Tag: Haunted MTL

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: CM Saunders

megHan

Meghan: Hey, Chris. Welcome back to Meghan’s HAUNTED House of Books. Thank you for once again taking part in our annual Halloween Extravaganza. Tell us about this new release I’ve been hearing about.

Chris: That would be X5. As the title suggests, it’s my fifth collection of short fiction. Most of the stories have appeared in magazines or anthologies before, and it’s a great feeling to package them up together and give them a new lease of life.

Meghan: What’s your favorite story in X5 and why?

Chris: You know how some people say you should love all your kids the same? Well, that’s bullshit, we all have favourites, and the same applies to stories. There’s one called Subject #270374, which I wrote about doing a drug trial in London making the story an (un)healthy mix of fact and fiction. It was a very weird experience, and fully merited having a horror story written about it. It first appeared in the anthology DOA3 on Bloodbound Books.

Meghan: What is your favorite part of Halloween?

Chris: I have a tradition where I stay up all night and watch horror movies. It doesn’t matter whether I’m alone or with someone else. That’s what I’ve always done, and that’s what I will continue to do. It can be a problem if I have work the next day!

Meghan: Do you get scared easily?

Chris: Only by centipedes and beautiful women.

Meghan: What is the scariest movie you’ve ever seen and why?

Chris: I remember watching the original Evil Dead as a teenager and being absolutely terrified. The whole concept of being the only survivor in the middle of nowhere having to overcome so many unnatural horrors  having just seen all your friends get either killed or possessed is just grim.

Meghan: Which horror movie murder did you find the most disturbing?

Chris: I don’t really find horror movies disturbing. It’s just a movie, right? Right?

Meghan: Is there a horror movie you refused to watch because the commercials scared you too much?

Chris: Unfortunately not.

Meghan: If you got trapped in one scary movie, which would you choose?

Chris: Without a doubt, Lost Boys. Come on, it was the eighties. That movie struck the perfect balance between style, substance and cheese. It made vampires cool before they were cool.

Meghan: If you were stuck as the protagonist in any horror movie, which would you choose?

Chris: Probably Jason Vorhees, because he just keeps on trucking.

Meghan: What is your all-time favorite scary monster or creature of the night?

Chris: Werewolf. Can you imagine having a friend who was a werewolf? I think, depending on the nature of your relationship, every full moon it would would cease to be scary and start being hilarious. The level of banter would be unprecedented.

Meghan: What is your favorite horror or Halloween-themed song?

Chris: Anything from the Disintegration album by the Cure. It’s brilliant, but so bleak and atmospheric. If dying sounds like anything, it probably sounds like that. It would also be the perfect soundtrack to anything remotely scary.

Meghan: Which horror novel unsettled you the most?

Chris: The Troop by Nick Cutter. If you’ve read it, you’ll know why.

Meghan: What is the creepiest thing that’s ever happened while you were alone?

Chris: I once woke up with scratches on my back in places I couldn’t reach, all in sets of three. I concluded that I had been the victim of a demonic attack, and thanked my lucky stars I’d been asleep when it happened because I don’t want to see that shit.

Meghan: Which unsolved mystery fascinates you the most?

Chris: There are so many. For a species that’s supposed to be intelligent, people leave a lot of questions unanswered; Jack the Ripper, Dyatlov Pass, the Bermuda Triangle, the JonBenet Ramsey murder, the 411 disappearances, and whatever is going down at the Winchester Mystery House. Top of the pile, though, is WTH happened to Flight MH370. I’ve read a couple of books on it, and they all agree there was a lot going on behind the scenes. Those poor people might just have been collateral damage.

Meghan: In a zombie apocalypse, what is your weapon of choice?

Chris: It would be easy to say some sort of assault rifle or machine gun, or even a sniper’s rifle enabling you to take zombies out from distance? But what happens when you run out of bullets? Then you would be in a world of hurt. For that reason, maybe a sword would be better, especially up close. One good swipe could take out a whole family of rotters.

Meghan: Okay, let’s have some fun… Would you rather get bitten by a vampire or a werewolf?

Chris: Vampire, because then I could party all night, sleep all day, and live forever (or until someone rams a wooden stakes through my heart). I know they say that if you’re bitten by a werewolf you turn into one at the next full moon, but most of the werewolf victims I see in movies just get torn to pieces. That’s no fun. No fun at all.

Meghan: Would you rather fight a zombie apocalypse or an alien invasion?

