Deep within Bury Me With’s… eleventh one-book posthumous library* lie insidious and whispering words from the doyen of cosmic hopelessness, Thomas Ligotti:
“The book I would like to be buried with is a book I have never read, and likely never shall read. Its title is Die Philosophie der Erlösung (The Philosophy of Redemption) by Philipp Mainländer (born Philip Batz). The Philosophy of Redemption was published in German in 1876 and has not yet been translated into English. Perhaps it will be so translated before I die; perhaps not. I own a selection of Philipp Mainländer’s works in German that I would like to pay someone to translate, but translators are expensive. I’ve thought about taking on the task myself, but I know enough about the German language not to attempt to become so intimate with it that I could translate the words of a nineteenth-century German philosopher. (See Mark Twain’s The Awful German Language).
While I have not read the massive Philosophy of Redemption, I know its main points from reading others’ writings on it to be absolutely certain that this is the book I want to be buried with. Most of these writings are cited in my book The Conspiracy against the Human Race, which contains a section on Mainländer and his philosophy. Basically, the German pessimist believed in the goodness of the prospect that the human race should become extinct. This good thing would happen, according to Mainländer’s metaphysics, because there exists within humanity a gradually mounting Will-to-die, the mirror image of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Will-to-live as elucidated in his World as Will and Representation (which fortunately has been translated into English three times). Here I quote from Conspiracy:
Mainländer was confident that the Will-to-die he believed would well up in humanity had been spiritually grafted into us by a God who, in the beginning, masterminded His own quietus. It seems that existence was a horror to God. Unfortunately, God was impervious to the depredations of time. This being so, His only means to get free of Himself was by a divine form of suicide.
God’s plan to suicide himself could not work, though, as long as He existed as a unified entity outside of space-time and matter. Seeking to nullify His oneness so that He could be delivered into nothingness, he shattered Himself—Big Bang-like—into the time-bound fragments of the universe, that is, all those objects and organisms that have been accumulating here and there for billions of years. In Mainländer’s philosophy, “God knew that he could change from a state of super-reality into non-being only through the development of a real world of multiformity.” Employing this strategy, He excluded Himself from being. “God is dead,” wrote Mainländer, “and His death was the life of the world.” Once the great individuation had been initiated, the momentum of its creator’s self-annihilation would continue until everything became exhausted by its own existence, which for human beings meant that the faster they learned that happiness was not as good as they thought it would be, the happier they would be to die out….
Rather than resist our end, as Mainländer concludes, we will come to see that “the knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom.” Elsewhere the philosopher states, “Life is hell, and the sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell.”
More beautiful and soothing words I’ve never heard in my life than the above two quotes from Mainländer’s book — the book that I would like to be buried with.”
More information about Philip Mainländer can be found at Wikipedia.
* Thomas Ligotti’s words.
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About Thomas Ligotti:
Thomas Ligotti is often cited as the most curious and remarkable figure in horror literature since H. P. Lovecraft. His work is noted by critics for its display of an exceptionally grotesque imagination and accomplished prose style. In his stories, Ligotti has followed a literary tradition that began with Edgar Allan Poe, portraying characters that are outside of anything that might be called normal life, depicting strange locales far off the beaten track, and rendering a grim vision of human existence as a perpetual nightmare. His works include:
Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986, rev. & exp. 1989), Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991), Noctuary (1994), The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales (1994), The Nightmare Factory (1996), In a Foreign Town, in a Foreign Land (1997, accompanying CD by Current 93), I Have a Special Plan for This World (2000, accompanying CD by Current 93), This Degenerate Little Town (2001, accompanying CD by Current 93), My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror (2002), Crampton: A Screenplay (2003, with Brandon Trenz), Sideshow, and Other Stories (2003), Death Poems (2004), The Shadow at the Bottom of the World (2005), Teatro Grottesco (2006, reprinted in 2008), The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (published in April, 2010 by Hippocampus Press).
May 24th, 2010
It’s the tenth instalment of Bury Me With… and the book dark cosmic speculist Laird Barron wants to be buried with is…
“T.E.D. Klein’s Dark Gods, a quartet of novellas that hit the stands in 1985 as a follow-up to his famous novel The Ceremonies. Klein, a respected former editor of The Twilight Zone Magazine, gave us a tour de force with his novella collection and demonstrated his standing as a master craftsman possessed of a sophisticated and cerebral style matched by perhaps a handful of modern fantasists.
