Skinner Box

And now Skinner Box is available for FREE from Tor.com website!

(Apologies to those who have already spent their 94p/$1.19--I didn't realise it would be free on Tor, honest guv...)

https://www.tor.com/2019/06/12/skinner-box-carole-johnstone/

© Adam Baines

Skinner Box

Skinner Box is out today!

This will be my first novelette from Tor.com, a publisher I've wanted to be published by for years. I am VERY pleased!

A bit of a departure for me, Skinner Box is a sci-fi story about a seemingly routine scientific mission to Jupiter that goes horribly wrong--in the most part, because of the crew.

Be warned, it's full of sex and violence (why, oh why can I never say that without immediately thinking "...a heavy bass line is my kind of silence..."* etc.) Because I'm sad.

However, despite all that, and a whole lot of what I hope will be surprising/shocking twists, Skinner Box is, at its black dark heart, a love story. So there.

I hope you enjoy it.

Available to buy:
Amazon UK   Amazon   Amazon CA   Amazon AU
And it will cost you a mere £0.94 / $1.19!

 

©Adam Baines

*©Dizzee Rascal/Armand van Helden; Bonkers, 2009 (obv) 

Housekeeping

I've been hugely busy for months now, and have neglected a lot more than just this poor blog. Even this post is only going to be a flying visit for now.

A few publishing updates:

My short, The Eyes are White and Quiet (originally published in Titan Books' New Fears), is to be reprinted by Prime Books' Year's Best, 2018, edited by Paula Guran.

My novelette, Better You Believe, about an ill-fated climbing expedition in the Himalayas, gets first billing (and reprinting) in Night Shade Books' Best of the Year, Volume 10 (also to be published in audio). It was also selected for Best of the Best, which has already got a fantastic starred view from Publishers Weekly here. Both books are, of course, edited by the one and only Ellen Datlow. John Joseph Adams of Nightmare Magazine has also acquired the rights for reprint, and I'll update when the issue # is confirmed.

My novelette, Deep, Fast, Green--set in a modern-day Edinburgh and a World War Two submarine--is to appear in Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, which will be published by Saga at Simon & Schuster in August 2019.

And finally, my first collaborative story, In the Gallery of Silent Screams, co-written with the very talented and very lovely Chris Kelso, is to be published in the next issue of Black Static (#65). It was an astonishingly painless experience that I would probably not be averse to repeating! See the fantastic accompanying artwork below, courtesy of Dave Senecal.

So, you know, I have been busy, honest.

And I also have something even more wonderful in the pipeline that I'm not allowed to announce yet, so watch this space!!

Wetwork: Black Static #52

My novelette, Wetwork, was the headliner of Black Static, Issue #52. Link to buy here.
I was very excited slash shitting myself about its reception as I really went all out on it. When that works, it really works. And when it doesn't...y'know. But I figure it's always too easy to stay where you are, doing what you do, especially when it's going ok. Writing every new story should be a challenge, but it should be a different challenge. I've played it safe plenty of times in the past, but stories like Wetwork teach me and show me what I could - and probably should - be doing instead. In this case: True Detectives meets Alien meets 28 Days Later. In mardy Doric and Glaswegian.

Artwork © Ben Baldwin

Thankfully, it's had a few great reviews already:

“...Some may find the phonetically-written Scottish drawls of various characters to be a little hard to “ken” (understand), but Wetwork is more than worth the effort, as it builds to a stunningly effective, tense, skin-crawling and “shout out loud” shock of a finale. This one’s a stunner.”
See full review here
© GARETH JONES

“Wetwork, by Carole Johnstone, is a terrifying view of police work in Glasgow."
© ELLEN DATLOW SF Editors Picks

“...Johnstone pens a tale that is both horrific and human, emotional and devastating, but infused with a quiet, mounting dread. Utilising phonetic Scots speech in the dialogue (both Glaswegian and Doric), she grounds her tale in the grime of the city, while her sharp, economic but descriptive prose pulls the story inexorably towards its gut-punch ending. It’s a powerful start to the issue and sets a high bar for those following.”
See full review here
© PAUL MICHAELS

