Look Out For … I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas

“I Am Providence is whip-smart, darkly witty and a genuine page-turner.”

For fans of legendary pulp author H. P. Lovecraft, there is nothing bigger than the annual Providence-based convention the Summer Tentacular. Horror writer Colleen Danzig doesn’t know what to expect when she arrives, but is unsettled to find that among the hobnobbing between scholars and literary critics are a group of real freaks: book collectors looking for volumes bound in human skin, and true believers claiming the power to summon the Elder God Cthulhu, one of their idol’s most horrific fictional creations, before the weekend is out. Colleen’s trip spirals into a nightmare when her roommate for the weekend, an obnoxious novelist known as Panossian, turns up dead, his face neatly removed. What’s more unsettling is that, in the aftermath of the murder, there is little concern among the convention goers. The Summer Tentacular continues uninterrupted, except for a few bumbling police. Everyone at the convention is a possible suspect, but only Colleen seems to show any interest in solving the murder. So she delves deep into the darkness, where occult truths have been lurking since the beginning of time. A darkness where Panossian is waiting, spending a lot of time thinking about Colleen, narrating a new Lovecraftian tale that could very well spell her doom.

Why We’re Excited About This Book:

Nick Mamatas’s latest novel is set during a H.P. Lovecraft convention known as the Summer Tentacular. In attendance are horror writers Colleen Danzig and Panos Panossian, as well as a motley assortment of pseuds, closet racists and men’s rights creeps.

But then Panossian is murdered and no-one seems to care much who killed him other than Danzig and Panossian himself (who narrates parts of the book from a trolley in the morgue). And that’s not all, for some of the convention attendees seem to take the writings of Lovecraft too literally, and are hunting out a book bound with human flesh.

Part satire of fan-culture, part Lovecraftian horror, part whodunnit, I Am Providence is whip-smart, darkly witty and a genuine page-turner. It’s a book that couldn’t have been written by anyone else but Mamatas: highly recommended.

I Am Providence is available now from Night Shade Books.

Look Out For … Penny Dreadfuls: Sensational Tales of Terror

“The amount of crime, treachery, murder and slow poisoning, & general infamy is something terrible!”

Body snatching! Premature burial! Cannibalism! The original Victorian-era penny dreadfuls entertained the masses with shocks, thrills and lurid horrors. This terror-packed anthology includes two novels—The String of Pearls, which immortalised Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, and the original 1818 edition of Frankenstein—as well as tales by Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Stoker, Alcott and Conan Doyle.

Why We’re Excited About This Book:

Celebrate the era of the penny dreadfuls with this this new leather-bound anthology of sensational and garish Victorian fiction. The penny dreadfuls were a publishing phenomenon at the time, cheap 8 or 16 page weekly issues with illustrations on the front page of the ghastly acts committed within: “blood, much more blood!” was one publisher’s instruction to his illustrators.

This volume contains fiction by John Galt, Poe, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and others, as well as supposedly ‘true’ accounts of the lives of notorious highwaymen and murderers. It also features the original 1818 text of Frankenstein, more gruesome than the more widely reprinted 1831 edition.

“The amount of crime, treachery, murder and slow poisoning, & general infamy is something terrible” said Mary Elizabeth Braddon about the penny dreadfuls (having published one under a pseudonym herself). Which sounds like recommendation enough to us.

Penny Dreadfuls is out on 7 August 2016 from Sterling.