A Pacific Grove pair publishes a collection of stories and poems devoted to black cats.

Cats are unique creatures – black cats even more so, as they are steeped in myth and lore. To explore their psyche, or rather how humans perceive these elegant beasts, enter Black Cat Tales: An Anthology of Black Cats by Pacific Grove-based editors Francesca Maria and Mark S. Causey, who picked June’s Friday, the 13th to share their project with the world.

“Black kittens are the last ones being picked up from the shelter,” Maria says. “And the shelter is particular about who they give black kittens to.” That’s because of the possibility of cat abuse in the wrong hands.

The volume is a collection of short stories and poems devoted exclusively to black cats. “We were clear that the black cat has to be a protagonist of a story, not just a cat in the background,” Causey says.

The project of gathering the material for the book took over a year, and the publishers are already planning volume two of the anthology. They received 500 submissions from all over the world, including Monterey County, and ended up picking 39 pieces for the book. The contributors are diverse when it comes to gender, ethnicity, nationality and life experience. The age of the writers spans from 17 to 80.

Every writer has their own take on black cats, but in almost every case the cats are presented in a positive light.

Poetry divides the short stories and adds another layer to the book, a “palate cleanser,” Maria observes.

On the pages of the anthology we meet a great variety of black cats, from mischievous kittens (“The Vermin” by Mary A. Turzillo) and powerful protectors of their families (“Garbo” by Scott Urban) to guardians of different dimensions (“Jamoca’s Last Patrol” by Daniel Bulone) and gothic harbingers of doom (“Elegy for Pilate Hardesty” by L.S. Johnson).

“‘Garbo’ was the first story we received,” Maria says. “We loved it,” Causey adds. “It set the pace for the whole anthology and is one of my favorites.”

Maria and Causey are black cat lovers, being not only black cat owners, but also being the force behind a comic book Black Cat Chronicles they have been publishing since 2019. Both the comic and the anthology are published by their very own Black Cat Publishing company. “The process was fun,” Causey says of the book. “For us, it’s all about the joy of publishing.”

Black Cat Tales: An Anthology of Black Cats by Francesca Maria and Mark S. Causey is available online.