The Strange Death Of Britt Nordenstam

The third instalment of Black Mountain, my serial for Spectral Press, is The Strange Death Of Britt Nordenstam, released at the end of this month.

Once again, the cover artwork is by the immensely talented Neil Williams, who's outdone himself with this stonking cover.

'I could hear him. Not one voice, but dozens. Hundreds. You know your Bible, Mr Ware? ‘Call him Legion, for we are many?’ Many voices, but all one. It was a call and it was beautiful but I could never quite hear it, and I had to. I wanted to follow it. Same as Britt. But it was worse for her, because it was her the devil wanted...

...I could hear it too, and it was calling me up into the pines. Because, you see, Mr Ware, that wood – Coed Capel – it isn’t always as small as it looks. There are places where the pines stretch out and out forever, and the paths through them coil around so you can never find your way back. And the devil’s waiting there for you in them.'

You can download the second episode, The Ghosts Of Hafan Deg, here, and read the first episode, The Red Key, for free here.

X7

X7 is a slim but punchy little anthology from a new small press called Knightwatch, and is edited by Alex Davis. Its theme? The Seven Deadly Sins...

'We are punished by our sins, not for them' - Elbert Hubbard. 

X7 takes you on a sinister, startling and scintillating journey through the deadliest of sins with seven superb horror tales. 

In these pages both hero and anti-hero will succumb to sin and reap the results of their behaviour. Be it the gastronomic society that uncovers a unusual delicacy, a brother seeking to become closer to his lost sister, the wrath of a serial killer – and his psychologist – being unleashed or the simple sin of lazing a while by the waterside, this anthology will shock and surprise and equal measure. 

Featuring new and exclusive stories from Alex Bell, Simon Bestwick, Simon Clark, Tom Fletcher, Amelia Mangan, Gaie Sebold and Nicholas Royle. 

As you can see, it's a bloody good line-up. My own contribution is on the them of Greed, and it's called 'Stormcats.' Here's a quick sample:

'At the bottom of the slope, where a shore of silt and loose stone was forming where the grass had been washed away, lay a tide-mark of straggly fur.

Aaron went down to the water’s edge. Rats, maybe? But he already knew they weren’t.

Cats. All along the shoreline – there had to be thirty or forty of them, washed up at his door. All dead, of course, long-drowned. None, that he could see, still had eyes. Movement in the water – he looked up to see more limp, furred bodies being washed in.

...

He looked down at the cats again, prodded the closest one with his foot.

It moved.

Aaron leapt back. Must be trapped gas, or something inside it, eating it from within. But no; the cat writhed there brokenly, then rolled and rose up on its paws, then looked around and, despite its absence of eyes, it saw him. And when it did, it hissed and arched its spine, the remainder of its bedraggled hair rising on end as it did.

The whole shoreline was moving now, the rest of the cats thrashing back into life and motion – getting to their feet and hissing, arching their backs –

And starting to advance.

Aaron backed away. The ones in the water were moving too. They floundered their way to shore, to join the other cats – the other dead cats – as they advanced on him.'

X7 is available both as a paperback or an ebook.

The Ghosts Of Hafan Deg are unleashed!

Black Mountain #2: The Ghosts Of Hafan Deg is now available to buy. You can download it to your Kindle for a mere £1.86 here (or in the US, for $3.07 here.)

The first instalment, The Red Key, will soon be available as a free download as well. In the meantime, you can read it - also free - here.

World War Cthulhu

World War Cthulhu: Darkest Hour is a new Second World War setting from game company Cubicle 7, a variant on their Call Of Cthulhu RPG. Which may not be of interest if, like me, you're not a gamer yourself. But Cubicle 7 have produced an ebook anthology of horror fiction to accompany the release, and asked the wonderful Jonathan Oliver to edit it.

Jon's a fine editor - I've had the great pleasure of working with him on both Tide Of Souls and The Faceless - and having a story in a previous anthology of his, End Of The Line. World War Cthulhu includes tales from James Lovegrove, Weston Ochse, Rebecca Levene, Robin D. Laws, Gaie Sebold, T.P. Pike, Sarah Newton, Greg Stolze, Paul Finch, John Llewellyn Probert, Jonathan Green, Archie Black and World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar. All fine writers.

Oh, and I'm in there too, with a tale called 'Now I Am Nothing.'

'They’d been crushed flat, but there was no blood... All the blood - all the moisture of any kind, it looked like - had been sucked or squeezed out of them. The bodies were punctured and perforated, and in places the dried, withered flesh was burned, as if by fire or some strong acid. Not all of them still had faces, but the ones that did were still screaming. Even in death...

The dead man stared up at him with the bloody, ragged sockets that had been his eyes. His hands were red claws, pieces of tissue still clinging to them...

 Its great, unending heap of a body glistened greasily; Its hide was smooth, pale and slimy, like intestine, like great sheets of gut. Pale and slimy except for dark, glistening patches that spotted it. Were there holes in the middle of those patches? And if so, what were they? More mouths? No matter. Under that hide things moved, like great armatures of bone. It was as if someone was trying to erect a tent from the inside; the great bulk of It rippled and shifted.' 

You can buy World War Cthulhu here. 

Black Mountain #2 - New Cover Art

The cover art for the second instalment of Black Mountain, The Ghosts Of Hafan Deg, has now changed. Here's a sneak preview: see what you think. 

Llyn Daioni, in North Wales, is a lake about a hundred feet long by fifty wide, hidden in a pine forest, away from the outside world. To look at, it’s as tranquil and picturesque a scene as you could hope to find in Britain.

But when you go to Llyn Daioni, what strikes you most of all is the silence. Not a single bird sings, as if they know not to come near.

Beside the lake is a cluster of strange-looking buildings, their bright colours already fading, symbols of a future that will never come to pass; they are the only surviving monument to a story of greed and ambition that ended in ruin and death.

 You can meet the ghosts of Hafan Deg yourself in just another three days. Watch this space.

Twisted Histories

Twisted Histories is a new anthology out from Snowbooks, edited by the steady hand of Scott Harrison. It features eleven tales that take some ancient myth or legend as their starting point. There's a great roll-call of authors, so I'm proud to be included.

My own contribution, Covenants, is based around the legend of the Ark of the Covenant, although it's a long way from Indiana Jones territory.

'When its body was tilted horizontally, its arms were bent at the elbows and its weight supported on its hands. It crouched on its four bent limbs, body suspended between them like a huge spider, and its head darted up and down and from side to side, twitching. Like a dog, sniffing for a scent. Then it stopped, went still, and its shrouded, sightless head swivelled smooth, like a mechanical part, till that face of blots and stains once more pointed directly at me. The eye-stains seemed to stare, the mouth-stain to scream.
I kept wanting to look away, seek witnesses or help, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off it, because I knew it would move the second I did; besides, there’d be no witnesses, not out on the beach at this hour. I’d wanted solitude; now I had it. The moment stretched out; the eyeless, faceless stare didn’t waver. When it scuttled towards me, dismayingly fast, it was almost a relief....'

You can buy Twisted Histories here.

The Ghosts Of Hafan Deg

With episode two of Black Mountain due out from Spectral Press at the end of the month, here's a sneak preview of Neil Williams' cover artwork for The Ghosts Of Hafan Deg.

'It wasn’t sunlight. The pale smudges against the glass were too uniform in shape, too exactly duplicated on each window, to be that.

Even through the magnifying glass, they were indistinct, but it was the same shape each time; a blurred white oval with two dark stains side by side, and a third, wider one below. They looked like faces, screaming. Or maybe laughing. And below them, were those hands, pressed against the glass?'