Look Out For… The Last Plague by Rich Hawkins
A pestilence has fallen across the land. Run and hide. Seek shelter. Do not panic. The infected will find you. When Great Britain is hit by a devastating epidemic, four old friends must cross a chaotic, war-torn England to reach their families. But between them and home, the country is teeming with those afflicted by the virus – cannibalistic, mutated monsters whose only desires are to infect and feed. The Last Plague is here.
Why we’re excited about this book: Début novelist Rich Hawkins presents a new take on the infected/zombie story with The Last Plague. A post-apocalyptic Great Britain crawling with infected mutants and judging from the cover art, these infected aren’t just shuffling zombie clones but have a touch of Cthulhu about them… Tentacle-faced horrors crossed with an end of the world apocalypse; what more could you ask for?
The epic apocalyptic horror story has a long and distinguished history including such classics as Stephen King’s The Stand and Robert R. McCammon’s Swan Song. The Last Plague looks set to join them.
This book will appeal to: people who still think they’ve got ‘Captain Trips’ the first sneeze of every winter.
The Last Plague is out on the 31 August 2014 from Crowded Quarantine Publications.
Look Out For… Dreams Of Shadow & Smoke
With Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and James Joyce among his admirers, the ghost stories and novels of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) cast a long shadow on the literary landscape. Dreams of Shadow and Smoke features ten new tales of the fantastic and macabre written in celebration of the bicentenary of Dublin’s “Invisible Prince”. Revisit a world in which certain elixirs remain capable of awakening the mind to the presence of unknown forces; where the monuments, portraits, and other legacies of history lay traps for the unwary; and the logic of finance butts up against the unyielding rules of folklore. We would like to think that should Le Fanu be handed this book, he would smile at the results and deem it worthy of his consideration.
Why we’re excited about this book: This year is the 200th anniversary of horror maestro Sheridan Le Fanu’s birth and to mark the occasion Dublin’s Swan River Press have published this anthology of stories inspired by his work from contemporary authors. La Fanu’s stories like ‘Green Tea’ and ‘Schalken the Painter’ were big influences on later writers like M.R. James but are perhaps not as well known as they should be. The stories in this tribute volume are intended not to be sequels or a pastiche of La Fanu, but modern day explorations of the themes of his fiction.
The editors have said they’d like to think Le Fanu himself would have approved of this book; with contributors including Angela Slatter, Lynda E Rucker and Mark Valentine that looks like a safe bet. One of La Fanu’s key themes was the idea of the past haunting the present, and this excellent anthology proves La Fanu is still haunting today’s horror scene.
This book will appeal to: fans of supernatural horror both classic and modern.
Dreams Of Shadow And Smoke is out on the 28 August 2014 from Swan River Press.
In the meantime, many of La Fanu’s original works are available from Amazon.
JAMES EVERINGTON