Chaosium is Relaunching their Fiction Program

Jun 252018

Friday, June 22, 2018 – For immediate release

Chaosium, Inc., publisher of the celebrated roleplaying games Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest, announces the relaunch of their fiction program.

The Chaosium fiction line originally launched in 1992 and was suspended in 2015 during a general company restructuring. Subsequently, Chaosium management brought on publishing and gaming industry veteran James Lowder as a consulting editor to help resolve any outstanding contract and payment issues with authors, editors, and artists.

Lowder then drafted new, creator-friendly contracts for the department, worked with SFWA to register the company as a qualifying professional market, and then commissioned a schedule of new, creator-owned fiction releases, in both print and e-book formats.

With the line’s relaunch, Lowder will assume the title executive editor of fiction for Chaosium.

James Lowder’s previous editorial experience includes serving as the Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft fiction line editor for TSR, executive editor for Green Knight’s Arthurian fiction program, and freelance editor for dozens of novels and anthologies. Lowder has also written several bestselling dark fantasy novels, as well as short fiction, comic book scripts, critical essays, and roleplaying game material. His work as an editor and author has received five Origins Awards and two ENnie Awards, and been among the finalists for the International Horror Guild Award and the Stoker Award.

“I’ve been a regular reader of Chaosium’s fiction releases since the line’s inception and look forward to adding new works to the already-impressive catalog,” Lowder notes. “For many years Chaosium was a leading publisher of classic Mythos fiction reprints, along with original Mythos-steeped anthologies and novels. Given the current Mythos renaissance in pop culture, it’s a great time for the line to return.”

Chaosium to release three new fiction titles in 2018

In SEPTEMBER, the humorous picture book H.P. Lovecraft’s Dagon for Beginning Readers, by R.J. Ivankovic; Dagon is a follow-up to Ivankovic’s popular H.P. Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers, also published by Chaosium.

Cover by R.J. Ivankovic.

In OCTOBER, Sisterhood: Dark Tales and Secret Histories, a trade paperback anthology of horror and Mythos stories set in female religious communities around the globe and across the centuries.

Sisterhood is edited by Nate Pedersen and features stories penned by some of the genre’s leading female voices, including Nadia Bulkin, Livia Llewellyn, Molly Tanzer, Sun Yung Shin, Penelope Love, and Damien Angelica Walters.

Cover by Liv Rainey-Smith and Inkspiral Designs.

Finally, in NOVEMBER, the trade paperback The Leaves of a Necronomicon, a braided novel revealing the fates of the doomed owners of one particular copy of that infamous cursed tome. Leaves is edited by Shirley Jackson Award-winning editor Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. and features stories by Nick Mamatas, S.P. Miskowski, Jeffrey Thomas, Anna Tambour, and Michael Cisco.

In 2019, Chaosium’s Mythos and weird fiction titles—which will eventually include anthologies, novels, novellas, single-author collections, and select non-fiction—will see release on a roughly quarterly schedule, along with other special fiction and non-fiction projects scattered throughout the year. All titles will be available through traditional book channels, as well as through game shops, DriveThruFiction.com, and the Chaosium website.

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