Month: February 2021

Chatter

/ Clint Smith / Leave a comment

The Skeleton Melodies (Hippocampus Press, 2020) received two particularly generous mentions this past week by a pair of authors who I not only admire, but who possess a massive amount of respect in our literary community.

Patricia Lillie added the book to her list of favorites for the year, and John Langan acknowledged The Skeleton Melodies as part of his year in review for Locus Magazine. Both Lillie and Langan’s own collections (The Cuckoo Girls and Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies, respectively) are currently on the Bram Stoker Awards’ final ballot for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection.

“Skeletal” Echoes In the OUTER DARK

/ Clint Smith / Leave a comment

The Skeleton Melodies receives a generous shoutout by Gordon B. White on a recent episode of The Outer Dark on This Is Horror.  This installment features readings by both Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Orrin Grey, but Episode 091 launches with a sapient take on why the mode of weird fiction supplies such amenable medium for marginalized voices and outsider characteristics of “the other.”

Near the episode’s opening, in his brief critique of the collection (beginning at about the minute 8:15:00 marker), White (whose debut collection, As Summer’s Mask Slips and Other Disruptions, was released in 2020) notes a pair of pieces, “Details That Would Otherwise Be Lost to Shadow,” as well as my novella, Haunt Me Still.  Host Anya Martin mentions a potential future appearance on the program, a collaboration which is currently in the works.