Now in our new weekly format Episode 19 of the Weird Tales Radio Show (24th May 2018) is our Royal Weddings edition, everything from Anne Boleyn losing her head to giant cheeses. We’ve also some weird Whitsun folklore + a tale of treachery at St Benet’s Abbey + we go urban mythbusting with the saga of the Buntline Special from the American Old West + the worst man in the world? No, not the inventor of the duvet cover but Tom Midgley. Er, Tom Who?

Click on the <player> button below or find the show on iTunes, YouTube and all the usual podcast platforms.

Last Sunday, the 21st May, was Whit Sunday and we are now in Whitsun or Whit Week. Technically it's the Christian festival of the Pentecost and takes place on the seventh Sunday after Easter and it used to be a time of public holiday and festivals here in the UK. At least it was until 1972 when it was replaced by the Spring Bank Holiday on the last Monday of May.

Naturally Whitsun has its own peculiar folklore. For example in rural areas of Cambridge, Whit Sunday was the day for eating the first gooseberry pie of the year. However, and this is a particularly weird one. You know that old nursery rhyme Monday’s Child, which ends with the lines 

And the child that is born on the Sabbath day. 
Is bonny and blithe and good and gay

Except apparently if the child is born on Whit Sunday where tradition holds that such a child is doomed either to kill or be killed. Apparently this fate can only be averted by going through a mock funeral ceremony for the child or squashing an insect in the child’s hand!

Houston poet  (and Grievous Angel contributor) Holly Lyn Walrath announces that her first chapbook of poetry Glimmerglass Girl is to be published by Finishing Line Press on 3rd August 2018. Pre-orders end 3rd June. We are planning to interview Holly for an upcoming episode of the Weird Tales Radio Show. Here are some of the early reviews...

• VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts calls Glimmerglass Girl "...an intersection between ethereal loftiness, humorous speculation, and poignant consideration ...a collection of poetry and images that encourage readers to be more than they perceive themselves to be.” 

• Poet Karen An-hwei Lee, author of Phylo of Joy, Ardor, and In Medias Res, calls it “A marvelous mix of toughness and tenderness. In a shimmering world at once ‘honey-brimmed and buzzing,’ where ‘blueberry coffee’ and a ‘kissing prayer,’ or a ‘quiet mess of a body of light’ offer diurnal delights, this book is a wildly chimerical gathering of hybridized fairy tales and fabulous meditations on womanhood.” 

Holly Lyn Walrath’s poetry and short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Luna Station Quarterly, Grievous Angel, Liminality, and elsewhere. She holds a B.A. in English from The University of Texas and a Master’s in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. She is a freelance editor and host of The Weird Circular, an enewsletter for writers containing submission calls and writing prompts. You can find her canoeing the bayou in Seabrook, Texas, on Twitter @HollyLynWalrath, or at www.hlwalrath.com

We're off now to ​the church of St Mary the Virgin in the village of Burgh St Peter, not far from the Urban Fantasist office here in Norfolk’s Waveney Valley.

This church is famous for three things. The first is it’s five stage square tower, which looks a little like a wedding cake but was actually inspired by the design of the Ancient Mesopotamian ziggurats. Apparently local residents used to tell visitors on boating holidays on the nearby Norfolk Broads that the tower could be extended and contracted like a telescope, and was lowered during the winter and only raised again during the summer to provide a handy landmark for visitors.

The second claim to fame is that during the 18th and 19th centuries, five successive generations of the same family - the Boycott family - served as rectors (or priests) at this church. Unfortunately the family is now best known for the son, Charles Boycott, who did not take holy orders but instead became a land agent – in effect a landlord’s enforcer – in Ireland.

Unfortunately his time in Ireland coincided with a rise in Irish nationalism and civil disobedience so when he issued eviction notices against several tenants, he found himself ostracised by the local community and the subject of widespread opposition. In fact the situation became so bad that local shops would not sell to him and even the local post office stopped forwarding him telegrams. Eventually Charles Boycott and his family, protected by a troop of cavalry, had to flee Ireland and return to England.

He should have stayed at home and become a vicar and I doubt it was much consolation for him to know that the verb “to boycott” meaning the refusal to buy or provide goods and services as a means of protest, would be coined from his name.

And then we have the church’s third claim to fame: its ghost. Or should that be doomed spirit trapped for all eternity in a churchyard porch?

This is an intriguing story as the legend holds that the church’s original builder, an Adam Morland, sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge and wisdom on how to complete the construction of the building. When he died – it was on the 2nd of May – he was buried within the church itself, so the Devil could not seize his soul. However his spirit is now trapped within the building – because he sold his soul, the spirit cannot rise up to Heaven but if it strays outside, it will be dragged away to Hell.

