Ten times the horror - Black Book is back!

Very pleased this week to announce that another volume in one of my current favourite series of horror anthologies, THE 10^th BLACK BOOK OF HORROR (the artwork to which is pictured left), will soon be published.

As many may know, penning short horror stories is one of my favourite past-times – I have a back-catalogue of such that goes back into what feels like ancient history – but given the amount of time I’ve been putting into my new series of cop thriller novels from Avon Books, I’ve had almost no time at all of late to write pieces of short fiction.

It isn’t a complete non-starter. I still manage to crank them out now and then, but they are, alas, few and far between these days. That said, the BLACK BOOK OF HORROR series (MORTBURY PRESS) is one I will always try and contribute to. The brainchild of editor Charles Black, it is very much heir-apparent to the famous PAN HORROR series of the 1960s and 1970s in that it sees the publication of an annual anthology of horror stories, which vary from the most gruesome and disturbing kind of contes cruels, to clever psychological mindwarps, to the kinds of eerie supernatural mysteries that hark back to the golden age of the English ghost story.

The 10th BLACK BOOK OF HORROR is due out very shortly, and it will the ninth one I’ve been fortunate enough to have a story included in (the only one I’ve missed thus far is BBH#2, though I sort of doubled up in BB#8, as the cover featured an image of my severed head – which was a little bit unnerving). Anyway, my contribution to BBH#10 is a story called MARSHWALL, which, without giving too many spoilers away, concerns a lonely house on the edge of a desolate, waterlogged wilderness, and its less than savoury occupants.

I can’t actually give you a date when this book will be available, but for anyone fortunate enough to have a ticket, it will most likely be getting an official launch at World Fantasy in Brighton at the end of October. If anyone still needs convincing, here’s a LINK to a rather neat little video put together to celebrate this series by regular contributor and resourceful mistress of the night, ANNA TABORSKA.

And if that isn’t enough for you, here’s the TOC for BBH#10:

STIFF by Angela Blake; THE EASTER BUNNY by Tom Johnstone; THE LAST TESTAMENT OF JACOB TYLER by David Surface; THE WAR EFFORT by Carl P. Thompson; THE PRE-RAPHAELITE PAINTING by David A. Sutton; CHRISTMAS IN THE RAIN by Chris Lawton; DEEPER THAN DARK WATER by Gary Power; MARSHWALL by Paul Finch; EXPLODING RAPHAELESQUE HEADS by Ian Hunter; THE BEST CHRISTMAS EVER by John Llewellyn Probert; THE PYGMALION CONJURATION by Mike Chinn; THE BOY by David Williamson; THE LAST WAGON IN THE TRAIN by Andrea Janes; DAD DANCING by Kate Farrell; GUINEA PIG GIRL by Thana Niveau.