William Wilkie Collins (1824–89), who was born in London, is the author of the widely acclaimed ‘sensation’ text ‘The Woman in White’ (1859–60). Recently, his detective novel ‘The Moonstone’ (1868) made it to Number 19 in Robert McCrum’s Guardian list of the 100 best novels written in English, where McCrum describes the book as a ‘marriage of the sensational and the realistic’. A close friend of Dickens, Collins is lauded as one of the great forerunners of detective fiction – T.S. Eliot considered Collins and 'The Moonstone' to have invented the genre. His contribution to the genres of sensational and supernatural fiction was considerable, and, famous for his unorthodox, even scandalous, lifestyle during the Victorian era, his own life was not short of inspiration for his work.
Flame Tree Fiction
Dragons don't exist.
That's a shame, of course. Instead we have to rely on the brilliant work of artists to render these fantastic worlds for us. One hugely important figure in the fantasy art world is the artist John Howe. With a much-loved body of work and perhaps best known for his concept art work on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film series, Howe's career is marked with an array of interesting experiences that have resulted in some truly astonishing fantasy art pieces.
Topics: Gothic & Fantasy Art, Biography
With a history in seamanship, photography and bodybuilding on top of his successful writing career, William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) makes for an interesting subject for today’s blog. Perhaps best known for his novels ‘The House on the Borderland’ (1908) and ‘The Night Land’ (1912), Hodgson’s fiction has been a great influence on a number of horror writers, especially celebrated for his authentic narratives on the horrors of the sea and his creation of the enduring supernatural investigator Thomas Carnacki.
Topics: Gothic Fantasy, Biography
You know Cthulhu. Monster. Scary. Gigantic. Yep, that's the one. If you know who this fearsome god is, you probably know why so many people think he's cool. But as the mythic monstrosity's popularity grows, you may find him wandering out of the ocean into pastures new. Perhaps even, into space.
Topics: Gothic Dreams, cthulhu
Our forthcoming Gothic Fantasy anthologies feature an explosive mix of new and classic writers. We've released the list of new authors, and their stories, now here are the biographies of Science Fiction Short Stories. Some are first time writers, others have had stories printed in magazines and story collections before.
‘A series of images, thoughts, and emotions, often with a story-like quality, generated by mental activity during sleep’: this is the definition of a dream given by the Oxford English Dictionary. We’ve all experienced it, that bizarre state between wakefulness and sleep (or between lengthy snooze alarms), when REM sleep has had just enough time to set in and pelt you with the strangest sequence of ideas – images sometimes mundane, sometimes fantastical, but always disconcertingly removed from reality. Frightening and exhilarating, that delightfully ambiguous state when the mind is not fully itself is when logic is distorted, traditional paths of thought are muddled and the mind is open to everything. There, there be monsters. The unrestrained creative world of dreams offers endless possibilities for the imagination, and such realms provide the most intriguing, thrilling and in many ways the most beautiful material for art.
Topics: Josephine Wall, Gothic Dreams
Our forthcoming Gothic Fantasy anthologies feature an explosive mix of new and classic writers. We've released the list of new authors, and their stories, now here are the biographies of Chilling Horror Short Stories. Some are first time writers, others have had stories printed in magazines and story collections before.
Our forthcoming Gothic Fantasy anthologies feature an explosive mix of new and classic writers. We've released the list of new authors, and their stories, now here are the biographies of Chilling Horror Short Stories. Some are first time writers, others have had stories printed in magazines and story collections before.
One of the biggest gaming announcements of the year was the unveiling of Bethesda's Fallout 4. Perhaps best known for their sprawling open-world game series, The Elder Scrolls (read, Skyrim), their critically acclaimed Fallout series is not far behind. With Fallout often edging it in when it comes to the critics the games are wildly different in terms of the universes they portray. Where Skyrim is full of rich colour and endless forests, Fallout operates within a desolate dystopian dumping ground. So why then are people so excited for the fourth instalment?
Topics: Gothic Dreams, dystopia
Our three collectable Gothic Fantasy anthologies, deluxe hardcover editions on Horror, Ghosts and Science fiction, each carry a potent mix of classic tales and new fiction, tracing the path of the thrilling tale from the early gothic to the modern fantastic. The range and high quality of entries forced us into a slight deviation from our original path, allowing us to include more of the new stories, at the expense of a few of classic writers. However, as you'll see below, we've selected a wide range of pioneer literary giants, from Henry James to E.M. Forster, Arthur Conan Doyle to Mark Twain, and, focussing on great reads, included some other fascinating contributions from the Golden Age of Pulps.
Topics: Gothic Fantasy, creepy stories, short fiction




