Amazing cover art by Sara Diesel
I’m delighted to say that my story “Lavinia’s Wood” has been accepted for She Walks in Shadows, the first all-women Lovecraft anthology (yes, women do write Lovecraftian fiction, no matter what the rumours say). Thanks to editors extraordinaire Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R Stiles!
‘You can’t read, can you?’
The undecayed Whatleys were possessed of an impressive fortune and a strict sense of philanthropy, which was how Lavinia Whatley, either afflicted or blessed – depending upon to whom one spoke – with albinism, came to be invited to the large house located on the correct fork of the junction of the Aylesbury Pike just beyond Dean’s Corners.
Despite fine intentions and enthusiastically mouthed better sentiments, all the older members of the sound branch had, at some point, used phrases such as ‘Witch Whatleys’, ‘Lesser Whatleys’, and, perhaps worst of all, ‘Queer Whatleys’. And they’d used them in their children’s hearing; children who stored spite in a more concentrated form, having not been exposed to the world and its doings, to learning things that sometimes diluted the acid of their malice.