I spent the next two decades searching for it, but it was now out of print and as rare as hens’ teeth. Dear even back then, it was prohibitively expensive now, and I could never justify spending 2 ton on what was effectively a box of cardboard pieces – even though, if I’m to be honest, my finger had hovered over the eBay ‘Buy now’ button on more than one occasion…


But one day, mooching around Coventry City Centre and stumbling into Oxfam to escape the rain, there it was. Staring down at me from a high shelf, beckoning me with its £9.99 price tag. I snapped it up, giddy with joy, explaining my history with the game to my bewildered wife who had wondered why I’d spent nearly ten pounds on a battered second-hand board game in a charity shop.


I took the box home, eagerly looking forward to reminding myself of it and playing it again. There was a bonus, in that the previous owner had purchased the expansion pack and it too was in the box, just like I’d done with mine. I then saw something that stopped me dead. My initials in my handwriting – DJC – scrawled inside the box lid.


It was my own copy of the game, somehow made its way back to me, across twenty years and even more miles.


As a rule, licensed games are customarily fucking awful. Typically rushed out to accompany a successful TV series or film, they’re more than often poorly-thought out games destined to be played once and then confined to a shelf (“Your Peaky Blinder has lost his flat cap. Miss a turn whilst you go look for it”).  And that’s not to mention the myriad of bizarre tie-in themed monopoly sets out there – Much as I can see the financial benefits of attaching the game to the lucrative Mandalorian or Walking Dead Universes, I can’t help but think that neither of those franchises featured a great deal of property management.  Perhaps I missed those episodes.
There are exceptions, however. Battlestar Galactica is still one of the best board games around, and its publisher Fantasy Flight have created some wonderful gaming experiences with both the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars licenses.


Two new licensed board games with a horror theme have recently been released, and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to play both of them.

​“All right, sweethearts, what are you waiting for? Breakfast in bed? Another glorious day in the Corps! Day in the Marine Corps is like a day on the farm. Every meal's a banquet. Every pay check a fortune. Every formation a parade. I love the Corps!” - Sergeant Al Apone

​Gale Force Nine are no strangers to giving licensed games the love they deserve, having excelled themselves with games in the Dune, Star Trek and Firefly Universes – as well as an excellent game (I hear) set in the world of the Spartacus TV series (2010-2013).


Another Glorious Day in the Corps is Gale Force Nine’s official Aliens board game, released towards the end of 2020. Originally announced in 2018 but delayed time and time again, it’s a co-operative game for between one and six people in which players (each playing one or more characters) work together through various scenarios based on the events of James Cameron’s 1986 movie.


Contact has been lost with the colony of Hadley’s Hope on LV-426, one of the three moons of Calpamos in the Zeta Riticuli system. Ellen Ripley, last survivor of the commercial towing vehicle Nostromo, is sent to the moon in an advisory capacity with a platoon of Colonial Marines. They arrive to find all one hundred and fifty-eight colonists missing, and signs of a recent battle for survival…

You’ll take your turn moving your characters around the map, trying to complete objectives whilst staying alive. The aliens – their movement and actions controlled by the boardgame – appear on the map as blips on your motion tracker, scurrying towards your hapless team. The number of aliens that a blip contains is unknown until you can see them – it could represent a lone warrior, or a vicious swarm of half a dozen.


One particularly nice touch is that you can send your squad of plucky Marines into battle with whatever equipment you see fit; any combination of weapons, armour and equipment. As the doomed Marine Hudson boasts in the dropship, the marines have everything.  But your tactical smart missiles, phased plasma pulse rifles, RPGS and sharp sticks don’t count for anything when a Xenomorph is inches away from you, grinning with you with two sets of teeth.

The ‘blip’ rule may be familiar to those of you who have played any edition of Games Workshop’s Space Hulk (1989). It’s a great mechanism to provide tension, in that they’re constantly appearing, and you’re never gifted with any breathing space to relax. However, rule plagiarism is fully permissible when you consider that Space Hulk was just a blatant rip off of the Aliens movie in the first place.


