The Psalms of Herod by Esther M. Friesner

I don’t collect books. Now that’s an introductory sentence to speak proud of. But no I do not collect books at all. I have over two thousand or so of the things but as a collector no that’s not my thing. See I see book collecting as some oddball hobby in which reasonably intelligent people spend unreasonably stupid amounts of money for a book that most likely will never have it’s spine broken in. Now tell me how much sense is there in that. So I don’t collect books at all. I buy them at used books stores, thrift stores, library sales, and flea markets. I buy them with covers missing, marked in, water damaged, and with receipts from 1965 in them. So I’m not a collector. Books are to be read and to be horded but not necessarily to be collected.

Now that’s an introductory paragraph to speak proud of.

I make that point to show you how unusual my Borealis collection is. To further instigate the strangeness let me further say that I have never been partial to a publisher. One publisher is like the other which is modeled after the same cookie cutter format. Which is find a genre that attracts the masses and glutton glutton glutton the market until the readership can not stand it anymore sending the business to a death trap of mediocrity. The alternative would be the small press of course which I need to get into sooner or later whenever I get the funds summed up. See you don’t get a lot of small press in Knoxville used books stores. Go figure.

But here’s how Borealis hit me. White Wolf had decided to publish fiction that was non-related to their World of Darkness gaming system. Vampires, Mages, Werewolves, and the Fae are all cool of course but I tend to steer away from stories that revolve around merchandising. It’s just me you know. Borealis was to be a house that would encourage strange storytelling from relatively unknown writers. The series was often dubbed “Dark Fantasy” but a more applicable tag would have been “Weirdly Wonderful”. Novels and stories went from Surrealistic Voyages in Clichéd Territories to Everyday Normal Weirdness. Thank you I just made those two tags up if you use them don’t forget to mention me.

Article Author: Celestial Dung

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