The Battle Royale Slam Book by Nick Mamatas

“I’ve been thinking a lot about Egypt lately…”įor the rest, get Letters to Lovecraft from Stone Skin Press. Lurlene glanced back and forth between the two of them, and then stared meaningfully at Stewart.

He was there now, so Nashawna held her blondie in a napkin with her left hand.Īaron looked at Nashawna, and the black cat, and the blondie, and said, “Ha, that should be a brownie.” Which he did at the start of every meeting. She only felt safe, irrationally so, when Lurlene’s black cat jumped into her lap and made himself comfortable, and purred. It was hard to feel safe in a room with windows these days. They met in the basement for the same reason. Her husband kept guns, and that made the two men feel safer. The group met at her house, because she kept it neat and always offered snacks and soft drinks - diet soda pops and lemonade from a powder mix. It was, when all was said and done, more of a support group. This group, with its four women and two men, was not that group. People dedicated to getting to the bottom of what had happened, to setting the world aright. Philosophers and scientists, poets and soldiers. Maybe one of the groups was comprised of important people. Met once a month, to talk about it, three months running, like this group had. And if there were others, it stood to reason that they would have found one another, formed groups. It wouldn’t be fair if they were all alone, all alone with the unbelievable truth.Īnd statistically, it was impossible that the four people in this room - two women, two men - were the only ones who had noticed the great change. There were other groups all over the world, or so the members of the group would have liked to think. We now come to the haunting final piece of the collection, “The Semi-Finished Basement” by Nick Mamatas. Letters to Lovecraft is our newest genre-blending anthology of original fiction, and to give readers a taste of what they can expect we’ve been posting excerpts from each of the stories.

The Battle Royale Slam Book by Nick Mamatas