Well, we’re a little over halfway through the open reading period for Fungi, the anthology that I’m co-editing with Silvia Moreno-Garcia. If you’ve still got fungus stories to send in, you’ve got until February 15th to get them to us. (See the guidelines here.)

In the meantime, I’m going to talk a bit about what we’ve already seen in the slush so far, and what we’d like to see more of. Silvia already posted her take here, and I don’t know that I have a ton to add, but I’m going to post anyway, because I’m editing an anthology, dammit, and I’m very professional!

This is my first time reading for an anthology, and so I wasn’t really sure what to expect, and I don’t know how what we’ve gotten stacks up against other anthologies, or slush piles for magazines, or what-have-you. A couple of things I can say is: Please, please, please put your word count in your cover letter? And put your cover letter in the body of your email? I don’t know how other people feel about this, but those two things make life a lot easier on me, anyway.

I’d also like to second and reinforce Silvia’s mention that we’ve been getting way too many then-I-turned-into-a-mushroom-the-end stories. I like mushroom people as much as the next guy (more, obviously), but at this point there definitely needs to be something more going on in the story if we’re going to take it. I’ll also agree that I would love to see a mushroom noir, if anyone’s got it in them.

Anyway, I think it’s shaping up to be a really exciting anthology so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing what we get in the remaining days!

Fungi, the anthology of fungal fiction that I’m co-editing for Innsmouth Free Press, opened to submissions on Sunday, and on that very same day I came down with a bad cold. Coincidence? Probably, but it’s pretty inconvenient all the same. Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ve fallen too far behind on reading subs.

This is my first time reading slush, or editing an anthology for that matter, so I don’t have anything to compare it to, but it seems to be going well enough so far. That said, while I don’t want to fall any further behind, I definitely want to see fungus subs keep pouring into that inbox, so please, check out the full guidelines here, and if you’ve got something to submit, send it our way!

Less than a week to go before the start of the open reading period for Fungi, the anthology of weird fungal fiction (guidelines here) that I’ll be co-editing with Silvia Moreno-Garcia for Innsmouth Free Press. (The open reading period is January 15th through February 15th, in case you missed it.) I’ve already talked a little bit about what I’m hoping to see in the slush, but I promised that you’d be hearing more from  me before the reading period began about some of my favorite fungus stories and creatures, so, without further ado, let me talk about a few of those in brief.

Of course any discussion of weird fungal fiction pretty much has to start with William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night.” If you haven’t already read it, I’d definitely recommend giving it a look or, if you’re so inclined, a listen, since the fine folks at Pseudopod recently did a production of it. I also recommend checking out the Toho movie adaptation Matango (aka Attack of the Mushroom People, aka Fungus of Terror). It’s surprisingly effective, wonderfully bizarre, and a major favorite of mine. Also, it has some of the best fungus creatures you’re ever likely to find, especially in cinema, where fungus creatures experience a sad dearth.

Where is there not a dearth of fungus creatures, you might ask? Well, video games seem to boast a larger roster of them than just about anyplace else. One of my favorites of those are the “moldy corpse” enemies from Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. Described in the in-game bestiary as “A human consumed by evil after eating a cursed mushroom,” the moldy corpses look like purple zombies with blue hair who stumble toward you and then keel over, dropping to their hands and knees as giant, vibrantly-colored mushrooms burst from their back and they crawl forward under their new fungal weight.

I’m certainly not the only person fascinated by Hodgson and “The Voice in the Night.” I was actually turned on to Hodgson’s work by Mike Mignola, who has mentioned Hodgson many times, and put a couple of homages to Hodgson’s Sargasso Sea stories (and “Voice in the Night” specifically) in his comics. The first one was the Hellboy mini-series “The Island,” which was originally supposed to be much more Hodgson-inspired than the final product turned out to be. See the back matter of the Strange Places collection, where you can see pages from the uncompleted original version of “The Island,” which feature some really brilliant fungus people in all their Jack Kirby-by-way-of-Hanna-Barbera glory.

