Story Acceptance: Good King David

I learned today that my story "Good King David" has been accepted for Dybbuk Press's anthology King David & the Spiders from Mars: More Tales of Biblical Terror. This is a followup to Dybbuk's She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror, published in 2010. I am super stoked about this sale. It's a very decent advance plus royalties.

David (at rest), 1865,

Frederic Lord Leighton.

"Good King David" combines elements of Hamlet with the story of Absalom. Sounds crazy but the stories mesh quite well. The setting is Denmark during the dark ages, so instead of telling stories about wandering through the desert of the Sinai for ages, David's people talk about being lost in the Black Forest for ages and following a flaming tree as their guide. Uriah, Bathsheeba's "murdered" husband, plays the role of the ghost who appears to Absalom to get the tragedy rolling. If you're familiar with Absalom's story from the Bible, you won't be surprised to find that this tale is filled with intrigue, murder, incestuous rape, and adultery. I had planned on using Absalom in the story's title but the more I wrote the more David's character insisted that the story was really about him. Typical of kings I suspect. As with customers, your characters are always right.