Tales of the city redolent with ritual and drenched in dread.Folk Horror is primarily associated with isolated settings and weird beliefs. Traditionally the isolated setting is rural, but our cities have been around for a long time too, their histories constructed layer upon layer, their secrets long kept and buried deep. And there are other types of isolation than geographical remoteness: housing schemes and suburbs, gilded business districts and gated communities...

A house is more than just a place to lay your head at night. Sometimes, the walls remember. Gathering ten modern masters of the strange and unsettling, Unquiet Guests sets fire to the blueprints and reimagines the haunted house from the foundations up. From dreamlike visions of an abandoned future mansion to a sentient building grown tired of its owners, these rooms echo with whispers of the disenfranchised and the lost. Featuring stories by: Chuck Palahniuk, Grady Hendrix, Kirsty Logan, W...

Collective gathers some of the most experienced and acclaimed editors currently working in genre fiction to discuss the practicalities of what they do, from pitching ideas to publishers, to deciding on the sequence the stories should appear in.Focusing on the art of curation, it also explores the many different styles of anthology, including unthemed anthologies, writers' group publications, and 'Best of Year' compilations.Together, these essays and interviews give...

From British and World Fantasy award-winning writer and editor Dan Coxon, Come Sing for the Harrowing is an uncanny folk horror collection for fans of John Langan and Robert Aickman.A young man working at a tourist attraction is singled out for unholy transformation, a gang of burglars are ambushed with something unworldly when they attempt to rob a local farm, and a daughter seeks revenge on her abusive father after his death. Invoking the sense of natura...

As the pre-mythagos in each of our heads will naturally vary according to our experience, so the wood would manifest differently were new people to spend time among its trees. What then might we see?Commemorating the 40th anniversary of Robert Holdstock's seminal fantasy novel Mythago Wood (winner of the World Fantasy Award and British Fantasy Award), Heartwood for the first time opens Holdstock's world to other writers. From new tales of Ryhope and Oak Lodge to strange encounters w...

From Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones , over the last hundred years few genres have captured the public imagination as powerfully as fantasy. Whether it's epic quests of dwarves and elves, wizards and paladins, or the influential childhood classics of Alan Garner and C.S. Lewis, the appetite among readers for all things magical seems insatiable. Pulling together a fellowship of some of the best writers of modern fantasy fiction, WRITING THE MAGIC invites you to step through the portal ...

There's been a murder... From the macabre tales of Edgar Allan Poe through to the locked-room mysteries of the Golden Age, to the many faces of modern crime fiction and the explosion of true crime, writers have always explored the most taboo of human transgressions: the taking of a life. What is it about murder that has fascinated us for so long? And what is it about crimes of this nature that make for such compelling fiction? Gathering an impressive line-up of suspects, Writing the Murder...

Fatherhood is in a state of flux. Gone are the simplistic gender roles of yesteryear, the clear divisions between mothers and fathers. More dads than ever before are staying home to be full-time parents to their children; those that work often find themselves part of a working partnership, their kids spending as much time with childminders and nannies as they do with their parents. As society changes its expectations, the question must be asked: what does it mean to be a father? In Being D...

A house is more than just a place to lay your head at night.Sometimes, the walls remember.Gathering ten modern masters of the strange and unsettling, Unquiet Guests sets fire to the blueprints and reimagines the haunted house from the foundations up.From dreamlike visions of an abandoned future mansion to a sentient building grown tired of its owners, these rooms echo with whispers of the disenfranchised and the lost.

Featuring:Sarah Hall, Lucy Wood, Lisa Blower, Lavinia Greenlaw and Lionel Shriver.Edgar Allan Poe once claimed the greatest literary works were those that could be read ’in one sitting’. ‘Brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect,’ he argued, once the effect has been established, of course.The stories shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2013 all use brevity with striking results, whether presenting a comp...