00 in our ebook store and get a substantial collection of short stories from our first few years of publishing. 

We have music! Yes actual properly recorded songs, how many publishers give you that? 

Lots of short stories are published on our free fiction page for you to download and enjoy and there are more in the skulk members area if you ‘join the skulk‘ below.  The members area also gives you discounts in the eshop and other goodies.

There is even a bit of video up all for your enjoyment and all it costs is a few moments of your time.

After all that, there is of course the blog, full of great content from guest posts and Hugo nominee Alasdair Stuart’s ‘Not the Fox News’. 

Indulge. Download the stories to take away and read at leisure. Tell your friends and send them over if they are looking for something new to read. The House of Fox has you covered.

Floof Will Out

We Are Seven

Well, I have to say when I agreed to do one book, on split proceeds in 2012 I didn’t expect to be here celebrating our seventh birthday and over 70 titles. I am so proud of what we have accomplished and the stories we have put out, of all our authors and artists and the behind the scenes team of editors and formatter and others who work their tails off to make FS what it is. 

Over on twitter we are doing random giveaways all month and other bits and bobs. We also have, throughout June a 25% discount on the FS ebook store (shop ebooks above) with the voucher code ‘skulkis7’.

I ordered this cake for my birthday a year or two ago, but it seems fitting. 

We will be getting the newsletters going again this weekend, after a brief hiatus (I changed day jobs) and there are even more exclusive short stories on the members page, along with a long term discount on the store and more stuff to come, so please do consider joining the skulk. 

We have loads of amazing titles coming out this summer, so there will be updates coming on those too. 

I would also like to do an update on our authors who are out in the world doing other stuff, so if you have ever written for Fox Spirit and have books recently out or coming soon, award nominations, events, or anything else please let us know. We want to spread the good news this month as we are full of birthday joy.
It’s also Mr Fox’s actual birthday soon so there is so much cake going on at Kettu talo!!

 

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!

Tales of Desperation – Love is a Grift Launch

Graham Wynd is back with another fantastic collection.

Love is a Grift.

Cover by S.L. Johnson

How does obsession begin? For one hit man it starts with a target he just can’t kill. She leads him on a deadly spree across Europe. With every step he’s in deeper. Each crime binds them together like a vow and only death can part them. But will it be his… or hers?

Love is a Grift and the other stories in this collection offer a fresh take on a classic genre, that begins with obsession and most often ends with death.

Available now from our own estore (in mobi and epub formats – both available to download after checkout) or amazon kindle

Paperback coming soon…

In the mean time you can enjoy this incredible theme tune for the book, but Victoria Squid!

LOVE IS A GRIFT
1. GALWAY—The Salt House
2. BRUXELLES—À la Mort Subite  
3. HELSINKI—Ravintola Saari
4. DUNDEE—The Tay Bridge Bar

OTHER TALES OF DESPERATION
PSYCHO MOTORCYCLE DOLLS (1966)  
BONNIE & CLYDE 97 THE TENDER TRAP
DON’T CALL ME DARLING
SMALLBANY
TOY MONKEY
HAM ON HEELS
BONKERS IN PHOENIX 
MESQUITE 
LIFE JUST BOUNCES
MASQUERADE
INEVITABLE
BROKEN BICYCLES
THE CABAL 187 THE OVEN
BLOODY COLLAGE
THESE TOYS ARE FOR TOUGH BOYS
SOMEWHERE IN SLOVENIA
REPETITION
COPPED IT
SPIRITS IN THE NIGHT
DO ANYTHING YOU WANNA DO
I’VE TOLD EVERY LITTLE STAR
REBELLIOUS JUKEBOX
30 VERSIONS OF ‘WARM LEATHERETTE’ 

Monster Blog – by Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría

SOUTHERN MONSTERS

by Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría

About fifteen years ago, a group of paleontologists made a discovery (just one of many that often take place in Argentine territory) that caught my attention. It was the fossil of a mosasaur, a marine animal that lived on this planet seventy million years ago. The name that the Argentine paleontologists gave to that fossil and the place where they’d found it really impressed me.

It is common that the denomination of a dinosaur or other prehistoric animal is based on the name of the region where it was discovered or after its discoverer. However, this mosasaur, this particular species, received a different name: Lakumasaurus antarcticus.

Yes, the specimen had been discovered in the southernmost place on Earth and bore the name of a mythological animal.

