Dear Reader,

Well, here we are, celebrating our tenth anniversary and twentieth issue! I can’t quite believe it. And what a cracking edition this is. This issue is a paper menagerie: strange creatures from fauns and moths, to rabbits and vultures, fill the pages. It also features creepy children and teenagers doing dangerous things. Eerie landscapes, body parts with an independent agenda, disappearing and reappearing spectres, everything you need for an unsettling night… In ‘Faun’ by N.J. Carré, a woman living alone in a neighbourhood plagued by antisocial behaviour has a strange synergy with a creature she encounters in the woodlands by her house. Terrified, she begins to think the faun is sent to protect her somehow…’A Grave for a Dead Horse’ by J.P. Relph, the allure of a swinging rope hung above a deep pit is tempting for a group of early teens with nothing much else to do. But the game goes horribly wrong for one member of the party as her sister looks on – she could have stopped this, she should have stopped this, shouldn’t she? And whose turn should it have been…? Another macabre children’s game (they often are, aren’t they?) leads these sadistic revellers to discover something far worse: Cheryl, the quiet friend, (because there’s always one) is perhaps a little too quiet and a little too willing in this very creepy tale, ‘Stacking Coffins’ by Josh Hanson. Ava DeVries’ story, ‘Only Carrion’, is a dark and brooding exploration of death and mortality. A woman receives visitations from birds after her miscarriage, and then, every time there is a death, a ‘wake’ of vultures begin to close in…  In the brilliantly imaginative story, ‘Tear-Sippers’ by Vonnie Winslow Crist, professor Floella Greer, an ambitious academic and expert in lepidoptera – in particular the variety of Tear-Sipping moths. Determined to forge ahead with her research plans despite the interventions of the misogynistic Professor Bogdan, she does something rather unethical to get her way…  We’ve all  coveted, cherished something belonging to a beloved relation. But what if it was really a part of them? In this eerie tale, a young woman inherits much more than a simple object:  the glass eye seems to be in possession of its own sight in Isobel Leach’s ‘My Grandmother’s Glass Eye’. It is summertime in a seaside town, the light shimmers and Billy loves Laurel. They like to watch films together, sit together at school and avoid Spencer and the bullies. Everything is almost perfect, almost. But laurel has a strange and occasional habit of disappearing – just not in the way you might think in Fiona Cameron’s story, ‘Freaks’. On a miserable corner of the coastline, two old friends, Daniel and Bramble, meet to chat on a dilapidated bench overlooking the sea. But Bramble has the sensation he is being watched (pursued?) by a figure in a yellow raincoat, a figure sent to remind him of something he’d rather forget in Tom Preston’s tale, ‘Bramble’. In Timothy Fox’s folk horror, ‘Listening Wood’, a young boy, raised by his father, haunted by the legend of his mother, keeps returning to the woods where she was found. A wood that only gives things up to those who know what they want. Tarnished by the name, Witch-boy, he struggles to line up to the ideals of what a boy should be. 

Dear reader, from the bottom of my black heart, I hold a goblet up to you in thanks. Go order your copy now! https://theghastling.com/the-ghastling-book-twenty/

Iechyd da!

Cheers!

Rebecca Parfitt & the ghosts at Ghastling Towers.