My man Joseph Kelly has finally published the first volume of The Midnight Collection, a compilation of dark fiction I’ve previously mentioned. He was originally intent on it being sold at zero profit, but in order to get an ISBN there was a minimum price that results in some amount of profit. Fear not, Mr. Kelly will surely not even make minimum wage on the effort it took to make this happen. You have a few options on how to read it – and one is completely gratis. I’ll explain that later.

The Midnight Collection is aiming to go quarterly – the next volume already in progress – and this first installment is themed “Feast & Famine.” I’m pimping this because I’m a contributor, and I’d love to hear what you think of my stories. Although I am really curious what reviewers, casual or serious, will think of all the stories. I have a personal opinion about which story is the best, and wonder how well that lines up with the consensus view.

This is a truly unusual collection. Despite the uniting theme, it’s as diverse as the members of our secret cabal of writers. There’s poetry, comedy, LGBT+ representation, and dark fiction ranging from traditional ’80s style horror to fantasy and sci-fi. Some of the writers are more conventional, some quite avant garde or ferocious. A little tour of the table of contents:

PEOPLE POT PIES – Brett Elijah Shelton
This short horror poem was written by my brother a very long time ago. Should it have been published? Is the world ready? You decide.

SATURNALIA – Lydia Moody
The first proper story in the book is a murder mystery featuring a nonbinary protagonist, in a style the author aptly dubbed “cozy splatterpunk.”

A GRIMM MARKET – Kirsten Aucoin
A modern take on Hansel and Gretel, of course, and as a child of poverty, I found something to relate to in the motives and experiences of these H&Gs.

BUTTERCREAM – Joseph Kelly
Like People Pot Pies to my brother, this is an older story by my lovin’ man, published here for the first time. A young character has been rousted into service at a child’s birthday party. Naturally the festivities take an ill turn. I find it very artistic. This might be the closest entry in the book to the genre of Literary Fiction.

ORTOLAN – Sascha Masoch
Another poem, this one penned specifically for the collection, and it couldn’t be more different from my brother’s opening act. The title refers to the ortolan bunting, a songbird most famed for being subject to very French cruelty.

BLOOD IS THICKER THAN BILE – Athena Victoria
The book’s dark fantasy tale. A fancy queen is harried by a demonic figure. This story brings the color – especially the red.

LOCUSTS – Bébé Mélange
My first entry, under my main nom de plume! I tried my hand at sci-fi poetry. I wonder what FtB’s own T.D. Walker would think. This is not my area of expertise as a writer, but I like to think the concept carries it – mad science used to resurrect capitalism in a world that had somehow killed it and moved on.

SAPSUCKER – Joseph Kelly
Another by my boyfriend, this one in a genre and style that compares well to Clive Barker – while still being its own gay thing. An artist has rented a cabin to get some paintings done, but a very sticky horror calls to him from the woods.

SUPPLY CHAIN BANDITOS – Bébé Mélange
It’s me again! Don’t worry. We have more contributors lined up for volume two, so it’ll have less of me. Here I try my hand at a kind of gentle dark comedy. A post-apocalypse scenario is gradually revealed, with roots in our present day lives.

EZEKIEL DRIFT – Damian Golfinopolous
Snowy weather for your late summer / early fall, Damian is a multi-talented artist from New Zealand, bringing post-apocalyptic sci-fi to the collection. Or is it supernatural? What’s really going on here?

FOUR – Christopher Scott Shelton
You might recognize this author’s name from the corners of these artworks. Possibly the most pretentious work in the collection, this one is a vaguely Napoleonic period piece about the horrors of war.

FRESSEN – Caesar Train Magenta
You might recognize this author’s name from here, or an early version of this short essay from here. The volume is brought to a close in a Rod Serling style monologue.

“Partie de Plaisirs” (detail) – Pierre Etienne Moitte (after Nicolas Lancret)

HOW DO I READ THE MIDNIGHT COLLECTION?

The way that results in the most direct support for future volumes is through Ko-fi. For a minimum three dollar donation, you can download the e-book in formats that work with most e-readers. The best way to view the interior illustrations, and have a nice artifact for your bookshelf, is by purchasing the paperback through Lulu. You may be able to purchase it through other sites soon, but it’s nice to not give Bezuggs a cut, and purchase on Lulu gives more money to the cause. And lastly, as promised, you can just read it for free at the Collection’s website.

There are a few original works by authors (nice!) but most of the illustrations are lovingly curated from public domain resources, like the picture to the right here – one of my faves. Some version of some of the illustrations are available on the website, more in the e-book, but yes, the best way to appreciate them is a hard copy.

I’d love to see reviews, either of the whole package or individual stories. For lowest effort you can drop some general thoughts in the comments below this article. You can also leave comments on the individual stories at the Midnight Collection’s site. And of course, you can review it wherever it is available for purchase. Thanks!