Chris: Zombies. Aliens are more likely to exist, but they’re an unknown quantity. They might be capable of anything. You know where you are with a horde of zombies so theoretically you’re more likely to come through.

Meghan: Would you rather drink zombie juice or eat dead bodies from the graveyard?

Chris: Zombie juice, please. It sounds like a Halloween cocktail. We can always put some vodka in it to give it a bit of a kick.

Meghan: Would you rather stay at the Poltergeist house or the Amityville house for a week?

Chris: Ooh, Amityville! I was greatly affected by the original Amityville Horror and it looks like a beautiful house. The poltergeist house is suburbia personified. Boring.

Meghan: Would you rather chew on a bitter melon with chilies or maggot-infested cheese?

Chris: I love chilies! I think the maggot-infested would depend on the maggots. There’s an Italian cheese called Casu martzu which has live maggots in it. Google it. I am a huge fan of cheese, but that’s gross. I have a line.

Meghan: Would you rather drink from a witch’s cauldron or lick cotton candy made of spider webs?

Chris: Dunno. What’s in the cauldron? Is it all eye of newt and toe of frog, etc? If so, I’ll go with that. I lived in China for ten years and I ate all that stuff anyway. One day a friend of mine told me she was coming over to cook a ‘special’ meal, and then she turned up with a pig’s snout.

Boo-graphy: Christian Saunders, a constant reader who writes fiction as C.M. Saunders, is a freelance journalist and editor from south Wales. His work has appeared in almost 100 magazines, ezines and anthologies worldwide including Fortean Times, the Literary Hatchet, ParABnormal, Fantastic Horror, Haunted MTL, Feverish Fiction and Crimson Streets, and he has held staff positions at several leading UK magazines ranging from Staff Writer to Associate Editor. His books have been both traditionally and independently published.

The fifth volume in my X series featuring ten (X, geddit?) slices of twisted horror and dark fiction plucked from the blood-soaked pages of ParABnormal magazine, Demonic Tome, Haunted MTL, Fantasia Diversity, and industry-defining anthologies including 100 Word Horrors, The Corona Book of Ghost Stories, DOA 3, and Trigger Warning: Body Horror.

Meet the local reporter on an assignment which takes him far beyond the realms of reality, join the fishing trip that goes sideways when a fish unlike any other is hooked, and find out the hidden cost of human trafficking in China. Along the way, meet the hiker who stumbles across something unexpected in the woods, the office worker who’s life is inexorably changed after a medical drug trial goes wrong, and many more.

Also features extensive notes, and original artwork by Stoker award-winning Greg Chapman.

Table of Contents:
Demon Tree
Revenge of the Toothfish
Surzhai
The Sharpest Tool
Something Bad
Down the Road
Coming Around
Where a Town Once Stood
The Last Night Shift
Subject #270374
Afterword

X X2 X3 X4 X5

SHORT STORY: Twitch by C.M. Saunders

megHan

Twitch

It started with a twitching left eyelid. Nothing major. More annoying that anything else. She’d had similar afflictions before, but they usually petered out after a while. This one didn’t.

It just kept getting worse.

The eyelid developed a life of its own, fluttering away seemingly at will. One spasm led to another, then another, until eventually she lost all control of her facial muscles.

The condition spread to her limbs, and all she could do was lie on the floor covered in her own vomit, drool and excrement, her entire body convulsing and contracting.

Demonic possession is no joke.

Boo-graphy:
Christian Saunders, who writes fiction as C.M. Saunders, is a freelance journalist and editor from south Wales. His work has appeared in almost 100 magazines, ezines and anthologies worldwide including Fortean Times, the Literary Hatchet, ParABnormal, Fantastic Horror, Haunted MTL, Feverish Fiction and Crimson Streets, and he has held staff positions at several leading UK magazines ranging from Staff Writer to Associate Editor. His books have been both traditionally and independently published, the latest release being Back from the Dead: A Collection of Zombie Fiction.

Website
Twitter
Facebook

Back from the Dead —
A collection of zombie fiction from British journalist and dark fiction writer C.M. Saunders, featuring two complete novellas alongside short stories previously published in the likes of Morpheus Tales and Crimson Streets, plus a brand-new novelette. Also includes an exclusive introduction and artwork by the award-winning Greg Chapman.

Featuring:
Dead of Night: young lovers Nick and Maggie go camping in the woods, only to come face-to-face with a group of long-dead Confederate soldiers who don’t know, or care, that the war is over.

