Here is the cover, as provided by the ever-reliable STEVE
UPHAM.
There perhaps isn’t an automatic cross-cover for readers
between thrillers and horrors. Some are content to indulge in both, others less
so. But as a writer, I have long been fascinated by the two sub-genres and have
regularly worked in both, finding many overlaps between the two. It’s only in
this last couple of years, of course, that my thriller novels, the likes of
STALKERS and SACRIFICE (with HUNTED due out from Avon Books in February) – action-fuelled
crime tomes following the investigations of DS Mark Heckenburg – have become
bestsellers and have subsequently started to occupy much of my time. But before
then, I had a long history of producing horror stories and novellas for
magazines and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic. Some 300 have been
published to date, going back to the early 1990s; two of these have been the
recipient of the British Fantasy Award, and one of them won the International
Horror Guild Award (so I like to think I knew what I was doing).
However, by the nature of the beast, many of the titles in
which these first appeared are now deleted, out of print or were the work of
small printing houses since defunct; either way, completists are finding them
elusive to collect, and new readers can only ever find them as titles in back-lists. As such, in the age of the e-book, it seemed an obvious
thing to look at the best of these again, tighten and trim where necessary, and
re-issue them as e-collections.
That, somewhat loosely, is the new plan.
DON’T READ ALONE will hopefully be the first in a rolling
programme of new e-publications – each containing about 70,000 words – drawing on
the best of my short horror stories and novellas, and each one assembled with tales specifically chosen to complement each other but also varying in subject matter so there
should always be something for everyone (the one overarching feature, if I say
so myself, is fear – I prefer my stories to be as frightening as possible, or at the very
least suspenseful and unnerving).
Audio versions and
even paperbacks may follow in due course, though I’m not totally sure how that
latter scheme will pan out at this early stage. If you’re interested in that,
keep watching this space.
The table of contents for DON’T READ ALONE is as follows:
The Old North Road (first published in Alone On The Darkside, 2006, and winner of the International Horror Guild Award): A writer investigating the myths surrounding the Green Man has a terrifying chance encounter on a lonely woodland road ...
The Poppet (first published in Enemies At The Door, 2012): A self-centred student does the dirty on a college pal, only to find his fate interwoven with a mysterious faceless doll ...
Grendel’s Lair (first published in Beneath The Ground, 2003): A callous cop, a brutal criminal, a missing child - and something unspeakable in a derelict air-raid shelter ...
Hell In The Cathedral (first published in The Shadows
Beneath, 2000): Brit tourists in the Med are taken on the boat-trip of a lifetime, but find themselves at the mercy of a voracious sea-beast ...
The Baleful Dead (first published in Groaning Shadows, 2009): An ageing metal band hook up at a lonely country manse to record one last album, unaware that their scheming manager has a 'foolproof plan' to summon assistance from beyond ...
