I
T WASN’T ALL THAT LONG AGO THAT CANADA HAD VIRTUALLY NO GENRE PUBLISHING SCENE. There were occasional, well-intentioned upstarts, but not many stuck and, as a result, most of our homegrown terror talent had to look south for lu- crative publishing opportunities.
This has begun to change, and one of the companies behind the
shift is Toronto’s own ChiZine Publications. But as Sandra Kasturi, who co-founded the press with her husband Brett Alexander Savory in 2008, explains, success isn’t always about having a big plan. Kasturi likes to joke that it all came down to “a complete lack of foresight and judgement.” But in actuality Kasturi and Savory – both published author/editors in their own right – had been running Chiaroscuro/
ChiZine.com as a pro-rate online zine for over a decade and were looking for a new challenge “Years ago, Brett had wanted to do an original ChiZine anthology...but we could
never find a publisher to take it on; original anthologies that pay a pro-word rate are super-expensive to produce, so the antho ended up not happening,” Kasturi explains. “We always regretted that, so when Brett said, ‘What do you think about doing ChiZine as a publishing house?’ I said, ‘Fuck it, let’s do it.’ I think that was literally how it happened. And while there are plenty of great small presses out there, and plenty of genre presses, there wasn’t really anyone dedicated to dark, literary fiction.” Originally the press was to release four titles a year, but after Savory lost
his job, the couple used his severance money and their savings to expand the business to twelve titles annually. ChiZine has risen to small-press promi- nence quickly; Savory and Kasturi are the Editor Guests of Honour at this year’s World Horror Convention in Austin, Texas. And while some of this suc- cess undoubtedly due to luck and their stalwart professionalism, more has to do with the quality of ChiZine’s fiction and the attention to detail the cou- ple pours into each of the books. “We want well-written fiction, but ‘literary’ so often has a pejorative aroma
attached to it,” explains Kasturi. “It so often means ‘beautiful writing, but nothing really happens.’ We don’t want that. We want beautiful writing, but you better have a plot, otherwise what’s the point? ... Every time someone sends me a vampire or serial killer novel, I sigh. The thing is, it’s not even that these are bad books – many of them aren’t. But okay just isn’t good enough. I want to be grabbed and wrung out by a book.” To that end, ChiZine has released stories by established horror boundary
pushers Tony Burgess (People Live Still in Cashtown Corners, about a gas station owner-cum-murderer) and Gemma Files (the first book in her Hexslinger Series, A Book of Tongues, is a magic-perfused horror western with heavy homosexual themes), as well as titles by genre mainstays Tim Lebbon (The Thief of Broken Toys) and Tom Piccirilli (Every Shallow Cut). Up-and-coming Canadian authors on the roster include Claude Lalumière (The Door to Lost Pages, in which a
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young runaway grows up in a mysterious bookstore that just happens to be caught in the middle of a war between gods and monsters) and David Nickle (Eutopia, about eugenics schemes and twisted small-town secrets). Not only are each of these books eclectic and intelligent – many garnering good reviews everywhere from Publisher’s Weekly to the pages of this magazine – but each of their covers, by gallery artist Erik Mohr, are practically frame-worthy. “Appearance matters,” notes Kasturi. “If people haven’t embraced that con-
cept yet, then they’re idiots. Publishing is a business. You want your books to do well, right? Well, why on Earth wouldn’t you put them out there in the prettiest package possi- ble? Why wouldn’t you have someone who un- derstood art – and packaging! – take care of that for you?” Now with a team of talented folks to help
them, reams of great reviews and awards, and many doors opening up for their imprint, one can’t help but wonder if all this sudden success has changed them. “Well, we’re pretty insufferable right now,”
Kasturi jokes. “Honestly, it’s been a bit of a shock. We figured there’d be a small audience for what we were trying to do, but the recog- nition has been a really great sur- prise. It’s almost like having everything you ever wanted sud- denly handed to you on a plate. Well, except for a pool boy. I still don’t have one of those, sadly.”
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