Best-selling novelist Neil Spring - author of The Ghost Hunters (adapted into the ITV drama Harry Price: Ghost Hunter starring Rafe Spall), The Watchers, The Lost Village, and The Burning House, kindly asked me to interview him for the online launch of his spooky and gripping new novel The Haunted Shore. I was more than delighted to do so.  I think we had an enteratining chat in the run-up to Halloween about what intrigues us both about the subject of the supernatural in fiction and real life - in fact, both of us rather blur the lines between the two. (For instance, Neil features Aleister Crowley as a background, malignant force in The Burning House, whereas I use him as a fully fledged character in "Netherwood" - one of the stories in my Dark Masters Trilogy.) Watch the whole conversation on Facebook here. Neil reveals some fascinating insights into the inspiration for The Haunted Shore, set as it is against the atmospheric and eerie background of Orford Ness, and, as ever with his stories, is as much about a sense of place as it is about the echoes of past traumas acted out in the present. A real page turner. ​

Buy your copy of The Haunted Shore here

I think it’s true to say that many of us horror writers of a certain generation have treasured memories of Hammer Films, Amicus Productions and their ilk. In fact, their output of genre classics is so important that some of us have secretly longed for a way to relive and recapture the excitement we had when we first experienced them. 

​That was my exact impulse when I first talked to Mark Morris about a book proposal entitled The Blythewood Horror Film Omnibus — an unashamed homage to John Burke’s Hammer Horror Film Omnibus, a fat paperback that came out in the sixties, comprising four novellas based on upcoming horror films. The difference being that our “Blythewood” would be a studio that never existed.

​Our four films would be movies that we’d invent from scratch. Movies we wished we could have seen as feature films when we were growing up. And now we can – in book form – thanks to PS Publishing.

Stephen Volk

Amongst the eighteen entirely new stories  brought together to celebrate the thirtieth year of Tartarus Press in the latest Strange Tales volume is my own contribution, "The Flickering Light", in which the preternatural flits in a hesitation between past and present tensions, real or imagined.

Tartarus says: Representing the best contemporary writing in the fields of the literary strange, supernatural, fantasy and horror, the contents of this anthology range from the wry comic fantasy of Jonathan Preece’s "Great Dead American Authors Alive and Living in Cwmbran", to the atmospheric horror of Andrew Michael Hurley’s "Hunger". ​In "Grassman" by Rebecca Lloyd, two sisters come of age during a village ceremony, while in "Meiko" by J.M. Walsh, a mysterious guest upsets the equilibrium of a country house party. Mark Valentine’s "Other Things" documents the romance and strangeness of private lore, while the search for a missing girl leads to a sinister discovery in D.P. Watt’s "The Wardian Case". Dark family secrets are gradually uncovered in Angela Slatter’s "The Three Burdens of Nest Wynne".

Founded in 1990 by Ray Russell and Rosalie Parker, Tartarus has become a well-egarded feaure of the genre publishing landscape, known for championing both classic and contemporary writers. The stories in this volume sit proudly within that tradition, and I'm very proud to be a part of it.

See here for full table of contents and list of authors

Some samples of beautiful concept art by the supremely talented Richard Dearing for a putative graphic novel rendering of Whitstable. I'm overjoyed and overawed. It would be tremendous for it to come to fruition one day. 

These designs for the DVD covers for Afterlife in the USA (Region 1) don't really convey either the atmosphere or the story content of the ITV drama series. But hey, it's rather nice art in its own right. 

I have often said in interviews that my original pitch to the BBC for Ghostwatch was as a six-part drama series, in the style of the BBC's (then recent) Edge of Darkness or (their much older, legendary) Quatermass serials: the "live broadcast from a haunted house" concept, at that stage, was only envisioned for the final, climactic episode. I came across a draft of that initial proposal when recently clearing out my reams of archive. If you are a Ghostwatch fan, it might make for fascinating reading. Above is a taster of page one. The episodes have intriguing titles, I think: 1) Flies on the Wall; 2) Viewers and Seers; 3) The Flesh Tape - after which the multi-stranded narrative collapses into indecypherable scribbles. Still, I wonder if my fully structured breakdown of the six-hour plot is lurking somewhere under the debris of 30 years' paperwork...