• We now have The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth available. (E-book to soon follow.)
• New page: Sword & Blood: Vampire Musketeers: Book One by Sarah Marques
  
• New page: A Song Called Youth Trilogy (omnibus of three novels Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, Eclipse Corona) by John Shirley
  

You can read the full Locus Review on the Mayan December main book page, but here are the highlights:

Switching between perspectives that include Alice’s educated skepticism, Nixie’s attention to details, and some early Mayans’ very different notions of their world, Mayan December achieves the unlikely feat of making a novel about time travelers at a crucial (shared) moment not just vivid but convincing. It never loses all connection with sanity or hope, despite threats ranging from the possibility of wholesale collapse for two great civilizations to more specific elements like Mayan religious rites of human sacrifice…Cooper handles one further complication, an international conference that brings world leaders to the Yucatan, through a deft interplay of scenes in the two eras. How is an archaeological tour for VIPs like a ritual dance for one’s own fetish beast? Mayan December provides some provocative answers.

Congratulations to Genevieve Valentine! Her novel, MECHANIQUE: A TALE OF THE CIRCUS TRESAULTI has been nominated as Best Fantasy of 2011 in the Reviewers Choice Awards from RT Book Review Magazine.

Other nominees include: Wayfinder by C.E. Murphy (Del Rey), The Edinburgh Dead by Brian Ruckley (Orbit), Cast In Ruin by Michele Sagara (Luna), Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente (Tor), and Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor).

First we apologize for any problems you had downloading. You can do so easily now if you couldn’t before. My server — where the PDFs are — were down literally as I was going out the door to the airport on my way to World Fantasy Con. I made some frantic phone call. My tech folks did get things back up, but there were some…well, times when things weren’t perfect.

We hope you had a great Halloween. We’re just back from WFC with piles of work to catch up on. But we will soon have some news and also pick two winners of some Prime Books from those of you who signed up for our newsletter. (We’ll give everyone this one last day — All Hallows and the start of Día de los Muertos — to subscribe!)

As I am attending the World Fantasy Convention, I’m setting the remainder of our Halloween treats to publish automatically while I am away. These are all classic scary stories we hope you will enjoy. We also hope you will take time to keep updated on Prime Books’ current and future offerings.

Oliver Onions: The Beckoning Fair One

Oliver Onions(13 November 1873 – 9 April 1961), and English author, published over forty novels and story collections. He wrote detective and historical fiction, even a science fiction novel. Among his several collections of ghost stories, the best known is Widdershins (1911). It includes the novella The Beckoning Fair One, which still stands as one of the best examples of psychological horror. To quote Wikipedia:

On the surface, this is a conventional haunted house story: an unsuccessful writer moves into rooms in an otherwise empty house, in the hope that isolation will help his failing creativity. His sensitivity and imagination are enhanced by his seclusion, but his art, his only friend and his sanity are all destroyed in the process. The story can be read as narrating the gradual possession of the protagonist by a mysterious and possessive feminine spirit, or as a realistic description of a psychotic outbreak culminating in catatonia and murder, told from the sufferer’s point of view. The precise description of the slow disintegration of the protagonist’s mind is terrifying in either case. Another theme, shared with others of Onions’ stories, is a connection between creativity and insanity; in this view, the artist is in danger of withdrawing from the world altogether and losing himself in his creation.