One Off Anthologies

From time to time we do one off anthologies, with no follow up planned. We have collected those here for you. Enjoy information on the storytellers involved in Wicked Women, Winter Tales, and You Left Your Biscuit Behind.  

Wicked Women

Cover by Sarah Anne Langton
Cover by Sarah Anne Langton

A. R. Aston is a speculative fiction writer from former industrial town of Swadlincote, located deep in the Heart of England (in the left ventricle if you must know…). An avid student of history and english literature, he has always had a passion for the written word. When not writing, he can be found reading voraciously, creating a functional time machine, and composing spurious facts about himself… For more of his work, visit his author page on amazon:

Or alternatively visit his blog, The Tentacled Tribunal, at: http://lordlucan1.wordpress.com

Stephanie Burgis lives in Wales with her husband, fellow writer Patrick Samphire, their two children, and their crazy-sweet border collie mix. She has published over thirty short stories in various SF and fantasy magazines and anthologies as well as a trilogy of Regency fantasy novels for younger readers, The Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson. You can find links to her other short stories and excerpts from her novels on her website: http://www.stephanieburgis.com

Zen Cho is a Malaysian writer of SFF and romance living in London. She was a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2013. Her short story collection Spirits Abroad was published by Buku Fixi in June 2014.
Her website can be found at http://zencho.org

Jaine Fenn is the author of the Hidden Empire series of far future SF novels published by Gollancz, which began with Principles of Angels. She also writes short stories in other genres, and is a sucker for a retold folk tale. Her website can be found at http://www.jainefenn.com

Tom Johnstone’s fiction has appeared in various publications, including the Ninth and Tenth Black Books of Horror (Mortbury Press), Brighton – The Graphic Novel (Queenspark Books) and Supernatural Tales, #27. He also co-edited the austerity-themed anthology Horror Uncut: Tales of Social Insecurity and Economic Unease with the late Joel Lane, published in September 2014 by Gray Friar Press.

Juliet E McKenna’s love of other worlds, other peoples, fantasy, myth and history was nurtured by childhood viewing of programmes such as Doctor Who, Star Trek and UFO. After studying Classics at Oxford University, she worked in personnel management before a career change to combine motherhood and book-selling. Her debut novel, The Thief’s Gamble, was published in 1999, the first of The Tales of Einarinn. That series was followed by The Aldabreshin Compass sequence, beginning with Southern Fire and The Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution, starting with Irons in the Fire. She writes diverse shorter fiction and always enjoying the challenge of something new, she wrote a serial story for Aethernet magazine in 2013. She is currently exploring the possibilities and opportunities of independent ebook publishing alongside traditional methods.
Check out her website at http://www.julietemckenna.com

Christine Morgan works the overnight shift in a psychiatric facility, which plays havoc with her sleep schedule but allows her a lot of writing time. A lifelong reader, she also reviews, beta-reads, occasionally edits and dabbles in self-publishing. Her other interests include gaming, history, superheroes, crafts, cheesy disaster movies and training to be a crazy cat lady. She can be found online at http://www.christine-morgan.org

Gaie Sebold’s debut novel introduced brothel-owning ex-avatar of sex and war, Babylon Steel (Solaris, 2012); the sequel, Dangerous Gifts, came out in 2013. Shanghai Sparrow, a steampunk fantasy, came out in 2014. She has published numerous short stories, had a variety of jobs (some more unusual than others) and is a member of T Party Writers. She now writes, runs writing workshops, grows vegetables, and procrastinates to professional levels. She has also been known to commit performance poetry and to run around in woods hitting people with latex weapons, though seldom both at the same time.
Extracts from Shanghai Sparrow and the Babylon Steel novels can be found on her website: http://gaiesebold.com.
Follow the latest scandal and tidbits from the world of Babylon Steel at http://scalentine.gaiesebold.com.

Sam Stone is the award-winning author of The Vampire Gene Series. Her latest works include the first part of her new apocalypse trilogy, Jinx Town, a short horror novel that first appeared in audio, The Darkness Within, and her latest Steampunk novella, What’s Dead PussyKat. A prolific and eclectic genre writer, Sam’s short fiction has appeared in many collections and anthologies as well as her own collection Zombies in New York and Other Bloody Jottings. She is currently working on the second Jinx book.
Sam lives in Lincolnshire with her partner David and their cat, Jinx.
Visit her at: http://www.sam-stone.com

Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed Shadows of the Apt fantasy series, from the first volume, Empire In Black and Gold in 2008 to the final book, Seal of the Worm, in 2014, with a new series and a standalone science fiction novel scheduled for 2015. He has been nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award and a British Fantasy Award and his first full length science fiction novel, Portia’s Children comes out in 2015. In civilian life he is a lawyer, gamer and amateur entomologist.
Find him online at: http://shadowsoftheapt.com

Jonathan Ward is a science-fiction, horror and fantasy writer hailing from the sprawling urban metropolis of Bedford. He has wanted to be an author since the age of eight, though it’s questionable whether his writing talents have improved since then. When not writing he can be found reading a good book, out exploring new places, or in the pub being sarcastic to his closest friends.
Jonathan’s Author Central page containing links to all of his published work: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jonathan-Ward/e/B002BLQ8HA/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
Jonathan’s Facebook writing page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Written-Ward/339336243357

Chloë Yates is a writer of odd stories. Having peppered her way across the Fox Spirit landscape with stories in all three of Kate Laity’s Noir series (Drag Noir will be out soon), work appearing (and to be appearing) in all but one of the Fox Pockets, and becoming a Girl at the End of the World (Vol. 1), she is currently working on her first novel and a collection of short stories for the upcoming Feral Tales trilogy. She lives in the middle of Switzerland with her bearded paramour, Mr Y, and their disapproving dog, Miss Maudie.
Find her online at: http://chloeyates.com

Winter Tales

Cover by S.L. Johnson
Cover by S.L. Johnson

Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire before heading off to Reading to study psychology and zoology. For reasons unclear even to himself he subsequently ended up in law and has worked as a legal executive in both Reading and Leeds, where he now lives. Married, he is a keen live role-player and occasional amateur actor, has trained in stage-fighting, and keeps no exotic or dangerous pets of any kind, possibly excepting his son. He’s the author of the critically acclaimed Shadows of the Apt series as well as standalone works Guns of the Dawn and Children of Time, and numerous short stories.

Amelia Gorman is a baker turned computer science student living in Minnesota. She has a short story in Innsmouth Free Press’s She Walks in Shadows anthology and her poetry has been published in Nonbinary Review and Liminality: A Magazine of Speculative Poetry. She sometimes writes things at http://gormanghastblog.wordpress.com/

Anne Michaud. Author of the Whispered Echoes series, Anne lives in Canada where her old house creaks at night… Might be from the ghosts or the weight of her many books, no one really knows.

B Thomas writes from New England where he unequally balances time between hiking, concerts, and quoting seemingly random movies. Get in touch at http://bthomas7.weebly.com

David Sarsfield has been earnestly writing within the Science Fiction genre for the past seven years, and is a proud member of the Sheffield Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Group. He is particularly interested in the dystopian and cyberpunk sub-genres, born out of a fascination with the future and how far technology may shape it. David is an academic publishing editor by trade and much of his literary work has been inspired by this wonderfully niche day job. He now lives in Bradford with his wife, Lisa, and two children, Isaac and Poppy.

DJ Tyrer is the person behind Atlantean Publishing and has been widely published in anthologies and magazines in the UK, USA and elsewhere, including A Grimoire of Eldritch Inquests, Volume I (Emby Press), State of Horror: Illinois (Charon Coin Press), Steampunk Cthulhu (Chaosium), Tales of the Dark Arts (Hazardous Press), Ill-considered Expeditions (April Moon Books), and Sorcery & Sanctity: A Homage to Arthur Machen (Hieroglyphics Press), and in addition, has a novella available in paperback and on the Kindle, The Yellow House (Dunhams Manor). DJ Tyrer’s website is at http://djtyrer.blogspot.co.uk The Atlantean Publishing website is at http://atlanteanpublishing.blogspot.co.uk

Eliza Chan writes about East Asian mythology, British folklore and madwomen in the attic, but preferably all three at once. Her work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, the British Fantasy Society’s New Horizons and Lontar Magazine. Originally from Scotland, Eliza lived for 3 years in Japan where she got the inspiration for ‘Yukizuki’ (which translates as snow lover) from the Yuki Onna folktale and the snowboarders of Hokkaido. Currently Eliza lives in Manchester with her husband, a growing collection of board games and a large collection of (toy and real) weapons. Follow her on Twitter: @elizawchan

Fiona Clegg is a freelance writer who lives near Oxford, England in a world of words and wonder. She inspires and encourages others to do the same in various writing communities.

G. H. Finn is the pen name of someone you are unlikely to have heard of but who keeps his real identity secret anyway, possibly in the hope of one day being mistaken for a superhero. G. H. Finn lives in Orkney. Having written non-fiction for a number of years he began submitting fiction in early 2015. He has been published in the UK, US & Canada writing speculative and cross-genre fiction, including detective, supernatural & comic horror. He is now also editing short story anthologies. Find him on Twitter: @GanferHaarFinn or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/g.h.finn or on his website: http://ghfinn.orkneymagic.com

Jan Edwards lives close to the Peaks Nation Park (UK) with her husband Peter Coleborn and the obligatory three cats. She has a passion for folklore and the supernatural, with numerous stories published in those spheres, including the Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Moriarty and Terror Tales of the Ocean. Many of her published short fiction are reprinted in her collections Leinster Gardens and Other Subtleties and Fables and Fabulations. Jan has won a Winchester Slim Volume prize and was short-listed for a BFS Award for Best Short Story. She edits for the award winning Alchemy Press and also for Fox Spirit. In a previous existence she was a Chairperson for the British Fantasy Society. For more details go to http://janedwardsblog.wordpress.com

James Bennett is a British writer of fantasy and horror. He’s had several short stories published internationally, the latest ‘Broken Bridges’ earning him a mention in Starburst Magazine. James lives in West Wales where he is currently at work on a fantasy series, the first volume of which comes out from Orbit Books in autumn 2016. There is myth and then there is myth. ‘The Red Lawns’ is what really happened. Feel free to join him on Twitter: @wytcheboy

Jonathan Ward is a science-fiction, horror and fantasy writer hailing from the sprawling urban metropolis of Bedford. He has wanted to be an author since the age of eight, though it’s questionable whether his writing talents have improved since then. When not writing he can be found reading a good book, out exploring new places, or in the pub being sarcastic to his closest friends. Jonathan’s Author Central page containing links to all of his published work: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jonathan-Ward/e/B002BLQ8HA/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0 and Jonathan’s writing page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Written-Ward/339336243357

Kelda Crich is a new born entity. She’s been lurking in her creator’s mind for a few years. Now she’s out in the open. Find Kelda in London looking at strange things in London’s medical museums or on her blog: http://keldacrichblog.blogspot.co.uk/. Kelda’s poems have appeared in Nameless, Cthulhu Haiku II, Transitions and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

K.N. McGrath is a science-fiction and horror writer from the lake-filled area of the state of New York. They are responsible for the DailyNightmare’s horror poem, ‘Cayuga’. They are greatly inspired by (and season their stories with) Asian history and cultures and Eldritch horror. You can read more about their work and publishing woes at http://karmaplacewriting.com

Lizz-Ayn Shaarawi is a Texan lost in the Oregon wilderness. She’s a screenwriter and author whose short stories have been featured in numerous anthologies. Her screenplays have been recognized by The Austin Film Festival, The Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting, and The Page Awards. She enjoys cheap thrills, expensive shoes, and things that go bump in the night. You can find her random babblings on Twitter under her username: @lizzayn

Masimba Musodza is Zimbabwe-born and lives in the North-East England town of Middlesbrough. His MunaHacha Maive Nei? (2011) holds the distinction of being the first science-fiction novel in his native ChiShona, and the first in that language to appear as an e-book first before going to print. His latest, Shavi Rechikadzi, alludes to the Lovecraftian mythos. Musodza’ next novel explores the return of the migrant to his native land, with a nod to Dracula…..

Mat Joiner lives near Birmingham, England. Their short stories and poetry have appeared in Not One Of Us, Strange Horizons and Lackingtons, amongst others. When not writing they consume tea and second-hand books, watch foxes, go hillwalking, and haunt backstreets and canals. Despite this story, their favourite season is autumn.

Ruth EJ Booth is an award-winning writer, and more, from the North-East of England. Her fiction has appeared in NewCon Press, Fox Spirit and Far Horizons; meanwhile her non-fiction work has appeared in publications from The Independent and Mirror Online, to Kerrang! magazine and Drowned In Sound. In 2015, she won the BSFA Best Short Fiction Award for ‘The Honey Trap’ (La Femme, NewCon Press). In her spare time, Ruth may be a live photographer, singer, musician, yogini, or half-marathon runner. Her heart is quartz. Her hands are ice. ‘The Love of a Season’ is her first published poem.

Sharon Kernow’s ability to write something dark, gritty, and even outright twisted has led to appearances in publications such as Midnight Street, Aoife’s Kiss, Night To Dawn, and Radgepacket. Her short story ‘Bitter and Intoxicating’ was snapped up for Red Velvet and Absinthe, an anthology edited by Mitzi Szereto, foreword by Kelly Armstrong, designed to evoke the romantic ethos of classic Gothic fiction with a serving of eroticism. She was propelled into the steampunk universe of Space, 1899 and beyond, winning approval of series creator and award-winning game designer, Frank Chadwick, and editor, writer, and co-author, Andy Frankham-Allen.

Su Haddrell lives in a picturesque and peaceful area of Worcester that’s been cleverly disguised as a noisy council estate. In addition to writing, she also cosplays as small Pratchett characters, builds rocket launchers and organises the UK’s only Judge Dredd convention. Su has been known to paint commissions for people and enjoys hoarding fabric for sewing projects that she never gets around to. Occasionally Su edits the work of other authors which she blatantly uses as an excuse to hide and read more. She loves rum, her cat, her boyfriend and movies where things explode within the first 14 seconds.

Tim Major lives in Oxford with his wife and son. His love of speculative fiction is the product of a childhood diet of classic Doctor Who episodes and an early encounter with Triffids. His novella, Carus & Mitch was published by Omnium Gatherum in February 2015 and his short stories have featured in Interzone, Perihelion and the Snowbooks anthology, Game Over. He blogs about writing and reading at http://www.cosycatastrophes.wordpress.com

Verity Holloway is a speculative fiction and historical non-fiction writer living in East Anglia. Her stories and poems are inspired by all things medical, historical, and religious, with a magical realist bent. In 2012, she published her first chapbook of poems, Contraindications, and her novella of magic and makeup, crypts and clownfish, Beauty Secrets of The Martyrs, was released in 2015. The Mighty Healer, Verity’s biography of her Victorian quack doctor ancestor, will be published by Pen & Sword in the winter of 2016. She blogs at http://verityholloway.com

 

You Left Your Biscuit Behind

A writer of bleakly noirish tales with a bit of grim humour, Graham Wynd can be found eating shortbread biscuits in Dundee, but would prefer you didn’t come looking. An English professor by day, Wynd grinds out darkly noir prose between trips to the local pub, including SATAN’S SORORITY from Number Thirteen Press and EXTRICATE from Fox Spirit Books, as well as tales in Anthony Award-nominated anthologies Murder Under the Oaks and Protectors 2: Heroes. See a full list of stories (including free reads) at GrahamWynd.com.

Jay Eales was born among the dying embers of the Swinging Sixties, in a rural Northamptonshire town where the Co-op was (and remains) King, and almost every family was in thrall to the boot and shoe industry (May it Rest In Peace). Jay has written, edited and published a variety of prose and comics, mostly under the Factor Fiction imprint, especially The Girly Comic and Violent! comic anthologies. He was News Features Editor for the award-winning Borderline Magazine and co-organised Caption, Britain’s longest-running comic convention. His comics have been published by Constable & Robinson, Image Comics, Accent UK, Futurequake Press and Borderline Press to name but a few. His prose has appeared within the pages of anthologies from Obverse Books, Murky Depths, Hersham Horror, Dog Horn Publishing, Rainfall Books, The Alchemy Press and Fox Spirit. His first novel progresses in fits and starts. If you simply must know more, then www.factorfictionpress.co.uk is a fine place to start.

James Bennett is a British author of Fantasy and other weirdness. ‘Ghost Signals’ doesn’t know whether it wants to be a spooky tale or a crime one, so it definitely falls into the biscuit category. Perhaps it isn’t a custard cream though. James Bennett’s debut Fantasy novel ‘Chasing Embers’ is out now from Orbit Books. James currently lives nowhere in particular. Feel free to follow him on Twitter: @Benjurigan

K.D. Kinchen was born and lives in Wales. She spends her time writing, drinking tea and defending her keyboard against the well-meaning paws of her ‘helpful’ rescue kitty. When not at her keyboard she can be found horse riding, watching action movies and hunting down Thai food. She likes rock music, archery, travel, fast cars and a good glass of red.
K.D. has self-published two crime novels via Amazon KDP; Evil Brewing and Darkest Hour. You can connect on Twitter, Facebook or pop on over to her website for further info.
www.kdkinchen.weebly.com

After working in many different jobs, Penny Jones finally realised that writing was the career for her, as she always spoke about herself in the third person. Her parents realised she was going to be a writer much earlier on in her life, when Santa brought her a typewriter for Christmas when she was three years old. You can follow her on twitter @pennyqotu although she does get a bit freaked that on-line stalking is now a thing.

Carol Borden is three days from retirement and she’s not looking for any more trouble. She’s just going to keep her head down and do paperwork. And three days from now, after she slams her badge down on the captain’s desk, she’s going to tell the captain where he can stick it. Just please don’t let her get assigned another spooky case with her hotheaded partner. She’s had enough of that guy. She’s going to spend every day, sitting by the river writing short stories. You can find more of her stories in Fox Spirit’s Noir series, Piercing The Vale, Things In The Dark, and The Girl At The End Of The World, Vol. 1. Man, that minute second hand seems to drag. Looks like it’s getting slower and slower, almost stopping. Shit, here comes the captain and her partner.

Mame Bougouma Diene is a French-Senegalese American humanitarian who lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn with a fondness for progressive metal, tattoos and policy analysis. He is published in Omenana, Brittle Paper, Short Story Day Africa, Edilivres, AfroSFv2 (Storytime), Myriad Lands (Guardbridge Books), and has stories upcoming with New English Press and Galaxies Magazine.

Originally from Wales, EJ Davies now resides in Ottawa, Canada. A keen cinephile, reader, reviewer, miniature painter, musician, cook, and gamer; he tries to get words on a page in some form of logical, and entertaining order. Find him on Twitter: @EJ_Davies, Facebook: @EJDaviesAuthor, or on his blog: http://ejdavies.wordpress.com
Biscuit of choice: The Golden Oreo

Kate Coe is a writer of fiction and fantasy, and blogs at writingandcoe.co.uk. In real life she’s a librarian with a background in classics and law, lives with an engineer and lazy cat, and fills her spare time in between writing with web design, gaming, geeky cross-stitch and DIY (which may or may not involve destroying things). She also reads far fewer books that she would like to, but possibly more than she really has time for.
She makes a mean chocolate brownie, but isn’t so good at biscuits – possibly for the best!

R.A. Kennedy is a Cornish writer whose animal fantasy stories focus on Cornish mythology and folklore. Once described as a “F**ked up Beatrix Potter”, he has been a musician for many years, listens to unhealthy amounts of metal, and looks like an extra from the t.v show Sons of Anarchy. R.A. Kennedy lives in Kernow with his wife (who is an actual mermaid) and animals. You can find him on Twitter: @RomeoRites and reviewing books, films etc for /Garbage-file

 

Respectable Horror front cover

K. A. Laity is the award-winning author of How to Be Dull, White Rabbit, Dream Book, A Cut-Throat Business, Lush Situation, Owl Stretching, Unquiet Dreams, À la Mort Subite, The Claddagh Icon, Chastity Flame, and Pelzmantel, as well as editor of Respectable Horror, Weird Noir, Noir Carnival and Drag Noir. She also writes historical fiction as Kit Marlowe and crime as Graham Wynd. Her bibliography is chock full of short stories, humour, plays and essays, both scholarly and popular. As a 2011-2012 Fulbright Fellow in Galway, Ireland she worked in digital humanities at NUIG. Dr. Laity teaches medieval literature, film, gender studies, digital humanities and popular culture at the College of Saint Rose, where she is also the director of the Digital Humanities Initiative. She divides her time between Hudson, New York and Dundee, Scotland.

