On April 10 at Ad Astra 2011, I read my short story “The Only Wish Ever to Come True,” which had originally been published in Talebones magazine. I shared the hour with Matthew Johnson, seen sitting next to me, waiting his turn to read. I’ll upload his performance in a separate video.

I chose that story because Matthew had indicated that he’d be reading a fantasy, so I thought I should, too, so that the flavors would blend together well for any audience. Also, I’d only read “The Only Wish Ever to Come True” once before, at a Readercon, and it was unlikely anyone attending Ad Astra would have heard it before. Don’t want to be repetitive!

Anyway, I recorded the hour so that what happens in Toronto doesn’t have to stay in Toronto.

(Please note that for some reason I’ve yet to figure out, the first few seconds of the last couple of videos I’ve uploaded are wonky, but that clears up quickly before the story begins. But if anyone has any suggestions as to why this is happening, please let me know!)

My birthday isn’t until Thursday, but I got my best possible present two days early, in the form of an email this morning from Steve Jones, letting me know that my story “What Will Come After,” which appeared for the first time in my zombie collection called, well, What Will Come After, had been chosen to appear in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #22.

And what’s more, Steve had decided to open the book with it!

This will mark my third appearance in one of Steve’s Best New Horror anthologies, and it occurs to me that all of my reprint sales to him were originally published in somewhat unusual sources, that is, not in traditional magazines or anthologies. (more…)

The Horror Writers Association has released this year’s preliminary Stoker ballot. You can probably guess why I’m sharing that bit of news with you. (And if you can’t guess, then you’ll just have to keep reading to find out … )

You can see the complete preliminary ballot here, but what’s made my day is this—my zombie collection What Will Come After has made that ballot in the category of Superior Achievement in a Collection!

Now this doesn’t mean I can call myself a Stoker nominee yet. First, the membership must whittle down the following ten collections to the five that will make up the final ballot. So I’ve got a 50/50 chance.

OCCULTATION by Laird Barron (Night Shade Books)
BLOOD AND GRISTLE by Michael Louis Calvillo (Bad Moon Books)
THIS WAY TO EGRESS by Lawrence C. Connolly (Ash-Tree Press)
WHAT WILL COME AFTER by Scott Edelman (PS Publishing)
FULL DARK, NO STARS by Stephen King (Simon and Schuster)
LITTLE THINGS by John R. Little (Bad Moon Books)
A HELL OF A JOB by Michael McCarty (Damnation Books)
A HOST OF SHADOWS by Harry Shannon (Dark Regions Press)
FUNGUS OF THE HEART by Jeremy Shipp (Raw Dog (Screaming Press)
HELLFIRE AND DAMNATION by Connie Corcoran Wilson (Sam’s Dot)

Of course, those are some damned fine collections I’m competing against, so it’s hard to tell what my true odds are of making it through to the final ballot. But if you happen to be a Stoker voter, and would like a PDF of the book for consideration (a book which contains three stories that did make the final Stoker ballot in previous years), please let me know at scott@scottedelman.com.

Little more than a week remains for members of the Horror Writers Association to make recommendations for the Bram Stoker Awards, so I thought I’d point out to those voting members who happen to drop by here that a PDF of my zombie collection What Will Come After can be obtained for consideration by sending a request to scott@scottedelman.com.

What Will Come After, which was issued by PS Publishing early last year, collects all of my zombie fiction, including three stories which previously made the final Stoker ballot when originally published—”A Plague on Both Your Houses” (1997), “The Last Supper” (2003), and “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” (2007). In addition to the reprints, the collection also contains one original short story, “What Will Come After.”

Recs must be received by midnight January 15th, so if you’d like a chance to consider What Will Come After, please let me know!

If you’ve been wanting to own a mess of my stories between two covers, but horror’s not your thing (so These Words Are Haunted isn’t for you) and zombies freak you out (so What Will Come After is waaaaaay out of your comfort zone), check out the cover to my next collection, What We Still Talk About, which will soon be published by Fantastic Books.

What We Still Talk About collects eleven of my favorite science-fiction (aliens, robots, time travelers and more) short stories from the past thirty years. As soon as ordering information becomes available, I’ll be back to let you know!