I loved the idea of a dinosaur with the name of a mythical spirit belonging to the Yámana culture, the original inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego and a large number of islands that mark the end of the American continent. “The end of the world”, as Jules Verne called that region … except for Antarctica.

That animal had lived on a very different Earth. What today is composed entirely of perennial ice at that time was a tropical, fertile and warm land. A landscape gone millions of years ago that could well have been another world.

When I was still studying astrophysics (later I decided to change my career and got my PhD in philosophy), I used to spend many hours at the Museum of Natural Sciences of La Plata (which is inside the campus). And every day I used to admire the replicas of the prehistoric animals that had lived on a planet very different from mine and, even so, the same one.

When I heard the news of the discovery of Lakumasaurus antarcticus I was already studying philosophy, in Buenos Aires. I could not help but to join the memories of my hours with those ancestral and gigantic bones with the myths that I was investigating at the time for my thesis. Yámana myths among many others. And the myth of Lakuma, the Spirit of the Waters, especially.

I felt that many things in my life were being reconnected by de magic of a very distant creature and place.

When, a few months ago, I was asked to write a story about a South American monster, I had no doubt about what it would be. It would have been impossible to speak of another monster that was not Lakuma: a “monster” that, at the same time, is mythical and scientific (indirectly, of course). And a monster that, far from being “terrible” to me, is deeply evocative.

After years of studying astrophysics and visiting the dinosaur room of the museum, after a PhD in philosophy and research, one day I decided to dedicate myself completely to my passion: writing. It seemed that I had always been jumping from one island of reality to another, just as the Yámanas had lived moving from one south island to another in search of food and dreams.

As a writer, Lakuma became a symbol of my life, of what it was and what it is, of worlds as different as the Cretaceous Earth and the Earth of the present … or as Mars, Jupiter or the space between asteroids. A symbol of the possibility of living completely different experiences and, from a certain point of view, all of them “in solidarity” with each other.

Thus my story was born, one that unites very different times, that interweaves mythical and factual realities, and that ultimately seeks to portray the importance of dreaming and creating “better worlds” (as the writer or the artist does) in the midst of a society that constantly attacks human dignity (a society that often considers its members an statistic).

There was a time when there were not in the South Pole, as there are today, miles and miles of ice as vast and deep as the geological abysses. A time where those lands exuded a green and exuberant vegetation. Days in which immense fusiform reptiles dominated the life and death of its warm seas, as if they were the spirit of its waters.

For millions of years, day after day, this was so. And if there had been humans at that time, they would never have hesitated to consider those landscapes and that life as “inevitable” or “eternal”. But now we know that was not the case.

Probably (hopefully) there will be a future in which humans will populate the Solar System and beyond as if we had always belonged to space. And surely there will also be those who will think of that reality as something “eternal” and “immutable”.

If science fiction is the literary form that announces change (all change), it is also the literary form par excellence that announces the possibility of the different, of the other. The non-immutability.

In our human history, monsters have always been “the Others”, the different ones, those who do not conform, those who demand to be respected for who they are.

Science fiction talks about monsters to be able to talk about the different in a symbolic way and show the need for that difference. The beauty of the monster.

Society loves the status quo, of course, but life shouts with all its strength that change is not only necessary but inevitable. The “monsters” exist, but they are not what people should fear.

We are all monsters as we seek our originality and we separate ourselves from “the establishment”.

Lakuma is my monster, the symbol of what adapts to the sway of the times (just like its body adapts to the waves of the sea), but also of what is capable of anchoring itself to the ideals of a better world (ideals dreamed and put into practice, like those of the Yámana shamans).

And what are those dreams that give me roots but also wings? Those that imply that everything can and should change, but that it is necessary to work so that this change is for the better. Those of a world in which we see the end of inequality between genders, the freedom to be what we are and want to be (and yes, I speak of the right to be LGBTIQ +), and where there is a true human brotherhood (beyond of cultures, socioeconomical differences, skin colors, countries of origin, capacities, etc.).

The Lakumasaurus antarcticus teaches us that nothing is permanent. That the kings of the sea, like the retrograde and inhuman ideas that are dominant in an era, must evolve or perish within the framework of the long marathon of time.

Lakuma, the mythological being of a vanished people, teaches us that the best of a human group, the noblest of what the human being can be, remains beyond themselves in those ideas that prove to be “monsters” before the dead and cold eyes of ossified prejudices.

