Although we are still closed to
submissions for novels and collections, we are now open for a charity
anthology we will be publishing later this year.
The book will be Kitchen Sink Gothic 2,
and all proceeds will be donated to a charity for the homeless (details to be announced soon). As
such, there will be no payment for any of the stories appearing in this
book other than a contributor's copy, but we are open both to original stories and reprints.
The book will be edited by David and Linden Riley.
To give an idea of the kind of stories we are looking for, here is the Introduction from 2015's Kitchen Sink Gothic:
M. John Harrison used the term kitchen sink gothic in
association with Robert Aickman. After quoting John Coulthart’s description of
Aickman as having the “quotidian Britishness of Alan Bennett darkening into the inexplicable nightmares of David Lynch”, he
added: “I often return to BBC4′s
The Golden Age
of Canals, which features Aickman as a broody, nerdy TE Lawrence of
the waterways, for its footage of decaying tunnel entrances, drained locks
& Kitchen Sink Gothic clutter embedded in wet mud."
Coined
in the 1950s, Kitchen Sink described British films, plays and novels frequently
set in the North of England, which showed working class life in a gritty,
no-nonsense, “warts and all” style, sometimes referred to as social realism.
It
became popular after the playwright John Osborne wrote Look Back In Anger, simultaneously helping to create the Angry
Young Men movement. Films included Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning, The
Entertainer, A Taste of Honey, The L-Shaped Room and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. TV dramas included Coronation Street and East
Enders. In recent years TV dramas that could rightly be described as
kitchen sink gothic include Being Human, with its cast of working
class vampires, werewolves and ghosts, and the zombie drama In the Flesh, with its northern working
class, down to earth setting.
It’s
an area of writing that fascinates me, especially coming from a working class
background and having been brought up in a terraced street in a solidly
Lancastrian mill town which any viewer of Coronation
Street would recognise as typical of its type. My formative reading in
weird fiction, though, came from middle-class Americans (Robert Bloch, Ray
Bradbury and H. P. Lovecraft) or from upper middle-class British writers like
M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, the Bensons. etc. I always felt there was a
place for working class horror fiction whose characters were more than merely
just comic constructs.
For
me, within the horror genre, kitchen sink gothic is the antithesis of Jamesian
or Lovecraftian horror. There are no distinguished scholars. The settings are
unglamorous, perhaps unatmospheric in the
accepted sense of the word in
supernatural literature. And gritty.
I
was reminded of my own occasional leanings in that direction after someone reviewed one of my stories (Dark Visions 1,
Grey Matter Press, 2013): "Scrap by David A. Riley could easily have been a kitchen sink drama,
depicting the lives of two brothers growing up in a poverty-stricken council
estate in England."
Shortly
afterwards I came across John Braine’s novel The Vodi, listed by M. John Harrision as amongst his top ten
novels: “Constructed round the fantasies of a recovering tuberculosis patient, this novel was the defining moment of an
as-yet-unreported genre, kitchen sink gothic. One of my favourite books of
all time, it doesn’t seem to be in print with the rest of Braine’s backlist.”
Fortunately, Valancourt Books rectified this situation, republishing it in
paperback in 2013.
In
the anthology you are now holding you will find stories that cover a wide range
of Kitchen Sink Gothic, from the darkly humorous to the weirdly strange and
occasionally horrific. I hope you find
the genre as fascinating as I do.
If any potential contributor would like to take a look at volume 1 to get a better idea of the type of stories we will be interested in, please email us at
paralleluniversepublications@gmx.co.uk for either a free mobi copy or a pdf, which we'll gladly email to you.
Deadline: TBA
