For reasons that still remain a mystery, author Simon Kurt Unsworth decided to create a theatrical version of several of his short stories and to then help put on the production. Several months of confusion followed, culminating in three performances of what had become known as Quiet Hauntings. Along the way there were edits, wholesale changes, excisions and additions and at least one bout of near hysteria as author, director and cast tried to wrangle ghosts, farmers, cows and a legal mystery into some kind of coherent, dramatic and satisfying narrative. This play is the result.
Wellbrook High is the school that needs no introduction. After the infamous events of 1993, it has become synonymous with unexpected - and unexplained - tragedy.While what happened thirty years ago is still being unpicked by Internet conspiracy theorists, however, the lives of the handful of survivors are a matter of public record. In this recreation of the fabled Yearbook of '93, some of the best emerging writers of horror and strange fiction revisit the years that followed the tragedy, and the lives of those who walked away on that fateful day.Some might say they were the lucky ones. The reality is not so clear.
It feels like this whole place is infected, like someone buried something here and its roots were rotten and dead, and it's coming up, and it's growing. Soon enough it'll sprout, and then we'll be breathing it in.A builder unearths a hand, buried on a building site; a woman with a unique way of speaking to the dead comes across her toughest client to date; a young man returns to his hometown, desperately searching for his missing sister.In his debut collection, Daniel Carpenter explores places and the people who get lost in them. From Manchester to London, as well as the uncanny fringes of England, these are stories that span the breadth of the Weird.
"I don't know anyone who grew up in the 1970s who wasn't scarred by the public information safety films on British TV. Those tiny, doom-filled dramas slipped in between the cartoons were often only fifteen or thirty seconds long but, by God, they caught our attention. Don't play with matches, or old fridges. Or kites or frisbees, should you happen to be near a pylon or electricity substation. Be careful crossing the road and running along the beach. And also near ponds and lakes, or when swimming in the sea. And never, ever talk to strangers.And then, of course, there was Protect and Survive. A full set of instructions for what to do in the event of nuclear war. Coming from a time of such existential dread, is it any wonder that those films are now considered a cornerstone of the UK's collective Horror imagination?I'd wanted to use them in a story for a long time, but the idea lay dormant until I realized two things. Firstly, that there was an element of warding ritual and incantation to them ("Look left, look right...", "Charley says...") reminiscent of folk horror, only in the urban environment rather than the usual remote rural setting. And, secondly, that those films were what Britain was scared of fifty years ago. What I ought to be writing about was what really terrifies me about this country now."
"Roth-Steyr, the story of Valerie Varden (or to use her full name, Countess Valerie Elisabeth Franzsiska von Bradenstein-Vr¿ovci, reluctant immortal and former assassin of the Habsburg Empire) wasn't quite like anything I'd written before. And almost as soon as I'd finished it, I knew Val had more to say. So I picked up her trail again, and found her making her way across a darkening Europe, hunted by a shadowy foe. Someone wants her dead: to find out who Val will need to remember everything she tried to forget. She must become, once more, an assassin. A killer. A Jaeger."
Twisted Branches is a dark domestic noir on familial love, poisoned loyalty and how we, knowingly and unknowingly, mess up and light up each other's lives.Artist and matriarch Effie clings to the house five generations of her family called home. But are its ghosts haunting her or is she summoning them? With Effie's death, rejected protégé Kerry-Alice and daughter-in-law Veronica fight to lay her influence to rest in their own lives, but who is truly haunted and who is doing the haunting?
Great British Horror 8 continues the annual series showcasing the best in modern British horror. Every year, the series features ten British authors, plus one international guest contributor, telling tales of this sceptered isle.The 2023 edition, Something Peculiar, once again features eleven previously unpublished stories from eleven authors at the very top of their game.
