The Fennec Line

Some time ago Fox Spirit looked into the possibility of a line of books for younger audience members. The project was named  ‘Fennec’ for the smallest fox, and we agreed we would very much like to publish G. Clark-Hellery’s novella ‘Ghoulsome Graveyard’.

Since then what was an idea has developed into a plan and in addition to being Fennec’s debut writer,  we have asked Geraldine to take on the role of commissioning editor for future titles. Luckily for us she said yes and Fennec is going live !

Welcome then to ‘Fennec’ a line of books for children from nine to teen from Fox Spirit Books.

fennec

The website can be found at kitthefennec.co.uk and Kit is also on twitter @kitthefennec

Ghoulsome Graveyard will come out this Autumn to launch the press.

‘A reporter is asked to cover the redevelopment of the graveyard and interviews the local residents: vampires, witches and ghosts. She agrees to help them save the graveyard and they hold a fete, with some chaotic consequences. It’s a fun story with quirky characters which pokes fun at established beliefs and pop culture.’

We are looking forward to bringing the Fox Spirit sensibility to a younger audience.

Geri said ”I’m really excited to be involved with establishing Fennec. I am looking forward to bringing the Fox Spirit style of genre fiction to younger readers. The whole skulk has supported me in my own writing, broadened my reading while introducing me to new voices of genre fiction & given me some great opportunities which I hope to be able to now offer others. Come join us on this exciting adventure!’

Introducing Dark Travellings

I am very excited to finally announce a book that we have had bubbling away as a plan for quite some time!

Ian Whates of NewCon Press and author of multiple amazing series, novels and short stories is entrusting Fox Spirit Books with a collection!

Dark Travellings will be launched at Edge.Lit this summer with a stunning image from Michael Marshall Smith for the cover.

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This project started with a conversation at Nine Worlds a couple of years ago and is a collection of thirteen new stories and reprints in multiple genres that I am delighted to see it come to life. With an introduction by Storm Constantine, these are Ian’s darker tales, so take a trip with us.

The Office of Lost and Found re release

The Office of Lost and Found by Vincent Holland-Keen is officially re released today.

lost and found small

 

Thomas Locke can find anything. You know the hurricane that hit a while back? Word is he found the butterfly that started it. So, when a desperate Veronica Drysdale hires Locke to find her missing husband, it makes perfect sense.

Except the world of Thomas Locke doesn’t make sense. It puts monsters under the bed, makes stars fall from the sky and leads little children to worship the marvels of road-works.

This world also hides from Veronica a past far darker and stranger than she could ever have imagined. To learn the truth, Veronica is going to have to lose everything.

And that’s where Locke’s shadowy business partner Lafarge comes in…

As this is a re release with no substantive changes I refer you to the kind words of some of the early adopters of VHK’s line on the absurd.

The Eloquent Page The thing to remember is that this isn’t your typical, by the numbers, urban fantasy this is something completely different. This novel is going to challenge your perceptions and force you to use the old grey matter. Underneath this splendidly quirky detective story there is an interesting on-going commentary about the nature of belief and those that choose to be believers. The key thing to remember when reading this metaphysical mind-bender, to paraphrase The Matrix, is that ‘there is no spoon’.

Elizabeth A White was very kind about this and the YA follow on Billy’s Monsters : To call Vincent Holland-Keen’s debut novel The Office of Lost & Found merely “strange” is an understatement of epic proportions. Of course, in my world strange means creative, original, enchanting, challenging, and mind-blowing, which means the über strange of The Office of Lost & Found makes for an amazing read; one of my Top 10 of 2011 in fact.

Crime writer Luca Veste  ‘The Office of Lost and Found’ is a novel unlike anything you are likely to read this year. Probably next year as well. It’s staggeringly different to anything else I’ve read since picking up a copy of a Douglas Adams book when I was a teenager, really enjoying it and then never reading anything in the same vein since. With character names which border on the ridiculous, situations which still make no sense to me and a plot which continually surprises right up to the end, ‘The Office of Lost and Found’ should find its way onto every readers shelf at some point.

Tony Lane I would recommend this book to anybody who is slightly unhinged or at least open to the possibility that pan-dimensional aliens are already walking amongst us. It is a wild and thoroughly enjoyable read that I will be recommending to my friends, and certainly reading again at a later date.

