Salamander Justice was originally published by Madness Heart Press in 2020. Unfortunately it was early pandemic and things got lost in the shuffle. However, there is great news as  they are re-releasing it with a new, better cover and an updated edit and that is coming out later this month.  And Ginger Nuts of Horror is proud to bring news about this great book and the new cover.  As well as details of Tamika's   brand new collection Unshod, Cackling, and Naked published next year by Unnerving Press!!

Salamander Justice Synopsis 

Veda is a successful public relations director who recently relocated to Kauai where she is grieving the murder of her ex-boyfriend Michael. Sam is a self-proclaimed vegan-pacifist who is searching for his life’s purpose despite being supported by his wealthy family. The salamanders that populate the Hawaiian island, that sneak into homes, and scurry across footpaths are simply an afterthought.

Believing that Veda is “the one,” Sam introduces her to his family in the hopes that he can turn their friendship into something more, but his plan is thwarted when Veda becomes smitten with his older brother Adam. Strange occurrences befall the trio on the anniversary of Michael’s murder, and as Veda chooses Adam, and as Sam becomes increasingly resentful, the love triangle spirals into a jealousy and anger so strong they begin to question reality.

Is the human-like salamander that Veda sees real or imagined? Is the leathery, yellow stripe growing on Sam's chest just in his head? Salamander Justice asks, Which creatures deserve to live? The answer will prove to be deadly.
​

PRAISE FOR TAMIKA THOMPSON

"['Bridget Has Disappeared'] is the optimum compelling and horror-
evolving fiction..."

— The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books

“With her distinct voice, Thompson has woven a passionate tale of
love, horror, suspense, and magical realism. Salamander Justice is
gripping, unique, and self-reflective in a way that, as a reader, I was
disarmed by. The way Thompson plays with this idea of identity and
echoes of ourselves sticks with you ... It’s one of the most original
thrillers I’ve read in a long time; I am in awe.”

— Scott Waldyn, Literary Orphans

"Tamika Thompson tells a mean monster story [in Salamander
Justice], a curiosity of wants against the backdrop of corporate
power and violent paradise.”
— Monique Quintana, author of Cenote City (Clash Books), and
contributing editor at Luna Luna Magazine

Coming from Titan Books July 2023,  Unquiet by E. Saxey
​

We are honoured to bring you the exclusive cover reveal for Unquiet by E. Saxey, publishing by Titan Books in July 2023, (it's up for preorder if you want to grab a copy now). And we also have an exclusive extract from The Unquiet, scroll down for the full cover and the extract.  

A gripping horror debut novel from an exciting new voice in British horror in which young woman, mourning the death of her brother-in-law a year earlier, discovers him one evening in her garden and journeys to strange folk festivals, isolated communities and asylums, unravelling the mysterious circumstances of his disappearance. At once a tense, gripping mystery and a terrifying Victorian gothic horror, this is perfect for fans of The Haunting of Hill House and Sarah Waters.


Synopsis:

London 1893. Judith has been living alone in her family home for four months, the rest of her family travelling around the world whilst she tries desperately to get over the death of Sam, her brother-in-law, who drowned in an accident a year ago.

One icy evening, she discovers Sam, alive, in the garden. He has no memory of the past year, and remembers little of the accident that appeared to take his life.


Desperate to keep his reappearance a secret until she can discover the truth about what happened to him, Judith journeys outside of the West London Jewish community she calls home, to the scene of Sam’s accident, only to unearth secrets she never thought she would find.

