Tagged: Deborah Sheldon

Articles / Reviews

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Again-Walkers by Deborah Sheldon

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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.

Alien: Inferno's Fall

Title: The Again-Walkers
Editor: Deborah Sheldon
Publisher: Demain Publishing
Genre: Historical Horror, Mythology
Release Date: 24th, June, 2022

Synopsis: The Again-Walkers was inspired by ninth century Danish mythology and superstition. The premise: To end a blood feud between two Viking families, Svana Norup is offered as a peace-pledge bride to blacksmith, Hallkell Jenson. Within weeks of moving to Hallkell’s village, however, Svana meets and falls for the shepherd, Agmundr Rask. If Svana and Agmundr want to make a life together, they must first get rid of Hallkell. But can the lovers risk murder when Hallkell might return from the dead to take revenge?

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Articles / Reviews

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Epeolatry Book Review: Liminal Spaces by Deborah Sheldon

Disclosure:

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: Liminal Spaces

Author: Deborah Sheldon

Genre: Horror

Publisher: IFWG Publishing Australia

Release Date: 1st March, 2022

Synopsis: Transitions occur in a liminal space. The familiar is gone. The unknown lies ahead and with it, terrible possibilities. Award-winning author Deborah Sheldon explores liminal spaces in this collection of dark, unsettling fiction. Her characters teeter on frightening thresholds with no way back. Liminal Spaces includes Sheldon’s award-nominated tales “For Weirdless Days and Weary Nights”, “All the Stars in Her Eyes” and Barralang, “Pop. 63”, plus original and unpublished fiction.

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Articles / Interviews

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An Interview With Deborah Sheldon On Liminal Spaces

Deborah Sheldon has another release, the collection Liminal Spaces: Horror Stories. For her many ardent fans, this is another sublime plunge into all things horror. Sheldon is a perfectionist. And it shows in her meticulous research of time, place and factual details. From complex characters and gritty plotlines to visual settings and skilfully-paced narratives, she never lets her readers down. I recently met with Deborah to talk about her writing.

 

For a collection like Liminal Spaces, do you focus your attention non-stop on writing the stories or do you break it up with other writing projects?
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Articles / Reviews

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Epeolatry Book Review: Man-Beast by Deborah Sheldon

Disclosure:

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: Man-Beast
Author: Deborah Sheldon
Genre: Horror
Publisher: Severed Press
Release Date: 6th September, 2021

Synopsis: Taylor’s Travelling Troupe of boxers has set up its tent at an isolated sheep station: bored farmers always bet to excess. Headlining the bare-knuckle fighters is Bluey, marketed as ‘The Man-Beast’, a Sasquatch-like monster, chained and kept drunk enough to fight punters without killing them. But the troupe has returned to where Bluey was first captured. Recognising the mountains, he calls again and again. And when his call is answered, all hell breaks loose.

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Articles / Interviews

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Interview with award-winning horror author, Deborah Sheldon

Deborah Sheldon is an award-winning Australian author with a long list of titles to her name, including short stories, novelettes, novellas and novels. Sheldon is masterful at the art of writing horror: believable plots, convincing characters, well-defined settings, decisive pacing, and the perfect amount of mayhem, destruction and bloodletting. Her new action-horror novella, Man-Beast (Severed Press) reflects all these skills. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Deb about horror writing in general, and Man-Beast in particular.

 

The title character in your book is a humanoid, but not the standard version. How did you go about revamping the Bigfoot trope?
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Articles / Reviews

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Epeolatry Book Review: Thylacines

Disclosure:

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: Thylacines
Author: Deborah Sheldon
Genre: Horror
Publisher: Severed Press
Release Date: 8 January 2018
Synopsis: The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, was hunted to extinction some eighty years ago. Now, Professor Rosie Giuliani and her staff at The Resurrection Lab have done the impossible: created a living, breathing litter from a preserved specimen. Yet Rosie can’t share this scientific breakthrough with the world. The cloned animals are more like monsters than thylacines. By chance, a small band of activists hears about the caged litter, and their decision to free the tigers will unleash a deadly havoc upon the campus of Fraser University.

“Drying blood masked the tiger’s face, right up to its ears, as if the tiger had dunked its head into a bucket of gore.”

