Every day I worry all day about what’s waiting in the bushes for us. I’m really thrilled to link to another reprint – this time my horror story The Woman in the Hill, a piece of Kiwi Lovecraftiana set in the hills, plain and bush of turn-of-the-century Tauranga. (Having grown up in Whitford, please do not take this as a savage attack on the place, as the worst thing that happened to me there as a child was that I once dropped an egg and a dog ate it).

I wrote this for excellent editor Lynne Jamneck’s Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror and can’t recommend the full book enough. As ever, I also can’t recommend Nightmare Magazine enough – they published my debut horror story Chew back in the day and if you would like to purchase a scary gift for yourself or your loved ones there is a button linked there to do so. This month’s line-up of December spooky stories is incredible, and I have to particularly recommend Nino Cipri’s Which Super Little Dead Girl™ Are You? Take Our Quiz and Find Out! if you want to laugh, feel bad, and also not sleep well that night.

Due to my own greasy need for self-gratification I can’t pass up the opportunity here to link The Woman in the Hill being discussed here on Tor by Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth as part of their Lovecraft reread. If you want to survey some incredibly intelligent discussion of the debt that The Woman in the Hill owes to H.P., and in general get some fantastic story recommendations and Lovecraftian legacy discussion in your eyeballs, do click through to this and the whole series. You might want to read it after you’ve read my story, though, because it is spoilers.

Thank you for reading me this year whatever you have read, and I hope you enjoy my own take on Lovecraftian protagonists driven demented by things they cannot understand! Happy holidays!!

Back in the back of a Cadillac, number one with a bullet I’ve got a reprint in Lightspeed.* 

“The Magician’s Apprentice”, a story completed at Clarion, published by Weird Tales and nominated for a Shirley Jackson, is free to read at Lightspeed! Wrote this in 2010 and I’m still fond of it in 2017, which is all one can ever ask for, really. Please enjoy a story about growing up, magic, comfort food, and the strong bonds we can make with our teachers. Feel-good tale of the year**.

Readers, please be reminded that you can support this truly excellent magazine what bothered to publish me for a mere $3.99, an amount of dollars that nets you not just my story but those by this month’s authors. I haven’t read them all yet or they haven’t landed, but you’ll be getting the likes of Tobias S. Buckell, Genevieve Valentine and a whole host of truly talented others. Lightspeed will give you all these stories cheap as free anyway, but I encourage you to toss money its way, it is a good thing.

(As ever whenever this story pops up, I remember how indebted I am to Dale Bailey, the Clarion instructor for that week and a truly superhuman being.)

* The actual lyrics.
** It is not the feel-good tale of the year.