A LITTLE TOUCH OF HUMOR ... FOR FREE!

 

I don't do funny very often, But my comedic fantasy tale REAL LIFE - set around a writer in New York - is free on Kindle for the next couple of days.

              GET YOUR COPY OF REAL LIFE HERE

FROM THE PAGES OF THE GREAT WEIRD TALES

 

My story 'The Waiters' first appeared in Weird Tales back in the days - under the editorship of Darrell Schweitzer - when that magazine was still a regular and leading outlet in the world of horror fiction.

And those days might be gone now but the story's just as good, praised by newer magazines like Black Static and available for Free on Kindle for a couple of days only.

Like most of my stories in eBook form, it can also be read on KU.

PICK UP YOUR FREE COPY HERE

MORE FREE HORROR FICTION

 

THE BLACK LAKE -- the lead story from my huge and heavily-praised collection THREE DOZEN TERIFYING TALES -- is Free this weekend on Kindle. Here's what one reviewer had to say about it:

"A creepy little number that could quite easily have been written by Stephen King."

PICK UP YOUR COPY OF THE BLACK LAKE HERE

GHOST STORIES ON KINDLE UNLIMITED

 

If you're on KU and enjoy ghost stories then this has to be your lucky week.

My collection of such tales does exactly what it says on the cover. Thirteen tales of supernatural haunting and existence after death, each story completely different from the last.

And if you're looking for some longer reads, I have two short ghost novels on KU too, my haunted hotel saga The Night Manager and my supernatural black comedy Postcards From Terri which only went onto KU today ... I finally got the rights in it returned.

A BLAST FROM THE PAST ... AND IT'S FREE!

 

THE BROTHER is one of my earliest stories, but one I'm still proud to have written. A really spooky chiller with an ending that will make the reader jerk with shock.

It first appeared in 1983 in the Fontana Books anthology 'Nightmares,' edited by the legendary Mary Danby. But it has been reprinted many times since then, in languages other than English too.

It appears in two collections of mine, THREE DOZEN TERRIFYING TALES and CLASSIC PAN & FONTANA HORROR.

But for the next couple of days you can get a copy Free on Amazon Kindle. Or else -- if you are on KU -- you can read it almost for free anytime.

                                  PICK UP YOUR COPY OF THE BROTHER HERE

GENTLER FANTASY ... NOW AVAILABLE ON KU

 

If you thought I just wrote dark and scary fiction then you couldn't be more wrong.

Touched By Magic: Human Dramas in the Paranormal World has 3 long stories and 1 short one, all of them exploring the gentler, more humane and more romantic aspects of the supernatural world. And they're set in great locations too, including Tokyo, the Southern Japanese island of Kyushu and the Malaysian island of Penang.

All of this fiction can now be read via Kindle Unlimited.

DOZENS OF HORROR STORIES ... NOW AVAILABLE ON KU

 

An awful lot of my eBooks on Kindle haven't been eligible for KU up till now.

But that situation has dramatically changed this week and now almost all my fiction can be read by people on the KU scheme.

Let's start with 3 horror collections:

Three Dozen Terrifying Tales is my top-selling Kindle in the UK (with fans in Germany and India too) and has picked up simply dozens of top rating and reviews. If you haven't come across this huge collection previously, here's your chance to find out why that is.

Classic Pan & Fontana Horror is quite well-regarded too. Stories from 3 famous UK anthology series, The Pan Book of Horror, The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories and the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, plus tales from other mags and anthos of the decade, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in its heyday under Ed Ferman's editorship.

And last but not least, Dark Futures: Sf meets Horror for those of you who like to vary their palate with a little taste of fusion fiction.

GHOSTS IN PAPERBACK

 

My popular eBook 13 Ghost Stories is now available in a newly-revised paperback. And are they all the same kind of ghost story, as you get with so many other collections? No ... 13 completely different takes on the theme of beings that exist beyond life and time, including my full-length novella Postcards From Terri, a very unusual kind of haunting indeed.

WHICH IS DARKER ... CRIME OR HORROR?

 

It might surprise you if you're not familiar with the writing scene, but there's an awful lot of crossover between those who write crime fiction and those who write horror. Here in the UK, authors who are members of the British Fantasy Society (nine-tenths  horror writers these days) are often members of the Crime Writers' Association too ... and I'm sure that must be equally true in the US.

Not quite so surprising when you really think about it. Writers like John Connelly and England's Stephen Leather frequently blur the line between straight crime tales and supernatural awfulness. And even Stephen King has had a couple of good stabs at writing crime.

