Subterranean Press has three new books in the works, and they’re already taking pre-orders for them. They are:
Pilot Light by Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock (writing as “William Ashbless”), illustrated by Gahan Wilson. “Those two madmen, Powers and Blaylock are back, with a recently unearthed and touched up short story thought lost to the ages. Pilot Light is vintage William Ashbless, complex to the point of incoherence, with a good eighteen footnotes added by the poet refuting and clarifying the changes made by Powers and Blaylock to his sacred words. Also included in this small form hardcover chapbook are an introduction by Powers and an afterword by Blaylock.” The 1000 cloth bound hardcover trade copies are available for $20 each. The 250 signed, numbered hardcover copies (which are signed by all three contributors and which contain a bonus interview with Ashbless available nowhere else) are going for $45 each.
Tales of Pain and Wonder by Caitlín R. Kiernan (interior illustrations by Richard Kirk). “This collection of twenty-two short stories by the author of Daughter of Hounds and Alabaster, originally published in 2000, firmly established Caitlín R. Kiernan as one of the preeminent voices in dark fantasy today. Through a cycle of interconnected narratives, Kiernan unflinchingly explores a surreal world where the fantastic and the mundane are never separated by more than the insubstantial thickness of a shadow. From the murderous backstreets of New Orleans to an abandoned shipyard of the Hudson River, from sun-weary Los Angeles to a maze of dank and forgotten tunnels beneath Manhattan, these stories present a landscape at once alien and undeniably familiar. Contents of this volume include “Estate” (selected for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror), “Postcards from the King of Tides” (selected for The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror), “In the Water Works” (the basis of Kiernan’s award-winning second novel, Threshold), and “Tears Seven Times Salt” (to be reprinted in The Century’s Best Horror). It will also include a new, previously unpublished story, as well as an introduction by Douglas E. Winter and an afterword by Peter Straub. The 1000 signed, hardcover copies are available at $35 each, and “copies ordered through Subterranean Press will include a chapbook of bonus material, available nowhere else.”
The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Three: Something Wild is Loose by Robert Silverberg. In his introduction to this volume, Silverberg writes: “The world that these stories sprang from was the troubled, bewildering, dangerous, and very exciting world of those weird years when the barriers were down and the future was rushing into the present with the force of a river unleashed. But of course I think these stories speak to our times, too, and that most of them will remain valid as we go staggering onward through the brave new world of the twenty-first century. I am not one of those who believes that all is lost and the end is nigh. Like William Faulkner, I do think we will somehow endure and prevail against increasingly stiff odds.
“A great many strange and dizzying things happen to the characters in these sixteen stories, and in the fourteen stories of the 1972-73 volume that will follow. The reader who makes the journey from beginning to end of all thirty stories will be taken on many a curious trip, that I promise—as was their author during the years when they were being written.”
The trade edition will be a fully cloth bound hardcover, for $35. The limited edition will consist of 125 signed, numbered copies, bound in leather and cloth, for $65.
The table of contents for this book is:
“Introduction”
“Something Wild is Loose”
“In Entropy’s Jaws”
“The Reality Trip”
“Going Caliban”
“Good News from the Vatican”
“Thomas the Proclaimer”
“When We Went to See the End of the World”
“Push No More”
“The Wind and the Rain”
“Some Notes on the Pre-Dynastic Epoch”
“The Feast of St. Dionysus”
“What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper”
“The Mutant Season”
“Caught in the Organ Draft”
“Many Mansions”