The Twilight Zone of suburban Surrey

This is a cross-post over to the Mirabilis blog, but it probably belongs here even more than there, because John Whitbourn's Binscombe Tales series is the next publishing endeavour from Fabled Lands LLP.

The Binscombe Tales are true classics that exist in the overlap between SF, fantasy, horror, ghost stories and whimsy (hey, fiction is an n-dimensional space, didn't you know?) and they have previously appeared in The World's Best Fantasy and the After Midnight books. Mr Whitbourn himself is a a laureate of the Gollancz/BBC first fantasy award - which is no mere tyro genre-writer award, believe me - making him the modern Hemingway of the bizarre.

We will be releasing the complete series of twenty-six tales in print form (three eminently collectible paperback volumes) and on Kindle in time for Hallowe'en. (In fact, October 31st is the very day of publication, how about that.) Lovers of the macabre, the mysterious and the marvellous in fiction will not want to miss.

Drenched in blood

This may be of interest only to the most ardent gamebook collectors or lovers of trivia (hmm, possibly two completely overlapping sets...) but, after all, what's a blog for if not to show off the most obscure of curiosities?

These were the original covers for the Blood Sword gamebooks, which later became the basis for my kids' fantasy series The Chronicles of the Magi. There was a general feeling at the publisher, and Oliver and I agreed, that these covers just didn't have "it". New paintings were duly commissioned. We weren't complaining. It was nice to know our publisher cared.

My only regret: when I had finally been persuaded that the series should be called Blood Sword, I said, "Okay, but what I'd really, really hate is if the logo has blood dripping off it." You see, in the '70s there had been a great little periodical called The Magazine of Horror, which reprinted stories from Weird Tales and other pulps of the '30s and '40s, and the editor, Robert A W Lowndes, and most of his readers were forever lamenting MOH's crass, gore-drenched masthead. Thankfully for Lowndes, he finally managed to get his art director to see sense.

When the new Blood Sword covers arrived, the art director had added a new logo. With, of course, lashings of bright red blood. Arrrrrgh.