Cirrus@Austlit

'The Fortunate Isles collects fourteen tales of salt-crusted weirdness from the rugged, cold-clime harbour village of Barradoon...

'Barradoon: the limit of worldly navigation; stronghold of sea-myths and ancient forces; a place of simmering tension and ruthless vengeance meted out by human and inhuman alike.

'These densely wrought, boundlessly inventive stories form, in their totality, a singularly strange mosaic novel of sorts - ever twisting and writhing like a storm-charged ocean. Yet they are never out of the meticulous control of Lisa Hannett's masterly storytelling.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Bitter Distillations is a collection of disquieting, disorientating and otherwise uncategorizable tales for which poison provides the inspiration.

'Poisons conspicuously sinister or quietly innocuous; deliberately distilled or unknowingly harvested; psychotropic, lethal, sickly or sweet. Care to partake?

'All 18 pieces are newly written and previously unpublished.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Alas! Is there a theme in supernatural fiction more prone to cliché and cozy familiarity than the haunted house story?

'With this mammoth new anthology, Egaeus Press aims to reclaim that supremely primal tradition, not only from glossy movies, cartoons and television-era ghost hunters, but also from the Victorians, and the great, academic spook story authors of the 20th Century who, by their nature, sought to calibrate, anthropomorphise and provide justification for acts by forces which might hitherto have been considered beyond the scope of human comprehension.

'Crooked Houses takes its cue from this earlier age. Though many of the stories presented are set in the modern world, the forces which pervade are primeval, unquantifiable; the stuff of folk-tales, family curses and collective nightmares.

'These houses have very deep roots. These houses have teeth.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This is a book on the subject of Death and Folly (but aren't they all really?): An entertainment including works from some of the finest authors of the weird and morbid working today: A collection of admirable knick-knacks and curios, fictions, non-fictions, poems, for your amusement.

'It isn't intended to depress or distress, to trigger or traumatize. It doesn't condone ghoulish, maudlin or destructive attitudes. It simply is... A dismal, witty, pretty, weird trifle of a thing on which, dear reader, I hope you enjoy passing a little time in the run of this absurd, overlighted dream we call human life.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A collection of seventeen dark tales & novellas, in which some of today’s finest weird story writers provide previously unpublished work inspired by traditional murder ballads. The results are sometimes enigmatic, sometimes witty, sometimes desperately grim; just like the songs they often appear to belong outside — either before or after — recorded time, in some malleable epoch of blood-drenched mythology. They channel not only these ballads, but also that certain brand of outmoded publication which once revelled so joyfully in all manner of luridness; publications such as The Newgate Calendar, The Illustrated Police News and of course the Victorian Penny Dreadful.'

Source: Egaeus Press.