Another Glorious Day in the Corps is great fun. It has a lovely mechanism whereby the hand of cards you use to play with dwindles through the game, rarely to be replenished. As you move between the three scenarios, cards are permanently lost from your hand – this effectively represents your team becoming both demoralised and exhausted, your resources (both physical and mental) reducing gradually.


And, at the end of each scenario, you’re faced with an interesting choice. If you lost any characters, they’re considered cocooned and out of play. (“The sarge and Dietrich aren't dead, man. Their signs are real low, but they ain’t dead”). You can set forth on an optional rescue scenario to get them back from the hive - but this runs the risk of losing your other marines in the process.


Another Glorious Day in the Corps already has two expansion sets; Ultimate Badasses (which adds the remaining Marines not featured in the main game, and Weyland Yutani sleazebag Carter Burke – boo hiss - and experience rules), and Get Away Her You Bitch (which adds a few more scenarios, Bishop the Android, The Power loader and the Alien Queen).


A word of warning for newcomers to the hobby; All of the figures that come with the game are self-assembly. This might not sound like much, but most of them – especially the Xenomorphs – are an absolute pain in the arse to glue together. They’re as beautiful and accurate as they are fiddly and delicate, and you – especially if you’re cursed with my apparent lack of co-ordination – will end up gluing everything except for the miniatures. They all took a good six hours to glue together, and Games Workshop’s Citadel Plastic Glue was the only thing I found that worked on them. Be warned!

​“It has been established that persons who have recently died have been returning to life, and committing acts of murder. A widespread investigation of funeral homes, morgues and hospitals has concluded that the unburied dead have been returning to life and seeking human victims. It’s hard for us here to be reporting this to you, but it does seem to be a fact.” – Reporter


For those of you familiar with the (many) Zombicide games, which take the joy of killing zombies through the dark ages to the depths of outer space, this might feel like an odd combination of licenses. The Zombicide series of games have always been more about ploughing through hordes of the undead with reckless abandon, than the downbeat and relentless siege atmosphere of the 1968 movie.


To those unfamiliar with the George A. Romero 1968 classic which kicked off the Dead Trilogy (followed later on by Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead), it sees a group of disparate mismatched survivors attempting to both defend themselves and ultimately escape from rampaging hordes of the undead. 


Ground-breaking for the era in more than one way, these ‘ghouls’ (the word ‘Zombie’ is, notably, never used in the film) have our survivors trapped, and they’re forced to cooperate to survive.  Despite being half a century old, the movie still stands up relatively well.  It’s a masterclass in building drama and tension, and probably one of the first of the now common “besieged” trope, star of a dozen zombie movie imitations as well as Assault on Precinct 13 (which is effectively a zombie movie, anyway).


As with Another Glorious Day in the Corps, Night of the Living Dead is a co-operative game for one to six players. Like that game also, the scenarios in the rule booklet take you through – and beyond – the events of the film.  The ongoing storyline will see you forced to barricade yourselves in before endeavouring to learn how to defeat the throng of ghouls, managing to escape – and eventually taking the fight back to them.


The games with sculpted miniatures of the cast (no assembly required!) and more zombies ghouls than you could shake a broken table-leg at.  Each character has two figures; a “Romero” mode (scared, demoralised) and a “Zombicide” variant (kick-ass, ready to fight).  A character in Zombicide mode is more skilful (extra turns, extra attacks, etc.) and is in a much more capable position to both defend the house and attack the rampaging hordes.  The character will be forced to shift between these two modes as the same progresses; a ‘Zombicide’ character can quickly be demoralised if he spots one of his relatives amongst the walking dead.

