Yes, it's finally here! Our second Occult Detective Magazine Mythos Special!

Welcome to the second of our occasional Mythosian Special Issues. Once again we blur the lines by not only including certain Lovecraftian concepts, but also including tales related to Robert W. Chambers’ ‘King in Yellow’ sequence, a brooding sandpit in which a number of Mythos writers have often played.

We’ve actually increased the number of brand new offerings this issue. Nick Marsh opens with ‘The Bibliophile’, a dark reflection on identity, which features the return of a character first seen in his excellent novel, The Express Diaries.

We close with our second completely new story, Marni Scofidio’s full-on, tongue-in-cheek venture into deep Mythos territory, ‘Beyond the Wall of Sheep’.

‘The Lights Beneath the Sea’, Aaron Vlek’s tale of her regular arcane character Geoffrey Vermillion (ODQ #4, ODM #7), with echoes of Innsmouth, is also new in that it has only previously appeared in an online magazine, in an unedited form.

This issue offers a range of new tales and reprints which we found of particular interest. We span the centuries, going from Ed Erdelac’s tale of summoned horror, ‘The Unrepeatables’ in ancient Rome, through Josh Reynolds story of Shakespearian dread, ‘A Tiger’s Heart, A Player’s Hide’, and up to the present-day with Paul StJohn Mackintosh and his bleak contemporary story of cosmic horror and subversion, ‘Drones’.

Along the way, you will find Brandon Barrows’ period story of that classic occult detective Carnacki, and his encounter with a certain forbidden play, in ‘The Madness of Arthur Malbrey’. Slipping further into the twentieth century, we present Mike Chinn’s ‘Sailors of the Skies’, featuring his own recurrent adventurer Damian Paladin (ODQ #2, ODM #0), whilst Gordon Linzner’s ‘Only the Dead’ includes the return of a particularly unpleasant human character from one of H P Lovecraft’s own works.

Which brings us at last to our other contemporary offerings – Erica Ruppert’s disturbing ‘Ex Astris’, James Lowder’s ‘Morning in America’, and Alice Loweecey’s ‘The King in Gray’, in which a hat shop owner is visited by a stranger, who has a message from his dead Aunty Em.

We hope that such a range once more intrigues, shivers, or amuses you.

It's available on Amazon here: https://mybook.to/ODMMY-02, but, if you're in the UK, you can order copies direct from Cathaven Press. Send a reply for details. It's not that we're unwilling to ship to other countries, but you'd have to pay the absurd international shipping rates.

Yes, there will be a Kindle edition. It'll take a few weeks, but it will come!

Now for some harsh realities! At the moment, this issue is at our usual price of £9.95 in the UK, and $12.58 in the USA (this will fluctuate with the exchange rate). I think that's a good deal for over 200 pages of excellent fiction, non-fiction and artwork. But we actually receive under a third of that amount from Amazon sales, and it's a constant struggle to break even. So the prices will be rising. We'll hold it at the current level until we publish the Kindle edition, and then it, and all back issues will sadly have to increase in price. I've held off on doing this for a long time, while absorbing the hike in printing costs that Amazon introduced last year, but while we do pay our contributors, we (John Linwood Grant, Jilly Paddock and I) have never made a penny out of our publications. We have no intentions of altering that situation in the forseeable future, but we can't afford to run at a loss, and we would very much like to increase our payment rates to our author's, and artists.

On to more cheerful things! What else have we been up to, and what do we have in the pipeline?

Well, we hope to get Occult Detective Magazine #11 out fairly soon. It will be a tribute issue to Sam Gafford, who sadly passed away in July 2019. Sam, with John Linwood Grant, co-founded Occult Detective Quarterly in 2016, and I immediately horned in with offers to help. Sam quickly promoted me to co-editor status, and when we lost him, my partner, Jilly Paddock, and I decided to take over publication, moving it to the UK, since that's where John, and we live. I immediately changed the title to Occult Detective Magazine with #6, as we'd learned how difficult it is to deliver a new issue every 3 months. It was a fortuitous decision, as COVID hit just after we got out first issue out.

For my part, I (Dave Brzeski) am working on an anthology of new stories, featuring Algernon Blackwood's Dr John Silence. I feel that Silence gets short shrift, as far as pastiche fiction goes, and have long wished to do something about it. Belanger Books, who have published excellent books featuring Sherlock, Holmes (including a series of 4 volumes teaming Holmes, and Watson with a myriad of Occult Detective characters, edited by none other than John Linwood Grant) and Carnacki, The Ghost Finder (also edited by John). Carnacki, of course is one of the main inspirations for what we do.

The Silence book will be a little different, though. While it will be published by Belanger Books, it will officially be an Occult Detective Magazine Special Publication, and will be credited as being in association with Cathaven Press! I will let you all know when the Kickstarter for that goes live.

As for John Linwood Grant, he has a couple of new books out, both of which should be of interest to occult detective fans.

Out NOW from Mocha Memoirs Press, a unique collection of weird/folk horror tales featuring the formidable conjure woman – hoodoo, haints, and the struggle for justice in 1920s USA.

AIN’T NO WITCH: The Wanderings of Mamma Lucy

“Beautifully written. Authentic and true. A new heroine set in the past, in this modern age. More please!”

“A tapestry made of legend, poetry and bone-chilling apparitions, with a stubborn and somehow unknowable Mammy Lucy always at the center. Among the best fiction inspired by the Southern Highlands in years.”

“The writing is wonderful. the setting and atmosphere is terrific, heartbreaking and tough and loving and beautiful. I want more!”

AIN’T NO WITCH: The Wanderings of Mamma Lucy is available (Kindle and PB) from Amazon and from Mocha Memoirs Press. https://mybook.to/WHDXs

An Unkindness of Shadows: The Strange Adventures of Justin Margrave

Readers will delight in the wit and danger found in art collector Justin Margrave's adventures in 1970s England. Whether the threat is folk horror or something from another dimension trying to slip through the cracks, Margrave deals with each situation with style and aplomb. Grant's new collection of occult fiction offers a sinister atmosphere accompanying the dealings of the aesthetic genteel and less-than-savory denizens of the world.