I hope you’ve enjoyed my Halloween countdown this year. I’ve featured horror writing tips, interviews, book recommendations, competitions and freebies (as well as some shameless self-promotion).
But wait… Listen… Somebody’s chapping at your door… Can’t you hear them?
MWAHAHAHAHAHAAH.
…But don’t worry; you’ve still got reading time. And if you’re in the mood for it, you could do worse than enter the blood-curdled world of my Halloween horrors collection, Trickier and Treatier… But do you DARE?
Buy now as a paperback or ebook.
From the bloodied pen of critically acclaimed horror author AJ Kirby comes this new and terrifying collection of 8 bloodcurdling horror shorts.
These are short, sharp, shocking stories from the darker side of the street. They are viceral tales of body horror. They are tales of bloodthirsty beasts on the prowl. They are stories of madness and mayhem, and of things that go bump in the night.
This book is a must-read for horror fans, and those who’ve already enjoyed Kirby’s works such as ‘Paint this town Red’, ‘Bully’, ‘Sharkways’, ‘Perfect World’ and ‘The Haunting of Annie Nicol’.
Halloween is coming. Hotly, wetly, it slouches into view. So with that in mind, you’ll forgive me for shamelessly promoting my dedicated Halloween anthology, Trickier and Treatier, which is available on Amazon for just £1.19 as an ebook, or a handsome £3.99 as a paperback. You can get your claws on a copy here.
Here’s the gen:
From the bloodied pen of critically acclaimed horror author AJ Kirby comes this new and terrifying collection of 8 bloodcurdling horror shorts.
These are short, sharp, shocking stories from the darker side of the street. They are viceral tales of body horror. They are tales of bloodthirsty beasts on the prowl. They are stories of madness and mayhem, and of things that go bump in the night.
This book is a must-read for horror fans, and those who’ve already enjoyed Kirby’s works such as ‘Paint this town Red’, ‘Bully’, ‘Sharkways’, ‘Perfect World’ and ‘The Haunting of Annie Nicol’.
Following on from last weeks’ free promo of Teeth, I’m now going giveaway crazy. This week’s freemans’ deal is for my short story collection Trickier & Treatier.
To download your FREE copy of the short story collection Trickier & Treatier follow this link.
And here’s the write-up of the book:
From the bloodied pen of critically acclaimed horror author AJ Kirby comes this new and terrifying collection of 8 bloodcurdling horror shorts.
These are short, sharp, shocking stories from
the darker side of the street. They are viceral tales of body horror. They are tales of bloodthirsty beasts on the prowl. They are stories of madness
and mayhem, and of things that go bump in the night.
This book is a must-read for horror fans, and those who’ve already enjoyed Kirby’s works such as ‘Paint this town Red’, ‘Bully’, ‘Sharkways’, ‘Perfect World’ and ‘The Haunting of Annie Nicol’.
It’s two minutes to midnight – the witching hour – on 31st October 2014, and here’s one last scare to let your day finish with a bang (and a whimper). Why not get your fangs (and claws) into my Halloweed-themed short fiction collection, Trickier & Treatier?
It’s available now from Amazon.com – http://www.amazon.com/Trickier-Treatier-AJ-Kirby-ebook/dp/B00GBWTYSA/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1383219228&sr=1-1&keywords=trickier+and+treatier and Amazon.co.uk – http://www.amazon.co.uk/Trickier-Treatier-AJ-Kirby-ebook/dp/B00GBWTYSA/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1383219228&sr=1-1&keywords=trickier+and+treatier
May it electrify your chills…
Halloween is lurching closer, like some rough beast – its hour come around at least – slouching into a street near you. Squeaking open your gate. Slavering up your garden path. Hammering at your door. Calling: Trick or Treat.
And in order to get in the mood for some thrills, chills and bellyaches, I’ve come up with a special recipe, a required reading list of my dark tales which will have you hugging your pillow just that little bit tighter.
For your starter, you could try one of my mouth-watering novelettes – perhaps you could treat your mouth to the burning sensation which comes from reading The Haunting of Annie Nicol. Or try one of the short, sharp shocks from my dedicated Halloween anthology, Trickier & Treatier?
For main course, how about getting your teeth into one of my horror novels? Dare you enter the Sharkways? Could you handle Paint this town Red? Do you tremble at the thought of Bully?
And for dessert? Well, how about Teeth?
