Deep in work on the much-awaited sequel to his B.C. bestseller, The Haunting of Vancouver Island, author Shanon Sinn has also managed to find time to start his own publishing company, Black Cat Books.
Black Cat’s self-titled first anthology is a collection of 13 fictional stories curated and edited by Sinn that are all set in the Pacific Northwest, and all feature a cameo of a black cat.
Other than that, the stories range from historic to futuristic, says Sinn, and the writers are mid-level Canadian authors who write in a variety of styles but have penned supernatural tales for the anthology.
“There’s almost no genre fiction coming out of Western Canada, so when it comes to books and publishers… most of our local reads and publications are history, children’s books or non-fiction,” says Sinn. “I wanted it to be really filling a gap, and [understanding] that gap came from talking to bookstores, who were saying this is what they don’t have — local, genre fiction.”
Several stories are by local writers, including Nanaimo-based writer Joshua Gillingham, who wrote Wolf in the Fog, Vancouver Island University alumni Zoe McKenna, who takes readers aboard a chilling and vivid shipwreck adventure, and award-winning writer and former Nanaimo Daily News editor Dustin Walker, whose story delves into The Man in the Cabin.
“It’s set in this universe where it’s illegal to talk to the dead. They’ve figured out a way to talk to the dead but it’s illegal so the government outlawed it all and it gets pushed underground. So it’s about a CSIS agent who goes up north trying to crack down on these people,” says Walker. “I wrote it as a parallel to drug and [sex work] prohibition — pushing it underground just creates new issues.”
Set in the remote northwestern B.C. community of Dease Lake, Walker said his early reporting experiences in places like Fort St. John informs his fiction writing.
“Unless you’re actually embedded in those communities, sometimes it’s difficult to understand the challenges that people in remote places face,” says Walker. This is embodied in his character of CSIS agent Mark Hall, who is “powering through on a goal that he thinks is virtuous and self-righteous, when in fact he’s an arrogant character and is making mistakes and hurting people without realizing it.”
Walker has written pieces for other publications like Pulp Modern that have the same protagonist and also inhabit this universe, in addition to pieces of short fiction on other themes, including one that won a flash fiction contest in 2021, and another that was recently nominated by Intrepidus Ink for a “best in net” award.
Walker’s latest piece for the October issue of Penumbric speculative fiction magazine also explores the world of mediums and channeling the dead as an illegal activity that has been forced underground.
“Kwakwaka’wakw artist Beau Dick once said the earliest domestic cat on the West Coast was taken from a Spanish ship by a local chief,” writes Sinn in the book’s introduction. “The cat — not explicitly described as black — ran into the forest and was never seen again. Could he or she have been the first black cat to haunt our forests and beaches?”
Black cats are outsiders, cohorts of demons and witches, a stand-in for the night and scorned as bad luck, writes Sinn, but “Black Cat Books honours our mysterious feline friends by embracing their iconic and often-frightful folklore as part of our core identity and branding.”
The publishing house aims to come out with more anthologies, and Sinn says they are looking into the possibility of expanding to include comic and graphic novel titles.
Black Cat is available to purchase online, or at Well Read Books on Commercial Street and at Newfoundland to Nanaimo on the waterfront. Sinn will have a table at Russell Books in Victoria on Oct. 24, and at the grand opening of Fireside Books’ new location in Parksville on Nov. 4 at 464 Island Hwy E.