But here's the point I'm really trying to get to.  I've attended plenty of events put on by both those groups, the BFS and the CWA. So have many of the horror writers that I know. And usually, those horror guys come back from a crime meeting chuckling and smirking. "I don't believe it," they keep saying. "Those guys think they're really dark. They don't have the faintest clue what dark fiction really is."

The assumption being that horror fiction -- with its Nameless Dreads, its Lovecraftian  Terrors, its lightless writhings and spectral iciness -- is naturally the darker style of fiction. And yes, I used to believe that too.

That was until I started working on my second straight crime novel, The Tribe, the follow-up to my first detective tale The Desert Keeps Its Dead. I was about twelve chapters into that when I stopped with a sudden jolt, a startled realization taking hold of me.

"Hold it just a second," was the thought that started going through my head. "When I sit down to write a horror story, I'm describing awful things for sure ... but awful things that mostly cannot happen and mostly never will. A lake cannot come alive. People cannot be re-animated. Sea creatures can't look like human beings (and I've done that more than once)."

"But just take a look at what I'm writing now. People being badly and deliberately harmed. People being terrorized, kidnapped, even killed. These are awful things as well ... but things that really happen in the real world all the time."

Crime fiction is massively more popular than horror stuff, not only in book form but in movies and TV, but is the type that deals with death and murder really any lighter or more pleasant? Hannibal Lector, a flesh-eating monster in a human body? James Patterson's repellent sexual psychopaths? The bleak oppressive grimness of most Nordic Noir? The elaborate and gruesome demonology of Criminal Minds?

It's not just writers who cross over, it's their subject matter. And it happens in real life as well. Just this week in the UK a harmless-looking young man was sentenced to life for stabbing to death (frantically) a pair of sisters who he came across in a public park. He didn't even know them, and so why do that? He believed he'd made a deal with the Devil ... if he killed enough young women he would win the Lottery (and do much better on the dating scene, just as an added bonus).

Unbelievable, but it really happened. Horrible, but true. And it's that one word, 'true.' that's at the heart of this discussion.

Horror fiction might be a lot more graphic in the way that it describes appalling stuff, except that what's being described exists only in imaginary terms. You're never going to fall foul of a vampire or a zombie or a ghoul. But serial killers really are out there. So are psychotic lunatics. Not to mention all those guys who have no feeling for their fellow beings and would hurt or kill them just to make a tidy buck, or even sometimes just for fun.

And all of those things being true, the suffering of its characters based on genuine human anguish, crime fiction (or a lot of it at least) has to be regarded as in many ways the darker genre.

OUT NOW ... THE NEW RAINE'S LANDING NOVEL

 

It's taken a good long while (and the pandemic helped slow it down even further) but the seventh novel in my series set in the fictional town of Raine's Landing, Massachusetts, is now available in paperback and Kindle.

Why did the pandemic slow it down? Like most writers, I need a calm environment when I am working on a full-length book. What's required is an unbroken string of weeks when I can settle down peacefully and concentrate on the writing and getting all the details of the story right. That applies to every single draft, and CIRCUS OF LOST SOULS went through 14.

And in the first few months of this outbreak, I hardly felt calm or settled, so I set this book aside and concentrated on short stories instead, most of those appearing in my new collection NIGHTCRAWLER.

If you're not familiar with Raine's Landing, Mass, it is a most peculiar town indeed, filled with magic of the good kind and the bad and trapped under an unbreakable witch's curse. And it gets some dangerous visitors from time to time. TWO of them in this particular novel.

I won't say any more about the book than that. Not yet, at least. CIRCUS OF LOST SOULS is now available in paperback, on Kindle, and through Kindle Unlimited.

                              TAKE A CLOSER LOOK AT CIRCUS OF LOST SOULS

PURE HORROR AND NOTHING BUT

 

A collection of mine on Kindle usually contains a mix of horror fiction, dark fantasy tales, and with a couple of ghost stories thrown in for good measure. But not this time.

15 CHLLING HORROR STORIES does exactly what it says on the tin. The horror, the whole horror, and nothing but the horror.

And it includes fiction that I've never collected in eBook form before, tales like 'The Universal' from my most recent Dark Regions Press collection, 'The Garbage Men' from The Alchemy Press Book of Horrors, and the original, unedited version of 'Across The Tracks,' which first appeared in an anthology a few years back.

                                                15 CHLLING HORROR STORIES

A BIG DARK FANTASY NOVEL ... FREE THIS WEEKEND

 

Originally published by Samhain in the States, HOT BLOOD is now on Amazon Kindle. Here's what it's about:

Two immortal creatures have arrived in New York City. One of them is Tanya Merrit, the last of the Ykrall, a magical race that lives among and depends on human beings ... they take a little of their blood, so to enhance their powers.

