the true home of british horror

PICTURES OF THE DARK
by SIMON BESTWICK

There are dark places everywhere.
The world outside your front door, and the one inside your head.  Dreads and longings.  Pasts and futures.
Loneliness and relationships.  Love and hate.  Life and death . . . and what might lie beyond.

  And then there’s the place the stories come from.
The council estate where the dead walk . . .  The farmhouse attic filled with mummified corpses . . .
The old tramp’s blanket, and what slept in it at night . . .

  Here, collected for the first time, are Simon Bestwick’s pictures of the dark -
23 despatches from a world very like ours, but where those dark places take on a life of their own.
The damaged and forlorn men and women in these stories pit themselves against their own demons or worlds gone mad,
uncover the rot at society’s core or in their own souls - but they’re all caught by the dark.  And nobody gets away clean.

  Will you?

  Open the book and find out.

— g f p —

TABLE OF CONTENTS


Love Among the Bones

Red Light

Death Will Come Softly, to the Beat of a Drum

Starky's Town

Coffee Vecqueray's Blanket

From The Dark Waters, Where Lost Bones Lie

To This Darkness, We Give Light

Welcome to Mengele's

The Hours of the Dead

Jindivik

Walkig in a Winter Wonderland

The Slashed Menagerie

The Loving of Ghosts

Never Say Goodbye

Going Under, Flying High

The Proving Ground

Once

To Walk in Midnight's Realm

Drop Dead Gorgeous

Touch the Dark

Close My Eyes

When the West Wind Blows

PUBLICATION DATE: June 2009

Trade paperback;
ISBN: 978-1-906331-08-5

UK, £8.99 + £2 P&P
USA, $16 + $6 P&P (airmail)
© gray friar press 2009