Imagine the Sixties and Seventies… Hammer films and American International Pictures… The time of Plague of the Zombies, Lust for a Vampire, Quatermass and the Pit, Tales of Terror, The Haunted Palace and The Masque of the Red Death. Imagine we’re back there now. No mobile phones, no videotapes or DVDs, no personal computers. And iPads and Kindles are decades away. Where we are now, music is played on vinyl records with a stylus picking up the recorded sound on an old fashioned “radiogram” or a “portable” record player.
Horror stories had their emphasis on strong supernatural themes; this was an era when you could believe in vampires and strange otherworlds. Ghosts, demons, monsters, maniacs, black magic. These are the subject matter of this anthology of yarns from the deathly realm. A stage magician and his horrific secrets revealed to a meddling assistant. The bizarre appearance of an Arabian market in a Surrey garden. A railway station from which none of the ill-fated travellers can escape. A man searching for his lost wife in a dreamlike realm. A film director trying to capture the essence of a witches’ coven and its sacrifice. The writers in this book offer up their weird and peculiar offerings for your reading pleasure.

Twenty-three short stories,  including fiction by Ramsey Campbell, David A. Riley, E. C. Tubb, Kenneth Bulmer, Robert Holdstock and Rosemary Timperley… start your journey now!

Ordering & more Information: http://www.shadowpublishing.webeasysite.co.uk

Shadow Publishing

These offers are also available if you wish to pay by cheque in the UK. Contact Shadow Publishing for further details.

About the book:
‘Not for the Squeamish! From the twisted mind of British Fantasy Award winner Johnny Mains comes 12 stories of death, betrayal, insanity and pregnancies…The collection includes five previously unpublished tales. From classic themes in his sequel to M. R. James’ A Warning to the Curious, in “Aldeburgh” to his wild take on traditional horror subject matter in the strange case of “The Were-Dwarf”, to the bleakly dark modern horror of “Cure”. This collection of extraordinary horror yarns will not disappoint genre fans who enjoy variety in the horror books they buy.’

“Johnny Mains not only carries a flame for the old horrors, but wants to cause a bit of a conflagration of his own. The most fitting result would be if the next generation of horror readers will look back with pleasure and affection at his tales as we did with the Pans and Fontanas of our ill-begotten youth” –Stephen Volk

Shadow Publishing have a special pre-publication offer – £1.50 off the retail price if ordered before the end of September. You can order using PayPal HERE

Reviewed by Matthew Johns

A selection of chilling tales almost 40 years old, this reprint of a 1975 Corgi Books anthology is a relic of times gone by.  The ten tales owe a lot to the likes of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected – the horror is left to the reader’s imagination, rather than explicitly portrayed in print as has proven to be so popular of recent times.

While the overall themes haven’t changed in almost 40 years, the way that they are depicted has – dramatically in some of the stories.  The titular ‘The Satyr’s Head’ is one such tale – it merely hints at homosexuality and that a character may be that way inclined, but 37 years ago, homosexuality was not something openly discussed.  A young man on his way to catch a bus meets a tramp afflicted with terrible sores, who sells him a stone satyr’s head that he claims to have found on the moors.  The young man is strangely attracted to it, and soon begins having strange dreams in which he is raped and sexually abused by the satyr.  Not long after, he starts to find himself feeling sick with strange aches, rashes and sores appearing on his face and body.

In another, cannibal brothers prey on unwary travellers in an unnamed American town until one of them meets a sticky end.  Another tells about Fred – a lonely man in a bar somewhere, who seems to be all but invisible to his fellow drinkers until he disappears in front of one of them.

If you’re tired of the torture porn and horror that leaves nothing to the imagination, then check out The Satyr’s Head – it’s likely that you’ll find solace in these tales from yesteryear.

