The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17 by Stephen Jones (ed.)

Author:Stephen Jones (ed.) [Jones, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Robinson
Published: 2011-07-18T23:00:00+00:00

TERRY LAMSLEY

Sickhouse Hospitality

TERRY LAMSLEY WAS BORN in the south of England but lived in the north for most of his life. He currently resides in Amsterdam, Holland.

His first collection of supernatural stories, Under the Crust, was initially published in a small paperback edition in 1993. Originally intended to only appeal to the tourist market in Lamsley’s home town of Buxton in Derbyshire (the volume’s six tales are all set in or around the area), its reputation quickly grew, helped when stories from the book were included in two of the annual “Year’s Best” horror anthologies.

The book was subsequently nominated for three prestigious World Fantasy Awards, with the title story winning the award for Best Novella. Ramsey Campbell accepted it on the author’s behalf, and Lamsley’s reputation as a writer of supernatural fiction was assured.

In 1997, Canada’s Ash-Tree Press reissued Under the Crust as a handsome hardcover, limited to just five hundred copies and now as sought-after as the long out-of-print first edition. A year earlier, Ash-Tree had published a second, equally remarkable collection of Lamsley’s short stories, Conference with the Dead: Tales of Supernatural Terror, and it was followed in 2000 by a third collection, Dark Matters.

More recently, Night Shade Books has reprinted Conference with the Dead, with the limited edition containing a previously-uncollected story. Edited by Peter Crowther, Fourbodings: A Quartet of Uneasy Tales from Four Members of the Macabre showcases the fiction of Lamsley, Simon Clark, Tim Lebbon and Mark Morris, while Made Ready & Cupboard Love is a collection of two original novellas from Subterranean Press, illustrated by Glenn Chadborne.

About the following story, the author reveals: “Having worked in a number of hospitals, I have had plenty of opportunity to observe how, when, due to disease or accident people are abruptly removed from their familiar circumstances and taken into care, they are forced to develop strategies to help them deal with their state of dependency.

“They find themselves surrounded by people involved in complex, inexplicable activities. Isolated in their own beds, they have to put their trust in expert strangers whose motives they must assume are well-meaning and benign.

“Recently, however, I have detected signs that this is not now always the case.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.