Showing results by narrator "David Shaw-Parker" in Science Fiction & Fantasy

In this volume your flesh may creep and crawl a little bit as our classic authors delve into the world of vampires. Some stories you may be familiar with but for most these will be new and unsettling experiences.

For an atheist it’s a great deal, though it does suggest atheism may have a weak point. For those of faith it’s a matter of jam now and purgatory tomorrow. A bargain many artists feel is something they can live with. For agnostics it’s usually a question of can the afterlife really be that bad, would workplace regulations reach all parts of heaven and hell. However, in this volume the terms are agreed and the Devil pays his fees and the character his dues, each happy to wait a few decades for the eternal payback.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. In this volume the Mad Scientist takes centre stage. Naturally the stories come in all shapes and sizes and in the pens of our classic authors the scientists more usually arrive as dark, twisted and evil as they go about their work illuminating humanity as only a mad scientist can.

These stories reveal the truth about vampires as told by a rather special vampire. Not the romantic or even the really nastily horrific stories that the non-vampires amongst us have dreamed up. Tracing a life lived over centuries, from ancient Rome right through to the more modern Texas, these stories are linked by the narrator, with interludes of explanation. Subtly dark, and with enough horror behind to send a shudder down the spine in places, but with gentle humour and a facility for twisting the historic truth just so much that the fictitious explanation makes sense in context.

Richard Garnett C.B. was born on the 27th February 1835. Educated in Bloomsbury he then joined the nearby British Museum as an assistant librarian in 1851, shortly after his father’s death. As an author he wrote several volumes of verse, a book of short stories and several biographies and history books.