First Story: “The Price of Glamour” by Steve Berman
\nLondon, 1844
\nTup Smatterpit sat on the back of a chestnut seller’s cart, his back warm from resting against the stove. Tup had sprinkled a pinch of powdered glamour over himself, and the old coster driving the wagon believed him to be one of the countless children that roamed Covent Garden’s marketplace, rather than one of the Folk. As the donkey slowly pulled the cart through the crowd, the gentle sway and the constant tick-tocking of his waistcoat was lulling Tup to sleep.
\nSteve Berman is the author of nearly a hundred published essays and short stories. His newest collection, Red Caps, features a sequel to “The Price of Glamour”. He lives in southern New Jersey, the only state that has an official devil.
\nYou can find him online at SteveBerman.com.
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Second Story: “The Magikkers” by Terry Dowling
\nTwice upon a time there was someone named Samuel Raven Pardieu. The first to bear the name was a nineteenth century blacksmith who tried his hand as a toother during the Napoleonic War. In the morning following the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, while collecting teeth from the newly killed to sell to dentists in the big cities, he was spotted by an English patrol and shot as a looter.
\nTerry Dowling is one of Australia’s most respected and internationally acclaimed writers of science fiction, dark fantasy and horror, and author of the multi-award-winning Tom Rynosseros saga. He has been called “Australia’s finest writer of horror” by Locus magazine, its “premier writer of dark fantasy” by All Hallows and its “most acclaimed writer of the dark fantastic” by Cemetery Dance magazine. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series featured more horror stories by Terry in its 21-year run than by any other writer.
\nThe award-winning US genre newspaper Locus calls him a “highly original” writer, “the most noted prose stylist in Australian speculative fiction” and regards his work as placing him “among the masters of the field.”
\nDowling’s award-winning horror collections are Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear (International Horror Guild Award winner for Best Collection 2007), regarded as “one of the best recent collections of contemporary horror” by the American Library Association; An Intimate Knowledge of the Night (Aphelion 1995) and the World Fantasy Award-nominated Blackwater Days (Eidolon 2000). His most recent titles are Amberjack: Tales of Fear & Wonder (Subterranean 2010) and his debut novel Clowns at Midnight (PS Publishing 2010), which the Guardian called “an exceptional work that bears comparison to John Fowles’s The Magus.”
\nDowling has written three computer adventures (Schizm: Mysterious Journey, Schizm II: Chameleon, and Sentinel: Descendants in Time), and co-edited The Essential Ellison and The Jack Vance Treasury among many other titles. He lives in Sydney, Australia.
\nHis homepage can be found at TerryDowling.com.
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About the Narrators:
\nEric Luke is the screenwriter of the Joe Dante film Explorers, which is currently in development as a remake, the comic books Ghost and Wonder Woman, and wrote and directed the Not Quite Human films for Disney TV. His current project Interference, a meta horror audiobook about an audiobook… that kills, is available free on iTunes and at Quillhammer.com.
\nGraeme Dunlop is a software solution architect and voice actor living in Melbourne Australia. He is the sound producer for the horror podcast Pseudopod, and used to host the YA podcast Cast of Wonders. You can find him on Google+ and he occasionally tweets as @kibitzer on Twitter.
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