Science Fiction Super Pack Out on Kindle; Towers of Darkness Poems Migrate to Bones

August 22, 2014 in Caveman, Fantasy, Horror, Poetry, Science Fiction
Tags: Bones, Fantastic Stories, Horror, James Ward Kirk Publishing, Nocturnal Publications, Science Fiction, Towers of Darkness, Warren Lapine, Wilder Publications

In what’s turned out to be a busy week, another big book is now available, FANTASTIC STORIES PRESENTS:  SCIENCE FICTION SUPER PACK #1 from Wilder Publications (cf. April 9 and 21, March 31).  At more than 750 pages, with 38 stories — “Fantasy & Science Fiction from the Present, Past, & Future,” to quote Editor Warren Lapine.  “Featuring stories by classic SF greats and up-and-coming new voices” — it also has a companion volume, FANTASTIC STORIES PRESENTS:  FANTASY SUPER PACK #1.  Both of these are primarily reprint anthologies designed in part in support of Wilder Publications’ new ezine, FANTASTIC STORIES, but judging from the contents of just the science fiction entry, with authors ranging from Isaac Asimov to Marion Zimmer Bradley, they look like good buys on their own merits especially for newer readers who may not have had time to be familiar with some of the masters.

I (ahem!) am a part of this too, although only in the science fiction one, with a story going back to when I was writing more sf, and one of my first professional sales to boot, “No Place to Hide,” originally published in Summer 1991 in the long since defunct SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW.  For this and more — much, much more — with a print edition expected to join the electronic ones in two weeks or less, information can be found here.

Then, speaking of “ancient” times, word came yesterday from James Ward Kirk Publishing that a mini-poem sequence excerpted from my long out-of-print chapbook TOWERS OF DARKNESS (Nocturnal Publications, NIGHT VISIONS poetry series #3, 1990 — my first published single-author book of any sort, by the way) has been accepted for their BONES III anthology.  Under the title “Three Dance Poems:  A Mini-Sequence from Towers of Darkness” — lots of threes here! – it’s somewhat experimental in form with a prose “introduction” setting the poems in the context of an evil, doomed city, followed by the poems themselves, “The Instrument Maker,” “Vibrations,” and “Bal D’Enfer,” on the subject of music and dancing and . . . bones.