Chico Kidd
Chico Kidd has been writing professionally since 1979. Since 2000 she has been busy with the Da Silva Tales, an ongoing sequence of novels and stories featuring “one of the genre’s most interesting and genuinely original new characters” according to Stephen Jones in Horror in 2001. The 2002 editions of his influential anthologies, Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 and Dark Terrors 6, feature three of the stories between them. Others have appeared in Supernatural Tales, the Ash-Tree anthology Acquainted with the Night (2004), and in three self-published chapbooks. The first novel, Demon Weather, is due out from Booktrope.
Previously, her ghost stories have been published in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and continental Europe. Most first saw the light of day in small press (Ghosts & Scholars, Dark Dreams, Peeping Tom, Enigmatic Tales, five self-published chapbooks, and others), many immediately snapped up for reprinting in mass-market anthologies. Almost all were collected together in hardback in Summoning Knells (Ash-Tree Press 2000). The Ghost Story Society’s verdict: “powerful… consummate craftsmanship”. Her first novel, The Printer’s Devil, came out from Baen Books (New York) in 1996. It came 12th in Locus magazine’s poll of Best First Novels of the year and gained some brilliant reviews and was reprinted last year by Booktrope with a cover by Chico. Chico also writes in collaboration with Australian author Rick Kennett about William Hope Hodgson’s occult detective Carnacki and their first hardback collection, No 472 Cheyne Walk, was published in 2002 by Ash-Tree.
“She had always been a fast driver, even before she could afford a fast car. It was impatience as much as anything: chafing at the fact that she couldn’t actually do anything while driving—except drive.”
“Still men be clever and in an hundred centuries or more, perchance will have found a way to journey thither; when that they have discovered and understood all things on the earth. What will a man be like in the xxvii century, or even the xx? Very like unto us, I do expect; I do not think that man’s nature shall change; nor do I anticipate that he will be the wiser than we, for all his learning, for ‘tis a part of that nature which is ours that we do not heed the lessons of history: neither our own, nor the world’s.”
“Evil itself is a dictator, whether it’s dressed up like a pompous little man with a moustache, or a bunch of faceless terrorists, or a fundamentalist state. That’s what the devil is, you know. And it’s precious difficult to combat. Or rather, it’s not so much difficult, as demanding of great courage. Will, and wit.”