The contents of Dark Gods include Children of the Kingdom, in which the author is enthralled by the tales of an old priest regarding lost tribes, subterranean kingdoms, and an ancient evil that occasionally rises to plague the surface world; the events of Petey transpire during a housewarming party in a remote Connecticut mansion as guests slowly uncover a macabre puzzle left behind by the former, utterly mad occupant; Black Man with a Horn may well be the crown jewel of the set — certainly a classic homage to Lovecraft’s Mythos in which an elderly author shares a plane ride with a missionary who’s convinced agents of a diabolical tribe are stalking him; Nadelman’s God is the tale of a man whose melodramatic college-era poetry has been co-opted by a lunatic who believes it possesses the power to summon a monstrous supernatural entity. Hilarity ensues.
Dark Gods has exerted some influence on my writing career. It reinforced my long held notion that novella-length horror is the genre at its most sublime. Klein’s masterpiece, alongside Peter Straub’s Ghost Story and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, is always close at hand. I often open it at random to instruct myself in the fine art of building atmosphere that gradually, and inexorably, draws in the reader and delivers unto him or her an exquisite thrill; a glimpse of the numinous in the yellowed and curling pages of an ‘80s paperback.”
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About Laird Barron:
Laird Barron is the author of two collections: The Imago Sequence & Other Stories, and Occultation; both from Night Shade Books. His work has appeared in places such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound, Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, Clockwork Phoenix, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies. Mr. Barron is an expatriate Alaskan currently at large in Washington State.
May 17th, 2010
Thanks to Pan MacMillan we have five copies of one of the most important horror novels to be published in the UK in years, Apartment 16, by Adam Nevill.
(Read Mathew F. Riley’s review here).
Some doors are better left closed…
In Barrington House, an upmarket block in London, there is an empty apartment. No one goes in, no one comes out. And it’s been that way for fifty years. Until the night watchman hears a disturbance after midnight and investigates. What he experiences is enough to change his life forever.
A young American woman, Apryl, arrives at Barrington House. She’s been left an apartment by her mysterious Great Aunt Lillian who died in strange circumstances. Rumours claim Lillian was mad. But her diary suggests she was implicated in a horrific and inexplicable event decades ago.
Determined to learn something of this eccentric woman, Apryl begins to unravel the hidden story of Barrington House. She discovers that a transforming, evil force still inhabits the building. And the doorway to Apartment 16 is a gateway to something altogether more terrifying…
To win a copy, tell us the title of the book that Adam would like to be buried with and email us via the contact form with your answer!
Closing date 31 May 2010. Sorry - UK entrants only.
May 11th, 2010
The ninth featured author is the truly scary Adam Nevill, who tells me about the book that means everything to him…
“I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the age of sixteen. At that age my relationship with fiction was based upon classic ghost stories, Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Lovecraft, Stephen King, pulp horror, and more Lovecraft. Which was all accompanied by a relentless soundtrack of pounding heavy metal, chiefly Iron Maiden and Deep Purple. I was also an acutely sensitive, self-loathing and angry misfit, displaced from New Zealand, and quite ashamed of the maelstrom of creative energy I had no outlet for, as well as being convinced that I was destined to be a pariah and too absurdly different from most anyone I knew. A familiar profile, I’m sure. And then I passed into the sixth form and just had my eyes opened on the A Level English Literature course.
I was surrounded by great novels at home, but had churlishly resisted anything that wasn’t horror or fantasy, as I’d foolishly imagined that anything else was conservative, dull, impenetrable, and not meant for such a loathsome creature of the shadows such as I. A levels back then were more rigorous than degrees and very hard to pass; you would study a dozen texts in minute detail with senior teachers in small classes, over two years, and then pass or fail in two three hour exams per subject at the end of the second year; there was no assessment. Less than 10% of school leavers made it to university. And I remember when my teacher Mr O’Brien, took me through Joyce’s Portrait in the lower sixth, I was stunned. Just stunned by revelation after revelation within the text. It was as if I’d waited my whole life for that one book to make sense of myself. (more…)
May 10th, 2010
With the exception of a handful of short stories consistently high in quality and spookiness, Adam Nevill’s singular voice has been quiet in the six years since the publication of his debut novel Banquet for the Damned, which was released as a collectable slipcased hardback by PS Publishing, and more recently in paperback format through the lamentably short-lived Virgin Books horror line which Nevill helmed.