Jack of several trades, master of none, Ian Burdon started writing fiction in his fifties. When not occupied by his day job, Ian spends his time at his desk in the shed, exploring the subconscious he has so far kept hidden from his unsuspecting family, often to the accompaniment of wildly unfashionable music. He lives in Edinburgh. You can find him at www.cosmicsurfer.co.uk or on Twitter @Cosmic_Serf

Anjana Basu is a lady of sensibility based in Calcutta, India who has penned 7 novels to date, umpteen poems and left her mark on various magazines, including Vogue India. She can be reached on twitter AnjanaBasu@AnjanaBasu

Maura McHugh lives in the Irish countryside, in a house watched over by rooks, and visited by hares. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in publications in America and Europe, as well as two collections – Twisted Fairy Tales and Twisted Myths – published in the USA. She’s written several comic book series, including co-writing Witchfinder for Dark Horse Comics. She’s also a screenwriter, playwright, a critic, and has served on the juries of international literary, comic book, and film awards. Her web site is http://splinister.com and she tweets as @splinister.

HV Chao  See www.EdwardGauvin.com

Coddled within the coterie of Contessa Cadenza Crimpildi’s College for Cultured Young Ladies in the temperate cheese forests of a forgotten Swiss canton, C. A. Yates, as she is currently known within certain hallowed circles, perversely cultivated a curiosity for all things respectably macabre during her early teenage years. Although frequently cited for insubordination and flagrant contempt, she eventually excelled in all her studies, most notably in Comportment, Gracious Conduct, and Finger Boxing (Heavyweight). By the end of her education, even the Contessa herself, had she not, some years previously, become ill-advisedly dead at the hand of her erstwhile Bavarian paramour, Colonel Dandy Von Nichols, would have been proud of how very respectable Ms Yates had become. Should you wish to follow her continued pursuit of excellence and, of course, respectability, you may visit her most courteous web presence at www.chloeyates.com or follow her, @shloobee, on the tawdry garden path that is Twitter.

Alan C. Moore is a writer, blogger, digital strategist, husband, and father from Virginia. He has been a writer for most of his adult life through academic, professional, and personal sources.

Catherine Lundoff is a Minneapolis-based award-winning writer and editor. Her stories and articles have appeared in such venues as The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty, The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper Stories, The Cainite Conspiracies, Callisto, Tales of the Unanticipated, Nightmare Magazine: Queers Destroy Horror and SF Signal. Her books include Silver Moon and Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction.
Website: www.catherinelundoff.com

Jonathan Oliver is the Editor-in-Chief at Rebellion Publishing, overseeing Solaris, Abaddon and Ravenstone books. He is the author of two novels and a forthcoming short story collection, The Language of Beasts. He twice won the British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology, for Magic and End of the Road. He lives in Abingdon, Oxfordshire with his wife, two daughters and their faithful cat.
Richard Farren Barber was born in Nottingham in July 1970. After studying in London he returned to the East Midlands. He lives with his wife and son and works as a Registry Manager for a local university.
He has written over 200 short stories and has had short stories published in Alt-Dead, Alt-Zombie, ePocalypse – Tales from the End, Horror D’Oeuvres, Murky Depths, Midnight Echo, Midnight Street, Morpheus Tales, Night Terrors II, Siblings, The House of Horror, Spectral Press’s 13 Ghosts of Christmas, Trembles, When Red Snow Melts, and broadcast on BBC Radio Derby, Pseudopod, and The Wicked Library.

Richard’s first novella, “The Power of Nothing” was published by Damnation Books and his second, “The Sleeping Dead” was published by DarkFuse. His next novella “Odette” is due out early in 2016.
His website can be found here www.richardfarrenbarber.co.uk

Su Haddrell is a British writer in a picturesque and peaceful area of Worcester that’s been cleverly disguised as a noisy council estate. She has had stories published by Fox Spirit and Phrenic Press and enjoys editing and beta reading for other authors. In addition to writing, she also paints, sews and organises the UK’s only Judge Dredd convention. She loves rum, her cat, her boyfriend and movies where things explode within the first 14 seconds.

Ivan Kershner Growing up “poor and on horseback” as part of a cattle ranching family on the Lakota Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, USA, provided Ivan with opportunities and perspectives rare in today’s world. Uniquely, Ivan was a minority in a Native culture not far removed from its roots in the open Western plains. His family’s hired man, Paul Bear Saves Life, had been a baby at the Massacre at Wounded Knee and Ivan’s best friend was Chucky Looking Elk.
The roots of Miss Metcalf…as a Halloween story…likely began with Ivan’s ranching family’s remote and rural lifestyle. On Halloween, Ivan and his brother and sister would put on their costumes, exit the back door, go around to the front door, and knock. Their father would answer the door and hand out treats. The children would then reverse their trek, entering the back door, and surprise their parents with the treats they had received. ikershner@netscape.net

Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer. Her short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and Apex Magazine, amongst others. She recently won a Sir Julius Vogel award for a ghost story about Ernest Rutherford splitting the atom, and her latest novella, “The Convergence of Fairy Tales” is a horror mash-up of fairy tale retellings. Her website is https://ojcade.com/, or you can find her @OJCade on Twitter.

Matthew Pegg is a writer based in Leicestershire. Most of his early writing was for theatre and his plays include work for puppet companies, youth theatres, community casts and a script designed to be performed during a medieval banquet. His most recent theatre work was Escaping Alice, a love story with chains and handcuffs, for York Theatre Royal. Most recently he’s written a community audio drama based on the life of Wordsworth and has been commissioned to create a puppet play which will tour to care homes for people suffering from dementia.
In 2012 he completed an MA in Creative Writing, and since then he has been working on a novel, and placing short fiction with a variety of publishers. His fiction is influenced by youthful encounters with M.R. James and Carnacki the Ghostfinder.
His website can be found at www.mpegg.co.uk

Suzanne J. Willis is a Melbourne, Australia-based writer, a graduate of Clarion South and an Aurealis Awards finalist. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in anthologies by PS Publishing, Prime Books, Fablecroft Publishing and Falstaff Books, and in Fantasy Scroll Magazine, SQ Mag, Mythic Delirium, and Lackington’s. Suzanne’s tales are inspired by fairytales, ghost stories and all things strange, and she can be found online at suzannejwillis.webs.com

D. C. White lives in Blackwood, South Australia with his possum Cheeky. D. C.’s work has been published in Australia, the UK and the US. He is currently wondering what to have for tea.

Rosalind Mosis is an arts graduate and classroom assistant by day, hunched gargoyle/slash writing creature by night. She is typically found at her desk, somewhere in deep dark Essex, drinking tea next to a storage heater because she spends about 80% of her time too cold and antisocial to function. Her main obsessions include Japanese horror, ghosts, urban legends, the paranormal and folklore. If it involves screaming relentless spirits with long black hair and twisted faces, she’ll probably be interested. Outside of horror, her favourite writing genres are fantasy, sci-fi and comedy.
Her main horror/weird writing influences are Clive Barker, H.P Lovecraft, James Herbert, Neil Gaiman, Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami. Her writing hero is Terry Pratchett. She also mainlines horror survival games like Ikenie no Yoru, Calling, White Day, Yomawari as well as the Silent Hill and Fatal Frame games. And a lot of graphic novels.
Somehow Rosalind managed to acquire a husband and daughter, who worry about what awful deeds she commits after dark and quietly appease her with biscuits. Her first novel is THE RITES OF LEMURIA, available on Inkitt.

Under some strange, irresistible compulsion Carol Borden was drawn to the manor library. She found the forbidden tome already opened, as if some has had left it for her ready to read. And she did read the book, though she knew she should not. Some had gone mad merely from glimpsing the subtitle. No, Carol Borden counted herself lucky to retain her sanity after what she learned. Decades later she still fell into trances of automatic writing, in which she produced dozens of short stories, including one published in this very book.

Monster Authors

The books of monsters are our world tour of things that lurk and savage us in the dark. The editors have worked with authors from all around the world to bring the horror back to monsters. 

European Monsters

 

Authors:

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed Shadows of the Apt fantasy series, from the first volume, Empire In Black and Gold in 2008 to the final book, Seal of the Worm, in 2014, with a new series and a standalone science fiction novel scheduled for 2015. He has been nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award and a British Fantasy Society Award. In civilian life he is a lawyer, gamer and amateur entomologist.

Aliette le Bodard

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction—her short fiction has earned her two Nebulas, a Locus Award and a British Science Fiction Association Award. On a Red Station, Drifting, a space opera inspired by Vietnamese folklore and the Chinese classic A Dream of Red Mansions, is available as an ebook.

Aliya Whiteley

Aliya Whiteley was born in North Devon, UK, in 1974. She writes speculative and literary fiction, and her post-apocalyptic novella, The Beauty, was published in 2014 by Unsung Stories. Her first two novels were published by Macmillan and her short fiction has appeared in The Guardian, Strange Horizons, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Lonely Planet anthology Better Than Fiction, and in many other places. She tweets most days as @AliyaWhiteley

Anne Michaud

Anne Michaud lives in an old house with her cats, dog and a dungeon full of ghosts. Her debut novel Hunter’s Trap is now available, as her collection of short stories Girls & Monsters. http://annecmichaud.com

Byron Black

Byron Black is a writer of dark fiction from an unknown location in an unspecified time. Influenced by HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, and Clark Ashton Smith, Byron Black finds solace in the macabre and seeks to emulate his forebears. He has no web presence nor email access, preferring to communicate via crow and or Nazghul, although the latter have become prohibitively expensive of late due to that whole Hobbit thing.

Chris Galvin

Chris Galvin writes and edits in Canada and Việt Nam. Her fiction, nonfiction and photos have appeared in various anthologies, literary journals and magazines, online and in print. Two of her stories appear in Fox Spirit’s Fox Pocket anthologies—one in Guardians and another in the forthcoming Reflections. Chris is currently working on a short story collection and polishing a nonfiction book about living in Việt Nam. She tweets as @ChrisGNguyen and blogs at http://chrisgalvinwriter.wordpress.com

Hannah Kate

Hannah Kate is a Manchester-based poet and short story writer. She has had work published in a number of a local and national magazines, as well as in anthologies by Crocus Books, Fox Spirit and Hic Dragones. She is currently seeking representation for her first novel. Under the name Hannah Priest, she has published numerous academic articles on medieval and contemporary popular literature.

Icy Sedgwick

Icy Sedgwick was born in the North East of England, and lives and works in Newcastle, where she teaches graphic design and illustration. She has been writing for over ten years, and had her first book, The Guns of Retribution, published in 2011. Her horror fantasy, The Necromancer’s Apprentice, was released in March 2014. She spends her non-writing time working on a PhD in Film Studies, considering the use of set design in contemporary horror. She also knits up a storm and makes jewellery! You can find her on Twitter @IcySedgwick or read her free fiction at www.icysedgwick.com.

James Bennett

James Bennett is not a monster, but he is a notorious monster sympathiser and has joined them on the occasional rampage. ‘Broken Bridges’ is clearly an attempt at monster propaganda. You can find more information about his stories on his blog: http://jamesbennett72.blogspot.co.uk and feel free to follow him on Twitter: @I_James_Bennett

Jasper Bark

Jasper Bark finds writing author biographies and talking about himself in the third person faintly embarrassing. Telling you that he’s an award winning author of four cult novels including the highly acclaimed Way of the Barefoot Zombie, just sounds like boasting. Then he has to mention that he’s written 12 children’s books and hundreds of comics and graphic novels and he wants to just curl up. He cringes when he has to reveal that his work has been translated into nine different languages and is used in schools throughout the UK to help improve literacy, or that he was awarded the This Is Horror Award for his recent anthology Dead Air. Maybe he’s too British, or maybe he just needs a good enema, but he’s glad this bio is now over. Website: http://www.jasperbark.com Twitter: @jasperbark

Joan De La Haye

Joan De La Haye writes horror and some very twisted thrillers. She invariably wakes up in the middle of the night, because she’s figured out yet another freaky way to mess with her already screwed up characters. Joan is interested in some seriously weird stuff. That’s probably also one of the reasons she writes horror. Her novels, Shadows and Requiem in E Sharp, as well as her novellas, Oasis and Burning, are published by Fox Spirit. You can find Joan on her website (http://joandelahaye.com) and follow her on Twitter (http://twitter.com/JoanDeLaHaye).

Jonathan Grimwood

Jon Courtenay Grimwood was born in Malta and christened in the upturned bell of a ship. He grew up in the Far East, Britain and Scandinavia. He has written for The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian & The Independent. Felaheen, the third of his novels featuring Asraf Bey, a half-Berber detective, won the BSFA Award for Best Novel. So did End of the World Blues, about a British sniper absent without leave from Iraq & running an Irish bar in Tokyo. His novels have been shortlisted for numerous other awards including the Arthur C Clarke Award & the John W Campbell.

Krista Walsh

Known for witty, vivid characters, Krista Walsh never has more fun than getting them into trouble and taking her time getting them out. After publishing a few short stories and novellas in various anthologies, she has now released her own anthology, as well as the first two novels in her Meratis Trilogy: Evensong and Eventide, with the third book, Evenlight, due out early 2015. When not writing, she can be found reading, gaming, or watching a film—anything to get lost in a good story. She currently lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

Nerine Dorman

Nerine Dorman is a South African author and editor of horror and dark fantasy fiction. Sometimes she can be enticed from her Treehaus with promises of good coffee and dark chocolate. Occasionally she makes music. Most of the time she’s considering her next demonic evocation.

Peter Damien

Pulled from the sea in 1856, Peter Damien or “The What Is It From The Deep” was kept preserv’d in a large jar and put on display in museums to frighten and educate youngsters. Re-animated in 1984 by a madman (subsequently shot), he also writes articles for Bookriot.com. He can found on twitter @PeterDamien, or just below the surface of calm waterways, deep in the night.

Artists:

Daniele Serra

Daniele Serra is a professional illustrator. His work has been published in Europe, Australia, United States and Japan, and displayed at various exhibits across the U.S. and Europe. He has worked for DC Comics, Image Comics, Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales magazine, PS Publishing and other publications. Winner of the British Fantasy Award.

Eugene Smith

Eugene Smith grew up in sunny California.  He remembers distinctly being terrified of monsters as a young boy.  The only thing that made sense was for him to start drawing monsters.  He studied illustration at The Academyof Art University in San Francisco and is now illustrating for clients around the globe.  Currently he resides in Chicago withhis lovely wife and daughters.  He also has two cats which he is convinced are trying to kill him.

Gavin Pollock

Gavin Pollock is a Scots Cumbrian comic artist (http://benandantiastralbodyguard.wordpress.com) and occasional teacher and life model. He studied Politics (East Asia) at Newcastle and Fukuoka universities, which led to him living in Japan for eight years before moving back to Cumbria with his children. Gavin spent a few years busy raising them before starting drawing again.

Kieran Walsh

Kieran Walsh is an Irish artist who now lives in Leicester. Having completed a degree in Visual Arts in 1996, he has spent years working in deprived communities developing arts projects and passing on his skills. He also works as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator, though is happy working in many other media such as sculpture and printmaking. His illustration work tends towards darker imagery, and often incorporates atmospheric use of landscapes, both real and imagined.

Fabian Tuñon Benzo

Fabian is a graphic designer, Painter and Comic book artist. Studied at the School of Fine Arts in Cartagena – Colombia and correspondence courses in Modern School Inc. of Miami, he worked with advertising agencies, has collaborated with comic strips in several newspapers of Colombia, besides didactic publish comics with local government and he has participated as an inker on the comic “The secret lives of Julie Newmar” and worked with another company of United states by creating characters. More work can be seen at cartagenacomic.blogspot.com and atube.deviantart.com/gallery/

 

Authors

Chikodili Emelumadu is a writer and broadcaster living in London. Her work has been published in Apex, Eclectica, Luna Station Quarterly, Sub-Q, One Throne and Omenana amongst others. Follow her twitter rants and musings on twitter: @chemelumadu Chikodili is a 2015 Shirley Jackson award nominee.

Dave-Brendon de Burgh wanted to be an artist and speak French, but Fate saved him and pointed him in the direction of writing. He’s a bookseller, co-parent to two wonderful “furkids”, reads speculative fiction voraciously, and is the luckiest guy in the world because he has a blonde, blue-eyed woman in his life who supports his need to write and be crazy. He lives in Pretoria, South Africa, and when he’s not writing he’s watching TV series, movies or playing games. He’s on Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, Instagram, and is also a paranormal investigator with Phoenix Paranormal South Africa.

Dilman Dila is the author of a collection of speculative short stories, A Killing in the Sun. He has been longlisted for the Jalada Prize for Literature (2015), the BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition (2014), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize  (2013), twice longlisted for the Short Story Day Africa Prize  (2013, 2014), and nominated for the Million Writers Awards (2008). His stories have appeared in several anthologies and magazines, including the Apex Book of World SF 4. His films include What Happened in Room 13, which has attracted over two million views on YouTube, and The Felistas Fable, which was nominated for Best First Feature by a Director at Africa Movie Academy Awards  (2014).

James Bennett loves mythology. Mythology, to him, is like putty. You can play with it any way you like and that’s exactly what he did with this story. The Red Lawns also serves as a sort of prequel to James Bennett’s upcoming fantasy series from Orbit Books in 2016. Sort of. Feel free to join him on Twitter: @wytcheboy

Jayne Bauling’s YA novels have won the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa, the Maskew Miller Longman Literature Award and the Sanlam Gold Prize for Youth Literature. Dreaming of Light was chosen for the 2014 IBBY Honour List. Her short stories for adults and youth have been published in various anthologies, and have twice been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. A former Johannesburger, she now lives in White River in Mpumalanga Province.

Joan De La Haye writes horror and some very twisted thrillers. She invariably wakes up in the middle of the night, because she’s figured out yet another freaky way to mess with her already screwed up characters. Joan is interested in some seriously weird shit. That’s probably also one of the reasons she writes horror. Joan is deep, dark and seriously twisted and so is her writing

Joe Vaz is a full-time actor working in features and television. Perhaps due to this he’s had to earn a living in several other fields too, including singing, directing, writing scripts for children’s TV, publishing, and editing. ‘After the Rain’ was inspired by a story told to Joe by his best friend some thirty years ago. The friend had supposedly witnessed, in the middle of the night, large dogs across the mine-dumps of Jo’burg walking upright on their hind legs, their front paws outstretched. It’s an image that has haunted Joe ever since.

Nerine Dorman subsists on gourmet coffee, and spends most of her day unf*cking sentences, making words, and pushing little picture boxes around on screens. She freely admits to having impure thoughts about Dorian Pavus, Cullen Rutherford and Varric Tethras. Stalk her on Twitter @nerinedorman

Nick Wood is a South African clinical psychologist, with around twenty short stories previously published in Interzone, Infinity Plus, PostScripts, Redstone Science Fiction and AfroSF amongst others. He has also had a YA speculative fiction novella published in South Africa entitled The stone chameleon. Forthcoming is the novella The Last Pantheon in AfroSF Volume 2 with Tade Thompson. Azanian Bridges will be published by NewCon Press in 2016. Nick is currently training clinical psychologists and counselors at the University of East London, England. He can be found at Twitter: @nick45wood or http://nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz

Nnedi Okorafor’s books include Lagoon (a British Science Fiction Association Award finalist for Best Novel), Who Fears Death (a World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novel), Kabu Kabu (A Publisher’s Weekly Best Book for Fall 2013), Akata Witch (an Amazon.com Best Book of the Year), Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), and The Shadow Speaker (a CBS Parallax Award winner). Her latest works include her novel The Book of Phoenix and her novella Binti. Nnedi is an associate professor at the University at Buffalo, New York (SUNY). Learn more at Nnedi.com

Sarah Lotz is a screenwriter and novelist with a fondness for pseudonyms and collaborating. Among other things she writes horror novels under the name S.L Grey with author Louis Greenberg and YA novels with her daughter Savannah. Her latest solo books, The Three and Day Four are published in over twenty-five territories.

