Continuing our conversion of the old PDF issues of Arkham Tales, here’s issue #3 available in MOBI and PDF!
Originally released May 2009, issue #3 features a cover by George Cotronis, and contains fiction by Nicholas Ozment, J.C. Koch, Rob Brooks, Nandi Ekles, Eric W. Jepson, Maura McHugh, J.J. Beazley and Edward Morris.
Arkham Tales #3 (MOBI) (8) | Arkham Tales #3 (EPUB) (8)
Hard on the heels of the re-issue of Arkham Tales #1, here’s the second issue in MOBI and EPUB versions for your reading pleasure!
Originally released February 2009, issue #2 features cover artwork by Jean-Marc Velladier, and contains fiction by K.S. Clay, Dev Jarrett, Jason Hardy, Bric Barnes, Bret Tallman, Matt Finucane, Catherine J. Gardner, John Jasper Owens, Diane Payne, and Garrett Calcaterra, and poetry by K.S. Conlon.
Arkham Tales #2 (MOBI) (25) | Arkham Tales #2 (EPUB) (21)
The earliest publication from Cold Fusion Media, the PDF-only magazine Arkham Tales, is finally available FREE in modern ebook formats!
Issue #1, released in November 2008, features cover artwork by Ivan Green, and contains fiction by Mike W. Barr, Scott Bastedo, Steve Calvert, Robert Masterson, Benjamin W. Olson, Derek Rutherford, Jenny Schwartz, and Jeffery Scott Sims.
Arkham Tales #1 (MOBI) (48) | Arkham Tales #1 (EPUB) (48)
The Golden Age of Crap has consistently been the bestseller of all of Cold Fusion Media’s publications — this despite some few formatting irregularities, at least two typos, and no ebook availability beyond Amazon. But as the Mayans prophesied, 2012 is the year in which all of those issues are resolved! Now all you Nookophiles can experience the joys and heartaches of 77 lengthy reviews from the heyday of the rental videocassette! Click here!
If you’re an indie publisher — either an author bringing your own work to the world, or a small press trying to navigate the Wild West of the new publishing marketplace — you need book covers which are striking and eye-catching, both at full size and at the “postage stamp” size at which potential buyers will first see them in online stores.
You need me.
That’s right, I’m not just doing covers for releases from Cold Fusion Media anymore. You can see the services I offer (and the very reasonable prices) at Fifth Planet Design.
From Jon P. Bloch of The Kindle Book Review, a five-star review posted on Amazon:
“Arcane” is a collection of forty-four short stories by some thirty contemporary indie authors. In the introduction, the editor of the anthology, Nathan Shumate, promises the reader two things that the stories all have in common: They are all written from disturbing, macabre point of view, and they are all very good. It is doubtful that anyone will successfully sue Shumate for false advertisement. Reading the collection is sort of like staying up all night watching a Twilight Zone marathon. Along the way, you get acquainted with the work of many an author. And you’ll be dazzled by the range of plots, characters, time periods, and locales–not to mention writing styles–that can scare the crap out of you.
Read the whole thing — you know you want to!
George King was, as I recall, devastated when news of Herman Laczko’s failing health reached him on the upstairs floor of King Publishing. The old actor had made King a lot of money over the years, after all, and more still rested on the imminent release of the unimaginatively titled Herman Laczko’s Yet More Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. King had already been pushing to get the book on catalogue before the end of the quarter, both to capitalize on the current BBC2 season of Laczko’s old horror movies and also his recent, many would say excruciating, cameo in a bad heavy metal video. With regard to the latter, King had got it into his head he might be able to tap into a new teen market, whilst remaining deaf to our inferences that Iron Gauntlet fans were not generally known for their bookishness. In any case, King’s plans were up in the air.
King was old-school publishing even for back then (this being 1984, or ’85, I forget). He’d emerged, along with this ramshackle publishing house, out of some squalid fringe of the post-war paperback market, never altogether kicking the habit of turning out austerity-era books with lurid covers and nasty yellowish pages of a paper they don’t even print free newspapers on anymore. There was, I suppose, in my mind a shabby old English cosiness about him and his set-up; it was funny. I liked King—I did, then—as a boss and just as some guy who shambled about the offices most of the day in a thirty-year-old suit, handing out cigarettes like they were sweets. But this business with Herman Laczko! Things were never going to be the same after all that.
It was a Friday afternoon, and most of us were getting ready for the pub when King called us all in. He was standing at the end of his desk staring intently into a sheet of notes and doodles he had been working on most of the day. I was junior copywriter; I didn’t even normally see the interior of his office.
