It's that time of the year again folks, and I know it has been a tough one for all of us, but I have just had to pay this year's hosting fees, and it was not a pleasant experience, the cost as happens every year has gone up yet again, to the point where I am begining to wonder if I can keep this going for another year. 

Over the years I have sunk £1000's of my own money into the website, from hosting fees to advertising the site on other sites, to even Facebook promotions, it's something that I can no longer afford to do. Everything we do on the site is done solely to promote the authors and horror creators that we feature on the site.

Without wanting to brag, Ginger Nuts of Horror is the largest independent horror review outlet in Europe, and we have a proven track record of helping to get films and books noticed, just ask the authors who have received film deals directly from featuring on the site.  

I understand that this has been a hard year for us all financially, and with that in mind for the fifth year in a row, the cost to advertise on the site will remain fixed.  I don't want to make money fro the site i just want enough money to cover the running costs of the site. Which this year will top out at a grad total of over $1000 all in.  


So I'm going to offer a basic package.  

ONE YEAR OF  ADVERTISING ON THE HOME PAGE  - £120 

this is open to anyone, if you are a publisher the advert will reflect the book that you want to promote, with  3 changes to the initial  advert allowed within a 12 month period.  That means you can advertise 4 of your books for a low price throughout the year .  



ONE YEAR FOOTER ADVERTISING - £150

this is open to anyone, if you are a publisher the advert will reflect the book that you want to promote, with  3 changes to the initial  advert allowed within a 12 month period.  That means you can advertise 4 of your books for a low price throughout the year .  

SIDE BAR ADVERTISING -  £80 PER PAGE 

this is open to anyone, if you are a publisher the advert will reflect the book that you want to promote, with  3 changes to the initial  advert allowed within a 12 month period.  That means you can advertise 4 of your books for a low price throughout the year .  

All packages will include an initial news item about your book, weekly social media shout outs and linkage to your preferred site for selling your book.  As well as a round robin inclusion in our new newsletter.   You can subscribe to it here 


These rates are exceptional value compare them to any number of horror websites out there and you will find them to be very reasonable.  

If interested please email me here 

Connolly continues the incredible high standard of book 12, The Wolf in Winter, with an absolute knockout of a follow-up. Interestingly and stylistically this entry is written entirely in the third person which breaks from the usual model in which Parker is written in the first person and other characters in the third. However, this is ingenious and brilliantly effective as the change in style gives the reader some added distance from Parker as he recovers slowly and painfully from his troubles in the previous book. As Parker is lying low for much of the time this gives some of the other characters time to shine and the story is populated with superb faces, both long story arc characters and those who are only here for A Song of Shadows. For the most part this book reads like a standalone novel until the stunning ending which sneakily brings in a much longer story arc which leaves the reader gagging for book 14. The novel kicks off with Parker taking a break from the detective business and moves to a small seaside town on the Maine coastline, however, after a body is washed up close to where he lives, he is unwittingly sucked into a complex conspiracy which involves Nazi hunters and secrets which go back to the Second World War. With Parker taking the backseat for much of the story the Nazi story arc was fascinating and perfectly pieced together and along the way his young daughter begins to play a bigger role. Make sure you hang in there for the ending! Superb stuff.
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​The brutal A Time for Torment maintains the super high standard of its predecessor A Song of Shadows which also presents Charlie Parker in the third person (up until book 12 he was almost always written in the first person “I” tense). One wonders whether this is a tactic in presenting Parker as an all-together darker entity, a product of the shocking ending in book 12 The Wolf in Winter? If this is the case, Connelly nails it. Interestingly, Parker is absent for large chunks of this novel, but his presence is never far away in a superbly written thriller which, for the most part, dances around the longer story arc, but the ghosts (quite literally) of the past are never far away. Much of the early part of the story revolves around a recently released ex-convict Jerome Burnel who turns to Parker for help after six years in prison. He claims he was framed for having thousands of child pornography images for payback in an incident where he thwarted an armed robbery and killed the two gunmen. But why and by whom? Parker, his sidekicks Angel and Louis, believes the story and soon the trail connects to a remote and reclusive community in West Virginia, ‘The Cut’, which control the small county of Plassey, through intimidation, extortion, murder, and brutal violence. The complex and riveting plot takes in many characters and with Parker being portrayed almost as an avenging angel it is impossible not to get sucked in. And prepare yourself for a quite stunning final hour of reading. As if often the case with these books there are many sneaky turns and the references to the longer story arcs are terrific, in particular Parker’s young daughter Sam and the obvious key role she is going to play in future plot developments.

