A final Treat from the Trickster and don’t miss Curfew

I’m freshly returned from a (socially distanced) holiday in Malta and have a few projects coming to fruition. First up is my story, ‘Shaft,’ which is featured in the latest (and final) edition of Trickster’s Treats, the annual halloween, charity anthology from Things in the Well. As you may know, after putting out almost forty excellent releases over the past few years, Steve Dillon has decided to call it a day running the press, to focus more on family life and his own writing. So many people have been given a break by Steve, myself included, with my first proper sale coming for ‘Warding’ in his anthology Below the Stairs: Tales From the Cellar, you can read more about that here.

But onto Trickster’s Treats 4: Coming, Buried or Not. This anthology has been edited by Louise Zedda-Sampson and Geneve Flynn, and it was a great experience, as Things in the Well anthos usually are, with some great editing bringing the most out of my story. The story is called ‘Shaft,’ but has nothing to do with a policeman who breaks all the rules. It’s set at Stonehenge in the UK, where a circular shaft was recently discovered nearby. That news story fused with the call for the anthology and the story kind of wrote itself. There is some visceral nastiness that I think and hope readers are going to get a thrill out of.

The cover art is great and there are more than 30 stories and poems in the book, AND the proceeds are going to an amazing cause, The Indigenous Literacy Foundation. You can read about the work they’re doing, here. So if you want to read mine and a host of other tales of terror, do pick up a copy either by pre-ordering or after its release on 26th September.

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Curfew is the second release of mine to come through Demain Publishing’s Short Sharp Shocks range of titles. My first one, Cinders of a Blind Man Who Could See, first saw the light of day last April and was my first solo release. I’m pleased to say that novelette is still finding new readers today and, by and large, they seem to be enjoying it.

Curfew moves away from folk horror in a sense, yet retains certain elements of it. A small community, strange practices and the main characters as outsiders all feature here. But I do feel the vibe is different from both Cinders… and The Balance. I won’t say much more, as it’s not a terribly long tale and I don’t want to spoil it. For now, it is available only in eBook format, but it will be reproduced in paperback format early in 2021, and my short story ‘Haldjas,’ which was originally produced in audio on Hawk and Cleaver’s The Other Stories podcast, will be appearing in print for the first time.

Released this Friday, 18th September, you can pre-order your copy for just £0.77 in the UK and a similarly bargain $0.99 in the US, with similar prices on Amazons worldwide. Cover art and design is once again handled by the brilliant Adrian Baldwin, and I’d love to know how you get along with it, either here, in the comments or on Twitter @lisboetaingles.