Look Out For… Hungry Celluloid by Frank Duffy
“Hungry Celluloid contains compelling, literate and disturbing pieces by a writer who knows exactly how horror works.”
The new collection from Frank Duffy, author of The Signal Block and Other Tales and Unknown Causes brings together thirteen unsettling stories which push through the thin fabric of reality to reveal the darkness which surrounds us.
Why We’re Excited About This Book: Hungry Celluloid is the third collection of short stories from Frank Duffy. Duffy’s fiction is a rare treat for those yet to discover it: compelling, literate and disturbing pieces by a writer who knows exactly how horror works.
Focussing on that all important horror ingredient, atmosphere, these stories have a rising sense of tension and threat that lingers with the reader long after the final sentences. There is also a dark humour at play in Duffy’s work, as evidenced by the opening story ‘Photographs Showing Terrible Things’ which uses the setting of a horror convention and the various hopeful, desperate and envious writers gathered there to tale its tale of a fate that cannot be escaped…
A fantastic collection from Duffy and Dark Minds Press, Hungry Celluloid contains some of the best stories released this year.
Hungry Celluloid is is released on 21 September 2015 from Dark Minds Press.
Look Out For… Shadow On The Wall by Jonathan Aycliffe
“Shadow On The Wall is an explicit homage to that greatest of all British ghost story writers: M.R. James”
In the countryside of Victorian England, Edward Atherton, rector of Thornham St. Stephen, has taken on the arduous task of restoring the ancient church. But he should never have meddled with the tomb that lay beneath the church’s crumbling walls. The moment the workman raised the tomb lid, an unspeakable horror escaped. At a loss to explain the unsettling noises and frightening visions that begin to plague the church, Atherton calls upon fellow antiquarian and Cambridge professor Richard Asquith to help investigate the strange events that began in the wake of the tomb’s disturbance.
The two discover tantalizing hints of whom and what may have been laid to rest in the tomb, but the unforeseen circumstances force Asquith to give up his inquiries and leave the small village of Thornham behind. Asquith tries to put the frightening experiences behind him and focus on his new wife and family. But death and disappearances abound, and Asquith soon has no choice but to confront the darkness that has followed him from that ancient church into his own home.
Why We’re Excited About This Book:
Jonathan Aycliffe is the acclaimed author of such classic modern ghost novels as Naomi’s Room, The Silence Of Ghosts and Whispers In The Dark. Now he returns with Shadow On The Wall, in what seems to be an explicit homage to that greatest of all British ghost story writers: M.R. James.
Set in Victorian Cambridge’s churches and collages before moving to the desolate fens, and featuring a cast of dons, clerics and antiquarians who unwittingly unleash an ancient evil, the book wears its influences with pride. But given the talent on display in Aycliffe’s previous work, Shadow On The Wall should hopefully prove to be more than a simple repeating of old tropes and combine them with a modern sensibility and fears.
Shadow On The Wall is released on 1 October 2015 by Constable.
JAMES EVERINGTON