It might be fair to say this is not a book for those who like a safe predictable read. The book contains a short story in the same world, notes and sketches by the author along with the original cover as part of the back matter.

Busy week ahead! All the announcements! Also some updates.

This is a quick ‘are you sitting comfortably’ post, as this coming week we seem to have numerous announcements.

Tuesday sees us launching the re release of a book that requires an act of faith in the early episodic chapters, but is adored by those who throw themselves into the journey, The office of Lost and Found by Vincent Holland-Keen. I’ll be linking to reviews from it’s original release in Tuesday’s post.

Later in the week I will be announcing the book to be launched at Edge.Lit. I’ve kept this very quiet so far, so it will finally be listed on the site. Right now, I’ll tell you it’s a collection and that we are sharing our launch space with the illustrious NewCon Press.

We also have news regarding our long planned line for younger readers, follow @kitthefennec for news as it comes on that. This is a busy week for us as lots of plans start to come to fruition.

We’d also like to remind everyone, that while it has been quiet on the FoxGloves front we will be launching that line with Neil Adams MBE’s autobiography covering the post Olympics years. This is an honest look at starting over and rebuilding after the day comes you discover you are no longer on the team and your sponsors have vanished. It’s a great insight into the world of top flight athletes when they have to confront life outside of competition and a tremendous story.

Aunty Fox Hoffman

Finally a few updates.

Fox Pockets no. 7 is now out, 8 Piercing the Vale is in formatting and should be released at the end of this month with Evil Genius Guide and Reflections following swiftly on. We know you’ve been waiting for them, but they are all going to be with us this summer. Catch them all.

Eve of War is well underway and we are aiming for a mid summer release, we will announce soon on the exact date.

The Forbidden Planet signing event for African Monsters went very well in February, it was excellent to meet everyone for an enjoyable evening. There are a small number of copies, signed by the attending authors still available at the London store.

Waxing Lyrical : Women in Horror by Theresa Derwin

Welcome to the waxing lyrical series in 2016. The series is open to any creative (writers, artists, publishers, editors, musicians etc) who want to air their opinions on the creative industries, from any perspective. If you are interested in contributing please contact adele@foxspirit.co.uk for more information. The only real rule is no personal attacks, we don’t have to agree with you but we won’t support attacking a person or group of people. 

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by Theresa Derwin

Women in Horror: Hear My Voice

This February the horror community celebrated Women in Horror Month 7, a month dedicated to recognition of women writing in the horror genre.
Let me repeat that. One month to celebrate women who write horror – one month out of twelve. So, I concur that women only write for one month a year. Maybe it’s a menstrual thing?
What? It isn’t so? They write every month of the year? No! You’re kidding!
Yes, there seems to be a perception amongst general readers, publishers and media that women just don’t write horror.
Unfortunately, this sometimes translates to misconceptions within the community too. And there are many reasons as to why. Reasons I hope to explore as part of a Creative Industries and Cultural Identities PhD Studentship commencing Sept 2016. So I want to share with you some preliminary findings, some thoughts, and insight into the research I hope to undertake including a suggested reading list.

Nov 2011 I attended a first time Horror con, Horror in the East created to get fans together of Horror and David Moody in particular. This con was predominantly organised by a woman. There were a few panels and some excellent items on horror in general, however, at the final round up of panelists/guest authors etc gathered together for a photo opportunity, I noticed that all, and I do mean every single one of the authors, panelists and moderators was male. So, I asked the question as follows; “I’m not a bra burning looney, just a woman who is concerned, so I wanted to know ‘where are the women?’ Every person standing up there, and I know they are a talented group, are male. What about female moderators or horror authors? Where are they?”
After a few embarrassed blank stares and looks exchanged it was with, ironically, a surmounting feeling of horror, that I received the following answer from the female organiser. “I didn’t ask any – female writers just write Mills & Boon s*** (cue expletive) Now, I stood up, and I didn’t retaliate, I just stood there in dumb awe as she continued to rant about the writing quality by female authors, when a friend interrupted with “Don’t bother, you’ve done what you wanted”, namely, because the organisers dug their own grave. And my argument was aided by Michael Wilson of ‘This Is Horror’, who raved about the female horror authors producing quality work.
So, within the horror community and beyond, there is by some (eejits dare I say?) a conception that ‘women don’t write horror’. In conjunction with this, and my personal experience at conventions and in the community, I pursued some informal initial data-gathering research.

