STORIES
Minions of the Moon
(Tor 1999)
Minions of the Moon is a mosaic novel made of up of ten stories, including “On Death and the Deuce” reprinted below. The narrator, Kevin Grierson, has a “Silent Partner,” a doppelganger who sometimes goes under the name Fred. Grierson is a gay man who has made a life for himself in New York City. We learn about his childhood in Boston, about his drug and alcohol addictions, his career in street hustling and crime. The Silent Partner encouraged him in all that. Grierson finds a counselor, Leo Dunn, who helps him kick his addictions and keep Fred at a distance. In the end Grierson has begun to reconcile the disparate parts of his life.
A “Grierson” story was published in the Full Spectrum Five anthology and another was in Algis Budry’s Tomorrow. Eight of the stories appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 1992-1998. One, “Streetcar Dreams” won the World Fantasy Award in 1998, the first award for which I was ever nominated. The novel itself was on the International Horror Guild short list and won the Lambda Award for best Gay/Lesbian SF/Fantasy novel.
On Death and the Deuce
This was my first professionally published story. It’s the sixth short story I wrote when I began writing stories in 1989 after not having written any since I was in college twenty-four years earlier. A couple of my earlier stories had already sold another couple would be sold later on. But ODATD was the first to see print.
Parts of the story are fictional, other parts are real. The dream was one I had during early recovery. Over the next six years nine more stories narrated by Grierson were written and published. But it’s in this story that the triad of Grierson, his counselor Leo Dunn and his “Silent Partner” sprang to life.
The story was reprinted in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #6, in The Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction (1994) and a few years ago was reprinted in Sybil’s Garage # 4
From The Files of the Time Rangers
(Golden Gryphon 2005)
Time Rangers is a Time Travel/Alternate Universe novel made up of nine stories and a lot of original material. The Time Lanes are controlled by mortals in the service of entities which we call by the names of ancient Greek deities. The span of time and the place in question is largely the 20th century in the Eastern United States.
The novel was on the 2006 Nebula Novel short list.
Here are a few of the short stories that went into that mix:
The Ferryman’s Wife
Time Rangers live as undercover agents in times and places into which they weren’t born. In this story a married couple and their young daughter live in mid 1950′s suburban America, in this case Westchester County, New York, and in some ways are absorbed into their environment.
I gave “The Ferryman’s Wife” some of the form and tropes of a New Yorker story of that time complete with commuter trains and adultery. The writer I was channeling was John Cheever – remembered now as a chronicler of suburban family life but a writer many of whose stories are tinged with magic with myth and fantasy.
I’m not sure where the character of Lady Olivia Wexford came from but I’m glad she appeared.
This story was on the 2003 Nebula Novelette short list.
The Mask of The Rex
For this story I turned both to Mount Desert Island Maine where I spent pleasant summer vacations in the 1970′s and to ancient myth for the shrine of Diana and for the Rex, the runaway slave/murderer who was its priest. This particular shrine is on the estate of an old New England family whose members form close bonds with the Rex of their time. From that family and those bonds comes an American political dynasty.
The story was on the 2004 Nebula Novelette short list and was reprinted in the Nebula Showcase 2005 (Dann).
Straight To My Lover’s Heart
STMLH was originally written by the narrator of a novella I wrote (a short story within a long story). In rewrite I decided to use another short story and STMLH with its title from a favorite Sam Cooke song was homeless. Two things happened,
In 2001 the Nebula Awards were held in New York and at some gathering, Dave Truesdale asked if I had anything for Black Gate which was just getting started. I gave them this. I was paid. It was published in their second issue and published online at Infinity Plus a few years later.
About the same time I started writing Time Ranger stories and with its combination of Gods and the contemporary world this STMLH was a natural fit.
Dust Devil: My Life In Speculative Fiction
Dust Devil is urban fantasy of the original kind. Narrated by a writer in contemporary Greenwich Village it begins in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and stretches into the near future. The narrator encounters ghosts at Ground Zero, the Headless Horseman and a kid who borrows the Necronomicon from the NYU Library. One of his god-children is a young lady who is part Central American tree cat. An old friend is the scion of a Boston Irish political family who has died but lives on in others’ brains.
