Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2012

 Paula Guran's latest Year's Best roundup is now available, including "Vampire Lake" by yours truly. Bonus: This antho's also got a tale from my bride, Tia V. Travis ("Still"), so there's plenty of good reading from our casa contained between the covers.

While I'm at it, here's a chunk of an interview I did on the Prime Books website about the genesis of "Vampire Lake:"

PRIME: The mythology behind Vampire Lake is fantastic -- almost Lovecraftian -- as it constantly hints at something bigger and much worse, even though we never learn explicitly what that might be. How did you come up with this hellish setting and its inhabitants?

PARTRIDGE: The initial inspiration was a song of the same title by The Builders and the Butchers. It lit a fire under me. Of course, songs and stories are very different animals. Apart from the weird western aspect, "Vampire Lake" is at heart the tale of a quest. One of the great things about writing a quest story is designing the (in this case literal) hell through which your characters journey. I had fun riffing off legends of the Old West -- lost Conquistadors and hidden gold, etc. I tossed in an underground lake, albino gators, dead men made of shadows, and a vampire queen. Since I was writing about a cave, there was plenty of room down there and I did my best to fill it up...

To read the full interview, click here.

And to check out an interview with Tia about the genesis of "Still," click here.

Sawtooth Jack 2012

Here's the official 2012 October Boy that I carved up last night (note: I could probably explain the spirit-hand visitation in the lower right hand corner, but in keeping with the season I'll just say that some mysteries are best left unexplained). Not too many trick-or-treaters went nose-to-nose with this bad boy when he was encamped on the front porch, though. Rain rolled over the hill from Oakland early, and that (mostly) skunked the trick-or-treat action around here.

Hope you and yours had a great holiday. On the post-Halloween front, Joe Nazare of Macabre Republic is back in action, post-hurricane. He's posted an interview with me where we discuss Halloween, favorite Twilight Zone episodes, and Universal Monsters. As Joe says, "it's a cool six-pack to stave off any Halloween hangover," and you can check it out here.