A quick round-up of short fiction that’s currently out in the wild, hunting for readers. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

First off, there’s another Lovecraft-inspired anthology from PS Publishing, Cold War Cthulhu, edited by Darrell Schweitzer. It’s a hefty volume even in paperback, and with some great writers involved. In “The Well”, I finally get to tell what William Burroughs was up to in Ecuador, and for once, it had nothing to do with drugs.

https://pspublishing.co.uk/cold-war-cthulhu-trade-paperback-edited-by-darrell-schweitzer-6542-p.asp

A further volume should be out in the not-too-distant future, Lovecraft’s Dark Dreamlands, which I was also lucky enough to get a piece in. “Mapping the Dream House” is a kind of re-take on HPL’s “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”, with the death of Queen Elizabeth thrown in. Again from PS Publishing, probably later this year or early next.

Ruádan Books is a relatively new company, based in Boston, MA. Their anthology Winter in the City (https://ruadanbooks.com/product/winter-in-the-city/), edited by R.B. Wood and Anna Koon, is an absolute gem. The brief was simple — a city, a season — and it’s produced some fine work from some excellent authors. For a city, I picked Amsterdam, and you can learn all about the Ahn, annoying supernatural creatures  who appear to the lost, the hopeless and the unemployed, utter a little saccharine advice, then vanish, leaving no-one better off… maybe. For Spring in the City (https://ruadanbooks.com/product/spring-in-the-city-a-collection-of-dark-speculative-fiction), from the same folks, I wrote about my old home town, and revealed a little of the secret history of Manchester. Despite the fantastic elements, these are two of the most autobiographical pieces I’ve ever published.

What else? Well, available online, there’s “The Zee” (https://www.unchartedmag.com/stories/the-zee/), the tale of a TV cryptid investigator, which earned a few nice comments recently; and, away from the fantastic, Syncopation Literary Journal Vol 4, Issue 2, has “Starstruck” (https://syncopationliteraryjournal.wordpress.com/short-stories-8/), a tale from the Manchester music scene. So you wanna be a rock’n’roll star? You might prefer to think again…

If you like any of these, you might want to try the collection, The Ice Plague and other inconveniences, available here: https://www.lulu.com/shop/tim-lees/the-ice-plague/paperback/product-m22g9kv.html?q=the+ice+plague&page=1&pageSize=4