Night of the Living Dead thrives in its unpredictability; where a well organised and executed plan can be thwarted by a sudden run of bad luck. In a recent game, we were doing exceptionally well right up until the end. We’d boarded up the house and were carrying out hit and run tactics to clear the zombies from outside and doing very well at it too. Then the game decided to suddenly spawn several “fatties” (bloated ghouls that can take twice as much damage as your common or garden strolling cadaver).  Not only that, but the game also spawned two of our relatives, now joined the shambling dead – the demoralising effect of which made us all weaker, and less equipped to deal with the hordes.  We won.  Just.

Oh, and a note to the publishers – if you ever want to make a Return of the Living Dead Zombicide, put me on the list as “very interested”. It’d be a perfect fit – punks, warehouse employees and a (possibly Nazi) mortician cutting a swathe through the undead? Perfect. And a Tarman figure? My wife’d love it. It’s a no-brainer.


No pun intended.


The Verdict


Both Another Glorious Day in the Corps and Night of the Living Dead: Zombicide are fine games, and majestic examples of how licensed games can be great. Both have exceptionally high production values – look at those miniatures! – and are clearly made by designers with great love for the source material.


I can see both these games getting dragged out onto the gaming table quite a lot, but I suspect that Night of the Living Dead will make more appearances. The Aliens game is a lot more involved and involves a lot more setting up – it’s got more depth than Night of the Living Dead, but it can be quite punishing.  The scenarios tend to be shorter in Night of the Living Dead, and it’ll have more appeal to the less hard-core gamer. The rules are very straightforward, and it’ll be the more tempting proposition to the casual player – on a more basic level, it’s the more fun out of the two.


It’s also worth noting that, like a great many co-operative games, both these can be played solo. In these days of lockdown when it’s next to impossible to get groups together, this is more of a tempting prospect.


And on a related note, if your gaming group is the people you share a house with, a co-operative game is less likely to cause fights or rivalries. You either all win, or you all lose.

Not board game related, but if you’re a fan of Aliens you could do a lot worse than immerse yourself in the frankly brilliant arguments over which is the Best Film Ever™ (Aliens or Robocop) between writers Kit Power and Tabatha Wood. It all kicked off here at everyone’s favourite horror website Ginger Nuts of Horror, and escalated through here, here and here.


Want an Alien gaming experience but don’t have/want any friends? Check out my review of “The Wretched” which can be found here.

David Court is a short story author and novelist, whose works have appeared in over a dozen venues including Tales to Terrify, StarShipSofa, Visions from the Void, Sparks, Burdizzo Mix Tape Volume One and Corona-Nation Street. Whilst primarily a horror writer, he also writes science fiction, poetry and satire. His last collection, Scenes of Mild Peril, was re-released in 2020 and his debut comic writing has just featured in Tpub’s The Theory (Twisted Sci-Fi). As well as writing, David works as a Software Developer and lives in Coventry with his wife, three cats and an ever-growing beard. David’s wife once asked him if he’d write about how great she was. David replied that he would, because he specialized in short fiction. Despite that, they are still married. He comes out at night, mostly.
 
Website: www.davidjcourt.co.uk
Twitter: @DavidJCourt

For Sam and Rylie an idyllic camping trip becomes an out of control nightmare. Seeking shelter on a local farm overnight when their car encounters trouble on the road, the couple find themselves at the mercy of an ageing farmer and her peculiar son.  The kindness of strangers is always welcome but soon that kindness descends into hallucinogenic fuelled madness as their host begins to show her true colours… when the crops fail and the land is barren there's only one thing left to eat and that’s a juicy lawn pig.

Written and directed by Devereux Milburn. Starring Sawyer Spielberg in his debut feature role plus Malin Barr (Top Dog) and Barbara Kingsley (Jessica Jones).
​
Signature Entertainment presents Honeydew on Digital Platforms 29th March 2021

On Digital Platforms February 12th

The legend Nic Cage takes on a set of violent animatronic amusement park mascots in this action packed, nail-biting tale of terror that will take you on the ride of your life.
​
Stranded in a remote town with a car that won’t work and no way to pay the local repair shop, The Janitor (Nic Cage) agrees to spend the night in an abandoned theme park full of animatronic characters that were once a joy to the kids of the town, but now hold a dark secret. As night falls, these once happy mascots come to life and they’re out for blood. Survive at any cost, it’s only one night! Willy's Wonderland is directed by Kevin Lewis. 

