Discover a dark fantasy made in Luxembourg

Are you looking for a last-minute gift to slip into your loved one’s stocking? Or do you want to discover the gloomy and thrilling world imagined by Luxembourg’s very own horror writer? Then look no further than Percy Lallemang’s short story collection Nightscapes, published in a special pitch-black edition by Black Fountain Press.

“I have always been writing and spinning stories in my mind and I’ve always been interested in fantasy and horror so I think, naturally, when I write, those are the sort of stories that come out” Lallemang said in an interview.

After a movie trilogy, Lallemang turned to creating his own collection of dark short stories.

“I’m not that interested in writing something that’s linked to reality – for me, it’s always a sort of escapism” he said about genre fiction which he enjoys experimenting with. “It deals with the collective unconscious of mankind. I love to put all those archetypes in different contexts and play with it.”

The process towards the final version of Nightscapes was very collaborative, he said. “I sent a bunch of stories to Black Fountain and together we chose to select the most gripping ones.”

In the creative exchange with the publisher, “I learned a lot about storytelling through their thorough editing and I will take that with me into the future,” he said.

“It was fun working on these stories with Percy,” said Anne-Marie Reuter, the owner and founder of Black Fountain Press, praising the author’s knowledge of history and film in making them come alive.

”And it was fun coming up with a totally different cover,” she said of the pitch-black edition. ”With a name like ours, we wanted to wave and wink at genre fiction. We wanted to indulge ourselves and include a dark book in our catalogue.”

Shadows and dark tales

In its final form, the book comprises three atmospheric short stories spanning centuries and locales, each offering a mix of genres from horror to detective, and even light sci-fi.

The first, “Man Without a Shadow” took inspiration from an author’s nightmare. “It was this image of someone watching me. It always stuck with me and I thought I had to put it in a story sometime, to get rid of it and exorcise it.”

Set in a mostly historically accurate early 19th-century Edinburgh, one of the author’s favourite cities, it follows an old-school police officer and war veteran whose sense of reality starts to sway from him.

The terse and gripping “The Infinite” is a reworking of a short story Lallemang first wrote as a young man. “The Infinite is nightmarish, but people reacted very well to it and even saw some positive aspects in the story.”

The final tale takes place in a near-future London where the world’s current issues have been extrapolated. One of its protagonists stems from a previous project of his, the script for Hellscape.

“Sam is a baby born to a policeman in that film. She was born when he died and he never met her and I wanted to write a story about her,” he author explained.

His writing is still deeply influenced by his script-writing experience in general, “people tell me that my stories are highly visual.”

Nightscapes is available at bookstores in Luxembourg carrying English-language titles or directly from the publisher.

In January, Lallemang will become the first English-language author to be published on Crime.lu with a selection of horror stories.

He is also working on making the first two screenplays from his trilogy into a novel. “First I want to finish two prequel stories and build on that. The novel will have a few surprises,” he said.