Tade Thompson lives and works in the UK. He is the author of a number of SFF, crime, general fiction and memoir pieces. His alternate history crime novel Making Wolf from Rosarium Publishing was published in September 2015.

T.L. Huchu’s fiction has appeared in Interzone, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Shattered Prism, Electric Spec, Kasma SF, The Sockdolager  and AfroSF. He is a creative writing PhD student at Manchester University. Between projects, he translates fiction between the Shona and English languages. He is not to be confused with his evil twin at Twitter: @TendaiHuchu http://www.tendaihuchu.com

Toby Bennett was born in 1976 in Cape Town, South Africa. He holds a degree in philosophy from the University of Cape Town. Like many writers he has had a varied career (we all do what we can to put food on the table and words on the page). His true passion lies in creative writing and to date he has written ten novels and appeared in various collections of short stories. His latest project, Viral (co-written with UK author Benjamin Knox), was released in October 2015 by Crossroads Press.

Vianne Venter is a scriptwriter and radio producer living in Cape Town, South Africa. She is the story editor for Something Wicked, a collection of spec fic short story anthologies, and has a background in entertainment and lifestyle journalism.

Artists

Amine Benali is a graphic designer/illustrator/comics author. His publishing career began in 2009. In 2010 he published his first manga ‘Sardar’ at Z-link, followed in 2011 by the publication of a short comic: ‘Pride & Jealousy… The Origins of Evil’ in the Collective album Monsters at Dalimen. He’s worked as a graphic designer since 2012. Amine would also like to work in self publishing with comics or web comics. He is interested in many fields: comics, graphic design, science, psychology, spirituality, music, cinema, humour (parodies).

Dave Johnson has had a love of drawing since he was a small child. Graduating from Norwich School Of Art & Design in 2003 with a degree in Graphic Design he has gone on to become a full time illustrator. He specialises in digital illustrations, book covers and concept design.

Daniela Serra is professional illustrator. His work has been published in Europe, Australia, United States and Japan, and displayed at various exhibits across the U.S. and Europe. he has worked for DC Comics, Image Comics, Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales magazine, PS Publishing and other publications. Winner of The British Fantasy Award.

Eugene Smith is an artist and illustrator based in Chicago, Illinois.  He lives with his wonderful wife and their two children, as well as two grumpy cats. Eugene graduated from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, California with a degree in Painting & Drawing.  He can often be found at home with pencil in hand, scribbling in sketchbooks or on the walls. His work takes inspiration from comic books, films, literature, and stormy weather.

Kieran Walsh is an Irish artist living and working in the UK. Based in Leicester, he has worked for over twelve delivering community-based arts programmes in disadvantaged areas. Kieran works in a broad range of media, from digital arts to more traditional art forms, and is always looking to experiment with new techniques. This is the fourth book he has illustrated.

Su Opperman is an artist and freelance illustrator based in Cape Town, South Africa. Though a fine artist by heart, an interest in the development of South African comic art remains a key concern of hers. As such, she works for the CCIBA (Centre of comic, illustrative book arts) as their comic art co-ordinator. In this capacity, she also functions as an organising member of Open Book Comics Fest and is curator to the POP the Culture creative hub initiative. Other than that, she draws things for other people and for herself.

Vincent Holland-Keen spent most of his formative years drawing in front of the television. He then stopped drawing for a while and tried writing instead. He now does both. Beyond that, his life is packed with incident.

The Editor

Margrét Helgadóttir is Norwegian-Icelandic and lives in Oslo, Norway. She was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Awards 2016 as writer with the debut book The Stars Seem So Far Away, and as editor for African Monsters, both published by Fox Spirit Books. Margrét’s stories have appeared in several literary magazines and print anthologies such as Gone Lawn, Luna Station Quarterly, In-flight Literary Magazine, Tales of the Fox and Fae, and Girl at the end of the World. She’s co-editor of the anthologies European Monsters (2014) and African Monsters (2015) and editor of Winter Tales (2016) and Asian Monsters (2016). Find out more about Margrét on her site: http://margrethelgadottir.wordpress.com or follow her on twitter where she’s @MaHelgad

The Authors

Aliette de Bodard is half-French, half-Vietnamese and lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories. Recent works include The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz, 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award), a novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, and its upcoming sequel The House of Binding Thorns (April 2017, Roc/Gollancz). She also published The Citadel of Weeping Pearls (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2015), a novella set in the same universe as her Vietnamese space opera On a Red Station Drifting.

The monster in Aliette’s Asian Monsters story is a hungry (unpropitiated) ghost—normally the ghosts of ancestors are meant to be protective, and Aliette guesses this one has a particularly… possessive way of going about it! (in China or Vietnam, ghosts who receive insufficient offerings from their descendants, or who die without descendants, can bring misfortune onto their families)
Carmen Yiling Yan was born in China and schooled in the US. Currently, she studies computer science at UCLA. Her writing has been published in Daily Science Fiction, and her translations of Chinese short science fiction have been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Galaxy’s Edge, as well as numerous anthologies.

The guanguan – the monster in her Asian Monsters story – is a creature from the Shanhaijing, an ancient Chinese bestiary and book of myth. It is described as having the appearance of a spotted dove, a cry like a rebuke, and feathers that grant the wearer immunity from confusion.

Fran Terminiello is half-Filipino and half-British and grew up in the U.K. She lives in Surrey with her family and a growing number of swords. She teaches renaissance sword fighting and writes stories. Find her on facebook, twitter and franterminiello.com

Fran chose the aswang as monster in her Asian Monsters story as it combines the horror of several monsters such as the vampire, demon and werewolf. The folklore that persists to this day, and the immigration of peoples in an increasingly technological world were the inspirations behind the story. The aswang is a much feared creature, even to this day. In a world where disease, child mortality and poverty threaten everyday life, particularly in rural Filipino villages, the aswang still occasionally rears its head. If milk has soured, crops fail, children are sick and weak, or births don’t come to term – the aswang can be to blame. It is a shapeshifter, taking the form of a dog or normal person in the day. For the latter it always appears very tired as it has been up all night searching for prey. The telltale sign is your own inverted reflection when you look into its eyes.

Eeleen Lee is a Chinese-Malaysian who was born in London, UK. She graduated from Royal Holloway College, University of London, with an MA in English Literature. Her short fiction and reviews have been published by Mammoth Books UK, Monsoon Books Singapore, Solarwrym Press Australia, Esquire Magazine, Malaysia and Intellect UK. Her debut collection of short horror fiction, 13 Moons, was published by Fixi Novo in 2014. She tweets at @EeleenLee

A langsuir – the monster in Eeleen’s Asian Monsters story – is the returning vampiric spirit of a woman who died during childbirth. She appears as a woman with red eyes, long black hair and a feeding hole in the back of her neck. The langsuir has the ability to fly or shape-shifts into an owl.

Eliza Chan writes about East Asian mythology, British folklore and madwomen in the attic, but preferably all three at once. Born and brought up in Scotland to Chinese parents, Eliza decided to be a stereotype and went travelling after her first degree in English and History. She lived and worked in Japan for three years: one in Sado, a sleepy island steeped in traditional culture and craft, and two in Sapporo, a vibrant city steeped in food and snow. Eliza has since returned to the UK and retrained as a speech and language therapist so she has an excuse to play with kids’ toys all day. Her work has been published in Fantasy Magazine, Lontar, Holdfast and Fox Spirit’s Winter Tales. Follow her on Twitter: @elizawchan or www.elizawchan.wordpress.com

Datsue-ba—the monster portrayed in Eliza’s Asian Monsters story—is the old hag of the Japanese afterlife. She judges those who have died and are trying to cross the river into the underworld by weighing their clothes and even skin on tree branches to gauge their sins. 

Eve Shi is an Indonesian fangirl and writer. She loves tea, singing to herself, and has lived most of her life in the West Java Province.

Lelepah—the monster in Eve’s Asian Monsters story—is a little known creature from Progo River, Central Java, and supposedly prefers meat, including human meat. You can contact Eve via Twitter @Eve_Shi or e-mail at stormofblossoms@gmail.com.

Isabel Yap writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has also lived in California, Tokyo, and London. In 2013 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared on Tor.com, Book Smugglers Publishing, Uncanny Magazine, Shimmer Magazine, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction volume 2, among other venues. She is @visyap on Twitter and her website is isabelyap.com.

The monster in Isabel’s Asian Monsters story is a riff off a tiyanak – a malevolent creature that takes on the form a baby or small child. Many regions in the Philippines have their own take on the tiyanak. In some versions it is vampiric; in others, it’s more like an old man with wrinkled skin in its true form.

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings (2015), is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty. It won the Locus Best First Novel Award and was a Nebula finalist. He has a collection of short fiction, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016). He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

In addition to his original fiction, Ken is also the translator of numerous literary and genre works from Chinese to English. His translation of The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, the first translated novel ever to receive that honour. Find out more about Ken on his website: http://kenliu.name

In “Good Hunting”—Ken’s story in Asian Monsters—Ken plays with the legends and lore around the nine-tailed fox, a shapeshifting creature of Chinese myth who has, over time, become the symbolic representation of potent, uncontrolled feminine sexuality. This story of postcolonial resistance turns the myth upside down and gives it a new chrome-coloured sheen.

Sunil Patel is an Indian-American Bay Area fiction writer and playwright who has written about everything from ghostly cows to talking beer. His plays have been performed at San Francisco Theater Pub and San Francisco Olympians Festival, and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Fireside Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, The Book Smugglers, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Lightspeed, among others. Plus he reviews books and TV for Lightspeed and is Assistant Editor of Mothership Zeta. His favourite things to consume include nachos, milkshakes, and narrative. Find out more at ghostwritingcow.com, where you can watch his plays, or follow him on Twitter: @ghostwritingcow. His Twitter has been described as “engaging,” “exclamatory,” and “crispy, crunchy, peanut buttery.”

As a child, he loved the stories of the Baital Pachisi as told in comics and the TV show Vikram Aur Betaal, which introduced him to vetalas—portrayed in his Asian Monsters story—ghostly creatures from Hindu mythology who possessed cadavers and haunted charnel grounds. In their most popular incarnation, they told moralistic tales with deadly consequences.

Usman Malik is a Pakistani writer of strange stories. He has won both a Bram Stoker Award and a British Fantasy Award and is a finalist for the Nebula and the World Fantasy awards. He resides in two worlds. 

Usman says about his Asian Monsters story: ‘”Blood Women” is an urban legend my cousins told me about when I was no more than five or six. Supposedly, one of our uncles was on his way to Murree, a small mountain city, one winter when he was stopped by a woman on the highway who asked him for a donation of blood for her sisters. That image haunted me all through teenage and adulthood, so one day I decided to write about it.’ 

Vajra Chandrasekera is a writer from Colombo, Sri Lanka. His stories have been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed and Strange Horizons, among others. He blogs occasionally at vajra.me and you can find him on Twitter as @_vajra

The yaka or yaksha – in Vajra’s Asian Monsters story – is not quite a god or devil, though they are called both. Yakku are otherworldly beings that have fulfilled many roles in Lankan lore over the millennia. They cause illness and prey on the unwary, but they are also guardians of treasure and tutelary spirits of ancient places. In the time before even gods were born, they were the first to worship the primordial waters of the newly created universe. This story takes liberties in reinterpreting their nature and lore: the masks are usually harmless, even in the hands of the obsessive. But just to be on the safe side, the only devil mask in the author’s house is a fridge magnet.

Yukimi Ogawa lives in a small town in Tokyo, Japan, where she writes in English but never speaks the language. She still wonders why it works that way. Her fiction can be found in such places as Fantasy and Science Fiction and Strange Horizons.

The monster in Yukimi’s Asian Monsters story, Kokuri Babaa, or Crone Kokuri, is a Japanese monster which is said to live in an abandoned temple, and to strip human corpses of their skin and eat the flesh. She also likes weaving things with the human hair.

As an undergraduate, Xia Jia majored in Atmospheric Sciences at Peking University. She then entered the Film Studies Program at the Communication University of China, where she completed her Master’s thesis: “A Study on Female Figures in Science Fiction Films.” In 2014, she obtained a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and World Literature at Peking University, with “Chinese Science Fiction and Its Cultural Politics Since 1990” as the topic of her dissertation. Now she is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at Xi’an Jiaotong University.

She has been publishing fiction since college in Science Fiction World and other venues. Several of her stories have won the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. In English translation, she has been published in Clarkesworld and Upgraded. Her first story written in English, “Let’s Have a Talk,” was published in Nature in 2015.

In the Asian Monsters story “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight,” Xia Jia plays with some Buddhist and Daoist lore about monsters and monster hunters, specifically those based on stories from Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, a classic fantasy collection from the Qing Dynasty. The overall mythology of the story reflects the syncretic nature of Chinese folk beliefs, in which monsters with origins in separate religions are melded into a seamless whole. Other sources of inspiration include Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, a reinterpretation of Kipling’s The Jungle Book in the British gothic literary tradition, as well as Tsui Hark’s animation “A Chinese Ghost Story,” which embellishes Pu Songling’s traditional ghost story with cyberpunk images.

The Artists

Benjamin Chee, being from a Cantonese-speaking family in Malaysia, grew up on Hong Kong films. They taught him to be afraid of stiffened, but no less agile hopping corpses—the jiangshi—who would feed on his abundant flesh if they could get their claws on him. So far he has managed to avoid being monster chow, hiding in Singapore, drawing comics and making games. His comics appeared in Liquid City Vol. 3 and LONTAR Issue 5. He can be found at charsiewspace.com, don’t tell the monsters.

 Cindy Mochizuki is a Japanese-Canadian interdisciplinary artist who creates drawing, installation, performance, animation, and collaborative works that consider spaces that embody both the fictional and documentary. She has integrated shapeshifting monsters, ghosts and spirits in her narrative-based projects. Her children’s book Things on the Shoreline was published by Access Gallery in 2016 and tells the story of slow processes and how we call forth the creaturely life of our imaginations. Her illustrative work has appeared in West Coast Line, The Capilano Review and Alternatives Journal. She lives and works in Vancouver, Canada and has screened and exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Please visit www.cindymochizuki.com 

Daniela Serra is professional illustrator from Italy. His work has been published in Europe, Australia, United States and Japan, and displayed at various exhibits across the U.S. and Europe. He has worked for DC Comics, Image Comics, Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales magazine, PS Publishing and other publications. Winner of The British Fantasy Award (Best Artist).

Dave Johnson is a UK-based designer and illustrator who is a fan of all things comic, film and book related. He has had an interest in folklore and the supernatural since he was a child, having lived in a number of haunted houses. Currently working as both an artist and college lecturer, he loves the chance to draw images that fire up the imagination or take it to another place entirely. Working in both traditional pen and digital media, Dave enjoys fusing the creative ideas of his past life as a graphic designer with the punch and impact of illustration. He is married to Lynsey and they share their Nottinghamshire home with four cats, Annabelle, Olly, Midge and Dora.

Imran Siddiq has visited Asia, searching for dragons in Hong Kong or the hairy apemen in Borneo, though did cross paths with a Velociraptor (claimed to be a Monitor Lizard). Based in Leicestershire, UK, he writes with passion and dabbles in dark art. His genre of preference is YA Science Fiction but he would love to have a crack at a graphic novel. When not working in the NHS and writing, he’s looking after his cats. You can contact Imran at Flickimp@gmail.com His website is: www.imranwrites.com and he tweets as @flickimp

Kieran Walsh is an Irish artist living and working in the UK. Having completed a Visual Arts degree in 1996, he currently works for a successful community arts organisation (Soft Touch Arts) in Leicester, where he works on creative projects with disadvantaged community groups. This is the sixth book (and third monster book) he has created illustrations for.

Vincent Holland-Keen has provided illustrations and cover artwork for a number of novels and anthologies, including Fox Spirit’s African Monsters and the three titles in their Bushy Tales series. He’s also the author of novels The Office of Lost and Found and Billy’s Monsters, and creator of the upcoming audio series Fantasyland Undercover. By day, he works for a major Metropolitan University as a business analyst/systems designer. 

The editor

Margrét Helgadóttir is a Norwegian-Icelandic writer and editor living in Oslo, Norway. Her stories have appeared in a number of both magazines and print anthologies such as In flight literary magazine, Gone Lawn, Luna Station Quarterly, Tales of Fox and Fae and Girl at the End of the World. Her debut book The Stars Seem So Far Away was published by Fox Spirit Books in 2015 and shortlisted to British Fantasy Awards 2016. A long-time fan of monsters, Margrét is editing the coffee table book serieFox Spirit Books of Monsters, seven volumes published between 2014 and 2020. Both African Monsters and Asian Monsters have been shortlisted to the British Fantasy Awards (2016 and 2017). Margrét is also editor for the anthology Winter Tales (2016).

Read more at http://margrethelgadottir.wordpress.com or Twitter: @MaHelgad

The authors

A.C. Buchanan lives just north of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Their short fiction has most recently been published in Glittership, Unsung Stories, the Accessing the Futureanthology from FutureFire.net and the Paper Road Press anthology At the Edge. You can find them on Twitter at @andicbuchanan or at www.acbuchanan.org The globster depicted in their Pacific Monsters story is based on an unidentified mass—later determined to be a whale carcass—which washed up on a New Zealand beach in 1965.

AJ Fitzwater is a meat-suit wearing dragon living between the cracks of Christchurch, New Zealand. They attended the Clarion workshop in 2014, and is a two time Sir Julius Vogel Award Winner. Having lived through Canterbury’s troubled times of earthquakes, AJ re-imagines and extends the New Zealand Maori myth of Papatūānuku, the earth mother, and her soRūamoko. When Papatūānuku and her husband Ranginui, the sky father, were pried apart by their sons, Rūamoko was left in his mother’s womb, and it is his movements which are said to cause earthquakes, volcanoes, and the change of seasons. 

Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada is a tiny part of his beautiful beloved Hawaiian community that fights every day for breath, for ea, for connection, for sovereignty. He is sometimes called tree, bear, Morris, hoa, and more. He is also sometimes an academic, editor, translator, blogger (http://hehiale.wordpress.com), poet, writer of dorky sff stories set in Hawaiʻi, photographer, and/or videographer. What he mostly does is surf with his mother and a crew of fierce activist poet wāhine who tease (and teach) him mercilessly. The monster Bryan has chosen to write about in Pacific Monsters is a kupua, which is a kind of shape-shifter or powerful being. Some kupua become caterpillars or turtles or owls. Some are more like Māui, who slowed the sun and fished the islands from the sea. This kupua becomes a niuhi, a man-eating shark, somewhat reminiscent of Nanaue

Iona Winter is of Māori and Pākehā descent and lives in KaritaneAotearoa New Zealand. Her writing has appeared in HeadlandHaloCentum PressReflex FictionFlash Frontier, and various online publications. In 2016 Iona was awarded the Headland Frontier Prize, and performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. She was also long-listed to the Bath Flash Fiction Award. She is currently working on a novella-in-flash. Iona is passionate about representing Aotearoa in her creative work, and writes hybrid forms that highlight the intersection between written and spoken word. Overlaying past, present and future, the traditional and contemporary, she creates a melding of the worlds we inhabit. Her story in Pacific Monsters is based on the myth of Te Pouākai, the extinct Haast Eagle. The largest eagle to have ever existed, it inhabited Te Waipounamu, the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Jeremy Szal is a Mediterranean-blooded mongrel who was born in 1995 in the outback of Australia, where he was raised by wild dingoes. His science-fiction and fantasy work has appeared in Nature, Abyss & Apex, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, The Drabblecast, and has been translated into multiple languages. He is the fiction editor for Hugo-winning podcast StarShipSofa where he’s worked with authors such as George R. R. Martin, William Gibson, and Joe R. Lansdale. He is represented by John Jarrold of the John Jarrold Literary Agency. He carves out a living in Sydney, Australia, where his Pacific Monsters story is set, and found it rather amusing to destroy his hometown through a spider-apocalypse. Unfortunately, dangerous spiders are all too real and infest the whole of Australia, including the author’s backyard (and at one point), coffee machine. Find him at http://jeremyszal.com or on Twitter: @JeremySzal

Kirstie Olley grew up on a farm in the rural far north coast of New South Wales and was surrounded by unusual monster stories like that of the Tuckean Swamp Monster and the Mudgerwokee. Despite much trekking through both bush and swamp she never found either. Inspired by the monsters and adventures of her childhood Kirstie has published ten fantastical short stories over the last four years, including several which have won competitions and been short listed for awards. You can track them down through her website http://www.storybookperfect.com with much more success (and ease) than she ever had hunting the real monsters. You’ll probably come across some Bush-Stone Curlews while there too.

