Look Out For… Shadows & Tall Trees 6

” A manifesto for horror in the short story form.“

Shadows & Tall Trees is the flagship publication of Undertow Publications, a small press based near Toronto. In 2010 and 2013 the journal was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award for Best Periodical/Magazine. Featuring notable visionaries including Robert Shearman, Steve Rasnic Tem, Alison Moore, Nicholas Royle, and Nina Allan, the stories published in Shadows & Tall Trees have been selected for reprint in The Best Horror of the Year, The Best British Stories, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing, The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror and Wilde Stories: The Best Gay Speculative Fiction.

Why we’re excited about this book: Shadows & Tall Trees is a magazine of literary horror (or horrifying literature, if you’d prefer) – it is now being published yearly as a book-length anthology. And what a fantastic book it looks to be. Edited by Michael Kelly (no slouch in the fiction department himself) the stories he selects are always intelligent, literate and scary. And there’s seventeen stories this time which, alongside Kelly’s passionate introduction, stand as a virtual manifesto for horror in the short story form. Some of the authors will no doubt be familiar to This is Horror readers – Robert Shearman, Conrad Williams, VH Leslie – but it’s a sign of a really good anthology or magazine that even the authors you’ve never heard of have stories as good as the big-shots and Shadows & Tall Trees always delivers in this department. If you’re as passionate about horror short stories as we are, then this really is a must buy.

And if you’re not passionate about short horror fiction then don’t worry, we won’t judge you. Much.

This book will appeal to: any and all fans of intelligent, literary horror.

Shadows & Tall Trees 2014 is out today from Undertow Publications.

Look Out For… Savage by Gary Fry

“A wrong turn leading to a creepy town, a savage monster and psychological musings on human nature.”

Driving home one day from a conference, Daryl seeks a shortcut through a barren countryside. He chances upon a mysterious village whose residents seem rather odd. But they have something to show him—a creature so strange he can hardly believe it exists.

And that’s only the beginning of Daryl’s problems, as he seeks to escape something far worse than he can ever imagine.

Something utterly horrific and extremely savage.

Why we’re excited about this book: It’s almost impossible to keep up with the output of Gary Fry; it seems almost every month there’s a new book out where he merges the ideas from the Lovecraft/Blackwood tradition with a thoroughly modern style. And here’s another one; a new novella from Darkfuse. It sounds a cracking read – a wrong turn leading to a creepy town, a savage monster and psychological musings on human nature. One highlight of Fry’s fiction is the way he dovetails the terrifying plot of this story with intellectual and philosophical concerns. And horror, from Frankenstein and Doctor Jekyll & Mister Hyde, through The Bodysnatchers and beyond, has always been the go-to genre for examining questions about ‘the outsider’, about ‘the other’. Horror’s monsters are a way of making ourselves question what it is that makes us human.

God knows how Fry keeps writing such good stuff at such a pace. Maybe there is no ‘Gary Fry’ but a global collective of mad scientists, kidnapped horror writers off their collective heads on experimental, military-grade hallucinogens, and an infinite amount of monkeys.

Or maybe he just doesn’t sleep much. But let’s hope he keeps it up, either way.

This book will appeal to: readers who like to do some philosophical pondering whilst also being scared silly

Savage is out on 10 June 2014 from Darkfuse.