This Is Horror

News Round-up Week Ending 12 November 2021

Here’s a small selection of the horror and genre news that caught our eye during the last week …

Infinite, book 3 in Duncan Ralston’s Ghostland trilogy, available for pre-order now

Ghosts wreak havoc in the streets of Duck Falls, and Lilian Roth has gone underground, hiding in the Laramies’ backyard bunker. With the town under military quarantine, the death toll continues to rise. And Hedgewood’s massive infrasound array stands to wipe out every “ethereal” within its radius, Ben Laramie and his friends at the Temple among them. Setting the ethereals free from Ghostland was only the beginning for Rex Garrote. He’s returned to the remains of his house to tear open the Dark Rift – a realm of terrifying impossibilities between the living and ethereal planes – and unleash its nightmare creatures upon the world. The End of Everything is on the horizon, and Lilian and Ben are humanity’s last hopes. Facing their greatest fears and insurmountable odds, they must return to Ghostland through the Dark Rift’s deadly, ever-changing landscape for a final confrontation between good and evil, to stop Rex Garrote once and for all. Available to pre-order in eBook, with a paperback edition to follow soon, you can guarantee your copy here.


Available now from author Paul Witcover and PS Publishing, Lincolnstein

April 1865. General Lee has surrendered his army to General Grant. Yet the Civil War continues. Pockets of rebel resistance smoulder, wanting only a spark to reignite the greater conflagration. The assassination of President Lincoln threatens to supply that spark. But if Lincoln can be restored—resurrected—all may be well. Desperate times demand desperate measures, and a dangerous, all-but-forgotten technology is used to return the dead president to a semblance of life. Abraham Lincoln rises unchanged in outward appearance. But inside, he is a different man. One with an agenda all his own. Escaping his handlers, Lincoln embarks on a vengeful quest to redeem a plundered past. He is pursued by a young agent from the Union Intelligence Service tasked with killing the president before his existence can become common knowledge. Now, as the trail leads ever deeper into the still-beating heart of the Confederacy, through ruined country inhabited by unrepentant rebels determined to deny their former slaves any semblance of freedom, the two Union men—one a revenant, the other an assassin—find themselves unlikely allies in a struggle to survive. But when the final, unexpected confrontation comes, bringing the sins of the past and the hopes for the future into violent collision, only one can walk away. Available in a jacketed hardcover or a signed, numbered edition limited to 100 copies, you can pick up your copy here.


Coming 15 November from writer Kyle Winkler, Oh Pain, a collection of weird short fiction

A new mother secretly bites her baby until the compulsion ruins her. An abandoned angel eats the trash of a small Ohio town. A social outcast spies on her neighbor’s morphing body for a secret agency bent on skullduggery. A scientist suffers horrible mutations to care for a radioactive orphan. A hopeful college graduate labors in an underground bunker scrubbing a giant. In these twelve weird stories, human bodies are morphed, warped, and withered. Through love, desolation, or entropy. Through motherhood, childhood, or disease. The settings for these stories of painful transformation are often the huddled corners of the uncanny Midwest, but the changes are always happening on the body in pain. Oh Pain is a collection of humor and despair from the author of the cosmic horror novella The Nothing That Is. Available for pre-order in eBook format, with a paperback coming soon, you can pick up your copy here.


Available now from Evan J. Peterson and Arus Entertainment, Metaflesh: Poems in the Voices of the Monster

In the flickering twilight of the Cinématoxique, the twisted brainchild of a mad doctor and an inspired poet waits for the opening curtain… Evan J. Peterson invites you to explore the life of the creature-Frankenstein’s “monster”-through poetry and prose in various genres and stylings throughout the ages. From its first steps to movies, adaptations, music, and beyond, this must-have collection will bring you to the edge of your seat and keep you there, no matter how much you might want to turn your mind’s eye away from the screen. Presented in one volume for the first time, Metaflesh is a literary retrospective of the ultimate antihero and science fiction’s original bad boy-the creature, the monster…Frankenstein! Available now in paperback and eBook formats, you can grab your copy here.


Coming 24 November from Adrian Meredith and Red Cape Publishing, A Splintered Soul

Sarah dreams of a life outside of the castle that has become her prison. George dreams of a life outside of the hell he finds himself in. When they finally meet, they soon discover they can harness the greatest power in the world, but it comes at a price – someone else has the same powers, and they need to kill him in order to save the world. What if Faeries and Dragons were angels for opposing Gods, using humans as proxies? What if humanity’s sole purpose was to act as a weapon in a war on a celestial level? This is that story. This story can be interpreted in many ways. Some say it is fantasy, others that it is science fiction, horror, historical fiction, religious, a metaphorical allegory, and many other types besides. They are all right, yet they are all wrong, and as the reader you will need to decide for yourself. Available to pre-order in eBook, with a paperback to follow, you can guarantee your copy here.


Released 28 November from Book Guild Publishing, Gothic Ghost Stories by Trevor K Bell

Whether it is the resuscitated corpse that visits a hotel gust in ‘The House of the Dead’ or the maleficent returning warlock cocooning a tomb robber in ‘Mad Allen’, or the taking shape of a vague apprehension in ‘A School Story’, or a human sacrifice in ‘Blood of the Lamb’, Bell knows that what we fear most is the sensation of being afraid and that it is the reader’s imagination which conjures up the true phantoms of terror. Available for pre-order in paperback and eBook formats, you can get your copy here.

KEV HARRISON