Matt's blog

After writing my previous article about Joseph Payne Brennan, I decided to try and find some more of his work.  This proved to be more difficult than I expected.  I checked E-Bay and Amazon for used copies of his anthologies.  I bid on several different auctions of Nine Horrors And A Dream, but they were going for more than $20 a piece for a thin paperback book.  I settled for The Shapes Of Midnight (1980) for $15.  That anthology was also a thin paperback, but it was the cheapest collection of Brennan tales I could find.  The following is a little information about the 12 stories contained within.

You can now see what the cover of the chap book that my short story, "The Collective of Blaque Reach" will look like if you follow the link below.  It looks very cool and fits my story well.  The cover art was created by Allen Koszowski, and it looks terrific.  It sounds like Bound For Evil and my story should be shipping by Tuesday.  I can't wait to check them both out. Working with Tom English of Dead Letter Press has been great.  You couldn't ask for a more nice, helpful editor.

http://departmentofdeadletters.blogspot.com/2008/02/bound-for-evil-arrives-monday-february.html

Edward Frederic Benson, the son the Archbishop of Canterbury, was born in 1867, in Wokingham, Berkshire. He attended Marlborough and King’s College, Cambridge. He spent three years studying archeology abroad in Greece and Egypt. He enjoyed immediate success with his first society novel, Dodo (1893) and ended up writing over a hundred published pieces in a wide range of fields. He is most well known for his comedies and society novels, but his interest in the paranormal allowed him to produce a number of supernatural works of fiction. His novel, Across the Stream (1919), anthologies Visible and Invisible (1923) and Spook Stories (1928) are evidence that he enjoyed the macabre. He sold several stories to Weird Tales Magazine, which I wrote an article about previously. He had a sister and two brothers (both of whom also produced their own writings). He was also the mayor of Rye in Sussex from 1934 to 1937. That town was the model for Tilling, the fictional town that many of his tales took place within. Benson died in 1940 of throat cancer.

For a long time now I have had a dream that I really wasn't sure I would ever be able to achieve. That dream was to someday be able to publish something that I wrote. That dream is about to come true, as I have sold my first short story, The Collective of Blaque Reach, to Dead Letter Press. It will be featured as the promo chap book that people will receive for free when they pre-order the massive 800 page anthology, Bound For Evil from their website. Bound For Evil is an 800 page anthology made up of 66 short stories from various authors. All the stories carry the common theme of Evil Books. It will be: "a deluxe smythe sewn hardcover, bound in black imitation leather, and stamped in gold leaf with an original cover design by World Fantasy Award-winning illustrator Allen Koszowski." It will feature stories from M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and my favorite writer, Ramsey Campbell, among many others. Bound For Evil will be limited to 500 copies.

The bonus chap book will be a 16-page chapbook is titled "The Collective of Blaque Reach" by Matt Cowan, with cover art by Allen Koszowski; and is being offered as a
premium to anyone who orders BOUND FOR EVIL directly from the publisher,
Dead Letter Press:
http://departmentofdeadletters.blogspot.com/2008/01/bound-for-evil-update-more-pages-more.html
This chapbook is limited to the number of orders received by the
publisher, plus a few extra copies for contractual purposes. Limitation is
expected to be 200 copies or fewer.

I have to say that my dealings with Tom English of Dead Letter Press were all terrific. He and his company are really great to work with.

I watched the 1961 movie, the Innocents the other night. I chose it because I had seen it so prominently listed among several peoples all time favorite horror movies lists. It was adapted from a novella by Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898). It is very good and holds up well still today. The acting is superb and it is well shot. It is black and white but that did not detract from my enjoyment of it. Although, truth be told, haunted house tales are my favorite kind of story, so I have a weakness there. The screen play was adapted by legendary scribe, Truman Capote.

In a previous post I wrote about the large contributions the magazine Weird Tales made to the field of horror fiction. I listed several of the writers that got their start there and went on to become icons of the genre. I have recently discovered another writer that was a regular contributor to Weird Tales. His name may not be as recognizable, but perhaps it should be. I was going to list several old horror stories by various authors that I enjoyed, without focusing on any one writer for this post. On that list of favorites I had the story, "The Horror at Chilton Castle" by Joseph Payne Brennan. I originally read it in the anthology Fine Frights, Stories That Scared Me Selected by Ramsey Campbell. I wrote it down and started scouring my other anthologies when I found another story of his which I had not yet read. I immediatey stopped and read "The Calamander Chest" and found it to be a deliciously creepy short story. This guy was a great writer!

I got to meet Tony Moran, the guy who played Michael Myers in the first two Halloween movies today.  He was the guest at our local comic book convention here in Indiana. Now, I am personally not a huge fan of either the Halloween or the Friday the 13th movies, so I didn't have a lot of good questions for him, but I did ask what some of his favorite horror movies were, other than his own of course?  He listed The Shinning, Psycho and The Exorcist.