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.

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.

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

AVAILABLE TO READ ON KINDLE UNLIMITED

I've already talked on this blog about my 2 collections specially compiled for KU readers. For science fiction fans there are the 15 stories - some of them good long ones - in UNLIMITED FUTURES.

And for aficionados of the darker arts there are the horror, supernatural and dark fantasy tales contained in CHILLS UNLIMITED ...  not only 15 stories in this book but 2 complete short novels too. But they are not the only works of mine included in the KU scheme.

There's my newest collection of dark and horror fiction, NIGHTCRAWLER & OTHER TALES OF DARKNESS.

There are all 6 - so far - full-length novels in my RAINE'S LANDING FANTASY SERIES, adventures set in an isolated Massachusetts town that's filled with magic, both the good kind and the very bad, and trapped under a witch's curse. In fact, the first five novels in the series can be read on KU in a single eBook, THE RAINE'S LANDING NOVELS 1-5.

Sticking with the supernatural theme, there are short novels of mine that are available too under this scheme. THE NIGHT MANAGER for instance, set in an old Victorian hotel that has some very scary - and inhuman - guests.

And then there is one of my personal favorites, UNDER THE ICE. Set in Helsinki, Finland, in the dead of winter, it's a re-visitation of the revenant theme. The website Horror Novel Reviews named it as one of their Best Ten Novels of the year.

For those of you who like their fiction imaginative but not so dark, there's THE ELECTRIC SHAMAN, set in a futuristic very modern Africa and featuring the Zimbabwe-based detective Lieutenant Abel Enetame.

And for those who prefer their detective fiction straight up there's THE DESERT KEEPS ITS DEAD, a hard-boiled thriller set in Arizona in the present day.

Back to the supernatural theme, but definitely with a far lighter touch this time. The 4 stories in TOUCHED BY MAGIC: HUMAN DRAMAS IN THE PARANORMAL WORLD have fantasy at their heart, but of a more humane, even romantic kind.

 

And if you're simply looking for a quicker read, many of my individual short stories are also available on KU ... superhero fiction like RAYVEN BLACK IN THE CITY OF NIGHT, ghost stories like THE WOMAN IN BROWN and many more.

YOU CAN FIND THEM ALL BY CHECKING OUT THE FULL LIST OF MY WORK ON KINDLE

SCI-FI & DARK FANTASY FOR KINDLE UNLIMITED READERS

I've been away from here a while ... I know that. But as it turns out lockdowns are extremely weird things, with some aspects of your normal life getting mysteriously overlooked. And this blog has proved to be one of them.

But now I'm back, and with fresh news.

I have numerous collections out on Kindle, but not one of them until this date has been eligible for Kindle Unlimited. And the reason for that omission is a very simple one. Books can only be available through KU if all of the material contained in them appears on Kindle and no other platform (which is precisely why you can't read Stephen King or James Patterson as part of your membership). And every last collection that I've put out till this point has stories in it that are equally available from the same publishers who put out them in eBook form in the first place, Dark Regions in the US, The Alchemy Press in the UK, and so on.

So I've finally decided I should put that right. UNLIMITED FUTURES is a a huge collection of my science fiction work. And if you're into horror, supernatural stuff and dark fantasy tales, then CHILLS UNLIMITED gives you 15 short stories and 2 complete short novels, and every single word of both these massive books can be read via your subscription to KU.

Oh, as a brief final note, other eBook fiction of mine can also be read through Kindle Unlimited, the 6 full-length novels (so far) in my Raine's Landing supernatural thriller series for instance.

                                         TAKE A LOOK AT UNLIMITED FUTURES HERE

                                          TAKE A LOOK AT CHILLS UNLIMITED HERE

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

A GHOST NOVEL FOR XMAS

A writer looking for a quiet place to finish his new novel checks into an empty old hotel beside the sea ,,, except it isn't quite as empty as it seems. That's the premise of my ghost novel THE NIGHT MANAGER, which is available on Kindle and -- of this month -- in a paperback edition.

                                        TAKE A LOOK AT THIS NOVEL HERE




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GHOST STORIES FOR XMAS

My collection 13 GHOST STORIES has been available on Kindle for a while. It has short fiction stretching from The Fontana Books of Great Ghost Stories right through to the present day, including several new tales that originally appeared in my collections from Dark Regions Press. And now it is available in paperback as well, just in time for you to settle down beside the fire on your Xmas break.

                                            TAKE A LOOK AT THIS BOOK HERE