​

I am looking at my original copy, right now, of Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum (Random House, 1965). I do not know where or how I came upon this thin volume of shivery delights, only that I am grateful I did.
 
This anthology was my first introduction to Ray Bradbury, with a beautiful melancholy tale called Homecoming. A young boy, Timothy, eagerly awaits the epic family reunion of his vampire clan that occurs each Halloween. Unfortunately, he is not like the others. Timothy was born a mere mortal. He will never soar through the night or transform into a beast. He is destined to wither and die while the party goes on without him.
 
There are all kinds of strange vampires in this story from different cultures with unusual gifts. It opened my mind to the wider world of vampires while at the same time rooting the story in the unrequited dreams of an all-too-normal boy. Not only that, it may have secretly altered my brain into that of a writer.
 
I recently re-read the story and was shocked to discover that it never had a happy ending. That sour down note must have lodged in my subconscious so deeply that I ultimately created a false memory of a gentler conclusion, one where Timothy learns to accept those little ways in which he is unique, and that maybe, that was enough.
 
But that’s just one exhibit. There’s a whole museum here, folks. Slime, by Joseph Payne Brennan, rocked my world with a story told from the monster’s point-of-view. It starts in the otherworldly sunless depths of the ocean floor, rises to the surface for creeping backwoods horror and then ends in a full blown battle with the army involving machine guns and flame-throwers.
 
There are so many unusual monsters in the book, from shapeshifting shadow creatures and gnoles to the indescribable Fearsome Critters invented by Manly Wade Wellman. Perhaps the worst creature in the monster museum was one I thought I knew, the humble ant.
 
Doomsday Deferred, by Will F. Jenkins, remains one of the greatest short stories I’ve ever read. It starts with the concept of army ants in the Amazon jungle and end with the terrifying prospect of an omniscient hive intelligence with billions of ravenous mouths. I won’t give away the ending, but it left me with a lifelong fascination for insects, biology, jungles and the little nudges that can send a bit of science-fiction spiraling into horror.
 
I highly recommend this book, of course, for adults and older children. As Hitchcock himself says in the introduction, “…onward, young friends. The monsters are coming!”         
 

My most recent book, We Bleed Orange & Black – 31 Fun-sized Tales for Halloween, is a spooktacular goody bag that harvests all the joys and terrors of the best night of the year. These stories explore Halloween from Appalachia to the Arctic Circle and take the reader on a journey from the Old West to Mars.

We Bleed Orange & Black presents 31 fun-sized tales of Halloween from author Jeff C. Carter.

A twisted faerie finds a lost child, a teenage werewolf sneaks out during a full moon, and a legion of monsters begin the downfall of man. Explore Halloween from Appalachia to the Arctic Circle and journey from the Old West to Mars.

This spooktacular goody bag harvests all the joys and terrors of the best night of the year. If you love air crisp as cider and scented with burning leaves, if you greet the darkness with a jack o’lantern grin, and if you yearn for the veil between worlds to grow thin, then you bleed orange & black. Get it now!​

Many may be wondering: why on Earth is a game like Hollow Knight being reviewed on a horror website? Isn't it a cutesy, Metroidvania style platformer involving amusing bug-people who inhabit a subterranean fantasy kingdom in the manner of a Studio Ghibli animated feature? 

