Sam Tyler

I read so much genre fiction and have seen so many horror movies that I don’t scare easy. My brain automatically remembers all the behind-the-scenes make-up specials and director commentaries; I know it is not real. However, back in 2005 the last film that scared me was about a group of female caver...

I have been lucky to work in some normal places in my life, but even I have been placed in spooky situations. Working late, I would walk home through the woods known as The Wilderness. Could there be a ghoul or a monster waiting for me behind a tree? I am too cynical to think so, but I could imagine...

Vampire lore is well documented, the rules and regulations differ from book to book, but in most cases if you are a vampire, you cannot do much during the day. In modern life not being able to escape during the daylight hours after leaving a few emptied bodies would be a problem. Cameras would catch...

I would not call myself a skeptic, but a super skeptic, I just cannot begin to believe that ghosts exist, but that does not stop me from enjoying a good ghost story, or even a good old-fashioned ghost story. The Haunting of William Thorn by Ben Alderson has very modern characters and relationships,...

I enjoy genre books of all kinds. I love a good kidnapping story as a well-oiled plan starts to unravel. I also like a horror story about the Old Gods, of human sacrifices and bloody gore. What you don’t normally get is a story that is both. The kidnapping crew in Kit Burgoyne’s The Captive have tak...

If pop culture has only taught me one thing it is that siding with the creatures from other realms is not a great idea. They tend to renege on contracts once they have what they want, usually via sucking your brain out through your nose. Also, the partnerships are not normally people you would want...

Being successful and superrich would be great to allow you to do what you want, but it also comes with limitations. My mother never wanted to be too rich as she thought one of us would get kidnapped. She needn’t have worried had she made a deal with a demon, if anyone had tried to take one of us, th...

What do you want from a collection of horror short stories? A complex mix of different styles and authors, or a single voice? When it comes to horror, I want them to feel like a quick punch to the guts, only for you to look down and find that the punch was more of a stab. Clay McLeod Chapman knows w...

Do you believe in luck? Gambling sites and Casinos hope you do as you believe there is a chance that you will win big. You may just do that, but there is a reason some of the richest people in the UK own gambling websites, the house always wins. You may win big, but elsewhere someone is losing big,...

I enjoy reading about the occult in contrasting times in history. If someone came up to a modern person and said there was a witch in the woods stealing children, they would raise an eyebrow and swiftly walk in the opposite direction. A couple of hundred years earlier around the same woods the react...

I have read thousands of books, and they normally follow the same structural rules, but on occasion an author likes to experiment with the format. Perhaps they will forgo the need for speech marks and instead write people speaking as part of a sentence. No thanks. What about telling the story as a s...

Like any genre, the horror genre has shifts in style and tone. I was always a fan of the nasty horror stories of the late 70s and early 80s. Books that saw lots of terrible things happen to good people. In Killer on the Road author Stephen Graham Jones attempts to capture that Grindhouse feel and gi...

I enjoy a retelling of a classic tale from an unfamiliar perspective. I have read about Sherlock Holmes from the point of view of almost everyone he ever met. I have read about Beowulf written by his niece. King Authur, Robin Hood, many others, but never a character as dark as Sweeny Todd. The Demon...