But the other is Janos Wolkran, an ancient and extremely deadly vampire. He has brought with him a brood of servants, people who he has converted into lesser beings, each of them existing solely for his bidding.

Except that one of them is dying right now. And looking for a new replacement, Wolkran's gaze alights on Tanya's human lover, Kathy Harrison. And when he steals her away and takes her with him, Tanya finds herself launched on a desperate pursuit that will lead her most of the way round the world ... and then even further.

But as Kathy is infected and begins to transform, the most appalling of all questions starts to raise its head ... can anything be done to change her back?

And HOT BLOOD is a truly epic story, starting on the East Coast but then moving on to a small Central American republic in the middle of a civil war (based partly on my own experiences in that part of the world back in the 1980s) before heading off to Eastern Europe ... Prague, Budapest and then the Carpathian Mountains.

And this weekend I'm offering it Free as an introduction to my other work.

                                  GET YOUR FREE COPY OF HOT BLOOD HERE

A HUGE BOOK OF HORROR ... NOW IN PAPERBACK AS WELL

 

My huge eBook collection Three Dozen Terrifying Tales has been picking up top reviews on Amazon for quite a while. And now this weighty book of horror is available in paperback too, and with a newly-written Preface.

Here is that same introduction, which tells you a little bit about my personal history as a writer of dark fiction.

THIRTY YEARS OF HORROR

 The oldest three stories in this collection all appeared in print way back in 1981 – ‘Headlamps’ in The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories, ‘Child of Ice’ in The Pan Book of Horror Stories and ‘After Dark’ in The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. The newest two – ‘Mr. Smyth’ in Back From the Dead: The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories and ‘The In-Betweeners’ in The Black Book of Horror – both saw publication in 2010.

An entire 30 years of horror, supernatural and dark fantasy fiction then, with the remaining 30-plus tales spread across those decades, stories that first showed up in outlets such as Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance, Black Static, Midnight Street, gothic.net and a whole slew of top anthologies like Dark Terrors, Gathering the Bones and The British Invasion. And – as you may have already guessed – an awful lot has changed in those three decades.

‘Headlamps’, ‘Child of Ice’ and ‘After Dark’ were all written on a manual typewriter and sent to editors via regular post … what we call snail-mail these days. There simply were no home computers back then – I wouldn’t own one for many more years. And obviously, because of that, no email either. Which begs the question: Mustn’t it have been quite horribly frustrating, being forced to work as slowly as all that? But here’s the amazing thing.

My first ever fiction sale – also written on a manual typewriter, also sent by regular post – wasn’t horror at all but a science fiction story, one that I submitted to a leading freelance editor called Richard Davis. And a couple of weeks later the same man wrote back to me. He liked the story on the whole, but wondered if I could make some changes. They seemed reasonable and so I followed his advice and revised the tale accordingly.

Two weeks later and another piece of mail with now familiar handwriting comes dropping through my letterbox. I had almost got the story right but not entirely. How about I give it yet another go with these additional suggestions?

Mr. D. was bringing his own decades of experience to bear and teaching me how to properly construct a short story, in other words (and yes, he bought it after that). And some months later I went through the exact same back-and-forth routine when I submitted my first ever horror tale – ‘Headlamps’ – to another prolific editor, Mary Danby. All of it by snail-mail. All of it by means of yellow back-sheets, carbon paper, clacking keys.

Computers might have sped things up an awful lot. But how often in our modern times does any editor take the trouble and the time to spot a fledgling talent and then spend a few weeks guiding that new writer down a better path and scraping away some of his rougher edges? So far as I can tell it hardly ever happens these days, if at all. And so it might well be the case that we’ve now got into the habit of mistaking haste for speed. Which is a shame. Perhaps, in all our rushing round, we’ve managed to lose something.

Except that the true bottom line is this: it doesn’t really matter how a short story gets written. All that matters is how good it is.

The tales in this big collection have been available as an eBook for a while and people seem to like them quite a lot. There’s certainly enough dark fiction here to keep you intrigued for a good few evenings.

The details of our daily lives might have changed considerably in thirty years, but not our love of being entertained … especially in a scary way!

Tony Richards

London, England 2021

              TAKE A LOOK AT THE PAPERBACK OF THIS COLLECTION HERE

A BRAND-NEW HORROR STORY ... FREE THIS WEEKEND

 

Here's a chilling tale of terror that has never been seen in print or even eBook form before.

THE MASK is set in a small town in Indiana in the run-up to and during the evening of Halloween. I originally wrote it for an editor who wanted a new story from me for an anthology that he was planning to put together. But unfortunately that antho hit some problems, never made it into print. So now I've put it out myself ... and this weekend as a free gift to all my readers.

                              PICK UP YOUR FREE COPY OF THE MASK RIGHT HERE