GARY FRY

So here are all the books I've read since last October and my ratings for them. Just four given full marks, but a lot of other good stuff. Lionel Asbo – Martin Amis 10 The Ritual – Adam Nevill 9 McTeague – Frank Norris 9 The Beetle – Richard Marsh 6 Queen Lucia – E F Benson 9 The Pregnant Widow – Martin Amis 8 Jimbo – Algernon Blackwood 5 Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane 5 The Card – Arnold Bennett 7 Call of the Wild – Jack London 6 O Pioneers – Willa Cather 7 The Napoleon of Notting Hill – G K Chesterton 4 Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley 6 The Gambler – Fyodor Dostoevsky 8 The Tragedy of Pudden’ead Wilson – Mark Twain 8 The Rainbow – D H Lawrence 10 Washington Square – Henry James 6 The History of Mr Polly – H G Wells 8 Moon and Sixpence – Somerset Maugham 9 Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad 6 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 8 A Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes 7 Apt Pupil – Stephen King 9 Christine – Stephen King 9 The Library Policeman – Stephen King 7 22.11.63 – Stephen King 10 ...

Here's the wonderful (Zach McCain-engineered) cover of the ebook rerelease version of my 2010 PS Publishing novel THE HOUSE OF CANTED STEPS. Coming from DarkFuse in February 2014. More info to follow.

LURKER by Gary Fry   Chapter 1     He was leaving her again.           Harry had to earn a living, of course—his salary provided for them both now—but even so, Meg missed her husband whenever he returned to West Yorkshire and worked his office hours.           Or did she simply mean that she disliked being alone?           She was unable to decide; it was too soon to have acquired any perspective. Their move to the coast had been her idea, an attempt to flee so many raw memories. And so it would hardly be fair to complain about Harry’s frequent absence.           After he’d moved to the door with his overnight case, she gave him a quick kiss. It wasn’t as if he’d never been away working when they’d lived inland. His job had taken him all over the world, and often for longer than the few days he ...

BOOK OF HORRORS edited by Stephen Jones Review by Gary Fry In his introduction to this book, Stephen Jones leaves himself a lot to live up, suggesting that the horror anthology has been sorely lacking lately and that his book is an attempt to address this problem. Well, how did he do? Let me take each tale at a time. The book kicks off with Stephen King’s ‘The Little Green God of Agony’. Despite hearing from others that this tale was King-lite, I rather enjoyed it. I don’t think it’s particularly frightening, but it has fun with issues of faith, medicine and money – the three peaks of US politics at the moment. A solid start. I enjoyed Caitlan Kiernan’s ‘Charcloth, Firesteel and Flint’ a great deal, with its incendiary central character and powerful allusions to various forms of “Armageddon”. Like a Poe prose-poem with erotic undergirdings. A fine piece. Peter Crowther is next, with his Bradburyesque small-town tale ‘Ghosts with Teeth’. The prose is quite cute, and not everybody digs t...

Yeah, you read it right. A nine book deal. I've been writing fiction for 28 years (about 10 with a mind to publication), and so days like August 31st, 2013 should be treasured. It was birthday. I got up a bit cross-eyed from the pre-celebration celebrations the previous evening and logged on to my email. And there it was: a communication from Shane Staley over at DarkFuse in the US offering me a three-year deal, involving the publication of three novels and six novellas. I was delighted, as you probably imagine, not just because DF have a real presence in the US horror market, but also because it offers me a regular market for my work, a readership to nurture, a focus and a purpose that is sorely lacking when you're just an odd-jobbing writer trying to hit as many markets as possible in the hope being noticed. I've already got started on the fiction, first a sequel to my next DF novel (April, 2014) called SEVERED. The follow-up will involve the same character, a guy called ...

My new novel SEVERED, due April 2014 from the peerless DarkFuse...

A review by Gary Fry I acquired this novella after joining the DarkFuse Kindle book club, which is one helluva deal: 36 books a year, with 5 free upon joining, and a bunch of other stuff thrown in. All for $59. Anyway, advert over. The novella. It's a cracker. It's a story set in my own heyday, the gaudy '80s. Naff music, fairgrounds, boys hanging out in gangs short of cash. The works. I really enjoyed all these prompts to nostalgia, but think they'll appeal to more folk than my own and Savile's generation. There's a gentle lyricism to the prose, an earnestness about the voice. The author obviously had a good time summoning all these playful details, providing a convincing backdrop to a story whose outré elements are decidedly ambiguous. The tale swings back and forth, from the present day to the past. It's the story of boys up to their games, and then dealing with the consequences, often over decades. There's a villain of the piece, artfully kept largel...