Out July 2023 from Titan Books

A strange and obscure beasty this time around, my loves, but one with a fervent and abiding cult following, of which I happily count myself a part: 


American McGee's Alice hit the PC in the latter 1990s/early 2000s, back when PC gaming was flourishing, becoming not only a viable platform, but one where innovation, wild experimentation and revolutions in the medium were the norm. Marketed as a bleakly psychological sequel to Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland, the game finds an older, teenage Alice confined to a Victorian insane asylum following a fire that destroyed her home and claimed the lives of her family. Catatonic since the event, she recedes deeper and deeper into a version of Wonderland that is slowly warping and decaying as her mind turns in on itself. Familiar settings and characters become Jungian metaphors for aspects of her psyche; components of the mental disease slowly corrupting her mind. Once the manifestation of her childhood imagination, Wonderland is now a place of bizarre horrors and arbitrary cruelties. Shattered, broken “...careening on the jagged edge of reality,” Alice must navigate the distorted dreamscapes in order to defeat those parts of herself that are slowly poisoning her, and restore some semblance of sanity to a world on the edge of collapse.


The game distinguished itself not through revolutionary technicals -though it was graphically impressive for the era-, but via its conception, atmosphere and design, all of which conspire to create a Wonderland quite unlike anything that had been seen before. A place of inconstant, twisting, hallucinogenic horrors, the subtle wit of the game lies in its taking of familiar characters, tropes and archetypes and suffusing them with disturbing thematic qualities. The Mad Hatter, for example, beloved by fans of the original books and Disney cartoon adaptation, is here an obsessive and unpredictable lunatic, fascinated with clockwork, time and mechanical contrivances. He himself is a distorted grotesque; gigantic, spindle-limbed, clockwork augmentations protruding from his back and limbs, he accuses Alice of “dawdling” and never having a grasp on time. Likewise, the Jabberwock, manifestation of Alice's guilt over the fire that claimed her parents, is a steampunk, bio-mechanical monstrosity; a draconic horror that assaults Alice emotionally as well as with its fiery breath, snarling accusations that see her collapse in near-total abjection. 


The game is well remembered for its delirious settings, that are as sincere a manifestation of a diseased dreamscape as might be found in a video game, and the lustrously gothic flourishes in its design. Whilst incongruously cute, it's also twisted, nightmarish and disturbing, that dichotomy escalating and escalating to the game's eventual climax, when Alice finds the very heart of her malady in the body-horror hellscape of The Queen of Heart's realm. A palace of living flesh and bone, it is here that Alice encounters the face of her insanity, and finds that it is her own. 


Whilst the game is visually impressive and vividly recalled for incredible visual work and visionary design, Chris Vrenna's score is equally worthy of note. Without it, the disturbia of the game would be much reduced, as would the sense of urgency that escalates as the story progesses and Alice's mind tangibly collapses around the player. 


Beginning with distortedly jaunty, warped nursery-rhyme tunes, the score soon descends into distressing, industrial tones that wouldn't be out of place on a Nine Inch Nails album. Throughout, Vrenna flourishes the soundtrack with moments of discord and incongruous cries, moans; voices in lament or pain. It's a truly beautiful, unsettling piece of work that more closely echoes the likes of Silent Hill or Shadow Man than other fantastical contemporaries. 

Arguably one of the most notable tracks accompanies the lacrimose “Veil of Tears” area; a fog-shrouded realm of Autumnal streams and rivers fed by the tears of crying statues, it is the manifestation of Alice's grief over her lost family and the life she once led, but also the fey and dallying childhood that no longer exists, the Wonderland that can never be again. 


Here, the score dips into slow and resonant elegies; strains of slow violins accompanying voices that weep and moan exclamation, suffusing the entire area with a palpable sense of oppressive despair. 


Later, in the Mad Hatter's clockwork, industrial realm (where Alice's subconscious experiences of the asylum itself have melded with her imaginary world, creating a condition that is neither waking reality nor the realm of her dreams), the score's industrial elements ramp up; sounds of clockwork, cogs, steaming engines married to distorted musical boxes, broken instruments and fizzing, hissing electricity. This is arguably the point where the true extent of Alice's malady becomes apparent in both the score and setting, both of which paint a picture of a fractured mind slowly falling apart under the weight of its own grief. 