Contains women AND horror.
Contains women AND horror.

Continue reading “Waxing Lyrical : Women in Horror by Theresa Derwin”

Winter’s Tale : How I owe The Wolf Moon to Boscastle’s Witch Museaum

A Winter’s Tale, or how I owe my story The Wolf Moon to Boscastle’s Witch Museum.

by Sharon Kernow

Diana, the huntress. Her mother called winter a time of silence. For Diana, most of her life is quiet, her only companions wolves. Known as a witch by those in the human settlement even her rare visits to town are unwelcome.

Gabriel, named after the angel; although he’s no heavenly messenger, he refuses to trap what the locals want him to catch. When he sees Diana, he’s on the hunt for different prey.

Two people, strangers to each other, both outsiders… A harsh winter is upon them, but when their paths cross it will take a little ingenuity to survive the coldest of seasons.

Shiver under The Wolf Moon, one of a collection of Winter Tales.

Many winters ago, more than I care to consider, I picked up a book called The Witches’ Almanac. I chose it for a love of all things mystical, but also owing to one of my numerous visits to The Witch Museum, at Boscastle, in Cornwall.

The unmistakable white and black building has housed the largest accumulation of historical witchcraft memorabilia and been a component of Boscastle’s landscape for fifty years. Originally founded on the Isle of Man by Cecil H.Wiliamson the museum’s survived various guises and displacements (at times Williamson received death threats and after nasty occurrences to encourage his ‘moving on’), until eventually finding its current situation sited right by the harbour. Many feared for its contents following the flood of 2004, but the collection survived that, too, guarded in recent years by a wicker representation of Pan.

I might not have looked at the Almanac if not for that visit and The Wolf Moon among other titles would never have come into being. The book inspired several stories, some of which I plan to publish individually in anthologies with the intention of creating a collection. As to how the idea of the story of Diana and Gabriel developed from nothing more than a title and a short list of items, it can be difficult to describe the process particularly when I’m a ‘pantser’ — someone who ‘flies by the seat of’ and often sits down with a vague notion with which to face an empty page.

My moniker Sharon Kernow (the cornish word for Cornwall) is something else that may never have come into being if not for my love of the county and all things mystical. It’s where my heart lies, where I long to live, and more a part of me than any other place I’ve visited. When deciding to brand my Dark Fiction there was no better name.

For those who can spare a few minutes to linger, here is some footage of the local area and the witch museum as it was in Cecil’s time.

Link to the film, embedding code below:

Epic giveaway time!

Want to win every Fox Spirit* title we release in 2016 in paperback?

You can and it’s easy! Retweet this on twitter with the #foxyfriday hashtag or share this post on Facebook and make sure you are signed up for our newsletter to be in with a chance. We will announce the winner through the newsletter, if you aren’t signed up you can’t claim your prize!

Once the winner is announced we will send them Winter Tales and In an Unknown Country, after that they will get each book sent out at the same time as the author copies go, all year.

This is our biggest giveaway ever and who doesn’t love surprise book post!

The giveaway is open worldwide and closes at 5pm on Monday 28th March, so you have all weekend to retweet or share and sign up to the newsletter. The winner will be selected at random.

You can register for our newsletter in the sidebar or by clicking here

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Titles in 2016 include the remaining Fox Pockets, ‘Piercing the Vale’, ‘The Evil Genius Guide’ and ‘Reflections’, along with the re release of Vincent Holland-Keen’s ‘The Office of Lost and Found’, anthologies ‘Respectable Horror’, ‘You left your Biscuit Behind’ and ‘Asian Monsters’ and more.

*Main line only, imprint titles are excluded from the giveaway.

Winter Tales : On When The Trees Were Enchanted

by Masimba Musodza

Several elements make up my story, spanning my childhood to the present day, and two countries.

As a middle-class boy growing up in Zimbabwe, I was first exposed to British pre-Christian culture through the TV series Robin of Sherwood. I had already heard of Robin Hood, but this TV adaptation featured a magical character, Herne the Hunter. Since then, I have remained fascinated with these islands’ most ancient lore.

