Occult Detective Magazine #11
Welcome back to the world of Occult Detective Magazine. We have a great issue for you, our biggest yet, packed full of terrific fiction and reviews. And for those who haven’t been with us before, it may be worth saying that ODM is not a place for endless pastiches and rewrites of tired tropes. Our mission is to stretch, fold, twist and mutilate the idea of the Occult Detective, to show off the sheer breadth of the sub-genre. We therefore espouse all manner of literary, noir, folk horror, weird, horror, pulp and parody fictions – unashamedly.
So… what do we have this time? A brand new novella by Dave Jeffery. ‘A Strange Case Of Something Familiar’ – exclusive to ODM – is the first story in Dave’s latest series, Clutterbuck & Postlethwaite Investigate, and is a stimulating tale of wit and witchery. Surrounding that, we have some very different investigative tales. John Guy Collick provides ‘The Gardens Of Consamo Braque’, a dark fantasy, whilst ‘Binnorie, Binnorie’ by Rowena Spring is a contemporary police procedural with a most unusual witness.
Brandon Barrows returns to our pages with one of his supernatural/spiritual mysteries set in modern-day Japan, ‘Twilight Komorebi’, and I.A. Watson’s popular Vinnie de Soth is once more engaged in one of his weird cases as he unlocks the secrets of Charnwood Orphanage in ‘Vinnie de Soth and the Lost Generation’. Then we have ‘Where Birds Go to Die’ (set in Australia) by an author new to us, Charles Spiteri; a troubling and brutal story of drug experimentation gone bad in Thomas Hunt’s ‘Nobody Man’, and ‘The Boleskine House Affair’ by Jude Reid, featuring a meeting between her character Hilda Roxburgh and the Aleister Crowley. Plus a murder, naturally.
Rhys Hughes, know for his surrealistic tendencies, brings us the distinctly odd ‘The Ultimate Shape’, a Nathan Gesture adventure, and in John Llewellyn Probert’s ‘Fae From The Madding Crowd’, John Glory looks into a most peculiar case which seems to involve a changeling.
We end this issue with a tribute to our co-founder Sam Gafford, who we sadly lost six years ago, by printing his deeply-moving tale ‘The Land of Lonesomeness’, one of his finest stories and one which explores the horrors of the World War One and the final days of William Hope Hodgson – the creator, of course, of Carnacki the Ghost Finder, the seminal occult detective.
ODM #12 is already under construction.
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John Linwood Grant
John Linwood Grant lives in Yorkshire with a pack of lurchers and a beard. He may also have a family. When he's not chronicling the adventures of Mr Bubbles, the slightly psychotic pony, he writes a range of supernatural, horror and speculative tales, some of which are actually published. You can find him every week on greydogtales.com, often with his dogs.
Occult Detective Magazine
"The only magazine dedicated to exploring, extending, and even re-interpreting, the ‘occult detective’ genre. From inquisitive Shinto priests, through terrified French police officers, to South African witch-sniffers and American cyber-adepts, we present weird and horror fiction at its darkest — and sometimes at its most entertaining."
The publication changed its name from "Occult Detective Quarterly" in 2019
Occult Detective Magazine consists of eleven primary books, and includes two additional books that complement the series but are not considered mandatory reads and series is set to expand with the upcoming release of one more book. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
Related series Occult Detective Magazine Mythos Specials