When Alice finally breaches the gates and labyrinths that protect The Queen of Heart's land, the score swells into a bleakly epic state, choral yet cancerous, celebratory yet horrific. Here, Alice walks the depths of her subconscious mind, where the very darkest of her drives and impulses have congealed and become manifest in The Queen of Hearts. 


Whilst undoubtedly horrific in design, the score accompanying Alice's confrontation with her inner-self is a masterwork of sublime horror; a throbbing, arterial strain that incorporates motifs from all of the game's prior environments and encounters, communicating without ambiguity that here is the heart of all darkness, the very root of the sentient cancer spreading throughout her imaginary world and slowly unraveling her sanity. 


From conception to design, from narrative to atmosphere, American McGee's Alice is a work of profound passion; a game designed to express so much more than its technical elements and medium might suggest. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the score, which is a thing of disturbing, ambient beauty, that elevates the final work into the condition of a delirious fever-nightmare, as obsessively engaging as it is bizarre, and more than worthy of the abiding passion it receives from its advocates, all these many years later. ​

Have you ever wondered what the elegy for a dying world would sound like? What must've echoed throughout Heaven following the war that split it in two, the ultimate failure of all creation? 


That's pretty much what you get with the soundtrack to Frank Darabont's big-screen adaptation of Stephen King's Lovecraftian, apocalyptic novella, The Mist. 


Darabont is the perfect director to adapt King's material; not only does he understand it on an intimate level, he also understands when it needs to be reworked, altered or re-imagined for the format of cinema. In The Mist, he takes the story's Lovecraftian horror and suffuses it with painfully self-destructive, human tribal stupidity; the inclination on behalf of desperate humanity to try anything, any means, to save itself from impending doom, even if it means returning to the old days of blood-sacrifice and scapegoating. 


Taking that misanthropy and essential nihilism as its thesis, the cinema adaptation of The Mist is an exercise in excoriatingly human horror. Whilst the extra-dimensional monsters that descend on the small, mid-western town that is the story's setting are treated in the manner of some arbitrary, apocalyptic disaster, the true horror derives from the desperate, foolish, terrified cluster of human beings barricaded in the local supermarket (a nice thematic nod to George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead). As one of the key characters notes, it takes less than three days before they start turning on one another in scapegoating violence, grimly inspired by the sickest, most deranged and depraved amongst them, who they turn to as a beacon of certainty -however lunatic- as the world around them falls apart. 


The soundtrack, for the most part, is minimalist and incidental; a perfectly functional horror-film score that serves to emphasise tension, compound the horror occurring both inside and out. It isn't until the apocalyptic scale of the event becomes apparent that the score swells and transforms, becoming a celestial mourning for lost creation with The Host of Seraphim: 

Beginning with an atonal, hymn-like chord of organ music, the piece erupts into vocal bravura that has all of the resonance of a Mother goddess lamenting the murder of her children. It is the very essence of despair and loss; the cosmos weeping for humanity where there are no angels left to do so. The event that has been unleashed on Earth -which may or may not be the result of human military science tampering in extra-dimensional technology- has much wider significance for the universe and reality as a whole: There's no saying, by the film's end, if the event can be reversed or if the disease-like invasion of another reality, entirely antithetical to our own, will continue to spread and spread until it subsumes or collapses creation itself. 


Like Lovecraft before him (whose work is an obvious thematic inspiration), King revels in emphasising the cosmic insignificance of humanity, and exposing how what we consider most sacred in our lives is ultimately ephemeral nothing, swept away by accidents and vicissitudes of reality that we can barely perceive, much less comprehend or predict. All of human history is undone within a matter of days here, swept away by an alien reality that seems entirely animal; an extra-dimensional wilderness that, the story even dares suggest, might be better than what we've created with our endless war, pollution, man-made extinctions etc. 


Unlike in the vast majority of King's work, there is no salvation here; nothing that can save even the most innocent of us. Reality does not care; there is no god, no angels (or, if there ever were, they are impotent or long, long dead). 


