Nu bestellen De Plaza e-boek. Print verschijnt februari 2012.

THE OTHER DAY AT a literary festival event (one of the rare occasions when both halves of S.L. Grey have been trundled out in public in the same room) the panel was asked whether South Africa should have its own genre imprint. The audience was made up of some of South Africa’s very loyal SFFH fans, and we think they expected the answer, ‘Yes, of course, it’s a scandal that there isn’t a dedicated genre imprint in South Africa.’ But we and fellow panellists, Lauren Beukes and Tom Learmont, all agreed that there shouldn’t be. The market in South Africa is simply too small to sustain one.

There’s no particular reason to have a dedicated imprint selling local science fiction, fantasy and horror. There’s still very little original novel-length SFFH coming out of South Africa, although it’s clear from District 9 (an example of South African SFF idiosyncrasy which is reaching its retirement date) and Lauren’s marvellous Moxyland and Zoo City, that there is a potential audience for them. There is a very loyal and fanatical SFFH fanbase in South Africa, which devours whatever SFFH it can lay its hands on, and most of this is British and American. Louis worked in a bookshop for years and remembers the round-the-corridor queues at a Terry Pratchett signing, compared with the embarrassing no-show at a signing by Graham Swift who had just that year won the Booker Prize.

Zoo City and Moxyland were published first in South Africa by Jacana, a publisher known for choosing leftfield novels of interest to them. ‘We publish what we like’ is their tagline, more than a nod to the title of murdered struggle icon Steve Biko’s posthumously collected writings, I Write what I Like. Jacana is not making a great deal of money.

It was barely a decision for us to submit The Mall overseas and bypass South African publishing.
Read on at Something Wicked

You can download the whole Corvus Spring catalogue here: http://www.atlantic-books.co.uk/about/catalogue/corvusspring2011.pdf

Later this week, you’ll be able to read our guest post on writing genre fiction in South Africa and — gulp — World SF’s review of The Mall by Harry Markov. Keep checking back.

***

In other news:

Sarah will be reading at the Bloody Parchment Horrorfest at The Book Lounge in Cape Town on 26 October.

S.L. Grey’s first short story will be published in Pornokitsch.Com’s ur-cool Pandemonium anthology, out this month to coincide with the Tate Modern’s exhibition of the art of apocalyptic painter, John Martin. Insane fun in store for all.

We’ve also been entered by our publisher, Corvus, to Pornokitsch’s Kitschies awards (won this year by Lauren Beukes). Hold tentacles for us in February.

We’ve had wonderful feedback about THE MALL. Check our shelf page here for the latest reviews and read the views of the happy Shoppers at Amazon.co.uk. THE MALL will be out in paperback in January for those who missed out on the trade paperback, and of course it’s alway available on Kindle. Also out in January is the Dutch edition of The Mall: DE PLAZA. Watch out for THE WARD, coming in June 2012.

Word is that South African and Australian Kindle account-holders will be able to access the promotion from Amazon.com’s Kindle Store, also from Christmas Day. Metadata is being mangled as we speak. Watch this space.

Remember that if you don’t have a Kindle, you can download a free Kindle reader from Amazon for your computer.

Read about The Mall here.

10 of the 12 titles on the 12 Days of Kindle promotion, like The Mall, are exclusive Kindle pre-releases for this period only. This is your only chance to get hold of The Mall before June, at a fabulous price.

The 12 Corvus Kindle titles are:

Blue Heaven – C.J. Box
Open Season – C.J. Box
First Thrills – ed. Lee Child
The Hanging Shed – Gordon Ferris
Splinter – Sebastian Fitzek
End Game – Matthew Glass
The Mall – S.L. Grey
1222 – Anne Holt
The Library Of Gold – Gayle Lynds
The Diviner’s Tale – Bradford Morrow
Ghost Watch – David Rollins
Hollywood Hills – Joseph Wambaugh

Read an announcement of the promotion in The Bookseller.

Pre-order The Mall for Kindle on Amazon.co.uk.

[...] we were talking about The Mall trailer – R___
said she thought it was a good plan to have it out before the end of the
year.
[...]
Possibly we should avoid maggots (!) I don’t want to find any.

_____

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 4:31 PM, L wrote:

This all sounds brilliant and extremely exciting [...]

But I was thinking maggots, maggots, maggots before I read your line.
We need a maggot… just one. (You can get meal worms at pet shops but
horror fans will know their maggots from their meal worms.) You’ve got
horses… leave a bit of offal out for a couple of days and you’re in
business.

_____

On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 6:51 PM, S wrote:

The problem with maggots is that they may put people off (too disgusting) but how about you fly down for the day and you could be the maggot wrangler?
I am NOT leaving offal out in the sun! Why would I have maggots if I have horses? It’s not like storing dead bodies. (I worry about you sometimes, L!)

_____

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 9:23 AM, L wrote:

Touchy touchy, horse-person.

I just meant, where there are horses there are flies.

I don’t really find maggots disgusting. Think it’s a girl thing?

_____

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 9:40 AM, S wrote:

It’s not a girl thing – you’re just weird. How can you not find maggots disgusting? They don’t exist without rotting flesh. I think they give me the heebies because years ago, when I worked for a newspaper, I was sent to take pics at a murder site. A gardener had butchered and buried his elderly employers in the back garden. The bodies had been taken away when I got there, leaving a gaping hole, but that still stank, it absolutely reeked (dead people smell worse than anything in the world), and scrabbling in amongst the piles of earth – maggots. Hundreds of them.

_____

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 10:15 AM, L wrote:

That’s their job. Otherwise we’d have rotting flesh lumps all over the show and imagine the stink then. Do you hate other carrion beetles? Vultures?
The maggots you *should* be worrying about are the ones that eat living flesh.

_____

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 10:53 AM, S wrote:

True, true. But you haven’t factored in the fact that unlike beetles and vultures they squirm in a sinister fashion, greedily slurping body juices. Also, having grown up watching 80s horror movies (where maggots were an integral part of the signature shocker scene), they’re imprinted on my mind as the embodiment of yukkiness. R___ and I actually had a cool conversation about ‘maggot moments.’

But the maggots that eat living flesh eat infection, don’t they? And munch away gangrene etc. So they’re the good guys.

_____

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 11:22 AM, L wrote:

No, most maggots only eat necrotic flesh – gangrene etc. – but stop at the flesh that has circulation. Doctors still use them for that reason. Nice clean up.

But I read in The Dante Club about a specific blowfly that lives in the southern US and other semitropical areas, and eats living flesh. So you have a bunch of those, they’ll eat you alive. That’s what happened to one of the victims in that book.

Wonderful senior editor at Corvus, Laura Palmer, had some kind words too:

“Have you ever felt that moment of brain-clutching, heart-stopping fear when something ordinary mutates into something terrifying, just for a split-second? Like when a light flickers, and the shadows turn menacing. Or when a lift stops suddenly before it’s reached your floor. Well, that’s what it’s like reading The Mall – only it’s not over in a split-second. When I finally finished reading at 4am, my adrenaline was pumping too fast to go to sleep. And I knew I had to buy this book.”