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Mountain Deviltry takes, as its canvas, the Blue Mountains region of NSW with its sleepy villages, its colourful past and, especially, its quirky populace, who operate in the glare of the tourist-trap workaday routine that funds the region, as well as in the shadows of their own private worlds. The various villages are an eclectic mix of the retired, the unemployed, the hardscrabble and the New Age: it's neither Western Sydney nor the Dubbo Plains but both areas wash up onto its shores and leave their traces.
The mystery of the Bush is never far away either, often dangerous and veiled in the perpetual mists - into this terrain who wouldn't expect to meet a ghost or two? Quite apart from spectres, there are other horrors of an all-too-human sort that exist alongside them, rubbing uncomfortably against the flash and spectacle laid on for the tourists: homelessness, poverty and addiction.
These opposing worlds meet and are examined in a second-hand bookshop, the owner of which values his privacy as much as his books (and his cat), and are investigated by him and his eccentric friends in an effort to bring peace and rest to those "Beyond the Veil", as well as to those living people they've left behind.
About the author
Craig Stanton was born and lives in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney in New South Wales where he works as a bookseller; he has a master's degree in Creative Writing from the Sydney University of Technology.
He has published poetry in the University of Newcastle's SWAMP Anthology and in narratorINTERNATIONAL; his short stories have appeared in "Protodimension Magazine" and "Occult Detective Quarterly". He has previously published a collection of short works entitled Love Songs & Other Weirdness through Moshpit Publishing; two stories from that collection also appear here. He was a contributing translator for Sebastian Dietz's graphic novel "Yuggoth Rising" and is now working with Sebastian to produce a Lovecraftian comic series entitled "The Black Pilgrimage".
He moderates a blog where he discusses all things Lovecraftian, entitled the Miskatonic Debating Club & Literary Society (http://mdcls.blogspot.com/) and another called Moon of My Delight (http://pehlehvi.blogspot.com/) which covers his collection of copies of the "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" and related issues. He runs mostly on coffee.
