Announcing a Brand New Annual Anthology! THE SPECTRAL BOOK OF HORROR STORIES Release date: September 2014 Published by Spectral Press, edited by acclaimed, award-winning novelist Mark Morris (Toady, Stitch, The Immaculate, Fiddleback and the forthcoming Obsidian Heart trilogy) and inspired by the Pan and Fontana books of horror and ghost stories, which were hugely popular in the 1960s and 1970s, The Spectral Book of Horror Stories will be the first volume of a non-themed annual horror anthology, showcasing all-original stories by the very best writers in the genre. Each yearly volume will contain around fifteen to twenty stories, and will be available in paperback and e-book format across all platforms. The cover for each volume will be a new and original work by multi-award-winning artist Vincent Chong. The Spectral Book of Horror Stories will be launched with a mass signing session at the 2014 British Fantasy Convention in York (September 5-7, 2014), though the book can be pre-ordered direct from Spectral Press at http://spectralpress.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/the-spectral-book-of-horror-stories-table-of-contents/ The final Table of Contents for volume one is:   ON THE TOUR – RAMSEY CAMPBELL THE DOG’S HOME – ALISON LITTLEWOOD FUNERAL RITES – HELEN MARSHALL SLAPE – TOM FLETCHER THE NIGHT DOCTOR – STEVE RASNIC TEM DULL FIRE – GARY McMAHON THE BOOK AND THE RING –…

1971. A middle-aged man, wracked with grief, walks along the beach at Whitstable in Kent.  A boy walks approaches him and, taking him for the famous vampire-hunter Doctor Van Helsing from the Hammer movies, asks for his help. Because he believes his stepfather really is a vampire… I like the premise of Whitstable, it’s most definitely intriguing. Taking a celebrity like Peter Cushing and crafting a horrific tale around events of his life seems like an ideal fit. The first element of the plot follows a man dealing with the loss of his wife. Volk’s writing effortlessly captures the grief in Cushing’s character. Society has a tendency to put those in the limelight on a pedestal. I think it’s easy to forget that at the end of the day they are people just like the rest of us. Traumatised by his spouse’s sudden departure, he longs for peace, actively isolating himself from the rest of the world whenever he can. In those rare occasions when he does set foot outside, he falls back on the only thing he knows, acting. He goes about his business behaving the way he supposes people would expect him to; inside however he is numb….