The Remnant Band Preview

The Dark Worlds website has posted an excerpt from my latest short story, The Remnant Band.  This is an all fantasy issue of Dark Worlds and has a great line-up of authors.  (And it's not me that I'm talking about).

The Remnant Band

Azark, the impetuous outlander hailing from the cliff-dwelling Arcasians, finds a clue to the whereabouts of the man who slew his father. His quest for vengeance sends him headlong into the tower fortress of Governor Icarod where he finds himself face to face with the remnant band--the surviving vestiges of the destroyed Assassins Guild.

The Remnant Band is a tale from the City of Bathos and picks up where my novel Through the Groaning Earth left off.  You can find The Remnant Band and a host of other great stories by excellent authors in issue six of the Pulp-Ark Award nominated Dark Worlds.

Dark Worlds is available in hard copy format for $14.59, or you may want to pick up the bargain digital download for $4.99.

Barclay Salvage is Back in Action

Aaron Barclay and his intrepid crew of interstellar salvagers come across an empty freighter being sucked into the orbit of poisonous planet.  What they discover leads them to a secret prison station that has been wiped out by a deadly plague...

Find this 15,000 word story in the pages of Startling Adventure #2, which is now available on Amazon!


The Artificial Woman, which appears in Startling Adventures, is my second crack at a Barclay Salvage space opera and I had a lot of fun returning to the characters (and adding in a few new ones).  This story takes place prior my first Barclay Salvage Story, The Investment, which appears in the first issue of Dark Worlds magazine.

I've had a publisher request another Barclay Salvage story for an anthology, so I hope to be getting to work on that one soon!

Lone Crow & Wyatt Earp

I know I teased this story, Against the Gathering Darkness, a long, long time ago but sometimes that's how long it takes to get a story published. But it's finally here! Famous native American gunslinger Lone Crow and another guy named Wyatt Earp join forces to look for a lost archeologist up north of Skagway Alaska and discover a little more than they bargained for lurking at the bottom of a played out mine. This sucker is about 12,000 words long--room enough for some heavy-duty storytelling and an action-packed ending--and you can read it in Dark Worlds #5. If you've got an electronic reader that can handle (PDF) Portable Document Files or you don't mind reading on your computer you can save a bundle by picking up the $3.99 download.

However, some might be tempted to pick up the hard copy just because of the awesome M.D. Jackson cover. But besides the cool cover you're going to get the following line up of nifty pulp-style stories:

"Of Kings and Servants" by C.J. Burch (Sword and Sorcery)

The Hook by J.F. Gonzalez (Horror)

The Black Grave of Deception by Peter Welmerink (Sword and Sorcery)

Body of Work (A Mythos Horror 'Book Collector' story)

The Cryo Game by Jack Mackenzie (Space Adventure)

Black Destiny of Ys by David A. Hardy (Historical Fantasy)

Against the Gathering Darkness by Joel Jenkins (Historical Western Horror/Adventure)

An Interview with C. J. Burch: A Chuck the Barbarian Cartoon

Dark Worlds Five

Here's the cover of Dark Worlds #5 with another awesome M.D. Jackson cover. This will be coming at you this summer chock full o' cool stories.

One of those cool stories will be Against the Gathering Darkness, recounting the story where famed Native American gunslinger Lone Crow meets up with Wyatt Earp in Alaska while searching for a missing archeologist doing field work for Miskatonic University.

I've had one previous Lone Crow story published in How the West was Weird. If you haven't picked up a copy of that you can grab one here.

Immortals Arrive

The latest issue of Dark Worlds has hit the newsstands, so to speak, and you can pick up an electronic or hard copy here!

This issue contains Immortals of the Cannibal Coast a swashbuckling fantasy tale by me and Martin Edward Stephenson. It also features a host of other pulp-style tales, which I've listed below:

The Tomb of the Amazon Queen by Michael Ehart
Roadblock, a space opera adventure by Jack Mackenzie
The Storming of Big Spree, an historical adventure by David A. Hardy
Bayou Mirage a Dark Fantasy by E. P. Berglund
Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, a detective Mystery by Nick Andreychuk
Laocoon, a Weird Western by G. W. Thomas
Communications Delay, SF by Lee Beavington

...and an interview the inestimable Joshua Reynolds, a fellow Pulpwork Press author. In celebration of this interview Pulpwork has Josh's short story horror collection, Bury Me Deep on sale for half price! This sale is limited to the quantity on hand, so get your order in now.

