Happy New Year, Dreadites! Here’s to a twenty-fourteen full of horrific words and splendid terror.
With all the holiday festivities to be had in December, there just wasn’t enough time to really dig into this collection, so the Dreadful Tales Book Club opens the new year with an extension of its December 2013 title, Someone Wicked: A Written Remains Anthology. The extra month will not only allow readers more time to enjoy the stories, but also a chance to visit The Mortuary message board to chat with some of the contributing authors as well as the anthology’s editors, Weldon Burge and JM Reinbold.
What better way to kick off your New Year than by delving into some disturbing tales of wicked people?
Join usssssssss……
Chat with the editors, authors, and other readers here!
Hello, Dreadites! I hope you enjoyed all the nastiness that John Everson’s little eight-legged friends had to offer in our October / November Book of the Month, Violet Eyes. Don’t forget to stop by and chat with us about the book here at The Mortuary, the official meeting place for the Dreadful Tales Book Club.
For December, we are reading the Smart Rhino Publications anthology Someone Wicked: A Written Remains Anthology. We’ve read Smart Rhino titles for the Book Club before. In fact, our inaugural Book of the Month was Zippered Flesh: Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad! which we later followed up with the sequel anthology Zippered Flesh 2: More Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad!
If you read the above-mentioned anthologies, you will see some familiar names in Someone Wicked like L.L. Soares, who was featured in both Zippered Flesh anthologies; JM Reinbold, contributor to Zippered Flesh 2 and co-editor of Someone Wicked; and Weldon Burge who is editor for all three anthologies as well as a contributor to the first Zippered Flesh collection. There are several new names as well and I suspect this anthology will fill up your to-read list as it has mine with both titles before it.
Here is a little tease from the Smart Rhino Publications website:
Avaricious, cruel, depraved, envious, mean-spirited, vengeful—the wicked have been with us since the beginnings of humankind. You might recognize them and you might not. But make no mistake. When someone wicked crosses your path, your life will never be the same. Do you know someone wicked? You will.
The 21 stories in the Someone Wicked anthology were written by the members of the Written Remains Writers Guild and its friends, and was edited by JM Reinbold and Weldon Burge.
You can pick up a copy of Someone Wicked in paperback format or for Kindle then come on over to The Mortuary to chat with us about the book! In the past, we have had a lot of success engaging the authors on the message board in discussions of their stories, so it should be a good time.
Find out more about Smart Rhino Publications and keep up with all the latest Smart Rhino news at their website here. You can also stalk them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.
This lovely banner is courtesy of Mark Brown (aka Dark Mark)
Colum proposed a very ambitious Bram Stoker challenge for all you DT readers (you can check that out here), but I have an unrelated warm-up challenge for our Book Club members; we’re reading two books this month! Well, technically one anthology and one novella.
Book Club readers are of course free to read at their own pace (I’m just now wrapping up January’s book!) and since we have two books this month you are welcome to read them in whatever order you wish. So, without further adieu and in no particular order I present to you the March Books of the Month. Continue reading →
As most of you probably know, we launched the Dreadful Tales Book of the Month Club, a book club for macabre maniacs hosted by The Mortuary, this past April with a reading of Zippered Flesh: Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad!. This short story anthology was initially on my radar because it included “Paraphilia” by one of my favorite authors, Lisa Mannetti, but it turned out to be a perfect collection for a horror book club, wonderfully morbid with widely diverse content. Zippered Flesh, edited by Weldon Burge and published by Smart Rhino Publications, contains 20 short stories by genre veterans and relative unknowns, but all share one common theme: (as you may have guessed) body enhancements.
Undoubtedly, each reader has their own expectation of what constitutes body enhancement and how that will be presented in Zippered Flesh, but you will find there are more imaginative horrors to body modification than strangely placed tattoos, piercings, or plastic surgery for wannabe Barbies.
One woman tries to become the ultimate sex object in Graham Masterton’s aptly titled “Sex Object.” Don’t be fooled though, this story isn’t concerned with ridiculously large breast implants or liposuction; rather we are introduced to a doctor that “used his surgical genius to create such erotic aberrations…”
There are historical pieces, like the deadly delights on the high seas in Elliot Capon’s “By Hook” and P.I. Barrington’s “Independence Day.” A couple stories present frighteningly realistic psychopaths while others still exist in the supernatural realm of our darkest fantasies.
Zippered Flesh features psychological drama with an unbelievable twist like Charles Colyott’s “Comfort;” straight science fiction, for example in “Unplugged” by Adrienne Jones; and future worlds offering body modification to unbelievable extremes like Jonathan Templar’s darkly humorous “Marvin’s Angry Angel.” This is a truly exceptional collection of stories sure to hit the hot spot of any horror fiction fan. Almost every tale is burned into my memory and with 20 entries that is phenomenal.
I could go on and on about how wonderful this collection is, and I do along with Jason Darrick in our Zippered Flesh podchat.
Be warned, there could be cursing, bad grammar, mispronunciation of author names and just regular English words! Please send all hate mail or complaints to the head of our complaint department, Jason Darrick. You can find him on Twitter or Facebook. Direct all compliments to the head of the compliment department, me (Meli)! You can post praise and romantic flourishes here or here. We can also be reached at dreadfultales AT gmail DOT com.
Enjoy!
(If you are interested in joining the book club, we are currently wrapping up Greg Lamberson’s zombie road novella Carnage Road. This is a short one, so a great time to start. We’re discussing the book here.)
Dreadful Tales has a special treat for anyone who has read Zippered Flesh: Tales of Body Enhancement Gone Bad!, the official Dreadful Tales April Book of the Month. Next week, from Monday 5/14 until Sunday 5/20, we have a number of the contributors of this wonderfully disturbing, weird collection of tales on hand to answer your questions at The Mortuary message board.
Here is a list of some of the authors who will be stopping by the boards:
Michael Bailey “Bootstrap – The Binds of Lasolastica”
Michael Laimo “Idol” (He’s also currently in production of the Chiller Network film adaptation of Dead Souls)
Adrienne Jones “Unplugged”
Charles Colyott “Comfort”
Christopher Nadeau “You With Me”
Scott Nicholson “The Shaping”
J. Gregory Smith “Something Borrowed”
John Shirley “Equilibrium”
L.L. Soares “Sawbones”
Aaron J. French “Whirling Machine Man”
Jezzy Wolfe “Locks of Loathe”
Lisa Mannetti “Paraphilia”
Jonathan Templar “Marvin’s Angry Angel”
Weldon Burge Editor and author of “Hearing Mildred”
In addition to having interesting discussions with the contributors and fanatic readers alike, a few authors have also offered up free digital copies of a title or two to giveaway to participants.
Stop by The Mortuary and pop into this thread to join the conversation.
Hope to “see” you there!
Dreadful Tales 