Download or read book Mammoth Books presents Messing With Your Head written by Brian Hodge and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Country - Joel Lane "'Black Country' is one of a sequence of weird crime stories set in the West Midlands that I've been working on for years," says Joel Lane. "A collection of them is forthcoming with the title Where Furnaces Burn. 'Black Country' is also a sequel to my earlier story 'The Lost District', which describes another narrator's experience of Clayheath. "I'd like to thank The Nightingales and Gul Y. Davis, whose words influenced this story. It was originally published as a chapbook by Nightjar Press, with an enigmatic cover illustration by Birmingham photographer Trav28." We All Fall Down - Kirstyn McDermott "I carried the bones of this story around for quite a few years before I finally stumbled upon its beating heart," explains the author. "In my head was the image of a doll house, huge and not quite right, and a woman searching desperately for something concealed inside. But I could never work a story around it that didn't seem twee. Doll houses, you know? "But then Emma and Holly appeared - trapped within their own fractured, futile relationship - and everything just, well, fell together. Beautifully. Awfully. And now I have a doll house story. Of a kind." Telling - Steve Rasnic Tem "As for the following story," reveals Steve Rasnic Tem, "it began with a dreadful image at the end of a dream. I couldn't remember the other details of that dream, but I was determined to find out where that image might have come from." A Revelation of Cormorants - Mark Valentine "'A Revelation of Cormorants' first appeared in the excellent series of chapbooks published by Nicholas Royle's Nightjar Press," explains Valentine, "and I first encountered the dark grace of the cormorant while visiting Galloway with Jo." Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls - Brian Hodge "I hardly ever write extended fragments of things and then leave them indefinitely," Brian Hodge reveals, "but that's how 'Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls' got started. "I first wrote the part about the fantasised magic show, plus the earliest bit about Roni moving in, after rereading a Thomas Ligotti collection. It may not be apparent to anyone else, but some flavour of his lingered in me for a little while and wanted to come out, and the magic show was the result. "Then it sat idle for three years or so before I knew what more to do with it. Maybe because I had to forget about how it had begun and get back to being myself again."

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents The Reunion written by Nicholas Royle and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Reunion" is based on actual events," reveals the author, "but the story only really came into focus for me when I was invited to contribute to Ellen Datlow's Poe anthology. Poe is brilliant. I was at a conference recently where a teacher revealed that she had read Poe's 'The Black Cat' to a lecture theatre full of schoolchildren. She switched off all the lights and used a torch to read by. A number of parents lodged complaints, which she took as a measure of the event's success. My tale is inspired by a different Poe story.

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents With the Angels written by Ramsey Campbell and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Campbell reveals, "My fellow clansman Paul Campbell will remember the birth of this tale. At the Dead Dog party after the 2010 World Horror Convention in Brighton, someone was throwing a delighted toddler into the air. I was ambushed by an idea and had to apologise to Paul for rushing away to my room to scribble notes. The result is here."

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents Princess of the Night written by Michael Kelly and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 10 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kelly recalls: "The genesis of 'Princess of the Night' is a little murky. It was written for an anthology of Halloween tales. Alas, it didn't make it into the book. The tale then sold to a slick new professional magazine, where it promptly languished for four years until the magazine (which published four issues, I believe) folded before publication. I forgot about the story for a while. Then, one day, as I was looking through my files for possible stories to include in a new collection, I chanced upon it again.

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents Christmas with the Dead written by Joe R. Lansdale and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I wrote 'Christmas with the Dead' simply because I wanted to write a holiday horror story," Lansdale admits. "This was the result.

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents Oh I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside written by Christopher Fowler and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside' came about firstly because I was commissioned to write a story for the World Horror Convention souvenir book and, as the event was to take place in Brighton, it seemed logical to set a tale on the South coast of England. "I had written a fantasy novel, Calabash, some years earlier, hinting at the dark madness of such seaside towns, which are the antithesis of their Mediterranean counterparts. I thought of the depressing Morrissey song "Every Day is Like Sunday", which captures the awfulness of English resorts. "Coincidentally, Kim Newman and I were discussing the inherent creepiness of pantomime dames, and I decided it was time to give vent to my horror of these coastal pleasure domes. I wish I'd thought to include screaming gangs of hen-nighters as well. And I thought it was a nice touch to have everyone in the story telling the hero to 'fuck off' until he finally does.

