A cluster of What Gets Left Behind being prepped to go to new owners
I have SOLD OUT of my stock of my first collection, The Ties That Bind. Thank you to everybody for your support – I’ll get a bulk order in if there’s demand but I can also dropship individual books to most addresses directly from the printer. I just won’t be able to sign them.
Meanwhile, I’m delighted to say that What Gets Left Behind has already made its costs back, even at this early stage and following a soft launch. I have plenty in stock still, with more available.
Paperbacks remain €10 plus postage if you get them from my site, though I can only post to Irish addresses (dropshipping seems to extend beyond Ireland in my tests so far, though).
And what’s that…? I’ve already named and done a cover for a third collection? Well yes, yes I have. It’ll be called The Paths Beyond, though when and where it gets published isn’t anywhere close to decided. Largely because I haven’t finished writing and editing the stories.
I’m exploring the possibility of selling ebooks from this website, but for now you can get both titles from Amazon, Apple books, Smashwords, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and a myriad other places in Europe and North America. Paperbacks are also available from Bookshop.org in the US for anybody who wants to support independent book shops.
On other fronts, I have a stack of stories coming out with the magnificent Graveside Press and am working on a supernatural, gothic-inspired novella called Beneath the Surface; a cosmic horror novel called Worlds Without End; and a clutch of stories for submissions in the US and elsewhere.
My second collection, What Gets Left Behind, is for sale now ahead of its official release on May 31. Just note that I can only ship paperbacks within Ireland.
However, paperbacks will be available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other places from the end of the month, and ebook preorders are live now from Amazon, Smashwords, and myriad other homes. Keep an eye on its little micro page here as new vendors go live.
This, quite frankly, one of the most astoundingly original books I’ve ever read.
We have a self-destructive drug addict (and mule) in Jennifer, who’s constantly fighting to control her own body because it’s also inhabited by a cosmic goddess older than anything. If that’s not enough, Jennifer’s former husband is in love with the goddess, and after he and his friends are killed by bigoted self-appointed vigilantes, Jennifer and the Divine Flesh go to track down the killers but end up dealing with conspiracies and festering human and non-human horrors while skirting ever closer to unleashing the Flesh on the world.
Both Jennifer and the Divine Flesh get first person POV treatment, and are often in conversation with one another, which adds to the interpersonal conflicts and motivations while furthering the plot.
It’s cosmic horror but built on a body horror framework, and how Huff manages to write so beautifully about the grotesque deserves five stars in and of itself, especially when the story becomes more abstract and dreamy (or nightmarish, depending on your perspective), reflecting more of what an immortal divine perspective must be like.
It was interesting how the Divine Flesh had a sort of adolescent attitude — after all, if you’re an immortal goddess, who’s ever going to tell you to grow up? But it explains her sort of playfulness when it comes to recreating and reimagining life forms; with no real limits on her power, she has a freedom to do things that would otherwise be unthinkable.
What’s monstrous to us is a game to her, and the concepts of good and evil are too binary to really apply to her.
I enjoyed also how the cosmic entities, despite their immense power and age, openly admit they don’t have all the answers, sometimes because they’ve been suppressed but at other times because they’ve forgotten things (which is kind of amazing as a concept).
My cosmic horror story Doorways is out now in the Rogue Planet Press anthology Exomoons.
This was the first collection I was invited to write for, as opposed to taking a shot in the dark, and I enjoyed writing the piece.
It’s about Tom Kinsella, who is called to an island off the coast of North America following the death of his father, Preston, and uncovers hints that the older man may have found where the dead end up … and may be able to bring them back.
Doorways is set in my Fairgale Island universe, which is also where Through the Gateway, included in Eldritch Encore, takes place. I created it for the novel I have in progress, Worlds Without End, but Doorways and Through the Gateway, written more than a year apart, have nothing to do with each other (at least right now, I might change my mind in another year or so).
I might actually earn royalties if enough people buy ebooks or paperbacks so if it sounds like your thing, give it a whirl.
Exomoons is a fun anthology that’s a mix of science fiction, horror, and grimdark all themed around moons that are outside our solar system – sometimes, like in Doorways, very far outside of it indeed.
Think of alien exomoons where once life was present and whose archaeological remains today have become the valuable prey of plunderers from space. So, in this book you’ll read a story about an exomoon that is bigger than planet Mars’s size, on which lifeforms are present, though orbiting a gas giant that doesn’t give them light, and warmth, the same as our Sun does. You’ll also read stories about exomoons that aren’t moons at all… And there is also a story about what happened to exomoons partly damaged by something that apparently almost turned them into pieces of shapeless rocks in outer space. Then, here you’ll also find a story about strange exomoons approaching our Sun. And an unusual moon out there in space where some Cthulian deities are at work, maybe… Be that as it may, for starters there’s a story that is about a werewolf and some different, very different exomoons!
Are those exomoons full of surprises, or just as dead as our Moon is? Have some alien species visited them, or do they plan on doing it in the next future maybe?
Barring some unforeseen catastrophe, my debut collection The Ties That Bind will be out on December 31, initially through Amazon but hopefully through other outlets for ebooks not long after. I’m looking into places like Lulu for paperbacks as well just so there are options.
I am very proud of these stories and they cover a wide range of subgenres and a few different styles as well.
I promised myself I’d have a book out in 2024, and while I did shop collections around to a few publishers ultimately I went my own road. And December 31 gets it into 2024 by the skin of its teeth, so I’ve kept my promise to myself.
I’m looking into options for selling through the website and am experimenting with Woocommerce, which is why you see a “shop” tab at the top that’s not currently anything.
All my story collections will be gathered under the umbrella of Shadows and Starlight – originally that was going to be the title of this book, but I was able to forge more thematic links between the stories.