Yep. It most certainly is that. Hollow Knight follows a fairly well-trodden road in many, many respects: an independent, two-dimensional platformer, it nails it's colours to the wall from the get-go as a dyed-in-the-wool Metroidvania title, mechanically differing from others in the tradition hardly at all. Anyone who has ever played the likes of Super Metroid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Harmony of Dissonance, Blasphemous, Axiom Verge or any of a hundred others will know this game intimately from a few minutes play. That's not to say there's nothing of note in the control system; it's worth pointing out that, as Metroidvania titles go, this is a very, very solid one; the controls tight, immediate and intuitive. Even those not terribly familiar with the tradition it occupies will be able to figure it out just through experimentation (making it an ideal title for both children and parents). As the game progresses, its control systems become gradually more complex, layering in numerous moves and spells and abilities all of which will be technically familiar, but also flourished with aesthetics and mythological flourishes that make them far more than a standard “double jump” or “charge attack.” 

This is where Hollow Knight starts to distinguish itself; one of the first things any player is likely to notice is its aesthetics: 

The game is gorgeous. And on numerous levels; as a two-dimensional game, it is operating in a saturated market. Opting for a highly distinct, cartoonish style, the game feels like a strange and faintly off-piste animated feature or TV series that the player has some agency over. The underground world of Hallownest is a dark and ruinous place, infested with invertebrate life of all descriptions. As the player moves through the various screens, they will notice not only the highly distinct architecture -which varies from the hollowed-out remains of fossilized creatures to cultivated, abandoned cities, temples and great gardens left to run riot-, but also the little environmental flourishes that lend every area distinct personality. 

From the moribund village of Dirtmouth, one of the first areas of the game, which features a perpetually blowing breeze, a certain hollow quiescence that evokes a sense of quiet despair, to the lush and vibrant Green Path; overgrown with all manner of -often lethal- vegetation and infested with numerous forms of fungally-infested life, the game's environments are rich, sumptuous and often quite distracting in their unutterable beauty and meticulous attention to detail. Two dimensional games have, traditionally, always struggled evoking a realistic sense of depth or dimension, given that the player often operates on only one layer or level of play. Here, the game's developers have made sublime use of multiple, independently-scrolling layers in which the silhouettes of flowers blooming or butterflies taking flight might be witnessed in the foreground, whilst in the background waterfalls splash and spume, machines twist and churn or bugs go about their business, unconcerned by what is taking place elsewhere. Meanwhile, each area exhibits its own redundant -but brilliantly effective- environmental elements and textures that help to invest the crumbling and decrepit kingdom of Hallownest with enchanting animus: 

In certain areas of the game, fungal spores dance and sift across the screen, erupting from both infested enemies and the gigantic mushrooms that might be used as platforms or trampolines to reach higher areas. Others are saturated with a faintly maddening pink light from crystals that erupt from the walls and floor. In the magnificent City of Tears, rain falls perpetually, pattering against the stone ground and pouring into culverts, streaming down windows that the Hollow Knight passes by. The overall effect is of a living, functioning eco-system that, albeit slowly breaking down, is still capable of arresting with its magnificence. 

I was a sensitive and over-imaginative child, always seeing things which were not really there; at least that was what my grown-ups told me. Even now, there are certain memories and events from my childhood that stay with me, making me shudder to think of them. Sometimes they even stray into my dreams.

I remain certain that there were a handful of these ‘incidents’ that did in fact happen. Perhaps I frightened my mother, father and my older sisters (I am the youngest of five) when I talked about them. Maybe that is why they tried so hard to assure me that it was all in my head. Their well-meant reassurances did nothing to persuade me. Even if no one else witnessed it, for me it was absolutely real.

We lived in a three-bed council house in a pleasant village in South Wales. Despite our problems (we all have them, don’t we?) we were a close and mostly happy family. It wasn’t all roses round the door, but it wasn’t the childhood from hell, either.

My parents were keen readers and it is to them that I owe my thanks for my love of both reading and writing. Dad in particular loved a good horror, his favourites being James Herbert, Dean Koontz and Stephen King, though he would read any horror book that caught his eye. He had a small bookshelf which he would fill with his quota of books from the library, or books from the second-hand stall on the market. When I was quite young I used to sneak them off the shelf, to read when I thought he wasn’t looking, but of course he must have known. He did nothing to stop me. Knowing dad, he probably thought they would either be too difficult, too boring or too scary for me to stick with. They were indeed scary, but that was what hooked me.

