Supernatural Tales

  Cover illo by Sam Dawson, for Steve Duffy's story 'Forever Chemicals', which offers an interesting take on the London of the early Thatcher era. Spoiler alert - it wasn't very nice.  Here are the contents in full: 'Forever Chemicals' by Steve Duffy.  A young man in need of a job ends up as a nightwatchman on the run-down Docklands site. Businessmen of the less honest kind dump stuff in the dock. As Christmas approaches, so does a strange and unwanted 'miracle'.  'Wendigo' by Michael Kelly.  Strangers on a train. A Canadian winter. A story about a legendary creature. All this  and more as events unfold in a cabin in the wilderness and disturbing truths revealed. 'The Unfortified Heart' by Tim Jeffreys An affair with a married woman is an exciting thing, what with the thrill of transgression and all that. But what if the husband finds out? An age-old premise given a new, supernatural twist in this gripping tale. 'The Wet Wife' by ...

  Cover by Paul Lowe illustrating 'Screen Burn' Steve Duffy's latest collection offers the discerning reader eight stories, five brand new and three previously published (two of which appeared in ST). As always, these are well-wrought tales in the great tradition of British supernatural fiction. But they are also modern in the best sense - offering characters and settings instantly recognisable to anyone who inhabits the UK. Drizzle, darkness, and decay are seldom absent.  'Dead Centre of Manchester', the first story, is a prime example. Steve takes a fragment from a notorious true crime case and runs with it in a strange and gruesome direction. The overall feel might be described as Alan Bennett meets Joel Lane. In a good way, of course. There's a whiff of Vick and a taste of blood. Believable characters reacting to extraordinary circumstances are one of the author's specialities and he does a splendid job here. Cath, newly retired, joins Facebook groups an...

 

 The link to the ezine is here .

  Here it is, large as life and twice as spooky! All-new fiction by a host of talents, mostly British but also including our first-ever contribution from Germany.  Here is the table of contents. You Roger Luckhurst     Braunhoffer’s Coaches Martin Ruf     Violet Rosanne Rabinowitz     Corpsed Matthew G. Rees     The Haunting of Ian Bland Lisa Pritchard     Hell Is James Everington     The Hands of Men Sam Dawson Click this link & it takes you to all available print-on-demand issues (It will also take you to EPUB versions)

Splendidly atsmopheric cover by John Coulthart ' Friends and Spectres is a companion volume to Ghosts of the Chit-Chat (2020), an anthology of ghost stories by authors who had been members of the Cambridge University Chit-Chat Club along with M. R. James. Here the associations with MRJ are less formal, but stronger and more enduring: for it is the bond of genuine friendship that ties these writers to him. 'The majority of pieces here were originally published under pseudonyms, and over half appeared first in amateur magazines or local newspapers. All deal with the supernatural, and several of the stories are themselves spectres—or more properly “revenants”, only now re-emerging into the light after decades of oblivion. There are rediscoveries here of “lost” tales by Arthur Reed Ropes, E. G. Swain, and the enigmatic “B.”' Thus spake the blurb! I greatly enjoyed Ghosts of the Chit-Cha t and am pleased to report that Robert Lloyd Parry has once more done a thorough job of sel...

This is the final part of a running review of  Lost Estates  by Mark Valentine (Swan River Press 2024) The final story in this splendidly produced volume is another deep drive into English folklore. A writer, accompanied by a photographer, goes to the region around the Wssh to research a book in a series on myths and legends. The topic he has chosen is the supposed loss of King John's treasure.  Now, like many people, I was taught that John's baggage train was simply caught by the tide and he lost a lot of precious metal and jewels etc. But as the story unfolds we find that things were not that simple. For a start, there's only one source for the lost treasure story. And a different contemporary account takes a very different line.  This novella allows the author to plunge into rival theories about not only John and his antics but the way in which the English - both scholar and commoner - have a proprietorial interest in myth and legend. The professional theories cor...