Those years of whispering silence have been fruitful as his second novel, Apartment 16 (plus a third, in-progress), have been picked up by publishing giant Pan MacMillan - an occurrence that (hopefully) has all sorts of positive implications for the genre in this country. A BIG UK publisher buying titles by a UK author? Not something that’s happened since, well, since the days of Clive Barker, and before him, Ramsey Campbell and James Herbert (synchronistically Nevill’s stablemate in horror at Pan MacMillan). From that ‘golden age’ and all that’s gone between (most of it not so nice if you’re a UK-based horror fan or writer) to now is a big gap in time, so whether you like it or not, these facts make Apartment 16 an important novel, and Adam Nevill an important writer who, I’m happy to say, establishes his status amongst today’s outstanding creators of speculative horror with Apartment 16.
(more…)
May 6th, 2010
In the eighth instalment of Bury Me With… Mark Morris tells us about the book that has influenced him more than any, the book he’d like to take to his grave… or does he? It’s obviously been a difficult decision:
“Am I assuming that if I’m to be buried with this book, then I won’t be alive to read it? In which case, I might choose one of my own, just so that bodysnatchers get an idea of who they’ve dug up before carting away my mortal remains to be used in macabre experiments.
However, if the inference is that this will be the only book I’ll have available to read throughout eternity, whilst sitting on my heavenly cloud, then that’s different. There are many books that are very dear to me, not always because they’re especially good, but simply because they retain a certain nostalgic resonance. Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion by Terrance Dicks is one such example. This was the first Doctor Who book I ever bought, and its joyful impact — on my life and subsequent career — has been immense. Similarly the stories in The Eleventh Pan Book of Horror Stories scared me utterly shitless one New Years Eve many years ago, though in such a thrilling, life-affirming way that they sparked off a desire and a love for horror novels, stories and movies which has never since wavered. And talking of movies, Horror Movies by Alan Frank, a book I received as a Christmas present in 1974, and which still sits on a shelf in my study today, was the first of many movie books in my collection. Other favourites include A Heritage of Horror by David Pirie, English Gothic by Jonathan Rigby and The Hammer Story by Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes. Then, of course, there are novels. The Shining by Stephen King and The Fog by James Herbert were probably the first ‘modern’ horror novels I read as a teenager, and as such were massively influential. Away from the genre, What A Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and the various works of Magnus Mills, Rupert Thomson, James Lee Burke, Cormac McCarthy and David Mitchell have all enthralled me in recent years.
But if I had to choose just one book, I think I’d probably go for a short story collection. My favourite single author collection is probably Dark Companions by Ramsey Campbell, but I wouldn’t want to restrict myself to just one writer. I’m going to cheat here and choose as my book an anthology which doesn’t actually exist. It’s got at least 1000 pages and contains around 100 stories, each individually chosen by me. It would contain stories by all of my favourite authors, many of whom have already been mentioned above, and added to which would be the likes of Ian McEwan, Graham Joyce, Nigel Kneale, Nicholas Royle, Conrad Williams, Michael Marshall Smith, Robert Shearman, Stephen Volk, Tim Lebbon, Sarah Pinborough, Christopher Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Carroll, Joel Lane, Peter Straub, Mary Danby, Rosemary Timperley, Dennis Etchison and…oh, many many more. I’m not sure any book would be sufficient to entertain me throughout eternity, but I’m sure that such an anthology would give me a few thousand years of pleasure, at least.”
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About Mark Morris:
Mark Morris became a full-time writer in 1988 on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, and a year later saw the release of his first novel, Toady. He has since published a further sixteen novels, among which are Stitch, The Immaculate, The Secret of Anatomy, Fiddleback, The Deluge and four books in the popular Doctor Who range. His short stories, novellas, articles and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and magazines, and he is editor of the highly-acclaimed Cinema Macabre, a book of fifty horror movie essays by genre luminaries, for which he won the 2007 British Fantasy Award. His most recently published or forthcoming work includes a novella entitled It Sustains for Earthling Publications, a Torchwood novel entitled Bay of the Dead, several Doctor Who audios for Big Finish Productions, a follow-up volume to Cinema Macabre entitled Cinema Futura and a new short story collection, Long Shadows, Nightmare Light.
