Simon Bestwick

In the cavern-like darkness of the arcade, the neon phosphor-glow of the screen beckons you close. Drawn to the dancing pixels like a moth to a flame, digging deep in your pocket you pull out a shiny coin and thumb it into the slot as the electronic siren sings the fanfare that marks your arrival. One hand on the joystick, the other splayed across the control buttons, your pulse begins to quicken. Ready Player One Press StartYou've barely begun but suddenly the discordant bleeps are trumpeting your failure as your 8-bit adventure comes to an abrupt end. At least in the world of the video arcade you get a second chance. But what is the true price you pay when you make a pact with the digital demon? There's always another coin, an extra life to be earned, a second chance...Isn't there?GAME OVERA dozen stories of creeping dread and savage horror inspired by the humble amusement arcade and the classic coin-ops of yesteryear. Twelve tales to chill your blood by twelve masters of the malevolent and the macabre.Just keep reminding yourself, it's only a game...Isn't it?

"I first read about the 1955 Le Mans Disaster over twenty years ago, but I knew at once there was a story to tell.When I learned there'd been newsreel footage of the aftermath, footage so appalling it never saw daylight, I also knew what kind of story: a story about how many of us want to see things we aren't supposed to, even when we insist we don't.What I didn't know was who would tell that story. It took me two decades to realise that it was also the story of two lovers who weren't lovers, in a world that was falling apart. So finally I began to write, following Ash and Danie into a shadow land of grief, obsession and things worse than death.Now the story's written. Open this book, and I'll tell it to you.And the film will start to play."

From Black Shuck Books and Simon Bestwick comes Singing Back the Dark, the eighth in the Black Shuck SHADOWS series.In Singing Back the Dark, Bestwick offers five tales of musical horror.

In the haunted desolation of post-nuclear Britain, the Catchman walks. Spawned from the nightmare of Project Tindalos, it doesn't tire, stop, or die. It exists for one purpose only: to find and kill Helen Damnation, leader of the growing revolt against the tyrannical Reapers and their Commander, Tereus Winterborn. Meanwhile, Helen is threatened from both without and within. Her nightmares of the Black Road have returned, and the ghosts of her murdered family demand vengeance, in the form of either Winterborn's death or her own. And close behind the Catchman, a massive Reaper assault, led by Helen's nemesis, Colonel Jarrett, is nearing the rebels' base. Killing Helen has become Jarrett's obsession: only one of them can emerge from this conflict alive.

In the haunted desolation of post-nuclear Britain, the Catchman walks. Spawned from the nightmare of Project Tindalos, it doesn't tire, stop, or die. It exists for one purpose only: to find and kill Helen Damnation, leader of the growing revolt against the tyrannical Reapers and their Commander, Tereus Winterborn. Meanwhile, Helen is threatened from both without and within. Her nightmares of the Black Road have returned, and the ghosts of her murdered family demand vengeance, in the form of either Winterborn's death or her own. And close behind the Catchman, a massive Reaper assault, led by Helen's nemesis, Colonel Jarrett, is nearing the rebels' base. Killing Helen has become Jarrett's obsession: only one of them can emerge from this conflict alive.

The dream never changes: a moonless, starless night without end. The road she walks is black, bordered with round, white pebbles or nubs of polished bone; she can't tell which but they're the only white in the darkness, marking her way through the night. In dreams and nightmares, Helen walks the Black Road. It leads her back from the grave, back from madness, back towards the man who caused the deaths of her family: Tereus Winterborn, Regional Commander for the Reapers, who rule the ruins of a devastated Britain. On her journey, she gathers her allies: her old mentor Darrow, the cocky young fighter Danny, emotionally-scarred intelligence officer Alannah and Gevaudan Shoal, last of the genetically-engineered Grendelwolves. Winterborn will stop at nothing to become the Reapers' Supreme Commander; more than anything he seeks the advantage that will help him achieve that goal. And in the experiments of the obsessed scientist Dr Mordake, he thinks he has found it. To Winterborn, Project Tindalos is a means to ultimate power; to Mordake, it's a means to roll back the devastation of the War and restore his beloved wife to the living.But neither Winterborn nor Mordake understand the true nature of the forces they are about to unleash. Forces that threaten to destroy everything that survived the War, unless Helen and her allies can find and stop Project Tindalos in time.

HERSHAM HORROR BOOKS PRESENTS5 more Original Stories from the Minds of: Simon Bestwick Alan Spencer David MoodyDaniel S. Boucher Maynard Sims. The Fifth anthology in our PentAnth range brings you five more chilling tales of terror. We all need water to live, but what if that life giving body was not so friendly after all.Dead Water