Were they the cause of my childhood experiences? Categorically not. I remember strange things happening to me long before I ever sneaked a book off dad’s shelf. Later on they may have added to my fervent imaginings, but they were definitely not the root cause.

Let’s go back then, to the very beginning and to my earliest memory of something odd happening to me.

Being the youngest, I was always sent up to bed first. My parents thought my protestations were because I resented this and saw it as unfair. Undoubtedly there was an element of that; but there was something else that made me try to put off going up to bed alone.

There was an old, white-framed and mottled mirror hanging by the front door. Next to it was a double set of light switches: one for the passageway, the other for the stairs. Upstairs, set into the outside wall of the airing cupboard, was a single switch that was also for the stair light. I tell you this because it played an important role in my childhood terror.

My mother would flick the light on, watch me climb up the first three or four stairs, then go back into the living room. That was where the trouble began. What happened next was the inspiration for my short story The Sandman featured in Wakeful Children: A Collection of Horror and Supernatural Tales.

I would suddenly find myself horribly alone, the passageway all at once cold and unwelcoming. The door to the front room was usually left half open and that room held a peculiar kind of terror for me too, one that I have trouble explaining. I had an urgent need to get away from it, up to the comparative safety of my bedroom. I just had to deal with the stairs, first.

I would find myself caught in a terrifying mid-way position, between each light switch. Having no choice, I would race up the stairs as fast as I could, because I knew the switch at the top would flick to the off position before I could get to my room, cloaking me in darkness, separated from the bosom of my family; all alone. The memory of making my way to my room in that darkness, the prickly, intense feeling of being watched every step of the way, still has the power to give me goosebumps even now. I tried, once, to turn the light back on. To my horror it did not work. The light did not come on again, no matter how many times I reached up to flick the switch. I never dared try again after that, for fear of touching a ghostly hand, poised over it, waiting for me.

Perhaps it was an electrical fault. Perhaps one of my sisters were playing a joke with me, using the switch at the bottom of the stairs to repeatedly turn the light off (they all swear they didn’t though, that they would never have frightened me like that as a child.) Whatever it was, it left a lasting, deeply disturbing memory for me. Something no one else ever experienced in that house, which makes it that bit stranger. Was it all in my mind?  I suppose the fear of the dark is a primeval one. Something most humans experience at one time or another. Oddly enough, as an adult, I don’t fear the dark per se. I will quite happily wander about in my own home in the dead of night without putting a light on. It is that memory, specifically, that gives me the shivers, even now. Those stairs, those switches; that house.

For that wasn’t the only frightening experience I had at that address. I used to share a room with two of my sisters, there being so many of us that we had to squeeze in together. In a bid to brighten the place up a bit one day, they decided to paint the walls. All well and good, except the paint they used was very pale and quite shiny. So what, you ask?

Being the first to be sent to bed meant that I spent a good deal of time alone in my room. I distinctly remember lying in bed one such night, trying to get to sleep. The moon was high and bright, shining into the room. At first, I appreciated its light, grateful the darkness was dispelled for a while.

That was until I saw the people processing across the newly painted, shiny walls. I can see them now: a parade of dark, featureless figures walking nowhere. There was a woman, holding something like a parasol or an umbrella – I remember that vividly. There were others, too, though their exact shape is hazy after all this time. I know there was at least one man, some children too. They traversed the walls as if they had every right to be there. As if they had just been waiting for the right shade and texture of paint before they revealed themselves.

That was a bit much, even for me. I don’t remember telling my family what I had seen, but I must have got my point across because the bedroom was redecorated not long after. I wonder if that was just to assuage me, or because one of them had seen something, too?

