A Glimpse of ‘Failed Anatomies’

Shane Ivey and Dennis Detwiller of Arc Dream Publishing are putting the final touches on the next Delta Green project, Delta Green: Failed Anatomies. It’s a collection of Detwiller’s short stories of intrigue, conspiracy, and cosmic terror, with an introduction by John Scott Tynes and opening and closing stories by Robin Laws.

Syme has finished reading the file he was to copy, and is having a hard time finding a point in the narrative to grab hold of and fold into a suitable shape to fit in his mind. It is not just the photos, which on their own are extremely disturbing. It is not the fact that the Federal government has seized the populace of an entire New England town in secret and interred them. It is not the fact that the report includes after-action statements from submarine commanders indicating torpedoes were fired. It is not even the agglomeration of these facts. It is what is left out of the report.

Delta Green: Failed Anatomies includes:

  • Introduction (Tynes)
  • The Alien Thoughts, Part 1 (Laws)
  • Intelligences
  • The File
  • Night and Water
  • Dead, Death, Dying
  • Punching
  • The Secrets No One Knows
  • Coming Home
  • The Thing in the Stairwell
  • Drowning in Sand
  • Contingencies
  • Philosophy
  • Witch Hunt
  • After Math
  • The Alien Thoughts, Part 2 (Laws)

The stories span the history of Delta Green, from the 1928 Innsmouth raid that led to its formation to horrors in the near future as human understanding and communication grow ever more powerful.

The holes in the report say things. They say that man is not the only intelligent resident of this world. They say that people can breed with inhuman . . . things . . . and that cities of their kind dot the bottom of oceans all over the world. They say the Navy has discovered an enemy which lives in the sea, and which had until now gone undiscovered. The report screams this without ever saying it outright.

Delta Green: Failed Anatomies will launch as a Kickstarter project in (we expect) November 2013. Backers will get Failed Anatomies as an ebook for download as soon as the project wraps, plus exclusive links to order it in paperback or hardback at a fraction of the cover price.

If the Kickstarter project does well, stretch goals will include new short stories by Ivey, Adam Scott Glancy, Greg Stolze and other authors — these may become their own anthology, and the team will likely be taking submissions from would-be Delta Green authors — as well as professionally-produced audio recordings of the stories of Failed Anatomies.

A Marine battalion, heavy weapons, full combat, torpedoes—as always, the Navy is deadly serious. It is only when this narrative is inserted into the photos that the story takes off on its own, a looping film of black and white in Syme’s mind.

His mind moves through pages and ties them up with photographs. In his mind’s eye, the photos enter the lines of text and vice versa, and when they are inextricably linked up they spin and spin, refusing to leave his brain.

—From “Punching,” by Dennis Detwiller

For news of Delta Green: Failed Anatomies:

failed-anatomies

Shane Ivey runs Arc Dream Publishing and is lead editor for Delta Green.

Leave a Reply