Visit Mark’s website
May 3rd, 2010
The seventh Bury Me With… and Devon-based, cosmically tentacled, blood sucking, mind-reading legend Brian Lumley explains his choice for his own literary-accompanied interment:
“I’ve been a fan of Jack Vance for as long as I can remember. Bury me with one of his books, by all means! Why? Because he can make light of the direst of situations — and I can’t think of a more dire situation than reading in the ultimate darkness. The book I’m talking about would be Cugel’s Saga. Anyone who hasn’t read it doesn’t know what he’s missing. Some of the funniest, cleverest stuff in modern fantasy fiction, not to mention some of the most nightmarish!
I wouldn’t want anything by Poe - let’s face it, he’s already been prematurely buried!”
More information about Jack Vance’s Cugel’s Saga at Wikipedia.
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Quite a lot about Brian Lumley:
Born 2nd December, 1937, Brian Lumley came into the world just nine months after the most obvious of his forebears – meaning of course a “literary” forebear, namely, H. P. Lovecraft – had departed from it. By his pre-teens Lumley had read Dracula and some other horror classics, but having followed the adventures of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future in the British Eagle comic, his first love was Science Fiction. Then, in his early teens – as a result of reading Robert Bloch’s Lovecraft pastiche Notebook Found in a Deserted House in a British SF magazine – he became more surely attracted to macabre fiction, an attraction that has lasted a lifetime.
Later still, in his early twenties while serving with the Corps of Royal Military Police in Germany, on finding a collection of stories by Lovecraft himself, Lumley began searching for every available item of the author’s work. This culminated in his contacting HPL’s publisher August Derleth in Sauk City, Wisconsin, in order to purchase the one or two volumes still missing from his collection. Then, after Derleth had read various “extracts” from the Necronomicon and other fictional “Black Books” of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, which Lumley had included in his letters, he asked if the aspiring author had anything solid he could use in a book he was preparing for publication, to be entitled Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Thus Lumley began writing in earnest. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Derleth included stories by Lumley in a number of Arkham House anthologies and went on to publish three of the author’s books. One was a short novel with the title Beneath the Moors; the others were collections of short stories and novellas: The Caller of The Black and The Horror at Oakdeene. These stories, set mainly in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos milieu, echoed HPL’s literary style: a somewhat archaic, adjectival mode of writing which, during the course of Lumley’s military career, he would gradually eschew in favour of his own very distinctive style.
Despite that Lumley completed a full term of 22 years with the RMP – during which time he rose to the rank of Warrant Officer and, in his final years, served as the WO Chief Instruction (the DI) at the RMP Depot and Training Establishment – still he managed to write and see published his three Arkham books plus the first of the six paperback novels in his Titus Crow series, and the stand-alone novel, Khai of Ancient Khem, while he was still a soldier. But by then: “it was time for the serious stuff!”
Having “retired” from the Army in December 1980, Lumley became “a professional author” (he had never really considered himself that way before) and of necessity began to write in earnest. he still had a projected series of four books in H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dreamlands milieu” to complete, during the writing of which he began the Psychomech trilogy, the very first of his works (with the exception of a handful of short stories) to be published in the United Kingdom.
Then came his breakthrough book. In March to September 1984 he wrote his dead-waking, ground-breaking horror novel Necroscope®, featuring Harry Keogh, the man who can talk to dead people. Not at first realizing, however, how successful this book would be (for it would eventually become a best-selling series), in late 1984 early 1985 he wrote the stand-alone novel Demogorgon. Also in ‘85 to early 1986, he completed his “Dreamlands” series with a book of short stories and novellas called Iced on Aran; which will explain the gap between the writing of Necroscope and Necroscope II: Wamphyri! After Wamphyri!, however, Necroscope III: The Source, took only five months to complete in 1987, and with the first two volumes having seen initial paperback publication in the UK, finally the trilogy was picked up by TOR Books, USA. Except it wasn’t going to stop at being a trilogy!
