Nova Scotia Vol 2 anthology, edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson, is now available to order! It celebrates the depth and breadth of Scotland's dazzling science fiction and fantasy landscape from its haunted islands to its transformed cities and everything in between. Jenni Coutts created the gorgeous cover art.
You can order the book on its own, or buy the bundle anthology deal - both from the Luna store.
Today we'd like to introduce you to Ali Maloney and the story "Grimaldo The Weeping".
About the author:
Ali Maloney was raised with video nasties in the news and Batman licensed as a breakfast cereal... and it shows.
He is a writer/performer, trained clown, and Agile Coach. Most recently, he devised a particularly noisy and body-horror-ific adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis of which Contemporary Puppetry said is "no mere imitation of familiar text but growls and purrs with new ferocity." A tour of this is currently being planned for 2025. His ritualistic horror podcast, CALEDONIAN GOTHIC, is preparing to launch season 2. Past theatre shows include the bleak panto of RATCATCHER and the diluvial romp of HYDRONOMICON. He has performed on stages as diverse as T In The Park and the Sonic Arts Expo in Plymouth; from live sessions on New York's top alternative radio station, WFMU, to Edinburgh and Glasgow Horror Festivals. Recent writing credits include Haunted Voices (Haunt Publishing) and a non-fiction piece in So Hormonal (Monstrous Regiment).
Ali on the story:
In some long distant draft, this was for a Kurt Vonnegut tribute anthology. In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, only skills have currency. A storyteller wanders from settlement to settlement, looking to trade tales, tall and true, for food and shelter. It was a downer for writers everywhere.In another long distant draft, this was a creative response to Al Seed’s spoken word / bouffon stage show, “The Fooligan”. This sought to expand upon its themes, themselves indebted to Arabian Nights; a ficto-critical review of sorts.
In yet another long distant draft, this was a playful romp through the intoxicating worldbuilding of weird fantasy. A sandbox of worldbuilding, it stretched tendons and biomechanical contraptions between Bosch, Burroughs, and Beksinski.
As with all writers, these ideas and drafts – written on Post-It notes, the backs of bills, notebooks, and a constantly running Google Doc – expanded and contracted, combined and clashed, subdivided and multiplied. It simmered…somewhere in the back of my mind.
Every writer should know the answers to “why this story?”, “why now?”, and “why this way?” More so, how can a narrator who may not be able to read or write tell this story? The solution to that made its structure clear and formed the nucleus of everything that could or might happen in Grimaldo the Weeping.
It is my personal favourite out of everything I have written. It touches upon so much of what I want to do with words. It speaks to the fetishisation of the aesthetics of religion; of second guessing the desires and needs held by the object of worship. There is the excess of wild imagery made possible by genre; a parade of wonderful and strange characters. As with almost all my writing, there are clowns and burlap — the latter, arguably, the most folk horror of all fabrics.
It was very nearly a stage show and this energy makes it a fun story to read, complete with mime gestures and aping the hulking clown god’s exhausted slumber.
With so much of my work, I am fascinated by making the act of engaging with a story, as reader or audience, to be part of the story’s world itself. I enjoy stories that seep off the page. I hope Grimaldo the Weeping’s final denouement makes the ramifications of hearing this story dawn terribly upon the reader.
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