Excerpt from Immortals of the Cannibal Coast:

Chapter 1: Damnation's Chest

Tarajel clutched the riggings of the pirate caravel as it reeled, dwarfed in the raging waves. Water engulfed her, tearing at her body so that she lost her footing as the entire ship plunged beneath the salty waters of the Southern Sea. She kept a death grip on the lines of the aft sail, her body locked in the cold depths and her lungs crying for oxygen. The spent air within her gushed away into the midnight blackness, and her fingers began to slip, drawn away from the hemp fibers of her lifeline by the inexorable pull of the ocean. Then suddenly, the ship was granted a momentary reprieve from its salty grave and bobbed to the surface, shedding long ropes of black seawater from its decks.

For a moment the dark clouds gusted away from the face of the moon, and Tarajel saw the tattered sails hanging useless from the broken masts. The savage wind howled in her ears, biting at her lithe form, and whipping out across the spume-tossed seas. Long brown hair whipped about her face, her sloe eyes scrying the rain swept night for some sign of salvation. From foot to neck she was clad in dark leather, a cuirass of tortoiseshell mail bound around her chest and back. For a brief moment she dared loosen one hand from the rope. It went to her side, and she felt calmer when she found the hilt of her curved sabre still firm in its scabbard, right alongside the oiled leather pouch that contained carefully measured doses of poisons from every known corner of the world.

A voice cried out to her through the howl of the wind, and she turned to see the almond-skinned face of Krat, one of the slaves she had freed from the slaver ship Damnation while relieving its merchant master of a chest full of ill-gotten loot. Less than six hours ago Tarajel and the crew of the pirate caravel had put the Damnation to torch and sent it to the bottom of the sea. The Damnation had become separated from its escort of Thraxian warships by the high winds of the impending storm, and when the pirates discovered the defenseless ship the fever of greed burned hot in their minds. They chose to ignore good sense and the foul weather on the horizon in favor of looting the slave ship.

“Are we going to make it?” asked Krat, his narrow eyes squinted against the spray carried on the storm.

Tarajel shook her head, water dripping from her tangled locks. “I’ve been raiding slave ships for two years now and I’ve never seen anything like this. You’d best start praying to your god, because this ship is going down.”

All about the deck of the ship pirates of every size and race clung to the ropes, looking, for all the gold in Shardia, like drowned rats. Captain Bronnit stood lashed to the wheel, his dripping beard a tangled mat, and water running from the empty socket of one missing eye. He roared out curses at his crew.

“Man the bilge pumps you scurvy runts! Will you die like men or like simpering women?”
Tarajel ignored the unintended insult and glanced over the side of the ship, noticing the stoven planks and the water that gushed in. “Blood from my guts!” she swore. “You’d have us pump the entire Southern Sea dry!”

Captain Bronnit was not accustomed to having his orders questioned, and he’d run his sword through more than one of his own men for less than an evil eye cast in his direction. “I’ll cut the head off any man—or woman—who lags. Now to the bilge pumps!”

Several pirates scurried to the pumps, but others eyed the mountainous waves that rolled about them, tossing the caravel like a cork, and threatening to fall on them at any moment. Tarajel and the short, but stoutly built Krat, didn’t move.

As the massive swells tossed the pirate caravel aloft, Tarajel thought she glimpsed something through the sheets of rain and wind. “I’ll be a Shardian camel herder,” she breathed.
Krat saw them, too. “The sea folk!”

They frolicked in the tossing seas, scaled tails flipping them aloft before they dove back beneath the surging brine. They were half men and half fish; torsos lean and sleek, naked to the bracing Southern Sea. The males were narrow-faced and handsome, with aquiline features and piercing blue eyes like the waters of the daytime sea. The women were long-lashed and full-lipped, and their merry laughs came tinkling to the ears of the pirates, carried on the howl of the wind.

“Sea nagas!” hissed Tarajel.

