Author: Paul StJohn Mackintosh

Articles / Reviews

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Epeolatry Book Review: Slow Burn by Mike Allen

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

​Title: Slow Burn
Author: Mike Allen
Genre: Horror Short Stories, Erotic Horror, Occult
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
Date: 16th July, 2024

Synopsis: The search for a missing grandson unearths a pit of unholy hunger. A war between flesh-stealing supernatural entities will subject an entire city to devastating mayhem. In a harrowing future world, a slave is charged by his terrifying master with building a creature in its likeness. The voyage of a plague ship won’t end at mere death. Parasites are partners and lovers, and the immortal soul is but a single stage in the complex life cycle of a symbiote.

Slow Burn gathers fourteen stories of horror and thirteen macabre poems by two-time World Fantasy Award finalist Mike Allen, author of the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated collections Unseaming and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident. Allen’s works are “exquisite and vivid, his worlds rich with brilliant detail,” says three-time Bram Stoker Award® winner Christina Sng in her introduction. “The images he paints with words are terrifying and mesmerizing, keeping you enthralled and unable to look away.”

These tales and verses, set in worlds of fantasy and sorcery, in twisted, surreal futures, and in hard-boiled modern milieus . . . all find ways to explore the abyssal darkness of the human heart.

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Articles / Interviews

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Horror Tree Q&A: Gemma Files, Canadian horror icon

Horror Tree Q&A: Gemma Files, Canadian horror icon

Gemma Files is a Canadian horror writer, journalist, and film critic. Her short story, “The Emperor’s Old Bones”, won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story of 1999. Her novel Experimental Film (2015) won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the Sunburst Award for Best Canadian Speculative Fiction (Novel) in 2016. Her most recent publications include her Bram Stoker Award-winning collections In That Endlessness, Our End (2021) and Blood from the Air (2023).

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Articles / Interviews

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Kim Newman: Anno Yuletide and the Modern Gothic

Horror Tree Q&A: Kim Newman: Anno Yuletide and the Modern Gothic

By Paul StJohn Mackintosh

 

Kim Newman is an award-winning writer, critic, journalist and broadcaster who lives in London. He has won many awards, including the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, Prix Ozone, British Fantasy and British Science Fiction Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and James Herbert Awards. Horror Tree readers will probably know him best for his Anno Dracula vampiric alternative history series, but he has written many other horror and speculative fiction novels and short stories, as well as numerous non-fiction books on popular culture, film, and television.

 

Kim has just released A Christmas Ghost Story, all about horror fans’ second favourite holiday – Christmas. “A nightmarish tale of a haunted Christmas set deep in the British countryside,” A Christmas Ghost Story looks to be a dark and sinister subversion of seasonal tropes. We thought this would be a good occasion to contact Kim and see where this work fits into his substantial oeuvre, and his sensibility.

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Articles / Reviews

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Epeolatry Book Review: A Christmas Ghost Story by Kim Newman

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: A Christmas Ghost Story
Author: Kim Newman
Genre: Ghost; Holiday; Horror
Publisher: Titan Books
Publication Date: 8th October, 2024

Synopsis: From the acclaimed author of Anno Dracula, the perfect gift for those who love the dark fantastic imaginations of Neil Gaiman and T. Kingfisher, this is a nightmarish tale of a haunted Christmas set deep in the British countryside not too long ago. Cosy traditions are made twisted and terrifying as a mother and son grapple with their painful past.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Grotesquerie by Richard Gavin

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Grotesquerie
Author: Richard Gavin
Genre: weird fiction, horror
Publisher: Undertow Publications
Publication Date: 1st September, 2020

Synopsis: Welcome to Richard Gavin’s “grotesquerie,” where fear and faith converge in eerie and nightmarish tales of transcendent horror from a truly visionary writer. The highly anticipated new collection of macabre delights, that explores dark realms of the fevered, fecund mind, and visits strange landscapes and vistas. These are grim and grotesque tales of terror — modern Mysterium Tremendums — that open new doors of perception and reality.

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Dagon Collection, ed. Nate Pedersen

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: The Dagon Collection
Author: Various, ed. Nate Pedersen
Genre: Horror Anthology, Literature
Publisher: PS Publishing
Publication Date: 1st January, 2024

Synopsis: The Dagon Collection is a companion book to “The Starry Wisdom Library. Once again, the new anthology is presented as a fake auction catalogue, however this time it is 1929, shortly after the events in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” The feds have just raided the Esoteric Order of Dagon Lodge. Now they’ve contracted with Pent & Serenade, Occult Auctioneers, to sell the items secured in the raid.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Only the Living are Lost by Simon Strantzas

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Only the Living are Lost
Author: Simon Strantzas
Genre: Weird Horror
Publisher: Hippocampus Press
Release Date: 3rd November, 2023

Synopsis: A new collection of 11 stories from one of the leading luminaries of the current wave of new weird fiction. Canadian author Simon Strantzas has been acknowledged as a key writer in this evolving area, thanks to a succession of insidiously disturbing shorter stories. This compilation, his first in five years, shows why.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Best Horror of the Year Volume 15 Edited by Ellen Datlow

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: Best Horror of the Year Volume 15
Editor:Ellen Datlow
Publisher: Titan Books
Genre: Horror Anthology, Best Of
Release date: 14th November, 2023

Synopsis: For more than four decades, Ellen Datlow has been at the center of horror. Bringing you the most frightening and terrifying stories, Datlow always has her finger on the pulse of what horror readers crave. Now, with the fifteenth volume of the series, Datlow is back again to bring you the stories that will keep you up at night. Encompassed in the pages of The Best Horror of the Year have been such illustrious writers as: Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Stephen Graham Jones, Joyce Carol Oates, Laird Barron, Mira Grant, and many others.

With each passing year, science, technology, and the march of time shine light into the craggy corners of the universe, making the fears of an earlier generation seem quaint. But this light creates its own shadows. The Best Horror of the Year chronicles these shifting shadows. It is a catalog of terror, fear, and unpleasantness as articulated by today’s most challenging and exciting writers.

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