Inside the seventh issue of bare•bones, you will find:
Stuart Gordon’s Lovecraft Adaptations by Matthew R. Bradley
William Schoell looks at classic genre film comic adaptations
Duane Swierczynski takes us inside the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood book launch event
A roundtable discussion on Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novelization with Stephen R. Bissette, Kim Newman, David J. Schow, John Scoleri and Duane Swierczynski
J. Charles Burwell on the Dell First Editions of James McKimmey
James McKimmey in Mike Shayne by Peter Enfantino
S. Craig Zahler reviews a potpourri of pulp fiction
Peter Enfantino shines a light down Sleaze Alley
The latest installment of David J. Schow’s R&D column
Cimarron Street Books is pleased to bring you an updated edition of David J. Schow's fifth short story collection — back in print after 20 years — and for the first time in paperback!
You might perceive EYE as an unblinking scrutiny of sex, obsession, idol worship, penny miracles, policing the birthrate, mysterious phone calls in the dead of night, pornography, wrongheaded faith, or the price of devotion. With whom — or what — are you really crawling into bed, in the dark?
Or you might view it as a phantasmagoric kaleidoscope of sex, monsters, empaths, telepaths, aliens, peewee crime kingpins, otherworldly lovers, sentient art, UFOs, "rectosonics" and/or Mexican wrestling.
You could behold EYE as a spectacle of serial love, hot-and-cold lust, betrayal, and relationships seen from both ends of the telescope. Or a long, hard look into killers from inside their POV (and out), murder, mayhem, death and things worse than death.
Or you could stop reading this hard sell and start eyeballing the thirteen stories that comprise EYE ... including two completely new tales that have never before seen print, luscious illustrations by Thomas Canty, and a sparkling new Afterword, all prepared specially for this edition.
You'll find none of that in Seeing Red, David J. Schow’s very first collection of short stories, back in print from Cimarron Street Books after twenty years.
Seeing Red features the World Fantasy Award-winning story, “Red Light,” the Twilight Zone Magazine prize-winner “Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You,” plus eleven more tales as startling, as disturbing, as provocative and unnerving.
Between these covers you’ll also find an introduction by best-selling fantasist T.E.D. Klein, a bevy of original illustrations (including previously unpublished cover concepts by Thomas Canty for the 1990 paperback edition), relevant magazine covers, an all-new interview — “Between Light & Shadow” — in which DJS recalls the era during which most of these tales appeared, and an updated and expanded Afterword. Not to mention, and an all-new cover by Tim Bradstreet!
Cimarron Street Books is pleased to bring you an all-new edition of CRYPT ORCHIDS — the fourth collection of short stories by award-winning author David J. Schow, a gathering of foreboding fiction that grabs the cutting edge barehanded, damns the spray of blood, and stays right in your face “until you want to go down on your knees and mumble for mercy,” according to best-selling author John Farris.
Crime. Psychos. Trashed relationships. Tainted love. Murder. Sinister plots. Evil connivance. Men in Suits with a Plan.
Bizarre cover copy.
Not to mention hustlers, losers, cutthroats, gun fetishists, homicidal hitchhikers, demented road-hogs, serial killer impersonators, government torturers, and a Ripper named Jack. And most unnerving of all . . . vaudevillians (shudder).
Welcome to CRYPT ORCHIDS, where you’ll also meet a most murderous collector, a horror movie host who deals in the real thing, an innocent victim of a TV test screening, persnickety aliens with testicle-heads, a werewolf with a hook in place of a paw, a Mikey who does, in fact, hate everything, a hit man named Mister Bart, and a temperamental geezer with a lot to say about the environment and skinning people alive.
As Robert Bloch once said . . . it takes balls to make CRYPT ORCHIDS.
Enter and be enthralled. The Management assumes no responsibility for parts of you left scattered about.
Full contents include:
Introduction: Look Out, He’s Got a Knife! by Robert Bloch
Action
Pick Me Up
Dusting the Flowers
Seeing Things
(Melodrama)
Scoop Bites the Dust
Final Performance (Stage Adaptation of Robert Bloch’s “The Final Performance”)
Schow is so fine a writer, so imaginative a storyteller, that he deserves a place in all contemporary fiction collections.
― Library Journal
A polished, clever, witty, unflinching writer who combines horror and dark humor as well as anyone since the late, great Robert Bloch. Schow is one of the few writers of his generation who can actually makes psychos interesting.
― Weird Tales
CRYPT ORCHIDS definitely meets the high standards established by Schow’s previous story collections, such as BLACK LEATHER REQUIRED. Versatile, charming, and fiercely independent, Schow is a master of the contemporary horror story.
― Fiona Webster - Amazon
(CRYPT ORCHIDS) shows an eager propensity to ricochet between the virtuosic and the crass, often within the same paragraph, sometimes the same sentence. It’s a fine line to tread, but Schow has rarely shown even a wobble’s worth of misstep in developing a style that’s as inimitable as it is distinctive, and pulling it off because each artistic “either/or” is the clear choice of an intellect as sharp as a leather awl.
― Brian Hodge - Hellnotes
On a purely linguistic level, Schow’s style is as carefully crafted as Lovecraft’s, Robert Aickman’s, or Thomas Ligotti’s, (wielding) a surprising variety of tone and mood . . . his tales themselves range from the brooding to the comical to the poignant.
― S.T. Joshi - Studies in Weird Fiction
Bleak and savage stuff, as good as it gets.
― Scott Winnett - Locus
