Then There Was Underland Press

This news on the new Underland Press just in from Matt Staggs...

WE LIKE STORIES that scare us. We like the macabre-monsters and magic and men with nothing to lose. More than anything, we like to be intrigued and entertained.

UNDERLAND PRESS was started to bring the best of the world’s scary and strange stories to life and to light.

CALL IT THE NEW WEIRD, or fantasy, or dark fantasy. Call it what you want. We like reading by flashlight under the covers at night. We want to make books you can’t put down.

Web 2.0 is doing more than threatening the position of big bookstores and providing a new platform for text distribution. It is changing the type of books readers decide to pick up, said Victoria Blake, founder and publisher of Underland Press.

"Everything's changing," Blake said, "and definitely not for the worse. Books now are where music was in 1996. Ready and primed to break."

No, the change isn't going to be e-readers or free PDF's, though that's part of it, Blake said. The change is the way readers find and buy their books. 

"I can't tell you how many books I've found by searching for online recommendations. The 'If you like this, you'll like X' function doesn't care about BISAC codes," she said. "That's very cool."

Blake started Underland Press—which she calls an "in print, online publisher"—because she believes in the power of this new, hungry and curious readership. 
"I have an idea that American fiction has been in a very domestic mode since Raymond Carver, or maybe before," Blake continued. "For 60 years, at least, our literary voices have told story after story about suburban life and angst, about affairs, about divorce," said Blake. "I love those stories - I grew up with them - but from where I stand now I believe there is about to be a sea-change. I think there's a reason why Cormac McCarthy's The Road hit as big as it did: readers and writers are hungry for something a little different."

Blake, who will graduate with an MFA from the Warren Wilson program for writers this winter, plans for Underland Press to be in a position to satisfy this hunger with fiction that she calls, "weird, strange, odd, and unsettling." 

"That's how new this is," she says, with a laugh. "There's no good name for it yet."

Whatever you call it--dark fantasy, slipstream, new fabulism, new weird–Blake feels that literature like this offers more than just cheap thrills. "I'm a fan of books that combine the best of genre writing, which is the imagination and the plot drive, with the best of literary writing, which is character and language focus," she said. "Fiction like this can be revelatory; it can tell us something about ourselves, what we're afraid of, and why."

Blake believes strongly enough in her personal vision that she left an editorial position with Dark Horse, one of the largest independent publishers of comic books and fiction in the world to strike out on her own.

 "I worked for Dark Horse for three years, handling their Aliens, Predator, Lankhmar, and Playboy series, as well as some one-off original fiction titles," Blake recalled. "I decided to branch out on my own when I read Brian Evenson's novella The Brotherhood of Mutilation. I was blown away. I thought it needed to be brought into the world."

Evenson's novella grew into a full-length novel called Last Days, and will be the first book released by Underland Press. Scheduled for February 2009, it will be released simultaneously with The Pilo Family Circus by Will Elliot. Both books will be followed by Chaos by Escober in the spring, and Finch by Jeff VanderMeer in the fall.

In the meantime, Blake has launched the world's first "wovel," a web novel where readers decide the plot—a choose your own adventure tale for the 2.0 world. Written by Kealan Patrick Burke, The Living is a zombie tale turned on its ear: the story of a living–dead protagonist pursued by hordes of remorseless human killers.

"The readers participate in the plot development of the book," said Blake. "The author posts an installment every Monday with a binary plot point at the end. Will the heroine kill her lover? Is the box empty, or is it filled with bees? The reader votes to decide, voting is open until Thursday, and the author writes a new installment over the weekend for a reposting on Monday morning, just in time for work."

Blake describes the wovel as the first of several projects from Underland Press that will use the interactivity of the Internet in an effort to support and augment quality fiction.

Although there are still some months to go until the first of Underland Press' books appear on bookshelves around the world, readers can check out Kealan Patrick Burke's The Living and get the latest news from Underland Press at www.underlandpress.com.

And read their blog at http://www.underlandpress.com/blog.cfm.