Allow me to introduce the most recent book on the Warped Perspective print roster!
Periphery is a collection of supernatural fiction, themed around the profound impact which landscape and place can have on us. Whilst this ostensibly reads like ‘folk horror’, and indeed many of the stories could be classed as part of that estimable genre, the stories chosen for inclusion frequently play with those elements, using the familiar to do something altogether unfamiliar. We visit places real and imagined, look at staple features of the environment through new perspectives and examine mental landscapes, and how these, in turn, interact with the outside world.
I’ve produced a couple of books of my own over the past few years; as much as I enjoy the immediacy of a website, and the elasticity of its readership (don’t ask me why a five-year-old review will suddenly get read 2,000 times in a given day, because I don’t bloody know), I am always going to be an avid supporter of print media. There’s just something amazing about seeing your work in print. Rather than doing another solo project, at the beginning of this year I decided I’d like to do something different: moving away from non-fiction to fiction, and (not to sound too lofty about this) perhaps giving people whose work hadn’t yet appeared in print the chance to get their own work out there.
The response to the call for submissions was really encouraging; in fact, it was a bit daunting, but genuinely awesome to see so many people interested in the project. The process was soon underway, as much as it’s a difficult thing to have to turn away some of the fine work submitted (a feeling I’m familiar with myself – in one particular week, I was receiving rejections for my own non-fiction projects at the same time that I was issuing them for some of the stories). There was a bit of an unexpected turn when a major surgery I thought would be happening over there, somewhere in the future, got brought abruptly forward – but we ended up getting everything done and printed to the original plan, which is very much down to the hard work and commitment of all the authors, who have been brilliant to work with, and it’s been really positive seeing them receive their contributor copies this week!
I am very proud of our book, and if you have an interest in supernatural short stories – some written by more experienced writers, some by first-time writers – then please do consider picking up a copy. These are currently available from the Warped Perspective store (we can ship globally) and are always sent out promptly.
The book contains a foreword, eleven stories and author biographies.
Authors:
David Shakes
Julian Gyll
P Wooldridge
C.A. Ellis
Jez Conolly
Frazer Lee
Michelle C-E Keeley
W. B. Randall
Richard Riley Burke
Simon Addison
and Lara Hurley.