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Short story collections
WARTS AND ALL
Mark Morris describes himself as one of the UK’s most stubborn horror writers. His first novel Toady was published thirty years ago during the genre’s last great boom period. Back then publishers were falling over themselves to find and publish as many exciting new horror writers as they could. It was an exciting time but eventually over-saturation of the market became horror’s downfall. Faced with too much choice, the horror-reading public became more selective, and the majority of horror books lost money. As a result of this advances were slashed, contracts cancelled, and many fledgling careers were nipped in the bud.
Some writers, though, kept going. They stuck doggedly to their guns, or they adapted or changed, as the market demanded. Mark Morris was one of those writers. As the horror market shrank he looked for new outlets, new markets. He wrote tie-in novels, movie novelisations, audio dramas.
But through it all, he never stopped writing horror.
Warts and All is testament to his dedication to the genre. Collected here are thirty stories, arranged in chronological order, which map a course through three decades of horror writing. The stories herein vary wildly in tone and mood, in theme and content, but all have a thread of darkness running through them. They show how versatile the horror genre can be, and how wide are its parameters.
WRAPPED IN SKIN
A GLIMPSE BENEATH THE SKIN...
A woman haunted by a mysterious upside-down door. A meeting between a famous punk rocker and a voodoo priestess. A group of friends who willingly place themselves in the path of bullets that travel through time...
These stories are wrapped in strange skin. Skin suffused with regret and grief and anger. Skin that twitches with bad dreams and appalling memories. Skin that is so thin it is unable to prevent the terrors of the past from breaking through.
LONG SHADOWS, NIGHTMARE LIGHT
From the Foreword by Mark Morris:
“Short stories are the lifeblood of the horror genre. I grew up reading the Pan and Fontana books of horror and ghost stories, the Armada books of ghost, monster and SF stories, numerous anthologies edited by the prolific Peter Haining, John Burke’s wonderful Tales of Unease collections, and many more. I still adore unearthing obscure anthologies, particularly if they contain unread stories by favourite authors. And it still gives me a huge kick whenever I sell one of my own stories to an anthology, because by doing so I feel as though, in my own small way, I’m contributing to a rich, proud and long-standing genre tradition.
The stories in Long Shadows, Nightmare Light span a period of eighteen years. Most have been published before – in anthologies, magazines and online – though a couple have been written specifically for this collection. One of the things I love about old anthologies is the one-line teaser trailers you often get for some of the stories – so here are mine.
Within these pages you’ll encounter: an amnesiac man who finds himself alone in a mysterious town… a world in which seemingly bottomless holes appear in busy city streets… a pair of lost dogs that return after nine years, having not aged a day… the Christmas haunting of a heavily-pregnant woman…”
CLOSE TO THE BONE
Close to the Bone: eleven carefully-crafted masterpieces, each of which guarantees a shudder and perhaps a sleepless night. The Schizophrenic held prisoner by his own psyche - the man whose aversion to a certain colour leads to violence and death - the gang forced to relive, year after year, a childhood tragedy: these are tales of obsession, of human despair, of a world gone mad. So what makes you afraid? Whatever it is, you'll find it here.
Foreword by Ramsey Campbell.