After revealing the spectacular cover for Ashley Stokes’ upcoming Gigantic, we’re thrilled to be back at Fantasy Hive to reveal another 2021 release, this time with cover design by long-time Unsung collaborator Vince Haig: a new collection from Malcolm Devlin called Unexpected Places to Fall From, Unexpected Places to Land.

Who better to introduce the cover and the book than author Malcolm Devlin?

“Dodos have always struck me as rather jovial looking birds. Plump, wide-eyed, their long hooked beaks curved in a slightly bashful grin.  The images you see of them are almost invariably based on Roelant Savery’s seventeenth century painting, donated to the Natural History Museum by the ornithologist George Edwards. The Edwards Dodo is flanked by a pair of colourful parrots and painted in a now familiar profile. From her expression, it looks as though she’s just told her very favourite joke and is tensely uncertain if anyone in her audience will think it worthwhile. The fact that Edwards would later draw his own version of the dodo and replace the parrots with a guinea-pig (“for the sake of relative magnitude”), feels as though he was just rubbing salt into the wound. 

In Unexpected Place to Fall From, Unexpected Places to Land (the title of which, I admit, is also considerably larger than a guinea-pig), a man named Prentis O’Rourke dies at the same moment in every reality, essentially becoming the first person in recorded history to go completely extinct. The remaining stories in the collection take place in some of those parallel realities, with different versions of the same characters living very different, slightly peculiar lives, and occasionally (unwittingly) crossing the path of a man destined to become something of a cosmic joke. 

So on the cover, it seems appropriate that this particular dodo is existing in more than one version of the world. From that knowing look in her eye, I like to think she’s spotted a more optimistic future for herself in at least one of them.” – Malcolm Devlin

Editor Dan Coxon says: 

“We’re absolutely thrilled to be publishing a second collection by Malcolm Devlin after the success of his debut, You Will Grow Into Them. From folk-horror to science fiction, Unexpected Places… presents us with a series of separate but subtly connected tales from a writer the Financial Times called “an author who exemplifies the very best of the genre”. We couldn’t agree more – and there’s a complexity and playfulness to this new collection that only serves to underline the point. We can’t wait until it lands on your shelves this October!”

Unexpected Places to Fall From, Unexpected Places to Land will be published by Unsung Stories in October 2021.

Malcolm Devlin’s stories have appeared in Black Static, Interzone and Shadows and Tall Trees. His first collection, You Will Grow Into Them,
was published by Unsung Stories in 2017 and shortlisted for the British Fantasy and Saboteur Awards. And Then I Woke Up, a new horror novella, is due to be published by Tordotcom Publishing in 2022.