Greetings! And Happy New Year. Dang, 2025 was gone in the blink of an eye. It’s so weird how the older I get, the quicker the time seems to go. With that in mind, let’s get down to business with a quick recap. In the name of promotion, in the past I’ve tried to limit any magazine or blog interviews I do to around release dates. I have since come to realise that this probably isn’t the best strategy. Best case scenario, your name is everywhere, all the time, for a couple of weeks or so, and then it’s nowhere for a year. Or until you release another book. Your audience either gets tired of you or they forget all about you. So my new strategy is to try to toe the line by doing a couple of interviews a year when the opportunities arise, and spreading them out. Here’s one I did with Andrew Cooper about my novella Silent Mine.
2025 was a good year for short stories. Cutter was included in Big Smoke Pulp (Volume 1), the sci-fi chiller The Incomplete Sneeze was included in a time travel-themed collection on Smoking pen Press, and the drabble Girl’s Night appeared in Flash Phantoms. Later in the year, Horrific Scribblings published The Screaming Man, describing it as ‘quiet horror sci-fi’, a very fitting description, and Collection in Person was included in Clubhouse 3 on Crystal Cook’s 13 Days publishing.
Also, my stab (sorry) at erotic horror, The Cunning Linguist was reprinted in the Blood Lust anthology on Black Hare Press, and I sold Revenge of the Toothfish as a reprint to an antho called Murderfish, the title being a massive clue as to the theme. I probably take more satisfaction in selling reprints than original stories, because it means getting paid for the same thing twice.
You might remember a fella called Dylan Decker, star of the aforementioned Silent Mine. DL Winchester, head honcho at Undertaker Books, let slip that they were putting together a Western horror anthology and asked if Dylan Decker would like to be involved. Of course he would. Decker doesn’t turn down many assignments. The result was Midnight at Deadwood Station, and it is probably the Decker story I am most proud of to date. All writers know that feeling when you don’t have to dig around for the words, they just appear in your head and you write them down. That’s when we do our best work. The story came out about 8,000 words, which is pretty long for a short story, but it works, and Horror on the Range is out now. Fittingly, it was also my hundredth published short story, not including reprints. There will be a blog post about that particular landmark coming shortly.
In the longer form, Dylan Decker saddled up for another adventure, this time at Blood Lake where, right after an encounter with an angry grizzly, he gets yanked into a duel with a flying cryptid. There was quite a complex back-story surrounding Blood Lake, which I wrote about in depth here. Decker’s near-legendary encounter with the group of murderous Germans, A Christmas Cannibal, was also re-released as a stand-alone, and you might be happy to know that book three (or four, if you count A Christmas Cannibal) is already in the publisher’s hands.
2025 also saw the re-issue of a revamped and remixed version of Tethered, my novella inspired by internet rituals, the Cecil Hotel, and the death of Elisa Lam, by 13 days Publishing. I did a deep dive into the history behind it here.
A couple of years ago, I made a conscious effort to broaden my reading. Until then I had read almost exclusively about zombies, ghosts, and serial killers and it was all getting a bit samey. There are only so many ways you can rip someone’s head off. That said, I loved the Drift by CJ Tudor. Perfect winter reading. And one of the most memorable experiences of the year was hiring a mini-cinema with my book club to watch the movie adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin after we’d read the novel. We did a similar thing before with Silence of the Lambs, and it adds a completely new dimension.
The experiment to read more widely is ongoing, and has provided mixed results so far. I still can’t stomach romance or erotica, read into that what you will, but I enjoy books by writers who aren’t from the US or UK. In a lot of cases, it offers an alternative perspective, or at least a slightly skewed one. Life is all about growth. Probably the best book I read in 2025 was the Shadow of the Wind by Spanish writer Carlos Ruis Zafon about a young boy, a hidden library, and the secrets of his favourite writer. A modern classic. As always, my TBR list is growing quicker than my R list, but that’s nothing new.
Anyway, without further a-do, this is a list of every book I read cover-to-cover in 2025. For 2024’s list, go HERE.
The Drift by C.J. Tudor (2023)
Winter Horrorland by Various Authors (2024)
Welsh History: Strange but True by Geoff Brookes (2017)
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)
The Dylan Decker novelette, A Christmas Cannibal, has been released as a stand-alone by Undertaker Books as part of their Graveside Reads series, making the perfect gift for the ghoul in your life!
Or for yourself.
Christmas in the badlands is never much fun. But when someone steals his horse and leaves him for dead in a snowstorm, this one has the potential to be Dylan Decker’s worst ever. Or even his last.
But he isn’t ready to die just yet. He tracks the thief to a nearby town, where the festive season is in full swing, with revenge on his mind. Little does he know that his ordeal is only just beginning, and the ho ho horror is about to go to another level.
