What better time to be launching our Bark & Bone book than Halloween weekend? Our third anthology is cauldron-stuffed with spooky tales and magical vibes. Forest-themed, Bark & Bone is a thicket of enchantment with dark twisty paths winding through various genres from fairytale and science fiction to weird fiction with coverts of mild horror. We’ve trailed the cover design, back blurb and Preface on this blog already. Finally, you can get your hands on the book itself!

Bark & Bone Goes On Sale

Bark & Bone is the first book in our WILDING WORLDS series of anthologies that are rooted in world-building and wildernesses. The deliciously spooky cover art by Sally Barnett evokes the plants, creatures and transformed humans that lurk everywhere in these woods. Birthed by arcane spells in a corner of the woods, it ventures out into the world for the first time TODAY, Friday 27^th October.

Bark & Bone is our biggest book yet with 33 contributors from around the world and more spine-tingling stories than ever. You can now buy an ebook copy for just £4 on our shop page. If you’re waiting to get your hands on a paperback copy with that gorgeous, unsettling cover design, don’t despair. As Halloween gives way to winter, we will be preparing the print edition for its launch at an in-person book party on Saturday 25^th November (2 – 4.30pm) in Quakers’ Meeting House, 16 Queens Road, Leicester, LE2 1WP. There will be shiny new books, birthday cake and readings from our lovely Space Cat stars. We’d love to see you there!

First Review

We’re thrilled to share a glowing review from Matt at Runalong the Shelves. Matt described Bark & Bone as: ‘really interesting’ and ‘a very well-balanced collection filled with unusual tales and a host of writers to keep an eye out for. Highly recommended’. Elsewhere, he describes it as ‘a hugely enjoyable SF/Fantasy and Horror collection around the theme of forests’.

Image credit: Jay

He clearly relished the range of genres he encountered and picked out eleven pieces for special mention. These included a ‘really eerie opening tale’ (Grounding Exercise by Cormack Baldwin), ‘a fascinating slice of weird fiction … filled with strange sights and constant dangers’ (Toadstools by Bitter Karella), and ‘a rather beautiful modern fable … filled with moments of humanity and a love of nature that really pulls the reader in’ (Emilia Who Talks to Trees by Rod Duncan).

Image credit: Krzysztof Niewolny

Several of our sci-fi forest stories were singled out, including J.K. Fulton’s ‘really unusual but compelling tale’ (Icewood), Holly Schofield’s ‘smart and unsettling piece of SF’ (Bear #178), and Alex Harwood’s Odd Eden, whose ending was ‘both unexpected and yet makes a great deal of sense’. In terms of fantasy pieces, R. J. Howell’s Of Brittle Heart and Bleeding Bone was picked out as being ‘haunting, weird and … rather devastating’. And Matthew Pegg’s Wolfskin was praised for being a ‘very refreshing take’ on the Red Riding Hood story that turns it into ‘a far more adult tale with people showing their true colours’.

Image credit: Alice Alinari

Read the full review on Runalong the Shelves’ website here.

Author Readings

It always warms our editors’ hearts to see our writers getting the accolades their work deserves. In addition to Matt’s focus on the science fiction, fairy tales and weird fiction, we’d mention the eco-themes which are subtly and thoughtfully unpacked in numerous pieces. These stories and poems evoke our complex and dysfunctional relationship with nature at this present moment. And we’re especially pleased to have unearthed a distinct LGBTQI+ strand in this collection, including a wonderful memoir about transitioning called Rewild Me by Charlie Winter.

You can meet all our authors via our Authors page (click images for individual pages). There’s something special about hearing the pieces in the author or poet’s own voice too so don’t miss our series of Bark & Bone author readings which are being released weekly between now and Xmas on our YouTube channel.