Born and raised in Yorkshire, Michael Grey now lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and three boys. As a newcomer to the southern lands Michael took an interest in the folklore and history as only an immigrant could. His research took him across word of the ningen—immense humanoid lifeforms seen until as recently as modern times in the Antarctic Ocean. While the advance of humanity across the globe has rendered many folklorish sightings as the overt optimism of wistful thinkers, in the vast emptiness of the least explored ocean on Earth the ningen remains a teasing possibility. Michael can be reached at http://michaelgrey.com.au, or through Twitter: @Mikes005

Michael Lujan Bevacqua is an assistant professor of Chamorro Studies at the University of Guam, where he teaches courses on the indigenous people of the Marianas Islands, the Chamorros and their language and culture. He is a passionate advocate for the revitalization of the Chamorro language and the decolonization of his island of Guam, which remains a colony of the United States. With his brothers Jack and Jeremy, they started a creative company, The Guam Bus in 2015, which publishes Chamorro language and Guam focused children’s books and comics. The monster in his Pacific Monsters graphic story, known ataotaomo’na, can take many forms, but they generally are the spirits of our ancient ancestors, and can sometimes trick us, punish us, but also act as protectors.

Octavia Cade has sold stories to Asimov’sClarkesworld, and Shimmer, amongst others. She has a PhD in science communication and likes writing about the natural world. She’s from New Zealand, so there’s a lot of nature to write about! The monster in her graphic story in Pacific Monsters is a real creature—flightless giant moa were endemic to NZ, and the tallest bird ever known to exist with the largest females reaching up to 3.6 metres in height. They are also sadly extinct—or so they say, for every so often there are rumours of moa surviving in the dark and unexplored depths of the Fiordland rainforest. (Octavia doubts the rumours are correct, but she would dearly love to be wrong.) 

Raymond Gates is an Aboriginal Australian writer currently residing in Wisconsin, USA, whose childhood crush on reading everything dark and disturbing evolved into an adult love affair with horror and dark fiction. He has published many short stories, several of which have been nominated for the Australian Shadows Awards and one, The Little Red Man,” received an honourable mention in The Year’s Best Horror 2014. He continues to write short fiction and is working on his first novel. Learn more at: http://www.raymondgates.com His story in Pacific Monsters features a classic legendary creature of Australia: the bunyip. Bunyips have their origins in Aboriginal mythology, and are said to inhabit rivers, billabongs and other water-holes. This story takes place at Lake George, New South Wales, approximately 40 kilometres north of the national capital, Canberra. A mystery in itself, it’s the perfect home for a bunyip.

Rue Karney is a writer from Brisbane, Australia who loves to read and write stories that are strange, unsettling, bizarre and weird. Karney’s work has appeared in the anthologies Hauntings, In Sunshine Bright and Darkness Deep, Monsters Amongst Us and Nothing as well as the horror magazine SQ Mag. Her Australian Horror Writers Association winning short story, “Brother,” was translated into Italian and published in Collana Mondi Incantati as “Fratello.” Her story in Pacific Monsters is set in an alternate version of Cape York, a remote region of far north Queensland, Australia. Although the Hand Walker is an invented monster, the massacre described in the story is historically accurate. Tens of thousands of Aboriginal peoples were murdered during the “settlement” of Australia, with a massacre occurring as late as 1928. In Queensland the colonial invaders were particularly brutal. Timothy Bottoms’ Conspiracy of Silence was a key source of information for this story.

Simon Dewar is an author and editor from Canberra, Australia. His works have appeared in various anthologies such as Death’s Realm (Grey Matter Press), The Sea (Crossroads Press), Morbid Metamorphosis (Lycan Valley Press). He is the editor of the Suspended in Dusk anthology series. Suspended in Dusk 2 is forthcoming January 2018 from Grey Matter Press. The Australian Drop Bear (Thylarctos plummetus), in his Pacific Monsters story, is thought to be a hoax Australian cryptid. It is said to be a larger, carnivorous cousin of the common koala. Their home ranges is wherever the common koalas are found, along the east coast of Australia. Australians take great pleasure in recounting horrible tales of drop bear attacks to unsuspecting foreign tourists. They’re probably not true. Probably.

Tihema Baker is a Māori writer from Ōtaki, a small town on the Kāpiti Coast of Aotearoa/New Zealand. His iwi (tribes) are Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga, Te Āti Awa kiWhakarongotai, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. His first novel, Watched, was a finalist in the Sir Julius Vogel Speculative Fiction Awards 2015 for Best Youth Novel, and his short story Kei Wareware Tātou won Best Short Story in te reo Māori (the Māori language) at the PikihuiaMāori Writers Awards 2013. He currently works as a policy advisor in Wellington, and is a keen gamer and movies/TV fan. He also blogs at http://tihemasdilemmas.wordpress.com The Patupaiarehe in Tihema’s Pacific Monsters story is a fairy-like people who inhabits the many forests and mountainous ranges of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Rarely seen, they only emerge under the cover of night or dense mist. Some stories describe them as benevolent, coming to the aid of lost travellers, teaching people to hunt and fish. In some oral traditions, fair-haired and -skinned Māori were believed to be the half-bred offspring of Patupaiarehe who had taken willing spouses. Others, however, tell of the cruel tortures inflicted on those foolish enough to enter their territory, and the powerful spells capable of bending those they desire to their will.

Tina Makereti writes novels, essays and short fiction. In 2016 she won the Pacific Regional Commonwealth Short Story Prize with her story “Black Milk.” Her novel, Where the RēkohuBone Sings (2014) was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and won the Ngā Kupu Ora Aotearoa Māori Book Award for Fiction, also won by her short story collection, Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa (2010). With Witi Ihimaera, Makereti is the editor of a new anthology of Māori and Pasifika fiction, Black Marks on the White Page (2017). She is of NgātiTūwharetoaTe Ati Awa, Ngāti Rangatahi Pākehā and, according to family stories, Morioridescent. Tina says she first met the monster in her Pacific Monsters story on the Wellington waterfront. There are a number of pools and lagoons to walk over and past, and it is easy to imagine someone living there with the fish and mussels and seaweed moving beneath. The creature emerged over time out of those extraordinary waters. None of it existed before the many earthquakes that have shaped and reshaped the harbour over time—the seabed has been lifted again and again. There are two famous taniwha (Māori water guardians, sometimes described by Westerners as monsters) that lived in the harbour, but Tina’s creature is not one of them. It emerged out of the contemporary sea and the conditions of the world we live in now, though it is an ancient thing, and she thinks of it still when she walks there.

The artists

Dave Johnson is a designer and illustrator who is a fan of all things comic, film and book related. He’s had an interest in folklore and the supernatural since he was a child, having lived in a number of haunted houses. Currently working as both an artist and college lecturer, he loves the chance to draw images that fire up the imagination or take it to another place entirely. Working in both traditional pen and digital media, Dave enjoys fusing the creative ideas of his past life as a graphic designer with the punch and impact of illustration. He is married to Lynsey and they share their Nottinghamshire home with one new born baby, and four cats: Annabelle, Olly, Midge and Dora.

Daniela Serra is professional illustrator from Italy. His work has been published in Europe, Australia, United States and Japan, and displayed at various exhibits across the U.S. and Europe. He has worked for DC Comics, Image Comics, Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales magazine, PS Publishing and other publications. Winner of The British Fantasy Award (Best Artist).

Eugene Smith has been a professional illustrator for the past twelve years, but has been drawing all manner of strange things since he was a child. His work takes inspiration from comic books, films, literature, black and white photography and all the odd things that can be found in life if one is willing to see them. He has created illustrations for historical comics, record covers, magazine editorials as well as covers, young adult books and most recently has finished his third set of tarot cards. Currently he is working on his first children’s book. Eugene lives in Chicago with his wife and two daughters, and a slightly disturbed dog.

Kieran Walsh is an Irish artist living and working in the UK. Based in Leicester, he has worked for over fifteen years delivering community-based arts programmes in disadvantaged areas. Kieran works in a broad range of media, from digital arts to more traditional art forms, and is looking to experiment with new techniques. This is the seventh book he has illustrated. 

 

Lahela Schoessler was raised on the island of Maui, Hawaii. When she was 11, her grandfather took the family to Disneyworld and there Lahela discovered the beauty of animation. It was then that she decided she wanted to be an animator. Lahela studied at Ringling College of Art + Design and has had the opportunity to animate on Disney and Marvel video games. In 2013, Lahela reignited her love for illustration and created HelabellaShe has been involved in many comic conventions in the Pacific Northwest. Pacific Monsters will be the first time Lahela’s illustrations have been published.

Laya Rose is an artist from New Zealand. She does both digital and traditional art, and is currently studying design at Massey University. She’s inspired by the South Island landscape which she grew up tramping in, as well as the sci-fi and fantasy that she loves.

 

Girl at the End of the World

Print

Adam “Bucho” Rodenberger is a 34 year old writer from Kansas City living in San Francisco. He holds dual Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy & Creative Writing and completed his MFA in Writing at the University of San Francisco in 2011.
He has been (or will be) published in Alors, Et Tois?, Agua Magazine, Offbeatpulp, Up The Staircase, The Gloom Cupboard, BrainBox Magazine, Cause & Effect Magazine, the Santa Clara Review, Crack the Spine, Penduline Press, Bluestem Magazine, Aphelion, Glint Literary Journal, Lunch Ticket, Eunoia Review, Serving House Journal, and Phoebe.
He blogs at http://triphoprisy.blogspot.com.

Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Lincolnshire and studied zoology and psychology at Reading, before practising law in Leeds. He is a keen live role-player and occasional amateur actor and is trained in stage-fighting. His literary influences include Gene Wolfe, Mervyn Peake, China Miéville, Mary Gentle, Steven Erikson, Naomi Novak, Scott Lynch and Alan Campbell. ‘War Master’s Gate’, the 9th book in the Shadows of the Apt series, is out now.

Alec McQuay writes from a bungalow in west Cornwall, in the shadows of ruined engine houses, surrounded by abandoned mining works. A martial artist, body builder and walking singularity for cups of tea, you might think his love of post- apocalyptic worlds comes from the environment he works in. You’d be wrong. He used to work in Croydon…

According to her late grandmother, C. Allegra Hawksmoor is related to Edward the Black Prince of Wales. She isn’t sure if this is true, as she’s yet to manifest the desire to invade France, however she is very fond of Wales, and has lived there since discovering its existence at an impressionable age. Allegra writes science fiction and fantasy, serves as fiction editor at SteamPunk Magazine and Vagrants Among Ruins, and maintains a blog at www.hawksmoorsbazaar.net

Alexander Danner has contributed science fiction stories to Machine of Death and Bound Off. He also writes comics, which can be found at TwentySevenLetters.com and TwoForNo.net. Alexander teaches online courses in writing comics at Emerson College, and his second textbook, Comics: A Global History, 1968— Present (with Dan Mazur) is forthcoming from Thames & Hudson. He is also president of The Writers’ Room of Boston, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing safe, affordable workspace to writers in the greater Boston area.

Alex Helm has always had an interest in the fantastical, the futuristic and the bizarre and has frequently been accused of having her head in the clouds. A keen live action roleplayer, historical re-enactor and cosplayer, Alex likes nothing more than spending a weekend dressed up in heavy armour and running around outdoors taking part in battles and pretending to be someone far more interesting (and with more interesting problems). She currently lives in Paris, France with her two feline overlords, and works for a video game company.

Andrew Reid is a writer obsessed with the fantastic and the adventurous. When the end comes, he will be bitterly disappointed that he never invested in a walled commune while the going was good. Born in Scotland, he lives in Yorkshire, far closer to cities than apocalypse safety regulations would advise. You can find him on Twitter as @mygoditsraining, where he shares tips on purifying water and recipes for the modern-day scavenger.

Anne Michaud lives on the south shore of Montreal with a head filled with dystopian worlds and an attic full of ghosts. Her  short story collection Girls & Monsters is now available, and keep an eye out for upcoming short stories published in  anthologies. http://annecmichaud.wordpress.com

The Ancient Wise Ones told of a woman who would chronicle the end of the old time and the beginning of the new one in the life domes and robot-monitored underground bunkers. Carol Borden is that woman. Living in the heart of apocalypse, she dons her enemies’ skins, still dripping with gore, and takes up her brush to paint upon the walls of a crumbling parking structure a sorrowful story based on true enough events, “Sophie and the Gate to Hell.” You may read some of her other stories in Fox Spirit Books’ Weird Noir and Noir Carnival, her articles on comics and Godzilla in The Cultural Gutter, and see her other doings at her personal website: www.monstrousindustry.wordpress.com/

Bruce Lee Bond has traveled since a teen, and hitchhiked around the west coast of North America at seventeen.  He left San Francisco State College at twenty-two, where he was the only undergrad in the graduate writing department, to journey to South Dakota as the student of an Oglala Lakota (Sioux) medicine man. After studying the rituals of the Native American (peyote) Church, he fled with the medicine man’s abused girlfriend, ranged from the Canadian Rockies to Mexico, attended the University of Oregon’s journalism department, and has lived in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest since.

He’s a founder of the Alaska Writers Guild, worked with the American Indian Movement during the armed occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, has fished, logged, built log cabins in the wilderness of the northwest and Alaska, and has rescued a dozen sex slaves in Alaska since the times of the pipeline boom while operating and owning cabs.  He has known corrupt cops and politicians, upright madams and honourable criminals, spent a dark winter under a pall of volcanic ash keeping fifteen starving moose alive while living in a log home he built in the Alaskan wilderness, and has looked down the muzzle blast of a pistol at eighteen.  He loves the haunted old towns of the American West, from the Barbary Coast to the dirt streets of Dawson City, Yukon Territory, and often finds the ghosts he encounters better company than newcomers. With proper coaxing they occasionally speak to him.

Cat Connor lives in Upper Hutt, New Zealand. She is the author of The_byte series published by Rebel ePublishers, USA. An FBI thriller series about the life of SSA Ellie Conway. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies, ezines, and journals in the UK and USA.
A coffee addict and a lover of red wine. Recently described as irresistible, infectious, and addictive. Cat believes music is essential. She knows where to hide the body and where you hid the body and more importantly where the stocks of anti-virals, antibiotics, and weapons are kept. There will be survivors.

Catherine Hill grew up in Worcestershire, England. She spent much of her childhood with her head in a book and played games in which her toys escaped from a variety of unexpected catastrophes. She now lives in Birmingham with her husband. While blogging with the Girls Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse collective she discovered that she has a lot of ideas about how to end the world. She may have published a post on the internet about how AIs can successfully wipe out the human race. She is certainly not responsible for our inevitable doom.

Cheryl Morgan has been accused of “destroying fandom” so often that she decided she should have a go at destroying the universe instead. She knows exactly which girl is tough enough to still be there at the end.
When not indulging in apocalyptic violence, Cheryl runs a small press and an ebook store, writes about books, and talks about books on Bristol local radio. You can follow her on Twitter at @CherylMorgan, or find out more at her website, Cheryl’s Mewsings ( http://www.cheryl-morgan.com/).

Leaving the rotting carcass of her alien pod far behind her, Chloë Yates defied her xenomorphic Queen and took to the open road, refusing to be held down by “the man”. Mixing metaphors and confusing pop culture, she has trailed a blaze of defiance in the post-apocalyptic landscape of both Slough and Grenoble (neither of which she’s been to). Catch her in Chalmun’s Cantina at weekends, where she plays her harp made from the skin of mutant managerial staff – but don’t accept a drink from her; she was once a pupil of the renowned Catherine Deshayes. She writes accounts of her prophetic dreams and expects another Apocalypse tout de suite… She’s available for most things of a writerly persuasion. Bring your own gloves.

Christian D’Amico is a science fiction, horror and genre fiction writer based in Surrey, England. Any similarities between his county and any dystopian futures are entirely coincidental. When he isn’t writing he spends his time involved with street dance, reading, gaming and in the gym, both as a fitness enthusiast in his own right and as a personal trainer.
Recently Christian has agreed on an on-going series of short stories and novels with his publisher, Fox Spirit, encompassing a world 9 years in the making. The series is titled “The Unity Wars”, of which more detail can be found on the published works page. www.chrisdamico.co.uk

Colin Sinclair has spent what seems like forever writing things and stuff. Some of it has even seen the light of day. Recently Colin provided settings, background material and short fiction for Broken Rooms, an alternate-worlds tabletop roleplaying game that features thirteen flavours of apocalypse. One of his ever-so-short stories is in the Fox Pockets “Guardians” anthology. His favourite word remains indolent. He still wonders if his bio should have jokes. http://www.brokenrooms.com/

Dash Cooray is a juvenile copywriter who secretly creates fantastic worlds in a filthy upstairs den in her parents’ farm in the chill and mist flavoured mountains of Kandy, Sri Lanka. She was born with an uncanny obsession for stories as all writers are and when she is not writing, she is engrossed in her other obsession – music. She tweets obsessively about her obsessions at the handle @dashdidntdoit and blogs sporadically at dashcooray.wordpress.comDemon Runner, combining fantasy with uniquely Sri Lankan history; is her first published short story. http://twitter.com/dashdidntdoit  http://dashcooray.wordpress.com

Dayna Ingram writes about girls who inhabit various worlds.. This one time, during the apocalypse, she fought alongside Michelle Rodriguez to quell the zombie scourge, and then wrote a memoir about it. Unfortunately, both her publisher and her therapist deemed this event “just a dream,” so she was forced to publish her account as fiction (EAT YOUR HEART OUT [BrazenHead/Lethe Press]). She’s currently working on expanding “Little Daughter” into a full-length novel. When not making up stories, Dayna enjoys making her mini-pig wear dapper sweater-vests, making her coworkers listen to her tales of epic failure at getting her pig to wear sweater-vests, and making out with pirates. Some day, she hopes to have Joss Whedon’s babies, but, like, not in a gross way. Visit her at thedingram.com.

David Turnbull is the author of a children’s fantasy novel featuring dragon hunters and airships – ‘The Tale of Euan Redcap’. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, both online and in print. His most recent anthologies include Dandelions of Mars, a Whortleberry Press tribute to Ray Bradbury, Astologica (The Alchemy Press) and A Chimerical World Vol 11- Tales of the Unseelie Court (Seventh Star Press). He is member of Clockhouse London Writers http://clockhouselondonwriters.wordpress.com/

Dylan Fox is mostly bacteria, water and ego. They writes short speculative fiction that’s been published through The Future Fire, Encounters Magazine, Steampunk Magazine, Twenty or Less Press and a few other places. They dabble with Taoism, drawing, clothes and costume making, jogging and mental health. When the end of the world comes, they looks forwards to being one of the panicked masses heroically killed by the protagonist. While the survivors cling doggedly to the old world and fight it’s inevitable collapse, Dylan will become the air and grass and animals of the new one. In the meantime, they occasionally blogs at www.dylanfox.net and posts before thinking on Facebook.

Eric Scott is the author of several articles in the field of psychology. He is a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health located in Baltimore, MD. He is currently a member of the faculty in the Department of Mental Health and his research involves improving school achievement, and reducing attention/concentration problems and aggressive and shy behaviors, by enhancing family-school communication and parenting practices associated with learning and behavior. His story, Contrition, appears in the Horrors of Historyanthology. You can find more of his writing at https://www.facebook.com/EricScottWrites.

Geraldine Clark Hellery thinks a lot about the end of the world: while Buffy & the Scoobies saved the world (a lot), does she have enough Apocalypse Girl training to survive? Geraldine has written about running in heels from zombies, killer fae, murderous grad students, rampaging dragons and things that go bump in the night which has hopefully given her a rounded view of survival (or rather, how to die in blood-curdling ways). A country girl at heart, Geraldine’s collection of short stories and poems, set in the ‘Weird Wild’ woods will be published by Fox Spirit Books in 2014. She lives with her ever present evac bag by her side along with an aged computer, a manic puppy and a very patient husband.