Reviewed by David A. Riley

Richard Davis, who died in 2005, was always far better known as an editor than as a writer, with ‘The Year’s Best Horror Stories’, ‘Tandem Horror’, ‘Space’, ‘Spectre’ and the Armada Sci-Fi series, not to mention his work on television with the BBC’s ‘Late Night Horror’ and ‘Out of the Unknown’. But he was also an extremely good writer, as this collection shows. All the stories here were previously published in anthologies from the 60s and 70s, such as the ‘Fourth and Sixth Pan Books of Horror’, ‘The Ghost Book’, ‘New Writings in Horror and the Supernatural’, ‘No Such Thing as a Vampire’, and ‘The Jon Pertwee Book of Monsters’, which contains Richard’s last story in 1978, ‘The Nondescript’. The collection is rounded off with an introduction by David A. Sutton, an article that Richard wrote (‘What We Were Looking for in Horror’), an interview originally published in 1969 in the literary fanzine ‘Shadow’, a further article by Richard (‘Horror in Fiction’) and a bibliography.

These constitute all of Richard Davis’s stories, and illustrate the versatility of his subject matter and the easy style of his writing, which reminds me very much of R. Chetwynd-Hayes without the (often unwanted) humour.

The title piece, ‘The Female of the Species’, is written as a journal, detailing the protagonist’s increasing fears about his sinister wife, both before and after her death. It’s a chilling story that grows increasingly tenser, involving love, death, and witchcraft.

‘Elsie and Agnes’ is a straight forward ghost story, though with more than one twist, and involving one of Richard’s recurring themes of a loveless, wasted life.

‘A Day Out’ is another ghost story, full of the joys of a 1960s seaside resort but with a final dénouement that may not come as a total surprise but is nonetheless shocking.

The sadness of a wasted life is again the central theme of ‘The Lady by the Stream’. Elizabeth is the harried minder for her over demanding wheelchair-bound mother. Never having had the chance to marry and have a family of her own, she finds fleeting warmth from the friendship of a ten year old boy she meets by a stream, fishing. The inability of other people to let this innocent relationship endure, though, results in an appalling climax, perhaps the most violent and chilling in this collection. ‘The Inmate’ is a tale of bestiality in the truest meaning of the word. I found to be the weakest, least convincing story, though it is well written, with Richard’s customary skills at characterisation.

In ‘A Nice Cut off the Joint’ Helen Bentley, a surgeon, finds that doing a native chief a favour in saving his life results in a Voodoo curse, presumably from a local witchdoctor put out by her skills, and the growth of a dangerous, all demanding appetite for fresh meat.

‘Guy Fawkes Night’, Richard’s earliest story, originally appeared in the ‘Fourth Pan Book of Horror Stories’. A period piece that starts in the 1920s it tells in retrospect what happened one fateful Guy Fawkes Night when the father of the protagonist’s friend disappears. Nearly everyone believed he ran away with his mistress, but thirty years later the horrific truth comes out.

In ‘The Sick Room’ Richard returns to the supernatural with a boarding house with a bedroom that may have an evil spirit. A man decorating has already slipped and broken his back for no apparent reason. Everyone who stays there either dies or murders whoever they’re with. A dark, grittily told story.

‘The Clump’ is set on a small Caribbean island. The clump in question is the local name for a small wood. This one, though, has a sinister reputation. Unfortunately, the young boy who wanders in to explore it when the cruise ship he is on stops by doesn’t know this at the time. Nor does his father, who is more concerned over his plans to poison his wife. The description of the entity that haunts the wood reminds me of the kind of thing depicted in much more recent Japanese horror films.

‘The Nondescript’ is a nineteenth century artefact made of a fish tail and the shaved torso of a monkey, cleverly joined to look like a grotesque creature. Young Bob finds one in the family attic in a glass case. Shortly he comes across another, better preserved, under a large rock close to a local pond. Unlike the first this may not be an artefact at all, as his father finds out when he discovers what happened at a ruined mansion whose owner, a collector of curiosities, died many years ago under suspicious circumstances. This is a rollicking tale, with some great descriptions of the Nondescript and a fittingly action-packed climax.

As Dave Sutton remarks in his introduction these stories are firmly set in the era in which they were written. To me that only adds to their charm. It’s a shame Richard Davis did not write more, but at least, thanks to Shadow Publishing, what there is have been collected together and made available.

“At the time I interviewed Richard for my small press magazine in 1969, he was already an established short story writer, had compiled two anthologies for Tandem Books and the BBC series Out of the Unknown, for which he worked as assistant story editor, had been on air since 1965… Yet, some forty plus years later, Richard’s fiction has largely been forgotten. Although not prolific, he was widely published in anthologies in England. Yet he never saw a collection of his tales published during his lifetime. Hence this book and its integration into a projected series under the collective tag, Writers from the Shadows.” (from the Introduction by David A. Sutton).

