Inside Writing HORROR

WHAT IS SPLATTERPUNK?If you want to understand what makes splatterpunk so different from the horror that came both before and after, your best bet is to read the authors who pioneered the form. It wasn’t just the visceral intensity of their literary assaults on convention. All the key writers – Clive Barker, Joe R. Lansdale, David J. Schow, and John Skipp and Craig Spector – were ferocious stylists, with original voices that completely stood out from the crowd.In THIS IS SPLATTERPUNK: THE JOHN SKIPP PRIMER, you’ll find 15 of Skipp’s most powerful, passionate, unbridled, and influential splatterpunkian short stories, from his early years in Twilight Zone magazine to the present day.Skipp also includes a definitive essay on the history and core elements of the movement – which he defines more as a “spontaneous eruption of the arts” – with additional notes on each story, for context.But mostly, it’s about Skipp’s unflinching empathy – his ability to put you inside the skins of his characters, make you feel what they feel every speck of the way – that makes THIS IS SPLATTERPUNK: THE JOHN SKIPP PRIMER an essential read for lovers of fearless fiction, and the perfect companion piece to his film.

From New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden comes a high concept horror novel about a man trying to protect his dead mother's body from the evil that is hunting them.Maggie Wise will take your eyes.When Malcolm was growing up, the local kids made up that chant about his mother, claiming she was a witch. He and his siblings did their best to ignore it. Now, Maggie is dying, and those same siblings have left Malcolm and his sister-in-law Violet to hold a vigil at her bedside.But they’re not as alone as they think they are. A dark figure waits and watches from beneath the willow tree across the street. Hundreds of miles away, an ancient evil stirs in its burrow under a farmer’s cornfield. Across the country, other buried things begin to dream in anticipation of Maggie’s demise. On her deathbed, the old woman elicits a promise from Malcolm, her youngest child―when she dies, he and Violet must return her body to her birthplace in Shediak, Maine.From the moment she takes her last breath, before her remains are even loaded aboard the baggage car of the Imperial Limited, there are forces trying to stop Malcolm from fulfilling that promise. Violence erupts on the train, evil preys on its passengers, and once the sun goes down, those long-buried things are coming to make Maggie Wise pay for her past. God help anyone who stands in their way

Chris is a writer of prose novels, magazine short stories, video and tabletop games and audio dramas. Together with Bram Stoker’s Great-Grand nephew Dacre Stoker, he has created the StokerVerse franchise. He has written the sequel to Dracula which will be released by Scar comics later this year. He has also created a science fiction universe with Babylon 5 actress Claudia Christian. This is coming to fruition in a series of games, novels and comic books. In addition to this he has worked on Doctor Who, Star Wars and most recently the Terminator franchise. Chris has been given the Reggie Bannister award for excellence in Horror writing and is nominated for a similar award in science fiction. He has greatly enjoyed the experience of working with Jeff and Dan, this is his first foray into the world of Lovecraftian poetry

The word-of-mouth BookTok hit about a supervisor at a top-secret government facility running experiments on human beings. He’s always been able to tell himself it’s for the greater good—until the day his work follows him home.“Inventive, scary, wholly entertaining, and deeply thought-provoking . . . T. J. Payne is the real deal.”—Jose Molina, writer/producer on The Vampire Diaries, Sleepy Hollow, and FireflyJoe works for an organization known only as “The Company.” He cannot speak about what he does in public. He and his employees live in a constant state of paranoia that The Company is listening to their phones and watching their search histories. Why? Because on the bottom floor of the facility, rows of padded cells keep a group of humans in a constant state of extreme sensory deprivation. With their minds awake but their senses unable to ground themselves, they have gone insane, oscillating between vegetative states and fits of violent rage.These experiments have a purpose, though—when the minds of these inmates transcend their physical selves, they’re able to “intercept” the sights and senses of anyone in the world. The process, however, is painful. Torturous.Joe likes to think that his work, helping the government track down bad guys, makes the world a better place. He has no regrets. Until the day when his ex-wife dies by suicide. He learns that a woman who looks very much like one of Joe’s inmates had been haunting her. After his ex-wife’s death, Joe’s daughter Riley comes to live with him. And then she begins to have visions of the woman too...Has Joe somehow played a role in turning the government’s most sinister weapon against his own daughter? And, most important of all: how far will he go to save her?

He failed to catch the killer. Now, he’ll rewrite reality to save his daughter.Jericho "Echo" Keane is a broken man. Disgraced from the SFPD and living in self-imposed exile in a shipping container, he is tortured by the memory of the Mission Street Killer who murdered his thirteen-year-old daughter, Olivia. Driven by failure and consuming guilt, Echo's only reason for getting out of bed is the slim chance he might not let the morning win.But one desperate encounter at a grief meeting changes everything. A gaunt stranger offers Echo the impossible: a chance to manipulate the "Mandela Effect" and bring back his daughter. This is no dream—it's a brutal reality where time can be "rewound" and consequences altered.Teaming up with Michelle Vale, a mother whose own daughter was the killer's first victim, Echo throws himself into a temporal war. He finds himself hunted by shadowy military-trained mercenaries hired by the ruthless E-Skinz corporation. To protect the new timeline and save the girls, Echo must become the rogue operator he never was.A mind-binding supernatural horror thriller that asks how far you would go to save the ones you love, even if it means dying a villain in the process. Find out the answer today and read into the night!

Love survived death—now it has to survive the apocalypse.On the second anniversary of her boyfriend's death, Cozy Coleman, a rising star in a world where necromancy is mainstream, boards DeathCon, a horror-themed convention cruise where she and her two best friends—the Scream Teens—are hired as headline necro-tainment.When a brutal she-wolf attack kills Cozy, she awakens reanimated, caught between life and something far darker. Her resurrection reveals an extinction-level virus beneath the Pacific—one that could turn the Hawaiian Islands into ground zero for an undead apocalypse.As the ship locks down, a covert military unit arrives to contain the outbreak, led by a hardened operative Cozy recognizes instantly: the boyfriend she's been mourning isn't dead, but deep undercover. Furious at the lie yet still madly in love, Cozy is forced to fight alongside him as the ship descends into chaos.With ravenous creatures overrunning DeathCon and time running out, Cozy must confront what she's becoming—and decide whether love, trust, and her dangerous power are enough to stop the end of everything.