The Dark Manor isn't just any old haunted house. Built on the site of a stone circle, from bricks saturated with pain and agony, windows that have seen terror beyond insanity, and doors that would scream if the wood from which they were fashioned could voice the appalling acts to which they have been witness, the house was designed with evil in mind and deliberately constructed to bring William Marx, the wealthy industrialist who built it, into contact with the spirit world.But Marx hasn't been seen since he entered the repository of death and madness that is The Dark Manor, and neither have any of the people who have gone looking for him. Now Sir Anthony Calverton has purchased it and needs the place investigating properly, which of course calls for some proper supernatural investigators.You are cordially invited to join Mr Massene Henderson and Miss Samantha Jephcott, specialists in paranormal adventure, as they embark on their most perilous case to date.Who will survive The House That Death Built?Only time and the pages within will tell…

Elton Burlock's done his time. Twenty-six years for a terrible murder. Some of those years were hard, some easy. On the outside, he takes the only job he can find - the custodian of a local cemetery. A simple job, keeping the grass tidy...giving the dead a haircut. But there are three black angels in the cemetery: a little girl's ghost that roams the night...and two women, one a vision in white, one a nightmare in black. When the killing starts, who can rock the restless dead back to sleep? Who but Elton? Elton, custodian of the dead, but the gatekeeper, too. The keeper of this world and the next. The dead are awake. The little girl is free of the earth. But there are no lullabies for the dead and if he's going to live, Elton's going to have to give her what she wants. Then, maybe, he can find peace for them both -- in the grave or out.


2012 seems to have been a bumper year for horror stories, and in particular a bumper year for ghost stories.  I love ghost stories, there is something reassuringly cozy about them.  That might sound a little odd, however I love to turn the lights down get myself a hot chocolate and sink into the chilling embrace of a good ghost story.  

In the tradition of The Shadow, The Bat, Doc Savage, The Spider; Dashiell Hammett's Continental Detective Agency; Dusty Ayers & His Battle Birds; Sheena and K-Zar. Hard-boiled detectives, sinister vigilantes, bizarre villains: the staples of the Pulp tradition. Two-fisted heroes - and heroines - fighting for right and justice in the midnight city, foetid jungles or exotic, far-flung lands. Deranged villains for whom the world is never enough. Editor Mike Chinn collects seventeen writers who dive headlong into the world of pulp fiction, to tell us tall tales of daring do, of heroes and heroines and their villains. With stories by Mike Resnick, Peter Atkins, Peter Crowther, Adrian Cole, William Meikle, Joel Lane, Amberle L Husbands, Milo James Fowler, Anne Nicholls, Robert William Iveniuk, Bracken N MacLeod, Chris Iovenko, Joshua Wolf, James Hartley, Ian Gregory, Michael Haynes and Allen Ashley.

Michael McBride, seems like the perfect story to pass a chilly morning.  Set in the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains, this fast paced killer action based horror is the perfect antidote to the winter blues.




Using a well worn premise of a group of friends, who despite growing apart over the years,  still come together out of a sense of duty and sentimentality, it may seem that this novella is going to tread the same well worn tracks of a hundred stories before it.  Hold on folks, Snowblind takes this premise, and takes the reader far off the beaten track and straight into an undiscovered valley of terror.




McBride has made a wise decision to keep this story at a novella length, by doing so he maintains level of tension, paranoia, and fear, far above what could be achieved in longer form.  He drops the readers straight into the action, and when the blizzard sets in and isolates our protagonists, you the reader will also become isolated from the rest of the world while you read this book.

The horror genre loves trends, hell just look at that shambling mess of zombie books out there.  Seal Team 666 is the latest book in this new trend of military horror novels.  You know the ones, covert military groups fighting some demonic threat to mankind.  You can never accuse these books as being high brow, however in the main they are entertaining.  When I read these books I always use, what in my opinion is the Grandfather of this sort of novel Necroscope III as the benchmark.  

When Grey Friar Press first announced this anthology from Thana Niveua I knew I had read it.  Based on the short stories of hers that I had read in a number of anthologies this year, she soon found her way onto my list of discoveries of the year.  So when I got a copy from my mother as a birthday present I put every other book aside and gave this collection my full attention.  From Hell to Eternity collects 16 of her stories, prefaced by an intelligent and thoughtful introduction from the Grandmaster Himself Ramsey Campbell.   This collection like a vintage single malt whisky deserves to be savoured slowly and lovingly one fabulous story at a time.  This is not a light read, her stories are layered, dark, melancholic and in a number of cases exceptionally chilling and disturbing. 


The first story, The Curtain a diver investigates an unusual wreck, and discovers that a curtain between our world and another reality has been lifted, is one of the most atmospheric stories I have read in long time.  Thana handles the diving scenes in such a way that the reader experiences the same sense of weightlessness, claustrophobia and isolation that diver in this pitch perfect modern take on an Elder God story.