Tag: Horror

Book Brief: Emeline and the Mutants

Emeline and the Mutants
by Rachel Tsoumbakos
Genre: Horror
83,500 words

Newsflash: A cure for AIDS discovered!
The Haum vaccine, as it came to be known, is so important to humanity that is available to the public immediately. Available in a vaccine, it is effective as both a preventative measure as well as a cure for those already infected.

No one needs know that the proper testing was short-lived, nor that a few ‘mutations’ are occurring. They are merely secrets for the government to hold onto.

Although, eventually there is no way to hide the fact that the world is now filled with people who are no longer predisposed to getting cancer, heart disease or diabetes; but of becoming werewolves, vampires and trolls.

Follow Emeline and her new-found friend, Gwennie, as they fight to find the truth behind the death of Emeline’s brother, Warwick.

EMELINE AND THE MUTANTS is a fast-paced cautionary tale of what happens when science goes wrong.

This title is available from Amazon US, Amazon UK,  and Smashwords. Continue reading “Book Brief: Emeline and the Mutants”

Build Your Wings

When I was maybe 12 or 13 years old, one of the first stories I ever wrote was about an old man wandering the streets in a dystopian future. He was so old and forgotten that he couldn’t even remember his name, going by the initials RDB. Those initials, of course, stood for Raymond Douglas Bradbury, and the man at the time was my literary hero. My very obvious stylistic mimicry of him back then, in that and many other proto-stories, was excruciating yet necessary; all part of a writer’s journey. But it’s no exaggeration to say I almost certainly wouldn’t have been a writer had it not been for Ray Bradbury and his short stories in particular. Up until the time I opened a well-pawed library copy of The Illustrated Man, I knew I loved stories (what kid doesn’t?), but I’d never realised until that moment how those stories could be presented, enclosed in beauty, garnished with lyricism and beauty. Not just the tale but the telling. That was Bradbury’s gift to me and countless other readers who, thanks to his example, began to dream of also being writers. Continue reading “Build Your Wings”

Featured Author: John Grover

Author John Grover

John Grover is a fiction author residing in Massachusetts. He completed a creative writing course at Boston’s Fisher College and is a member of the New England Horror Writers Association.

Some of his more recent credits include stories in Best New Werewolf Tales Vol 1 by Books of the Dead Press, The Epitaphs Anthology by The New England Horror Writers, The Northern Haunts Anthology by Shroud Publishing, and The Zombology Series by Library of the Living Dead Press.

He is the author the new fantasy series Song of the Ancestors and of several collections, including the recently released Creatures and Crypts for Amazon Kindle as well as various chapbooks, anthologies, and more. Please visit his website www.shadowtales.com for more information.

Web of the Spider Queen by John Grover

Combining elements of horror and sword and sorcery, John Grover weaves an epic fantasy tale full of action, mystery and suspense.
A long vanquished evil has returned to the beautiful and peaceful realm of Orum. An evil that will stop at nothing to plunder and enslave all of the realm’s people and lay waste to its lands. An evil that refuses to die, that has ravaged every realm it has touched. Its name is Sinnia, the Spider Queen and she has set her eyes back on the one world that eludes her grasp.
The leadership races must come together and harness the old power of their ancestors, sing their song of lore as one people and defeat this horror once and for all. These races will come to discover a long lost secret about their own ancestry, their connection to each other and the realm itself, a secret that will change their world…forever.

Web of the Spider Queen is available from Amazon US and Amazon UK.

The Horror… The Horror…

“Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror.” Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

You’d think that horror would be one of the easiest of genres within which to write: create a protagonist who is either extremely likeable or go for the opposite, a character deserving of some particularly overdue and nasty payback; either invent or import a monster from Familiar Horror Trope Land (sparkly or not, preferably the latter); bring them together in some unexpected location and everything gets all squishy and liquidized and unpleasant and the audience members lose all control of their bodily functions and curse your parents… except that’s not necessarily what happens at all. Horror is hard to write. Okay, no, I just lied. Horror is easy to write, but good horror is hard to write. Continue reading “The Horror… The Horror…”