“Even the most well-read horror fan will find gems in The Valancourt Book Of Horror Stories new to them.”
Spanning two hundred years of horror, this new collection features seventeen macabre gems, including two original tales and many others that have never or seldom been reprinted, by:
Charles Birkin – John Blackburn – Michael Blumlein – Mary Cholmondeley – Hugh Fleetwood – Stephen Gregory – Gerald Kersh – Francis King – M. G. Lewis – Florence Marryat – Richard Marsh – Michael McDowell – Christopher Priest – Forrest Reid – Bernard Taylor – Hugh Walpole
Why We’re Excited About This Book:
The Valancourt Books catalogue has an impressive range, covering horror from long lost works all the way to modern classics from the Twentieth Century. The inspiration behind their new anthology was simple: to create a book that served as an overview for their entire range.
So within The Valancourt Book Of Horror Stories you will find Gothics and Victorian horror from Richard Marsh and Mary Cholmondeley mixed in with contemporary writers such as Michael Blumlein, Michael McDowell and Christopher Priest. As Priest’s inclusion suggests, many of the stories here are by authors not normally considered horror writers, but who can turn their hand to a dark and insidious tale nonetheless.
Even the most well-read horror fan will find gems in The Valancourt Book Of Horror Stories new to them: there are original pieces and many lost pieces being reprinted for the first time.
A treasure-trove of the macabre and ghostly then, and a fitting tribute to Valancourt Books.
The Valancourt Book Of Horror Stories is out now from Valancourt Books.
“What better way to spend Halloween than to find out what stories frighten Stephen King?”
Number 1 bestselling writer Stephen King introduces and presents six gripping and chilling stories in this captivating anthology.
Stephen King discovered these stories when he judged a competition run by Hodder & Stoughton and the Guardian to celebrate publication of his own collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. He was so impressed with the entries that he recommended they were published together in one book.
Reader beware: the stories will make you think twice before cuddling up to your old soft toy, dipping your toe into the water or counting the spots on a leopard…
Why We’re Excited About This Book:
Towards the end of 2015, as part of the promotion for his collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Stephen King judged a short story competition for The Guardian. Now the six short-listed stories have been collected together in this new anthology from Cemetery Dance.
The deserved winner was ‘Wild Swimming’ by Elodie Harper which tells of an American tourist Chrissie and her ill-fated stay near a Lithuanian reservoir. But Harper takes this common-place horror plot and retools it for the twenty-first century: the story is told entirely in emails.
The rest of the stories have an impressive range. There’s a fable about the power of tyranny in Paul Basset Davis’s ‘The Spots’, crime in ‘La Mort de L’Amant’ by Stuart Johnstone and a small boy surviving an apocalypse in ‘The Bear Trap’ (Neil Hudson). And there’s not one but two tales about killer toys: ‘The Unpicking’ by Michael Button and Manuela Saragosa’s ‘Eau-de-Eric’, which King praised for its “good, clean prose, clarity of narration and beautifully sinister build”.
What better way to spend Halloween than to find out what stories frighten Stephen King?
Six Scary Stories is out on 31 October 2016 from Cemetery Dance Publications.
JAMES EVERINGTON