Suspended In Dusk

by Ramsey Campbell

  Her website is: www.annareith.co.uk

  Armand Rosamilia ~ is a New Jersey boy currently living in sunny Florida, where he writes about everyone around him getting eaten by zombies. He has over 100 releases currently available, including a few different series, like his Dying Days extreme zombie books. He also loves to talk in third person… because he’s really that cool. He’s a proud Active member of HWA.

  You can find him at http://armandrosamilia.com for not only his latest releases but interviews and guest posts with other authors he likes! And e-mail him to talk about zombies, baseball and Metal: armandrosamilia@gmail.com

  Icy Sedgwick ~ was born in the North East of England, and lives and works in Newcastle, where she teaches design and social media. She has been writing for over ten years, and has had several stories included in anthologies, including Short Stack and Bloody Parchment: The Root Cellar & Other Stories. She favours Gothic horror, but is not averse to writing fantasy, steampunk or historical fiction!

  Icy had her first book, a pulp Western named The Guns of Retribution, published through Pulp Press in September 2011, and re-published through Beat to a Pulp in May 2013. Her latest novella, a horror fantasy called The Necromancer’s Apprentice, was published by Dark Continents Publishing in March 2014. Sequels to both titles are in the pipeline, and she is also in the process of editing her YA ghost adventure about a Cavalier named Fowlis Westerby.

  She spends her non-writing time working on a PhD in Film Studies, considering the use of set design in contemporary horror, with a focus on haunted house films. Icy also knits, crochets, and makes jewellery, including a new merchandise range to support her published titles. She spent some time working on paranormal investigations and is keen to infuse her fiction with the supernatural wherever possible.

  She spends a lot of time using social media, so you can email her at icy@icysedgwick.com, or follow her on Twitter @IcySedgwick. Her blog is at www.icysedgwick.com, where she posts weekly free fiction, and you can find her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/miss.icy.sedgwick.

  Rayne Hall ~ has published more than fifty books in several languages under several pen names with several publishers in several genres, mostly fantasy, horror and non-fiction. She is the author of the bestselling Writer’s Craft series and editor of the Ten Tales anthologies.

  Having lived in Germany, China, Mongolia and Nepal, she has now settled in a small dilapidated town of former Victorian grandeur on the south coast of England where she enjoys reading, gardening and long walks along the seashore. She shares her home with a black cat adopted from the cat sanctuary. His name is Sulu and he’s the perfect cat for a writer––except when he claims ownership of her keyboard.

  You can follow here on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/RayneHallAuthor and Twitter @RayneHall where she posts advice for writers, funny cartoons and cute pictures of her cat.

  Chris Limb ~ is a writer and designer based in Brighton, UK. After many years hovering on the periphery of the music industry -originally just going to gigs but eventually graduating to selling t-shirts and badges plus operating the lighting rig for bands––in 2011 he published a pop memoir I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan which went down well with its core-audience, received good reviews and continues to sell at a steady rate.

  Chris’s full length novel Comeback––in which the UK music industry and the mythological underworld collide––is currently being submitted to agents and publishers and he recently completed work on the first draft of the follow up Ghostdance.

  Chris reviews books and audiobooks for the British Fantasy Society and has blogged on a regular basis since mid-2009. In addition he writes short stories a number of which have been published over the past 18 months with more to come over the next six months.

  When time allows, Chris also plays bass guitar in a couple of bands as well as performing random acts of web and graphic design for a diverse selection of clients in the comedy and theatre scenes.

  You can find him at www.chrislimb.com or on Twitter @catmachine

  Toby Bennett ~ was born in 1976 in Cape Town, South Africa. He holds a degree in philosophy from the University of Cape Town. Like many writers he has had a varied career that has included graphic and web design, database administration and technical writing. His true passion lies in creative writing and to date he has written eight novels and appeared in a few collections of short stories, including the Bloody Parchment and Dark Harvest anthologies. He has a story in the upcoming anthology The Sea and is looking forward to the release of his serialized novel––Viral, co-written with Benjamin Knox. (Release date to be announced).

  His website is www.thedragontower.co.za.

  S.G Larner ~ is a denizen of sunny Brisbane, Australia, where she wrangles three children and complains about the heat. As an antidote to her relatively mundane life she revels in exploring the dark underbelly of the world through her short fiction and poetry.

  Her work has appeared in Aurealis, SQ Mag, Tincture Journal, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, and the Grey Matter Press anthology Equilibrium Overturned, among others. Upcoming publications include Fictionvale Episode 4 and Phantazein, a new anthology by Fablecroft Publishing.

  In her non-existent spare time she knits, sews, runs, bakes, grows things and co-ordinates a school library. You can find her at http://foregoreality.wordpress.com and on twitter @StaceySarasvati.

  J.C. Michael ~ lives in rural North Yorkshire with his wife, who encourages him to write, and his young son, who distracts him from getting on with it.

  His debut novel, Discoredia, was published by Books of the Dead Press in 2013, and his flash fiction piece, Insufficient, won the 2014 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre Competition run by Grey Matter Press.