Human Waste: Dan Pallister wakes up one morning to find the zombie apocalypse has started. Luckily, he’s been preparing for it most of his life. He just needs to grab some supplies from the supermarket…

‘Til Death do us Part: When the world as we know it comes to an abrupt end, an elderly couple are trapped in their apartment. They get by as best they can, until they run out of food.

Roadkill: A freelance ambulance crew are plunged into a living nightmare when a traffic accident victim they pick up just won’t stay dead. He has revenge on his mind.

Plague Pit: A curious teenager goes exploring the Welsh countryside one summer afternoon and stumbles across a long-abandoned chapel. What he finds there might change the world, and not for the better.

Dead Men Don’t Bleed: A gumshoe private eye is faced with his most challenging case yet when a dead man walks into his office and asks for help solving his own murder.

Drawn from a variety of sources, all these tales have one thing in common; they explore what might happen if our worst nightmares are realized and people came BACK FROM THE DEAD.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: C.M. Saunders

megHan

Meghan: Welcome back to the Halloween Extravaganza. It’s always wonderful to have you here at Meghan’s (Haunted) House of Books. What is your favorite part of Halloween?

Christian: The fact that for a few days each year, everyone turns into mad horror fiends and I don’t appear quite so weird. Afterwards, though, most people go back to being normal and I just stay weird.

Meghan: What is your favorite Halloween tradition?

Christian: The movies! Okay, I watch horror movies all year round, but for as long as I can remember on Halloween night, no matter where I am, who I am with and what else I have going on, I’ve always made time for a horror movie marathon, much to the displeasure of various partners over the years. Some people just can’t handle it when shit gets real.

Meghan: If Halloween is your favorite holiday (or even second favorite holiday), why?

Christian: The movies, the trick-or-treating, the family traditions, the blood, the gore, the serial killers, the rotting corpses rising from graves, what’s not to love?!

Meghan: What are you superstitious about?

Christian: I don’t know if you can call this a superstition, but I’ve always had a thing for the number 27. it follows me, and it seems to come in waves. I might go months without noticing it, and then suddenly it’s everywhere, all around me, as if the universe is trying to tell me something. For example, a few years ago, I was writing an article for a magazine about the 27 Club, all those musicians who have died at 27, when my cousin called me. He said, “I’m just ringing to tell you I’ve moved. Yeah, I live in number 27 now.”

Another time, I was telling a friend about my 27 thing. They laughed and said it was just coincidence. We went into a restaurant, and were given the table number 27. They were like, okay…

Meghan: What/who is your favorite horror monster or villain?

Christian: It has to be Freddy Krueger. What a fantastic concept. A monster that comes to get you THROUGH YOUR DREAMS! I mean, how long can you stay awake? How long can you stay safe? We all know the answer to that because we’ve all seen the movies, right? Often, when I talk about movies 30 or 40 years old, I wonder how a remake or reboot would fare with a big budget and superior special effects. In this case remakes and reboots are not necessary because the original movies are just about perfect.

Meghan: Which unsolved murder fascinates you the most?

Christian: That would be the murder of my wife. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of her. It’s so weird they never found the body. They never looked in the garden, though. Kidding. Gotcha! I’ve never been married. I’m sorry to be so unoriginal, but I’d love to know who Jack the Ripper was. I don’t buy into the stuff about him being the queen’s doctor, but I read a theory recently suggesting that he and H.H. Holmes, he of Chicago’s murder castle, were the same person. The links are tenuous, but that’s the thing, the links to every suspect are tenuous but somebody did it, so one of these mad theories has to be true.

Meghan: Which urban legend scares you the most?

Christian: Ooh! I can tell you a famous Welsh one. Angelystor is a mystical ghostly figure that appears twice a year (Halloween and 31st July) in the village of Llangernyw in Conwy. Standing beneath a 3000-year old Yew tree, the supernatural entity announces the names of all the people who would die in the parish that year. What a guy!

Meghan: Who is your favorite serial killer and why?

Christian: There’s something morally wrong about having a favourite serial killer but you got me. I do have one. I’m going to go with that man H.H. Holmes again. The whole concept fascinates me. He didn’t just moider loads of people, he went to extraordinary lengths to do so and apparently took great pride in his work. He was also a conman, a trickster and a bigamist. I mean, how busy was this guy? He was convicted of 27 killings (there’s that number again, see what I mean?) but may have, and probably did, kill more than 200. That takes dedication.

Meghan: How old were you when you saw your first horror movie? How old were you when you read your first horror book?

