Excerpts From The Upcoming Occult Detective Quarterly #6

An Announcement

Ladies and Gentlemen! Announcing an exciting upcoming publication: Occult Detective Quarterly #6. This is a quarterly magazine that publishes occult detective stories–exclusively. What is an occult detective story, you ask? It is (and this sounds pretty obvious, now that I’m typing it) a story featuring an occult detective. A detective, that is, who investigates the occult. Yes. I can hear you being unsurprised from here.

Enough with petty definitions! On to the two exciting things I want to tell you.

The first thing: a story of mine will be included in Occult Detective Quarterly #6! Huzzah! It features the same character, Simon Wake, Edwardian occult detective, who appeared in Occult Detective Quarterly #3. At the bottom of this post, please view a Portrait of the Authoress As Simon Wake. No, please do it. The make-up and the posing and the lighting took hours.

The second thing: I have been given permission to give you a preview of some of the exciting material that will be included in Occult Detective Quarterly #6. Here it is, quoted from ODQ-editor John Linwood Grant‘s Facebook post:

The Excerpts:

A dark contemporary novelette by Bryce Beattie – ‘The Unsummoning of Urb Tc’leth’. “I had been smitten from the first moment I laid eyes on her. Now I’d finally get a chance to see her again. Of course, the last time I saw her, a smoke demon had exited her body via her eyes. It was my first and most visceral experience with the occult. I hadn’t heard from her since that day, despite a flurry of texts sent over the ensuing week or two. She had just disappeared.”

The return of Melanie Atherton Allen’s great period character Simon Wake, last seen in ODQ #3, in ‘The Rending Veil’. “I’d allowed myself to be persuaded into answering Wake’s summons, but only in order to cut him. Looking at him now, I saw he was sadly changed. His black hair was too long, and terribly tangled. His suit, which had been a good one, bore signs of ill-use. His eyes were wild, as if with the memory of a thousand opium dreams. And he was fearfully thin.”

A fascinating story by John Paul Fitch, ‘Angelus’. “The report kept cutting to show grainy camera footage of streaks of light in the night sky. Hysterical crowds of people milled in the streets, panicked masses were flocking to churches, who welcomed them with open arms and smiles. The camera focussed on a placard that read “THE SECOND COMING IS NIGH.” The reporter pushed his way through the crowd. The camera panned across the gathering fanatics and settled on a minister who implored the crowd to remain calm. The congregation responded to his every gesture, like a seething ball of cobras hypnotised to submission by a snake charmer.”

The Moral:

Need I be explicit? If people do not buy literary magazines, they wither and die. In my opinion (and not just because they’re publishing my story), Occult Detective Quarterly is a great publication, and lots of fun, and deserves to be read, and you should buy copies now. I could work the guilt angle harder, but why be tedious? This is a genuinely fun thing, and you’re going to love it. So… buy a copy of ODQ today! You can’t have ODQ #6 yet, because it isn’t ready, but you could buy some of the older issues. For example, you can buy Occult Detective Quarterly #3, featuring, among other excellent stories, my first Simon Wake story, right here.

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3 Comments

  1. I shall be receiving my copy by this coming Wednesday. With the AtoZ over on Tuesday, I will have time to visit my reading uninterrupted by the time it arrives.

    One more day.

  2. Pingback: Short walk #71 – A short walk down a dark street

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