  Ramsey Campbell ~ The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild.

  Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know and The Kind Folk. Forthcoming are Think Yourself Lucky and Thirteen Days at Sunset Beach, and he is working on a trilogy, The Three Births of Daoloth. Needing Ghosts, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki and The Pretence are novellas. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You and Holes for Faces, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in Dead Reckonings and Video Watchdog. He is the President of the Society of Fantastic Films.

  Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His web site is at www.ramseycampbell.com.

  Brett Bruton ~ writes exclusively during the hours that are most inconvenient for him. As such, the majority of his editing process involves removing curse words. Brett writes horror because comedy is too difficult and ‘blood’ is easy to spell.

  Find him on twitter: @BrettRexB

  Karen Runge ~ was born in Paris, France. The daughter of a diplomat, her family lived in France and then Gabon before returning to their native South Africa when she was a young child.

  She is a horror writer, sometimes an artist, and works teaching adults English as a second language. Her works have appeared in Shock Totem, Pseudopod, Something Wicked, Pantheon magazine, Structo, and Sirens Call, among others. She lives in Beijing, China, with a wonderful Italian. You can find her at karenrunge.wordpress.com.

  Tom Dullemond ~ stumbled out of university with a double degree in Medieval/Renaissance studies and Software Engineering. One of
these degrees got him a job and he has been writing and working in IT ever since. Tom writes primarily short fiction across all genres, including literary fiction and the occasional poem. He co-authored The Machine Who Was Also a Boy, the first in a series of philosophical fantasy adventures for middle-grade students, and writes a regular flash fiction column for The Helix science magazine.

  He is currently involved with the www.streetreads.com project, delivering a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style location-based story for the Brisbane City Council, as well as featuring in the forthcoming ‘Unfettered’ anthology by Tiny Owl Workshop.

  His website is www.tomdullemond.com and he can be found on Twitter @cacotopos.

  Wendy Hammer ~ teaches literature and composition at a community college. Her stories can be found in the anthology Gaia: Shadows and Breath (Pantheon Magazine) and on Crooked/Shift, Liquid Imagination, and Every Day Fiction. Her trilogy of dark urban fantasy novellas, Cross Cutting, has been acquired by Apocalypse Ink Productions.

  She can be found online at her website www.wendyhammer.com and on twitter @Wendyhammer13.

  Wendy lives in Indiana with her husband.

  Shane McKenzie ~ is the author of Infinity House, All You Can Eat, Bleed on Me, Jacked, Addicted to the Dead, Muerte Con Carne, Escape from Shit Town (co-authored with Sam W. Anderson and Erik Williams), Fat Off Sex and Violence, Pus Junkies, Stork, Fairy, The Bingo Hall, Parasite Deep, and many more to come. He also writes comics for Zenescope Entertainment.

  He wrote the script for a short film entitled M is for Matador, filmed by LuchaGore Productions, which was selected by DraftHouse Films to be included in the DVD The ABCs of Death 1.5. LuchaGore Productions will be filming a short film based on the first chapter of his novel Muerte Con Carne, entitled El Gigante.

  He lives in Austin, TX with his wife and daughter. He will find you and he will cut you.

  His website is: www.shanemckenzie.org

  Sarah Read ~ writes, reads, and knits near Rocky Mountain National Park. She is fiction editor for Pantheon Magazine. Her work can be found in Black Static, Revolt Daily, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, and forthcoming in anthologies from Dark House Press and Thunderdome Press.

  You can follow her on twitter @inkwellmonster.

  Benjamin Knox ~ rogue author, wanders the post-apocalyptic landscape that is modern publishing, never staying long in one place lest the degenerate mutants get his scent and devour him to the bone. Relying only on his wits and armed with his trusty keyboard he flits from the outposts of genre press, braving the radioactive, cannibal infested, wastes of indie publishing that lay between. During his adventures he delivers up tales of the strange, eerie and unsettling. Dare you open those pages and glean what is within?

  For further strangeness find him at: benjaminknox.net

  Or:

  Pulpocalypse.tumblr.com

  John Everson ~ is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Covenant (2004), Sacrifice (2007), The 13th (2009), Siren (2010), and The Pumpkin Man (2011). All of these novels were released in paperback by Dorchester/Leisure Books. Limited hardcover editions were also issued from Delirium Books, Necro Publications and Bad Moon Books. Covenant, Sacrifice and Siren have been translated or are in the process of being translated and released in Poland, Turkey, France and Germany.

  John’s sixth novel, NightWhere, was released by Samhain Publishing in 2012.

  Over the past 20 years, John’s short fiction has appeared in more than 50 magazines, including Space & Time, Dark Discoveries and Grue, as well as in a couple dozen anthologies, most recently in Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror, The Green Hornet Casebook, Kolchak: The Night Stalker Casebook, Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. 1), Best New Vampire Tales (Vol. 1), Best New Zombie Tales (Vol. 2) and Fell Beasts. His short stories have also been translated and published into Italian, Polish and French. A wide selection of his short fiction has been collected in five short story collections: Deadly Nightlusts (Blasphemous Books, 2010), Creeptych (Delirium Books 2010), Needles & Sins (Necro Books, 2007), Vigilantes of Love (Twilight Tales, 2003) and Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions (Delirium Books, 2000).

