Flame Tree Fiction

You know Cthulhu. Monster. Scary. Gigantic. Yep, that's the one. If you know who this fearsome god is, you probably know why so many people think he's cool. But as the mythic monstrosity's popularity grows, you may find him wandering out of the ocean into pastures new. Perhaps even, into space.

‘A series of images, thoughts, and emotions, often with a story-like quality, generated by mental activity during sleep’: this is the definition of a dream given by the Oxford English Dictionary. We’ve all experienced it, that bizarre state between wakefulness and sleep (or between lengthy snooze alarms), when REM sleep has had just enough time to set in and pelt you with the strangest sequence of ideas – images sometimes mundane, sometimes fantastical, but always disconcertingly removed from reality. Frightening and exhilarating, that delightfully ambiguous state when the mind is not fully itself is when logic is distorted, traditional paths of thought are muddled and the mind is open to everything. There, there be monsters. The unrestrained creative world of dreams offers endless possibilities for the imagination, and such realms provide the most intriguing, thrilling and in many ways the most beautiful material for art. 

One of the biggest gaming announcements of the year was the unveiling of Bethesda's Fallout 4. Perhaps best known for their sprawling open-world game series, The Elder Scrolls (read, Skyrim), their critically acclaimed Fallout series is not far behind. With Fallout often edging it in when it comes to the critics the games are wildly different in terms of the universes they portray. Where Skyrim is full of rich colour and endless forests, Fallout operates within a desolate dystopian dumping ground. So why then are people so excited for the fourth instalment?

Our three collectable Gothic Fantasy anthologies, deluxe hardcover editions on Horror, Ghosts and Science fiction, each carry a potent mix of classic tales and new fiction, tracing the path of the thrilling tale from the early gothic to the modern fantastic. The range and high quality of entries forced us into a slight deviation from our original path, allowing us to include more of the new stories, at the expense of a few of classic writers. However, as you'll see below, we've selected a wide range of pioneer literary giants, from Henry James to E.M. Forster, Arthur Conan Doyle to Mark Twain, and, focussing on great reads, included some other fascinating contributions from the Golden Age of Pulps.

Well, that was difficult. 721 submissions for our three anthologies on Ghosts, Horror and Science Fiction. Authors from around the globe, some published in magazines such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Plasma Frequency Magazine, Outposts of Beyond, Weird Tales, podcasts (Pseudopod, Escape Pod, Toasted Cake, Flight of the Fifty Fancies), award winners, and recent anthology collections, others never published before. I suppose we expected 150 stories, and a struggle to find the 60 we needed, but it was a complete shock to discover so many great reads, and distressing to have to make choices.

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