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents Mami Wata written by Simon Kurt Unsworth and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When I was first asked to contribute to Exotic Gothic 3 (which was to feature Gothic-influenced stories in non-Gothic environments), I agreed without really thinking about it," Unsworth explains, "and then spent a long time struggling, trying to work out how, precisely, I was going to manage it or quite how to make a start. "I knew what I wanted to do, sort of, but not exactly how to do it, so one day alarmingly close to the deadline I did a fun thing: I freewheeled through Google. Using a small document about Zambian myths and cultures I found online (I set the story in Zambia for no reason other than an old family friend lives there and it seemed exotic in Gothic terms), I used one Zambian word from it as a search term and read what came up, took one intriguing Zambian term from the search results and searched for that, etc, and disappeared into Google's merry depths. "I ended up with an academic paper about a particular myth, a travel blog about a sort of beer made from corn and a weird little 'my God's better than your God' blog by a kid in Africa, and somewhere in the middle of that, the story appeared.

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents Out and Back written by Barbara Roden and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "My cousin-by-marriage Sean Lavery, knowing my love for weird and outré websites, sent me a link to the Dark Roasted Blend site (www.darkroastedblend.com)," reveals the author, "where I found several pages featuring photographs of abandoned places. "My imagination was fired by pictures taken at Chippewa Lake Park in Medina, Ohio, which opened in 1878 and was abandoned in 1978, with the buildings and rides left to rot where they stood, and I began looking around for some information about the park. "I've always had a fondness for amusement parks, ever since I was a child visiting Vancouver's Pacific National Exhibition with my father and my brother: an annual trip which was one of the red-letter days on my childhood calendar. The photographs of Chippewa Lake Park were equal parts eerie and sad, for anyone who has ever thrilled to the sights and sounds of a midway, and the story sprang, almost fully-formed, into my head; one of the few times that's happened." To see some of the pictures that inspired the following story, visit: www.defunctparks.com/parks/OH/ChippewaLake/chippewa-lake.htm.

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents Substitutions written by Michael Marshall Smith and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taken from The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22, edited by Stephen Jones. As Smith recalls: "This story came about in the simplest way, the way I always enjoy most - something happening in real life that makes you think 'What if?' "Our household gets a lot of its food via an online delivery service, and one day when I was unpacking what had just been dropped at our house I gradually realised there was something...not quite right about the contents of the bags. "There's two things that are strange about that experience. The first is that - given that every household is likely to buy at least some things in common - you don't realise straight away that you've been given the wrong shopping. You don't immediately think 'This is wrong', more like . . . 'This is weird'. The second is how personal it is, gaining accidental access to this very tangible evocation of some other family's life. You can't help but wonder about the people the food was really destined for. "In real life, I just called up the delivery guy and got it sorted out: but in fiction, you might tackle things slightly differently . . ."

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents Featherweight written by Robert Shearman and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I don't like writing at home much," admits Shearman. "Home is a place for sleeping and eating and watching afternoon game shows on TV. There are too many distractions. So, years ago, I decided I'd only write first drafts in art galleries. "And the best of them all is the National Gallery, in London, a pigeon's throw from Nelson's Column. I can walk around there with my notebook, thinking up stories - and if I get bored, there are lots of expensive pictures to look at. Perfect. "A lot of those paintings, however, have angels in them. They're all over the place, wings raised, halos gleaming - perching on clouds, blowing trumpets, hovering around the Virgin Mary as if they're her strange naked childlike bodyguards. And I began to notice. That, whenever the writing is going well, the angels seemed happy, and would smile at me. And whenever the words weren't coming out right, when I felt sluggish, when I thought I'd rather take off and get myself a beer, they'd start to glare. "I wrote this story in the National Gallery. Accompanied by a lot of glaring angels. Enjoy.

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents Telling written by Steve Rasnic Tem and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author reveals the following story "...began with a dreadful image at the end of a dream. I couldn't remember the other details of that dream, but I was determined to find out where that image might have come from."

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents We All Fall Down written by Kirstyn McDermott and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I carried the bones of this story around for quite a few years before I finally stumbled upon its beating heart," explains the author. "In my head was the image of a doll house, huge and not quite right, and a woman searching desperately for something concealed inside. But I could never work a story around it that didn't seem twee. Doll houses, you know? "But then Emma and Holly appeared - trapped within their own fractured, futile relationship - and everything just, well, fell together. Beautifully. Awfully. And now I have a doll house story. Of a kind.

