Of Unsung Dreams & British Lore

As is often the case with this blog, I'm writing this later than I originally intended. For the past four weeks I've been crowdfunding my latest anthology, This Dreaming Isle, with Unsung Stories over at Kickstarter. This blog piece was intended as a promotion for the book, but we're already close to the final whistle... in some cases, by the time you read this it may already be over. All too often, real life (and work) gets in the way.

If you do come to this later, you'll find This Dreaming Isle over at the Unsung Stories website. But if you catch it in time - please consider backing us on Kickstarter! If you read my blog, you'll already know my views on how great crowdfunding has been for anthologies.  

This Dreaming Isle has already had a huge amount of interest, with Nina Allan kindly saying that it "may come to be seen as a landmark in the field". Then there's the stellar lineup we have, including horror legend Ramsey Campbell and Costa Award winner Andrew Michael Hurley.

Here's the blurb from the Kickstarter:

Britain has a long history of folk tales, ghost stories and other uncanny fictions, and these literary ley lines are still shimmering beneath the surface of this green and pleasant land. Every few generations this strangeness crawls out from the dark places of the British imagination, seeping into our art and culture. We are living through such a time.

This Dreaming Isle is an anthology of new horror stories and weird fiction with a distinctly British flavour, edited by Dan Coxon. It collects together seventeen brand new horrifying or unsettling stories that draw upon the landscape and history of the British Isles for their inspiration. Some explore the realms of myth and legend, others are firmly rooted in the present, engaging with the country’s forgotten spaces.

The full lineup is as follows:

Catriona Ward
Jenn Ashworth
Andrew Michael Hurley
Tim Lebbon
Aliya Whiteley
Stephen Volk
Kirsty Logan
James Miller
Robert Shearman
Jeannette Ng
Richard V. Hirst
Gareth E. Rees
Alison Moore
Gary Budden
Alison Littlewood
Ramsey Campbell
Angela Readman

The full Kickstarter campaign can be found here, including paperbacks, hardbacks and art prints of the cover - get ordering!

And while we're talking crowdfunded anthologies, my friends at Boudicca Press are also crowdfunding their first book, Disturbing the Beast - an anthology of weird fiction by women writers. This is such a great theme, with such a great cover, plus it has two wonderful writers already on board (Aliya Whiteley and Kirsty Logan), so show it your support. It's projects like this that are keeping the short story alive and healthy. Their Kickstarter page is here.

Finally, I'll leave you with this snippet from an interview I did with STORGY about the new anthology. You can read the full interview here.

I think I can safely say that all the writers in This Dreaming Isle avoid nostalgia and sentimentality about the past. Maybe that’s simply in the nature of folk horror: the past isn’t tea and scones on the lawn, it’s malicious ghosts and weird goings-on in the fells, it’s witches burned at the stake and towns razed to the ground by Vikings. The past is a dangerous, cutthroat place, filled with violence, injustice and inequality... Those who see it through rose-tinted glasses aren’t really engaging with it, they’re only fantasizing. And that’s always dangerous.