We have some extra books in the house (literally, in my living room), and we want to offer some Convention Prices for you at home. So, a bundle for you.
Dark Bits and Vignettes from the End of the World for 20$ USD, shipping included. There are only a few of these, but if this goes well, expect more offers like this in the future!
I’m working diligently to finish up the March issue of LampLight, and while there will be more about that soon, I am excited to announce what the plans for Volume 5 will be.
All four issues of LampLight Volume 5 will be guest edited.
The Year in Exile will start with the September issue, which will be edited by Damien Angelica Walters.
Damien’s new book, Paper Tigers has just come out, and the title story in her collection, Sing Me Your Scars has been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award.
The December issue will be edited by Katie Winter, the assistant editor of LampLight.
Katie has been with LampLight since the first issue, and her help has been invaluable. Her perspective has guided LampLight for years, and we are excited to have her at the helm.
We will update later for the editors of March and June 2017 issues at a later time. For now, though, send in your subs!
Welcome!
Editor, Jacob Haddon was on The Horror Show, with Brian Keene. The interview discusses the origins of Apokrupha, the hows and how-nots of making a magazine, and more!
Links for the two books, LampLight Volume 3 and the steampunk adventure, The Honey Mummy are below!
More discussion about the podcast on JacobHaddon.com
Subscribe and never miss an issue.
The third Volume of LampLight maga
zine, collected into a single volume, featuring issues from September 2014 – June 2015
Featuring the full novella by Kelli Owen, Wilted Lilies. Fiction and interviews with Yvonne Navarro, Mercedes M. Yardley, Nate Southard, Victorya Chase.
Fiction from:
Gary A. Braunbeck, Sana Rafi, Nick Mamatas, Roh Morgon, Tom Brennan, Salena Casha, Rati Mehrotra, J. J. Green, Damien Angelica Walters, Gwendolyn Kiste, John Boden, Kristi DeMeester, T. Fox Dunham, Davian Aw, John Bowker, Kealan Patrick Burke
A mummy bound in honey.
An auction of archaic wonders.
An immortal link to the past.
Beneath the streets of Alexandria, Agent Cleo Barclay stumbled into a catacomb that changed her life. Her arms were taken, transfigured, and something remarkable was revealed–something that will stir an ancient life from the ashes of history.
A serpentine sarcophagus holds clues to Cleo’s past and future. She enlists Eleanor Folley and Virgil Mallory to collect the artifact at auction, to unravel its mysteries and her own. When the sarcophagus falls into the hands of an enigmatic Egyptologist, they find themselves participants in his diabolical pursuits.
Drawn to Alexandria by their friend–and the temptations of a newly discovered ring–Folley and Mallory will be challenged as never before.
The Honey Mummy is coming, 1 March, 2016!
A bungled museum theft. An ancient Egyptian riddle.
The rumor of strange creatures moving beneath the streets of Paris.
Kindle edition updated to include a free preview of The Honey Mummy!
Looking for the book that started it all? Travel to Egypt near the turn of the century for a steampunk adventure!
Save 40% by pre-ordering the Kindle edition of The Honey Mummy by E. Catherine Tobler!
Agents Eleanor Folley and Virgil Mallory are back!
A mummy bound in honey.
An auction of archaic wonders.
An immortal link to the past.
Beneath the streets of Alexandria, Agent Cleo Barclay stumbled into a catacomb that changed her life. Her arms were taken, transfigured, and something remarkable was revealed–something that will stir an ancient life from the ashes of history.
A serpentine sarcophagus holds clues to Cleo’s past and future. She enlists Eleanor Folley and Virgil Mallory to collect the artifact at auction, to unravel its mysteries and her own. When the sarcophagus falls into the hands of an enigmatic Egyptologist, they find themselves participants in his diabolical pursuits.
Drawn to Alexandria by their friend–and the temptations of a newly discovered ring–Folley and Mallory will be challenged as never before.
Each month, Damien Angelica Walters brings fiction recommendations from around the web!
We are going to make some changes for submissions for 2016, starting now.
We will be reading from now until the end of January. From this we will pick stories for both the March and June issues.
LampLight will be closed for submissions 1 February, 2016.
When we open back up for Volume 5, we will have reading periods set up for the issues. This is just one of a few changes we will be making in 2016 to improve the way we operate, and improve response time.
Thank you, as always for reading, submitting and supporting LampLight!
Featured Writer is Tim Waggoner, who brings an all new short story, Trespasser. We talk to him about writing and art.
Kevin Lucia returns to LampLight with the first of a four part series on the history of the genre, entitled ‘Horror 101.’ The first piece is The House and the Gothic, focusing on haunted houses and the bad place.
Fiction from P. D. Cacek, Christopher Shearer, Jamie Lackey, Charles Payseur
Guest edited by Paul Michael Anderson.
