Current obsession, fiction: Richard Bowes.
Since 2005, Rick Bowes has been publishing a short story series/novel-in-parts in venues like Fantasy and Science Fiction and anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow. Called Dust Devil: My Life in Speculative Fiction, the series has been called a speculative memoir because it tells the stories of a gay writer named Rick Bowes who lives in a very real New York haunted by ghosts, angels, and other mysteries. One story (“There’s A Hole In The City” from 2005) won the International Horror Guild Award, while another (2008’s “If Angels Fight”) won the World Fantasy Award.

In the blogpost on speculative memoir linked above, Richard Larson writes about Bowes’ 2009 story “I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said”, saying it “is not only a pitch-perfect and heartbreaking fantasy about life, death, and the passing of time, but is more integrally a portrait of the parts of our existence that we can’t quite put a finger on: moments when memory blends with hallucination, experiences become blurred and intricately layered, and time feels entirely arbitrary. The stuff, that is, of speculative fiction: questions of real vs. unreal, magical or something else.”

Mary Robinette Kowal wrote about a different story, 2007’s “King of the Big Night Hours”: “The thing that he does is tell a story that seems so absolutely, totally grounded in reality that it makes you wonder why you haven’t noticed any magic happening in your life. I mean, these seem like they are things that actually happened.”

What I’ve been appreciated from the stories that I’ve read (half of the fun is tracking the other stories down) is that Bowes is good at weaving together different strands in his stories: the life of a gay man, even as he grows older; the life of a writer, specifically a not-famous writer of speculative fiction; ghosts, and the way that the past continues to affect the presence; and finally (but definitely not least), the innumerable ways that a city impinges itself on the people who inhabit it. Each story in the series can be read on its own, but each one gains from being juxtaposed with the others. I’m looking forward to the collection.

I discovered Bowes because many of his stories from this series have been collected in various “Year’s Best” anthologies, including the 2009, 2010 and forthcoming 2011 editions of Wilde Stories: Best Gay Speculative Fiction, the 2008 and 2009 editions of Best Gay Stories (both series edited by Steve Berman), the 2011 Nebula Showcase (ed. Kevin J. Anderson), the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 3 (ed. Jonathan Strahan), Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2009 (ed. Rich Horton), Best Horror of the Year: Volume 1 (ed. Ellen Datlow), Year’s Best Fantasy 9 (ed. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer), and Horror: Best of the Year 2006 (ed. John Gregory Betancourt and Sean Wallace). I’m probably leaving a few out.

Here’s the list of Dust Devil stories that have been published so far, to the best of my knowledge.

2005: “There’s a Hole in the City”, Sci Fiction 15 Jun 2005
2006: “Dust Devil on a Quiet Street”, Salon Fantastique (ed. Datlow and Windling)
2007: “King of the Big Night Hours”, Subterranean 7 (guest ed. Datlow)
2008: “AKA St. Mark’s Place”, Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy (ed. Datlow)
2008: “If Angels Fight”, Fantasy & Science Fiction Feb 2008
2009: “The Office of Doom”, Lovecraft Unbound (ed. Datlow)
2009: “I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said”, Fantasy & Science Fiction Dec 2009
2010: “The Margay’s Children”, The Beastly Bride (ed. Datlow and Windling)
2010: “Knickerbocker Holiday”, Haunted Legends (ed. Datlow and Mamatas)
2010: “Waiting for the Phone to Ring”, Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar/Apr 2010
2010: “Pining to Be Human”, Fantasy & Science Fiction Jul/Aug 2010
2010: “Venues”, Fantasy & Science Fiction Nov/Dec 2010