We finish out a week of announcements with yet more news of an upcoming project—except this one isn’t a comic book!
Coming this winter from indie publishing house Black Coat Press is the anthology Tales of the Shadowmen 20: Fin de Siecle (French for “end of century”), a collection of tales that span time and space, starring a trainload of public domain characters—and I was asked to contribute one of the stories!
In “Her Cheek’s Last Tinge, Her Eye’s Last Spark,” the bloodsucking Lord Ruthven—created in 1816 by Dr. John Polidori, the traveling physician of Lord Byron, in the novella “The Vampyre”—crosses paths with Isaac Laquedem, an immortal who’s perhaps better known as the mythical Wandering Jew, who made the mistake of taunting Jesus along the route to the Crucifixion and was cursed with eternal life.
(Laquedem, by the way, stars in the Black Coat Press novel The Wandering Jew’s Daughter, written by fantasy author Paul Féval (1816–1887) and originally published in 1864; the BCP edition features a translation and “adaptation” by SF author Brian Stableford. Lord Ruthven: The Vampire, which reprints Polidori’s story along with the screenplays for a pair of stage adaptations performed in the 1820s, is also available from BCP.)
The Tales of the Shadowmen series is edited by the husband-and-wife team of Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier, who are also the publishers of Black Coat Press. I’ve known Jean-Marc since the late 1990s, when I was the editor in chief of ibooks, inc. and he was the agent for comic-art legend Jean Giraud, aka Moebius. Jean-Marc is also recognized worldwide as one of the great authorities on the British sci-fi series Doctor Who, and as a comic-book writer, most recently on Dynamite Comics’ Barbarella projects.
This isn’t my first contribution to BCPs’s popular anthology series, though. Tales of the Shadowmen 4: Lords of Terror (still available) includes my story “Night’s Children,” which has thief Irma Vep (from the 1915–16 French movie serial Les Vampyres) match wits with Count Graf Orlock from the classic German horror movie Nosferatu; it was later reprinted in BCP’s French-language collection L’Almanach des Vampires (The Almanac of Vampires), and then in the English-language The Vampire Almanac, Vol. 2. (That’s right: from English to French and back again. It’s a story with a lot of mileage!)
Tales of the Shadowmen 20: Fin de Siecle goes on sale in December. Stay tuned for more information!