The fear of winter and darkness appears to have persisted through the generations, even to this age where every British home has central heating. I don’t think a lot of people from Zimbabwe would associate winter with fear. In our part of the world, it is a delay in the onset of the rainy season that is to be dreaded. It leads to hunger, which leads to death. Hunger leads to the breakup of families as people go off in different directions in search of a means to earn an alternative living. It takes people away from the land in ways that do not, on the surface, appear anywhere near as brutal as the Slave Trade but have the same effect of eventually detaching them from their culture and heritage.

There is a connection between this ancient lore and modern literature that many people may not always immediately recognise, especially in the speculative, fantasy and horror genres. In The Persistence of Darkness- Shadows Behind the Life of the Story, Michael R. Collings draws attention to how the plot summary of the Germanic epic Beowulf could as easily apply to Stephen King’s The Mist:

A handful of people have gathered in a building in the centre
of a small town. Inside, they have found safety….or at least
the illusion of safety. Outside, there are only darkness, and fear,
and death. Daylight is dying. With the night will come the
monster. The people huddle close for warmth, for comfort. They
know that by the time the sun dawns again, some, or most-or
all-of them may be dead.

Yet, the two cultures- the one I was brought up in and the one I have found myself in- had this much in common: a belief that invisible yet omnipresent forces can intervene to change natural phenomena such as prolonged heat or cold for the benefit of humanity. Another belief, which the British seem to have lost but still holds sway among Zimbabweans, is that some parts of the land are sacred to various gods. Out of respect to those various gods, such sacred spaces are never touched by the work of man, not even as much as litter. When The Trees Were Enchanted speculates on resorting to the ancient powers of those gods to protect their sacred spaces when modernity- environmental protection laws etc- has failed.

Middlesbrough, North-East England, has seen many open spaces built over. On the one hand, the town needs at least 40000 new tax-payers in order for the books to balance. So, homes are being built on every available space. I am a member of a group called Hands on Middlesbrough, which seeks to raise awareness of these issues. It was founded by Scarlet Pink, who led a spirited campaign to save the oak trees at Acklam Hall as the builders moved in. The Middlesbrough suburb of Acklam is mentioned in the Domesday Book as Aclun, “the place of oaks.” That such symbols of the region’s heritage should be uprooted to make way for progress is outrageous. I remember looking at those trees as I walked past Acklam Hall and asked myself: whosoever claims those trees should protect them.

Migration, a topical issue in Britain, also found its way into the story. The narrator is a Zimbabwean man married to a British woman. It is her heritage that we are mostly concerned about, but his- in the form of his paternal aunt- follows him to the part of Britain he has chosen to make a home in as an intrusion. She is an eccentric, possibly mad woman, left to her own devices in this new land. Still, she becomes the link between powers visible and invisible, the past and the present.

Other ideas swirled into the story, clearly, but these are the main ones that moved me to sit down and pen it. I wonder what else others will read into it.

Winter Tales : ‘Yukizuki’

by Eliza Chan

‘Yukizuki’ means snow lover.

Before I moved to Japan, I thought I knew what seasons were. In the UK we get a smattering of snow in winter and a glimpse of sun in summer. I never realised the true extremities that seasons can bring until I lived in Hokkaido. Hokkaido is the northern-most island of Japan and here winters last from about November to April. Snow falls so thick that the snow ploughs only scrape off the surface layer and pile it up in metre high walls at the sides of the roads. And then when the snow finally melts, Hokkaido becomes the breadbasket of Japan: renowned for its dairy products, seafood, beer and fresh flowers.

These opposing forces are what I love about Hokkaido and about the yuki onna folktale. A yokai who is as cold as winter and yet in the most famous version of the tale by Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaiden, she also loves. She brings beauty and life but also death. Her tale has captured the imaginations of many for this same reason. I loved that she is reminiscent other Asian female spirits: Lady White Snake or the nine-tailed fox. But yuki onna is also the a version of the universal snow queen who exists in nearly every culture across the world that has a snowy season.

When I first moved to Sapporo, I loved the snow. Rather than the chance day or two we have in the UK, we were given guaranteed months and months of powder white. It was the snow you saw in children’s films and on Christmas cards. It made houses look like they should be made of gingerbread. But snow can also lower spirits. Nights were long and walking home after work on the slipping pavements lost its novelty. It became a chore, a hindrance to socialising, to getting places. I nearly started to dislike winter until I took up snowboarding. There were snow and ice festivals across Hokkaido but snowboarding was something I could look forward to at all those other times. The times it would have been very easy to stay at home and mope. I’ve never liked competitive sports or felt the need for speed therefore my friends going off-piste and trying tricks, soon grew bored of my leisurely curves as I would stop and admire the view.