G.R. Delamere hopes someday she’ll have a real writing routine. When not working as a doctor she may be found with her kids at fairy makeovers or in dragon multiverses. She is completing an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London and working on a novel for young adults. In spare moments she dreams of her next project: an epic steampunk alternative history set in colonial India.  Mechanized elephants will surely feature.

I’m afraid James Bennett did not survive the apocalypse. His clone did, however, and is writing this now. If anyone is out there, in the dead and derelict cities, in the black and barren hills, you might want to take a break from killing zombies for a minute and read one of his stories. http://jamesbennett72.blogspot.co.uk/ Twitter: @I_James_Bennett

James Dorr’s newest collection is The Tears of Isis, released by Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing in May 2013. This joins his two prose collections from Dark Regions Press, Strange Mistresses: Tales of Wonder and Romance and Darker Loves: Tales of Mystery and Regret, and the all-poetry Vamps (A Retrospective) from Sam’s Dot/White Cat. An active member of SFWA and HWA with nearly four hundred individual appearances from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to Xenophilia, Dorr invites readers to visit his site at http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com.

James Oswald is the author of a series of crime novels featuring Edinburgh-based Detective Inspector Tony McLean, the first of which, Natural Causes, was the pick of the 2013 Richard and Judy Book Club Summer Reads.  He was also short-listed for the National Book Awards New Author Award in 2013. His epic fantasy series, The Ballad of Sir Benfro, will be published by Penguin, starting in late 2014 with Dreamwalker.
When not tied to his writing desk, James runs a 350 acre livestock farm in North East Fife, where he raises pedigree Highland Cattle and New Zealand Romney Sheep. You can find him at jamesoswald.co.uk or as @SirBenfro on Twitter.

J.M. Perkins writes Science Fiction, Action Horror, and whatever else will pay the bills.  He spent the first 14 years of his life preparing to flee to the wilds of Canada to escape the forces of the Antichrist. Since then, he’s graduated UCSD, worked at a candy factory, and performed a variety of unsanctioned sociological experiments. He’s had over a dozen of his short stories sold, published, printed and adapted. In 2012 he used a successful Kickstarter Campaign to publish his first novel CHEMO: How I Learned to Kill. He cohosts the podcast ‘John vs Patrick.’ J.M. Perkins lives in San Diego with his roller derby playing photographer wife and his dog. You can find out more at J.M. Perkins’ website www.strugglingwordguy.com

Jonathan Ward is a science-fiction, horror and fantasy writer hailing from the sprawling urban metropolis of Bedford. He has wanted to be an author since the age of eight, though it’s questionable whether his writing talents have improved since then. When not writing he can be found reading a good book, out exploring new places, or in the pub being sarcastic to his closest friends. Jonathan’s Author Central page containing links to all of his published work: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jonathan-Ward/e/B002BLQ8HA/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Justin Brooks lays low in the hungry shadows of Southern California, where something almost as bad as the traffic now owns the streets: Flesh Eating Homeboys! Still, as nothing can ever quench his love for roaming the outdoors, he still risks an occasional run in the open (and what’s more motivating for a sprint than a starving mob behind you?). The art of writing has always fascinated him, and he intends to keep it alive beyond the world’s death. ‘Shirtless in Antarctica’is one of his first short stories, but he aspires to finish many more before radiation sickness or malnutrition finish him.

Cover 1 Book 2
Cover 1 Book 2

 

Kara Lee is a SFF writer who daylights as a biologist. In the event of an apocalyptic showdown, you should totally pick her for your team. Until the power grid goes down, you can find her at http://www.windupdreams.net/.

Dr K. A. Laity is an English professor, specialising in medieval language and literature with a specialisation in apocalypse studies. Her examination of late 20th century artefacts of the Zombie Conflagration has uncovered evidence of a widespread international conspiracy between conservative political parties, but she has been unable to follow up on the suggested connections since her appointment to the lucrative post as Head of Research at the Royal Institute of Filthy Lucre (formerly the London Business School). All posts relating to these discoveries have now been scrubbed from www.kalaity.com

Kim Bannerman lives in a tiny house surrounded by deep dark woods on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where she writes short stories, novels, and plays. Her stories have appeared in journals like Room of One’s Own and Parabola Magazine, and in anthologies like the ground-breaking Paraspheres (2006), 100 Stories for Queensland (2011) and She’s Shameless (2009). She is the author of four novels: The Tattooed Wolf (2014), Bucket of Blood (2011), The Fire Song (2011), and The Wolf of Gilsbury Cross (2006), and her fifth novel, The Mark of the Magpie, will be released in late 2014.  Together with her husband Shawn Pigott, they runs Fox&Bee Studio, where they have produced over 100 short films. Visit her atwww.kbannerman.com.

Margrét Helgadóttir is a Norwegian-Icelandic writer who started to submit fiction in English for publication in 2012. She lives in Oslo, Norway, and is highly influenced by dark Nordic culture, climate and personality in her writing. Her stories have so far appeared in several magazines and she’s got stories in the 2013/2014 print anthologies Girl at the End of the World, Impossible Spaces, Fox & Fae, and the three first volumes of Fox Pockets. Find out more about Margrét on her site: http://margrethelgadottir.wordpress.com or on Twitter where she’s @MaHelgad

Michael Ezell is a former US Marine and ex-cop who now works in the Makeup FX field in Hollywood.  The first two occupations prepared him to fight in any apocalypse scenario, whether it be alien invaders, thugs in the wasteland, or rabid Mary Kay sales reps.  The third allows him to pull a “Bill Murray” and blend in with our Zombie Overlords.

Michael’s short fiction has also appeared in Stupefying Stories, the anthology “I, Automaton,” and the anthology “Fantasy for Good.”

In his professional life, Mikey Nayak is an aerospace engineer who has worked on the Space Shuttle, two-probe NASA missions to the moon, and as the Flight Director for multiple experimental satellite programs. Currently he is designing a shoebox-sized satellite for Low Earth Orbit proximity operations. Outside work he is a pro skydiver, scuba diver and vertical wind tunnel flyer, holding instructional ratings in all these sports. He also enjoys motorcycle riding, skiing, flying small aircraft and generally anything that could qualify as potentially injurious, but has been known to moonlight as an amateur thespian, stand-up comic and short film maker. He now lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where he is working on his Ph.D in Planetary Science and his first novel.

Nathan Lunt is a performance poet, Spoken Word artist, Slam Champion, and founding member of The Decadent Romantics. Flitting between the page and the stage, Nathan has turned his hand to most forms of poetic expression, and can usually be found surprising at open mic nights, ambushing festival goers, or plotting to conquer the internet from his YouTube channel. When he remembers to Tweet, find him @Nathan_Lunt

N.O.A. Rawle is an insomniac mother of two who manages to juggle family, writing projects, four teaching jobs and  translation work. Inspired by perfection in art and nature, fuelled by passion and enthusiasm, she is addicted to writing and believes life is too precious to be wasted.
A British national located in Greece, her work has been long-listed for The Guardian Travel Writing competition and the AEON Award. ‘Vanquish’ is due to be published in the anthology ‘Girl at the End of the World’ (Fox Spirit) in 2014.  www.noarawle.blogspot.gr

Paul Starkey has always been a little behind the curve (he didn’t learn to drive until he was 37) and so whilst he wanted to be a writer since he was ten, when a teacher picked up on his love of telling stories and suggested maybe he’d be an author someday, unfortunately the necessary discipline and dedication eluded him until he hit thirty. Luckily since then he’s thrown himself into his craft with ever increasing passion, dedication and downright mania. Like a career criminal he started small, writing his own Star Trek fan fiction before graduating to more original works and to date has written 4 novels. The first of these, the vampire/ zombie (or possibly zombie/vampire) post-apocalyptic actioner City of Caves, he published via Lulu. He’s also published a collection of short fiction, The Devils of Amber Street, via Amazon. He’s had multiple short stories published in myriad publications, including the British Fantasy Society Journal, and blogs at http://werewolvesonthemoon.wordpress.com/

R. B. Harkess scuttles around the abandoned wasteland north of London, avoiding the search and detain sweeps of the Angel militia as he scribbles the warning notes and hides them in the info-caches that are the only way to share information between the Free as they claw out an existence in the Dark Times. All his notes are signed www.rbharkess.com, though nobody can remember what it means.

Ruth E.J. Booth lives in the shadow of sandstone, on the edge of a valley of trees. There she runs, writes about metal for magazines, sings of the dead in Cathedrals, photographs music makers and drunks for their own purposes – and writes tales, such as this one. Her ancestors were sheep thieves and sailors. Her descendants will sing under orange skies. Follow her at @ruthmidget on twitter, until she has a website in order.

Academic, creative director, writer and Final Girl, Tracy Fahey has battled the apocalypse on many fronts, using her wits, pluck and an inordinate amount of information gleaned from horror movies. Her short story in this collection, Coming Back, is dedicated to fellow foot- soldiers from the front line, Tara and Scott, with thanks. Tracy runs a fine art department and an art collective, Gothicise (www.gothicise.weebly.com). Previous short stories have been published in the Impossible Spaces anthology(2013) and in the forthcoming Hauntings anthology (2014), both published by Hic Dragones Press. Her research and creative writing alike are continually fascinated by aspects of the unheimlich, from doppelgangers to haunted houses to the inevitable return of the repressed. In her spare time she relaxes by writing a PhD.

The Eve Series

The minds behind Tales of Eve and Eve of War

 

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Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Lincolnshire, studied and trained in Reading and now lives in Leeds. He is known for the Shadows of the Apt fantasy series starting with Empire in Black and Gold and currently up to Book 8, The Air War. His hobbies include stage-fighting, and tabletop, live and online role-playing. More information and short stories can be found at www.shadowsoftheapt.com

Alasdair Stuart is the host of award-winning podcast Pseudopod (www.pseudopod.org) and works as a freelance writer and journalist, specializing in genre fiction in all its forms. Yes, including that one. An enthusiastic amateur baker and martial artist, he’s worked for The Guardian, magazines
such as Neo, Sci Fi Now and Death Ray and blogs for sfx. co.uk, as well as his own site, www.alasdairstuart.com. His collection of every 2012 Pseudopod essay, The Pseudopod Tapes Volume 1, is also available from Fox Spirit Books.

Andrew Reid is a writer obsessed with the fantastic and the adventurous. Born in Scotland, he lives in Yorkshire with four chickens, three cats, and an ever-growing stack of unsold novels. You can find him on Twitter as @mygoditsraining, where he will be overjoyed by any mention of movies from
the eighties or nineties.

C.J. Paget hates writing bios. Bios remind him that he’s got none of the qualifications to be a science-fiction writer. He doesn’t have a PhD in Astro-physics. He wasn’t born into a literary or scientific family. He’s never worked in interesting fields or places. He wasn’t there when major world events went down. He’s never lived in far-off places and bathed in the tides of other cultures. He doesn’t even own a cat. He did win the 2011 James White Award. So that’s something.

Francesca Terminiello lives in Surrey with her family and a growing collection of swords. She has previously contributed
a short story to the Tales of the Nun & Dragon anthology, also published by Fox Spirit, and is currently putting the finishing
touches to her debut novel, a dark and bloody fantasy noir co-written with David Murray. She spends her spare time contributing to several blogs, as well as practicing and researching Historical European Martial Arts, in particular 16th Century Bolognese swordsmanship and 17th Century Italian rapier. Fran talks swords at The Girls Guide to the Apocalypse http://www.ggsapocalypse.co.uk and promotes women in Historical European Martial Arts at Esfinges http://esfinges1.wix.com/e. Her own blog can be found at http://franterminiello.wordpress.com/ where she juggles both pen and sword.

Juliet E McKenna has always been fascinated by myth and history, other worlds and other peoples. Her debut novel, The Thief’s Gamble, was published in 1999 and 2012 sees the publication of her fifteenth epic fantasy, Defiant Peaks, concluding The Hadrumal Crisis trilogy. She reviews for the web and magazines notably Interzone and Albedo One, teaches creative writing from time to time and fits all this around her husband and teenage sons. She writes diverse shorter fiction from stories for themed anthologies to a handful of tales for Doctor Who, Torchwood and Warhammer 40k, always enjoying the challenge of writing something new and different to her novels.

Paul Weimer An expat New Yorker who has found himself living in Minnesota for the last 9 years, Paul Weimer has been reading SF and Fantasy for over 30 years and exploring the world of roleplaying games for over 25 years. Almost as long as he has been reading, and watching movies, he has enjoyed telling people what he has thought of them and trying his own hand at writing fiction as well. In addition to his reading, writing, and gaming interests, Paul enjoys taking architectural and landscape photography, with the occasional picture of a SF or Fantasy author who comes to town. Besides his chatty presence on Twitter (@Princejvstin) Paul can be found at his own blog, Blog Jvstin Style, the Functional Nerds, the SF Signal Community, Livejournal and many other places on
the Internet.

Ren Warom is a writer of the strange, dark and bizarre, not known for an ability to fit into boxes of any description. She’s a certified Pirate-nun, mum to three spawn, slave to several cats, writing and editing obsessive and general all round weirdo. The word askance was invented for the way people tend to look at her. Represented by the fabulous Jennifer Udden of Donald Maass Literary Agency, Ren’s looking to traumatise a book
shop near you very soon. Find her on twitter @RenWarom and on the web at http://renwaromsumwelt.wordpress.com.

Rob Haines is a writer, podcaster and ex-turtle biologist. His work is collected at www.generationminusone.com, and he can be found on Twitter as @Rob_Haines.

Suzanne McLeod is the author of the Spellcrackers.com urban fantasy series about magic, mayhem and murder – liberally spiced with hot guys, kick-ass chicks and super-cool supes! The Shifting Price of Prey – #4 – is her latest book. Suzanne has been a cocktail waitress, dance group roadie,
and retail manager before becoming a writer. She was born in London (her favourite city and home to Spellcrackers.com) and now lives with her husband on the sunny (sometimes) South Coast of England, about a mile away from the sea.

 
Born in Scotland, Andrew Reid is a teacher and author currently living in Sweden. He writes fantasy and thrillers, and harbours an unhealthy obsession with baking, coffee and playing video games. His first fantasy novel, Kingdom’s Fall, is currently available on Amazon. You can find him on Twitter as @mygoditsraining.

Rahne Sinclair lived in Scotland for many years before moving south of the border. She has a love of ancient pantheons, particularly Norse, and their rich mythology often serves as inspiration for her writing. She has a fondness for bows, werewolves, tattoos, and cider. Her writing can be found in 9 out of the 10 Fox Pockets.

Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire before heading off to Reading to study psychology and zoology. He subsequently ended up in law and has worked as a legal executive in both Reading and Leeds, where he now lives. Married, he is a keen live role-player and has trained in stage-fighting and historical combat. He maintains a keen interest in history and the biological sciences especially entomology.
Adrian is the author of the acclaimed 10-book Shadows of the Apt series starting with Empire in Black and Gold published by Tor UK. His other works for Tor UK include standalone novels Guns of the Dawn and Children of Time and the new series Echoes of the Fall starting with The Tiger and the Wolf. Other major works include short story collection Feast and Famine for Newcon Press and novellas The Bloody Deluge (in Journal of the Plague Year) and Even in the Cannon’s Mouth (in Monstrous Little Voices) for Abaddon. He has also written numerous short stories and been shortlisted for the David Gemmell Legend Award and the British Fantasy Award.

Juliet E McKenna is a British fantasy author living in the Cotswolds, UK. Loving history, myth and other worlds since she first learned to read, she has written fifteen epic fantasy novels, from The Thief’s Gamble which began The Tales of Einarinn in 1999, to Defiant Peaks concluding The Hadrumal Crisis trilogy. Exploring new opportunities in digital publishing, she’s re-issuing her backlist as well as bringing out original fiction. She also writes diverse shorter fiction, reviews for web and print magazines and promotes
SF&Fantasy by blogging, attending conventions and teaching creative writing. Learn more about all of this at julietemckenna.
com 

Alasdair Stuart is the owner of Escape Artists, which produces the Escape Pod, Pseudopod, Podcastle and Cast of Wonders podcasts as well as digital magazine Mothership Zeta. He’s the author of The Pseudopod Tapes, several stories in the Fox Pockets series and writes for tor.com. He can be found tweeting, usually about movies at @AlasdairStuart. He can be found blogging, usually about movies, food or exercise, at www.alasdairstuart.com

Francis Knight was born and lives in Sussex, England. When not living in her own head, she enjoys SF&F geekery, WWE geekery, teaching her children Monty Python quotes, and boldly going and seeking out new civilizations. R. J. Davnall has been telling stories all her life, and thus probably shouldn’t be trusted to write her own bio. She lectures in philosophy at Liverpool University. Rarely seen in the wild except in a hurry, she spends most of her free time intently studying video games and their storytelling 

An expat New Yorker who has unexpectedly found himself living in Minnesota for the last 13 years, Paul Weimer has been reading SF and Fantasy for over 35 years and exploring the world of roleplaying games for over 30 years. Almost as long as he has been reading and watching movies, he has enjoyed telling people what he has thought of them and trying his own hand at writing fiction as well. In addition to his reading, writing, and gaming interests, Paul enjoys taking architectural and landscape photography, with the occasional
picture of a SF or Fantasy author who comes to town. Besides his chatty presence on Twitter (@Princejvstin) Paul can be found at his own blog, Blog Jvstin Style, SF Signal and many other places on the Internet.

Born the same year as the Russians launched Sputnik, S.J.Higbee confidently expected that by the time she reached adulthood, the human race would have a pioneer colony on the Moon and be heading off towards Mars. So she was at a loss to know what to do once she realised the Final Frontier wasn’t an option and rather lost her head – she tried a lot of jobs she didn’t like and married a totally unsuitable man. Now she’s finally come to terms with the fact that she’ll never leave Earth, she has a lovely time writing science fiction
novels and teaching Creative Writing at Northbrook College in Worthing. She lives in Littlehampton on the English south
coast with a wonderful husband and a ridiculous number of books.

Rob Haines is a writer, comic co-conspirator & mercenary code-wrangler who lurks amongst the rafters of a Welsh chapel. Find him on Twitter as @rob_haines 

K T Davies writes about herself in the third person, practices historical European martial arts, and plays computer games. When she isn’t messing about with swords and computers she writes. Last year she was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Society’s Best Fantasy Novel Award, which was nice. You can find her on Twitter as @KTScribbles

Ren is a writer of the strange, dark and bizarre, not known for an ability to fit into boxes of any description. She’s repped by the fabulous Jennifer Udden of Donald Maass Literary Agency and has two cyberweird novels forthcoming in the UK and the US with Titan Books – ESCAPOLOGY in 2016 and VIROLOGY in 2017. Ren tweets here: @RenWarom, Waffles on Facebook here:
Ren Warom and YouTube’s here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJG0N7oVbG2AaIW1UM1gGug

Alec McQuay hates writing bios but mean people keep making him. During happier times he writes from his home in Cornwall, trying to make some progress before he passes out and the cats start licking his eyelids. He loves science fiction, horror and action movies, playing the guitar and once hugged Kriss Akabusi. When he’s not writing he probably should be, but instead of that he lifts weights. Big ones. He’s really very impressive.

Imprisoned, for a crime she more than likely committed, deep beneath the majestic Alps in a treacherous network of caves, the Right Reverend Chloë Yates chisels her work by candlelight and then hoists the inscribed tablets topside via a complicated system of ropes and pulleys, achieved only with the assistance of her rodent bandit army. No one knows what she looks like, both because it is dark down there and the last known portrait of her was painted by that infamous forger of the seventeenth century, Count Shen A. Nigan, but you can find her work on the fabled internet via the portal www.chloeyates.com or follow her on the fading path that is twitter via
the moniker @shloobee

Geraldine has a number of short stories published, including her collection titled ‘Weird Wild’. Her YA novel ‘Akane: The Last of the Orions’ was published last year. Geraldine has recently become the Commissioning Editor for Fennec Books, the children’s imprint of Fox Spirit Books. She currently lives in the UK with a travelling teapot, a bouncing beagle, a cheeky mini-human and a very patient husband.

The Bushy Tales

The contributors to the Bushy Tales anthologies, a foxy lot. This collection includes the books that started it all, Tales of the Nun and Dragon.