"The seed of this novella was a single image I'd long had in mind before composition. A young boy standing in a farmyard no longer knowing which hand he led with. That struck me as a promising metaphor for something my conscious mind had yet to catch up with, and indeed it was another few years before I finally figured it all out. By this time I'd returned to my early love of the classic dark novella. Lovecraft, obviously, but also a renewed appreciation of Arthur Machen, particularly his criminally underrated "The Terror". In that piece, I was struck by its accumulative, almost investigative structure, the way it drew upon different sources of information to conjure a vision packed with verisimilitude. In The Dread They Left Behind, I wanted to evoke an isolated rural community via the medium of a retrospective first-person narrator along the lines of he who regales us in HPL's "The Colour out of Space". The difference is that mine is directly exposed to and physically affected by the historical events. Along with all the requisite intrigue and frights, the piece allowed me to explore concerns I have about political extremism. It took a long while to get right - I tinkered with it for years. But for me it embodies everything I hold dear in the field. Whether it does so successfully, I leave for readers to determine."
"There's a tiny gap between the stories we tell ourselves and those we tell others and that's where you'll find the truth."All That's Lost is the second collection from award-winning horror writer Ray Cluley, bringing together 17 stories exploring the haunted, the strange, and the uncanny.Lose yourself in the darkness here, and find yourself changed...
"The Derelict is really a story of two derelicts - the events on the first and their part in the creation of the second. With this story I've pretty much nailed my colours to the mast, so to speak. As the tale is intended as a tribute to stories by the likes of William Hope Hodgson or H P Lovecraft (with a passing nod to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner), where some terrible event is related in an unearthed journal or (as is the case here) by a narrator driven to near madness.The primary influence on the story was the voyage of the Demeter, from Bram Stoker's Dracula, one of the more compelling episodes of that novel. Here the crew are irrevocably doomed from the moment they set sail. There is never any hope of escape or salvation once the nature of their cargo becomes apparent. This was to be my jumping off point with The Derelict. Though I have charted a very different course from the one taken by Stoker, I have tried to remain resolutely true to the spirit of that genre of fiction and the time in which it was set." -Neil Williams
"It's fair to say that parenthood has dominated my thoughts - and certainly my identity - for the last nine years. While I love my children unconditionally, I'm morbidly fascinated by the idea of parenthood lacking an instinctive bond to counter the difficulties and sacrifices of such a period of life. And I'm afraid of any possible future in which that bond might be weaker. Identity is a slippery thing. More than anything, I'm scared of losing it - my own, and those of the people I love. Several of my novels and stories have related to this fear. In Shade of Stillthorpe, it's quite literal: how would you react if your child was unrecognisable, suddenly, in all respects?"-Tim Major
"For a long time Sorrowmouth existed as three or four separate ideas in different notebooks until one day, in a flash of divine inspiration, I recognised the common ground they shared with each other. A man trekking from one roadside memorial to another, in pursuit of grief; Beachy Head and its long dark history of suicide; William Blake and his angelic visions on Peckham Rye; Blake again with The Ghost of a Flea; a monstrous companion, bound by lifes' cruelty...As I wrote I discovered these disparate elements were really about me getting to some deeper truth about myself, and about all the people I've known in my life, about the struggles we all have that no one save for loved ones see - alcoholism, dependence, self doubt, grief, mental illness. Sorrowmouth is about the mystery hiding at the heart of all things, making connections in the depths of sorrow, and what you have to sacrifice for a moment of vertigo."Simon Avery
"The idea for the book came from an image that I had bought a few years ago, with the intention of using it as a cover for a more traditional look at zombies and voodoo. I loved it and wanted to use it in some shape or form, so decided to let it inspire me. It''s a near-black image, with a man smoking a cigarette, etched faintly at its edges.The night is a place where the places and people we see during the day are changed. Their properties - especially how we interact and consider them - are altered. But more than that, the night changes us as people. It''s a time of day which both hides us away in the shadows and opens us up for reflection. Where we peer up at the stars, made aware of our utter insignificance and wonder, ''what if?'' This book takes something that links every single one of us, and tries to illuminate its murky depths, finding things both familiar and alien. It''s a story of loss, hope, and redemption; a barely audible whisper within, that even in our darkest hour, there is the promise of the light again."
