2020 will forever be remembered by me as the first year — and the only year, I hope — during which I wasn’t able to attend an in-person, face-to-face convention. But here at Eating the Fantastic, I’m doing my best to turn those might have beens into realities.

And so you’ve already had the chance to eavesdrop on meals which were meant to have taken place in Wellington, New Zealand during Worldcon — with Lee Murray, Stephen Dedman, and Farah Mendlesohn — and last episode, we went to Scarborough together for a StokerCon meal with Priya Sharma. Now it’s time to return to StokerCon to chat and chew with the always entertaining Robert Shearman.

Robert Shearman has won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and multiple British Fantasy Awards for his fiction, some of which has been gathered in such collections as Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical (2009), Remember Why You Fear Me (2012), They Do the Same Things Different There (2014), and earlier this year, a massive three-volume collection We All Hear Stories in the Dark. His writings for television, radio, and the stage have won him the Sophie Winter Memorial Trust Award, the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the World Drama Trust Award, and the Guinness Award for Theatre Ingenuity. He also wrote the Hugo Award-nominated Doctor Who episode “Dalek” at the request of producer Russell T. Davies.

We discussed the reason we’re lucky we each survived to adulthood, how he almost talked his way out of selling his first short story, the way he starts every story thinking it’s funny even as things turn horrific, why some readers find his new collection offensive and others uplifting, how he’s following up that three-volume, 2,000-page, 650,000-word, 101-story collection, the way his brush with COVID-19 has affected his writing, and much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on our conversation — (more…)

So you couldn’t make it to the World Fantasy Convention this year—or perhaps you could make it, but wasn’t able to figure out a way to be omnipresent—and are pissed? Don’t worry. There are at least three readings you didn’t have to be present to witness.

And here they are …

F. Brett Cox

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Since I’m having too much fun at the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto to write up a full report just yet, let these six photos suffice for now to let you know what my first day was like.

Vatican City burger at Burger’s Priest

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How much did I love Robert Shearman’s short story collection Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical? So much so that I took my time reading it. You might think that if you really love a writer’s work you’d gobble down all his stories as quickly as possible, but no, I wanted this to last. Now it’s done and I’m wishing the book had been longer. Much longer.

You often hear people say that a certain book seems to have been written for them alone, and though that’s a cliché, in this case, it felt very much the truth, because all of the stories in the collection dealt with love in one form or another, and I feel that all of my stories (yes, even my zombie ones) are love stories, too. As Ted Sturgeon wrote in his essay “Why So Much Syzygy?” (and as I quoted in the introduction to my own collection What We Still Talk About):

I think what I have been trying to do all these years is to investigate the matter of love, sexual and asexual. I investigate it by writing about it because …I don’t know what the hell I think until I tell somebody about it.

And so Shearman writes touching and funny and whimsical tales like the one about a couple who literally gave each other their hearts, and the one about a world in which the percentage of the love that you feel for each person you know can be measured, and then there’s the one about a man who heads off on a cruise to dispose of his late wife’s ashes only to learn, well, you’ll find out when you read it … and more.

And after all of these already amazing stories, one of which even got me verklempt, there comes a tour de force (I know, I feel that word is overused, too, but this time it truly is a tour de force) in which Shearman critiques all those other stories that came before. In the collection’s penultimate story, “Not About Love,” Shearman (yes, it’s a metafictional story is about Shearman himself) arrives at an awards ceremony where he is nominated for the very book you’re reading, and is assailed by the elderly patron after whom the award is named. (more…)