Horror

Upcoming: HEX by Thomas Odd Heuvelt (Hodder/Tor)

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HeuveltTO-Hex

I tweeted about Thomas Odd Heuvelt‘s Hex yesterday, and figured that it also made sense to mention it on the blog. It looks interesting (not to mention creepy), and I’ve been hearing great things from people who have read it early. Here’s the synopsis:

Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay until death. Whoever comes to stay, never leaves.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Blind and silenced, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children’s beds for nights on end. So accustomed to her have the townsfolk become that they often forget she’s there. Or what a threat she poses. Because if the stitches are ever cut open, the story goes, the whole town will die.

The curse must not be allowed to spread. The elders of Black Spring have used high-tech surveillance to quarantine the town. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town’s teenagers decide to break the strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into a dark nightmare.

Hex is published in April 2016 in the US by Tor Books, in the UK by Hodder, and in the Netherlands by Luitingh-Sijthoff.

Excerpt: ACAPULCALYPSE NOW by Alison Littlewood (Robinson)

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LittlewoodA-ZA-AcapulcalypseNowToday, Robinson has allowed me to share an excerpt from Alison Littlewood’s contribution the the publisher’s Zombie Apocalypse Series (created by Stephen Jones): ACAPULCALYPSE NOW. Here’s the synopsis:

The Hotel Baktun is an exclusive vacation complex that is about to open on the coast of Acapulco, Mexico. Owned by a mysterious multi-millionaire businessman, it is shaped like an ancient Mayan pyramid and its halls are lined with rare and expensive artefacts.

For Stacy Keenan, the hotel’s new Head of Security, things are already chaotic as the locals continue to put the finishing touches to the festivities while VIPs begin to arrive for the grand opening. When a Russian cruise ship turns along the shore and disgorges its cargo of flesh-eating zombies, the guests and staff soon fragment into various factions as they struggle to withstand the spread of HRV (Human Reanimation Virus).

As the armies of the dead conquer all that stand before them, and the human survivors prepare for a final battle against an unstoppable enemy, a horror even more ancient and terrible is revealed when ‘The Death’ comes to Paradise… Continue reading →

Guest Post: “How a Fourth Book is Really the Beginning of a New Series” by Clay & Susan Griffith

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GriffithC&S-AuthorsPicTHE GEOMANCER: The Return of the New Vampire Empire

Hi. We’re Clay and Susan Griffith, authors of the Vampire Empire books and the Crown & Key trilogy. Our newest book, The Geomancer (November 3, Pyr Books), is the latest in the Vampire Empire novels. It’s the fourth book we’ve written set in that world, but it’s the first book in a new ongoing “Gareth and Adele” series. The original Vampire Empire was a trilogy. It was conceived and executed as a trilogy. By the end of the third book, we brought the major storylines to a close and tied up most of the questions. The characters had developed over the course of three books. We proudly considered the story done and moved on to other projects.

Only it didn’t quite work out that way. Continue reading →

Interview with NATE CROWLEY

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CrowleyN-AuthorPicLet’s start with an introduction: Who is Nate Crowley?

He is a guy who tweets as @frogcroakley, and is probably best known for Daniel Barker’s Birthday, a prank on a friend that somehow lurched into being a 75-day serialised space opera. He lives in south London and is getting a bit uncomfortable about talking himself in the third person.

Your debut novel, The Sea Hates a Coward, will be published by Abaddon in October. How would you introduce it to a potential reader? Is it part of a series?

It’s the story of a rebellion among dissidents who have been executed, then reanimated to work as forced labour aboard a city-sized whaling ship. On an alien world. As such it’s a zombie story, but it’s also a whaling story and a sort of dying-world dystopian story too. At the moment it’s a standalone, but the setting is a corner of a much wider world I’ve got in mind, so there are potentially lots more stories to tell. Continue reading →

Interview with CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

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FowlerC-AuthorPicLet’s start with an introduction: Who is Christopher Fowler?

If you want the official version, Christopher Fowler is the award-winning author of over 40 novels and short story collections, including the Bryant & May mysteries, recording the adventures of two Golden Age detectives in modern-day London. His most recent books were the haunted house thriller Nyctophobia and The Burning Man. Other work includes screenplays, videogames, graphic novels and audio plays. He won the CWA Dagger In The Library this year for outstanding work and has a weekly column in The Independent On Sunday. He lives in King’s Cross, London and Barcelona and daily updates his fairly unusual blog.

Your latest novel, The Sand Men, is published by Solaris. I finished it recently, and enjoyed it. How would you introduce it to a potential reader?

I like thrillers that ask awkward questions about our world. It’s about what happens when old and new cultures clash, in this case, Dubai’s fast-forward rush into the future, and the damage it inflicts on people. Continue reading →

Quick Catch-Up with M.D. LACHLAN

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The Valkyrie’s Song is the fourth novel in your Wolfsangel Cycle series. How does it feel to have it got this far? Are there more books to come?

