HWA Newsletter Ad – August 2021

What if you thought you were losing your mind?
What if all those nightmares were real?
Could you survive a demon bent on torment and death, a nightmare feeding on your fear?

“If you’re open to reading a book that is genuinely disturbing, in some cases distasteful, and creepy as hell, then I’m pretty sure you’ll ‘enjoy’ Shadows.” – Dave de Burgh, author of Betrayal’s Shadow

This is the first major collection to gather together twenty of Lisa Morton’s finest short stories (chosen by the author herself). During a career that has spanned more than three decades, she has produced work that has been hailed as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening” (the American Library Association’s Readers Advisory Guide to Horror).

If you’ve never encountered Lisa Morton’s work before, you’ll find out why Famous Monsters called her “one of the best writers in dark fiction today.” If you’re already a fan, this collection will offer up a chance to revisit these acclaimed and award-winning stories.

A plague of vampirism has crept across the country, reducing once-thriving cities to ghost towns.

In Chicago, a few scattered survivors hide behind the fortified walls of office buildings and museums, raiding deserted stores for dwindling supplies of clothing and food.

Meanwhile a hungry vampire population also struggles for survival as their prey grows scarce, forcing them to capture alive the last remaining humans as breeding stock for the blood farms that will ensure their future.

The isolated Australian harbour town of Gulpepper isn’t like other places. Some maps don’t even show it. And only outsiders use the full name. Everyone calls it “The Gulp.” It has a habit of swallowing people.

• A truck driver thinks the stories about The Gulp are made up to scare him. Until he gets there.
• Teenage siblings try to cover up the death of their mother, but their plans go drastically awry.
• Under the blinking eye of the old lighthouse, a rock fisher makes the strangest catch of his life.

Five novellas by Alan Baxter. Five descents into darkness. Welcome to The Gulp, where nothing is as it seems.

There’s been a gang massacre on Auckland’s Freyberg Wharf. Body parts everywhere. With the police’s laboratory out of action, it’s up to scientific consult Pandora (Penny) Yee to sort through the mess.

It’s a hellish task, made worse by earthquake swarms, insufferable heat, and Cerberus’ infernal barking. And what’s got into her brother Matiu? Is Matiu running with the gangs again? If he’s involved, Penny will murder him herself.

Join Penny and Matiu Yee for the family reunion to end all family reunions, as the struggle between light and dark erupts across Auckland’s volcanic skyline.

In the first full-length collection of her edgy, award-winning short stories, Loren Rhoads punctures the boundaries between horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction in a maelstrom of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.

Ghosts, succubi, naiads, vampires, the Wild Hunt, and the worst predator in the woods stalk these pages, alongside human monsters who follow their cravings past sanity or sense.

The stories are drawn from the pages of the magazines Cemetery Dance, City Slab, Instant City, and Space & Time, the Wily Writers podcast, and the books Sins of the Sirens, Demon Lovers, The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two, Tales for the Camp Fire, and more.

The horror stories in this collection take you deep into lives touched by darkness.

Herein, you’ll meet a grandmother with a knack for storytelling, a little girl caught in a lightning storm, and a medical intern who learns the true meaning of family–the hard way.

At times gory, very often moody and intense, these tales reveal a truth about our world: evil exists, and love persists.