"How much do we really know about Quincey Morris?In one of the greatest Grand-Guignol moments of all time, Dracula is caught feeding Mina blood from his own breast while her husband lies helpless on the same bed. In the chaos that follows, Morris runs outside, ostensibly in pursuit. "I could see Quincey Morris run across the lawn," Dr. Seward says, "and hide himself in the shadow of a great yew-tree. It puzzled me to think why he was doing this..." Then the doctor is distracted, and we never do find out.This story rose up from that one question: Why, in this calamitous moment, did the brave and stalwart Quincey Morris hide behind a tree?"Lisa Moore
Great British Horror 6 continues the annual series showcasing the best in modern British horror. Every year, the series features ten British authors, plus one international guest contributor, telling tales of this sceptered isle.The 2021 edition, Ars Gratia Sanguis, once again features eleven previously unpublished stories from eleven authors at the very top of their game.
At heart, Dreamland is an elemental feminine landscape.These twenty-one stories from female-identifying writers embody the disconnect between reality and the subconscious, the desire for meaning and the need for escape, the too-blue sky and the abyss.These are voices that embrace the topography of the other: the weird, transgressive, uncanny and strange. Voices that displace, unsettle and unnerve, that are subtly subversive in their power.
A series of micro-collections featuring a selection of peculiar tales from the best in horror and speculative fiction.From Black Shuck Books and Rachel Knightley comes Beyond Glass, the twenty-seventh in the Black Shuck SHADOWS series.
A series of micro-collections featuring a selection of peculiar tales from the best in horror and speculative fiction.From Black Shuck Books and Simon Avery comes A Box Full of Darkness, the twenty-eighth in the Black Shuck SHADOWS series.
Great British Horror 5 continues the annual series showcasing the best in modern British horror. Every year, the series features ten British authors, plus one international guest contributor, telling tales of this sceptered isle.The 2020 edition, Midsummer Eve, features another eleven original stories from eleven authors at the very top of their game.
A man suffering from extreme grief finds that pieces of himself are going missing, while another attempts to cheat death in a very unusual and dangerous way...One woman gets more than she bargained for during her pregnancy, while another is the target for a unique killer who must feast to survive...And as one prisoner attempts to escape not only his pursuers but this reality, an unhinged individual attempts to build the perfect family bit by bit...In this collection of thirteen tales from award-winning and #1 bestselling author Paul Kane (the BFA-Nominated Monsters, Before, The Storm), you'll find every conceivable kind of Body Horror. This very special book also contains Kane's first published story 'Façades', a novelette set in his PL Kane crime universe (Her Last Secret, Her Husband's Grave) featuring a brand new PI, the scripts for the theatre version of 'The Torturer' (recently turned into a short film starring current Pinhead Paul T. Taylor) and the comic adaptation of 'The Disease', plus it comes with an introduction by John Llewellyn Probert (The Compleat Valentine, Made for the Dark) and stunning cover art by Les Edwards (Nightbreed, The Thing).Get ready to be traumatised!
"You never know which ideas will stick in your mind, let alone where they''ll go. Roth-Steyr began with an interest in the odd designs and names of early automatic pistols, and the decision to use one of them as a story title. What started out as an oddball short piece became a much longer and darker tale about how easily a familiar world can fall apart, how old convictions vanish or change, and why no one should want to live forever.It''s also about my obsession with history, in particular the chaotic upheavals that plagued the first half of the twentieth century and that are waking up again. Another ''long dark night of the European soul'' feels very close today. So here''s the story of Valerie Varden. And her Roth-Steyr."
In an alternative 2017 where computer viruses are still taking down businesses and social media algorithms are still programmed to profile everybody, join Aurora - the social platform that shines a light for everyone - in watching new user, Siward Walls, watching back.
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