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
