Following the success of their first publishing endeavor last year—the collection You Shall Never Know Security by J. R. Hamantaschen—West Pigeon Press is back with its second ambitious volume, an anthology of fifteen dark and personal tales titled For When the Veil Drops.

From their website:  http://www.westpigeonpress.com/for-when-the-veil-drops/

“West Pigeon Press is honored to present its newest anthology, a collection of resonant, unbridled dark fiction.  Unburdened by genre and disparate in subject, these stories find common cause in their emphasis on mood, style, intelligence, and emotional depth….

Featuring all new stories by A. A. Garrison, Paul L. Bates, Bryan Brown, Robin Wyatt Dunn, J. R. Hamantaschen, Christian Larsen, B.V. Lawson, Samuel Minier, Nick Medina, Doug Murano, Joshua Clark Orkin, Yarrow Paisley, Lydia Peever, Michael Trudeau, and Michael Wehunt.…”

This collection includes an oddity of mine, surely inspired by the wasting death of my wife, Nancy, at age 53 from cancer and the attending medical freak show which accompanied it. “St. Mollusks” may well be the purging of the pent up frustration and rage the entire two and a half year experience engendered.  Whatever it is, I literally wrote half of it in a dream, awoke to transcribe and complete the first draft in the wee hours, making every effort to remain faithful to both the tone and the logic of the dream version.  I rewrote the tale several times over the course of five years, expanding and polishing it from 1900 to 2500 words, a simmering seething prose poem.

As a story, “St. Mollusks” is unquestionably a departure from the norm as there is neither protagonist—unless an institution can constitute a protagonist—nor plot—unless a series of hypothetical situations and random histories strung together like bones on a shaman’s necklace may be considered a plot.  Nevertheless it remains a coherent whole, celebrating the inevitable triumph of medical science in the (thankfully) unlikely event that such an utterly warped horror should ever come to pass.

T.O.C.

• “724″ by Christian A. Larsen
•  “The Chopping Block” by Doug Murano
• “The Persistence of Frondu” by Yarrow Paisley
• “Bless You” by C. Bryan Brown
• “A Coat that Fell” by Michael Wehunt
• “The City Underneath” by Robin Wyatt Dunn
• “Beside Still Waters” by B.V. Lawson
• “The Condition She’s In” by Nick Medina
• “St. Mollusks” by Paul L. Bates
• “Thicker Than” by Lydia Peever
• “The Third List” by Samuel Minier
• “Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened Here” by A.A. Garrison
• “Oh Abel, Oh Absalom” by J.R. Hamantaschen
• “Misery Don’t Wait on Me” by Joshua Clark Orkin
• “Still Life” by Michael Trudeau

Available from:  http://www.amazon.com/When-Veil-Drops-Pigeon-Press/dp/1478387807/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1352168755&sr=8-1&keywords=%22for+when+the+veil+drops%22

©   Paul L. Bates  2012