Imago – ojcade.com

I have a story out in a new book! Not a new story, but I was pleased to get it in anyway. “Imago,” my creepy-girls-and-cicadas-in-a-dead-end-mining-town horror is out in This World Belongs to Us, a bug themed anthology recently published by From Beyond Press. Just look at that cover: it’s by Jacob Blanchet and it’s fantastic.

This is a horror anthology. Now, I like insects – most of them, anyway – so I’ll be one of the first to say that bugs don’t have to be horrifying. They’re still fun when they are, so when I saw the call for submissions for this book I knew that I had to send in something. I was working on a story about insects in a haunted house at the time, but eventually I had to admit that it was never going to be ready in time. (It’s still not ready. That draft is dreadful. There’s something wrong with it but I don’t know what, so it’s staying in draft form for a while longer until I know how to fix it.) Luckily for me, the anthology was open to reprints, and so I had a back-up ready to go. “Imago” was originally published in Three-Lobed Burning Eye, but I’m so happy that it’s now available in a book entirely devoted to horrifying bugs.

If you like your creepy things to crawl as well, you’ll like this anthology. Please go take a look!

I have a new story out! And I blame Animal Planet. It’s entirely their fault. There I was, blamelessly flicking through channels on the telly, and there was a documentary on cicadas. And not just any cicadas – if I wanted just any cicadas, I could see lots of them in the back garden. (I’ve admired their split skins since I was a kid.) No, this was about periodical cicadas. Apparently, over in the US, there’s a type of cicada that swarms every 13 or 17 years. The next swarm, all those years later, is laid by the previous swarm, and all I could think as I watched this programme was “I could make a great horror story out of this!”

So, there you have it. Blame Animal Planet. This weird, gross, insect-filled body horror was inspired by them. Poor things, they probably thought they were sharing scientific and educational information, real learning opportunities. Little did they know, across the other side of world a horror writer was trawling for bait.

I kind of disgusted myself with it, apparently. I certainly made a couple of writer colleagues who were kind enough to read an early draft retch. Apparently they dislike the egg part. Ha.

Anyway, “Imago” is free to read at Three-Lobed Burning Eye. If your stomach’s strong enough, that is.