We are stoked to announce Meerkat Press will be publishing two new works by J. Ashley Smith, one a novelette, The Attic Tragedy, in 2020, and the other, a novella, Adriadne, I Love You, in 2021. Both are mesmerizing, deliciously dark tales. We are excited to be working with this talented, award-winning author.

About The Attic Tragedy

Sylvie never called them ghosts, but that’s what they were—not that George ever saw them herself. The new girl is like a creature from another time, with her old-fashioned leather satchel, her white cotton gloves and her head in the clouds. George watches her drift around the edge of the school playing fields, guided by inaudible voices.

When George stands up for Sylvie, beating back Tommy Payne and his gang of thugs, it brings her close to the ethereal stranger; though not as close as George would have liked. In the attic of Sylvie’s father’s antique shop, George’s scars will sing and her longing will drive them both towards a tragedy as veiled and inevitable as Sylvie’s whispering ghosts.

About Ariadne, I Love You

Jude is dragged out of Alt Country obscurity, out of the dismal loop of booze and sadness baths and the boundless, insatiable loneliness, to scrub up and fly to Australia for a last, desperate comeback tour. Hardly worth getting out of bed for—and he wouldn’t, if it weren’t for Coreen.

But Coreen is dead. And, worse than that, she’s married. Jude’s swan-song tour becomes instead a terminal descent, into the sordid past, into the meaning hidden in forgotten songs, into Coreen’s madness diary, there to waken something far worse than her ghost.

About J. Ashley Smith

J. Ashley Smith is a British–Australian writer of dark fiction and other materials. His short stories have twice won national competitions and been shortlisted five times for Aurealis Awards, winning both Best Horror (Old Growth, 2017) and Best Fantasy (The Further Shore, 2018).

J. lives with his wife and two sons in the suburbs of North Canberra, gathering moth dust, tormented by the desolation of telegraph wires.

Website: https://www.spooktapes.net/