This lends the film's score a note of hideous irony; the eponymous “Host of Seraphim” might mourn, but they either did nothing to prevent the tragedy or were impotent in the face of it. In point of fact, faith itself is painted as powerfully negative throughout; a source of enshrined neurosis that leads to nothing less than scapegoating murder and the lionisation of lunatics. 


Those that sing for dying creation here do so in the full knowledge that there's no one and nothing to hear, no one and nothing that will mark the passage of humanity or the world itself. It is an empty elegy; profound in its redundancy, epic in its vacuity. 


And it is one of the most soul-shudderingly beautiful soundtracks in horror cinema history. ​

As part of his October crowdfunding campaign for My Life In Horror Volume II, regular site contributor Kit Power is running a series of online promotional events over the next week that we want to make you aware of.

Firstly, on Wednesday 19th, 8:30pm UK time, he’ll be doing a live reading of a My Life In Horror essay followed by a Q&A, on Twitter Spaces. Click through to set a reminder, and to vote on which essay he’ll read! If you want to catch up on the previous event, including readings from Kit’s essays on The Tripods and Cracker, you can listen back to the recording here.

Secondly, this Sunday, 23rd October, at 7:30pm, Kit will be taking to YouTube for a live reading of his final-ever My Life In Horror essay! This will be the world premiere of the piece, which won't be available on the website until the end of the month, and you really, really, don't want to miss this; he’s been cooking up something very special for this performance, and it promises to be a real ‘do-you-remember-when?’ event!

And afterwards, at 8pm, there will be an aftermath afterparty on Facebook, where Kit will be doing a live Q&A/AMA, featuring a very, very special guest. So best sign up for that, too.

The My Life In Horror Volume II campaign is an all-or-nothing campaign, meaning the project will only happen if it funds in full. Just £2 will snag you a copy of the ebook edition at a discounted rate. There are also 3 different print editions, all of which are limited editions and exclusive to the campaign. Each of the three versions will be signed, numbered or lettered, with dedication upon request, and each edition will feature its own campaign-exclusive cover art. Additionally, if you back either of the hardback editions, your name and/or website URL will appear in every edition of the book, including the mass-market editions, under a SPECIAL THANKS banner at the front of the book.

You’ve only got until the end of October to pick up a genuine collector's item and help make My Life In Horror Volume II a reality; so celebrate spooky season in style -  Pledge Early, Pledge Often!

Nowhere was that more evident than in the blossoming horror genre that, thanks to the likes of Resident Evil, was enjoying a significant renaissance. 


Acclaim's Shadow Man is, sadly, one of the less well-remembered of the era, having suffered a truly lamentable Sony PlayStation port, thus massively limiting its potential audience. Despite this, those who managed to experience the game on platforms such as the PC, N64 and -later- Dreamcast recall a unique and captivating experience, whose horror was quite unlike anything that had gone before. 


Drawing inspiration from the VooDoo mythos comic books of the same name, Shadow Man follows the escapades of Michael LeRois, current incumbent of the immortality-granting "Mask of Shadows," an artefact that transforms him into the titular VooDoo messiah and allows him access to "Deadside," the metaphysical dumping ground where everyone goes, without exception, when they die. 


Hunting the dark souls of five serial killers, Michael seeks to avert the grim prophecies of his forebears and undo the cancerous evil that has taken root at the heart of Deadside in order to bring about an apocalypse that will see both Dead and Liveside (AKA the living world) reduced to a lunatic's Eden, a state where sadists and serial killers are sainted, and where pain is a sacrament to hideous gods. 


Whilst the game is graphically impressive for its era, its truly epic ambition and visionary scope still runs up against technological limitations. As such, it evinces heavy reliance on composer Tim Haywood's legendary soundtrack to cultivate and maintain its atmosphere. ​

Whilst the era is characterised as one of heady experimentation -from the classic horror cues and situational themes of the Resident Evil series to the discordant, industrial stylings of the latter Silent Hill games-, Shadow Man's soundtrack distinguishes itself as not only unique, but uniquely disturbing. 