Mignola dipped back into the Hodgson fungus creature well with his first Baltimore comic mini-series, and from the looks of the covers we may be getting some more fungal horror from Mignola very soon in the forthcoming B.P.R.D. mini-series “The Pickens County Horror.”

That’s just a tiny sliver of the fungal stories and monsters I’ve enjoyed, without even dipping into things like myconids, the writings of Jeff VanderMeer, or short stories like Brian Lumley’s “Fruiting Bodies,” to name just a few, but hopefully it’s a place to start. I plan to update throughout the open reading period, giving some insight into the process and what I’m seeing in the slush, and I can’t wait to read as many fungal stories as possible, so if you’re on the fence about submitting, please, pile them on!

On the heels of the Fungi anthology guidelines, my co-editor Silvia Moreno-Garcia has made a post about what she’d like to see in the slush, and I figured it would behoove me to attempt something along similar lines. Mine will probably ramble more than hers, and be less immediately helpful and bullet-point-y, but hopefully it’ll be at least a little informative if you’re thinking of submitting to our little fungus anthology. (Please do!)

Silvia talked about wanting stories that straddle genre. (Steampunk, etc.) And yes, we definitely want those stories. But I also admit to having a soft spot for a good traditionally weird or supernatural tale, and I’d love to see some of those, too. There’s a lot of good places you can go with a science fiction-ish angle on a fungus story, but my particular partiality is for supernatural tales, so I’m hoping to see a good mix of those in the slush, too. If in doubt, aim for menacing and atmospheric and creepy, as well as fun and inventive, and you’ll probably hit my wheelhouse.

The stories that got me interested in this theme in the first place were William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” and the Japanese film adaptation of same Matango. So while we obviously can’t do an anthology of nothing but mushroom people (and wouldn’t if we could), I’ll be very sad if we don’t get at least a few stories along those lines. (Probably no danger of that.) I’ll also be talking sometime in the coming days about some of my favorite fungus monsters from books, movies, video games, etc.

But your fungus monsters certainly don’t have to fit the Hodgson mold (no pun intended) to pique my interest. Feel free to go nuts making the weirdest fungus creatures you can come up with. One of the world’s largest organisms is a fungus, just to give you an idea. Nor are we only looking for stories of fungus monsters. As long as fungus plays a prominent role, then odds are we’re interested in taking a look.

Okay, so that’s some of what I’m looking for. How about what I’m not looking for? I don’t want to go into that too much, because there’s no rule I can make that won’t find an exception if the right author is doing it, but here’s a couple of caveats:

Not necessarily Lovecraftian. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Lovecraft, but this being an Innsmouth Free Press book and Lovecraft’s work being as associated as it is with fungus, I don’t want to give the impression that this is Fungal Lovecraft that we’re doing here. Lovecraftian fungus stories certainly won’t be turned away at the door, and I’m expecting and even hoping to get a few, but don’t feel constrained to that. We’re looking for a wide range of weird fungal spookiness, so go to town.

Think twice about Cordyceps zombies. Again, I’m not saying don’t do them, but they’ve been all over the Internet lately, and I’ve already heard several people talking about them in relation to this anthology, so I have a feeling we’re going to get inundated with them. So if you’ve got a really killer Cordyceps zombie story, by all means, we want to see it, but just be warned that you’ll probably be part of a pretty big crowd.

Like Silvia, I won’t really know what I want until I see it, but this will hopefully help give an idea of where I’m coming from. Like I said, I’ll be posting in the coming days some more about some fungus creatures and stories of which I am particularly fond, and I’ll also try to give updates once the slush starts rolling in. As I’ve said before, this anthology is literally the culmination of a dream I’ve had for many years now, and so I’m very, very excited to see it come together. And if you have any questions or just want to talk fungi, please feel free to contact me here or at any of my various social networking whatevers.