FR Press Announces Slices of Fate
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Matt M. McElroy, Publisher of FR Press, has announced that Slices of Fate, the collected works of author Eddy Webb, is now available in eBook and print formatsp.
“Slices of Fate is a collection that spans the depth and breadth of Webb’s work,” said editor Monica Valentinelli. “Arranged chronologically, this is a beautiful representation of the stories and voices Webb has to offer his readers.”
About Eddy Webb: Hired on with CCP/White Wolf in late 2007, Eddy Webb (with a “y,” thank you) is a writer, game designer, transmedia developer, and the voice of the White Wolf Blogcast. His RPG works includes Minds Eye Theatre: The Awakening, New Wave Requiem, ICONS: Jailbreak, Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition and many more. He lives a sitcom life with his wife, his roommate, a supervillain cat, and two pug dogs.
Description: a unique collection featuring the works of Eddy Webb. Stories within range from the author’s nod to literary tales as in his piece “A Sheepish Trip to Yorkshire” to his more speculative work such as “The Battlefield.”
Essays include a series on two of Webb’s oldest loves: wrestling and Sherlock Holmes. Combined with several pieces of microfiction, this debut collection is an in-depth representation of Eddy’s work over the course of several years.
About FR Press: FR Press is the publishing arm of popular horror and dark fantasy webzine FlamesRising.com. FR Press’s recent releases include Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror and Conventions for the Aspiring Game Professional.
Both digital and print editions of the collection are available now online at DriveThruFiction.com: Slices of Fate
Mirador Publishing Launches New Imprint
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In these days of falling book sales and record closures of high street book shops one publisher is bucking the trend. Mirador Publishing, an Indie publisher based in the West of England, has just launched three new books under its new Sci-Fi and Fantasy imprint, Netherworld Books.
The first title, A History of The Devil by Adrian Briggs is also a massive gamble for the fledgling publisher. The book asks the reader to take a sympathetic view of history’s greatest bad guy, Satan himself.
Commissioning Editor Claire Ashton said yesterday, “This book is already causing a huge controversy with some elements not seeming to understand it’s just a work of fiction.”
The second title. Lucid by Marion Grace Woolley is no less controversial, dealing as it does with the effects LSD and Shamanistic Magic. It has been described as, “A journey through the chaos of LSD and the magic of dreams into the darkest corners of the human mind.”
The third book Hell’s Secrets by F R Jameson is a more straight forward horror novel in the classic mould. Claire describes it as, “A sort of a cross between Stephen King and Dante.”
Asked why the company was taking such a gamble on these three books as the launch platform for Netherworld Books, Claire replied, “Netherworld was created to give new authors a chance. When the Big Six publishers are cutting back and only investing in established safe authors we felt there was a need to support the first time novelist.”
Netherworld was created on the back of the experiences of one author who was reduced to tears at the treatment she received when she tried to present her manuscript to a big publisher.
Mirador Publishing itself is a huge success story and despite the recession continues to grow year on year.
Mirador’s Marketing Manager David Luddington said, “The world of reading has never been healthier, it’s just the traditional publishing model of Agent, Publisher and High Street Bookshop that’s failing. We exist to support our authors, not the other way round. There are some quite excellent authors out there and they deserve to have their voice heard.”
Netherworld Books is currently seeking new authors and sees itself as the new light in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy publishing world. “We are looking to give a chance to bright new novelists who are getting a rough deal from the traditional publishing world,” said David.
The Priest’s Hole
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Damnation Books has released the digital edition of Ray Clark’s horror novel, The Priest’s Hole.
Description: If you’re willing to unlock the gates of hell, be prepared.
Four charred bodies in the middle of a field. The evidence suggested a ritual killing.
The body of a young constable with his head smashed to a pulp. He was investigating with his colleagues and he was on the other side of the oak tree from the four charred bodies. No one saw or heard anything!
A registered charity collector, bloodless and deflated, stretched out on the driveway of the house of a famous, well-known, local writer.
With each of the mysterious slayings, there are no clues, no motives, and no witnesses.
The police have no ideas, until their investigation takes them to Mark Farnham’s house, the author, a man who has everything … including more than enough secrets … and one of those is a Ouija-Board. Have the police found the answer to their problem?
Or have they found an even bigger headache?