Such was the appeal of the Necroscope books that TOR published the so-called trilogy in the space of just twelve months: September 1988 to September 1989 — by which time Lumley had written Necroscopes IV and V: Deadspeak and Deadspawn. And in just five years, 1984 to 1989, the financial problems which the author had experienced on leaving the Army were well and truly behind him. Bestsellers in the USA, his books had already passed one million sales and were heading for two million.
But still the story wasn’t finished; in fact it wasn’t half-way there yet! Such had been the success of the first five volumes, and such was the demand from readers, that Lumley went straight on from Deadspawn to commence writing the massive Vampire World Trilogy, which he considers his finest, most ambitious and important work. Begun in 1991, finished in 1993, Blood Brothers, The Last Aerie and Bloodwars between them contain some three-quarters of a million words of horror, fantasy … even a little of the author’s first love, Science Fiction.
In 1994, just short of six years since publishing the original Necroscope, TOR began reprinting the entire series in hardcovers: a rare event in the modern publishing world. And Blood Brothers was the first Necroscope – or more properly the first series spin-off – to be published in hardcovers from the outset. The rest of the volumes in this incredible series have all followed suit. Their titles are:
The Lost Years and Lost Years Two: Resurgence – the Invaders Trilogy: Invaders, Defilers and Avengers – and the novellas: Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes – and, in the Summer of 2006, Necroscope: The Touch. Harry and the Pirates – a volume of Necroscope novellas – appeared in 2009, and one final novella is promised.
Thirteen countries and counting have now published, or are in the process of publishing these and others of Lumley’s novels and short story collections, which in the USA alone have sold well over three million copies. In addition, Necroscope comic books, graphic novels, a role-playing game, quality figurines, and in Germany a series of audio books have been created from themes and characters in the Necroscope books, and Lumley has added his “real” voice to Dangerous Ground, a Downliners Sect rock-&-roll album released in the UK in 2004.
Lumley’s works other than Necroscope – such as his SF-ish novel The House of Doors and its sequel Maze of Worlds; also a dozen collections gathered from his more than 130 short stories and novellas, most notably Fruiting Bodies & Other Fungi, whose title story won a British Fantasy Award in 1989 – have seen or are seeing print in many European countries as well as the USA, and all the while his reputation is growing apace. As far back as 1990, the readers of Fear Magazine voted Lumley “Best Established Genre Author” for The Source, and his short story Necros (not a Necroscope spin-off!) was adapted for Ridley Scott’s The Hunger series on the USA’s Showtime Television series. But best of all, in 1998 as Guest of Honour at the World Horror Convention in Phoenix, AZ, he received the genre’s most coveted Grand Master Award in recognition of his work. Moreover, the original Necroscope has now been optioned (and four times re-optioned) for a major film, and the original trilogy will be included in the deal if there’s a follow through.
From 2000 through 2007 fans of Necroscope and Lumley’s other works convened at the annual KeoghCon, and there celebrated with the author and his wife Barbara Ann, who is known to one and all as “Silky;” where each successive year forged stronger bonds between the members of this much extended “family” of friends and fans. (As for the last word, “fans:” Lumley prefers to refer to these people — his friends — as “dedicated readers.”)
Widely travelled, Brian Lumley has visited or lived in the USA, France, Italy, Cyprus, Germany, Malta, Canada, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, not to mention a dozen or more Greek islands. He still makes regular visits to the Mediterranean, indulging a passion for moussaka, retsina, just a little ouzo … and Metaxa, naturally! In addition – as icing on the baklava – Necroscope and its sequels, along with others of his books, are now appearing in Greek translations.
UPDATE LATE 2009: Recently, both Subterranean Press in the USA and Solaris in the UK have published two companion volumes of Lumley’s previously uncollected Cthulhu Mythos tales: The Taint and Other Novellas and Haggopian and Other Mythos Tales. Other books from Subterranean include a very special edition of Necroscope®, Brian Lumley’s Freaks, Screaming Science Fiction, A Coven of Vampires, The Nonesuch and Others and Necroscope: The Plague-Bearer (forthcoming).
As for the future: “Well, the future is always uncertain.” But with several books from an extensive backlist awaiting reissue, it certainly isn’t over yet!