This time, Dylan may have bitten off more than he can chew…
I love horror stories set on boats or in secluded cabins deep in the woods. Or, absolute best case scenario, a cabin on a boat. I don’t know why. Must be the sense of isolation. Here, I got exactly what I wanted, even if the boat in question is moored and now functions as a kind of research facility. In his work for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Charlie Book has been living aboard and studying the Christabel, a 19th century freighter that lies half-sunken off the coast of Galveston, which now houses a mangrove forest complete with snakes, crabs, and other wildlife. After overcoming tragedy, everything seems to be going well in Book’s life. Right up to the point his ex Ruby shows up with another woman and a baby in tow begging for shelter from an approaching storm, both literal and figurative. Book is naturally wary at first, especially when tall tales of witches, covens, and magic abound. But soon old feelings resurface and he sees an unlikely shot at redemption, if he can only make it through the night alive. But when he realises what he is up against, that might be more difficult than he first imagined.
Apart from the unique setting, I thought one of the strengths of this atmospheric horror thriller is its relentless pace and the revelations (along with the action) come thick and fast. Though the story is certainly fantastical, it somehow manages to retain an element of realism and the characters are fleshed out and relatable, though not to the point that they become overbearing. That said, several of the secondary characters did have very similar traits and it was easy to lose track of them, especially when the story raced toward its climax. My main complaint however, and I realise this might be considered peak pedantry, is the MC’s name. Reading a book about a man called Book just didn’t sit right, especially when he talks about books.
Admittedly, I think this is the first Christopher Golden novel I have read so I am not overly familiar with his style, summarised by one source as being “characterised by a blend of immersive horror, compelling character development, and brisk pacing, often exploring themes of folklore, mythology, and human nature.”
But it probably won’t be the last.
Night Birds is available in paperback and eBook formats on Titan Books from 18 September 2025. You canalso catch Christopher Golden on tour with Tim Lebbon throughout the UK.
Riding east through the Rockies in the aftermath of his ordeal at Silent Mine, career loner Dylan Decker gets tangled up with a grizzly bear, and then finds himself neck-deep in even more danger.
The town of Dudsville has been plagued by an anomalous creature dubbed the Winged Terror for longer than most folks there can remember. Dylan is tempted to keep riding. Not his problem. But he but feels indebted to the townspeople who showed him kindness in the aftermath of the grizzly fight, and when the Winged Terror drops in, he agrees to join a small posse in a bid to rid the town of the evil beast once and for all.
But is the posse hunting the Winged Terror, or is the Winged Terror hunting them?
A battle rages through the foothills of the Rockies as Dylan and his friends match wits with a beast unlike anything he’s faced before. Can they bring down the Winged Terror, or will the monster slip away to terrorize another generation? .
My latest novella, Tethered, is out now on 13 Days Publishing. What follows is the afterword from the novella, edited to remove spoilers.
Many of the so-called Internet rituals described in the story are real. That’s not to say that they actually work. But they are ‘real’ in the sense that they have been written about and discussed extensively online. I changed a few crucial details in my descriptions, especially that of the Elevator Game. I’m not saying I’m a believer, but I don’t want it on my conscience if one of my readers tries one of these things and ends up in an alternate dimension or something. Lots of people have tried the Elevator Game, with mixed results. They usually end up disappointed. However, as alluded to in this book, it might be worth noting that if it actually worked, they probably wouldn’t be in a position to tell anyone about it.
The death of Elisa Lam in 2013 is often linked to the Elevator Game because of the genuinely unsettling surveillance footage which emerged of her acting strangely in an elevator. Her demise is still shrouded in mystery and often cited as one of the most bizarre deaths in recent years. Was it an accident? Murder? Suicide? Or something altogether stranger?
Nobody knows, and ultimately, that’s what makes it so chilling. The other cases mentioned of people being found dead in water tanks are also real, and I am sure there are lots more that haven’t been so widely publicized. The Cecil Hotel (since rebranded as Stay on Main) in Los Angeles is a place with a very weird history, and Richmond House is also an actual building in Southampton, albeit with a slightly more mundane background.
The summer of 2018 saw the arrival of a British reality TV show called The Circle, where a group of strangers were kept segregated and could only communicate with each other via a special social networking platform only they could access. One participant used his girlfriend’s pictures, and suckered everyone else into thinking he was someone he wasn’t. He won the first prize. I was fascinated by the way he manipulated the other players. It just goes to show that in an online world, you can be whoever you want to be. It also shows that even if there are red flags, the majority of people will ignore them and believe what they want to believe. I wanted to do something similar with the reader in Tethered. Anyone familiar with my work will know how much I love twist endings. I hoped to string you along for a while, feeding you just enough information so you think you know what will happen, and pull the rug out from under your feet. Then, just as you were getting your bearings, I wanted to do it again.