Haywood's work not only emphasises the horror of Shadow Man's nihilistic metaphysics -a situation in which belief, morality and conviction have no place and make no odds as to one's ultimate destiny; we are all collectively just refuse dumped into the mouldering expanse of Deadside-, but also its mythological epicness. Unlike Resident Evil, this is a story whose implications are cosmological; events underway in Deadside might potentially reshape all of reality, and it's this quality that Haywood seeks to capture. 


Whilst wandering Liveside as Michael LeRois, the soundtrack is minimalist and environmental, consisting of little more than whispering winds, chirping crickets etc. 
​
However, when he translates to Deadside -using the conduit of his murdered brother's teddybear-, the score begins in earnest: ​

Fully orchestral, it consists of elegiac chords and melancholic strains, conspiring with the notably grim visuals to cultivate an atmosphere of epic dereliction; of waste and barrenness that is metaphysical in scope. This is the quiet horror of Deadside and of Shadow Man's metaphysics; not the threat of pain or physical mutilation, but of spiritual degradation that comes from realising there is no poetry or purpose in this condition: It is as arbitrary and absurd as the living world, as lacking in wider meaning as any random birth. Tim Haywood's score for the endless tracts, depths and desolations of Deadside encapsulates this quality; a sense of epic scope and mythic significance, yet also of despair and ultimate degradation. Variations on the theme occur depending on environment; some depths take the eponymous anti-hero into ancient VooDoo temples, which have a more bassy, rhythmic theme, redolent of tribal drums and chanting. Elsewhere, he descends into depths of infernal murk and darkness, where the subtlety of the soundtrack echoes with muted voices and instrumental chords that seem to occur somewhere off in the distance, beyond the perpetual veil of fog. 


But nowhere is the score more notable or distinct than within The Asylum: 


A metaphysical horror, The Asylum is a palimpsest structure erupted from within the necrotic flesh of Deadside itself, part cancer, part architecture; a Boschean vision of Hell that derives from no earthly tradition or metaphysics, but is the singularly twisted inspiration of the most deviant and perverted souls in existence. 


In the game's opening sequence, we are introduced to none other than Jack The Ripper, to the strains of Moonlight Sonata, a distorted, inverted version of which becomes the character's theme tune later in the game. An architect and engineer by trade -outside of his more bloody work-, Jack is commissoned by an entity that calls itself “Legion” to design The Asylum; a cathedral to pain and sadism, where serial killers are revered as saints and blody-handed messiahs, where the repulsive work of ushering in Armageddon can begin. 


Jack's work is a hellish masterpiece; a hybrid of Victorian insane asylum, cathedral and processing factory, it is an impossible feat of non-euclidean architecture, where the endless clanks, hisses and whirs of machinery mingle with cries of pain, whimpers of despair, and the sadistic, bestial exclamations of those responsible for administering the endless feats of agony experienced within. 


Whilst impressive in terms of its visuals -certainly for the era-, what truly sells the nihilistic horror of The Asylum is its soundtrack: 

Consisting of several distinct areas, from the transitional industria of The Cageways to the disturbing, perverted sanctity of The Cathedral of Pain, Tim Haywood's score is as schizophrenic and disturbing as the setting itself, marrying industrial and surgical sounds to strains of discordant music, the dripping of blood, cries of pain and hymn-like choruses. As in the architecture of The Asylum itself, various, ostensibly contradictory or clashing themes marry in its soundtrack, creating a sense of infernal sanctity that is as distressing as it is unique. 


It would be several more years before Silent Hill would make its debut and rewrite the rules for horror video games (not least of which due to a soundtrack unlike anything had ever heard in the medium), but Shadow Man certainly deserves notice in this regard. To this day, its score is a unique cocktail of disturbingly clashing elements, that elevates the game to new and terrible heights of disturbia.  ​