Shallow Creek Special Announcement

Dear STORGY readers,

My name is Anthony Self – I’m one of the directors of STORGY magazine. We don’t usually write personal messages on the website but it’s with a heavy heart and great trepidation to announce some terrible news. We’ve been monumentally busy over the last six months putting together the amazing short story collection Shallow Creek and have recently sent out Kickstarter surveys to all the contributors involved. If you are one of these contributors, thank you for taking part in the Shallow Creek anthology. We greatly appreciate all you’ve done for us so far.

This message is to all the encouraging supporters and fans of uncanny, speculative fiction. You see, to cut a long story short…we made a mistake. Quite frankly, it’s a massive one. When we started this endeavour, we never dreamed that this experiment would snowball into the gargantuan anthology that it currently is. We thought that we’d receive a few entries, publish an e-book and then be on our merry way to the next project. Sometimes though, an idea has a funny way of getting ahead of itself and becoming a behemoth of a task. The support we received was unprecedented. We got amazing stories and amazing artwork. But then, something terrible happened.

In hindsight, we never should have given responsibility to Mallum Colt. The owner of the curiosity shop in Shallow Creek approached us with the original idea and perhaps looking back, we gave him too much responsibility. You see, when it comes to publishing hard copies of books, you normally use wholesalers or distributors to get your product out to the masses. We were in the middle of discussions with a couple of distributors and with the whole Kickstarter campaign, we didn’t have any place to store the books. Mallum kindly offered his shop in Shallow Creek as a temporary storage facility, so all the copies were sent to him.

The thing is, we haven’t been able to contact him for the last month. We need to shortly send out the anthology to the people that contributed to the Kickstarter, but we can’t get in contact with him. We sent a couple of people round to investigate but his shop didn’t have any pallets of anthologies. We don’t have the books. I’m sorry to report this, but unless we find Mallum, the whole Anthology is kaput. Done.

He’s simply disappeared. Tracing his moves back to last month, a strange tale has emerged. He was last seen drinking in Jack’s Tavern on December 28th – 9.00pm. Witnesses claimed that he was in good spirits, promoting the anthology and generally being his usual, weird self. But we haven’t heard anything from his social media in the last month. No-one has reported him strolling around the town of Shallow Creek. At first we thought he’d pulled a con on us, stealing the books for…some reason. But that wouldn’t make sense. He was as hyped for the book as we are.

But then we received a disturbing message.

It was one of the books.

Bloodstained.

Folded inside was a note. Scrawled in spidery handwriting, we read the following in horror:

MALLUM IS WITH US NOW.

HELP HIM AT YOUR PERIL.

YOU’LL NEVER GET THE BOOKS.

We’ve had people in Shallow Creek try to get Mallum’s GPS signal from his phone. We’re hoping that he’ll contact us soon (I’d HIGHLY recommend following his Twitter feed @ColtMallum) for further details.

Or perhaps, it’ll be an ADVENTURE. And we might need to CHOOSE certain decisions to help him escape. Maybe.

Help us find Mallum.

To all the people that contributed to the Kickstarter, I can only apologise.

We may need your help again.

Tune in to @morestorgy and @ColtMallum tomorrow.

I’ll be updating the website every week with more news. I can only apologise to our supporters that have already contributed to the site. Hopefully we will soon untangle this mess…