Here’s a small selection of the horror and genre news that caught our eye during the last week …
Once upon a time there was a man who lost his wife, and tried to find her by reading all the books in the world. Thus begins this collection of 101 stories by Robert Shearman. An old woman sits in the dark. She has 101 stories to tell you—the last stories in existence. But the route through them is challenging. Each tale branches into multiple paths, dependent upon the choices you make. Navigate your way through a labyrinth of colliding and contrasting tales. A brand new Arabian Nights—except this time Scheherazade isn’t spinning yarns to save her own life. Follow the right path, and win back your wife from the dead. There are fairy tales and myths, adventure stories, horror stories. Comedies and tragedies, fantasy and fables and realist tales of modern life. Some of the stories are funny, and some are moving. Some of them are frightening. Most of them are very, very strange. At time of going to press, both of the two hardcover editions had sold out, but this fantastic collection is still available in trade paperback from PS Publishing, here.
From writer John McNee and The Sinister Horror Company, Doom Cabaret, coming 24 April
This is the stage. These are the players. A young woman’s sexual appetites prove too powerful to be undone by death. Hedonistic clubbers covet a drug that warps flesh rather than the mind. A wealthy cannibal encounters a meal too beautiful to be eaten. The Lullaby Man ushers another eager victim into his clockwork lair. Here is where such stories are told. Blood and beauty, defilement and deformity, musicians and monsters. Welcome to the Doom Cabaret. Available in paperback and eBook formats, you can pre-order your copy now, here.
Available in both signed and unsigned jacketed hardcover editions (signed editions limited to one hundred copies), this new collection from Mark Morris spans his thirty year horror writing career. Thirty stories, Warts and All is a tribute to Morris’ dedication to the genre, beginning in horror’s paperback heyday, traversing the lull in the genre’s popularity in the early 2000s and continuing onward to the modern resurgence of horror as hot property in written form. The stories herein vary wildly in tone and mood, in theme and content, but all have a thread of darkness running through them. They show how versatile the horror genre can be, and how wide are its parameters. Available now, you can grab your copy here.
KEV HARRISON