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Hinterlands Annual #1 Release and Notes

It’s been almost a month since the last blog post, and originally this blog post was supposed to follow up the digital release of Hinterlands Annual #1 but I had a few weeks where I struggled to make myself work on my projects. More importantly, my first draft of this blog post was ultimately unpublishable. Alas! So I'm whipping this up on the spur of the moment because I wanted to put a little something out there to celebrate getting this behemoth short story collection of a zine out the door, after it consumed something like eight months of my life. Maybe nine.

Before we go any further I should remind you that if you don't have a copy of The Hinterlands Annual #1 you can get it here.

As a little bit of background, you should know that this zine was planned as a special halloween short story collection meant to be released in October 2025. It dragged on and on and became something hanging over me for months, so I have mixed feelings about it as a project, but I’m very glad that it’s finished, and I think the final product is something I can be proud of even if there are lots of things I’d do differently in hindsight.

Okay, enough rambling: here are some notes about the stories in the collection, because despite my desire to be a David Lynch or Gene Wolfe type artist who lets his work talk for itself, I grew up in love with commentary tracks and I’m giving myself the chance to make a small one of my own as a treat.

Corvus Ergo Sum & Hyperfixation

These two stories were written as part of horror fiction writing project in 2023, and were the first real posts on this blog. I don’t recommend going back and reading the original versions, as they’re literally first drafts and the versions in the zine are much improved, but I don’t want to take them down either, because they represent an important milestone to me in pushing myself to get back to doing the creative work that I always wished I was doing. I had a long fallow period when I started my first serious job in 2017/2018, where I basically stopped writing and reading for as long as five years. Around 2021 I started making a plan to begin writing again (which had to start with reading again – you can’t write if all you do is play video games and watch movies), and eventually the result was these two stories from October 2023. As a result, I have a special affection for them.

Both stories are infused with isolation, paranoia, and a feeling of disconnection from other human beings. Hyperfixation in particular was inspired by a first viewing of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (1997)

Really can't describe how big of an impact this movie had on me. Always hoping it'll come around in theatres some time. It can be difficult bringing inspiration from visual media into written fiction because so much of what is so effective in a film can't be reduced to words, so you need to find another way to capture the thoughts and emotions that the source material instilled in you. (movies, as many literary types are unaware, are not just scripts that are then acted out and photographed as an afterthought - the pictures are the thing)

The Great Parade

This is the oldest story in the collection, originally written in 2016. I’m really glad its in here, because it functions as a bridge between two eras of my writing life, the era in which I was writing regularly in my teens and early 20s, beginning to have things published (in very small publications), and felt like I was on track to go somewhere, and this current era where I had to humble myself and abandon my ego entirely to convince myself it was okay to write again, accepting that my work would be bad for a long time before it was good. And so having this story, which I liked when I wrote it and still like now (especially after putting it through a few rounds of edits), gives me a feeling of continuity between these two versions of myself. I am fulfilling a promise I made to myself when I was younger that seemed like it had been irretrievably broken for many years.

I should also mention that only now, a decade later, have I realized that this story is very heavily inspired by The Ninth Skeleton by Clark Ashton Smith, a writer I was very interested in when I was deep in the Weird Tales obsession of my late teens. I mostly stuck to Lovecraft, but this Smith story clearly left a deep impression on me, being woven into this new idea many years after reading it.

Skeletons are really fucking hard to draw, especially if you are very bad at drawing like me. So many little details, so much proportion, it's a nightmare. I used this image as a reference repeatedly which was probably a mistake because it resulted in me constantly comparing myself to Warhammer artist Adrian Smith, one of the all time greats at this sort of thing. Damn those skeletons look sick though. I love skeletons!

Death Pool

I started this story in January 2024 after the release of the horror film Night Swim. It was one of those terrible horror movies that they drop in the doldrums of the early new year because even a bad horror movie can be relied on to make some money if there’s nothing else on and it’s too cold to do anything outside. I was so offended that the perfectly good and serviceable idea of a movie about a haunted pool had been wasted on what was by all accounts a dull and unimaginative box ticking exercise to extract money from bored teenagers that I decided to write my own haunted pool story. Since I was determined that the story should be About Something, I aligned the story with the evils of suburbs. The pool is haunted by the spectre of north american car-centric sprawl (I feel a little ashamed of flatly stating the ‘point’ of the story, but first, it’s not particularly subtle in the text, second, like all stories, it’s more complicated than that, and third, the opinion of the author is simply more text to be interpreted by the reader – it’s possible and inevitable that I have embedded the story with more meaning(s) than I intended).

Anyway, I ultimately wrote a little less than half of the story in 2024 before abandoning it until I picked it up as something I could fix up to round out this collection in 2025. It’s a fairly silly story, but it was a fun exercise and I’m proud of myself for going back to an abandoned story and finishing it

I've never actually seen this movie but I ripped off and misremembered the title for Death Pool's subtitle. I don't think I ended up capturing any of this gonzo tone though, it ends up feeling like a bit more of a somber YA dark fantasy/fairytale thing. Maybe I need to challenge myself to rewrite the story like it's for a Larry Cohen movie.

The Transaction

This is the only story in the collection that was entirely written in 2025, even though I wrote about 30,000 words of new horror fiction material last fall that was under consideration for inclusion in the zine. Ultimately I had enough older stories ready to go that I only included this one, as it was pretty short and therefore easy to edit and include without increasing the amount of work for myself too much. (The remaining 3 longer stories are still sitting in my to-do basket waiting for edits).

I definitely wasn’t thinking about Weapons when I did a witch story, and more likely I was influenced by the commonality of doppelgangers in horror fiction. Us, Annihilation, basically everything by David Lynch...obviously this story isn’t of that calibre, but doppelganger fiction had a big influence on this story.

Ironically I read this after writing this story. Obviously there's a lot of politics stuff in here, long sections on Steve Bannon etc, but I think the cultural history examining the history of doppelgangers in fiction and philosophy is really interesting and something I'll be thinking about for a long time. As Klein points out, the original doppelganger is the idea of the soul. Now that's an idea you can write horror fiction with!

Well, that’s all the stories in the zine! I’m still deciding what to do with the next annual zine. I’ve decided not to do a full short story collection, as I think I need to take the next step and start submitting my best stories for publication instead of self-publishing them all in these home-made zines. I’m going to continue to publish some fiction in all my zines, and I think the next annual will definitely have more than one story, and longer stories as well, but I haven’t decided exactly what that will look like yet.

On the monthly zine front my slow August means Hinterlands Annual #2 may end up being a Fall zine instead of a summer zine – (all my zines are annual zines). What a disaster. Still, I have lots of ideas for more zines and I just need to get my mind and body moving in the same direction and the work will follow. Keep an eye open for more of my projects coming your way.

Links and Recommendations:

• The Hobbit X Roadside Picnic TTRPG: I haven't featured a roleplaying blog here in a while, largely because I fell off of reading my RSS feed (oops), but I checked back in this week and was delighted by this series by Rise Up Comus treating the Smaug infested Lonely Mountain of the Hobbit like The Zone from Roadside Picnic/Stalker. Really good stuff.
• I read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller last week and it is a masterpiece, sure to be high on my year end list.
• I finally started Malazan after picking up a gorgeous hardcover copy of Gardens of the Moon a decade ago. It didn't grab me right away but once I sunk into the rhythm I ended up really high on it. Looking forward to reading more of the series.

In case you didn't read this blog, Hinterlands Annual #1 is available here.

My month of malaise has delayed the release of a new youtube video, but the last one is still here if you haven't seen it yet. Hoping to start putting these out consistently.

Okay bye!