Part of Series
The fourth volume of strange tales from Tartarus presents fifteen new stories in the fields of fantasy, horror, decadence and the supernatural. Christopher Harman’s ‘By Leaf and Thorn’ mines the not-to-be underestimated magick of the English countryside, while John Howard’s uneasy timeslip piece ‘You Promised You Would Walk’ is set in modern Berlin. Rebecca Lloyd’s ‘Gone to the Deep’ explores the Celtic sea-myths of the Scottish isles, while Rhys Hughes’ ‘The Secret Passage’ follows the architectural obsession of a would-be good son. Matt Leyshon has his ne’er-do-well anti-hero escape to a Greek island in ‘The Amber Komboloi’, while Angela Slatter’s ‘The Badger Bride’ follows the adventures of her shape-shifting, grown-up fairy-tale characters. H.V. Chao’s ‘The Recovery’ details a writer’s decadent working holiday in the South of France, while in ‘Drowning in Air’, Andrew Hook’s protagonist visits an anxiety filled, post-war Japan. More stories of the highest quality—by John Gaskin, Jason A. Wyckoff, Richard Hill, Alan McIntosh, V.H. Leslie, Mark Francis and Andrew Apter—contribute to a fascinating, rewarding, and sometimes bracing trip through the highways and byways of contemporary strange fiction. Containing: 'By Leaf and Thorn' by Christopher Harman 'The Secret Passage' by Rhys Hughes 'Gone to the Deep' by Rebecca Lloyd 'You Promised You Would Walk' by John Howard 'Forth' by A.J. McIntosh 'Preservation' by V.H. Leslie 'The Man Who Wore His Father’s Clothes' by Andrew Apter 'The Badger Bride' by Angela Slatter 'The Amber Komboloi' by Matt Leyshon 'For a Last Spark of the Divine' by Mark Francis 'The Recovery' by H.V. Chao 'Drowning in Air' by Andrew Hook 'The Homunculus in the Curio' by Jason A. Wyckoff 'Time' by Richard Hill 'The Memento Mori' by John Gaskin
Authors
Angela Slatter is the author of the urban fantasy novels Vigil (2016) and Corpselight (2017), as well as eight short story collections, including The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, and A Feast of Sorrows: Stories. She has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, and six Aurealis Awards. Angela’s short stories have appeared in Australian, UK and US Best Of anthologies such The Mammoth Book of New Horror, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, and The Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction. Her work has been translated into Bulgarian, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, and Romanian. Victoria Madden of Sweet Potato Films (The Kettering Incident) has optioned the film rights to one of her short stories. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006, and in 2013 she was awarded one of the inaugural Queensland Writers Fellowships. In 2016 Angela was the Established Writer-in-Residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Perth. Her novellas, Of Sorrow and Such (from Tor.com), and Ripper (in the Stephen Jones anthology Horrorology, from Jo Fletcher Books) were released in October 2015. The third novel in the Verity Fassbinder series, Restoration, will be released in 2018 by Jo Fletcher Books (Hachette International). She is represented by Ian Drury of the literary agency Sheil Land for her long fiction, by Lucy Fawcett of Sheil Land for film rights, and by Alex Adsett of Alex Adsett Publishing Services for illustrated storybooks.
John Howard was born in London. His fiction has appeared in several anthologies and the collections The Silver Voices (2010), Written by Daylight (2013), and Cities and Thrones and Powers (2013). The majority of his stories have central and eastern European settings; many are set in the fictional Romanian town of Steaua de Munte. The Defeat of Grief (2010) is a novella set in Steaua de Munte and the real Black Sea resort of Balcic; Numbered as Sand or the Stars (2012) attempts a 'secret history' of Hungary between the World Wars. Between 2003 and 2007 John Howard collaborated on eight short stories with Mark Valentine, six of which featured Valentine’s long-running series character The Connoisseur, an occult detective whose real name is never revealed. All 23 tales of The Connoisseur, including the collaborations, were reprinted in The Collected Connoisseur (2010). Secret Europe (2012) is a collection jointly written with Mark Valentine comprising 25 short stories set in a variety of real and fictional European locations. Ten of the stories are by Howard and fifteen by Valentine. John Howard has written articles for numerous magazines including Book and Magazine Collector, Supernatural Tales, Wormwood, Studies in Australian Weird Fiction, and All Hallows. He contributed essays to the Fritz Leiber special issue of Fantasy Commentator (No. 57/58, 2004) and to the books Black Prometheus: A Critical Study of Karl Edward Wagner (2007), Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays (2008), and The Man Who Collected Psychos: Critical Essays on Robert Bloch (2009), all edited by Benjamin Szumskyj. John Howard also wrote the introduction to the Ash-Tree Press edition of Francis Brett Young’s classic 1924 horror novel Cold Harbour (2007).
