Look Out For… After The Fog Clears by Lee Thompson
“Thompson combines the breakneck pace of the best thrillers with the dark atmospherics of horror, with the result being distinctively his own.”
When a policeman accidentally runs over a young boy on a fog-shrouded street in Saginaw, Michigan, it thrusts three families into a head-on collision with grief, violence and chaos…
Officer Nathan Hazzard: for years now a dirty cop and on the brink of losing touch with reality, willingly releases himself from society’s shackles…
Luther Anderson: a young man whose only true concerns up to the day of the accident is to care for his crippled brother and their grandmother, becomes the target of intense hatred…
Raul Spencer: a disgruntled son working at his father’s funeral home; an adulterer, who fears his sins will find him out, blames everyone else for his problems even as his selfishness leads him ever more astray…
Geneva Spencer: the wounded mother who holds her dying son in her arms and finds that there is no one there to hold her as the life she knew takes a dark turn once Officer Hazzard starts pursuing her for reasons she can’t begin to understand…
In the fast-paced suspense novel, After the Fog Clears, author Lee Thompson probes the fractured psyches of the lost, the abandoned, and the psychotic.
Why We’re Excited About This Book:
After The Fog Clears is the latest release from Lee Thompson and it has that signature style that we saw in It’s Only Death and With Fury In Hand. It opens in the middle of a police chase and the relentless pace barely lets up from there on in. Thompson manages to combine the breakneck speed of the best thrillers with the dark atmospherics of horror, with the result being something distinctively his own.
In common with many of his previous books, After The Fog Clears features a cast of broken, isolated characters, who are forced into bleak situations beyond their control. Whilst the reader might not know what is coming next one thing is clear: in a Thompson novel, when you think things can’t get worse he’ll prove you wrong.
After The Fog Clears is out now from DarkFuse.
Look Out For… The Cold Embrace: Weird Stories by Women
“With such an abundance of riches every reader is likely to discover stories new to them.”
This original anthology presents 19 short stories that cover nearly a century of speculative fiction by women authors. Selections range from Mary Shelley’s ‘Transformation’ (1830), a pendant to Frankenstein in its themes and motifs, to ‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched’ (1922) by May Sinclair, a tale of time travel that follows its heroine to Hell and back.
Gripping narratives include Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Haunted House’, in which a ghostly couple revisit their former home; ‘A Wedding Chest’ by Vernon Lee, a story of romance and revenge that unfolds in Renaissance Italy; and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, recounting a woman’s psychic possession by the previous occupant of her attic bedroom. Additional tales include E. Nesbit’s ‘From the Dead’, ‘The Eyes’ by Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Curious If True’, and many others. Editor S. T. Joshi offers an extensive Introduction as well as notes on each of the authors.
Why We’re Excited About This Book: The Cold Embrace is an anthology of Gothic, horror and weird fiction by women, presented chronologically from Mary Shelly in the 1830s to May Sinclair in the 1920s. There are some stories here that will no doubt be familiar to many readers, not least Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s all time classic ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. But there’s plenty of stories from authors who are either lesser known (Amelia B. Edwards, Edna W. Underwood, Ellen Glasgow) or not predominately known for their supernatural work (Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Gaskell, E. Nesbit). With such an abundance of riches every reader is likely to discover stories new to them, as well as see those which they have read in a new context.
As editor S.T. Joshi says in his introduction, the contribution of female authors to the canon of the weird is large and significant. This anthology is a perfect way to see its historical development, or just simply to read a selection of great stories.
The Cold Embrace: Weird Stories by Women is out on 24 June 2016 from Dover Horror Classics.
JAMES EVERINGTON
