S.J.Budd

It's with great pleasure to announce that my latest tale will be appearing on the legendary horror podcast that is The No Sleep Podcast! You can listen to my tale, which appears first here Happy listening!

A sick daughter, a father’s race against time to find the one thing that might save her and a mysterious tree growing through the kitchen floor…  Author Christopher Stanley on writing ‘The Forest Is Hungry’: “Quite often my stories come from several different places. In this one, the walk at the beginning, where the parents are separated from their child, is a walk I’ve done a number of times with my own family. My sister moved into a big new house and she told me about some of the conversations she had had with the site foreman. And we have a family friend who cuts our trees for us. All of these things happened around the same time and – bang! – there’s the story!”  This is the third offering I've read in Demain Publishing's Short Sharp Shocks and now I'm hooked. This time I've read, The Forest is Hungry by Christopher Stanley. It's a really vicious folk horror tale of a family torn apart through separation trying to survive The story starts with every pare...

"Jared can feel the tower blocks looming overhead, three concrete sentinels watching as he runs. He knows he has less than a minute before his pursuers are on him, but as he rounds the corner into the alley he stops, dead. There's a strange canvas structure propped against the wall, a hand-made sign scrawled on a scrap of cardboard. Enter the Shadow Booth,  it says,  and you will never be the same again." This is the third offering from The Shadow Booth. I loved the two previous volumes and was really excited to get my hands on this. In the Shadow Booth you'll find a collection of 11 strange and twisted tales. These aren't horror or dystopian but somewhere between the two. These are those wonderfully "out there" hard to classify stories that stay with you long after you have finished reading them. On the whole I really enjoyed most of the stories here, I have to admit there were a few that didn't quite do it for me, but that's to b...

Sylvia Bernstein doesn't want to end up on a dead-end path like a former journalism colleague. She begins searching the tabloid's archives for a story that can get her career back on track. A strange bridge, with an abnormally high rate of suicides, seems like the perfect place to start. She journeys to the little town, eager to investigate, but encounters a tale far more sinister than she ever expected... Calvin Demmer's latest release is part of a new venture, Demain Publishing that have kicked off to a great start by releasing a series of short sinister fiction which cost less than a pound/dollar. I've previously read Cinders of a Blind Man Who Could See by Kev Harrison and absolutely loved it. I've read a lot of Calvin Demmer's work over the years and  had high hopes for this. I wasn't disappointed. This is a tale long enough for you to feel really involved in, it felt more like a mini novel rather than just a short story. I easily devoured th...