And another thing you missed by not attending Readercon was me reading my short story “Tell Me Like You Done Before,” which can be found in my collection of zombie stories, What Will Come After.

If you’re up to finding out what happened to George and Lenny after John Steinbeck got through with them, check it out below!

(more…)

It’s been a busy week. How can I tell it’s been a busy week? One way is that I went to New York to read at the KGB Bar on Wednesday night, and I’m only just telling you about it on Saturday!

I got to Manhattan early that morning, and until I needed to head downtown in the evening, I spent my time in meetings with my boss. (Not, not Liz Lemon. And no, not Jack Donaghy, either.) The first person I spotted when I got to the bar was my partner in crime that night, Jack Ketchum, who was standing outside catching a smoke. Here we are inside in a photo taken by the evening’s co-host Ellen Datlow.

(For more photos, check out Ellen Datlow’s flickr stream.)

I was glad to see my tribe outside of the usual convention circuit venues. If I lived in NY, I guess I’d be doing it all the time, but for me it was a rare experience to see my friends in something other than a strange hotel.

I read about 85% of the title story from my collection What Will Come After, shortening it so I could fit it into the time allotted. I’d originally been thinking of reading a shorter, lighter story in its entirely, but I was thankful that Ellen and her co-host Matt Kressel thought I should do otherwise. “What Will Come After” is me at my best, and even though I was getting so emotional reading it I almost lost it a couple of times, I’m glad that’s the side of me I got to show off.

There’s a lot more I could share about the trip, including my amazing Thursday lunch at Shopsin’s, which was almost (but not quite) enough to cause me to move back to New York, but I’ll have to leave all that for another time. Yes, I’m that busy.

In response to repeated requests (OK—make that one request), here’s a column I wrote for The Comics Journal back in 1978. It was pointed out to me that though I posted the text of all of my mid-’80s TCJ Ethics columns here, I never shared my much earlier one-off which I’d called “Bullpen Bull.”

As you’ll see, I used to scribble down quips made by my fellow Bullpenners, and once I was no longer on staff, I decided to share my favorites.

My favorite from among my favorites? The day production manager John Verpoorten, bemoaning how late our books had become, walked into the Bullpen, towering over us all, and said, “I was just speaking to our printer. He was wondering if we were still in business.”

Jason Pettus of the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography has encountered my zombie collection What Will Come After, and thought it rotten!

And since I believe in total disclosure, and that there’s no such thing as a bad review, I’m here to tell you that not only did he feel it was—

a story collection that gets very tedious very fast

—and that I exasperated him so much he was moved to say—

J-sus, ask me how ready I am for that literary trend to be over!

—but that he also dubbed the book—

A big disappointment from the normally great PS Publishing

Sorry I let you down, Pete!

To read the complete review, visit the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.

Another day, another killer review of my PS Publishing zombie collection What Will Come After.

This latest one is written by the Adam-Troy Castro, whose own zombie tale “Dead Like Me” is a must-read, and appears in the June 2010 issue of SCI FI magazine.

(Full disclosure for those who worry about such things: Adam wrote the introduction for my last horror collection, the 2001 These Words Are Haunted, while I wrote the introduction for Castro’s 2002 collection Vossoff and Nimmitz: Just a Couple of Idiots Reupholstering Space and Time. Take that as logrolling if you will, but I prefer to think of it as two guys who really, really like each other’s writing. Birds of a feather, and all that.)

Here’s what he had to say in a review that gave the book a grade of A:

Zombies are not renowned for their individuality. Once transformed, they become part of the same vast shambling horde, with little in the way of an agenda beyond chowing down on any living people in their vicinity.

But authors of zombie stories are of course a different matter entirely, and so the subgenre that sometimes seems unable to offer much more than endless variations on the trope of intrepid zombie-killers finding a way to put one in the brain, proves richer and deeper and even more emotionally effective in the hands of storytellers who take the trope’s seeming limitations as a personal challenge. Witness Scott Edelman, who here seems to say, “Okay. They shamble. They eat flesh. They’re not too pleasant to the nose. That’s a given, and that’s frankly old news. Want to see what else I’ve got?” (more…)