There are just three weeks to go until Halloween. In order to get you in the mood, I thought I’d bring you an excerpt from one of my ghostly tales.
If you’re interested in reading more, check out my Halloween anthology Trickier & Treatier, or else one of my stand-alone haunting tales such as The Black Book, The Haunting of Annie Nicol, or Hangingstone, or else one of my beastly horror novels: Sharkways, Paint this town Red, or Bully.
Today, I thought I’d revisit Bully, which was published by Wild Wolf way back in 2010. Here’s the synopsis: They say you should never go back. But sometimes you don’t have a choice.
After Gary Bull’s miraculous survival from an explosion in Afghanistan, he is compelled to return to the small town where he grew up, a place that he thought he would never set his eyes upon again. Memories of a past long buried come back to him and he finds himself forced to face the horror of what he did when he was young. It started with the bullying…
Newton Mills appears normal enough on the surface, but scratch the surface and there is something far more sinister.
It has more than its fair share of graveyards and the skeletons are liable to walk right out of the closet.
Newton Mills is the scene of a despicable crime.
No one gets out alive.
EXCERPT
“Newton Mills was built in the bottom of this deep gorge. That’s how it got its name in the old days, on account of the river which ran through it and powered the massive cotton mills. Grange Heights overlooked all of this, and stood in judgement of the factories and the industrial estates which had started to spring up. The town was intersected by a railway; on the one side was the new town with its garish red brick, but on the other was the town I knew. In the old town, most of the houses were built from the local stone and when it rained, seemed to take on the water and darkened from light grey to almost black.
Now, Newton Mills was shadowed by threatening clouds and the place looked depressing; lifeless even. But I knew that life teemed within it; within the small dome of the school library which glistened with wetness and the corrugated metal sides of the new leisure centre and the main street and its countless pubs.
But more than anything else, what this aerial picture of Newton Mills showed me was the graveyards. Hell, even the damn taxi driver would have spotted the fact that there was a graveyard at the end of virtually every street. There were scores of them; grey gravestones pebbledashed the town. I remember when I first came up here and I felt this slight chill creeping up the back of my neck when I tried to count them all.
I don’t know when I first noticed it. As a kid, you don’t really go around comparing and contrasting towns. Measuring the number of shops or restaurants or houses and then coming to some kind of conclusion about the nature of the town was not really anything any of us ever paid any mind to. Newton Mills was simply home to us, and we wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was a known quantity, a given. Even when changes occurred, such as when a shop came under new ownership or new houses were built, we never thought of it as change. It was on the periphery of our vision, and as long as the shop that changed hands wasn’t Burt’s sweet shop, and as long as the new residents of the new garish redbrick houses across the tracks were not going to be introduced into our classes and clubs, we simply didn’t care.
But one day the understanding had washed over me. I suppose it was as though I’d finally given voice to that silent knowledge which I’d always known, deep down. Newton Mills had an unnatural amount of graveyards. And I mean there were a lot; miles more than such a town that size should have had.
‘The Graveyards of Newton Mills’ was the first school project that I ever aced. It was the first that I’d ever tried in. I suppose I was morbidly fascinated by them. I put together this lever-arch file full of photographs and maps, pencil rubbings of some of the gravestones. I even tried to draw some conclusions about why there were so many graveyards.
My dad loved that I was getting interested in history, and helped me out at the local library. We dug out loads of old books and newspapers. Gradually, he edged me towards his own conclusion about the graveyards. He suggested that working on the mills was a terrible, life-sucking existence and that most of the folk would die young. But because the farming industry was doing so badly, people kept coming into the town from the surrounding countryside, looking for work. He suggested, in his fiery working class hero way, that the mills were doing more than manufacturing cotton. They were cleansing the local area of the undesirables. They were processing the workers; depositing them straight into the graveyards at the end of the shift.
I stared out over the town and remembered. I remembered my dad and the way that he’d been a little obsessed with the graveyards; after my project, the teacher invited him in to talk to the class about them. Later, my friends gave me no end of crap for having a loony-tune dad. Nobody but nobody ever wanted their parents to come to the school, let alone if they came in and ‘talked to the class.’ That was the lowest of the low. But despite my embarrassment, I had found myself becoming interested in what my dad had to say. He was talking about the amount of different burial sites; there were some for the Protestants, some for the Catholics, some for the rich, and some for the poor. There were some that weren’t affiliated to any church. In fact, he said, only two of the graveyards in the whole town came with your traditional church spire in the scene too. I’ll always remember what he said at the end of that talk. It was like he’d shaped that voice in my head even further. He’d let me see the light.