“How do you know they be nagas and not mermen and maids?” asked Krat, his blue-knuckled fingers wrapped around the rail.

Tarajel bit back a sharp retort as she remembered that Krat was not an experienced sailor—only a slave recently chained to the oars of the Damnation and not privy to the lore of the sea. “The mermen dive deep during the storms, but the nagas love the winds, because they know that the gales drive ships into reefs.”

“Is it true that the nagas eat human flesh?”

The warrior didn’t reply, but the steel in her eyes answered Krat’s question as eloquently as any verbal response. Another question came to the former slave’s lips, but before he put it to voice the ship lurched, the hull grinding against a coral reef hidden by the fury of the lashing waves.

Pick up a copy of Dark Worlds #3 here.

Dark Worlds Interview

G.W. Thomas, editor of the Dark Worlds magazine has conducted a short interview with me and posted it at the Dark Worlds blog. Check it out here. In the interview we discuss such topics as inspiration versus imitation, why write pulp?, which dead pulp-writer I'd most like to have a chat with, profanity in modern fiction, and my preference for vicious bloodthirsty vampires instead of brooding romantic vampires.

If you haven't already, do pick up the latest issue of Dark Worlds. The cover story (with fabulous cover art by M.D. Jackson), Lords of the Bitter Dark, is taken from my impending dark fantasy novel, Through the Groaning Earth.

Lords of the Bitter Dark

I'm pleased to announce that, Lords of the Bitter Dark, a story extracted from my upcoming novel, Through the Groaning Earth, is now the cover story for Dark Worlds Magazine #2 and is now available for purchase at Lulu.com.

Lords of the Bitter Darkness revisits Bathos, the city of corruption, which is the setting for my previously published novel, Escape from Devil's Head.

When his ship is blown across the great oceans by a sudden storm and founders upon the reefs of an unknown land, Azark plunges into the depths of the fiend-haunted silver mines of the Monks of Racaovanj, in order to free some enslaved fellow sailors who have been captured and put to work mining the silver ore. Soon, he finds himself caught between the deadly monks that zealously guard the mines and the living dead that lurk within the deep caverns.

Besides Lords of the Bitter Darkness, Dark Worlds #2 is 120 pages chock full of pulpy goodness and features other stories such as "Voices" (Mystery) by Nick Andreychuk, "Cauldron of Life, Blades of Death" (Historical Fantasy)by David A. Hardy, "River Baby Weeps" (Horror) by Joshua Reynolds, "Trick Candles" (Horror)by Stephen D. Rogers, "The Clatter of Dry Bones" (Mythos)by Jack Mackenzie, "One Man's Trash" (Space Opera)by C. J. Burch.

Lords of the Bitter Dark

I just received notice a couple of days ago that my story, Lords of the Bitter Dark, is to be the featured tale in Dark Worlds magazine issue #2. Interior illustrations for the story will be done by G.W. Thomas.

Lords of the Bitter Dark is a preview of the yet to be released Through the Groaning Earth which is a dark fantasy novel that takes place in the City of Bathos--sometimes known as the City of Corruption. The first novel I wrote that takes place in Bathos is Escape from Devil's Head, which is available at Amazon.com in bound hard copy and at Fictionwise.com in digital format.

Lords of the Bitter Dark tells the story of an outsider ship-wrecked on the shores of Bathos who becomes involved in a centuries old feud. I'll spill a few more details as the release date of Dark Worlds #2 comes nearer.

In the meantime I encourage everyone to get familiar with the City of Corruption and a few of its denizens by picking up a copy of Escape from Devil's Head.

Again Dark Worlds

Here's what Derrick Ferguson recently had to say about my recent appearance in Dark Worlds magazine #1. I thought it was quite amusing, and though I don't condone the robbery of the young or the old, I thought I'd share what he had to say:

Why am I peddling DARK WORLDS? Well, besides the fact that it's chock full of pulp-style tales it also happens to contain a certain story called "The Investment" which is written by Joel Jenkins, a writer of superlative talents that I have had the pleasure of being associated with for quite some time now.

"The Investment" is a space opera tale that follows the adventures and calamities of the crew of the Scavenger as they try to be the first to salvage a warp drive from a Kree spaceship abandoned on the jungle-covered planet of Arcturon VI. They get a little more than they bargain for when bounty hunters show up and the natives begin to get restless.