Amazing, really. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself in the Norse world — or at least my version of it. There are more novels to come but there may be a big leap in time period for the next one. I’m thinking of setting it in WWII.

LachlanMD-W4-ValkyriesSong

What drew you to the werewolf myth, and the particular periods of history you’ve chosen for your novels?

I don’t know — it just hopped out of me fully formed on the page. I like the werewolf because of the lack of control, the  idea of the ancient animal heart beating beneath the civilised surface, ready to run amok in our lives. Big teeth, too — everyone loves big teeth. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “Heroes & Villains” by Paul Kane

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KaneP-AuthorPicThe relationship between heroes and villains has always fascinated me, even before I became a writer. I remember growing up watching the Doctor battling his mortal enemies, The Daleks on TV (in the Baker/Davidson era), watching Kirk repelling Klingons from the starboard bow, and Bond doing battle with Blofeld (so nice to see him back this year in Spectre!). Blake had Servalan, Obi Wan and co. had Darth Vader, Sherlock Holmes had Moriarty, Batman the Joker, Judge Dredd – Judge Death and Robin had his Sheriff of Nottingham in my favourite take on the mythos, Richard Carpenter’s Robin of Sherwood from the ‘80s… but more on those guys later.

There was just something about it all, the two sides of the same coin thing, but also the notion that one can’t exist without the other – in fact in certain cases one creates the other. It’s the age-old struggle of good vs evil, and these characters symbolise it perfectly. Sometimes one side wins, sometimes the other: but it’s always entertaining to watch how things pan out. Continue reading →

Q&A with Stefan Spjut

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SpjutS-AuthorPicWhat inspired you to write a book about the stallo people and how did the idea for Stallo originate?

I didn’t set out to write a book about the stallo people, I more or less stumbled across their mythological footprints when expanding my troll story geographically. What is a troll? It’s a makeshift denomination for an elusive, mischievous supernatural being, originating from the stories of our oral tradition, therefore pertaining a certain degree of authenticity. In the sami culture of old, such beings, roaming the borders of reality, were referred to as stallo, or stallú, which is a sami word of obscure origin. Maybe it means steel, maybe it doesn’t – the etymological obscurity contributes to the sense of mystery. So the troll and the stallo are essentially the same. It’s obviously part of my literary method to adumbrate a hidden connection like that. The idea popped up when I moved a lawn and happened to find out where or rather how the troll was hiding. All these long years it was hiding in our domestic fauna, under my very nose. Hidden, however, is not forgotten. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “On Writing – I do it My Way” by Sue Tingey

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TingeyS-AuthorPicI would imagine if you ask half a dozen writers about how they get their ideas and how they go about putting them down on paper you would get a half a dozen different answers. For me, it changes from project to project. On the whole though, there are certain definites to my writing regime and process.

I try to be disciplined about my writing as that’s the only way it works for me. I write every weekday morning without fail from 7 a.m. until 8.30 a.m., and sometimes later when I’ve got caught up in a scene and forgotten the time. Fortunately I have a very supportive boss – at least he hasn’t sacked me yet! In these one and a half hours I re-read and edit the work I wrote the previous day to get me back into the flow and then I aim for a count of between 700 and 1000 words. If I manage more, I’m happy. If I write less than 700 – well, let’s not go there. Meeting the daily word count keeps me focused and if I wasn’t so strict on myself I would probably flounder and not get anything finished. Continue reading →

An Interview with SUE TINGEY

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TingeyS-AuthorPicLet’s start with an introduction: Who is Sue Tingey?

Hi Stefan, thank you for inviting me to be interviewed.

Who is Sue Tingey? That is actually rather a deep question and I’m probably the last person you should ask, but I’ll have a go at giving a sensible and possibly truthful reply:

I’m a book and animal lover. Married with no pets at the moment except for some Koi carp. I’m slightly obsessive about things that matter and couldn’t really give a damn about things that don’t (though this has taken years to perfect – I used to be a natural born worrier). I love horror films but only if viewed from behind a cushion or, if no cushion available, from between my fingers. I hate animal films because I spend the whole hour and a half sobbing. I put it down to being traumatised by Disney’s Old Yella when I was a child. As for Marley and Me – don’t even go there.

Your debut novel, Marked, will be published by Jo Fletcher Books. It looks rather fabulous: How would you introduce it to a potential reader? Is it part of a series?

Thank you kind sir. Marked is the first book of the Soulseer Chronicles and is about Lucky de Salle, a young woman who, for as long as she can remember, has been able to converse with the dead. Even her best – and only – friend Kayla is a ghost. The book starts when Lucky reluctantly returns to her old school, from which she was expelled fifteen years earlier, to help with a haunting brought about by three boarders playing with a Ouija board. As it happens her instincts are correct: ghosts are the least of her worries – the schoolgirls have called up a daemon and he has a message for Kayla. From this point on Lucky finds that no one she meets is who they say they are and even her best friend has been keeping secrets. Soon she’s caught up in the political intrigues of a world she never knew existed, and her already weird life gets weirder by the moment. Continue reading →