Odds and Ends
Black Box edited by Shane Jiraiya Cummings (Brimstone Press) is a multimedia follow-up to Shadow Box, featuring dozens of pieces of horror flash fiction, most by Australians, plus sound effects and music.
The Complete Collected Essays of H. P. Lovecraft edited by S. T. Joshi (Hippocampus) can now be bought as a CD-ROM. The disc includes the five volumes that were previously released in trade paperback. Also included is the complete run of Lovecraft's amateur magazine, The Conservative.
The Sirenia Digest by Caitlín R. Kiernan is a PDF file emailed monthly to subscribers. In it she always includes a story or vignette or two, an excerpt from a novel-in-progress, and occasionally a guest's story (Sonya Taaffe has contributed fiction on several occasions). You can subscribe by going to Kiernan's website.
The Nightmare Factory, Volume 2 by Thomas Ligotti (HarperCollins/Fox Atomic Comics) collects graphic adaptations of "Gas Station Carnivals," "The Clown Puppet," "The Chymist," and "The Sect of the Idiot." Ligotti provides introductions. Stuart Moore and Joe Harris adapted the stories and the art is by Bill Sienkiewicz, Toby Cypress, Vasilis Lolos, and Nick Stakal.
Fantasy Classics, Graphic Classics, Volume 15 edited by Tom Pomplun (Eureka productions) includes work by Lord Dunsany, Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, L. Frank Baum, Clark Ashton-Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft, illustrated by various artists.
Three Shadows by Cyril Pedrosa (First Second) is a graphic novel translated from French about a father determined to save his young son's life, despite the three shadows that want to take him away. He takes the child on a journey to cheat fate, encountering pain and ugliness and magic along the way. Dark and moving.
Where Madness Reigns: The Art of Gris Grimly (Baby Tattoo Books) is a fun introduction to the grotesque yet charming cartoonish art of this illustrator, which ranges from evil bunnies to a pill-filled Elvis. The book includes samples from a 2007 gallery exhibition and privately owned art that has never before been published.
The Dangerous Alphabet by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Gris Grimly (HarperCollins) is a clever, rhyming pirate journey taken by two children who meet with all types of wicked, ugly, and dangerous creatures beneath the city where they live.
Sparrow art book series number six by Rick Berry (IDW Publishing) is a small square hardcover book of a variety of darkly fantastic and sometimes erotic subjects. Berry is best-known for illustrating Stephen King's and Harlan Ellison's work.
Poe: A Screenplay by Stewart O'Nan (Lonely Road Books) is a limited edition of O'Nan's so far unproduced screenplay about Edgar Allan Poe's life. With an introduction by Roger Corman, a beautiful black and white frontispiece by artist Jill Bauman, and an afterword by O'Nan explaining why he wrote the screenplay.
Spectrum 15: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, edited by Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner (Underwood Books), covered the year 2007 and was juried by five fantasy artists. The book continues to be the showcase for the best in genre art-the sheer variety of style and tone and media and subject matter is impressive. The volume was heftier than in the past, having added over twenty pages. John Jude Palencar was honored with the Grand Master Award, and to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the series an award for Best in Show was given to James Jean. Arnie Fenner provided an overview of the political and cultural year plus a necrology. The jury convened in Kansas City all day where they decided on Gold and Silver awards in several categories. This is a book for anyone interested in art of the fantastic, dark or light.