Tim Lebbon – horror and dark fantasy author

Published Cemetery Dance Publication, 2009

Availability:

• Limited edition hardback, direct from publisher

They’ve invaded before, sending their best and brightest to transform popular music for all time. This time, they’re leaving the music behind and focusing on words. The British Invasion has begun again, in a collection of twenty-one unforgettable stories of horror and the dark fantastic.

From the birthplace of horror fiction, the land where writers first dreamed up the icons that shaped the field we know today — Frankenstein’s monster, Count Dracula, the vile Mr. Hyde and more. You think you know desperation? Discover a literary tradition born from centuries of violence, pain, and suffering, distilled through the veneer of civility, and twisted by the reign of tyrants and kings.

You think you know fear?

From creeping dread to hideous humor, from quiet terror to brutal horror, from mad speculation to unspeakable truth, the twenty-one tales here represent the best that the U.K. has to offer. The rising stars and the masters of British horror have joined together.

The British Invasion has begun.

Table of Contents:
Introduction by Stephen Volk
“Lost in a Field of Paper Flowers” by Gord Rollo
“Respects” by Ramsey Campbell”
“Farewell to the 21st Century Girl” by Mark Chadbourn
“At One” by James Lovegrove
“The Nowhere Man” by Sarah Pinborough
“The Spaces in Our Lives” by Allen Ashley
“The Crazy Helmets” by Paul Finch
“Slitten Gorge” by Conrad Williams
“Birchiam Pier” by Tony Richards
“Beth’s Law” by Joel Lane
“Black Dogs” by Gary Fry
“The Misadventure of Fat Man and Little Boy, Or, How I Made a Monster” by Philip Nutman
“The Goldfinch” by Nicholas Royle
“Never Go Back” by Steve Lockley & Paul Lewis
“Mutiny” by Kealan Patrick Burke
“British Horror Weekend” by Anonymous
“King of the Maggots” by John Travis
“Leaves” by Peter Crowther
“Puppies For Sale” by Mark Morris
“Yellow Teeth” by Adam Nevill
“The Vague” by Paul Meloy
Afterword by Kim Newman

Reviews & Praise:

“From Gord Rollo’s transcendentally eerie tale of a comatose young boy’s revenge (“Lost in a Field of Paper Flowers”) to Mark Morris’s cautionary tale about a pair of unorthodox vampires (“Puppies for Sale”), the 21 original stories in this anthology establish the strength of British horror writers. Contributors include Ramsey Campbell, Sarah Pinborough, Conrad Williams, Peter Crowther, and other veterans and new authors. A strong collection of contemporary horror from across the pond…”
— Library Journal

“The British may not have invented the modern horror story, as the editors of this all-original anthology claim, but the 21 stories they’ve selected prove that contemporary U.K. writers are infiltrating American publishing markets with some of the most provocative horror fiction written today. Refreshingly devoid of genre clichés, these subtle tales offer ambiguously supernatural horrors from the dramas and traumas of everyday life. Nicholas Royle, in The Goldfinch, gives chronic illness an unsettling spin by objectifying a man’s cancer as a relentless shadowy stalker. Mark Morris’s Puppies for Sale presents a nuclear family’s gradual implosion as a consequence of a malignant supernatural influence that may be a complete figment of the distraught father’s mind. In Conrad Williams’s Slitten Gorge, the disconnect between the unpolluted natural world and the protagonist’s industrially despoiled environment achieves an aura of otherworldly horror. The book’s title notwithstanding, there’s nothing peculiarly British about these stories, but their authors are exceptionally articulate in the universal language of horror.”
— Publishers Weekly