  “Letting Go,” one of the short stories from Needles & Sins was nominated for a 2007 Bram Stoker Award and three other short stories from the collection have been included in the Honorable Mention List of the annual Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror anthology co-edited by Ellen Datlow.

  Angela Slatter ~ specializes in Dark Fantasy and Horror fiction. She is the author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, the World Fantasy Award finalist Sourdough and Other Stories, and the Aurealis finalist Midnight and Moonshine (with Lisa L. Hannett). Angela’s short stories have appeared in such writerly venues as The Mammoth Book of New Horror #22, Fantasy, Nightmare and Lightspeed Magazines, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Fearie Tales, A Book of Horrors, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, and Australian and US Best Of anthologies.

  She is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award (for “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter” in A Book of Horrors, Stephen Jones, ed.).

  In 2013 she was awarded one of the inaugural Queensland Writers Fellowships. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, and is a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006.

  Forthcoming in 2014 are the collections The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings (a prequel to Sourdough and Other Stories) from Tartarus Press, and The Female Factory (with Lisa L. Hannett), the last in the Twelfth Planet Press “Twelve Planets” series.

  Angela has recently finished an urban fantasy novel Vigil, (based on the short story Brisneyland by Night) and has started the sequel, Corpselight. She is also completing work on her Queensland Writers Fellowship mosaic novel, The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales.

  Acknowledgements

  “Burning” by Rayne Hall originally appeared (in a greatly different form) in the E-zine Byzarium.

  “Spirits Having Flown”, copyright 2003 by John Everson. Originally published in MOTA 3: Courage, by Triple Tree Publishing.

  “Digging Deep”, copyright 2007 by Ramsey Campbell. Originally appeared in Phobic, edited by Andy Murray.

  Fit Camp, copyright 2010 by Shane McKenzie. Originally appeared in Dark Recesses magazine.

  Also Available from

  Books of the Dead Press:

  Duncan McGeary - The Dead Spend No Gold

  Virginia Reed survived the Donner Party only to find herself in a life and death struggle with a creature out of her nightmares––a monstrous beast who reacts to the invasion of his territory by killing everyone who trespasses.

  Daren O. Godfrey - Apathetic Flesh

  Men, women, and children, walk the pages of this collection with flesh riding their bones in various stages of apathy, empathy, sympathy, and gaping insanity. Introduction by Kealan Patrick Burke.

  Julie Hutchings - Running Away

  Eliza Morgan is desperate to escape the horrors of her mortal life and understand why death follows her, leaving only one man, Nicholas French, in its wake. He’s the one she loves, the one she resents, the one fated to make her a legend among vampires.

  Suspended In Dusk - Anthology

  A whore hides something monstrous and finds something special. A homeless man discovers the razor blade inside the apple. Unlikely love is found in the strangest of places. Secrets and dreams are kept… forever. Forward by Jack Ketchum.

  Tonia Brown - Lucky Stiff: Zombie Gigolo

  Peter Lyles was unremarkable in life but unforgettable in death. After overdosing, Peter's friends turn him into a zombie with the help of "sex-magic" Voodoo. His unforgettable adventure takes him from bedroom to bedroom, giving him a career as the hottest gigolo not quite alive, while he denies his hunger for human flesh.

  Justin Robinson - Undead On Arrival

  Glen Novak is a dead man. Unfortunately for the scumbag who killed him, Novak will keep on cracking skulls until he finds the piece of trash that set him up, or is turned into a
walking sack of rotten meat.

  Steve Kuhn - We Are The Plague:

  Dext of the Dead, Book 1

  Dext is a regular man in an irregular situation. The undead plague has decimated the population, but pockets of survivors still remain. A battered military search for survivors while scientists work frantically to control the spread. The clock is ticking… if he can keep running.

  Steve Kuhn - We Are The Infected:

  Dext of the Dead, Book 2

  Dext and his crew are reeling from the losses incurred during their stay at The Haven and are on the run. A military unit known as Kilo Company appears to be the group’s best bet for survival, but they are miles ahead and the gap is widening. Everything is not what it seems.

  Steve Kuhn - We Are The Entombed:

  Dext of the Dead, Book 3

  The dead have permeated every square inch of the country, leaving the survivors desperate for commodities. Roving bands of raiders and small, independent communities pose serious threats to one another, much like the increasing numbers of ravenous, shambling corpses.

  Steve Kuhn - We Are The Extinction:

  Dext of the Dead, Book 4

  Tensions mount for Dext and his crew as they travel west in search of the elusive military unit known as Kilo Company. Characters, both good and evil, affect the course of events. Threats wait around every corner. A truth has been revealed: mankind is more monstrous than the living dead.

  Steve Kuhn - We Are The End:

  Dext of the Dead, Book 5