Tagged: Horror

Articles / Guest Post

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How To Start Writing Your Own Horror Blog

How To Start Writing Your Own Horror Blog

A horror blog is an excellent opportunity to combine your passion for such a genre and be useful to other lovers of the horror world.  Surely you know what fans of this genre want to get, and this is a starting point in blog creation. If you do not know where to start your blog, then in this article, you will find tips that will help you start writing horror stories and trigger readers’ interest. 

Top 5 Tips How to Start Your Horror Blog

Newbies in such a direction as horror blogging face difficulties to start content creation. Even though there are a lot of those who prefer horror topics, this direction requires a reasonable approach to conquer their audience. Below you will find tips that will help you to start writing a horror blog.

Determine the Purpose of Your Blog

Before you start creating a blog, it is worth it to determine the goal. Maybe you desire to write horror stories? Maybe you are dreaming of making horror or book movie reviews? 
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Articles / Guest Post

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If You’re a Horror Writer, You Should Know How Not to Lose Your Reader in 10 Pages

If You’re a Horror Writer, You Should Know How Not to Lose Your Reader in 10 Pages

Description: Discover how not to lose a reader when writing horror stories. The art of storytelling is easy if you follow its simple rules, but we often forget the principles that make up a good story, including a horror one. Learn more in our article!

(Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash)
The interest span of individuals has gone down drastically in recent years. There is a high requirement for instant gratification in almost any walk of life. For example, online slots have to grip users with the design and bonus features right from the start. The same goes with movies, books, and pretty much everything online. It leads to a conundrum for horror story writers, who are heavily dependent on two factors—choice of words and the imagination of readers—to keep anyone hooked to the story.

The creator of a horror movie has various tools like music cues, editing, visual effects, and more. Yet, the choices are minimal for someone who has to put everything into words.
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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.