Books published by Hippocampus Press

Like Carlos Fuentes's The Old Gringo, this absorbing novel...tracks Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) south of the border as the American journalist and short story writer journeys with Pancho Villa into the maelstrom of the Mexican Revolution... Fans of Bierce's writing should enjoy this semibiographical tale with a suspenseful plot as wild as some of his more fantastical works.-Publishers Weekly In The Assassination of Ambrose Bierce: A Love Story, expect to be entertained - to laugh and sneer and shiver - expect to think - on life, on death, on love - and expect to feel - pain, anger, desire - but most importantly, expect to find out what happened to Ambrose Bierce when he left his home without looking back, and faded into the white dust of Mexico.> This novel is a fiction based on Ambrose Bierce, who mysteriously vanished in Mexico in 1913. In summary: The 71-year-old Bierce crosses into revolutionary Mexico where he encounters Pancho Villa. Not only does Bierce save Pancho's life but develops a close relationship with the bandito-supremo. Dreaming of death and reliving the past, Bierce accompanies Pancho through exhilarating war-time adventures until the two men find themselves in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1915. There, Bierce meets a handsome young widow, and discovers he still has the capability of falling in love, despite the difference in their ages. Through flashbacks and literary digressions the reader learns about Bierce's turbulent early life and his associations with such historical figures as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, William Gladstone, Oscar Wilde, Theodore Roosevelt, P.T. Barnum, and William Randolph Hearst. The reader also sees Bierce's development as a chronicler of the horrors of the Civil War, his conversion into a cynic and misanthrope, his role as a major literary arbiter, and finally as a man who learns to love in his twilight years.

This eighth issue of Spectral Realms features a diverse array of poetry from the pens of such acclaimed poets as Adam Bolivar, Ashley Dioses, K. A. Opperman, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Ann K. Schwader, John Shirley, and Richard L. Tierney. Wade German contributes a cycle of four evocative poems, "The Nightmares"; Manuel Pérez-Campos, with "The Vortex That Ate Poseidonis," pays tribute to the memory of Clark Ashton Smith; Liam Garriock, a promising young writer from Scotland, contributes the moving prose-poems "The Spirit of the Place" and "Past, Present, and Future"; Charles Lovecraft pays homage to his namesake in "The King of Horrors, Howard Phillips Lovecraft"; in "The Final Masquerade," Alan Gullette turns the King in Yellow mythos upside down; and Mary Krawczak Wilson channels Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth" in "Sea Creatures." Among the classic reprints is a poem by Farnsworth Wright, longtime editor of Weird Tales, published in that immortal pulp magazine under a pseudonym; and Arthur O'Shaughnessy's chilling "To a Young Murderess." Frank Coffman contributes a long and incisive analysis, "Verse vs. Free Verse," in which the virtues and failings of free verse are keenly dissected. Sunni K Brock reviews Christina Sng's scintillating volume A Collection of Nightmares, and Leigh Blackmore assesses the many strengths of Michael Fantina's Alchemy of Dreams. Once again, Spectral Realms #8 is a testament to the remarkable renaissance of weird poetry in our time.