‘Newton Mills,’ he said, ‘is a town which has always been surrounded by an awareness of death. We’re comfortable with it, even. But we shouldn’t be. We don’t have to allow ourselves to simply sleep our way along the conveyor belt and succumb to our fate.’
Suddenly, I remembered the taxi driver that had dropped me off at the airstrip in the desert in Afghanistan. I remembered what he’d said about the ‘awareness of death.’ I also remembered that I now knew what death and pain really were, in the end. Involuntarily, I shuddered.
Dad wasn’t invited back to the school again after the talk. I think the teacher thought that it wasn’t his place to rant about stuff like that and put ideas like that in children’s heads. The teacher was from out of town though, and probably hadn’t grasped the fact that Newton Mills life was exactly how dad said it was. Most of us were surrounded by an awareness of death. We saw it in the heavy grey stone of the suffering houses. We saw it in the faces of the men and women that had grown up in the town.
As I stared out, I picked out some of the graveyards that I knew. And we did know some of the graveyards fairly well. Unconsciously, all of the lads I grew up with spent times in the graveyards. We were a little scared of them, of course, but what kids don’t like doing things that are a little dangerous; a little close to the bone?
What we really liked were the old abandoned ones, like the one off Dye Lane, which I could pick out as it scarred across the land, running parallel to the river. Back then, we knew that we could play in the graveyards to our hearts’ content and no adults would come asking questions or telling us to shove off. They were kind of like secret gardens or something. I didn’t tell anyone, but I thought of them as magical places, like the plateau in The Lost World. I thought that time stood still in those places and that lurking in the dense bushes would be prehistoric creatures and mythical demons and the like.”
AJ KIRBY’S HORROR LIBRARY:
…I’m pleased to announce that the next novel in the AJ Kirby stable has been announced as the crime-thriller When Elephants Walk Through the Gorbals. So hold on tight to those reins, I’m going to be working at a canter over the next few weeks getting everything ready along with the publishers, White House Publications.
It is scheduled for publication in both paperback at the start of May (by which time these Grand National puns will be neigh good). Over the next few weeks I’ll be whetting your appetites with some teasers from the book, some trailers, and some general gumph regarding the writing of it.
The book follows The Magpie Trap, Bully, Perfect World, Paint this town Red and Sharkways into print format (where they line-up alongside my three short story collections, The Art of Ventrilquism, Trickier and Treatier, and Mix Tape.) And for now, much of the scope of the novel will remain under wraps.
But for now, I’ll tell you this: the book’s aimed at all of those folk who loved the TV series Life on Mars, and the Rebus books by Ian Rankin. It features the same grizzled detective – Jim Hunter – who starred in my 2007 novel The Magpie Trap, only in this one, Hunter’s right at the start of his career in the force, waiting for the tape to rise so he can run hell for leather after the criminals in Glasgow’s seedy underworld.
To catch up with The Magpie Trap, follow this link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Magpie-Trap-A-Novel-ebook/dp/B00CKRWDWY/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1396536297&sr=1-1&keywords=the+magpie+trap
Or if you’re more interested in reading some of my crime shorts, go here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Art-of-Ventriloquism-ebook/dp/B008VM8S0I/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1378740720&sr=1-1&keywords=the+art+of+ventriloquism
Triskaidekaphobia – the fear of the number 13…
Some scaredy cats won’t be leaving their houses today. They won’t be getting behind the wheels of their cars, and they certainly won’t be walking past any black cats. What’s more, they won’t be entering any graveyards, nor will they be risking passing by any plate glass windows… They’ll have the fear…
If you’re one of those people scared by the myths, speculations (and truths) of Friday 13th, and you’re stuck in the house all day – hell, even if you’re not – then why not try wrapping your eyes around one of my horror specials, available from Amazon?
Do you dare take on my horror shorts collection, Trickier and Treatier?
Could you risk facing down the terrifying creature in Paint this town Red?
Do you have the guts to crack the spine of The Black Book?
Can you stomach the trial by fire which is The Haunting of Annie Nicol?
Dare you enter the Sharkways?
Or can you hack a supernatural tale of revenge from beyond the grave in Bully?
paintthistownred 