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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