Check it out on the Kindle: The Priest’s Hole
The Journal of Unlikely Entomology Issue #3
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The Journal of Unlikely Entomology has published its third issue, which is currenly available online for free.
The Table of Contents:
- My Day Came by Conor Powers-Smith, Illustrated by Eleanor Leonne Bennett
- War Beetles by J.M. McDermott, Illustrated by Linda Saboe
- The Performance by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Illustrated by Mariusz Siergiejew
- The Familiar Buzz of Gone by Cate Gardner, Illustrated by Kyle Conway
- Dragonfly Miscalculations by Steven L. Peck, Illustrated by Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein
- Skitterings in Corners by Juliet Kemp, Illustrated by Svetlana Sukhorukova
- Drift by Amanda C. Davis, Illustrated by Natasha T-Z.
Check it out for yourself: Issue 3 of the Journal of Unlikely Entomology
May 20th Horror Quick Hits
posted by · CommentsExorcist author, William Peter Blatty, who turned Georgetown University into a horror scene in The Exorcist plans to sue the school in church court, charging that his alma mater has strayed so far from church doctrine that it should no longer call itself Catholic.
British new kids on the block This Is Horror are seeking to cement their position as major champions of home grown and worldwide genre literature with the announcement of an exclusive, limited edition quarterly run of horror chapbooks.
Kindertrauma is currently carrying an interview with Nancy Strickland author of Landfill.
Book Review: Westlake Soul, by Rio Youers
Horror came to the Cannes Film Festival this year, courtesy of Italian cult director Dario Argento who told AFP in an interview that his 3D Dracula is a man for our times. “It’s an experiment with Dracula. What fascinates me about the character is his way of seeing reality, his bisexuality … his wild nature,” said the director of the film that premiers out-of-competition at midnight Saturday.
Werewolf by Night #42 was the culmination of an arc under writer Doug Moench and artist Don Perlin where the book transitioned from the story of a young man who transforms into a werewolf based on the lunar cycle to a book about a young man (Jack Russell) who can control his transformation into a werewolf and decides to use his werewolf abilities to fight crime.
Now that he’s resurrected Jane Austen’s adored heroine Elizabeth Bennet as a formidable foe of zombies and reimaged the 16th president of the United States as a lethal hunter of vampires, writer Seth Grahame-Smith is undergoing a transformation of his own. The best-selling novelist of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter is getting into the movie business, with not one but two flicks opening this summer.
People are reading. In fact, more people are reading now and buying books than ever before. According to an online British article by The Guardian’s Lloyd Shepherd titled, “The Death of Books Has Been Greatly Exaggerated”, there was a 42% increase in book sales over the last ten years (in Britain, and no I don’t know how many emails were hacked to get the figures). It’s All About the Money: The Shrinking Horror Niche
Writers Craig Pay and Dave Schofield Launch Cutaway Magazine!
Mark Andrew Smith (Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors) and James Stokoe (Orc Stain) have been working on their baseball-horror graphic novel Sullivan’s Sluggers for a couple of years and it’s finally ready to go into production.
David Cronenberg looks like he’s back to his old form with Cosmopolis, now in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Adapted from Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel, it tells of an asset manager who cruises through New York City in a high-tech limousine as the world crashes around him. He is losing money after shorting the yen, and everywhere he is pursued by activists rioting and waving rats wherever they go.
Horror Author Lia Scott Price has released the first issue from her new Vampire Comic Series Vampire Guardian Angels. Entitled The Guardian, the book is the first of 3 issues to be published in 2012. The first issue is published through createspace.com.
ParaNorman, the newest stop-motion animated feature from LAIKA, is a horror/comedy about a lonely boy who becomes his town’s only hope when a witch’s curse unleashes the walking dead. It’s the brainchild of writer/director Chris Butler and co-director Sam Fell, who sat down with reporters at LAIKA studios in Portland, Oregon, taking a break from shooting the film’s final scenes.