The cover artist is the painter and illustrator Caroline O’Neal. Caroline has done dark fantasy illustration for Bad Moon Books, Premonitions and Midnight Street magazines, among others.

For more information about the book see the new dedicated Shadow Publishing website HERE. Copies may be purchased from Amazon or via David Sutton’s website HERE.

Also, Frightfully Mild and Cosy Stories For Nervous Types, Johnny Mains’ second collection, will be published by David A. Sutton’s Shadow Publishing in Autumn 2012.

This is the first new edition of the long out of print Transworld/Corgi Book The Satyr’s Head & Other Tales of Terror, first published in 1975. With stories by Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Joseph Payne Brennan, Eddy C. Bertin, David A. Riley, James Wade and others, this new edition will bring back into print some ten chilling tales of the supernatural and the sub-human, of ghosts and demons, strange phenomena and the inexplicable.

More information HERE

Richard never saw a collection of his stories published in his lifetime and this book will include all of the author’s short stories, culled from as far back as 1963 and The Fourth Pan Book of Horror Stories up to the 1980s. The collection will include an introduction about his life, the fiction and anthologies, including his work as story editor for the BBC’s Late Night Horror series. The book will also feature two rare articles and an interview with the author, from the late 1960s.

“At the time I interviewed Richard for my small press magazine in 1969, he was already an established short story writer, had compiled two anthologies for Tandem Books and the BBC series Out of the Unknown, for which he worked as assistant story editor, had been on air since 1965 … Yet, some forty plus years later, Richard’s fiction has largely been forgotten. Although not prolific, he was widely published in anthologies in England. Yet he never saw a collection of his tales published during his lifetime. Hence this book and its integration into a projected series under the collective tag, Writers from the Shadows.” (From the Introduction).

The cover artist will be the painter and illustrator Caroline O’Neal. Caroline has done dark fantasy illustration for Bad Moon Books, Premonitions and Midnight Street magazines, among others.

For more information contact via the website HERE

David Sutton

First, The Satyr’s Head: Tales of Terror, edited by David A. Sutton, cover art by Steve Upham. This is the first new edition of the long out of print Transworld/Corgi Book The Satyr’s Head and Other Tales of Terror, first published in 1975. With stories by Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Joseph Payne Brennan, Eddy C. Bertin, David A. Riley and others, this new edition will bring back into print some ten chilling tales of the supernatural and the sub-human, of ghosts and demons, strange phenomena and the inexplicable.

The Writers From the Shadows series will revive the work of some of the genre writers whose work has been overshadowed and overlooked down the years.

The first of these will be The Female of the Species and Others by Richard Davis (1945-1990). The author worked in the 1970s as a script editor for the BBC’s Out of the Unknown series and edited the first three volumes of The Year’s Best Horror Stories, published by Sphere Books, as well as editing a string of other horror and science fiction anthologies. He published a number of short stories which have remained uncollected and this new book will remedy this. Also included will be an interview conducted with the author in 1969, in which he discusses his writing, his film Viola and working as story editor for Late Night Horror and Out of the Unknown, plus a comprehensive introduction.

Next, Temple of the Fox: Writers from the Shadows Series # 2, by James Wade (1930-1983), collects a number of the author’s genre short stories from the 1960s onwards. After army service, James Wade settled in Korea and he wrote widely on music for a variety of periodicals. His symphonic and chamber music has been performed in many countries, and he completed an opera based on Richard E. Kim’s best-selling novel of the Korean War, The Martyred.  James Wade’s work includes the Cthulhu Mythos yarns, The Deep Ones and A Darker Shadow over Innsmouth and others such as Temple of the Fox, which only ever saw print in Korea. His work has been anthologised by such noted editors as August Derleth, Ramsey Campbell and Herbert Van Thal. The collection will also contain an essay, The Mass Media Horror, a short article first published in 1971, plus some verse and a comprehensive introduction.

Finally comes The Shadow Book of Horror – an anthology of new and obscure short stories. No further details yet on the content or format. Writers may wish to contact David Sutton to receive writers’ guidelines when available. Please use the contact form on the Shadow Publishing website.