“This novelette sure needs working at to start off with, but your work is half the battle towards something great. The Glaswegian dialect dialogue needs to be transcended but half its power is its direct meaning which is eventually easy to absorb...Nothing can do justice to the onward extended compulsion of the whole story but particularly of its closing scenes...And the end-revelation, too, is devastating.
Go to it! Work at this work! And it will work hard back at you, with grinding relentlessness.”
See full review here
© D. F. LEWIS

The Wildhearts also very generously allowed me to use lyrics from one of their brilliant songs as an epigraph to the story - which was a huge first for me, made all the more special because I've been in  love with them since I was about sixteen years old. Check them out - best decision you'll ever make!  

Best Horror of the Year, Vol.7

The Best Horror of the Year, Vol.7, edited by Ellen Datlow is now available to buy in the US and the UK. I last had a story selected for this brilliant series back in 2010 with Dead Loss, and although I’ve had a few honourable mentions in the years since, I’m so pleased to be reprinted again.

This time, the story is called Departures, and it was selected from my short story collection, The Bright Day is Done. (By happy coincidence, Dead Loss can also be found in the same collection...) :-D



Catching Flies, which appears in Fearful Symmetries and the forthcoming The Monstrous was also one of Ellen’s top 50 Honourable Mentions printed at the back of the book.

And three other stories made her full recommended list:

Equilibrium; Black Static #41
Gettin High; The Bright Day is Done
Victoria Sponge; The Bright Day is Done

And finally, just to really make my year, Ellen Datlow also had this to say in her 2014 Summation at the start of the book:
“The Bright Day is Done by Carole Johnstone (Gray Friar Press) is a terrific debut collection of seventeen stories by a British writer whose work has been published in Black Static, Interzone, and a host of anthologies including The Best Horror of the Year and The Best British Fantasy. Five of the stories and novelettes are new. A must-read.” ©Ellen Datlow


The Best Horror of the Year, Vol.7 was recently reviewed by SFRevu:
“...My favorite stories are "It Flows from the Mouth" by Robert Shearman, a wonderful piece told in a superb narrative style, which casts some light on the little mysteries of our existence by portraying a strange friendship surviving beyond the grave, and "Departures" by the amazing Carole Johnstone, an outstanding tale set in the departure section of an airport, incredibly well told and frightening in the extreme. In short, a great anthology not to be missed.”
©Mario Guslandi
You can read the whole review here

Finally, SF Signal are running “a series of guest posts featuring the authors of The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 7. Each gives us a glimpse into the how and why of each story.” Here's the link

And here is my how and why:
I hate airports almost as much as I hate tube trains; more specifically, I hate departure lounges. Even more specifically, I hate domestic departure lounges. They’re cattle markets. Flights land and then take off again with mindboggling speed; arrivals often have to battle their way past impatient queues determined to take their place before they’ve even managed to leave. No quarter is given to late arrivals or the confused. They’re soulless, noisy, pitiless, desperate places, and when I’m forced to be in one I’d rather be almost anywhere else.

As well as making me tense, nervous, bored, and frustrated, airports also make me very, very stupid. I’m forever going the wrong way; making an art out of looking guiltily shifty; panicking about losing my passport and boarding card, despite rarely losing anything that I’m not hanging onto for dear life wherever I go; wearing as many metal things as possible, so that I beep enough to deserve literal exposure in the dreaded body scanner; stressing about my plastic bag being the wrong size or whether or not lip balm is a bloody liquid; making ill-considered jokes about a party I went to last week while a biosensor checks my hand luggage. And really panicking about being late – about Missing The Flight!!! – to the extent that I’m always far too early.