You may notice how integral the number 14 is to the plot. After setting sail from Southampton, a city integral to the plot of Tethered, the Titanic hit the iceberg on 14th April, the Cecil Hotel has 14 floors (Richmond House has only 13, I changed it for effect) my version of the Elevator Game has 14 steps, and both the serial killer Richard Ramirez and the ‘Man in Black’ from Tethered needed 14 victims. I thought this would be a bit more original than the usual 13. Regular readers of mine might also note that it fits in with one of my previous books, Apartment 14F. That story is about an English teacher living in China and realising his apartment is haunted. The Chinese take numerology very seriously. Every number is symbolic. Mainly because of the phonetic similarity when pronounced in Mandarin, the numbers ‘one’ and ‘four’ have come to signify loneliness and death, two predominant themes in both that book and Tethered.
Knowing what a horror hound I am, last Halloween the book club at work asked me to recommend some suitable books for them to read. I’d previously been shocked at how few of them had ever read Sai King, and in a bid to remedy the situation recommended Pet Sematary. I’ve read it before, when I was a teenager, and wanted to see if my perceptions would be different now. When it first came out in 1983 I was barely even into double figures, and I didn’t even discover SK until my teens. This was probably one of the first of his books I ever read, if not THE first. I might have read it again at some point in the late nineties or early naughties but if I did, I can’t remember a lot about it. Not that that’s saying much. If you’d lived in nineties Britain, you’d know what I mean. This was the era of acid and Britpop.
I find Stephen King really easy to read, you just sort of fall into the story, the characters are relatable and he doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. You pick up one of his books and the next thing you know you’ve read 50 pages. Which is just as well, as he has a bit of a reputation for waffling. Even the waffle, though, is kinda comforting, it’s like listening to Uncle Albert talk about the war, and it all helps shape the characters and the setting. I think because I’ve read him so much, I find his writing style very familiar. I know every quirk and idiosyncrasy. It’s like meeting an old friend for a pint. I’ve been off gallivanting and meeting lots of new people over the past few years (by that I mean making an effort to read other writers) so it feels good to get back to what I know. Like coming home. The version I read this time, a reprint published in 2000, includes an introduction where he talks about writing the book and then being so horrified by it that he stuck it in a drawer and only got it out again years later when he needed to fulfil a contract with his then-publisher. They always say that you should avoid harming children and animals in books because readers don’t like it. In Pet Sematary there’s plenty of both, along with some elder abuse for good measure. Well, it isn’t abuse as such. Old people die in it. They get moidered. But that isn’t saying much because children also die, as do students, regular folk and animals. Everyone dies, which ties into the fundamentals of the book.
One thing more clear to me now is that Pet Sematary is essentially a study in mortality. It’s about death, and the flip-side of death, which is, of course, life. The thought processes and actions of main characters, all at different stages of life, reflect this, meaning for an interesting dynamic. We have Luis and Rachel, in their thirties, their young kids Ellie and Gage, and the older generation represented by Jud and Norma Crandall. An exchange between the three groups quite early in the book not only demonstrates King’s insightfulness but also sets the tone for what follows. It’s Halloween night, and shortly before poor Norma has her heart attack, she gives the trick-or-treating Ellie an apple, which she drops. Ellie then says she doesn’t want a bruised apple, and Luis scolds her for being impolite. Norma then turns the tables and scolds him, reminding him that ‘only children tell the whole truth,’ the implication being, of course, that adults don’t. Harsh truths, and how people deal with them (or don’t) are integral to the story. How a parent would feel about an outsider undermining him in front of his offspring is another sub-plot, tantalisingly unexplored by SK. In this instance, anyway.
Something else that took on added weight is Jud’s reasoning for taking Luis to the place beyond the Pet Sematary even though he knew Church the cat would come back changed. The assumption was at first that he had done it because he felt endebted to Louis for saving Norma’s life. Then, he said he did it to teach little Ellie that sometimes dead is better, before finally admitting that he did it because he wanted to share the secret he was privy to (“You make up reasons, they seem like good reasons, but mostly you do it because you want to”). He was compelled to share the secret. Whether this was a damning indictment of human nature (Don’t we all love to share secrets?) or whether there was something deeper at work, is left to the reader’s imagination. The implication is that the Pet Sematary itself somehow reached out and influenced events.
