New Works, A Taste of Meyrink, Kindlings

I'm deep into the second draft of The Cold Heavens, my Old-Weird Planetary Romance, currently at 220,000 words.

Like One Who Disappeared (due in 2011 from PS Publishing) The Cold Heavens features several real-life characters, none more prominently than the Austrian fantasist Gustav Meyrink.
A disgraced banker, champion sculler and fencer, theosophist, debunker of charlatans, follower of the charlatan Bo Yin Ra, and founder of the Order of the Blue Star, Herr Meyrink was one of the key writers of unease in the early twentieth century. The Golem, written in 1913, is possibly the most famous novel of Prague written by a non-Czech, and a work which seems, like much of his output, to foretell the coming apocalypse of 1914-1918. My favorite Meyrink (apart from the short, sharp stories that gained him his reputation) is The Angel of the West Window, an unearthly, disturbing, complex novel about the possession of a 20th century man by the 17th century world of alchemist John Dee, charlatan Edward Kelley, and the mad, melancholic Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, Dominus Mundi, King of Bohemia, Hungary, Germany and the Romans, who ruled his empire from gloomy Prague. (Rudolf is also a character in my novel, his madness compelling him into a solar system haunted by literal angels and demons).





















Look also for The Green Face, written during the War, about a post-war Amsterdam haunted by the figure of the Wandering Jew. . .

And The Opal and Other Stories, a collection of SF/Fantasy and Horror stories written in the early years of the Twentieth Century that recalls (at least to me) the bracing shock of Clive Barker's original Books of Blood.




On the back burner, I've been preparing my novels for Kindle and other e-book platforms. Expect an announcement soon about a subtly-expanded Ceres Storm and its massive unpublished sidequel, Yan Tan Tethera (Therese Littleton's favorite unpublished book), as well as a substantially tightened and polished and darkened October Dark (aka OD: the director's cut?).