Volume II, What Gets Left Behind, is due out on March 31. Volume III, believe it or not, is in the process of being chosen, though I don’t have a title in mind for that just yet.
Read my piece ‘The Cold Snap that Turns into a Hard Frost’ in the Brussels-based Manila Lit Mag. It’s about guilt, loneliness, and ultimately hope as a father tries to find a way to reconnect with his son.
I had a great time speaking to and with the Bottomless Book Club in Cork at the weekend. I gave an informal talk about my writing process, my work, and how my history and journalism work intersects with my horror stuff, plus a few thoughts on the subject while the club discussed Shirley Jackson’s beautiful Haunting of Hill House.
Meanwhile, I have two stories out now in Halloween anthologies from Wicked Shadow Press.
Flash of the Dead: Halloween ’24
You can read my piece of flash fiction, ‘Grave Tidings’, in Flash of the Dead:Halloween ’24. It’s about a paranormal and occult fixer, Liam Kincaid, who spends the night dealing with the ghosts in the Famine graveyard outside Skibbereen.
Halloweenthology: Witches’ Brew
Meanwhile, ‘Lantern Jack’ is out in Halloweenthology: Witches’ Brew, and is about two girls hoping to catch a glimpse of a folk figure while they watch the trick or treaters.
I’ve also got a piece of contemporary flash fiction, ‘Family Tree’, in the anthology Mono No Aware: the book is themed around the Japanese concept of the awareness of transcience and being softly sad about it passing.
Want to read my pieces but not able to buy the books? I got you. Mail me and I can send on the PDF, as the publisher has encouraged us to share.
Two more pieces have been accepted and are in the pipeline: one for CultureCult’s Haunted Haus anthology (this one also features Liam Kincaid, who is a recent creation of mine) and another for Wicked Shadow’s Petting Boo collection of animal-related horror stories.
This is a great anthology that showcases the wide variety of speculative fiction being produced by Irish authors, as well as those from abroad under the wing of Temple Dark Books (which makes them Irish by adoption, surely).
Dystopian-esque SF, various strands of horror and dark fantasy are all on show here. Three stories actually deal with curses, though in such dramatically different ways they show just how varied writing can be (post-apocalyptic in We Do What We Must, urban dark fantasy in Gestalt, smalltown horrors and isolation in Phobia). I seem to like that theme, though I haven’t made use of it in my own writing yet.
There’s also a really unusual and innovative piece about a detective with the sensory powers of a dog, which has a real Gothic/classic lit sort of feel.
Hats off to the editor, Ronald, a formidable SF author in his own right, for his epic poem Fensham’s Wake. Writing poems is beyond my skillset so I’m always impressed by people who can do it, let alone people who can sustain it (thematically as well as content-wise) in a sort of long form.
A bonus is the selection of tasters of Temple Dark’s published novels, along with valuable forewards by the authors which give you a bit of insight into how each extract fits into the whole and also their motivations in writing them. I’ve bought two more Temple Dark novels since, A Land Without Wolves and Hell’s Gulf, and I’m looking forward to starting them.
This anthology of previously never anthologised ghost stories is a gem of a find and is the first of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series that I’ve read in full.
There are eighteen stories here from the late 19th century to the 1920s and cover all aspects of ‘horror’, from creeping supernatural to moody atmospheres that unsettle rather than terrify. That’s the joy of the genre, really, in that it can run the gamut without getting tiresome. We have everything from Gothic hauntings to Mesopotamian adventure stories; the editor is right to say that the last one could make a good Indiana Jones movie.
What I found especially interesting is how fresh and contemporary the stories feel. True, some of the settings are of their time, like duels with rapiers and the like or some dubious attitudes by male characters toward women (such as ‘The River’s Edge’ by Mary Schultze), but the actual writing styles are typically engaging and fluid.
As I’ve mentioned the fact that these stories have never been included in a book since their initial publication makes it part archaeological/archival retrieval. There’s a bio and potted history of each writer but some of the authors have no history that can be found, despite the editor’s efforts by going through census and other records to try and match bylines to verifiable historical figures.
There is something well, ghostly, about an author such as Eric Purves (whose story ‘The House of the Black Veil’ is one of the more innovative pieces) now existing solely in reference to the single story he/she/they seem to have published. Ashely in his intro to that story notes that “When John Reed Wade, the editor of Pearson’s Magazine, ran the following story in the May 1929 issue, he announced it as ‘One of the most original mystery stories ever written.” And yet there is no trace of any other Purves work. Was it a pseudonym? We’ll never know.
Not every reader will like every story, which is natural enough in an anthology, but lovers of ghost stories will have plenty to hold their interest here.
David O’Mahony is a horror and dark fantasy writer from Cork, Ireland. He specialises in ghost stories but can also be found writing contemporary fiction.
A prolific writer of short stories, he was a finalist in the 2024 Globe Soup primal fears competition and his first round entry to the 2024 NYC Midnight short story challenge was praised as a “creative, original take on the ghost story”. He has been published or is about to be published in Ireland, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, India, and Thailand.
An award-winning newspaper designer, his non-fiction work tends to focus on history, in which he has a PhD, or on books and literary matters. Read his non-fiction for the Irish Examiner here.
When not writing he is assistant editor of the Irish Examiner, where he has picked up numerous awards for eye-catching front pages. One of his efforts, marking the publication of the mother and baby homes report and naming all the children who died at Bessborough mother and baby home, featured on Sky News, BBC, and CNN as well as being raised in parliament as an important historical document.
His front page on the murder of Lyra McKee was named front page of the year in 2019, and his team produced the front page of the year for 2020 as well as having an unprecedented double nomination. The Bessborough page won the award in 2021 and he won the 2023 award for Thank you, Vicky.