With Charlie well and truly beginning to get his life in order he begins to investigate the suicide of a young woman called Grace Peltier. He quickly realises that the death was murder and that it is connected to the discovery of a mass grave in northern Maine and a reclusive religious community and ultimately a shadow organisation known as the Fellowship. Prepare to meet a couple of the series greatest villains, whose story partially continues in book four, The White Road. If you do not like spiders avoid this book like the plague. Cults are a theme which are frequently revisited throughout the series and the example included in this story is a corker.
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​The Unquiet was the closest to a traditional murder-mystery novel in the series since the first couple, with Parker hired to protect a woman called Rebecca who is being stalked by a guy called Frank Merrick (who is an outstanding and totally menacing character). Merrick believes that Rebecca’s dead father, an eminent child abuse expert and psychologist, is still alive and has a bone to pick with him. When Parker begins to investigate Merrick’s motives, it takes him deep into the area of child abuse, revenge and the case becomes all too personal as it is unclear who is telling the truth and whether an old child abuse ring is still active. Although many of the usual characters pop up in The Unquiet, they have rather subdued roles and Parker’s own personal problems are also kept on the backburner. A great character from earlier in the season also makes a welcome return and the pain from Parker’s past is never far away. Interestingly, supernatural characters called Hollow Men are introduced, but you could argue not enough is done with them, and they lurk in the background as the darkness surrounds Parker and reappear in future novels. Although this was a beautifully written book, the subject matter was unquestionably dark, with the evil of man much worse than anything the supernatural world can give us. Also, the prologue featuring ‘Dave the Guesser’ was a quite simply outstanding piece of writing and one of the most striking sequences in the whole series.

​After the astonishingly high standard maintained in books 12-14, arguably the strongest trilogy in the sequence, A Game of Ghosts was a slight disappointment. There was nothing wrong with it and it was an entertaining read but compared to Connolly’s best very best work it came up a shade short. The series, as it has over the last few books continues to present Parker in the third person and this book seemed to have so many characters in it, I struggled remembering who some of them were. In comparison to the best of the recent books, many of these minor characters were not particularly memorable, and I found that the supernatural entity which lurked at the back of this book was slightly disappointing with an underwhelming ending which barely involved Charlie Parker. The series is at its strongest when Parker is up front, and centre and he seemed to be underutilised in A Game of Ghosts. The plot revolves around Parker’s search for a missing detective, hired by the FBI who have an agenda of their own, Parker begins to circle an ancient organisation which have made a pact with something very dodgy. Ultimately, my gripe with this book was the fact that for the most part it neglected the fascinating story arc with Parker’s young daughter Sam, which really deserved more page time. Perhaps this will be developed more substantially in the next book, but I felt a tad short changed. However, watch out for the demise of a major recurring character! I was with Parker here and was sorry to see him go.

Book ten, The Burning Soul, was as close to standard police procedural as the series gets, with three separate story strands which the reader is certain are going to interconnect, with much of the fun being in how it happens. Parker finds himself working for the lawyer who has featured in the last few books and is investigating a series of threatening (potentially blackmail) messages her client, Randall Haight has received. Why has he not gone to the police? Many years ago, when he was fourteen, he and a friend killed a little girl and since being released from prison has been given a new identity. However, the blackmailer seems to know who he is. In a story top heavy with small town secrets, the second plot is very much in the present day, with the disappearance of a fourteen-year-old girl. The police have no clues, the FBI become involved and the two cases overlap. The third story was the least interesting, and took up too much page time, the downfall of a city gangster and his cohorts which have old family connections to the small Maine town shocked by the disappearance of the teenager. Although this was an entertaining page-turner it lacked the spark of the best of the series, Charlie himself is a bystander in much of the novel with much of the story going around him, with Angel and Louis having minor roles and the non-Charlie supernatural aspect of the story seemed unnecessary. John Connolly also fails to return to the big family revelations dropped a couple of novels ago.
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Some of you may feel 7/10 is too low a score of The Dirty South and if I revisit this article in a couple of years hindsight may prove you to be correct. I read this within two weeks of its predecessor and would probably have enjoyed it more if I had let the grass grow longer between books.   In the afterward Connolly mentions that following the magnificent A Book of Bones (book 17) was nigh of impossible, so he decided to tackle a more traditional stand-alone mystery next, so as this is a type of ‘origins’ story it lacks the long story arcs and personal growth of the characters from the recent books. The Dirty South takes us right back to 1997 where Charlie Parker is dealing with the personal tragedy which he is attempting to revenge in the first book Every Dead Thing with the action being a side story which takes place in Arkansas, before he heads to New Orleans, following the trail of ‘The Travelling Man’. Parker stops in Arkansas as there have been murders which have some similarities to the modus operandum to the killer he is tracking. It is worth noting that the Arkansas tourist board will not be using this book for promotional material any time soon, as just about everybody seems to be corrupt! Parker finds himself helping the local police to solves the murders and faces obstacles all the way, mainly from a powerful local family who are trying to lure big business to the area. It is believed the murders were not investigated properly because the victims were all poor black women and there has been some sort of coverup. As a standalone mystery it was an entertaining enough novel, but it lacked some spark. All other recurring characters were absent to about 90%, the support characters were bland or unlikable, and the story lacked the brutal killers of recent novels. As I approached the end of the book, I found myself not particularly bothered who the killer was in what was a simple murder mystery which lacked the scope of most of the recent books in the series and if felt like a holding novel before the next big thing happens.   ​

