Agreeably scary

It's almost Halloween, and if you're stoking up the fire (or even just upping the brightness on your PC's fireplace screensaver) you may be casting around for delicious fictive chills to run a teasing finger of fright along your spine.

Fans of John Whitbourn's classic Binscombe Tales stories will know that few experiences can be quite so disturbing and at the same time strangely comforting as dropping in at the Duke of Argyll in the company of Mr Oakley, our hapless narrator, and the mysterious Mr Disvan. It's what autumn, imagination, log fires and real ale were created for.

The Binscombe Tales are hard to describe. Possessed of great human warmth and yet often coldly heartless. Sometimes scary but just as often more in the way of startling and thought-provoking. Science fictional except where they're fabulous, fantastic, whimsical, spooky or simply bizarre. Thrilling yet often delightfully leisurely. Terrifying or mind-bending - but always funny with it.

In short, they're the very best of English weird fiction, and if you haven't encountered them yet then you're missing a treat. Fortunately, Jamie and I think ahead so that stuff like the equinox, tax demands and the release of Witcher sequels don't take us by surprise, and this year we had the foresight to prepare an omnibus paperback edition of the complete Binscombe Tales from our Spark Furnace imprint.

Herein you will learn about: the man who spent a lifetime waiting for a bus; the suburban kitchen cupboard that is a gateway to another world; the whispering voices that force a nightclub owner to keep the music turned up loud; the incredible reminiscences of an antique writing desk; and all about the mythic threat lurking under Binscombe's electricity substation. I have previously blogged about the first of those stories, which gave me an authentic shudder as John read it out at a ghost story evening chez Morris, and if you want to try "Waiting for a Bus" then it's available as a free PDF - but only until Halloween.

As well as all twenty-six tales, many of which have garnered awards such as the Year's Best Fantasy, Binscombe Tales: The Complete Series includes a long essay by John Whitbourn in which he reveals that oft-asked authorial secret - to wit, where he gets his ideas from. The whole book is 660 pages so there's no danger of running out of gruesome entertainment before the days start getting longer. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's the perfect present for those long dark evenings ahead.

The intersection of the timeless moment

I'm constantly telling my old friend, role-playing comrade and esteemed fellow author, John Whitbourn, that he should publish the Binscombe Tales, his cycle of whimsical fantasy/horror stories, on the Kindle, Nook and iPhone.

The Binscombe books, originally issued as hardcovers a decade ago, are now out-of-print and fiercely sought by collectors. My first encounter with the Binscombe Tales was in the late 1980s when John came along to a ghost story evening at my house. We all had a nice dinner, a little fine wine, and settled down around the fire to entertain ourselves with some cosily spooky stories. An activity that Man has only been doing for - what? twenty thousand years and more.

Then John got up and read us "Waiting for a Bus" and a chill dark hand closed over the group. As he read the final words, you could hear the sigh of long-held breath and people looked from one another with that bright-eyed smile that says you know you have just had the bejasus scared out of you. My first reaction: "Get those stories on the radio, John. It'll be an M R James for our times - the Beeb'll bite your hand off." Now I say, "Short fiction is perfect for digital platforms, you need to get the Bincombe Tales on iPhone." But John is more of a traditionalist, like many of the readers of this blog, and likes a book you can hold and stroke and breathe in. On his blog, John describes the stories thus:

There is a real place called Binscombe, located in the south-east of England; but these tales are not about that Binscombe. Instead they concern another Binscombe, linked to the first by subtle but invisible bridges of 'what if?' This other Binscombe is a place rich in history, where strangers are welcome, but not always safe; a place where watching a video is not as harmless a pursuit as it might seem, where waiting for the bus may take much longer than expected, and where churchgoers are advised to pay very close attention during the midnight service on Christmas Eve. It is, in short, a place which takes its history very seriously - and with good reason, as the unwary are apt to find out to their cost. No one takes Binscombe and its history more seriously than Mr Disvan, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of the village and its past seems to have been acquired through more than simply reading history books. We see Mr Disvan and Binscombe life through the eyes of Mr Oakley, a newcomer whose family has long had roots there, and who thus proves the truth of a local saying: 'They always come back'. This local connection gives Mr Oakley an opportunity to see some of the stranger side of life in Binscombe, with Mr Disvan as his guide; but it also shows him that once you come back, it isn't always possible to leave again.

"Waiting for a Bus", that story that gave such a shudder to the dinner party guests who were privileged to hear it first, was picked as one of the World's Best Fantasy stories of that year. Everyone who reads it recognizes that this is a new and authentic voice in English horror-fantasy. And yet, thus far, only a small cult readership has experienced the special delights, dreads and brilliant inventiveness of the Binscombe Tales series, so I'm going to keep on at John to authorize an ebook edition. In the meantime, Fabled Lands Publishing has his latest novel and I'll be telling you all about that in the very near future.

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment is England and nowhere. Never and always. - T.S. Eliot "Little Gidding"