Among the yak nomads, rowdy, restless young have thrown themselves into a cult of were-beasts ridden by unknown spirits, and they stalk Goatskin.
They feel evil: evil by the lights of the intruder Temple, or by the banned old beliefs? And the shaman Goatskin searches for – a sad old man who set off on a quest his people call insane – what beast does he impossibly grapple?
In the starry high meadows, what inhabits the night? Whose evil?
My new novella from Brackenbury Books, What Rough Beast?, is out on June 15th.
You can pre-order now from the publisher’s website brackenburybooks.com
Every tale of Goatskin is a standalone — and I’m likely to urge people to start with the latest, since that’s what I’m most in love with — but events in this one do follow on from Waste Flowers, found in Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery, where I am back to back with a novella by Dariel R.A. Quiogue.
I’ve done a few interviews over the past six months, if you’d like to catch me on the new novella and Goatskin’s tales in general.
Rebecca Buchanan at Forests Haunted by Holiness, her pagan-themed blog
SE Lindberg at Blackgate, in his series on Beauty in Weird Fiction
Eric de Roulet at Sad but Building Worlds, in a joint interview with Dariel Quiogue and me around the subject ‘Writing Power Struggles on the Steppe’
As ever, my great thanks to Oliver Brackenbury, editor and publisher at Brackenbury Books and New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine. He is fantastic to work with, and has given my writing a new lease of life. And, forever, ginormous thanks to sister of the century — and last — Julie Bozza, without whom writing would not be writ, nor life lived.
Cover art by Goran Gligović, with a black & white frontispiece by Linnea Sterte and a map by Caster Jones