British Fantasy Society people! My collection Cheer The Sick is eligible for an award this year. As is Elemental Forces, which I’m very proud to have a story in. Use the Google form to nominate them. You have until the 9th of May to vote.
I wrote about Meta’s theft of my books. It’s £1 to read the entire archive, so I’ll understand if our friend Mark Z can’t afford it right now.
Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman’s 1987 film The Last of England.
It’s that time again. Another beautiful yuletide issue of Hellebore zine arrives just in time to counteract the malignant influence of Mariah Carey.
I’ve contributed an article about Cruel Coppinger, the legendary Cornish smuggler. Gang lord, ghost, or emissary of the devil? You decide.
Libraries! I adore them. That’s why I’m taking part in Ashland Public Library’s horror auction. I’ve donated a signed copy of The Others of Edenwell and Pseudotooth, as well as a letter from Dr Challice himself, welcoming you to Edenwell Hydropathic. The proceeds go towards the library’s upkeep and busy schedule of community events.
The auction begins on the 15th of October. Take a look at the preview site to see what other horror goodies are up for grabs. (OMG, R.L. Stine!)
A bedridden camgirl possesses a divine gift; a Victorian warship is haunted by a ghost who knows too much; a miraculous drug is extracted from a captured satyr; a soldier would rather face monsters than her past.
From the author of Pseudotooth and The Others of Edenwell, sixteen unsettling tales of the sickly, the desperate, and the doomed. What ails you?
“Cheer the Sick is filled to the brim with the most wise, surprising stories; Verity Holloway is a uniquely wonderful writer.”
—Aliya Whiteley
Coming from Black Shuck Books this Halloween: Cheer The Sick. Atishoo, atishoo, pre-order now.
Coming in October, a new addition to Flame Tree Press’ ABC of Horror anthology series: Elemental Forces. I’m so thrilled to be in this collection alongside some of my horror heroes. Eight Days West of Plethora is a spaghetti western body horror in which a cynical bandit accompanies an old friend deep into the desert to the shrine of a mysterious lizard deity. Yippee.
Elemental Forces is the fifth volume in the non-themed horror series of original stories, showcasing the very best short fiction that the genre has to offer, and edited by Mark Morris. This new anthology contains 20 original horror stories, 16 of which have been commissioned from some of the top names in horror, and 4 selected from the 100s of stories sent to Flame Tree during a short open submissions window. A delicious feast of the familiar and the new, the established and the emerging.
You are not going to BELIEVE what I found in an antique shop today.
I was walking by when I saw what I took to be a box of tintypes in the window. I dived inside (because I know how to party), but I was wrong – it wasn’t tintypes at all. This was a box of mid-century copper etchings from the Fitzwilliam Museum. Copies of artworks in their collection for the purpose of printing catalogues. Everything’s done digitally now, so there’s no use for the printing blocks, and a box of them came into the possession of a pair of retired teachers who are now selling them on.
And who was right at the front of the box, gazing up at me with his puppydog eyes, delicately etched in copper? The man, the myth, the legendary chaos merchant: my guy Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His 1855 self-portrait, the one he later gifted to Charles Howell for helping him retrieve his poems from his wife Lizzie Siddal’s grave.
I said some very rude words out loud. And immediately bought him.
I’m bouncing off the walls. The fact that I’ve held the catalogues printed with this actual block and now it’s displayed on my mantlepiece is wild to me. When the light hits the copper at the right angle, it flares up beautifully. Dear old DGR!
Wellbrook High is the school that needs no introduction. After the infamous events of 1993, it has become synonymous with unexpected – and unexplained – tragedy.
While what happened thirty years ago is still being unpicked by Internet conspiracy theorists, however, the lives of the handful of survivors are a matter of public record. In this recreation of the fabled Yearbook of ’93, some of the best emerging writers of horror and strange fiction revisit the years that followed the tragedy, and the lives of those who walked away on that fateful day.
Some might say they were the lucky ones. The reality is not so clear.
Happy Christmas to me and all my corvid friends. The Others of Edenwell has made Esquire’s best of 2023 list! “Imagine if E.M. Forster wrote a cryptid horror novel and you’re somewhere on the way to understanding the delightful oddness of this book.”
New story! ‘Veterans’ is in British Fantasy Society Horizons #15. Insufficient patriotism, disability, and ink that Knows.
