Goin’ supernatural

Though I’m still rather sad that John Connolly, a fairly popular writer (both in terms of books sold and rounds bought) won’t be attending Bouchercon this week, he has a fairly good reason: his latest project, the short story anthology NOCTURNES, is just out and he’s promoting it in and around his native Ireland. In a Q&A on his website, he talks about each of the stories and novellas in detail, how his childhood love of horror stories influenced the resulting collection (as well as his crime writing overall) and his expectations for the anthology:

Sometimes, I think writers publish a collection of short stories simply because they happen to have written a lot of them for various anthologies or publications, and it seems like quite an easy option to stick them all between covers and publish them. Other times, young writers use them as a calling card for their careers, or as a dry run for a novel. Nocturnes doesn’t really fit into either of these categories. It was planned. Stories were written especially for it, and there are thematic links between them.

I thought that putting together Nocturnes would be easy, as most of the stories were not very long, but in fact it was desperately hard, and I literally put years of effort into it. Each story was like working on a small novel, and as I’m an obsessive creator of new drafts I found myself rewriting each one over and over again, and worrying about tiny details in each. Even now, after cutting four stories from it, I still agonize over some of the choices that I made. Still, it was worth it. Nocturnes will never sell very many copies, but that was never the point. Some of the best work I’ve done is contained in its pages, and I’m proud of it, if it’s okay to admit to that.

As a longtime fan of Connolly’s stories (and truthfully, I like them better than his books) I’ve been really looking forward to this collection for some time. Though I think he’s right on about the fact that the prospective audience is quite limited, I’ve no doubt the right people will find it and take to these stories.

He’s also putting together a coda of several stories that didn’t make the final cut, but still wanted to make available in a limited edition. Never mind that, as he puts it, this is free stuff. Always works….