Then there was the strange noise that came from within the walls. Now this I did not imagine; my mother and at least one of my sisters also heard it, so it was not the stuff of fantasy. My mum told us that it was a ‘tick beetle’ living in the walls. Given my wild imagination (my sisters had fertile imaginations too) mum undoubtedly refrained from giving it its proper name – Deathwatch Beetle – for obvious reasons! I have done a little research on this creature since. Given that they live on rotted wood, preferably oak around 60 years old – then either that house was seriously structurally compromised or mum simply could not find any other explanation. On a quiet night in winter, that tick-tick in the walls could be very creepy.

Then there was the very scary event that happened to me yet again alone in that bedroom. My bed was adjacent to the door, directly opposite the chimney breast that climbed up through the house. I was dozing one night, almost nodding off, when something caught my eye. I watched as a pale, indefinite shape rose from the base of the chimney breast in my room. It drifted up it, parting from it before it reached the top, when it started coming for me.

I had a blue candlewick bedcover at the time (early 80’s, don’t judge me.) I drew it up over my head and closed my eyes tight. I was absolutely convinced that shape was hovering over me, looking down at me through the cover. I gripped it so tight that my fingers hurt, holding my breath until my lungs nearly burst. It was only when I felt it had receded that I dared let go. Whatever that shape was, it had gone, leaving no sign that it had ever been there.

That only happened once, but once was enough, thank you. I was a bit older then, about twelve or thirteen. Perhaps it was hormone induced. Perhaps it wasn’t.

These last three experiences combined were the inspiration for the short story Crawl, which is also featured in Wakeful Children: A Collection of Witchcraft and Wickedness.  Elements of them, plus the next anecdote I am about to share with you, also inspired another story.

This time it was not so much an inexplicable event as a vivid, dread-laden dream I had around about the time my dear Uncle Albert passed away, rest his soul.

There was a wing-back chair in our living room that my uncle used to sit on when he visited. I have very fond memories of him, a lovely man with a large frame and the deepest voice I have ever heard on a man. He also had a stutter, which probably explains why he was rarely chatty, bless him.

Anyway, in my dream this chair was empty and altogether different, although in that weird way that dreams have, it was simultaneously the same chair. It was upholstered in dark green leather, with dark wooden legs leaving a few inches clear below it. Invariably, it was placed in the centre of an otherwise empty room, which at the same time was also our living room, rendering the whole thing familiar yet strange.

I don’t know if I was in the room with the chair, or if I was looking at it from somewhere else. Either way, the green leather would slowly begin to grow body parts; tongues, hands and feet suddenly protruding from what was now a green skin, alive and clammy, covered in a cold sheen of sweat. Those limbs would reach out into the nothingness, tongues licking the cold air, searching. I would wake in a cold sweat myself, shuddering as the memory of this horrible image gradually receded.

This is in fact a recurring dream, one of a few that I have from time to time even now. It was probably induced by grief, loss and stress. Regardless, it was the inspiration for my stand-alone short story (free on my website should you care to read it) called Dark and Moving Things.

There were many other things that happened to me in that house as a child. The most obvious explanation for them all, Occam’s Razor and all that, is that they were simply manifestations of an over-imaginative, relentlessly active mind as a child.

There again of course, they could have been manifestations of a different kind…

Apart from Dark and Moving Things, all the short stories mentioned above, plus more, are featured in my book, Wakeful Children: A Collection of Horror and Supernatural Tales, which can be found on Amazon and Troubador.

Thank you. I have enjoyed looking back at my childhood fears, in a strange kind of way. I hope I don’t dream tonight!

S P Oldham

This was very much Stephanie Ellis’s project (conceived originally with her Infernal Clock Press publishing partner David Shakes) as in she is the one who came up with the idea of curating a horror anthology inspired by Dante’s Inferno and the Nine Circles of Hell.

I came on board as co-editor and contributing author when David Shakes’ commitments meant he had to bow out of the venture as editor, but he has contributed a fantastic story. I work as an editor/proofreader for a British indie press, so it was a happy skillset match. Plus Steph and I have known each other for a few years, beginning with me submitting to Steph at the Horror Tree.

