#Titanuary ‘Dead Letters’ edited by Conrad Williams

About the book….

The Dead Letters Office: the final repository of the undelivered. Love missives unread, gifts unreceived, lost in postal limbo. Dead Letters: An Anthology features new stories from the masters of horror, fantasy and speculative fiction, each inspired by object from the Dead Letters Office. Featuring original stories by:

Joanne Harris * Maria Dahvana Headley & China Miéville * Michael Marshall Smith * Lisa Tuttle * Ramsey Campbell * Pat Cadigan * Steven Hall * Alison Moore * Adam LG Nevill * Nina Allan * Christopher Fowler * Muriel Gray * Andrew Lane * Angela Slatter * Claire Dean * Nicholas Royle * Kirsten Kaschock

Just take a quick look at those contributer names, benchmarks in short fiction writing, one and all.

Titan published the  ‘Dead Letters’ anthology in 2016, and the central theme for each cautionary tale is letters sent, undelivered, or in some cases, returned to sender.

This is an intriguing concept as every year in the UK, 500,000 letters go ‘missing’, as in undeliverable, and are stored in a Belfast based warehouse. In the US, Atlanta, Georgia is where the dead letter office can be found, handling upwards of 90 million items a year, a seemingly unfathomable amount.

Amongst these missives are opportunities to spin the misplaced into ghosts, chain letters foretelling doom for those who do not send them on, tokens of love, tokens of regret and so forth. A fertile breeding ground for a fevered imagination, if you will, and each of these tales takes the dead letter and delivers it to the reader’s conscience with style, unease and a lingering sense of being disturbed.

I love this idea, and the way that each tale is so individually interpreted. From the subtleness of Nina Allan, to the eldritch horror of Muriel Gray,the body horror of Adam LG Nevill to the mystery of folkloric legends of Kirsten Kaschock, this is like a tasting plate of emotions, a degustation of fear folded up and placed inside an envelope, delivered straight to your frontal lobe.

It’s eclectic and weird in the best ways-I admit to not ‘getting’ every single tale which will, eventually necessitate a re-reading, however, this is like the random pile of letters found clutched together behind the door of a multiple occupancy household. It’s a brave notion,to take the humble letter and imbue it with a sense of fear which, to this reader, feels entirely natural as senders chase down missing communications, and the wrongly received is desperately attempted to return to sender.

The oddest church jumble sale you ever read of will give you terrors in ‘Buyer’s Remorse’ by Andrew Lane,, as will the ticking of an old lady’s watch which arrives and sets off a chain of events when the wrong man opens it up,in Adam LG Nevill’s ‘The Days Of Our Lives’. He enters into the most unholy of communions…

Merlin and Nimue chase each and shreds of magic through the centuries in , the deathly effects of mysterious experiment is found within ‘Ledge Bants’ by Maria Dahvana Headley and China Mieville .

This collection comes highly recommended, and if, like me, you enjoy waiting at the door to watch the arrival of the postman for news of other worlds, I think that you will find a lot to dive into amongst the ‘Dead Letters’…

About the editor…

I’ve been writing stories since infant school. The first story I remember writing was called ‘Fire’ and it was about… a fire. Later, when I was 11, I wrote my first horror novel, ‘A Package Called Death’. This was 24 pages long and handwritten. I submitted it to Pan Books, with a covering letter. I told them that I understood about publishing, that I was aware that a book needed to sell. ‘All of my friends at school will buy a copy,’ I wrote. ‘So you have nothing to worry about.’

Pan rejected it. But I received a very encouraging letter from them. My next novel was entitled ’36 Hours Till Doom’ (40 pages) and was about a spy who steals a Russian submarine and, during a stand-off, sacrifices his life by launching all of its nuclear missiles at Moscow. This one was typed out by the mother of a schoolfriend. ‘Escape from Asquinon’, a Star Wars meets The Lord of the Rings epic was longer still. In fact, it remains unfinished, at around 50,000 words.

I was 20 when I made my first serious attempt at writing a novel. ‘ID’ was very much an homage to my then hero, Stephen King, a writer whose sequence of early novels beginning with ‘Salem’s Lot’ and included ‘The Shining’, ‘The Stand‘ and ‘The Dead Zone’. A brilliant quartet. It drew me in to horror fiction. ‘ID’ was dreadful and remained locked in my archive files, never to see the light of day. But I’d hit 70,000 words – novel territory – so it was a psychological victory for me. The next novel, ‘Sipping Midnight‘ was written while I was a student at Bristol Polytechnic, where I was given advice and support from local author David Peak. But it was ‘‘Head Injuries’‘, written when I was 24, that set me on my way.

My most recent books are ‘‘Blonde On A Stick’‘, ‘‘Loss Of Seperation’‘ and ‘‘Gutshot’‘. New novels are on their way…

Links-http://www.conradwilliams.net/