The fiction app Great Jones Street has reprinted three of my stories.
Magpie Sisters – a magical realist fairytale
Circus Boy Without A Safety Net – a coming out fable about a queer black boy and his love of Lena Horne
Strange Alphabets – a historical fantasy about the French poet Arthur Rimbaud
Yesterday, the author Bogi Takács tweeted up a storm about my YA novel, Bereft. Thanks to them, both for understanding what I was trying to do, and for signal boosting the book.
I have excerpts from the two short stories in my Variations series of short stories.
Fur & Gold, loosely based on Beauty and the Beast, is here.
Liturgy of Ice, inspired by The Snow Queen, is here.
Both are dark and homoerotic. They were fun to write! Hopefully, the excerpts will entice you to buy them, (available in a variety of ebook formats).
Calling you, tears thaw my sleep
Wanting you, this hoary web is weaved
From this strange confusion
Grows a perverse communication
It enthralls me and coils me around
—“The Sweetest Chill,” by Siouxsie and the Banshees
“Liturgy of Ice,” dark, queer take on “The Snow Queen,” was partially inspired by the song “The Sweetest Chill” by Goth Ice Queen Siouxsie Sioux. It’s a beautifully unsettling ballad of romantic obsession, full of wintry images.
Music, of course, is one of my major obsessions, and my love for it spills over into my fiction. The first Variation took its title from Bat for Lashes first album, “Fur & Gold.”
Liturgy of Ice was inspired by one of my favorite fairytales, The Snow Queen. I use the fairytale imagery as a mediation isolation and loneliness.
Other inspirations: “The Sweetest Chill,” by Siouxsie & the Banshees; Philip Ridley’s novel In the Eyes of Mr. Fury.
It’s on Kindle here.
And the Kobo here.
It’s also on the Scribd platform as well: here.
This cover was created by Thomas Drymon, who has done cover art for a couple of my projects. I am very pleased. The back cover copy reads:
Magic is more than skin-deep. It hides in the folds of a haunted quilt, and it illuminates the secret histories of Negro memorabilia. It reveals the destiny of a great storyteller and emanates from a sculpture by an obscure Harlem Renaissance artist. It lurks in the basement of an inner-city apartment building and flourishes in a city park. Magic is more than skin-deep; it shimmers in the 10 stories in this collection.
The collection should be out sometime this summer from Rebel Satori Press.
My dark fairytale retelling, Fur & Gold, gets a lovely review:
Gidney presents a prequel of Beauty and the Beast, mining from the queer notes of Jean Cocteau’s work as a whole, and the fantastical breaking of boundaries. The Beast here is a more sinuous creature, both savage and beautiful, warring between animal instinct and fleeting grasps of humanity. There is a new sense of the curse from man to beast being an unknowing and tantalizing transgression, rather than a stock moral lesson. This is the start of a series of new fairy tales, so come back for more.
I am currently writing the second in this short series; the series is called Variations.
I’m publishing a series of stories, called Variations, on the KDP Direct Program. It’s a series that plays with fairytale motifs, with flourishes of horror. The first piece, to be published soon, is called Fur & Gold. It was inspired by Tanith Lee, Angela Carter, the music of Bat for Lashes, the art of Jean Cocteau and transgressive fiction of Jean Genet.
The cover credits are as follows:
Kindle cover art designed and composited by Tom Drymon, drymondesign; images © shutterstock.com, © Nejron Photo, © Willyam Bradberry.
Look for Fur & Gold this Monday (March 3, 2014)!
Tinkerwench is a horror story, written from the point of view of a club drug. It was written in the late 90s, when Ecstasy and Crystal Meth (or “Tina”) were in the gay club scene. At the time, my (ex) roommate was in the full swing of a meth addiction.
My story, Thy Father’s Lies, is now up on Wattpad. This is a postcolonial fantasy, a sort of prequel to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, told from the spirit Ariel’s point of view. Ariel is my favorite Shakespearean character, so in a way, this is a piece of fan fiction. Enjoy!
Craig Laurance Gidney 
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