In my case, these monsters allowed me to see myself (accepting myself as the “good monster” I want to be, without the fear of being different), and to think, to dream and to create worlds where the landscape is wide enough to shelter each and every one of the people (wonderfully different from each other, as we are all) who want to read my stories.

Monster Blog – Gustavo Bondoni

The Story Behind My Choice of Gualicho

A quick google search will inform anyone interested that a Gualicho (or Gualichu) is a spirit from the mythology of the original people of Patagonia.  It’s the kind of evil spirit that every mythology has, and was often used to explain away every misfortune that befell the tribe. 

Now, I’ll be honest: I knew very little about the Mapuche people—the native population of parts of Patagonia—until very recently.  Argentina is a mainly European country and native populations represent a tiny percentage of the overall population.  The history and traditions of the original inhabitants of the country are only superficially studied in school.  When one encounters a person of evident native ethnicity, most assume that they are more recent immigrants from Bolivia or Paraguay.

These attitudes are the result of initial wars of conquest followed by a few centuries of assimilation—unlike in other areas, the original sparse native populations succumbed mainly to intermarriage with the much more numerous Europeans.

 Nevertheless, I’ve heard the word “gualicho” countless times in everyday conversation.  It has lost its original meaning to become synonymous of any kind of magic spell cast by a witch or shaman.

But it survived.

Somewhere in the wars of subjugation of a people who were far from most centers of commerce and population, one concept burned so strongly that not only was it understood by the conquerors, but it survived and entered the dominant Spanish language to live on in the vernacular.

Two hundred years later, an Argentine writer of mainly Italian ancestry (only a quarter of my forebears were from Spain) sat down to choose a traditional monster from South America. 

My research identified dozens of candidates, from legendary monsters to native gods and from spirits only a handful of indigenous people ever believed in to entities that frightened the superstitious colonists hundreds of years later.

The process ended as soon as I found the Gualicho.  I became fascinated with the fact that a word could morph and survive one of history’s truly definitive wars of annihilation.  It must have had some powerful mojo.

As a term that reaches us through an essentially oral evolution, the etymology is pretty confused, but in my imagination, I can see the Mapuches repeating it again and again every time they came into contact with those Europeans who, through firearms or disease, had become so intimately connected to the unimaginable evil befalling their people.

There was nothing else you could call them, was there?  Those pale-faced interlopers must have seemed to be perfect stand-ins for the evil spirit that haunted their people.

It must have been a powerful spirit indeed, powerful enough to find a way to survive.  But surely a spirit strong enough to be familiar to someone unconnected to the history of the region two hundred years after the people whose legends it had sprung from were gone would find a way to abide, to plan for the time when it could vanquish not only its original victims but also the new interlopers…

But who would it fight?  Would it attempt to ally itself with the Mapuche against the new enemy?  Would it continue to torment the Mapuche’s descendants? 

The answer, once I understood the spirit, was obvious.  This thing would fight agains everyone.

But how?

Well, to get that answer, you’ll have to read the story.

American Monsters – Christopher Kastensmidt

The Many Faces of Kalobo

Hello all! I’m Christopher Kastensmidt, author of The Elephant and Macaw Banner series and “A Parlous Battle”, a story in that series published in American Monsters.

The Kalobo (or “Capelobo”, as it’s known in Brazil) is a relatively unknown legend in Brazil. Dozens of people have told me over the years that they’d never heard of it before the Brazilian publication of “A Parlous Battle” way back in 2011. In fact, if you Google images with “Capelobo”, the most popular images of the creature are those related to my series. I’d like to share a few of those here.

Since it was one of the first creatures that appeared in the stories, it was also one of my first art commissions. Brazilian artist Paulo Ítalo produced two drawings of the creature for me. I worked very closely with him on these and they are the closest to my own personal concept of the creature:

After that, I allowed other artists liberty to create their own interpretations, without any interference from me. U.S. artist Jay Beard created two very different pieces inspired by the creature:

When Czech magazine Pevnost published the story, the artist Jan Štěpánek drew this amazing illustration:

Finally, one of the most well-known illustrations is this gorgeous painting by SulaMoon:

Many thanks to Margrét Helgadóttir for the chance to introduce this creature to readers around the world in the American Monsters anthology. For those looking for more stories from The Elephant and Macaw Banner, the complete series is now available in one volume from Guardbridge Books.