EDIT TO ADD:  Somebody international couldn’t use a card to purchase it through ko-fi so begrudgingly there is now an e-book on Amazon as well. Purchase your e-book there if you must, but know that if you do it on ko-fi, the format should work on any modern kindle as well.

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PS: I mentioned before I’m going to release my first novel soon, keep your eyes open for that as well…

Some Great American Satan writing will be coming to book form soon!  There’s a compilation in which I have a few submissions, soon to be published, and if I pull off this wild last-minute dash thing I’m working on, my first novel may also come available within a week of that!  Here’s the back cover of that collection.  I’m the Bébé Mélange and none of the described scenes are from my submissions…

The collection is going to be sold at zero profit, but my novel – The Septagram – will involve at least some reward for me other than thronging fans.  I’ll get into that in more depth sometime within the next few weeks here.

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Just in case I get hit by a bus before august of 2023 (feeling imminent bus hit vibes at the moment for reasons), I wanna do something special for my boyfriend’s birthday.  Safe to talk about it here because he only reads posts I call to his attention.  Anyway, I’d like to write him a poem, but I can’t think of an approach that feels right.

He doesn’t like to think about his corporeal existence so talk about how he physically appeals to me should probably be kept to a minimum.  I’m way out of practice being romantic because I excised most of those feelings from my head in response to some bad relationships past, and the rest bled out when age diminished my ardor (sez the 46 year old geezer).

Any poets, bards, or modern day troubadours in my audience have a notion?  A form or structure for poems you’re liking lately?  An angle for waxing poetic when inspiration is hard to pin down?  I could contemplate this guy in writing here, but he’s a private person and I’d best not.  Not sure what to say.

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The last few years I’ve been exposed to a lot more amateur writing than I have since college (over fifteen years ago).  I’m seeing common mistakes, and if the larger pool of amateurs age 20-40 are anything like these kids, might be that a huge amount of your competition for getting published is likewise disadvantaged.  What are they doing wrong?  They avoid writing the highest moments of tension and conflict.

Their plots might have a central conflict, sometimes a person may confront somebody else, a person may take some sort of action, but anything that would make a scene genuinely tense or the outcome of a conflict at all uncertain?  They’re afraid to write it.  They write circles around it but never show it.  I imagine it’s because those moments are emotionally uncomfortable and they’re too timid to face those emotions.

An example:  A story is present tense and begins with a person riding a bus to see her ailing mother.  She sees a lake and remembers her childhood there.  The story cuts to her at a rest stop recovering from barfing.  Why did she barf?  Now the present tense story has her remembering that – on this very bus ride – she got a call that her mother died.  Not only did the author avoid writing an emotionally intense moment, they had to do a time skip in a present tense story.  It felt very weird.  They didn’t even write about the moment of barfing, like that would have been too much.  We start a bus ride, reminisce, then cut back to the present and have skipped the only emotionally significant event in the story and its fallout.

Another example:  A story begins with the hero tending bar.  Some guys come in, connected with her shady past, and start bullying her.  Will she slip up and reveal who she is, starting a gun fight?  No, her boss makes an excuse for her and she bails.  Now as she leaves, she’s remembering a time in her shady past when collateral damage from a shootout led to her arguing with her squad and going solo.  Cool, but what’s more tense?  Bawling out your boss for bad tactics, or the shootout itself, where innocent bystanders died at the barrel of your own gun?

OK, but there’s two moments of tension in example two – the bullying and the boss-bawling, right?  No.  Both conflicts were fully one-sided.  There was never a question she’d submit to the bullying.  It was her plan from the first minute – didn’t want to reveal herself.  And when she’s yelling at her boss, self-righteously barking and waving a gun in his face?  He’s just solemnly kneeling there, saying “I know, I suck.”  If there’s an argument, if there’s a fight, if there’s any moment that would be made more exciting by uncertainty, it’s avoided.

And of course the most exciting event mentioned in the story went wholly undescribed – the shootout that precipitated her rebellion and desertion.  If you’re thinking back to a traumatic event in your life like a car crash or fight, do you remember the traumatic moment, or what the paramedics said afterward?  Scratch that – you might remember the paramedics more strongly.  But what would make for a more exciting story?  Would Return of the Jedi be better if they skipped Vader dying and Luke just said it happened after the fact, at the ewok party?

Part of this is a lack of confidence as an author, one can surmise, but another part might come from the conventions of fanfic.  If somebody wants to write around the canon, they aren’t making the key events themselves happen.  They only write interstitial moments.  Between this scene and that from an episode of Muscular Monster Hunting Bros, these guys totally held hands.  That’s what they’re writing.

It sometimes feels like hand-holding would be more emotionally heavy duty than these kids can handle.  So if you want to stand out from maybe half the young writers out there?  Simply make things happen in your story and actually describe them happening.  You just might clear the slush pile from a reader’s sense of relief at witnessing that lost bit of courage from days of yore.

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