He began by muttering, as if as a matter of obligation, his sorrow at Laczko’s hospitalisation, though clearly his heart wasn’t altogether in it, nor was his mind on such sentiment. When that was done with, he slumped back on his chair, causing a miniature avalanche of cigarette ash to go cascading down his lapel…
[Read the rest of this story, plus twenty-nine others others, in the anthology Arcane! Click here!]
I watched my cousin Julia descend the steps of the summerhouse, her wide skirts swaying like a church bell at a funeral. A butterfly drifted up from a peony bush and fluttered before Julia’s face. A chill stroked my arms.
I knew she would be dead within days.
My mother appeared at my elbow, her crinoline rustling. “Julia, darling,” she called. “Come meet your cousin Billy.”
“William,” I said, though I knew my mother would ignore it. Her fan rapped against my shoulder. I obediently rose.
Julia strolled across the fresh-cropped lawn. Her dress was cut low enough to display a curving bosom. Rosy lips with a similar curve begged to be kissed. For a moment, her blue eyes seemed to darken to green, and her blonde curls shimmered with a silvery light. I wanted to scream aloud.
It was too late. The death-woman had shown her face.
“A pleasure,” I said to Julia, lifting my hat.
She inclined her head. “Cousin Billy.”
“William.” Would I ever stop having to say it?
“You’ll always be Billy to me,” Julia said. “My only real memory of you is when you asked me to dance at a holiday party. You couldn’t have been more than ten years old, and I suppose I was thirteen. You fell down the stairs and ripped the seams in your trousers clean through.”
“The infamous Christmas ball of 1846,” my mother said. “Billy made such a spectacle of himself!”
Julia and my mother shared a laugh, two adults enjoying a child’s peccadillo. Heat flared in my cheeks. Our age difference was still an unbridgeable gulf. Nineteen-year-old Julia prepared for her marriage bed, but I was no more a man at sixteen than I’d been at ten. When I turned nineteen, would they admit me to their ranks?
“Billy, did my aunt tell you?” Julia said. “We’ve decided to marry in October instead of January. I’m here to shop for my trousseau.”
The anger that had stabbed me melted in a heartbeat. My cousin wouldn’t live long enough to choose her clothes. I had seen the butterfly. I’d felt the sudden cold on my skin and seen in Julia’s face the death-woman’s green eyes and silver hair. Soon I would sleep. I would see my cousin, for the last time, through the clouded green of the death-woman’s eyes…
[Read the rest of this story, plus twenty-nine others others, in the anthology Arcane! Click here!]
To counteract the ominous reputation of this day (especially if your a Roman consul-turned-dictator), I’ll run the simplest of all giveaways:
The first five people to comment on this post will get the Arcane anthology in their choice of ebook formats.
(Fill in your email address in the comment form — it will not be visible to the public — and state your format preference in your comment.)
Jane entered the room looking back over her shoulder to make sure she hadn’t been detected. Confident that nobody had seen her, and noting that Eddie was already waiting at the table, she shut the door behind her and breathed a deep sigh. The room was little more than a cube with a single door, bare, dingy walls that may once have been white, and a concrete floor that had long ago lost its shine. An old fluorescent light buzzed and crackled overhead, its one bad bulb flickering on and off like a dance-club strobe that had lost its sense of rhythm. At the empty gray card table, in a rusty metal folding chair, sat Eddie.
“I can’t stay for long,” Jane said, sliding her chair out from the other side of the table so she could sit and face her ex-husband. “Chris may start looking for me.” The chair legs screeched on the concrete like fingernails down a chalkboard. Jane shivered, but more from nerves than from the noise. Eddie grinned at her.
“I’ve told you about Chris, haven’t I?” Jane took Eddie’s silence for assent, and leaned forward to look him in the eye. “We’re married now. Have been for a while.” She let the statement hang in the air with all the weight of an anvil in a cartoon booby-trap. Eddie didn’t take the bait, so she continued. “He wouldn’t like me coming to see you like this.”
Neither spoke for a few minutes. The light above flashed and hummed. A fly landed on the table; Jane tried to slap it and missed, only scaring it back into the air. Eddie continued to grin, but now it looked more like a sneer.
“He’s good to me, Eddie. Good to me in a way that you never were.” A strand of Jane’s hair fell into her face, and she pushed it back so she could better look at the man across the table. “He says he loves me, and I believe him. I love him back.”
There was no question about it now. That was definitely a sneer.
“Well, you don’t have to believe me; it’s true. I do love him. That’s why this is the last time I’m going to come visit you.” No reaction from Eddie. Only a blank stare. Jane shook her head and continued. “I mean it this time. I’ve got to quit sneaking around like this. I think he suspects something. He even asked me about you the other day. I told him you were nothing to me anymore… but I think he knows better…”
[Read the rest of this story, plus twenty-nine others others, in the anthology Arcane! Click here!]