On one such occasion, I was in Stansted airport waiting for a flight to Edinburgh. I’d just come through security, and as usual, I got caught up in the mass hysteria of Missing The Flight!!! (these come in waves, I’ve found, but whenever there is a sudden, noticeable shift of people in one direction, you can be sure that a wave is about to begin). I blindly followed this exodus, of course, and ended up at the departure gates’ lounge – you guessed it, far too early for my flight. I sat down anyway – seats in domestic departures are like gold dust – and it was only when everyone around me started stampeding towards the Belfast flight gate that I realised I’d been sitting at the wrong gate anyway. Again.

I waited until the flight had boarded before getting up and nonchalantly wandering back towards the right gate, pretending that I wasn’t a moron. It was quite late at night, and the Edinburgh flight must have been the last of the day, because I suddenly realised that the place was nearly deserted. A deserted domestic departure lounge is almost as intimidating as a packed full one. It was incredibly creepy. The shops were mostly shuttered; the gate corridors yawned empty, opening onto nothing but empty space (really creepy); the flashing, beeping puggies were my only companions, and I marvelled at the contrast – the weirdness of it. That lull didn’t last long – a few minutes at most – and then the place started filling up again, making me wonder whether I’d imagined the whole thing completely. So I wrote a story about it. And I started writing it while sitting at that correct gate, feeling vaguely smug while all around me panicked waves rolled and crashed and went the wrong way.

Here are the direct links to buy The Best Horror of the Year, Vol.7 at:
Amazon uk
Amazon.com
Night Shade Books

Updates!!!

So, there are a few. I'll blame laziness, with a side order of it always looks better when there's a list:

The Mammoth Book of Sherlock Holmes Abroad, edited by Simon Clark and published by Constable & Robinson in the UK, is now available to buy in paperpack and ebook here.
It will be available from Running Press in the US on July 14th here.

It features my story, the Draugr of Tromso, and I'm especially happy about this one because it's my biggest mass market sale yet, my name made the front cover (yippee!), but mainly because I'm just really proud of it. It's always surprisingly hard to admit something like that, but I worked bloody hard on it - BLOODY HARD! - and I know that it's one of the best things that I've written. Honest.

The TOC for Night Shade Books' Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 7 was announced by editor Ellen Datlow at the end of Feb., and I was ecstatic to hear that she'd selected a story from my short story collection, The Bright Day is Done. The story is called Departures, and is a testament to my deep love of airports (or not).

At the moment, it's on pre-order on Amazon UK (here) and US (here), with a publication date of Aug 4th. Again, it will be available in paperback and ebook formats.

Some miscellanea:

My short story, Catching Flies, which appeared in Fearful Symmetries (ChiZine Publications; ed. Ellen Datlow), appeared on the 2014 Locus Magazine Recommeded Reading List

And I stumbled across a terrific review of my sci-fi/horror short, Ad Astra, published in Interzone#248 and Best British Fantasy 2014 at Tomcat in the Red Room.

Here's an excerpt, with full review here:

"Incredible Science Fiction Horror story...impressively crammed: there’s Hard SF discussions of zero gravity, intense psychological realism, sex, violence, mind-games: the busy and jam-packed form of the narrative mirrors the claustrophobic, cluttered, cramped nature of its setting. Ad Astra is both genuinely frightening in its un-spoken suggestions of alien horror and conspiracy, and genuinely sad in its examination of marital distrust." ©Tomcat

Em...think that  might be it for now. If I think of anything else, I'll let you know.

Fearful Symmetries

I can't believe that I forgot to post about this as I was deliriously happy to find out that Ellen Datlow had selected my short, Catching Flies, for her themeless Kickstarted anthology, Fearful Symmetries, to be published by ChiZine in May.

I can't boast of being one of the invited authors; instead, Ellen opened the antho to unsolicited submissions for three places, and I ended up getting one of them. I hear rumour that there were over 1000 subs during that month, so yay! And the ToC is just bonkers.

See here for details.