Call for Submissions

As the editor of the annual anthology series The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror for Prime Books, I am now reading for the 2012 edition—the third in the series—which will include material published in 2011.

I am looking for stories of dark fantasy. Dark fantasy can simply unsettling or eerie; revelatory or baffling. It can be a story in which a small glimpse of life is seen “through a glass, darkly.” Or, in more literary terms (all of which are debatable) it might be any number of things: weird fiction (new or old), supernatural fiction, magical realism, surrealism, the fantastique, or the ever-ambiguous horror fiction (which need not have a supernatural element but can crossover into other genres).

You can get an idea of what I am looking for from the first two volumes of the series: The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2010 (covering 2009) is widely available and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2011 (covering 2010) will be published in August 2011. You might also read the introduction to the first in the series here.

This is a REPRINT anthology so I am only reading material published during the calendar year of 2011.

READERS: I appreciate your recommendations. Email darkecho@darkecho.com.

PUBLISHERS: I prefer email submissions of Word documents, RTF, or PDF rather than hard copies if available. It saves you the postage and I can keep track of things better this way. If you must send galleys, magazines, or books, email me for snailmail address. If your publication appears on the Web only, please make me aware of it. Send to: darkecho@darkecho.com

WRITERS: It is best to request your publisher send me your entire collection, the anthology, or periodical in which your story was published. If it has been legitimately published online, please send the URL.

Please post and/or pass this on to others.

DEADLINE for 2011 materials: February 1, 2012. (but the sooner the better!)

Thank you.

Paula Guran

New York Times Sunday Book Review, June 3, 2011:
Valentine’s novel has the stylized quality of books by Angela Carter like “The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman,” and it displays similar pyrotechnics. Run by a woman known as Boss, the traveling Circus Tresaulti ekes out its existence against a postapocalyptic backdrop of cities rebuilding after “the bombs and the radiation.” The setting is unimaginative, but the circus performers, most of them mechanically altered to enhance their acts, come to life in a series of skillful set pieces. Chief among these performers are the aerialists Alec, who has recently (and intentionally) fallen to his death, and Bird, who has replaced him. Together they give the novel its emotional force, as Valentine keeps returning to the reasons for Alec’s death: “For anyone who sees it, a moment like that is never in the past; it is always happening. . . . When Bird falls, Alec is falling.” In contrast to the complexity of that haunting echo, the plot is more basic, involving the threat from a dastardly “government man.” Yet in a highwire act of her own, Valentine still raises the novel above the ordinary through her ability to convey the richness of the circus performers’ emotional lives, coupled with impressive writing — as in a description of Alec’s surgically attached wings, every bone-and-brass feather “jigsawed and hammered and smoothed so thin that when it strikes another feather it rings out a clear note.”

In a review of the Barnes & Noble Touch, Laptop: The Pulse of Mobile Tech selected a really great book to use as a screen comparison example…Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine! The review compares the Nook and the Kindle side by side and then uses this illustration…

…then goes on to mention graphics”such as book covers and magazine art, look as good in grayscale as we’d expect…” There it is: Mechanique‘s cover by Kiri Moth in glorious black-and-white.

We’d love to claim our clever product placement and brilliant marketing strategy put the book there, but we really don’t know how it got there except that the reviewer must have excellent taste in books!

Click here for alarger version of the hardcover dust jacket.

Fangtastic Books: Looking for Vampires? Read This…

This is a great collection of vampire stories from a wide range of authors. I was thrilled to see some names I knew and have read and also discovering stories by new to me authors. I loved Tanya Huff’s story, it was like catching up with an old friend. It featured Vickie and Mike Celluci from her Blood Books (and Blood Ties TV show)… I love short story collections because they give you a glimpse of a writer’s style and sometimes characters and they make you want more. I know I haven’t yet read much by Carrie Vaughn, Rachel Caine or Kelly Armstrong but thanks to their contributions to this and other anthologies I want to read their books. If you love vampires and you love short stories this is a must-have book for your shelves.