When they’re not travelling, the Lumleys keep house in Torquay, Devon, England…
April 26th, 2010
The zombie Nazi film sub-genre is, like everything else these days, not the obscure, difficult to discover (and fund) thing it once was. The atmospheric Outpost (although, were they really zombies, or ghosts, or…?), and the blood-drenched zombedy Dead Snow both made positive contributions to the list that began with Shockwaves back in 1977 and then all but expired with the mouldy cheese that was Oasis of the Zombies (1981) and Zombie Lake (1981).
The most recent addition to the canon (although it was made in 2006) is the ultimately disappointing Zombies of War (as it’s known in the UK on DVD; Horrors of War elsewhere). Many of the reviews on the Internet Movie Database have referred to ZoW as being referential to the ‘classic’ B war movies of old, but, you know, arguably there’s not much call for this sort of approach these days, (unless you’re Tarantino), so as someone states, why bother?
(more…)
April 23rd, 2010
The sixth Bury Me With… features the impeccable taste of Thespian and dark-scribe, Reggie Oliver:
“The book I would like to be buried with is A Dance to the Music of Time.
Recently I went to a talk by the revolutionary intellectual and radical 60’s icon Tariq Ali at my local Literary Festival. In the course of an interview he revealed, to my amazement, that, like me, he was a devotee of A Dance to the Music of Time, the twelve novel sequence by Anthony Powell. This is a work which divides opinion considerably. Some see it a dull and snobbish series of novels, mainly about Old Etonians and their spouses written in a slightly circuitous mandarin prose. Others, like Tariq Ali, Ian Rankin (and I) see it as a unique vision of 20th century English society which charts the course through life of some memorable characters.
The most memorable of these is, of course, Widmerpool whose rise and hideous downfall is marked by a series of comic and sometimes horrific vignettes. For the moralist Widmerpool is a masterly study in the destructiveness of egoism; to a political thinker like Tariq Ali he is the quintessence of the ruthless establishment man who walks the British corridors of power, to a fellow writer he is a superb lesson in how to build and develop a credible but memorable fictional character over a period of time.
And why should a horror writer in particular admire this work? Well, Powell is a writer who has no dogma or ideology to speak of but who is fascinated by the sheer strangeness of life and human nature. There is a fascinating occult and supernatural thread running through the books: there is Mrs Erdleigh, the fortune teller; Dr Trelawney the mage, based partly on Aleister Crowley whom Powell had met; there is the New Age occultist Scorpio Murtlock who proves to be Widmerpool’s nemesis. A ghost features unapologetically in the fifth novel, The Kindly Ones. And there are scenes of true dark horror: for example the deaths of X. Trapnel and Widmerpool whose last episode reflects as in a distorting mirror the first time we see this character in the very first of the novel sequence, A Question of Upbringing.
Powell is a writer who sees life as a strange dance, full of mysteries and coincidences, whose pattern only half emerges as you approach its end. I think you will find that vision shared and expressed by many of the best writers in our genre.”
More information on A Dance to the Music of Time is at Wikipedia.
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About Reggie Oliver:
Reggie Oliver has been a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975. His biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, was published by Bloomsbury in 1998. Besides plays, his publications include four volumes of stories: The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini (Haunted River 2003), The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (Haunted River 2005), Masques of Satan (Ash Tree 2007), and Madder Mysteries (Ex Occidente 2009), and a novel Virtue in Danger (Ex Occidente 2010). An omnibus edition of his stories entitled Dramas from the Depths is published by Centipede, as part of its Masters of the Weird Tale series. His stories have been published in Zencore, Shades of Darkness, Tails of Wonder and Imagination (an anthology of cat stories) and many other anthologies including successive editions of such series as Exotic Gothic, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Black Book of Horror and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.
Visit Reggie’s website, The Black Cathedral
April 19th, 2010
Sometime late in the afternoon of March 28th, I found myself sitting in the A&E ward of Eastbourne District General Hospital receiving a severe telling off from a very young doctor.
“Clearly you’ve been overdoing things,” he said.
“Perhaps,” I replied.
“What the hell have you been doing these past few days?” he asked.
“Ah, I was at World Horror Con!”
(more…)
April 14th, 2010
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