A Frome man is celebrating the success of having his first book published on all things horror.

Paul Edwards, of Welshmill, Frome, is a PCSO in the town but in his spare time he has a passion for horror movies and books.

Since he was a youngster, Paul has enjoyed attending horror conventions and writing short stories. A collection of those short stories has now been published in his first offering, Black Mirrors. The book has been published by Rainfall Books and, as the title suggests, centers around mirrors and mirror images.

Description: the debut collection from Paul Edwards, a writer who’s been involved in the UK horror scene for a while now and edited the magazine Unsane, back in the days when small press zines were all print editions. Published by Rainfall Books, another name from the past which is re-invigorating itself, this features fourteen stories (two original) and runs a gamut of styles, across the breadth of the horror spectrum. Edwards has a keen eye for character detail, giving even the smallest of roles a life with elegant phrasing and descriptions and he’s unflinching in his view of people and their relationships. Perhaps befitting the title, a lot of the stories focus on mirrors and the dark secrets that linger within them and this is keenly highlighted with “Black Mirror, Mirror Black,” a scary mixture of travelling fairgrounds and missing children (and difficult to read if you’re a parent). Modern life, with its inherent bleakness and downtrodden, broken people is another keystone of the collection, with “Irrecoverable” creating a link between hoodies, council estates and demonic possession, whilst “End Of The Line” features a reclusive child killer, who meets his own horrifying demons. Things occasionally take a surreal turn, with “The Foundling” featuring two spinsters find a baby wrapped up on their doorstep and decide to take care of it and “The Centre Of Everything,” where a downtrodden man, unloved by his family, finds a tear in reality. The highlight of the collection is “The Bleeder,” which takes everything and melds it into something quite dark and really quite beautiful, a horror story for today, for damaged souls, that gives no easy or comfortable answers. With no filler, this collection highlights Edwards as a writer spreading his wings and pushing his abilities and marks him as someone to watch for in the future.

You can pick this one up directly from Rainfall Books: Black Mirrors