Thursday, August 24, 2006

Horror Beyond II (It's a Wrap)



Stories of Strange Creations

I’ve been working on a new anthology titled Horrors Beyond II (yep, there is a Horrors Beyond I), and I’ve heard from all of the authors finally. Everyone has been notified, one way or the other, so I figured I’d post the author list here. There is no order to the list yet:

Gene O’Neill, William C. Dietz, A. A. Attanasio, Robert Weinberg, Stephen Mark Rainey, Tim Curran, John Shirley, John Sunseri, David Niall Wilson, Lucien Soulban, Michail Velichansky, Paul S. Kemp, Jay Caselberg, C.J. Henderson, Paul Melniczek, Richard A. Lupoff, E. Sedia, Greg Beatty, Alexis Glynn Latner, Ron Shiflet.

This is quite a list, with stories ranging across the book’s theme. In total, around 4,800,000 words were submitted. My eyes are weary from the reading. And there were many close fits — some that I’ll be able to use for other projects. Most every story was a good read, but some didn’t fit well with the previously selected stories. Others stories stayed in the reading pool to the last minute.

Anthologies are odd creatures. They are not a collection of the editor’s favorite tales; they are collections of stories that (hopefully) fit together nicely and produce something more than a scattering of short fiction. That’s my opinion anyway.

I’ll be posting this on the ESP forums in a few days. Some of my emails bounced back, so I know there are writers still waiting to hear.

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