Black Gate

James Brogden is an Australian horror writer with three novels to his credit, The Narrows, Tourmaline, The Realt, plus the collection Evocations. His latest is a modern-day dark fantasy about a teacher who has four students go missing on the same day… and the horror that begins when one of them returns alone.

Tim Lebbon calls it “Brilliant… full of great twists and beautifully drawn characters,” and Kirkus Reviews says it’s “genuinely scary… a wonderfully odd mix of dark Bronze Age fantasy and modern-day thriller, and it works.” Booklist gave it high praise indeed, saying

The engrossing plot features steadily intensifying dread… a fast-paced and terrifying ride as everyone tries to solve two mysteries, one modern and one ancient… a horror novel and a standout thriller that can hold its own against the best in either genre.

Hekla’s Children was published by Titan Books on March 7, 2017. It is 400 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital version. The cover was designed by Julia Lloyd (click the images to embiggen). Read a brief excerpt at Dread Central.

T.E. Grau’s short horror fiction has appeared in The Children of Old Leech, The Dark Rites of Cthulhu, Dark Fusions – Where Monsters Lurk!, World War Cthulhu, and other fine anthologies and magazines. His other books include Triptych: Three Cosmic Tales, The Lost Aklo Stories, and The Nameless Dark, which was nominated for a 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Single-Author Collection. His novella I Am The River will be published later this year by Lethe Press.

I’ve been wanting to sample his fiction for a while, and his brand new novella They Don’t Come Home Anymore seems like the way to do it. On his blog, Grau describes it this way.

They Don’t Come Home Anymore [is] a story that might, at first blush, seem like a slight departure from my previous work, as it centers on a teenage girl, and is very much a tale of obsession, loneliness, and a search for meaning, acceptance, and love in a world (and sub world) that waits, cruel and threatening, just behind the facade. It’s also about vampires, but not the garden variety sort you’d expect in a mass market/network television teenage vamp story, but something that cleaves closer to the natural world, and how our planet once was, and might still be in certain darkened corners. I can’t really say more, other than to invite you to pick up the book when it’s available, and tell me what you think it’s about, underneath, beyond that first impression.

They Don’t Come Home Anymore was published by This Is Horror on November 28, 2016. It is 104 pages, priced at $10.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Candice Tripp.