Somewhere, on a gondola perhaps, or admiring the view on a solo ride, the yuki onna came back to me. I wrote a traditional retelling of the tale at first, set in feudal Japan. But it felt wrong. Like most folktales the motivation for what the characters did was sparse. I wanted to fill in those gaps, give them a life before and after the story ended. And for me, yuki onna became more than a woman. The restrictions that had been placed on her were a human conceit. If she was a spirit, it did not matter what form, what body she possessed. She is simply the winter.

Winter Tales : Under your Skin

by Amelia Gorman

I have a poem in Fox Spirit Books’ Winter Tales anthology, edited by Margrét Helgadóttir! It’s a beautiful book, with a fun mix of fabulism, sci-fi, stories with only the smallest touch of speculative elements, poetry, all kinds of stuff. I’d like to share the things that I think are great that inspired my particular piece.

There were two specific ideas I had been kicking around for months, trying to work into a poem or story when I saw Fox Spirit’s call for Winter Tales.

The first was a ballad in a book of poetry I stumbled across at the library. I think I was looking for the book “Monsters of the Sea” but this rebound, simple book of poetry grabbed my attention. It had classics like The Mermaid by Yeats, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, many more modern pieces and a few inspiring strange anonymous ballads I had never read before.

(Weird. I want to say it was Penguin Random House’s Poems of the Sea because most of the pieces I remember being in the book EXCEPT the relevant poem is listed on the table of contents. Oh well, that looks like a nice book of poetry about the sea too.)

The best ballad that caught my attention was The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry.

An earthly nourris sits and sings,
And aye she sings, “Ba lilly wean,
Little ken I my bairn’s father,
Far less the land that he staps in.”

Then ane arose at her bed fit,
And a grumly guest I’m sure was he,
Saying “Here am I, thy bairn’s father,
Although I am not comely.”

I am a man upon the land,
I am a silkie in the sea,
And when I’m far frae every strand,
My home it is in Sule Skerry.”

“It was na weel”, the maiden cried,
“It was na weel, indeed” quo she,
“For the Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie,
To hae come and aught a bairn to me!”

Then he has taken a purse of gold,
And he has laid it on her knee,
Saying, “give to me, my little young son,
And take thee up thy nouriss fee.

It shall come to pass on a summer’s day,
When the sun shines hot on every stone,
That I shall take my little young son,
And teach him for to swim the foam.

And thou shalt marry a proud gunner,
And a very proud gunner I’m sure he’ll be,
And the very first shot that e’re he shoots,
he’ll kill both my young son and me.”

I found a number of things in this poem sticking with me. First of all, most selkie stories about women and their lives of shedding their skin, marriage, children, and usually returning to the sea. It was strange to read a story where the mythological creature was the father. Beyond that, the entire contents of the poem were just bizarre. He buys his son back? Especially knowing what’s going to happen? Is that a prophecy at the end or just him being sarcastic?

I wanted to tell a slightly more compassionate story, so I wrote about the difficulty of a formerly absent father adopting his son after the death of the mother.

Gorman - WInter Tales - blog picture

The other topic that fascinated me at the time was the Weddell seal, especially as presented by David Attenborough in the polar seas episode of Blue Planet It was almost too easy to anthropomorphize the seal’s fascinating life into something deeply lonely and tedious. The Weddell Seal is forced to gnaw open a single air hole alone all winter long so as to not run out of oxygen. In fact, its life span is shortened by its decreased ability to feed after dulling its teeth during the winter. I turn to nature documentaries for a lot of plots, the lives of animals contain so many bizarre, rich events that don’t take much work to twist into narrative structures.

Anyway, once I realized I wanted to combine those two ideas I wrote the poem that appears in Winter Tales. And along with that, I’m happy to share a very interesting ballad and one of nature’s great stories of survival, both of which are worth spending a little time with.

Copyright information for the quoted poem:
From Ballads Weird and Wonderful from 1912. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vernon_Hill,_The_Great_Silkie_of_Sule_Skerry,_1912.png.  Ballads Weird and Wonderful, 1912 can be checked up on here – https://archive.org/stream/balladsweirdwond00choprich#page/n39/mode/2up