The Wrath of Angels is a loose sequel, of sorts, to the fifth book in the series, The Black Angel, which was one of my least favourites of the sequence.  This was also, possibly the most overtly supernatural of the series thus far and even the reappearance (and development) of ‘The Collector’ cannot save it from being bogged down by too many characters, sub-plots, and a serious sag in the middle of the book that had me frustrated. The villain from The Black Angel also returns, but he is sadly both underused and underdeveloped and although The Wrath of Angels does connect to both the wider multi-book story arc and a ghost from a previous novel, I found it stodgy. The story revolves around the discovery of a crashed plane in a remote part of the Maine wilderness, two local hunters find the wreck and steal the money they find and soon someone comes looking for both the money and a list of names. The names are all prominent and successful people and many years after the money is long spent Charlie Parker is called to investigate by a surviving relative and is more closely connected to the investigation than he ever thought possible. With the story returning to the very powerful and secret organisation hinted at in Black Angel, Charlie has his work cut out as the bodies begin to mount and the hunt for the list is on.

How many times have you heard that or said it yourself? Exactly nobody ever said it about me. I was the kid who was afraid of everything. I wouldn’t ride the merry-go-round, convinced the horses would break loose and carry me away. This was long before I saw the Mary Poppins movie (which confirmed my fears were possible, so stop laughing) but movies didn’t help.

When I was five or six, an incredibly creepy live-action film version of “Red Riding Hood” made the rounds. My school showed it as part of their keep-the-kids-occupied-during-summer-break program. I don’t know what they were thinking. I survived that, but then ads for it began appearing on television. Although the wolf in the movie was a person in a wolf suit, the commercial featured a very realistic wolf. Just his head, surrounded by black. He stared at you and opened his mouth wide, all teeth and tongue, and the camera cut away. He was sheer evil, and I knew whatever he was about to do was far worse than swallowing Red’s grandma.

All I had to do was catch a glimpse of him, and I’d wake up in the night and see him poised to jump. He never got farther than the floor since my screaming both frightened him away and brought my parents to my room. I soon learned to shut my eyes when the commercial came on, but it sometimes took me unaware and the wolf returned. If he didn’t, I knew just because I couldn’t see him didn’t mean he wasn’t there. I began sleeping with my pillow over my head and my arms outstretched at my sides holding the blankets tight against the bed. Maybe, just maybe, if he couldn’t see me, I’d be safe.

And then there were the old movies. Creature from the Black Lagoon must have run one afternoon a month for a year. As an adult, the zipper in the Creature’s costume is obvious, but as a five-year-old, he followed me around for weeks, and the things that had happened off-screen, in those days of less explicit screen horror, kept me awake at night.

In Superman and the Mole-Men, the eponymous Mole-Men crawl through a child’s bedroom window. She rolls her toy ball toward them. They roll it back. At their touch, the ball glows. I never saw what came next. By then I’d learned to close my eyes and hide my head under the nearest pillow or blanket or whatever. I swear, that window looked exactly like the window in my room. I was an adult before I discovered the encounter was innocent. Nothing happened. The girl was safe. For ages, I saw the Mole-Men rolling the phosphorescent ball at her every time I entered my room. For years, in my head, she touched that glowing ball and—I didn’t know what came next, but I knew it was bad.