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents The Best British Crime Omnibus Volume 7 8 and 9 written by Maxim Jakubowski and published by C & R Crime. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 1311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 122 fantastic stories from Britain's best crime writers For ten years the Mammoth Best British Crime series has been publishing an annual volume of the most outstanding crime and mystery short fiction published in the UK. Over 400 stories by the very best writers in the field have been published. Contributors have included, among many others, Mark Billingham, Liza Cody, Roger Jon Ellory, Reginald Hill, Peter James, Simon Kernick, Alexander McCall Smith, Val McDermid, John Mortimer, Anne Perry, Ian Rankin, Derek Raymond and Andrew Taylor. On several occasions, stories published in The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime have won some of the most prestigious awards in the field, including the Crime Writers Association Short Story Dagger, The Mystery Writers of America Edgar award and the Anthony award, while countless others have featured on the respective shortlists. This truly bumper collection of over 120 stories, an omnibus edition of Volumes 7, 8 and 9, showcases as ever the impressive breadth of crime writing, from cosy tales of detection to noir mayhem and psychological suspense and terror. There are puzzles to solve, nagging questions about the nature of the society in which we live, but, above all, there is an abundance of first-class entertainment. Over 1600 pages of outstanding crime fiction by: Lin Anderson, Kate Atkinson, Ian Ayris, Ray Banks, Robert Barnard, Colin Bateman, Mark Billingham, Nigel Bird, Tony Black, Stephen Booth, Paul D. Brazill, Simon Brett, Gerard Brennan, Christopher Brookmyre, Alison Bruce, Ken Bruen, Declan Burke, Col Bury, Tom Cain, Ann Cleeves, Liza Cody, Natasha Cooper, Bernie Crosthwaite, Judith Cutler, Colin Dexter, Martin Edwards, Matthew J. Elliott, Kate Ellis, R. J. Ellory, Chris Ewan, Christopher Fowler, Simon R. Green, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Allan Guthrie, Sophie Hannah, John Harvey, Mick Herron, David Hewson, Reginald Hill, Matt Hilton, Kate Horsley, Peter James, Paul Johnston, L. Kennedy, Bill Kirton, John Lawton, Simon Levack, Michael Z. Lewin, Toby Litt, Peter Lovesey, Phil Lovesey, Stuart MacBride, Adrian Magson, Barry Maitland, Alexander McCall Smith, Keith McCarthy, Val McDermid, Brian McGilloway, Denise Mina, Steve Mosby, Edward Marston, Amy Myers, Barbara Nadel, Stuart Neville, Christine Poulson, Ian Rankin, Sarah Rayne, Peter Robinson, Nicholas Royle, Zoë Sharp, Roz Southey, Sally Spedding, Jay Stringer, Andrew Taylor, Marilyn Todd, Peter Turnbull, L. C. Tyler, Simon Kernick, Nick Quantrill, Sheila Quigley, Louise Welsh, Marc Werner and Kevin Wignall.

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents Death in the Promised Land written by Pat Cadigan and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Death in the Promised Land' explores the potential dangers of becoming too closely involved in virtual reality. Parts of the story were later reworked into the novel Tea from an Empty Cup (1988), which had a sequel in Dervish is Digital (2001), both excellent examples of merging cyberpunk with the detective genre.

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents That Haunted Feeling written by Barbara Roden and published by Robinson. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six short stories to shake you to your core. Out and Back by Barbara Roden An abandoned amusement park attracts unwary thrill seekers The Game of Bear - Reggie Oliver & M. R. James Reggie Oliver completes M. R. James' unfinished classic. Shem-el-Nessim: An Inspiration in Perfume - Chris Bell Venturi - Richard Christian Matheson Party Talk - John Gaskin Princess of the Night - Michael Kelly

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents The Legacy of Rachel Howells written by Michael Doyle and published by C & R Crime. This book was released on 2012-05-17 with total page 29 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two blank sheets of writing paper sealed in an envelope with a postmark from Baskerville are brought to Holmes by London publisher Garrison Bolt. The addressee is Newman Musgrave. Together they must investigate why this letter, which contains a hidden secret, was sent with such urgency to a man, who unbeknown to the sender has been dead for number of years. Or is it possible that this note was never intended for the deceased man, but rather deliberately intended to fall into Holmes's hands?

Download or read book Mammoth Books presents The Adventure of the Bulgarian Diplomat written by Zakaria Erzinçlioglu and published by C & R Crime. This book was released on 2012-05-17 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holmes receives an anonymous letter on behalf of a royal client, requesting his services. After he is paid a visit from a Turkish nobleman and advised to handle the case with extreme sensitivity Holmes discovers he is dealing with a dangerous political crisis that leaves him responsible for preventing a war. The only other issue Holmes's must bear in mind is how much of the truth he has been told.