The narrator sells stories, reads his fiction at various venues, goes through a string of lovers mostly male, loses a beloved brother, encounters Death in fabled, haunted St. Vincent’s Hospital and finds his past closing in.
Mermaniac Blog Post on Dust Devil Stories
http://www.mermaniac.com/post/3017021095/current-obsession-fiction-richard-bowes
Dust Devil Stories:
There’s a Hole in the City
This story was written and published online on the SCIFICTION site close to four years after the events of 9/11. It was about then that people seemed able to think and write about that day and what followed. This was the first of what became the Dust Devil stories and it was here that the template of the city almost as a character, the writer/narrator and the surreal elements was established. The story was anthologized and nominated for the Nebula and the Gaylactic Spectrum awards. It won the International Horror Guild and Million Writers awards. In 2006 WBAI radio in New York broadcast my reading of the story as part of its Fifth Anniversary Memorial for 9/11. In 2011 it was rebroadcast as part of the Tenth Anniversary Memorial.
The story was reprinted in Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005 (Strahan), Horror: The Best of the Year 2006 (Wallace), Digital Domains (2010 Datlow) and is scheduled for inclusion in
The Million Writers Award: The Best Online Science Fiction and Fantasy (2012 Sanford).
If Angels Fight
A lot of my stories are set in New York City and environs but in novels I usually have at least one section set in the Irish Catholic Boston of my childhood. In this one, the narrator is sent on a mission by the family of an old friend. Major parts of the story are set in a time and place where politics was a business and a sport. A JFK cameo that’s included makes me wonder why it took me over fifty years to make use of the incident on which it’s based.
The story was on the Nebula Novelette short list and won The World Fantasy Award for best Novella 2009. It was reprinted in five year’s best anthologies: The Year’s Best SF and Fantasy 2009 (Horton), The Best Horror of the Year Vol One (Datlow), Year’s Best Fantasy 9 (Hartwell/Cramer), The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (Strahan) and Wilde Stories (Berman). I’m told this is a record!
I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said
About as close to autobiography as I’ve gotten: more of this happened than not. About three years after the events described here, St. Vincent’s hospital where much of the story is set was shut down for lack of funds.
A legendary Greenwich Village institution, harbor for the Village poor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, beacon in the nightmare landscape of AIDS in the 1980′s, its passing was described as the result of changing urban demographics, of modern medical practice. I think of it as having been carried away in the stream of time which moves ceaselessly as we sleep or are distracted or lie sick in bed and leaves only our memories.
The story was on the Nebula Novelette and the World Fantasy Novella short lists. It was reprinted in Nebula Awards Showcast 2011 (Anderson) and Wilde Stories (Berman).
Fairy Tales
I’ve written several of these very short stories over the last few years. Or rather I’ve rewritten them. Most have kicked around for a while and been half forgotten. I have to say that writing and even rereading them has given me a lot of pleasure. Here are a couple:
The Bear Dresser’s Secret
.(http://www.electricvelocipede.com/2011/07/06/the-beardressers-secret/)
This goes way back. It got hauled out of a box where it lay forgotten was given a rewrite and found a publisher. I know you’re saying to yourself, “But I could never dress a bear!” I believe this story proves you wrong
The Cinnamon Cavalier (at Fantasy Magazine)
Lois Tilton called this, “The Gingerbread Man writ large,” and I liked that description. This was, I think, the fourth story I produced when I began writing short fiction again in 1989. All it took was a sixteen year wait and a rewrite. “An amusing whimsy,” Ms Tilton called it and I think that’s just right.
INTERVIEWS
Interview by Mermaniac (Bill Jennings):
Dancing the Dance
http://www.mermaniac.com/post/3496499001/dancing-the-dance-an-interview-with-richard-bowes
ESSAYS
A Fantasy Book From the Last 10 Years That Will Stand the Test of Time
The Mosaic Novel
Stonewall at 40 (at the Mumpsimus)
I Like Writing But Hate Being a Writer (at Clarkesworld Magazine)
Floor Games by H.G. Wells (at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)