All of the above happened before I was seven. Shortly before my seventh birthday, we moved from the land of single-story houses built on slabs to the land of multi-story houses built over basements, and I acquired a whole new set of fears. Basements. How the hell could a giant house hover over a big hole in the ground? It was bound to collapse, probably with me underneath it. And if it didn’t—this time—what was lurking at the bottom of those steep stairs, just out of sight? To this day, I still have, shall we say, “issues” with basements, stairs, and dark corners.

When I was about ten, my cousin and I watched the 1963 version of The Haunting, based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. It scared the crap out of both of us. In my memory, we are two little girls huddled together on the living room floor, unable to look away. The worst part was we never saw the monster or ghost or whatever it was. Even at that age, I knew if they would just show us the Big Bad, the fear would lessen, but by that age, I loved it.

Having made it to adulthood despite repeated trips to the basement, I now know most of my fears were the unknown, the unexplained. Those carousel horses? It wasn’t the running away; it was the where would they take me? Yes, it might be a great adventure, but it might be somewhere horrifying and deadly. The only way to find out was to go there, and I wasn’t having any of it.

To this day, the usual things, spiders for example, don’t scare me—when I can see them. But the thought of picking up a mitten that’s lain in a dark corner of the closet since spring, sticking my hand into it, and finding a big hairy spider…or a whole nest of them…excuse me, but I need to take a moment and pull myself together.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of self-examination to realize how this all made its way into my work and shaped me as a writer.

In 1826, Ann Radcliffe defined the main characteristics of Horror fiction as terror, the mounting dread that takes place in anticipation of an event, and horror, the disgust or revulsion that takes place after the event. Stephen King, William Nolan, and others have written that Horror is not about the monster behind the door, which once revealed will never be as big or as scary as we imagine it to be, but about the slow opening of that door. My work, like my childhood (and frankly, my adult) fears, generally depends more on Radcliffe’s “terror” than her “horror.” In the stories in The Cuckoo Girls, the threat usually lies just beyond the light, beyond the basement stairs and out of sight. Violence happens, but it is usually off-screen. The monster behind the door is sometimes seen but seldom explained. As Abby, the protagonist of The Ceiling Man, states, “I do not know who he is. I only know he is.”

A beach town, crowded with sunbathers, a summer paradise where I as a child played in the sand and shot an arrow from a bow straight into the blue sky, then ran for my life. All arrows come down – straight into the shooter’s head! I read Richie Rich comic books and ate French fires from a paper boat with lots of ketchup. To this day, I still love beaches and sand and there is currently buried a Richie Rich comic book in a dune, since I tried to bury the following memory, but have failed. It still haunts me.

My family were close friends with another family, who had a cottage at Wasaga Beach. It was an old cottage from the 1950s, forest green flaking paint, a large porch enclosed by mosquito netting, on which was unfolded a cot for my mother and I to sleep. The interior was full of people. The chances of monsters was slim since I was well-protected, squeezed on half the bed between my mother’s body and the bare wooden wall. But no mother can protect her child from his imagination.

In those dark days of Fonzie, Sweathogs, bowl haircuts, plaid pants, and brown Adidas running shoes with jagged yellow Charlie Brown stripes up the sides, there were still drive-in movie theatres. Three families in total were heading to the drive-in, one of them related to the other, and already residing in the beach town paradise of Wasaga.

I was ten years old. My life was about to change forever.

Playing on the big screen was the recently release, The Amityville Horror, starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder. Why in the hell my family thought showing me horror movie at ten years old was a good idea, I dunno. Were they evil? Was this an orchestrated move to destroy my mind by forcing me into a world of fear forever! (From which I have yet to escape….)

I was there! I saw it all! The son waking at night to systematically kill his entire family while they slept. (I would never sleep again – that’s how they getcha!) The blood seeping from the walls, the glowing red entrance to Hell in the basement (Don’t go down there, George Lutz!), the flies amassing on the windowsill (my bedroom had a wooden window exactly like that one, and it too amassed flies), those windows which were the devil’s eyes, and of course, Jody the Pig! (I was raised on a farm that had pigs.)

I’m sure all of the adults had a good scare and laughed about it as they chewed their red licorice and sucked popcorn and hung elbows on 1970s car doors, scenting the warm beach breeze. I remember nothing until we returned to the cottage and were told it was “beddie-bye time”.