Diablo, much like all of Blizzard’s franchises, has a deep and vast history behind it. So deep that even small side characters end up having a lengthy section just about them. Between the plotlines of the games themselves focusing on the prevention of Diablo and his minions from exerting their control over the mortal realm, though, there is not always a chance to go deeper into the relationships between the various entities of a franchise, or what happened prior to a game’s events. Diablo III: The Order – book review
How to create the perfect zombie was the unusual lesson for students when they had the chance to meet comedian turned children’s author Charlie Higson. Charlie, who is best known for writing and appearing in programmes such The Fast Show and Randall and Hopkirk Deceased, dropped into Great Baddow High School and King Edward VI Grammar to talk about the paperback release of The Fear, the third book in his zombie adventure series: The Enemy.
It’s official: the Stephen King Movie Renaissance is now in full swing. With the announcement that two producers headed to the Cannes Film Festival to sell a big screen version of King’s short story “The Reach” (a tale King is often quoted as saying he would “most like to be remembered for after his death”), a new era of the author’s movie adaptations has begun.
David Vann excels at writing about the darkest side of the human heart. His earlier works, short-story collection Legend of a Suicide and novel Caribou Island, explore the lives of those driven to embrace death. The theme of Dirt is similar to those of its predecessors, its journey less introspective. Book review: Dirt, by David Vann
Mira Grant is really not Mira Grant. She is really Seanan McGuire – and according to legend, she is not afraid of the monster under your bed because she is the monster under your bed. Beware of Mira Grant! Feed your zombie hunger: An interview with Mira Grant
Karl Edward Wagner was among the most talented writers of the generation that helped to put horror on the popular fiction map in the 1970s and ’80s. For this comprehensive two-volume retrospective of his short horror fiction, editor Stephen Jones gathers the full contents of Wagner’s collections In a Lonely Place (1983) and Why Not You and I? (1987), plus most of the contents of Exorcisms and Ecstasies, a compilation of Wagner’s previously uncollected short fiction that Jones assembled in 1995. Stefan Dziemianowicz reviews Karl Edward Wagner at Locus Online
Ghostwriting – Book Review
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Ghostwriting
Eric Brown
Create Space Paperback 11.99
Kindle edition Infinity Plus $ 3.55
March 2012
Review by Mario Guslandi
A renowned SF author, Eric Brown has occasionally tried his hand also at horror and supernatural fiction. His work in that area has been now collected in a single volume, assembling eight short stories.
Irrespective of genre limitations Brown is a terrific storyteller as the present collection effectively proves.
“The Man Who Never Read Novels” is a delightful piece about the peculiar, tragic events occurring every time a certain individual finishes reading a novel, while “Beauregard” is a rather enigmatic tale, hinting at unspeakable secrets which remain partially undisclosed even at the end of the narrative.
“Taipusan” is an enjoyable piece of pulp fiction with a truly exotic taste taking place in a dark Indian setting.
“The Disciples of Apollo” vividly portrays the last days of a man suffering from a mysterious illness while “The House,” an excellent story told in a steady narrative style and featuring great characterization, revolves around the dangers connected to the staging of a haunted play and “Li Ketsuwan” is a splendid, powerful tale of witchcraft and love.
My favorite story is, perhaps, “The Memory of Joy,” a perceptive tale about the blessing and the curse of memory, featuring a couple of parents grieving for the loss of a daughter where the wife jeopardizes the marriage by seeking relief from her pain in a very unusual fashion.
All in all an excellent collection of entertaining and well written dark fiction.
Rise of The Animals
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Brain Damage Films is now carrying the DVD of the horror/comedy Rise of The Animals.
Description: After infiltrating an all girl’s slumber party in a remote cabin, Wolf, an awkward pizza delivery driver spends a passionate evening with a beautiful teen named Samantha. The next morning Samantha is gone, and the cabin in the woods is attacked by a family of deer. After a brutal massacre the cabin is bathed in the blood and gruesome remains of deer and teenage girl. Wolf, his best friend Jake, and Jake’s sister Rachel are the only one’s left standing.
Wolf finds Samantha’s cell phone amidst the blood bath, and the trio set out on an epic, cross-country journey to return the lost phone to the girl of Wolf’s dreams. As animals across the globe turn on humanity and society quickly collapses into chaos, Wolf’s determined spirit pushes him forward against all odds. But is she worth it?
Here’s the teaser:
Directed by: Chris Wojcik
Starring: Greg Hoople, Steph Motta, Adam Schonberg
Special Features:
- Behind-the-scenes Featurette
- Teaser/test scene
- Visual FX Featurette
Check it out: Rise of The Animals
