Saturday 26 November 2022

Our new chapbook: A Handful of Zombies: Tales of the Restless Dead now available in print as well as kindle

After several expressions of interest in a print version of our new e-chapbook A Handful of Zombies: Tales of the Restless Dead we have now published it in softcover, priced at just £5.00. If this experiment in chapbooks proves popular enough we intend to publish more in the future by other authors.

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com

All four stories in this collection cover a wide range of tropes within the zombie genre. 

Dead Ronnie and I is a tale of high adventure by plane and sea, with an abortive escape by our protagonist to the as yet untainted Isles of Scotland. This was originally published in Sanitarium Magazine No 44 in 2016.

His Pale Blue Eyes is probably the most traditional take of zombie stories today, featuring a young girl’s determined search for her parents during a zombie apocalypse. It’s a story, though, about conditioning and how what someone is taught can radically affect their behaviour. Is the horror in this the shambling undead or the girl herself? See what you think. This first appeared in Bite-Sized Horror edited by Johnny Mains for Obverse Books in 2011.

By contrast Right For You Now, originally published in Weirdbook Zombie Annual No 3 in 2021, harks back to the original concept of the zombie in Voodoo-haunted Haiti, though this tale is set in present-day Britain. It’s a combination of a crime story, revenge, and a man’s obsessive fascination with age-old practices.

Our final tale, Romero’s Children, is more in the way of a science fiction story. The zombies here are certainly the most different. For a start off they are not dead but have been granted near immortality by a drug that swept the world with its promise to stop aging. Alas for those caught up in the frenzied demand to use it, though, its side effects were such that they would have been better off dead. This story appeared in 2010 in The Seventh Black Book of Horror edited by the late Charles Black and was subsequently picked up by American editor Paula Guran for her 2012 anthology Extreme Zombies.

I would like to thank my friend Jim Pitts who has kindly allowed me to use his illustrations both for the covers and for the interior.

 

Monday 21 November 2022

New e-chapbook available from PUP: A Handful of Zombies

At PUP we are experimentng with a new line in cheap e-chapbooks, which will be available online for £1.99 each..
The first is now available, with a cover and interior illustrations by Jim Pitts. Called A Handful of Zombies: Tales of the Restless Dead e-chapbook number 1 includes four stories by David A. Riley: Dead Ronnie and I, His Pale Blue Eyes, Right For You Now, and Romero's Children.
 

amazon.co.uk  £1.99

amazon.com  $2.99

 

Sunday 20 November 2022

Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 5 now available in paperback and kindle


Cover: Jim Pitts

 

I am pleased to announce that Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 5, presented by Jim Pitts and me, is now available as a paperback and kindle e-book.

amazon.co.uk

amazon.com 

The contents are: 

The Rotted Land by Charles Gramlich

Skulls for Silver by Harry Elliott

For the Light by Gustavo Bondoni

People of the Lake by Lorenzo D. Lopez

Free Diving for Leviathan Eggs by Tais Teng

The Black Well by Darin Hlavaz

Degg and the Undead by Susan Murrie Macdonald

The Mistress of the Marsh by David Dubrow

Silver and Gold by Earl W. Parrish

Bridge of Sorrows by Dev Agarwal

Prisoners of Devil Dog City by Adrian Cole

Of the eleven writers included this time, five hail from the United States, four from the United Kingdom, one from The Netherlands and one from Argentina. 

This is our biggest volume so far, with over 300 pages, though the price has stayed the same.