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

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.

FOR PAPERBACK READERS

When eBooks like Kindle first started becoming popular, an awful lot of folks predicted that the humble paperback book would disappear completely, and in a few years too. Which has definitely not turned out to be the case. eBooks are a very big deal these days, surely. But the humble mass market p/b is still around and thriving, not to mention its larger cousin the trade paperback, which has largely replaced the hardbacked novel.

There are still loads of readers who simply prefer something tangible between their fingertips, the smell of paper and of print, the history and memories behind all that. And with that in mind, I have five offerings here that are easily within most people's pockets.

STORIES WITH A STING IN THE TAIL does exactly what it says on the cover. 12 tales of mystery, suspense and fear from the pages of magazines like Hitchcock's and Cemetery Dance, each of them with a twist ending. Black Static magazine's top critic Peter Tennant has compared these stories to the work of Roald Dahl. Tales of the Unexpected indeed. $6.99/£5.99.

CLASSIC PAN & FONTANA HORROR contains horror and ghost fiction mostly from the 1980s when those three famous anthology series Pan Horror, Fontana Horror and Fontana Ghosts were still in their heyday. But there's also fiction from that period from collections edited by Mary Danby and by Richard Davis and even a story from the 1980s F&SF, back when that magazine was at its best. And this book concludes with my tale from the 2010 Back From the Dead: The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror. $7.99/£6.99.

My ghost novel THE NIGHT MANAGER is next. It's centred round a once-successful writer who checks into an old grand Victorian hotel to complete what he hopes might be his comeback novel. It's way off season and the hotel seems deserted ... but it's not as empty as it first appears. A definite touch of Stephen King's The Shining here, although it is not at all the same story. $5.99/£4.99.

If you're into either science fiction or mystery fiction, here's the one for you. The central character of THE ELECTRIC SHAMAN is a police detective lieutenant for sure, solving murders, kidnappings and other crimes. But he's doing all of that in a united Federal Africa of the future, that great continent massively changed. The book takes the form of five long stories, each of their narratives connected, and four of them originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. $7.99/£6.99.

Set in Finland in the depths of midwinter but with a British central character, my supernatural novel UNDER THE ICE has been through a number of incarnations. Appearing first from UK publisher Sarob, it was then released in the US by Samhain. The Horror Novel Reviews site subsequently named it as one of the 10 Best Novels of the year. $5.99/£4.99.

Plenty of books for your shelves then, whatever your favorite style of fiction.

CLASSIC BRITISH HORROR

In the world of genre magazines and anthology series, there are always a precious few that take on what can honestly be called a legendary status. When it comes to science fiction, then it's Amazing Stories in the States and New Worlds in the UK. And when it comes to supernatural and horror fiction? Weird Tales, obviously, in the US. But there is a Brit equivalent to that.

The Pan Book of Horror Stories is an anthology series that ran yearly from 1959 to 1989, all but the last five editions under the editorship of publisher Herbert van Thal. It featured top authors like Stephen King and Ray Bradbury and even the occasional tale by such literary big guns as Muriel Spark and Ian McEwan, but it became first and foremost a showcase for brand-new talent. It sold in huge numbers and is still revered by horror fans to this very day (thirty years on) with numerous websites dedicated to it.

Running a close second were The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories and The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, both of them also yearly and the latter edited by that excellent author of spooky fiction Robert Aikman before passing on the stewardship to Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes, another genre great.

And it was in these three outlets that I first cut my teeth as a fledgling writer. Here are those stories and others from that period, each with its own introduction as to how it made it into print.

                                              FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

                                                  Also available on KOBO and NOOK