In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.
I signed up early for the Kickstarter campaign for the new anthology The Speculative Detective Agency: Case Files of the Supernatural and Fantastic, edited by Matthew David Goodwin and Richie Narvaez—and featuring a terrific line-up of authors across the genres of crime, horror, and science fiction, including Scott Alderberg, Frederick Aldama, Heather E. Ash, Megan Chee, Victor De Anda, Alex Grecian, Alex Hernandez, Monique Laban, Lincoln Michel, Richie Narvaez, Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos, Nadia Amina Rabbani, Karlo Yeager Rodriguez, Lekha Sen, Amber Sparks, and Martin Willis. Here’s the official description of the book—to give a sense of what’s in store:
The Speculative Detective Agency is a global organization of agents confronting cases that defy conventional logic: haunted environments that resist documentation; a Bloody Mary sighting at an elementary school; half a demon terrorizing a neighborhood; and an office staffed entirely by functional zombies. Released to the public for the first time, these cases create a mosaic of strange investigations filled with monsters, myths, and personal mysteries reflecting our fractured yet shared global reality where borders blur, consequences ripple, and no story exists in isolation.
To celebrate the new collection, publishing officially this week, we’re welcoming back Scott Adlerberg to the First Two Pages to talk about his story “The Case of the Singular Hands”—a story which also reaches back for at least some inspiration to the Victorian Era and author Sheridan Le Fanu, as you’ll learn in the essay below.
Scott is an amazing writer—not only of fiction but also of essays, on literature, film, and more. In addition to short fiction, he’s written five novels—Spiders and Flies, Jungle Horses, Graveyard Love, Jack Waters, and The Screaming Child—and he’s a regular contributor to CrimeReads and Mystery Tribune as well as the blog Do Some Damage.
We’ll be welcoming another contributor soon—and more new anthologies and collections to celebrate ahead too!
Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.