“It’s a matter of roots. It may not do any good to know that your grandfather liked to sit on the stoop of his building with his sleeves rolled up and smoke a pipe after supper, but it may help to know that he emigrated from Poland in 1888, that he came to New York and helped to build the subway system. If it does nothing else, it may give you a new perspective on your own morning subway ride…”
– Stephen King, Danse Macabre
Two events led me to study the evolution of the horror genre. One was an illuminating night spent with genre legends Tom Monteleone, F. Paul Wilson and Stuart David Schiff, editor of the famed Whispers magazine. They spent the evening regaling their experiences in genre fiction while I listened, a rapt audience of one. I came away convinced my horror reading diet was too shallow, that I needed to explore earlier contemporary voices in horror. This led me to discover Ramsey Campbell, Charles Grant, Manly Wade Wellman, Fritz Lieber, Karl Edward Wagner and so many others. As a writer, I was never the same.
The second event occurred later that year, at the very first AnthoCon, a small but wonderfully intimate speculative convention held annually in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Brian Keene’s Keynote address, “Roots,” exhorted young horror writers to examine the horror genre’s roots to better understand where it’s already been, so we could write stories within the horror tradition that were also uniquely our own. At the time, I was reading The Philosophy of Horror, by Noel Carrol, and Danse Macabre, by Stephen King. I was working on a paper for a graduate class, Film & Philosophy, charting the evolution of American horror cinema. I started blogging about my findings, and my thoughts about the evolution of horror as we know it.
Right around then, the late Larry Santorro approached me about running a monthly segment on his podcast, Tales to Terrify, charting the evolution of the horror genre. “Horror 101” was born. Of course, I realized right away charting the evolution of the horror genre through all its divergent iterations was a weighty task. To try and organize things as best as possible, I decided to follow four tracks in my initial study, understanding there’d be multiple crossovers between them: The House & the Gothic, The Ghost, The Beast & the Monster, and The Weird.
Unfortunately, I only got halfway through The House & the Gothic before increased writing demands and equipment issues (read: my laptop crashed) forced the podcast into hiatus. Sadly, not long after, Larry Santorro passed. Horror 101 was shelved indefinitely.
Recently, editor, colleague and friend Jacob Haddon approached me about writing a quarterly nonfiction column for Lamplight Magazine. Seeing this as an excellent opportunity to resurrect Horror 101 from the dead (which happens so often in the horror genre it deserves its own sub-genre), I pitched the return of Horror 101 to him, with my original four installments: The House & the Gothic, The Ghost, The Beast & the Monster, and The Weird. He liked the idea, so here we are.
One thing to keep in mind, however, especially former listeners of Horror 101: Because of length restrictions, I won’t be able to cover the strands of the horror genre nearly as meticulously as in the podcast. Because of this, I will need to paint with a slightly broader brush.
Defining the horror genre can be a slippery proposition. Probably the best definition comes from Douglas Winter, literary critic and Stephen King biographer, “horror is an emotion” and any tale invoking the emotion of “horror” in its readers is, therefore, a horror tale. This definition, however, opens our focus incredibly wide. If any story invoking a sense of “horror” could be considered a “horror story,” tales not necessarily considered as horror from a marketing standpoint could now be viewed as horror stories. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Beowulf. Titus Andronicus, an early Shakespeare play. “A Rose for Emily,” by William Faulkner. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor. “Young Goodman Brown,” by Nathanial Hawthorne. The Kite Runner. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Where do we begin?
For our purposes, I’ll begin by approaching four branches of the horror tale: The House, the Gothic & the Bad Place; The Ghost; The Beast & the Monster; and The Weird. These by no means encompass everything considered to be horror. It’s merely somewhere to start. We’re sure to stray off path, and should we survive with our sanity intact, there are other facets of the horror genre to consider: The Splatterpunk Movement, the Zombie Phenomenon, Quiet Horror; Religion, Myth, and Folklore in horror, and Post Modern Horror, only to name a few.
A note concerning source material: I’ve drawn much of my information for these columns from The Philosophy of Horror by Noel Carrol, Sacred Terror by Doug Cowan, Christian Horror by Mike Duran, Vortex by Robert Dunbar, and Danse Macabre, by Stephen King. I highly recommend all these tomes, though regrettably The Philosophy of Horror is expensive. For this article, I also drew from an online exploration of German theologian Rudolph Otto’s theories concerning “numinous dread.”
more at lamplightmagazine.com/horror101
Subscriptions are the life-blood of a magazine. You aren’t just purchasing issues, you are supporting the next year of LampLight, allowing us to grow and in turn, give more back to the genre. Each subscription gets us closer to our goal of being a pro-market.
The subscription is through us, no Amazon or Kickstarter fees. You’ll get ebooks in epub and mobi, and if you have a Kindle, we’ll send it directly to your device.
Volume 4 is starting in September, and you aren’t going to want to miss any of these four issues.
For more information on our titles:
The Past issues: http://lamplightmagazine.com/past-issues/
Pre-Order the next Clifton Heights story from Kevin Lucia!
“A
Night at Old Webb” is an intimate tale of youth, wonder, attraction, and exploration of mystical places. Blurring the lines between memoir and fiction, it’s an unsettlingly sweet and sad story about friends, new and old, standing around being young together.”
To be released by Apokrupha on 24 July in print and ebook!