Now I'm not gonna lie to you and say I've read this story and that you should jack little old ladies for their gold teeth if necessary in order to buy a copy. But I have read most of Joel's stories and even had the pleasure of collaborating with him on a couple. So on that basis alone I'm gonna get out my ski mask, pliers, head out to the nearest senior citizen center and lay in wait.

So with an endorsement like that, I've got ask, "What are you waiting for?" Pick yourself up a copy of Dark Worlds #1 right away.

Dark Worlds Released

Dark Worlds Magazine #1 is now available at Lulu.Com. It's 130 pages of unadulterated pure pulp goodness in a prestige paperback format. $13.95 for a hard copy or $4.99 for an electronic version (PDF-portable document file).

Why am I peddling Dark Worlds? Well, besides the fact that it's chock full of pulp-style tales it also happens to contain a certain story called The Investment, which is written by me.

The Investment is a space opera tale that follows the adventures and calamities of the crew of the Scavenger as they try to be the first to salvage a warp drive from a Kree spaceship abandoned on the jungle-covered planet of Arcturon VI. They get a little more than they bargain for , when bounty hunters show up and the natives begin to get restless.

Lost World Cover Art

I've just received some advance cover art for the first issue of DarkWorlds, in which appears a science fiction story I penned, The Investment. The Investment comes from the annals of the employees of Barclay Salvaging and follows the intrepid crew of The Scavenger as they explore the jungle-covered depths of Arcturon 6 hunting for an ancient hyper-drive engine.


In the tradition of some of the 1930's pulp magazine covers, the cover art for Dark Worlds #1 is a bit racy--though not particularly shocking by today's standards. And despite the occasionally lurid artwork, one of things I quite admire about the pulp-fiction of the 1930's is the limited use of profanity and that despite the frenetic pacing the authors use a restraint that is rarely seen in today's authors. Over all, I think it makes for a better piece of fiction that is accessible to more readers.



To your left is an illustration from The Investment, which depicts some of the denizens of Arcturon 6.

Dark Worlds #1 will be available in both print and electronic formats. I'll let you know where you can pick up a copy when they become available.

Dark Worlds Update

I've just received notice that the first issue of the Dark Worlds magazine is slated for a June 1st release.

As I've mentioned in a previous post, my Barclay Salvaging science fiction story, The Investment, will be appearing in the pages of Dark Worlds--and I'm told that an artist is feverishly working on an accompanying illustration to render the horrifying and fantastic situation into which Aaron Barclay and his team of intrepid intergalactic salvagers have been thrust.

I'll keep you updated as more information falls into my hands...

Dark Worlds

I just received notice of the line-up for the first issue of the pulp-style magazine called Dark Worlds, which is a new publishing project put from Mike Jackson and G.W. Thomas (the editor responsible for shepherding Dire Planet to publication at both CyberPulp and Rage Machine Press).

My Novella length story, The Investment, will be one of the two featured novellas. I'm familiar with some of the work of the other authors, and I'm eager to find out what they've put together for this first issue of Dark Worlds magazine.

The Investment follows the employees of Barclay Salvaging as they make a run for a trove of ancient alien technology. With rival salvaging companies trailing them, and a team of intergalactic assassins gunning for them they've trouble enough when they find that the supposedly uninhabited planet on which they've crash-landed is occupied by something far more sinister than all the other forces aligned against them.

The Dark Worlds line-up is listed below. I'll keep you updated and be sure to let you know when Dark Worlds comes off the presses.

Dark Worlds, Issue #1 line-up:

Novellas:

IN THE SERVICE OF THE ALL FATHER C. J. Burch
THE INVESTMENT Joel Jenkins

Short Stories:

RED ENGINE Bret Tallman
FIFTEEN MINUTES David Bain
HELLER G. W. Thomas
THE REVENGE OF CTHULHU J. F. Gonzalez
EYE, URREAL Robert Burke Richardson

Articles:

INTERVIEW WITH JUSTIN GUSTAINIS/Review of Black Magic Woman
THE DARK WORLDS CLUB