So now, once a year, every t2nd of May, the builder’s ghost – reduced now to a skeleton in a raggedy shroud – can be seen flitting around the church porch (which is holy ground) and therefore protected, peering out to see if the Devil has finally given up waiting to enforce the demonic pact the builder so foolishly signed all those centuries ago.

The judges have decided and we now have a winner for the SCI-FI-LONDON Urban Fantasist 2018 48 Hour Flash Fiction Challenge... 

1st Place: Survival Mechanism by Natalie Dixon

2nd Place: All My Blood by Simon Bennett 

3rd Place: The Charm by Bethan James

A BIG THANK YOU to all our 500+ participants AND to our lovely judges AND to Louis Savy and the Sci-Fi-London team who organised the technology.

We'll be published the winning entries over the next few weeks.

This year is my second (and final) year as a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction literature and I'm pleased to report we now have a shortlist of six excellent, but also widely different, books:

Sea of Rust - C. Robert Cargill (Gollancz)

Dreams Before the Start of Time - Anne Charnock (47North)

American War - Omar El Akkad (Picador)

Spaceman of Bohemia - Jaroslav Kalfar (Sceptre)

Gather the Daughters - Jennie Melamed (Tinder Press)

Borne - Jeff VanderMeer (Fourth Estate)
 
Here's the official announcement:

“If you are new to reading the genre, each of these tremendous novels can demonstrate what sf is capable of. It’s unusual that none of the writers have been on the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist before, although a number of them have been contenders in previous years. We also have authors who have written in other fields or genres and it’s especially exciting to be able to draw attention to debut novelists. At the moment, any of the six could emerge as the winner."
...Chair of Judges, Dr Andrew M. Butler

“In this year’s shortlist we see themes of climate change, human hubris and gender politics writ large, alongside alien encounters, apocalyptic robot armies and genetically engineered flying bears (often in the same book). With over 100 novels in contention again this year, and strong submissions from across the full range of UK publishing, our judging panel accepted an epic challenge in selecting these six works from the many excellent and often hotly tipped titles they received.

“The result is a shortlist forged from passionate debate and compelling contrasts but with little by way of compromise and shaped always by the purposeful intent and vision of our judges. I strongly suspect in future years that this will be a shortlist long remembered as a vintage year for the ArthuC. Clarke Award and for science fiction literature.”
...Award Director, Tom Hunter

A huge thank you to our judging panel and their supporting organisations!        
* Dave Hutchinson, British Science Fiction Association
* Gaie Sebold, British Science Fiction Association
* Paul March-Russell, Science Fiction Foundation
* Dr Kari Maund, Science Fiction Foundation
* Charles Christian, SCI-FI-LONDON film festival    

The winner will be announced at a public award ceremony held in partnership with Foyles Bookshop, Charing Cross Road, London on Wednesday 18th July 2018. In the meantime I'm re-reading all six.

Tonight (Wednesday 2nd May) the results of the SCI-FI-LONDON/Urban Fantasist 2018 48 Hour Flash Fiction Challenge will be announced. We'll have the results on this site tomorrow (and we'll also be publishing the first, second and third entries over the coming weeks) but, in the meantime, let's meet the judges...

Charles Christian (chair) curates the Urban Fantasist website and hosts the Weird Tales Radio Show podcast series. A journalist and blogger, he is the author of the best selling creative writing guide Creating Imaginary Worlds: The 12 Rules. For the past two years he has also served as a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Science Fiction Literature Award.

The Jury

Dr Una McCormack is a New York Times bestselling author of science fiction, an academic, and Co-Director of the Anglia Ruskin Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy. In 2017 she was a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her most recent novels are The Baba Yaga, The Star of the Sea, and Star Trek Deep Space Nine: The Crimson Shadow.

Jonathan Pinnock is the author of several books, including the novel Mrs Darcy Versus the Aliens (Proxima, 2011) and the short story collections Dot Dash (Salt, 2012) and Dip Flash (Cultured Llama, 2018).

Marie O’Regan is a British Fantasy Award-nominated author and editor, and the co-chair of the Horror Writers Association’s UK Chapter. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of genre magazines and anthologies in the UK, US, Canada, Italy and Germany. She is co-editor of the bestselling Hellbound Hearts, Mammoth Book of Body Horror and A Carnivàle of Horror – Dark Tales from the Fairground, plus editor of bestselling The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women and Phantoms, the forthcoming ghost story anthology from Titan Books.