A Haunting We Will Go

So I met up with indefatigable editor Stephen Jones and several other local bookish characters for pre-Christmas drinks, and he pressed into my hand a volume of one of his latest books, Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, an anthology of new and reprinted ghost stories. It features numerous luminaries of the horror field, including Christopher Fowler, Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Michael Marshal Smith, Lisa Tuttle, and also includes a rewritten version of one of my early short stories, 'Inheritance' - my ninth published story, in fact, which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction way back in 1988. I'm best known for my science fiction, but I've been a fan of horror stories from way back, turned on by Universal and Hammer films, the Mayflower horror anthologies, the Pan Books of Horror Stories, and the stories of M.R. James. On Christmas Eve in 1968, while the rest of the family were at Midnight Mass, I was frightened half to death by Jonathan Miller's famous TV adaptation of James' 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad'.  Lonely beaches never seemed the same afterwards. And now one of my stories is between the same covers as one of the master's, 'A Warning to the Curious'. How cool.

Also cool - my novella, 'The Choice' has been selected by Rich Horton for his Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012 Edition. Table of contents here.