Our ongoing Horror Design Essay Project has a new contribution today. Horror author Paul Alabaster offers a peak into his creative writing process and gives us a look at what he has in store for the future…

Chasing His Nightmares

My love of stories came from my mother – Jacqueline. I always remember whilst tucked up in bed, my mother reading me bedtime stories of Winnie the Pooh. I would listen with eager delight to what misadventures Pooh Bear had gotten himself (and his ever-forgiving friends) in to. Another beloved treasure I adored my mother reading to me was C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe.

A beautiful, newly discovered alien race is spreading a virus that turns its victims into cannibals, in the third part of Gena Showalter’s Alien Huntress series.

They’re called the Schön, and both Alien Investigation and Removal and Mishka Le’Ace’s boss want them investigated, captured and killed. As always with this series, the world-building is outstanding and the Schön case is intriguing…but it’s only a subplot. And if you’d read the back cover copy, you wouldn’t know about this storyline at all.

Promethean is a ‘new’ property for White Wolf, rather than a rehash of an older proper as their other new World of Darkness titles have been. This, incidentally, means that they have now pretty much caught up, after over a decade, with Nightlife, another RPG that could really do with a reboot in my opinion.

Promethean, basically, covers the idea of ‘constructs’. The inspiration is most clearly from Frankenstein’s Monster but other ideas are mingled in with that inspiration from golems and homunculi to Egyptian myth, all held – loosely – together by a theme of alchemy and a hint of the old anti-technology vibe that the old World of Darkness often displayed, an underlying loathing of ‘the unnatural’.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

One man stood between them and us.

U.S. Marshal Jameson Arkeley—the country’s foremost authority on vampires—taught police investigator and vampire fighter Laura Caxton everything she knows about monsters. After a bloody war visited upon Gettysburg by an army of vampires, Arkeley gave up his own life to save others. Except he didn’t exactly die . . .

The author of 13 Bullets and 99 Coffins, David Wellington takes the Laura Caxton series to a whole new level in this action-packed third volume.

Vampire Zero: A Gruesome Vampire Tale is available at Amazon.com.

It’s Halloween season and until this weekend the movie theatres had offered horror fans zero tricks or treats. On October 10th director John Erick Dowdle’s Quarantine became this season’s first theatrically released genre movie and by default it vaulted to the top of my must-see list.

Quarantine, the American remake of last year’s well-received Spanish genre offering, [REC], opens with TV reporter Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter) and her cameraman Scott (Steve Harris) filming an episode of their soft news program in which they profile the firemen at a Los Angeles fire station.

Review by Jason Thorson

You might remember when I last wrote about one of Rosemary Clement-Moore’s books, I pronounced it the scariest book I’d reviewed for Flames Rising. Since I’m also a fan of “fluffy bunnies” level horror (as I also expressed in that review), I was not disappointed when the sequel, Hell Week, was not as nightmarish. In the sequel, girl-psychic Maggie Quinn does face a whole new level of evil: Rush and sororities. As a college freshman and budding journalist, her plan is to infiltrate her campus’s Greek societies and write scathing exposés. Balance this with an undefined relationship with the cute upperclassman who, in Prom Dates from Hell, helped her defeat a demon; her grandmother’s urging to continue her psychic training; her best friend continuing to study witchcraft against Maggie’s long-distance advice; and freshman year would be tough enough. But evil doesn’t take a break, and there’s something scarily lucky about the Sigma Alpha Xis, who choose Maggie to join their number. When Maggie’s usually helpful dreams disappear and she finds herself on the receiving end of that same good luck–and enhanced sexual attraction–that is the mark of the Sigma Alpha Xis, she suspects something dark at work. On the bright side, evil is always good for investigative journalism, if it doesn’t kill her first.

Review by Alana Abbott

Super Genius Games (SGG) is proud to announce that Murder of Crows will be available for purchase as a PDF beginning Wednesday, August 13.

“This is the first Call of Cthulhu product published under our license with Chaosium, Inc.,” said Hyrum Savage, President of SGG, “and we couldn’t be happier or more excited. We’ve been working on this and other Call of Cthulhu products for months, and it’s great to see them start to reach the audience at large.”

We gave you a peek at the new cover art by Eric Lofgren and introduced you to the basics of Tales of the Seven Dogs Society last week.

Tales of the Seven Dogs Society is a collection of stories inspired by the Aletheia role-playing game published by Abstract Nova Entertainment. Each of these stories is a possible continuation of the events described in that book.

Today’s sneak preview is a small bit from Jim Johnson’s Lifting the Gingham Veil, which is the second story in the collection.

With sold out shows and talks of an Oscar, if you haven’t seen The Dark Knight you’re probably wondering if it lives up to all of the hype. Even within the body of countless movie reviews for the film there are a few who, believe it or not, don’t like The Dark Knight. Why? You see, the one thing this comic book movie has at its core (that other movies of a similar type don’t) is an atypical visibility to a broader audience. While it’s impossible to find a true statistic, could it be safe to assume that people unfamiliar with the darker Batman franchise went to see the movie just because it was Heath Ledger’s last role?