Christian: My first horror film was either a little-known zombie flick called The Child, or American Werewolf in London, when I was ten or eleven years old. That’s a movie I must have watched a dozen times since. I didn’t start getting the humour in it until much later, and when I lived in London I made a pilgrimage to Tottenham Court Road underground station where some key scenes were filmed. It literally gave me shivers. It’s harder to remember the first book, but it was probably a Stephen King paperback nabbed from my sister. I’m going to say Pet Sematary.

Meghan: Which horror novel unsettled you the most?

Christian: I had a Richard Laymon phase in my late teens, like I guess most people do. He’s a very underrated writer. Sure, he put out some smut and he had a weird obsession with the word ‘rump,’ but nobody’s perfect! There are two books in particular I could mention, Funland and Body Rides. The most disturbing of the two is the latter. Not in a gruesome kind of way, but in the sense that when you finish it you feel as if Richard Laymon just reached inside your head, pulled out your brain, licked it, kicked it against a wall a few times, then put it back.

Meghan: Which horror movie scarred you for life?

Christian: The original Evil Dead. I remember watching it alone when I was twelve or thirteen and my parents were away for the night, and I was too scared to turn the lights off or go to bed. That creepy refrain, “Dead by dawn!” was running through my head constantly.

Meghan: What is your favorite Halloween costume?

Christian: I dressed up as Dracula when I was nine. See embarrassing pictorial evidence. I was certainly sullen enough, but I think the hair let me down.

Meghan: What is your favorite Halloween-themed song?

Christian: The Ramones Howling at the Moon from their 1984 album Too Tough to Die. Punk forever. You’re welcome.

Meghan: What is your favorite Halloween candy or treat? What is your most disappointing?

Christian: I’m British, and when I was a kid all the kids in my street used to get together and play ducking apples. You know, when you’re blindfolded and have to stick your head in a bucket of water and try to pick out apples with your teeth? Let me tell you, it got quite competitive! There’s no such thing as a disappointing treat.

Meghan: Thanks again for stopping by. Before you go, can you share your favorite Halloween reads and movies?

Christian: Even though I’m a writer, I’m going to give you my Top Three Halloween movies because I think reading more than one book in a night would be a challenge, but we can all squeeze in enough time for a classic horror movie marathon!

  1. The Fog (1980)
  2. The Howling (1981)
  3. Pet Sematary (1989)

FYI, every month I watch a classic horror film and post about it over on my blog. You’re welcome to take a look.

Boo-graphy:
Christian Saunders, who writes fiction as C.M. Saunders, is a freelance journalist and editor from south Wales. His work has appeared in almost 100 magazines, ezines and anthologies worldwide including Fortean Times, the Literary Hatchet, ParABnormal, Fantastic Horror, Haunted MTL, Feverish Fiction and Crimson Streets, and he has held staff positions at several leading UK magazines ranging from Staff Writer to Associate Editor. His books have been both traditionally and independently published, the latest release being Back from the Dead: A Collection of Zombie Fiction.

Website
Twitter
Facebook

Back from the Dead —
A collection of zombie fiction from British journalist and dark fiction writer C.M. Saunders, featuring two complete novellas alongside short stories previously published in the likes of Morpheus Tales and Crimson Streets, plus a brand-new novelette. Also includes an exclusive introduction and artwork by the award-winning Greg Chapman.

Featuring:

Dead of Night: young lovers Nick and Maggie go camping in the woods, only to come face-to-face with a group of long-dead Confederate soldiers who don’t know, or care, that the war is over.

Human Waste: Dan Pallister wakes up one morning to find the zombie apocalypse has started. Luckily, he’s been preparing for it most of his life. He just needs to grab some supplies from the supermarket…

‘Til Death do us Part: When the world as we know it comes to an abrupt end, an elderly couple are trapped in their apartment. They get by as best they can, until they run out of food.

Roadkill: A freelance ambulance crew are plunged into a living nightmare when a traffic accident victim they pick up just won’t stay dead. He has revenge on his mind.

Plague Pit: A curious teenager goes exploring the Welsh countryside one summer afternoon and stumbles across a long-abandoned chapel. What he finds there might change the world, and not for the better.

Dead Men Don’t Bleed: A gumshoe private eye is faced with his most challenging case yet when a dead man walks into his office and asks for help solving his own murder.

Drawn from a variety of sources, all these tales have one thing in common; they explore what might happen if our worst nightmares are realized and people came BACK FROM THE DEAD.