Steph had already drawn up a list of international writers from her own writing network (which encompassed her peers some of whom have been published by indie horror press Silver Shamrock). I added a few more names from my own writing contacts, but we also ran an open call-out on the Horror Tree site (where Steph is co-editor at their online flash zine, Trembling With Fear) specifically aimed at POC, and writers from the LGBQT communities, in order to have a more diverse and inclusive TOC. This call-out did bring in a handful of stories, one of which made it into the anthology and is a pacy, pulpy fun read.

There were one or two of the invitees, who for personal or work reasons, were unable to finalise a story or had to withdraw. When you’re working with twenty or so writers this is inevitable. Life happens and writing goes on pause.

Steph and myself wanted to ensure each circle was represented by at least one story, some circles have two and in the cases of the rather popular Eighth (Fraud) and Ninth Circles, (Treachery) three.

We also gave the writers a choice as to which circle they’d like to visit and linger in for a while – fictionally speaking. Some of the circles flew off the shelves (eight and nine) compared to others, which was a little bizarre, but fun to see who would choose which sin to write about. I chose the Third Circle - gluttony- which called to my foodie-loving soul – and the story rolled out like pastry for a pie.

In the end there are eighteen devilishly dark stories for the readers’ delectation. A smorgasboard of delights.

Hailey Piper, indie horror writer extraordinaire, author of The Possession of Natalie Glasgow, amongst others, kindly agreed to don Virgil’s cloak and wrote the erudite foreword.

Steph and myself are both proud of the diverse TOC represented in Inferno, and that the writers come from a rich variety of backgrounds, and are marking their mark in the environs of indie horror and in mainstream publishing too. Some are at the beginning of their writing journeys and some are further along, with years of experience under their belts but they all share a love and passion for horror which comes through so strongly in their stories.

We have :- First Circle – Lynn Love and Shannon Felton (The Prisoners of Stewartsville) Second Circle:- Cassie Daley; Third Circle :- Alyson Faye (The Lost Girl/Spindleshanks) and T C Parker (Saltblood); Fourth Circle:- Kev Harrison (The Balance), Robert Allen Lupton (Feral); Fifth Circle:- Irene Lofthouse (Stories from Stone), Charlotte Platt (A Stranger’s Guide); Sixth Circle :- V Castro (Sed de Sangre); Seventh Circle:- David Shakes (Deadcades), Steve Stred (The Window in the Ground); Eighth Circle:- Stephanie Ellis (The Five Turns of the Wheel), R J Meldrum (The Plague), Daniel R Robichaud (Smudges and Circles); Ninth Circle:- C.C. Adams (Downwind Alice), G.A. Miller (The Shopkeeper) and Lionel Ray Green (Scarecrow Road).

Some of those names might be new to you, I suspect others will be more familiar, but by the end of reading Inferno you will have, I am sure, some new additions to your ‘must read list’.

There is, I discovered, a lot of work in putting together an anthology of this size and scope with so many different authors’ voices. Once the stories started trickling in, then the serious reading began, and the editorial marking up of the texts to suggest changes or redos, sometimes to tighten up the world of the story and bring it closer to Dante’s vision, or to enrich the layers of dread and menace. This is a horror anthology – so we need to frighten our readers. We can’t be too gentle.

Some stories, like my own, MaXXed Out, went through a few rewrites and polishes, before the final, final proofread, by which time I could almost mouth the dialogue in my sleep. And I was dreaming about this anthology a lot by then.

Needless to say there were a blizzard of online chats/emails between Steph and myself as we edited on Google Docs, but fortuituously there was very little disagreement. We were both on the same page. (I know terrible pun there).

Steph is 100% responsible for designing the lushly dark cover and formatting the text and of course for getting the whole project off the ground.
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This has been my first collaborative editing project but it won’t be my last. There is more to come next year from myself and Steph, so Inferno is the trailblazer, (more puns).