In the run up to the convention we’re attending this week my better half @MadNad has indulged her latest passion… some fella called Joe Hill.  Imogene is young, beautiful, kisses like a movie star, and knows everything about every film ever made. She’s also dead, the legendary ghost of the Rosebud Theater. Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with a head full of big ideas and a gift for getting his ass kicked. It’s hard to make friends when you’re the only inflatable boy in town. Francis is unhappy, picked on; he doesn’t have a life, a hope, a chance. Francis was human once, but that’s behind him now. John Finney is in trouble. The kidnapper locked him in a basement, a place stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. With him, in his subterranean cell, is an antique phone, long since disconnected . . . but it rings at night, anyway, with calls from the dead. . . I shall be attending the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton, where I will be one of a few lucky souls to share a room with Joe Hill and Peter Crowther in a unique opportunity to discuss  the…

A woman sits beside her father’s bedside as the night ticks away the final hours of his life. As she watches over her father, she relives the past week and the events that brought the family together . . . and she recalls all the weeks before that served to pull it apart.  There has never been anything normal about the lives raised in this house. It seems to her that sometimes her family is so colourful that the brightness hurts, and as they all join together in this time of impending loss she examines how they came to be the way they are and how it came to just be her, the drifter, that her father came home to die with. But, the middle of five children, the woman has her own secrets . . . particularly the draw that pulled her back to the house when her own life looked set to crumble. And sitting through her lonely vigil, she remembers the thing she saw out in the fields all those years ago . . . the thing that they found her screaming for outside in the mud. As she peers through the familiar glass, she can’t help…

My first exposure to Paul Kane’s work was the rather brilliant post apocalyptic remix of Robin Hood that he wrote for Abaddon Books as part of the Afterblight Chronicles series. The trilogy was set in my adopted hometown of Nottingham, and I loved every minute of it. Paul got in touch recently and asked if I would be interested in taking a look at his new short story collection. My interest in short stories has been rekindled this year after some excellent stories published by Spectral Press, so needless to say I jumped at the chance. The Butterfly Man & Other Stories contains eighteen horrific tales that should delight any horror fan. I have been sat here for the last half an hour trying to decide which of the stories were my favourites, a near impossible task when all of them are so damn good. After much umming and ahhing here, in no particular order, are my personal picks from this collection Speaking in Tongues – What happens when your tongue decides its time to leave? This is gross-out body horror that nearly made my eyes pop out of my head. I think it is safe to assume that this…