Tim Major joined the Luna family on the 1st of January, and we're delighted to have him with us! Tim's collection for the Harvester Series will be called And The House Lights Dim.
If you missed our initial post on the new Luna series, click here.
We asked Tim to tell us more about his collection:
"And The House Lights Dim is my first collection of short stories, which were written over a three-year period. They’re pretty diverse, spanning weird fiction, horror and SF – but I confess that when I wrote them they seemed more diverse than they really are. It was only recently that I realised just how prevalent particular themes have been in my writing: houses, homes and family.
Perhaps it’s no surprise. The earliest of the stories was written when my wife was pregnant with our first child; one of the novellas was written in a mad hurry in the weeks before his birth; nowadays I write in a fog of fatigue due to my second child’s sleepless nights. I think about family constantly and as a freelance editor I’m trapped in my home for the greater part of every day.
In this collection are stories about a sentient house overprotective of its new occupants, a supernatural Greenland shark that attacks a family via sound, a married couple alone on a lengthy space flight, two young girls who live in isolation and in fear of the world beyond their walls, a camping trip that turns a family feral, a post-apocalyptic Center Parcs, a man who has defragmented his mind and another who splices a rival’s brain patterns onto his own.
Most of the stories have been published in various places, including Interzone, Not One of Us, The Literary Hatchet and anthologies published by Fox Spirit, Jurassic London and Hic Dragones. ‘Carus & Mitch’ was previously published as a standalone novella by Omnium Gatherum and was shortlisted for a This Is Horror Award in 2015. People have been very nice about it: Lynda Rucker said it was a ‘compelling, unconventional page-turner… blending a John Wyndham-esque melancholy with a dose of existential despair’. Adam Roberts called it ‘punchy and scary and tense and genuinely moving’ and James Everington said it was ‘an intimate, original, and character-driven take on the post-apocalyptic genre’, all of which made me feel awfully proud."
Tim Major is a freelance editor and co-editor of the British Fantasy Society’s fiction journal, Horizons. His first novel, You Don’t Belong Here (Snowbooks, 2016), is a curious mix of time-travel SF and psychological horror. He has also published two novellas: Blighters (Abaddon, 2016) and Carus & Mitch (Omnium Gatherum, 2015) – the latter was shortlisted for a This Is Horror Award. His short stories have appeared in Interzone, Not One of Us, The Literary Hatchet and numerous anthologies. In 2018, his first novel for young adults will be published by ChiZine and his non-fiction book about the 1915 French silent crime serial, Les Vampires, will be published by Electric Dreamhouse Press.
Find out more at www.cosycatastrophes.wordpress.com
Tim joins an amazing group of writers: Paul Kane, Marie O'Regan, Stephen Bacon and Wole Talabi.