In the book club discussion, it was agreed that there are many different kinds of horror; there’s the supernatural kind, the evil that men (or women) do to each other, then there’s the kind where terrible shit just happens. Accidents, natural disasters, survival situations, that kind of thing. It’s all horrific. Though Pet Sematary definitely has supernatural elements, given the prophetic dreams, the Indian burial ground, and people coming back from the dead, it’s more about that last category. It’s about the fragility of life, and how it likes to kick you in the arse every now and again. There are lessons to be found in this book, lessons that went completely over my head when I read it the first time. One more thing that has more resonance now is when Louis Creed quotes the Ramones’ Blitzkrieg Bop (“Hey ho, let’s go!”), which he does numerous times throughout the book. It makes you wonder whether they were being earmarked to do the soundtrack even while SK was writing the book, or whether that line was inserted later as one of his infamous Easter eggs.
Since editing other people’s work has been part of my day job I have become hypersensitive to bad habits. After a while, they stand out a mile. One of my pet hates is repetition, where writers use the same word, or words, repeatedly. I never noticed it with SK before, but in Pet Sematary a lot of people laugh until they cry. In the first half, anyway. There isn’t too much laughing in the second half. There’s a section around the midway point where it’s all happy families and Gage and Louis are flying a kite (Flyne, Daddy!) and even if you haven’t read it before you just know SK is setting you up for something. And when it hits, its brutal, man. BROO-TAL.
In the aftermath, the same suggestion that the Pet Sematary, or, more precisely, the Micmac burial ground that lies beyond it, might have the power to influence outside events to its liking is made again when the driver responsible for the carnage admits being clean and sober at the time of the accident, but was speeding because, “When he got to Ludlow he just felt like putting the pedal to the metal. He said he didn’t even know why.”
At its core, Pet Sematary raises an interesting ethical dilemma; if one of your loved ones died and you had the ability to bring them back, even though you knew they might come back changed, would you still do it?
Let’s face it, most of us probably would.
Like all of us, Louis Creed is deeply flawed. He is a weak man, though at the same time strong. He knows right from wrong, and he knows where the line is. But he is more than prepared to cross it, ostensibly to serve and protect his family. But dig a little deeper (pun intended) and you can see his actions are driven by selfishness rather than selflessness. He just wants things back the way they were because he preferred them that way.
I think sometimes we all kid ourselves that the things we do are for other people’s benefit when in reality we do it meet our own needs. Take, for example, people who donate their time or money to charity. Good on them, right? But ask yourself, do they really care about that particular charity? Or are they donating just because it makes them feel good? You might argue that it doesn’t matter. But if you value honesty and integrity, maybe it does. Of course, the other option is that Louis really had no choice in proceedings. He was always going to do what he did because that was what the force connected to the Pet Sematary/Micmac burial ground wanted him to do.
I can confirm that even after repeated readings, and even when you know it’s coming, that ending still packs a wallop.
My latest short story, Collection in Person, is included in the anthology Clubhouse 3 on 13 Days Publishing. As the cover blurb says: “The tales in The Clubhouse 3 aren’t just of the bump in the night variety but also those that shriek into the daylight and paint the bright, bustling world in wet crimson.”
Collection in Person, about the downside of selling stuff on eBay is, by my count, my 98th published short story. It has heavy American Psycho vibes, and is probably one of the very few horror stories that features a guest appearance by Bruce Springsteen.
NB: Don’t worry, Tramps. No Springsteens were hurt in the writing of this story.
Saddle up! Dylan Decker is ready to ride again, and you’ve been invited. Blood Lake follows him as he journeys east after the horrific events at Silent Mine, and encounters a creature unlike anything he has ever faced before.
Check out the awesome cover art by Rebecca Cuthbert.
I am pleased to announce that my sci-fi short story The Incomplete Sneeze is included in A Twist on Time, the new time travel-themed anthology on Smoking Pen Press. I have worked with SPP before, when they included Down the Road in Vampires, Zombies, & Ghosts, another entry in their Read on the Run series.
From the cover:
You won’t find anything reminiscent of H.G. Wells, or of the Doctor Who series. Rather, you’ll find some unintended jumps in time, without any machines or devices. You’ll find some questionable means of travel. And – in contrast to the ‘standard’ rule that you cannot/should not change the past, you will find people from the future who come back with the goal of changing the future, and you’ll find efforts at do-overs, both successful, and not so successful.
What’s the Incomplete Sneeze about? Well, in the mornings I sometimes have sneezing fits. Some kind of allergy, I suppose. An old girlfriend once described sneezing as like having an orgasm in your head, which is a pretty unique description and not far off the mark. Anyway, I began to wonder what might happen if I fell through a wrinkle in the universe and teleported every time I sneezed. In my mind, this somehow got tied up with the mystery of the Somerton Man, when a ‘well-dressed’ gentleman was found dead on a beach in Australia and nobody could work out who he was, and a story was born.
cmsaunders 