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Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Lincolnshire, studied and trained in Reading and now lives in Leeds. He is known for the Shadows of the Apt fantasy series starting with Empire in Black and Gold and has now passed Book 8, The Air War. His hobbies include stage-fighting, and tabletop, live and online role-playing. More information and short stories can be found at www.shadowsoftheapt.com

Alec McQuay juggles writing with a love of Thai Boxing, weight training and cake. When he isn’t writing, Alec can be found on Facebook, either complaining about the things that have kept him from writing or talking about future occasions upon which he will be writing. Sometimes these occasions will come to pass and sometimes not, but that’s just the sort of sexy maverick he is.

Andrew Reid is a writer obsessed with the fantastic and the adventurous. Born in Scotland, he lives in Yorkshire where he is working on his first novel. You can find him on Twitter as @mygoditsraining, where he will be overjoyed by any mention of movies from the eighties or nineties.

Bolt-01 is half of the editorial team behind the critically acclaimed comics FutureQuake, Something Wicked and the 2000 AD Fanzines Zarjaz & Dogbreath. www.futurequake.co.uk

Cat Connor is a New Zealand author of international thrillers or if you prefer, international woman of mystery. Her first novel, killerbyte, was a finalist in the 2010 EPIC awards. An anthology she was delighted to be included in, ‘Tales for Canterbury’, won the prestigious Sir Julius Vogel award for Best Collected works, 2012. Cat is published by Rebel ePublishers, and has four novels available – killerbyte, terrorbyte, exacerbyte, and flashbyte. Killerbyte is currently being produced as a talking book for the Blind via the Royal New Zealand Blind Foundation. Her days are spent writing amidst the general chaos of children and with her retired racing greyhound – Romeo, keeping her company.
Visit her website: http://catconnor.wordpress.com/

Catherine Rogers grew up in West Wales and has always loved storytelling. She has collected thousands of stories both in print and in her head. Her first story on paper is being published later this year in a collection called Overheard by Salt . Overheard is edited by Jonathan Taylor and features
many wonderful stories including those from Robert Shearman, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan.

Chloë Yates currently lives in the middle of Switzerland with her bearded paramour, Mr Y, and their disapproving dog, Miss Maudie. Surrounded by books, effigies of owls, and the great god Ganesh, she contemplates many philosophical questions, including how on earth they fit rugby players into such small shorts. She has been published in the Fox Spirit Books’ (www.foxspirit.co.uk) anthologies Weird Noir (2012) Noir Carnival (2013) and Piracy (2013) and has several more stories coming out in the next year. You can find her online at www.chloeyates.com and she wanders erratically through Twitter under the sobriquet @shloobee

Colin F. Barnes is a writer (and publisher with Anachron Press) of dark and daring fiction. He takes his influence from everyday life, and the weird happenings that go on in the shadowy locales of Essex in the UK. Colin likes to blend genres and is currently working on a Cyberpunk/ Technothriller
serial ‘The Techxorcist.’ which combines elements of Sci-Fi, Thriller, and Horror. Website: www.colinfbarnes.com/books/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/ColinFBarnes

Francesca Terminiello lives in Surrey with her family and a growing collection of swords. She is currently putting the finishing touches to her debut novel, a dark and bloody fantasy noir co-written with David Murray. She spends her spare time contributing to several blogs, as well as practicing and researching Historical European Martial Arts, in particular 16th Century Bolognese swordsmanship and 17th Century Italian rapier.
Fran talks swords at The Girls Guide to the Apocalypse http://www.ggsapocalypse.co.uk and promotes women in Historical European Martial Arts at Esfinges http://esfinges1. wix.com/e. Her own blog can be found at http://franterminiello.wordpress.com/ where she juggles both pen and sword.

Geraldine Clark Hellery grew up surrounded by books. Saturday mornings would be spent at the book shop, while Saturday afternoons would be spent in a faraway land. Raised on a diet of Nancy Drew, Red Dwarf and pancakes, her passion for creative writing sprouted. Travelling the world fed her imagination, filling it with ideas and stories of dragons, water gods, epic battles and so much more. Every November since 2008 is devoted to National Novel Writing Month and so far Geraldine has written seven novels covering Science Fiction and Fantasy, aimed at children, young adults and adults. Now the next adventure is entering the publishing world, with her contribution to ‘The Nun and Dragon’ being her first published work. Geraldine is helping prepare women for the end of the world with a number of articles published on ‘The Girls’ Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse’ including a very important article about shoes as well as how to survive if you’re turned into an animal. Geraldine currently lives in the UK with an orchid who has triffid aspirations, a magic teapot, a travelling dog called Mrf and a very patient husband.

Haralambi Markov is a writer, reviewer, columnist and as of recently an editor. Generally off-kilter, but most pleasant, you can find Markov sitting somewhere with fingers on some sort of keyboard. Markov has completed his Masters in Advertising and Media Communications and has transitioned from working as an SEO expert to working as a freelance content writer and marketer. You can find him on  Twitter @HaralambiMarkov or and his blog The Alternative Typewriter: http://haralambimarkov.com/blog/

James Bennett is, in fact, a changeling. A few days following his birth, the fair folk snatched him out of his crib and left an acorn in his place. The acorn grew up into a somewhat mischievous character, prone to dancing in woodland groves, playing the occasional prank and writing highly unlikely – but no less true – stories, such as the one in this book. Feel free to follow his shenanigans on Twitter: @I_James_Bennett and find more tall tales via his blog: http://jamesbennett72.blogspot.co.uk

Jasper Bark finds writing author biographies and talking about himself in the third person faintly embarrassing. Telling you that he’s an award winning author of four cult novels including the highly acclaimed Way of the Barefoot Zombie, just sounds like boasting. Then he has to mention that he’s written 12 children’s books and hundreds of comics and graphic novels and he wants to just curl up. He cringes when he has to reveal that his work has been translated into five different languages and is used in schools throughout the UK to help improve literacy, or that he was awarded the This Is Horror Award for his recent anthology Dead Air. Maybe he’s too British, or maybe he just needs a good enema, but he’s glad this bio is now over.

Jay Faulkner resides in Northern Ireland with his wife, Carole, and their two boys, Mackenzie and Nathaniel. He says that while he is a writer, martial artist, sketcher, and dreamer he’s mostly just a husband and father. His work has been published widely, both online and in print anthologies, and was short-listed in the 2010 Penguin Ireland Short Story Competition. He is currently working on his first novel. Jay founded, and edits, ‘With Painted Words’ – www.withpaintedwords.com – a creative writing site with inspiration from monthly image prompts, and ‘The WiFiles’ – www.thewifiles.com – an online speculative fiction magazine, published weekly. He can also be found as a regular co-host and contributor on the Following The Nerd radio show – www.followingthenerd.com. For more information visit – www.jayfaulkner.com

Joan De La Haye writes horror and some very twisted thrillers. She invariably wakes up in the middle of the night, because she’s figured out yet another freaky way to mess with her already screwed up characters. Joan is interested in some seriously weird shit. That’s probably also one of the reasons she writes horror. Joan is deep, dark and seriously twisted and so is her writing. Joan’s novels, Horror, Shadows , her brutal crime novel
Requiem in E Sharp and her zombie novella Oasis are published through Fox Spirit. Visit her website http://joandelahaye.com/

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K.A. Laity All-purpose writer, Fulbrighter, uberskiver, medievalist, flâneuse, techno-shamanka, Broad Universe social media wrangler, History Witch, Pirate Pub Captain “Laity is a remarkable sorceress indeed,” says Elizabeth Hand. Her novel Owl Stretching (Immanion Press) arrives in September 2012 and her dark fantasy collection Unquiet Dreams (Tirgearr Publishing) took wing in October 2012.  http://www.kalaity.com

Karen Davies was born in West Yorkshire. She has a degree in literature from the Open University, and a modest comic collection. Karen share’s her life with an understanding partner, two savage children, three silly dogs, and an angry cat. She’s lived int’north of England and the Republic of China. Karen currently resides in suburban bliss in the West Midlands. She’s worked as an actor, a teacher, and a scaffolder (amongst many other things). A nerd and proud, Karen plays with dice and swords and all manner of foolish, and potentially dangerous things. The most exhilaratingly stupid thing she’s done was to fall down Yu Shan, the highest mountain in Northeast Asia. After much hilarity, Karen finally stopped falling and was led to safety by a couple of local tribesmen in exchange for some cigarettes

Margrét Helgadóttir is a Norwegian-Icelandic writer who was born and lived parts of childhood and youth in East- and West-Africa. She now lives in Oslo, Norway. Margrét started to submit fiction in English for publication in autumn 2012. Her stories have so far appeared in magazines like Luna Station Quarterly, Tuck Magazine, The Linnet’s Wings and Negative Suck, and she’s got stories in the 2013 print anthologies Impossible Spaces, Tales of the Fox & Fae and the three first volumes of the Fox Pockets from Fox Spirit Books. Her first story was one of the winners of Fox Spirit Books’ International Talk Like a Pirate Day story competition in 2012. You can find out more about Margrét on her site: http://margrethelgadottir.wordpress.com

Mark West has been publishing in the small press since 1999 and has had over sixty short stories appear, two novels and a collection. Two novellas are forthcoming from Pendragon Press and he’s currently struggling with a novel. Mark lives in Rothwell, Northants with his wife Alison and their young son Matthew. He can be contacted through his website at www.markwest.org.uk
Amazon page

Mhairi Simpson is a fantasy writer (mostly blood and inner demons) and inveterate traveller (mostly Europe and South America). An only child who grew up in boarding schools and with a background in modern languages and paper pushing, Mhairi has spent most of her life with words on a page, leading her to realise her best shot at faking sanity is to be a full time author/editor. http://mhairisimpson.com/

Pat Kelleher lives in Penury, Greater Manchester, with his wife and step-daughter. He has spent most of his time writing for a wide variety of TV licensed characters across a bewildering array of media. He has several non-fiction books to his credit and writes educational strips and stories for the RSPB Youth magazines. His BSFA nominated sci-fi pulp adventure series, No Man’s World is published by Abaddon Books. You can find out more at http://nomansworldblog.blogspot.co.uk/ and http://twitter.com/PennineFusilier  Amidst all this, he has somehow managed to avoid all those careers and part-time jobs that look so good on a dust jacket. You can, however, find him on twitter- http://twitter.com/patkelleher

Peter Ray Allison Having the industrial backdrop of Los Angeles 2019 from Blade Runner (actually ICI Wilton near Middlesbrough) during his formative years obviously made an impression on Peter. From an early age he had a fascination with technology; and when most of his peers were following football teams, Peter was far more interested in William Gibson and the Science-Fiction genre. It was in 2006 that Peter had his first article published, which chronicled his experiences travelling to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. The following year, Peter joined the Pennyblackmusic
online music magazine, where he still regularly reviews albums and interviews bands. He has written a daily blog for Dominion and currently writes for OneMetal and the Huffington Post. Peter lives in rural Derbyshire with his wife and two children. His hobbies include gaming, dragging his family to
Science-Fiction conventions, and feigning deafness so he can keep his nose in a book at dinner time. ‘The Sound of Latex’ is Peter’s first short story.

Ren Warom is a writer of the strange, dark and bizarre, not known for fitting into boxes of any description. She’s a certified pirate-nun, a slave to several cats and the official wrangler to three spawn of varying sizes. Published in a few random places and represented by the magnificent
Jennifer Udden of Donald Maass, Ren hopes to infect many bookcases with her brain drippings in the very near future. You can find Ren wittering on a blog: http://renwaromsumwelt. wordpress.com/ being vaguely annoying on twitter: @RenWarom and muddying Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ren.warom – caution is advised as a Ren is an unpredictable creature, approach bearing gifts of cake to be
assured of personal safety.

Sammy HK Smith is a full time detective in the police, part time writer and 100% geek. A massive lover of all things fantasy and science fiction, she is proud to admit that her nickname is Starbuck, she plays board based RPG’s, is an amateur archer, and has a secret yearning to try LARPing …
Snuggled away in her little cosy corner of Oxfordshire, she lives with her wonderful husband, 12 cats, 2 dogs and multiple fish, and here she pours out the overspill of her imagination and organises the letters into words: creating her characters, worlds and stories. And no, the ‘HK’ does not stand for Hunter Killer … Unless, of course you cross her: you have been warned. www.sammyhksmith.com

Sarah Cawkwell is a great believer in the adage that becoming an adult is mandatory and growing up is optional. She’s been writing stories for many years. She has had several short stories and two novels published by the Black Library; The Gildar Rift, a Space Marines Battles story and Valkia the Bloody, a Warhammer Fantasy tale. Sarah’s Occasionally Eloquent Musings can be found at http://pyroriffic.wordpress.com

Simon Bestwick is the author of the novels Tide of Souls and The Faceless, the collections A Hazy Shade Of Winter and Pictures of the Dark, and a chapbook, Angels of the Silences. His short fiction has been reprinted in The Best Horror of the Year alongside work by Stephen King and Peter
Straub, and shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award. He lives in Lancashire, is working on his third and fourth novels, and doesn’t get anywhere near enough sleep.

S.J. Caunt currently lives in Leicester for his sins (which are many!) and has several short stories floating around out there in book ether.
He’s currently working on the finishing touches to his first YA project, unless the end of the world gets in the way and hiccups his endeavours!

Soussherpa is a Graduate from Five Towns College, Dix Hills, Long Island, New York. A self taught artist who has been drawing as long as they can remember. Soussherpa is a musician and have dabbled in film. They write, done comic books, comic book covers, album artwork, Logo work and a little advertising work. They’ve also had their work used in short films as well as my music: www.soussherpa.com soussherpa.deviantart.com/

T F Grant is a pen-name of Stephen Godden  Stephen Godden writes speculative fiction. He reads pretty much anything. He uses the second to fuel the first. (And writes this stuff in the third, because somebody told him that he should and he didn’t like to argue.) Other than that, Steve’s just a bloke of independent penury and incidental personality. He uses the name Stephen Godden for the Fantastical end of the spectrum and the name TF Grant for the Science Fictional end of the spectrum.

V.C. Linde has been writing poetry for most of her life in a wandering variety of styles and now writes custom written poems for international customers. She has been published in the anthology Dark Currents and won the 2012 NYT Found Poetry competition.

Wayne Simmons was born in Belfast and has loitered with intent around the horror genre for some years. He penned reviews and interviews for several online zines before publication of his debut novel in 2008. His work has since been published in the UK, Austria, Germany and Spain.
Wayne currently lives with his ghoulfiend and a Jack Russell terrier called Dita. Look out for him at various  genre and tattoo cons or catch him online at: www.waynesimmons.org

Brought forth from that most holy union of the juice of Hera’s golden apples and the shimmering hair of a demigod’s nut sac, Chloë Yates’s mind sometimes takes a dark turn, but never on a rainy day. While she is a fan of both mice and Minotaurs, she could never eat a whole one… of either. You can find her work in nine of the ten Fox Pockets, as well as in various other Fox Spirit compendiums,
but you must wait with bated breath until at least next year for a whole volume of her own. In the meantime, find her on the celestial webs at www.chloeyates.com or on Twitter under the sobriquet @shloobee.

K.T. Davies has a lifetime membership of Club Nerd and plays all manner of computer/console games as well as the unplugged varieties which she sometimes reviews for SFcrowsnest. K.T. Davies also reviews books n’ stuff. As if that wasn’t enough to prove a platinum geek credit card, K.T. Davies also practices medieval martial arts (occasionally on horseback) , larps, reads comics and wargames. 

James Bennett is a British Fantasy writer. He grew up reading Greek myths (among others) and is often found sat wondering what they’re up to now. ‘Provoking Cerberus’ is one such story. If you’d like to read more in this vein, his debut Fantasy novel ‘Chasing Embers’, the inaugural part of a series, comes out from Orbit Books in September this year. James Bennett is currently travelling in Europe. Feel free to follow him on the Twitter: @wytcheboy

Nerine Dorman is a South African creative who wears an assortment of hats. They are very nice hats. One of them has a phoenix feather. Another is trimmed in dragon scales. She also tells stories and provides free entertainment daily on Twitter @nerinedorman

Jay Faulkner resides in Northern Ireland with his wife, Carole, and their two boys, Mackenzie and Nathaniel. He says that while he is a writer, martial artist, sketcher, and dreamer he’s mostly just a husband and father. His work has been published widely, both online and in print anthologies, and was short-listed in the 2010 Penguin Ireland Short Story Competition. He is currently working on his first novel. Jay founded, and edits, ‘With Painted Words’ – www.withpaintedwords.com – a creative writing site with inspiration from monthly image prompts, and ‘The WiFiles’ – www.thewifiles.com – an online speculative fiction magazine, published weekly. He can also be found as a regular co-host and contributor on the Following The Nerd radio show – www.followingthenerd.com. For more information visit – www.jayfaulkner.com

Sarah Cawkwell is a freelance author hailing originally from the South of England, but who, after not taking a left turn at Albuquerque, now finds herself in the North East. Her first sci-fi novel, ‘The Gildar Rift’ was published by the Black Library in December 2011 and her first fantasy novel ‘Valkia the Bloody’ in July 2012. She appeared in the first Fox Spirit ‘Tales of the Nun & Dragon’ with a story about a hero so inept that he makes the British Government look competent. Sarah finds talking about herself in the third person incredibly hard to manage and so generally prefers to spend her ‘free’ time reading, watching films, playing computer games and playing her music ear-bleedingly in the car.

Pat Kelleher is a freelance writer. He served his time writing a wide variety of TV licensed characters, across a bewildering array of media, has several non-fiction books to his credit, and a collection of children’s stories published by Bloomsbury. His No Man’s World series of pulp sci-fi novels is published by Abaddon Books, along with his Gods and Monsters e-novella, Drag Hunt. He also worked on Sniper Elite 3, the latest in the video game series from Rebellion and has short stories published by Tickety Boo Press and the award-winning Fox Spirit Books.

C C D Leijenaar works in publishing and occasionally writes.

Joan De La Haye writes horror and some very twisted thrillers. She invariably wakes up in the middle of the night, because she’s figured out yet another freaky way to mess with her already screwed up characters. Joan is interested in some seriously weird shit. That’s probably also one of the reasons she writes horror. Joan is deep, dark and seriously twisted and so is her writing.
You can stalk Joan on her website: https://joandelahaye.com/

Andrew Reid is a writer obsessed with the fantastic and the adventurous. Born in Scotland, he lives in Stockholm where he is working on a growing pile of SF/F novels. You can find him on Twitter as @mygoditsraining, where he will be overjoyed by any mention of movies from the eighties or nineties. 

A resident of the dark and frozen reaches of Northern England, Ben Stewart is an aspiring writer who cites the pulp greats like Howard, Lovecraft, Wagner and Burroughs as his main influences. He is an inveterate geek with a love of Japanese Kaiju movies, superhero comics and miniature wargaming, but despite this he’s somehow married with three kids. Ben has managed to get a handful of his short stories published in various anthologies though his ultimate goal of actually completing a novel-length work still eludes him.

Catherine Hill comes from Worcestershire in England. She spent much of her childhood with her head buried in books and as a teenager mice were her favourite animals; she still has various rodent-based ornaments. An interest in history and mythology, especially the ancient Mediterranean kind, led her to an Ancient History degree. A love of fantastical and impossible stories led her to most of her favourite people. It’s probably fairly clear why this particular anthology is right up her street. She lives in Birmingham with her husband, her baby and a pet rat. She rambles about things she enjoys at http://www.catherinetjhill.blogspot.com

Jan Siegel was twenty-four when pulled out of the slush pile at Faber for the prestigious Introduction series. Faber wanted her to be a ‘literary’ writer but she was keen to write popular fiction and has published in several genres, under several different names, with several major publishers (eg Hamish Hamilton, Viking Penguin, Little Brown, Century Arrow, Harper Collins). She prefers SF and fantasy realism and has won/been nominated for awards and received wide critical acclaim in all genres. Her fantasy is often bracketed with Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling and her SF has been compared to Stanislaw Lem. As Jemma Harvey, her excursions into romcom (more com than rom) led her to be picked by Heat magazine for their Top Ten Summer Reads. She also writes poetry, usually incorporated into her novels, and is currently involved in a major project to promote great poets.