Tales of the Seven Dogs Society is a collection of stories inspired by the Aletheia role-playing game published by Abstract Nova Entertainment. Each of these stories is a possible continuation of the events described in that book.

In the Aletheia RPG, players are presented with a detailed history of the strange events that led to the formation of the Seven Dogs Society, including some interesting supernatural phenomena that to this day remain unexplained. The book also gives describes how the Society works and just what types of characters might be recruited to join up.

This is the second part of the Scion Companion to be released as a PDF, the first having been the Tuatha de Daanan segment and with a couple more to come. It furthers White Wolf’s relatively progressive e-book policy while simultaneously acting almost as a preview for the eventual, finished product and also, probably, cunningly getting people to buy much of the same material twice – can’t really fault them for doing that! This section is all about the powers, the elevated statistics and their consequences, the fields of expertise and the powers within those, additional companions, followers, artifacts, magic and so on.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

In this hardcover edition of Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: The First Death, fans will get both issues in the series, as well as the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures Handbook. Published by Marvel with a retail price of $19.99, the book is a prequel to Laurell K Hamilton’s best-selling novel Guilty Pleasures, which is the first in the Anita Blake series.

Adapting a comic book from a novel series isn’t an easy thing to do, because of the novel’s rich format, rife with details and setting descriptions. Additionally, the Anita Blake series is told from the first person point-of-view, which can be challenging to display visually in a graphic novel. Stray too far from the point-of-view, and you may encounter oddities–things that the main character (Anita Blake) may be describing but hasn’t seen yet. A nod to the writing team of Laurell K Hamilton and Jonathon Green, each scene was pointed and specific to Anita’s character.

Private investigator Vicki Nelson, like most everyone in Toronto, doesn’t believe in the paranormal, but when it appears that the latest serial killer could be a vampire, she’s out of her depth. Retinitis pigmentosa has already cost Vicki her former life as a homicide detective, and she needs specialised help with this case. Enter historical romance writer Elizabeth Fitzroy, or known about town as Henry Fitzroy, the bastard son of Henry VIII. He’s also a vampire, and as he and Vicki investigate, they realise that a vampire may not be to blame – but a demon and a screwed up college kid are.

Review by Tez Miller

In this prequel issue, the story is about the contrast between the harm people cause to other people, and the harm that comes from evil beyond our understanding. Told in a very cinematic style with artwork to match, we first meet Danielle, a strong female character who works with Malcolm and Michael for the Organization.

Sent to “take care of business,” they hunt down a man named Peter Moore. In a typical suspense-filled mob movie, you might expect that Peter had already met an untimely death.

For those of us who were geeks in high school, comparing prom to hell wasn’t much of a stretch. The same can absolutely be said of Maggie Quinn, who has no intention of getting conned into going to prom. She doesn’t have a boyfriend, so that’s not a concern, and her stalwart friends have mocked the dance as much as she has in the past. But as the dance nears, and supernatural danger strikes, all of Maggie’s plans are scattered. Welcome to Rosemary Clement-Moore’s Prom Dates from Hell.

Review by Alana Abbott

Buy $50 worth of in-stock books (preorders not included) and you’ll automatically get a copy of James A. Moore’s Little Boy Blue by Bloodletting Press thrown in your shopping cart for free!

What’s so special about this sale, is that this book isn’t even available for sale anywhere, as Bloodletting Press produced it for this year’s World Horror Convention, as a giveaway chapbook.

So if you couldn’t make it, here’s your chance to get it for free!

Some of the stories have interesting premises, but sabotage themselves with clunky writing or clumsy execution (the first two stories, Adam and Eve Versus the Human Race by Alexander Zelenyj and Waking Finnegan by Joseph Benton are prime examples of this). Other stories have competent but unremarkable writing but tired, clichéd plots–A New Year’s Tale by Dave Bartlett starts off promising, but quickly turns into something extremely similar to The Hills Have Eyes.

There are a few pieces that are quite good. The two opening poems by Guy Belleranti are atmospheric and effective. Unfortunately, the rest of the poetry included in this anthology doesn’t work quite as well. But, it has to be said, revenants aren’t the most inspiring subjects when it comes to poetry.

Review by Leah Clarke

The Edge of Propinquity is a series of short stories exploring the world around us that lurks just beneath the surface. It is the world of the unexplained, supernatural, magic, horror, duty, responsibility, black humor, conspiracy, unknown heritage and power.

Check out Volume 26 of The Edge of Propinquity for a tale by Alana Joli Abbott called The Valley.

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A Japanese terror movie remake is frequently a bad idea, but an American horror movie that looks like one is worst. “Wind chill” tries to tell a declared true story in a Japanese way. That means to use a claustrophobic atmosphere, an aesthetic style and especially a plot based on spirits that want revenge. But in the end, it’s just a nothing-happens movie with bad acting and lazy direction.

Review by Douglas Lobo