Night trees swayed their limbs and threw shadows diffused by the mosquito screen against the wall I faced. My back to my sleeping mother, I stared at the wooden wall and saw Jody the Pig and blood sweating through the wood and flies walking up walls, gathering on my face, with the devil himself waiting to devour us all … once we returned home. If we ever did. Wasaga Beach was a paradise, and people from the city still go there to escape to this very day. But every paradise contains a serpent …

For years afterwards I lived in fear due to that movie. Jaws made me afraid of swimming, The Omen made me check my head under my hair for 666 because I was sure I was the devil’s son (I still believe this … I’m losing my mind slowly every year), and Phantasm terrified me to think that steel balls with spikes would fly out of nothing to stab into my forehead and shoot out a geyser of my brain blood. But none of them came close to the unending horror of Amityville. (Also where Jaws took place – what’s with this town – burn it with napalm!)

Why in the held did my parents let me watch so many horror movies so young?

And now, years later, I fear nothing. But I write horror to constantly try and bring back that feeling of horror, and I know I fail every time. This is intentional. Still as a child, I gravitated towards comedy to dispel horror, and comedy may find its way inadvertently into my work, to shine a light into the darkness to make it a little less horrifying. The melodrama is also intentional since it comes with the genre; if you make something overblown, you decrease its fear. I can’t write subtle because if I do Jody the Pig will eat me!

Website: https://robbliss.weebly.com/
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Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Rob-Bliss/e/B07VL1TQ1R?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1610743021&sr=8-1

Goodreads Profile: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19496667.Rob_Bliss

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rob.bliss.779/

Twitter: @BlissRob

Out of the Darkness collects together brand new stories by Jenn Ashworth, Alison Moore, Nicholas Royle, Laura Mauro, Aliya Whiteley, Tim Major, Simon Bestwick, Eugen Bacon, Gary Budden and many more. They all deal with mental health in some way, and many are written by people who have first-hand experience of the challenges mental illness can present. They tackle the topics of anxiety, depression, obsessive–compulsive disorder and other issues, as well as the pressures mental illness can place on family members and friends – sometimes obliquely, sometimes head-on. At times that can make for challenging reading, but the authors have all actively engaged with the central philosophy of this book: that with support and open discussion, those who are suffering from mental health problems can move out of the darkness and into the light. In addition, all the authors are donating their fees and royalties to Together for Mental Wellbeing.

Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting some of the authors involved in this great anthology.  ​

For more info on Verity, check out her website here 
  https://verityholloway.com/

Out of the Darkness challenges some of the most exciting voices in horror and dark fantasy to bring their worst fears out into the light. From the black dog of depression to acute anxiety and schizophrenia, these stories prove what fans of horror fiction have long known – that we must understand our demons to overcome them.

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, what began as a mental health crisis has rapidly become an unprecedented tsunami. The Centre for Mental Health has estimated that 10 million people will need mental health support in the UK as a direct consequence of Covid-19, with a staggering 1.5 million of those being under eighteen.

Edited by Dan Coxon (This Dreaming Isle) and featuring exclusive stories by Alison Moore, Jenn Ashworth, Tim Major and Aliya Whiteley, this collection harnesses the power of fiction to explore and explain the darkest moments in our lives. 

Horror isn’t just about the chills – it’s also about the healing that comes after.

Back the kickstarter by  here 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/unsungstories/out-of-the-darkness-an-anthology-of-horror-and-dark-fantasy

Uncanny Collective joins  forces with sibling tale-weavers Jason Buck Storyteller, and Rosalind Buck, creator and performer, to summon spring from the dead winter ground.

Click here to get your tickets via Eventbrite.

Sara Lynam will be performing a Victorian poem – ‘A Ballad of the Were-wolf’ by Rosamund Marriott Watson and conjuring the dark spring with some Celtic folksongs, a Māori waiata and a murder ballad as well!

Jason Buck will tell his version of the Grimms’ (collected) story of ‘The Singing Bone’: Monsters, murder and unquiet dead.

Rosalind Buck tells her original short stories ‘The Sap’ and ‘Hare Raising’ – you will never drink milk again…

How to watch on the day:

You’ll receive an email after buying a ticket, with a link and passwords to the session (check your spam folders). We will be online 15 minutes before the start of the story, to help with any technical issues or answer any questions.

You may need to download and install the app Zoom Client for Meetings to participate, so best to do that ahead of time (compatible with most computers and phones etc): https://zoom.us/download

How to watch later:

Purchase a ticket, as normal, and within 48 hours of the performance date, please contact Jason at jasonbuck@hotmail.co.uk with the details of the email address you used to buy your ticket and he will send you a link to stream/download the show