IFWG is very pleased to announce the acquisition of a collection of four stories by David Kuraria, called ‘Bedding the Lamia’. Two of the stories are reprints (found in Midnight Echo, the other in Dimension 6). “Kuraria has already contributed to a few of IFWG’s anthologies, and has won acclaim in that particular journey,” said Gerry Huntman, Managing Director of IFWG, “and it is wonderful to have the opportunity to showcase his work in a long-fiction collection.”

Of Melanesian and Scottish heritage, the author was raised by his extended family on the island of Ranongga in the Solomon Islands. He attended Kingsland Intermediate school in Auckland New Zealand before reuniting with his family in the Solomon’s capital, Honiara. To date, David has had just three stories published in Australian Anthologies. His 2018 story Kõpura Rising (published in Cthulhu: Land of the Long White Cloud), describes a malign, marine-dwelling race named Kõpura. That tale was selected as a finalist for the 2018 Australian Aurealis Awards for Best Horror Novella and added to Ellen Datlow’s 2018 Best Horror of the Year recommended reading List. This is his first collection.

The four stories are:

The Gods of Mwaia
A Melanesian farmer and his companions trek to a secretive Solomon Island tribe to beg for land rights for his starving People. They bear gifts of persuasion but become gifts for the dominant tribe’s frightful gods.

And He Shall Suffer for his Art
An artist experimenting with narcotics and obscure occult methods inadvertently calls up an unwelcome muse. The price paid for a favour is bloody and final.

Silent is the River
A war historian, a young New Zealand teacher and an Aboriginal Spiritual man travel up a Northern Australian River on a converted war barge. Here brutal Colonial past reaches out to ensnare modern adventurers on a journey into horror.

The Absurd Quest of Thomas Wu
A survivor of the 2011 Christchurch New Zealand earthquakes takes his deceased grandfather’s diaries to recreate the old man’s 1950s travels around Melanesia. He soon finds himself crossing a borderland into a strange ‘otherworld’, where any action has blackly comical and unpleasant consequences.

IFWG Publishing will release Bedding the Lamia in the first quarter of 2021.