TJ Everley is a large hairy creature that roams the British Midlands. There have been numerous sightings over the past three decades; Several American amateur filmmakers have attempted to capture footage of the beast, but until authenticity of these images can be confirmed, the subject remains controversial. Some disputed sightings have been attributed to bears, bigfoot, and Tim Robbins

Names in Noir

The Authors behind Weird Noir, Noir Carnival and Drag Noir

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AJ Sikes is the author of Gods of Chicago, a new noir urban fantasy released in serial installments through Anachron Press. His stories also appear in anthologies by Fox Spirit Books (Noir Carnival), Xchyler Publishing, and KnightWatch Press. When he’s not scribbling, you can find him editing for his fellow independent authors or contributing to the annual sawdust output in his woodshop. Visit him at ajsikes.com or on Twitter @SikesAaron

Allan Watson is a writer whose work leans towards the horror and supernatural end of the spectrum. He is the author of four novels – ‘Dreaming in the Snakepark’, ‘Carapace’, ‘The Garden of Remembrance’, ‘1-2-3-4’, and a motley collection of short stories called ‘…..And Other Stories’. His latest doomed venture has involved acting as ghost writer for the Reverend Strachan McQuade’s opus of bad taste comedy ‘Invergallus’. In between  the books, Allan wrote extensively for BBC Radio Scotland, churning out hundreds of comedy sketches, in addition to being a regular contributor for the world famous ‘Herald Diary’. He also masquerades as a  composer/musician, collaborating with crime writer Phil Rickman in a band called Lol Robinson with Hazey Jane II whose albums have sold on four different continents (Antarctica was a hard one to crack). Allan lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland, but has never worn the kilt or eaten a deep fried Mars Bar. He is currently pretending to work on something new.

Andrez Bergen is an expat Australian writer, journalist, DJ, and ad hoc saké connoisseur who’s been entrenched in Tokyo, Japan, for the past 11 years. He published noir/sci-fi novel ‘Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat’ in 2011 and the surreal fantasy ‘One Hundred Years of Vicissitude’ through Perfect Edge Books in 2012. He’s currently working on #3, titled ‘Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa?’ Bergen has published short stories through Crime Factory, Shotgun Honey, Snubnose Press, Solarcide and Another Sky Press, and worked on translating and adapting the scripts for feature films by Mamoru Oshii, Kazuchika Kise and Naoyoshi Shiotani. http://andrezbergen.wordpress.com/

Asher Wismer is an Editor for eNotes.com, living and working in Maine. He is a second-generation writer; his father Don Wismer published four science-fiction books in the 1980s. Asher’s flash fiction is featured on the website 365tomorrows.com, and he has had
three short stories published in anthologies from Wild Wolf Publishing (‘December in Florida,’ Holiday of the Dead), Matt Hilton (‘Jobs Taken,’ Action: Pulse Pounding Tales Vol. 1), and KnightWatch Press (‘Safety in Numbers,’ anthology title pending). ‘Evil and Life’ will be his fourth published short story.

Carol Borden is a maker of weird artsy things, a writer and purveyor of crazy talk, bringer of the wrong. Her stories appear in Fox Spirits anthologies, Weird Noir; Carnival Noir; and in the upcoming, The Girl At The End Of The World. She is the comics editor and Evil Overlord at the website, The Cultural Gutter. Some of her favorite articles have been collected into a book, The Cultural Gutter, available from Carnegie-Mellon University’s ETC Press. She also creates monster-themed art. Keep up with her doings at her personal website: http://www.monstrousindustry.wordpress.com

Chloë Yates toured the world for many years with J.B.Lansbury’s Travelling Circus Company as Scheherazade The Sibilant Snake Woman from Beneath the Hot Sands of Zanzibar (although no one is quite sure why as she is, in fact, from Kent). It proved an excellent cover for her real role as an operative for the Skulk, an elite band of ninja foxes. Forced into hiding after a routine job went bad, she embarked on establishing a new life. After extensive and excruciating epilation, Chloë turned to writing for comfort. In October 2012, under her new identity, she was one of the winners of Fox Spirit Books’ International Talk Like a Pirate Day Flash Fiction contest with her story “Leave the Pistol Behind”, which can be found in the first of the Fox Pocket series, Piracy, while her noirish chops previously slathered into this volume’s predecessor, Weird Noir (2012). She’s currently working on a big idea or two, and writing short stories. You can read her ranting at www.chloe-yates.blogpost.com  and she sometimes wanders through twitter under the sobriquet @shloobee. She is suspicious of dolls.

Christopher L. Irvin scribbles about the dark and mysterious and dreams of one day writing full-time. His stories have appeared twice in the University of Maine at Machias Binnacle Ultra-Short Competition, The Undead That Saved Christmas Vol. 3 Monster Mash! and Dreadworks Journal. He lives with his wife and son in Boston, Massachusetts. www.HouseLeagueFiction.com

Emma Teichmann loves cotton candy and the teacup ride, but can’t hit coconuts for shit. She also loves writing, fighting, and music-making. On weekdays she can be found with her lawyer’s cap on. She can also be found at https://www.facebook.com/#!/emma.teichmann.5. Emma’s story  ‘Silvermelt’ is published in the Fox Pockets Piracy anthology, and her story ‘The Mimicians’ is in the Shapeshifters edition.

Hannah Kate is a Manchester-based poet, short story writer and editor. Her work has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, and her first full-length poetry collection, Variant Spelling, was published by Hic Dragones in 2011. Under the name Hannah Priest, she is an academic writer and lecturer. Hannah’s two personas are meant to be separate but are currently locked in a battle for territory. Hannah’s website http://hannahkate.net and she’s on Twitter as @_Hannah_Kate_

Hector Acosta has recently been testing out a theory, in which he’s found that if he sits down and forces himself to write, eventually stories will fill up the blank page. He’s currently thinking of setting up speaking engagements across the country to extol his new found theory. In the meantime, he continues to write. You can find on him on the web at hjacosta.wordpress.com – which he promises to start updating more.

James Bennett escaped his cage at Waldo’s some time ago. ‘The Teeth Behind the Beard’ is his first Crime story, based on the strange things he saw there. You can find more information about his stories on his blog: http://jamesbennett72.blogspot.co.uk/ and feel free to join him on Twitter: @I_James_Bennett

Jan Kozlowski is a freelance writer, editor and researcher. Her first novel DIE, YOU BASTARD! DIE! was published in 2012 by John Skipp’s  Ravenous Shadows imprint. Her short horror stories have appeared in HUNGRY FOR YOUR  LOVE: An Anthology of Zombie Romance and FANGBANGERS: An Erotic Anthology of Fangs, Claws, Sex and Love, both edited by Lori Perkins and in NECON EBOOKS FLASH FICTION ANTHOLOGY BEST OF 2011. Her websites are: www.jankozlowski.com and www.butshekeepsanicelawn.com

Jason Michel is the Dictator over at the joyfully irreverent Pulp Metal Magazine and the author of And The Streets Screamed Blue Murder! He lives in Paris. For his sins.

Jennifer Martin lives in El Paso, TX with her husband and two children. She writes horror, urban fantasy and paranormal stories and novels. You can find her at : jenmartinauthor.wix.com/wordisart   www.Facebook.com/author.jennifermartin

Joan De La Haye writes horror and some very twisted thrillers. She invariably wakes up in the middle of the night, because she’s figured out yet another freaky way to mess with her already screwed up characters. Joan is interested in some seriously weird stuff. That’s probably also one of the reasons she writes horror. Her novels, Shadows and Requiem in E Sharp, as well as her novella, Oasis, are published by Fox Spirit. You can find Joan on her website (http://joandelahaye.com/) and follow her on Twitter (http://twitter.com/JoanDeLaHaye)

Born in Singapore but a global citizen, Joyce Chng writes mainly science fiction (SFF) and YA fiction. She likes steampunk and tales of transformation/transfiguration. Her fiction has appeared in Crossed Genres, Semaphore Magazine, Bards and Sages Quarterly and Everyday Fiction. Joyce also has a crowdfunded web novella entitled ‘Oysters, Pearls and Magic’. Her urban fantasy novels are contracted under Lyrical Press. Her YA science fiction trilogy will be published by a Singapore publisher, Books Actually. Her website is found at http://awolfstale.wordpress.com.

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K. A. Laity chose the stories for these collections after she was foolish enough to pitch the idea to ‘the muse who punches you in the face’ AKA Adele Wearing. She is grateful to Daz for doing the hard work of actually editing the stories. Her works include Chastity Flame, The Claddagh Icon, Unquiet Dreams, Owl Stretching and many many more. All-purpose writer, Fulbrighter, uberskiver, medievalist, flâneuse, techno-shamanka, Broad Universe social media wrangler, History Witch, and Pirate Pub Captain, she divides her time between Dundee & New York · http://www.kalaity.com

When Katie Young isn’t juggling projects in the high-flying world of kids’ TV, she is mastering the beasts of her imagination and whipping words into shape. She has work published in various anthologies and with direct-to-mobile publisher, Ether Books. Her story, Atelic, was shortlisted for the 2010 Writers’ & Artists’ Year Book short fiction prize, and she is also a regular contributor to the Are You Sitting Comfortably? story-telling events in London, run by White Rabbit. Katie’s first dark fantasy novel, The Other Lamb, will be published by Curiosity Quills Press in Autumn 2014. She lives in South East London with her lovely assistant and a ferocious second-hand cat. http://katieyoungauthor.wordpress.com/

Karina Fabian breathes fire, battles zombies with chainsaws and window cleaner, travels to the edge of the solar system to recover alien artifacts, and has been driven insane by psychic abilities. It’s what makes being an author such fun. She won the 2010 INDIE Award for best fantasy for Magic, Mensa and Mayhem (her first DragonEye, PI novel) and the Global E-Book Award for best horror for Neeta Lyffe, Zombie Exterminator. She’s an active member of Broad Universe and the Catholic Writers’ Guild. When not writing, she enjoys her family and swings a sword around in haidong gumbdo. http://fabianspace.com

Katherine Tomlinson is a former journalist who prefers making things up. Her stories have appeared online at sites like ThugLit, Shotgun Honey, Inner Sins, A Twist of Noir, and Eaten Alive as well as in the anthologies Pulp Ink, 2, Drunk on the Moon, and Alt-Zombie. She is the editor of the upcoming Nightfalls anthology. She lives in Los Angeles where she sees way too many movies. Find her work at her blog: http://kattomic-energy.blogspot.com/

Leeyanne Moore is literary director for The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative in Charlottesville, Virginia where she organizes readings and literary events. She has an MFA from Syracuse University and she has published short stories from her collection The House With  Chicken Feet in McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies, The Alembic, Western Humanities Review, and redlightbulbs. A lonely fabulist writer, she welcomes contact from other writers who like bizarre fiction too. Email her at leeyannemoore@gmail.com.

Li Huijia is a former editor with a penchant for folklore and fairytales. Her writing has appeared in Singaporean magazines, and her short fiction has been published in the anthology Eastern Heathens. She lives in Singapore and blogs about life, books and ice-cream at www.jiawrites.com.

Michael S. Chong was born a Scorpio in the Year of the Dog. He has lived in Toronto for most of his life but spent a few years in the Netherlands where he learned to love eating fries with mayonnaise. Now back in Canada, he enjoys the gravy and cheese curds of poutine but every once in awhile sentimentally slaps mayo on his frites. His story ‘The Creep’ is in the upcoming collection Masked Mosaic from Tyche Press.

Neal F. Litherland brings his own brand of chills and thrills from the exotic lands of Indiana, U.S.A., he puts on a show the likes of which folks won’t soon forget. Witness the dark wonders of visceral horrors, and listen to tales of far away worlds. Featured in Sidekicks with his story “Relic of the Red Planet”, and in the collection Big Damn Heroines with his spine-tingling tale “Terror on Saturn VI”. Find out where he’ll be and what he’s doing at www.Facebook.com/NealFLitherland

Paul D. Brazill was born in England and lives in Poland. He is the author of The Gumshoe, Guns Of Brixton, 13 Shots of Noir and Snapshots, and the editor of Drunk On The Moon and True Brit Grit. He writes regular columns for Pulp Metal Magazine and Out Of The Gutter Online. He is a member of International Thriller Writers Inc and the Hardboiled Collective, as well as editor-at-large for Noir Nation.

Rebecca Snow would be a lion tamer if her cats preferred flaming hoops to sleeping. She spends her days spinning cotton candy threads and weaving them into stories. Her short fiction has been published in a number of small press anthologies and online. Her online merry-go-round can be found at cemeteryflowerblog.wordpress.com. Stalk her on Twitter @cemeteryflower. And find her bloody hand on Facebook. She plants her tent stakes in Virginia

Richard Godwin is the author of critically acclaimed novels Apostle Rising, Mr. Glamour and One Lost Summer. One Lost Summer is a Noir story of fractured identity and ruined nostalgia. It is a psychological portrait of a man who blackmails his beautiful next door neighbour into playing a deadly game of identity. He is also a published poet and a produced playwright. His stories have been published in over 34 anthologies, among them his anthology of stories, Piquant: Tales Of The Mustard Man. Apostle Rising is a dark work of fiction exploring the blurred line between law and lawlessness and the motivations that lead men to kill. It digs into the scarred soul of a cop in the hunt for a killer who has stepped straight from a nightmare into the waking world. Mr. Glamour is about a world of wealthy, beautiful people who can buy anything, except safety from the killer in their midst. It is about two scarred cops who are driven to acts of darkness by the investigation. As DCI Jackson Flare and DI Mandy Steele try to catch the killer they find themselves up against a wall of secrecy. And the killer is watching everyone. Confessions Of A Hit Man is a high octane thriller with a plot that adds velocity like a well-oiled chicane. When ex-Royal Marine Jack becomes a paid assassin, work comes easily, especially when working for the Sicilian Mafia, until he gets drawn into a government plot selling enriched plutonium to a rogue Nation. It will be published in 2014 by MeMe and has already sold foreign rights in English, French, Italian and Spanish.
His fourth novel, Noir City, will be published next year in English and Italian by Atlantis. In it a Gigolo seduces the wife of a Mafia boss and is hunted across Europe. Richard Godwin was born in London and obtained a BA and MA in English and American Literature from King’s College London, where he also lectured. You can find out more about him at his website www.richardgodwin.net , where you can also read his Chin Wags At The Slaughterhouse, his highly popular and unusual interviews with other authors.

Robin Wyatt Dunn lives in The Town of the Queen of the Angels, El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, in Echo Park. He is a Member of the Horror Writers Association, and is proud to have been born in the Carter Administration. You can find him at www.robindunn.com.

Sheri White lives in Maryland with her family. She has been published in many small-press anthologies and magazines, and also has a collection to be published by Necon E-Books. In addition to writing horror, she reads and reviews for several horror publications, both online and in print. She is also an editor/proofreader for Morpheus Tales magazines, and submissions editor for SNM Magazines. When not immersed in horror, Sheri is usually on Facebook or listening to The Beatles. You can contact her at sheriw1965@yahoo.com, or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/sheriw1965.

S.L. Johnson is a well-known, if seldom seen, recluse living in Connecticut. It has been rumored that she was a messenger for the French Resistance, going by the name of ‘Le Noir Pigeon.’ Or a rich Russian heiress, disowned by her family for falling in love with a poor Norwegian carpenter. Or a woman who took leave of her senses when she was jilted at the altar. Feel free to ask her any questions about her artwork. But not about her past. www.Sljohnsonimages.com

W. P. Johnson graduated from Temple University with a degree in English Literature. He is a writer of horror, weird fiction, and a member of the Horror Writers Association. You can follow him via the moniker americantypo through twitter, wordpress, and whatever other social media is popular this week. He currently lives in Philadelphia where he is researching his first novel, a horror story about stand up comedians.

Cover by S. L. Johnson

 
Bryan Asbury (Introduction), also known on stage as Critiqa Mann, is proof that drag queens can have class. By day he is a researcher and teacher at Illinois State University where he specializes in public speaking, culture, gender and sexual identities, and communication in families and relationships. By night, he is an active member of the drag community: back-up dancing, dressing, choreographing, and performing. He has simultaneously held titles as a State champion intercollegiate public speaker and the Miss Gay Illinois USofA drag title. He is also guilty of frequently dressing his dog in cisgender and other gender drag. She hates it, but the pictures are just so funny. Sorry Daisy!

Born in the north of England in 1984, Redfern Jon Barrett is a polyamorous pagan giant with a Ph.D. in queer literature. His novel The Giddy Death is being published by Lethe Press, scheduled for release in 2015. His shorter fiction has featured in the magazines A Cappella Zoo, The Future Fire, Sleek and Corvus; the anthologies Bestiary and Heiresses of Russ; as well as the book Shaped by Time (Danish National Museum, 2012). His non-fiction has featured in German newspapers Bild and BZ, as well as Scifi Methods (2012-13), Gender Forum, Polytical, Überlin, and Witches/Sorcières (Revolver, 2012).

Jack Bates is an award winning screenplay writer with a couple of eBooks to his credits and a few kids books as well. He appears in a good number of anthologies including Discount Noir, Moon Shoot, The Killer Wore Cranberry, and Shadows of the Emerald City. You can read all about him at http://flashjab.blogspot.com

James Bennett writes fantasy, horror and lately, crime. The McCaw stories stem from an abiding love of Raymond Chandler, mixed with a diverse and weird sensibility. ‘King Bitch’ is a follow up (of sorts) to ‘The Teeth Behind the Beard’, which a reader can find in last year’s Carnival Noir anthology. Discover further stories from James Bennett on his blog: http://jamesbennett72.blogspot.co.uk And feel free to join him on Twitter: @I_James_Bennett

Carol Borden is the kind of dame you’ve heard about, but never met. A hellcat born to be bad. Trouble all the way through. She’ll hold your heart in her hand and laugh as she stubs her cigarette out in it. And you’ll love the burn. Find out the whole thrilling story at: monstrousindustry.wordpress.com

Paul D. Brazill is the author of A Case Of Noir and Guns Of Brixton. He was born in England and lives in Poland. He is an International Thriller Writers Inc member whose writing has been translated into Italian, German and Slovene. He has had writing published in various magazines and anthologies, including The Mammoth Books of Best British Crime 8,10 and 11, alongside the likes of Ian Rankin, Neil Gaiman and Lee Child. He has edited a few anthologies, including the best-selling True Brit Grit – with Luca Veste. His blog is: http://pauldbrazill.com.

Michael S. Chong is a writer living in Toronto. His stories have been published in Pink Factory, Kung Fu Factory, Masked Mosaic, and K.A. Laity’s previous collections, Weird Noir and Noir Carnival. His story “Unredeemable” is in the upcoming Exile Book of New Canadian Noir.

Walter Conley lives in central Virginia, USA, where the air rings with buckshot and freight train whistles. His fiction has appeared most recently in the Blackwitch anthology Exiles. He is at work on a novel based upon characters from his Wellesport, CT short stories. When he isn’t writing fiction, Walter sometimes blogs and records music under the name Katharine Hepcat (http://katharinehepcat.com).

Tracy Fahey writes Gothic fiction that is concerned with uncanny domestic space, folklore, traces and hauntings. She has published short stories in various anthologies including ‘The Changeling’ in Drag Noir (Fox Spirit Press), ‘Looking for Wildgoose Lodge’ in Impossible Spaces (2013, Hic Dragones Press), ‘Coming Back’ in The Girl At The End Of The World (2014, Fox Spirit Press) and ‘Ghost Estate Phase II’ in Hauntings (2014, Hic Dragones Press). She has several short stories forthcoming in other anthologies including ‘Walking the Borderlines’ in Darkest Minds (Dark Minds Press), ‘The Cillini’ in Piercing the Vale (Fox Spirit Press) and ‘Wherever You Go, There You Are’ in ‘In An Unknown Country’ (Fox Spirit Press). Her author web-site is at http://designingtracy.wix.com/tracyfahey In her spare time she runs a department of fine art, a centre for postgraduate studies and the fine art collective, Gothicise.

Richard Godwin is the author of critically acclaimed novels Apostle Rising, Mr. Glamour, One Lost Summer, Noir City, Meaningful Conversations and Confessions Of A Hit Man. He is also a published poet and a produced playwright. His stories have been published in over 34 anthologies, among them The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime and The Mammoth Book Of Best British Mystery, as well as his anthology of stories, Piquant: Tales Of The Mustard Man, published by Pulp Metal Fiction in February 2012. You can find out more about him at his website www.richardgodwin.net , where you can also read his Chin Wags At The Slaughterhouse, his highly popular and unusual interviews with other authors.