This bio-horror novella (122 pages) by Australian writer Deborah Sheldon, is a fast, pacy, adrenaline fuelled read which you can gobble up in a sitting or two. The author has clearly done her research into Thylacines aka Tasmanian Tigers or if you want to be cosier, you could call them Tassie Tigers and she deftly weaves this information into the narrative without making it a lecture. The striking cover gives you an idea of what Sheldon has in mind.
An older female scientist, (a well written character) has succeeded in bringing a litter of Thylacines back from extinction. This would give most people pause but not this crew. Whilst the animals are locked up in the lab they can’t do much damage. But (ironically) it is a trio of animal rights’ activists who by deciding to free T1-T6, end up being the first course on the menu. For these newly born Thylacines have significant differences to their ancestors. They are faster, fiercer, more intelligent, larger and with a taste for human flesh.
The action unfolds, contained within the university’s campus- as body parts fly and there are several tense scenes where the Thylacines are cornered and fight back. Each chapter ends on a cliff hanger in fact. Another strong female character leads the tiger chase, a local cop, pulling overtime, Janine and her trained police dog, Zeus. I was rooting for Zeus all the way. Go Zeus! An engaging and convincing partnership.
My only disappointment is that it’s a novella not a novel and the ending came really fast. I would have liked a longer played out denouement. Maybe there is a sequel in the offing?
If you liked Jurassic Park or any other novels in that vein, you’ll go for this novella. It’s the equivalent of a B movie on steroids. Have fun.

Thylacines can be found on Amazon!

Reviews

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Epeolatry Book Review: Perfect Little Stitches: And Other Stories

Disclosure:

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: Perfect Little Stitches: And Other Short Stories
Author: Deborah Sheldon
Genre: Horror Short Stories
Publisher: IFWG Publishing Australia
Release Date: November 1st, 2017

Synopsis: A collection of twenty-one dark fantasy and horror stories by Deborah Sheldon.

Mysterious. Creepy. Disturbing. Including:

– A funeral director, who steals body parts for cash, takes delivery of an unusual corpse.

– The crew of a nineteenth-century fishing boat encounters an unknown but irresistible danger.

– A dog-sledder on a secret mission in Antarctica fights for his life against the monsters that have fuelled his every nightmare since the Vietnam war.

“Oh, she was beautiful. She was the first cadaver of the day..“

This collection of dark fantasy and horror stories, 21 in all, is from the imagination of Australian writer Deborah Sheldon. The book comes with an impressive pedigree -Long-listed for the 2017 Bram Stoker Award- “Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection”. One of Aurealis Magazine’s Top Picks of 2017. Nominated for the Aurealis Award “Best Collection 2017”.

It lives up to all this promise and delivers with a kick. The collection is peopled with the weird, macabre, ghostly and the alien. The titles of each short story are brilliant and clever. A shout out too for the cleverly designed cover art.

Each story creates a micro world of strangeness filled with strongly written characters and relentless tension; there are no weak links in this collection.

We meet harpies/mermaids (not the pretty cute sort)/ aliens in the attic/ the undead/a were cow masquerading as a sundowner/a killer prehistoric bird and grave robbers. Just your usual Friday night crowd down the pub. Yes, if you drink in Hell’s Grave.

In the opening story which provides the title for the collection, a funeral director who has a financially lucrative but unethical sideline, gets his comeuppance in a horrifying fashion.

In one of my personal favourites, written in a visual almost filmic fashion, ‘Species Endangered’, a day at the beach for a couple becomes a fight to survive when they’re attacked by a blast from the prehistoric past.

‘Nocturnal Fury’ evokes the legend of the Old Hag who visits at night to feed on your life force, but she’s imaginary isn’t she? The doctor is on the case so all will be fine.

Sheldon plays with our expectations, keeps us off kilter, making the normal situations of everyday life, topple into the bizarre and dangerous. We are watching through distorted mirrors and playing with shadows. Sheldon is very good at packing in a great deal of detail and terror into a few pages never outstaying her welcome.

This collection should be on every horror reader’s list for 2018.

You can pick up a copy of Perfect Little Stitches: And Other Short Stores On Amazon.