by Paul Kane
“All we need now is a ghost living with us,” he joked, his dark eyes twinkling, “and we’ll have the set. A hat-trick.”
I laughed, but I also knew that if we weren’t careful the war would find us… Though I had a different war to fight. It would be hard, but I’d decided I would try to do something none of the others I’d seen had even attempted. There was a place I could go in the basement of this very hospital when the moon was full, where I could lock myself away – and there were always the woods as a last resort. The rest of the time I would try and live my life.
I’d try to be the wolf, but also to be human. Balance out the two halves of myself. Might not go to plan, but I’d try and beat this thing, break it or embrace it. This curse. This curse that started so very long ago…
This curse of the lycanthrope.
The curse of the wolf.
Biographies
&
Story Notes
Paul Kane is the award-winning, bestselling author and editor of over fifty books – including the Arrowhead trilogy (gathered together in the sellout Hooded Man omnibus, revolving around a post-apocalyptic version of Robin Hood), The Butterfly Man and Other Stories, Hellbound Hearts, The Mammoth Book of Body Horror and GHOSTS. His non-fiction books include The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy and Voices in the Dark, and his genre journalism has appeared in the likes of SFX, Dreamwatch and Fangoria. He has been a Guest at Alt.Fiction five times, was a Guest at the first SFX Weekender, at Thought Bubble in 2011, the Derbyshire Literary Festival, Edge-Lit and Off the Shelf in 2012, plus Monster Mash and Event Horizon in 2013, as well as being a panellist at FantasyCon and the World Fantasy Convention. His work has been optioned and adapted for the big and small screen, including for network US television, plus his latest novels are Lunar (set to be turned into a feature film) and the Y.A. story The Rainbow Man (as P.B. Kane). He lives in Derbyshire, UK, with his wife Marie O’Regan, his family and a black cat called Mina. Find out more at his site www.shadow-writer.co.uk which has featured Guest Writers such as Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Charlaine Harris, Dean Koontz and Guillermo del Toro.
Story Notes:
When I was first asked to do this story, I started to think about the nature of the werewolf curse and what it might mean for someone bitten or scratched. What secrets they might learn. I’ve always loved the device Clive Barker uses in Chiliad: A Meditation to go back through the generational history of violent deeds, and saw an opportunity to go back myself through the history of this particular lycanthropic curse, tracing it down the line of those infected. It would also allow me to write a love letter to previous takes on the werewolf mythos, plus I managed to find a way to tie it in, not only to the character of Neil from my ‘Life Cycle’ stories (the third of which will appear in my Monsters collection this year), but also RED, the sequel to which I’m working on now. I even brought The Gemini into it! So I hope you’ll enjoy what was a lot of fun for me personally to write.
Paul Kane
Chesterfield 2014
Fogbound From 5, Alt-Dead, Alt-Zombie. Siblings, Anatomy of Death, Demons & Devilry and Dead Water
all © Hersham Horror Books 2010-2015
Coming next 2015 from
Hersham Horror Books
The curse of the ghost
by marie o’regan
The 3rd in a series of 6 brand new THEMED novelettes BY 6 EXCITING AUTHORS
Also available now:
The Curse of the Mummy by Maynard Sims
http://silenthater.wix.com/hersham-horror-books#