Dana Gravesen (introduction), also known as Twinker Belle, is proof that drag queens are trashy. By day, he is a doctoral candidate at the University of Iowa who is grateful to stumble out of her trailer court by noon and focus on media and film studies, transnational identity, and queer studies. By night, he is an active member of the gay community: gay bars, rest stops, and the Parliament House. He has simultaneously performed in amateur drag competitions while publishing in numerous academic outlets. He is also just guilty.

K. A. Laity (editor/foreword) slips between identities, genres and genders with gay abandon, writing as C. Margery Kempe (http://cmkempe.com), Kit Marlowe (http://kit-marlowe.com), and Graham Wynd https://www.facebook.com/GrahamWyndWriter) as well as under her own name with mad novels like White Rabbit and Owl Stretching. She edited Weird Noir (2012) and Noir Carnival (2013) for Fox Spirit Books. ‘The Prof’—as she’s known among the skulk—wanders the world not so much like Caine in Kung Fu but rather more like Michael Caine in Pulp (though with his wig from Dressed to Kill).

Selene MacLeod works nights, daydreams too much, writes too little, and frequently looks around and thinks “This isn’t what I signed up for.” She holds a BA in Communications from Wilfrid Laurier University, and her work has appeared in WLU’s poetry journal and a number of horror and transgressive fiction anthologies. While she figures out how to update her blog, she’ll be your friend on Facebook.

Liverpool lass Tess Makovesky is now settled in the far north of England where she roams the fells with a brolly, dreaming up new stories and startling the occasional sheep. Although officially a history graduate, she’s long been a student of the darker side of human nature. Many of her stories feature revenge, but she’s never been tempted to get her own back on anyone herself. Except, of course, by writing them into her stories… which you can find at the likes of Shotgun Honey, Pulp Metal Magazine, Out of the Gutter Online and most recently in Exiles: An Outsider Anthology from Blackwitch Press. You can follow her ramblings, both literary and actual, at her blog (http://tessmakovesky.wordpress.com/).

Amelia Mangan is a writer originally from London, currently living in Sydney, Australia. Her writing is featured in many anthologies, including Attic Toys (ed. Jeremy C. Shipp); Blood Type (ed. Robert S. Wilson); Worms, After The Fall, X7 and No Monsters Allowed (ed. Alex Davis); Phobophobias and The Bestiarum Vocabulum (ed. Dean M. Drinkel); and Carnival of the Damned (ed. Henry Snider). Her short story, “Blue Highway,” won Yen Magazine’s first annual short story competition and was featured in its 65th issue. She can be found on Twitter (@AmeliaMangan) and Facebook (facebook.com/amelia.mangan).

Ben Solomon grew up with Picasso, Cagney and Beethoven. He studied classical ballet and theater, lived on a diet of comic books, and watched enough classic cinema to lend his skin the patina of silver nitrate. He’s worked across many disciplines, attempting to capture the heart and soul of music on canvas, translate oils and celluloid into words. Solomon’s soft spot for the tough guy world of early gangster and PI flicks led to the creation of his throwback, short story series “The Hard-Boiled Detective” in February 2013. He published the first collection from that series in 2014. More info’s available here: http://thehardboileddetective.com/

Becky Thacker was born in Hancock, Michigan in 1948 and hasn’t been back there since. She’s been writing stories, letters and essays since the third grade. More recent publications include Amazon Girls Handbook, a humorous advice book for older lesbians, loosely based on scouting organizations, and Faithful Unto Death, a historical novel about the unsolved arsenic murder of her great-grandmother. The author is also descended from the grandchildren of Rebecca Nurse and Cotton Mather, Salem Witch trials victim and hanging judge respectively. Becky Thacker now lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, with her wife Harriet.

It is entirely anecdotal that Chloë Yates was the inspiration behind the infamous and redoubtable adventurer and lover, Giacomo Casanova, though one can understand why this story has endured. Neither is it true that she was Da Vinci’s original choice of model for the Mona Lisa, but refused to shave her beard for the sittings. It is but rumour she once masqueraded as the Spanish Infanta in a Channel Four “reimagining” of Dashiell Hammett’s lost work ‘They Can Only Hang you in Spandex”, and had the credit for her discovery of the fossil Fabulosa Sequinus stolen by The Duchess of Duke Street in 1785. It is true, however, that she writes odd stories. Having peppered her way across the Fox Spirit landscape with dark tales in all three of Kate Laity’s Noir series to date, work appearing (and to be appearing) in all but one of the Fox Pockets, becoming a Girl at the End of the World (Vol. 1), and adding her advice on ‘How to be the Perfect Housewife’ to the deliciously iniquitous anthology Wicked Women (2014), she is currently working on her first novel and a collection of short stories for the upcoming Feral Tales trilogy. She lives in the middle of Switzerland with her bearded paramour, Mr Y, and their disapproving dog, Miss Maudie. She’s available for most things of a writerly persuasion, although she does insist you bring your own gloves. Find her website at http://www.chloeyates.com

Pocket Scribes

The idea of Fox Pockets is to offer snippets from a range of the talented new authors coming through the genre ranks. the books themselves do not contain the Bio’s but you can find them here collected like their stories. 

Sarah Anne Langton
Fox Pocket Covers

Loves words and pixels. Draws books. Writes books. Scribbles a lot about comics for Forbidden Planet. Qualified Astronaut. Part time archaeologist. Full time geek. Mainly lives in the Marvel Universe and will work for shoes.

 

pockets

A quick who’s in what books guide:

Authors - Fox Pockets all

Alasdair Stuart is the host of award-winning podcast Pseudopod (www.pseudopod.org) and works as a freelance writer and journalist, specializing in genre fiction in all its forms. Yes, including that one. An enthusiastic amateur baker and martial artist, he’s worked for The Guardian, magazines
such as Neo, Sci Fi Now and Death Ray and blogs for sfx. co.uk, as well as his own site, www.alasdairstuart.com. His collection of every 2012 Pseudopod essay, The Pseudopod Tapes Volume 1, is also available from Fox Spirit Books.

Alec McQuay  writes from behind a monitor in the depths of West Cornwall, where men are men, women are women and analogies don’t always pan out. When not writing he runs, lifts weights, attends Thai Boxing classes and hopes you’re very impressed with his bio.  @vampiricchicken http://alecmcquay.wordpress.com/

Asher Wismer Maine resident Asher Wismer is a second-generation writer; his father Don Wismer published four science-fiction books in the 1980s. Asher’s fiction has appeared on 365tomorrows.com, and thewifiles.com, and his short stories have appeared in anthologies from Wild Wolf Publishing, Matt Hilton, Fox Spirit Press, and The MayDay Collective, as well as a serial novel on jukepopserials.com. Follow his unhinged ravings on Twitter @belarafon.

Catherine Hill  is from Worcestershire in England and spent much of her childhood with her head buried in a book. An interest in history and mythology led her to an Ancient History degree. A love of the fantastical and impossible led her to most of her favourite people. She now lives in Birmingham with her husband. http://www.catherinetjhill.blogspot.com   @ctjhill

Chloë Yates writes odd stories. English born, she currently lives in the middle of Switzerland and when she’s not reading or writing, she can be found swearing at the rugby. Her story “Leave the Pistol Behind” was one of the winners of Fox Spirit Books’ International Talk Like a Pirate Day in 2012, and her noirish chops have slathered into Fox Spirit’s Weird Noir (2012) and the eagerly anticipated follow up, Noir Carnival (2013) You can read her ranting at www.chloe-yates.blogpost.com and she wanders through twitter under the sobriquet @shloobee.

Chris Galvin is a writer, editor and photographer with one foot in Canada and the other in Viet Nam. Her words and photos have appeared in various literary journals, anthologies and travel magazines, including PRISM, Descant, Asian Cha and others. She is currently working on an essay collection. When not writing, Chris is usually in the garden, the kitchen, or the middle of a good book. Sometimes, all three practically at once. Find her on Twitter: @ChrisGNguyen and on her website: http://chrisgalvinwriter.wordpress.com/

Christian D’Amico is a science fiction, horror and genre fiction writer based in Surrey, though similarities between the county and any dystopian futures are entirely coincidental. When he isn’t writing he spends his time involved with street dance, performance cars, reading, gaming and in the gym, both as a fitness enthusiast in his own right and as a personal trainer. chrisdamico.co.uk

Colin Sinclair has spent what seems like forever writing things and stuff. Some of it has even seen the light of day. Most recently Colin provided settings, background material and short fiction for an alternate-worlds tabletop roleplaying game called Broken Rooms. His favourite word is indolent. He wonders if his bio should have jokes.

Den Patrick was born in Dorset in 1975 and shares a birthday with Bram Stoker. He has at various times been a comics editor, burlesque reviewer, bookseller and Games Workshop staffer. Anything to avoid getting a real job in fact. He lives and works in London. His first three books for Gollancz, the War Manuals, are released autumn of 2013. Three novels, The Erebus Sequence, are in the works.’ http://www.denpatrick.com/
Amazon page.

E.Saxey is a queer Londoner, working in universities and hanging around museums. Their short fiction has appeared in Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Lightspeed’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction, and Mammoth’s Tales from the Vatican Vaults anthology. They are always happy to know more about science, feminism, the 19th century and the supernatural, and blog at lightningbook.wordpress.com

EJ Davies hails from Ottawa, Canada. Cinephile, Wittertainee, writer, reader, and reviewer.  When not devoted to one of these five things, you’ll find his alter ego teaching high school students about Science.  Find him on Twitter (@EJ_Davies), Facebook, or his blog ejdavies.wordpress.com

Emma Teichmann is a lawyer by day, a writer by night (or, more often, at the crack of dawn), and a Star Trek fan forever. Alongside a steady drip of short stories, she’s currently working on a novel for adults and a children’s picture book series. Her story, ‘Carne Levare’ is soon to be published in K. T. Laity’s Noir Carnival anthology. In her spare time (when not commuting or writing) Emma likes to splash about in the sea, play flute, and sword fight.

Fiona Glass When she isn’t being a pane in the glass, Fiona writes darkly humorous fiction, almost always with a twist in the tail. Her twin loves are gritty crime and ghost stories and many of her stories have been published in anthologies, magazines or online.  She lives in a slate cottage within stone-throwing distance (never a good idea in glass houses…) of England’s largest lake.  You can find out more about both her and her work at her website. http://www.fiona-glass.com

Fran Terminiello lives in Surrey with her family and a growing collection of swords. She is currently putting the finishing touches to her debut novel, a dark and bloody fantasy noir co-written with David Murray. She spends her spare time practicing and researching Historical European Martial Arts, in particular 16th Century Bolognese swordsmanship, 17th Century Italian rapier, and Bartitsu of the Victorian era.

Geraldine Clark Hellery grew up surrounded by books. Saturday mornings would be spent at the book shop, while Saturday afternoons would be spent in a faraway land. Raised on a diet of Nancy Drew, Red Dwarf and pancakes, her passion for creative writing sprouted. Travelling the world fed her imagination, filling it with ideas and stories of dragons, water gods, epic battles and so much more. Every November since 2008 is devoted to National Novel Writing Month and so far Geraldine has written seven novels covering Science Fiction and Fantasy, aimed at children, young adults and adults. Now the next adventure is entering the publishing world, with her contribution to ‘The Nun and Dragon’ being her first published work. Geraldine is helping prepare women for the end of the world with a number of articles published on ‘The Girls’ Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse’ including a very important article about shoes as well as how to survive if you’re turned into an animal. Geraldine currently lives in the UK with an orchid who has triffid aspirations, a magic teapot, a travelling dog called Mrf and a very patient husband.

Graham Wynd can be found in Dundee but would prefer you didn’t come looking. An English professor by day, Wynd grinds out darkly noir prose between trips to the local pub, including SATAN’S SORORITY from Number Thirteen Press and EXTRICATE from Fox Spirit Books. Find Wynd on the Facebook and the Twitter.

Jack Hanson lives in Arizona, and enjoys firearms and boxing in his free time.  He likes to write about dinosaurs with machine guns in space, a jihad between sharks and dolphins, and undead soldiers.  His website is www.iwritejack.com .

James Bennett is a British Fantasy writer. He’s had several short stories published internationally, the most recent ones in the Fox Spirit anthologies: European Monsters, African Monsters, the upcoming Mouse & the Minotaur and Winter Tales. James Bennett isn’t an evil genius himself, but he knows several. Well, they’re clones really. Clones on a secret moon base, but he doesn’t talk about that. James Bennett’s debut Fantasy novel ‘Chasing Embers’ comes out from Orbit Books in September.

Feel free to follow him on Twitter: @wytcheboy

James Everington mainly writes dark, supernatural fiction, although he occasionally takes a break and writes dark, non-supernatural fiction. His second collection of such tales, Falling Over, is out now from Infinity Plus.

2016 saw the release of a ghostly novella Trying To Be So Quiet from Boo Books and The Quarantined City, an episodic novel mixing Borgesian strangeness with supernatural horror, from Infinity Plus.

James has had work published in The Outsiders (Crystal Lake), Supernatural TalesMorpheus Tales and Little Visible Delight (Omnium Gatherum), amongst others. He has also co-edited the anthology The Hyde Hotel (Black Shuck Books).

Oh and he drinks Guinness, if anyone’s asking. You can find out what James is currently up to at his Scattershot Writing site.

James Fadeley is a 30 something author living in Virginia. An author to almost a dozen short stories, his first novel The Gift of Hadrborg will be released later this year.

Jenny Barber  is an editor for Alchemy Press, writer of weird things, history geek and short story fanatic.  When not doing any of that, she can also be found wrangling spreadsheets and walking around rented houses talking to herself. Web: www.jennybarber.co.uk   Twitter:  @jenqoe
Goodreads and Amazon

Jonathan Ward is a science-fiction, horror and fantasy writer hailing from the sprawling urban metropolis of Bedford. He has wanted to be an author since the age of eight, though it’s questionable whether his writing talents have improved since then. When not writing he can be found reading a good book, out exploring new places, or in the pub being sarcastic to his closest friends. Jonathan’s Author Central page containing links to all of his published work:

K. A. Laity’s works include White Rabbit, Chastity Flame, The Claddagh Icon, Unquiet Dreams, Owl Stretching and many many more stories, essays and scripts. She edits the Noir Series for Fox Spirit. All-purpose writer, Fulbrighter, uberskiver, medievalist, flâneuse, techno-shamanka, social media wrangler for Broad Universe and Mavens of Mayhem, History Witch, and Pirate Pub Captain, she divides her time between Dundee & New York ·http://www.kalaity.com

K.C.Shaw’s fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Visit her website at http://kcshaw.net and follow her on twitter @kc_shaw.

Kim Bannerman lives in the rainforest on Vancouver Island, Canada, and her neighbours are bears, wolves, cougars and sasquatches. Her novels include The Tattooed Wolf (2014), a contemporary fairy tale; Bucket of Blood (2011), a Victorian murder mystery set in the Canadian wilderness; and its sequel, The Mark of the Magpie (2014). Together with her husband Shawn Pigott, they run Fox&Bee Studio, where they’ve produced over 100 short films. Visit her at www.kbannerman.com.

Kit Marlowe is the author of The Mangrove Legacy and Knight of the White Hart from Tirgearr Publishing (tirgearrpublishing.com) as well as other amusing tales like Airships & Alchemy, all of which can be found at her website www.kit-marlowe.com. When she is not writing Kit can generally be found frequenting milliners’ shops, collecting seashells by the seashore or reading as all genteel people are wont to do. Some underling runs a Facebook page for her.

Margrét Helgadóttir is an Icelandic-Norwegian writer who was born in Africa, but now lives in Oslo, Norway. She started to submit fiction in English for publication the autumn 2012. Her first story was “Nora”, one of the winners of Fox Spirit Books’ International Talk Like a Pirate Day story competition the autumn of 2012 and published in ‘Piracy’. http://margrethelgadottir.wordpress.com  @MaHelgad

Michael S Pack was born in the Deep Southern US, but he fled to Canada after an encounter with a particularly fierce mosquito swarm. He has a love of stories, both the true kind and the other sort. He studied history until becoming frustrated with its lack of narrative cohesion. His hobbies include reading, gaming, and herding cats. Michael writes science fiction, fantasy, and other weird stories. He is currently working on an epic fantasy novel. He sometimes muses on twitter @Michael_Pack and on Facebook ashttps://www.facebook.com/M.Pack.Author

N.O.A. Rawle is a Brit teacher based in Thessaly, Greece and holds a degree in creative writing from MMU. Works of her speculative fiction and dark poetry have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, won or been nominated for competitions including the AEON Award (2012). To explore the world inside her head check out www.noarawle.blogspot.gr, tweet her on Twitter and like her on Facebook.

swords

Rahne Sinclair lived in Scotland for many years. While there, due to her love of wolves, she became a supporter of the campaign for the reintroduction of the apex predator in the highlands. She has a love of ancient pantheons, particularly Norse, and their rich mythology often serves as inspiration for her writing.

Rob Haines is a writer, programmer and ex-turtle biologist who lives amongst the rafters of a Welsh chapel. He’s a contributing writer at Unwinnable.com, and his short fiction can be found scattered about the internet, including the Drabblecast. He also podcasts short fiction at Postcards From Lepari, building an alternate-history world one audio snapshot at a time.   www.generationminusone.com @rob_haines”

Ruth EJ Booth A quiet writer from the North-East of England, noone ever suspected Ruth “Dangerosa” Booth was a woman of more… esoteric tendencies. Perhaps they should have noticed when her first Fox Pocket story, ‘The Real Deal’, appeared in Piracy back in 2012. Perhaps they should have guessed when she picked up the BSFA for Best Short Fiction for ‘The Honey Trap’ (Noir, from NewCon Press). Perhaps they should have realised when she started talking about herself in the third person. No matter. In 2016, with her first published poetry appearing in the likes of The Speculative Book (The Speculative Bookshop) and Fox Spirit’s own Winter Tales — as well as her column ‘Noise and Sparks’ for Shoreline of Infinity — her reach only seems to be extending. She bides her time, waiting for the perfect moment, at www.ruthbooth.com…

S.J. Caunt currently lives in Leicester for his sins (which are many!) and has several short stories floating around out there in book ether. He’s currently working on the finishing touches to his first YA project, unless the end of the world gets in the way and hiccups his endeavours!

Steven Poore is an Epic Fantasist and SF Socialist. He lives in Sheffield with a crafty partner and a three-legged cat, and cannot move for towers of books. Heir To The North is published by Grimbold Books; the sequel, High King’s Vengeance, is currently being edited for a scheduled release in late 2016. Steven hosts the semi-regular SFSF Social events in Sheffield, supported by the BSFA and BFS. Follow him on Twitter: @stevenjpoore & @SFSFSocial

T F Grant is a pen-name of Stephen Godden  Stephen Godden writes speculative fiction. He reads pretty much anything. He uses the second to fuel the first. (And writes this stuff in the third, because somebody told him that he should and he didn’t like to argue.) Other than that, Steve’s just a bloke of independent penury and incidental personality. He uses the name Stephen Godden for the Fantastical end of the spectrum and the name TF Grant for the Science Fictional end of the spectrum. (Stephen sadly passed away on 7th November 2014. His work for Fox Spirit is available free on the site and will remain so as our small tribute to a talented writer.)

Tracy Fahey writes short fiction concerned mainly with uncanny domestic space and folk Gothic.  Since taking up fiction writing in 2013, she has had short stories accepted for publication in anthologies by US and UK presses including Fox Spirit Press, Hic Dragones Press, Dark Minds Press, A Murder of Storytellers and Hydra Publications. Her debut collection, The Unheimlich Manoeuvre, will be released with a UK press in 2016. As all good Gothic writers do, she has a doppelganger, Dr. Tracy Fahey, who runs a fine art department, a research centre and an art collective, Gothicise. More details and some taster fiction available on her author website www.designingtracy.wix.com/tracyfahey.

Victoria Hooper is a writer and editor living in Nottingham with her husband and imaginary panther. You can find her stories in Fox Pockets anthologies Missing Monarchs and The Evil Genius Guide, as well as the Sword and Laser anthology and Women Writing the Weird 2. She’s also a staff writer and reviewer for Fantasy Faction. She loves video games and cheesy movies, and can be bribed with chocolate brownies. Find her on her blog: http://vickyhooper.blogspot.co.uk or on Twitter @VickyThinks