Trusted by 500+ fans to find the fun in the funereal, the absurd in the macabre, and delight in the darkness. Join fiction author Morgan Delaney three times a week for genre-bending stories of cozy horror, dark fantasy and a brain with mind of its own...
Shot By A Witch!
 it’s been all bloody go here at the HQ of the Official Hawkinge-By-Hythe Historical Society. First, I had those man sniffles, then a sudden change in weather gave me a migraine. And then I got lumbago. Look, I hate making a fuss, but I’m putting my foot down – carefully, because of the lumbago – whoever has the Morgan voodoo doll, could you stop now, please? The internet tells me “lumbago” is an “outdated term for lower back pain”, and I agree. We should all be using the more evocative German term instead: Hexenschuss. Literally “witch shot.” (In the sense of shot by a witch, not shot with a witch. Though if you found a witch hard and knobbly enough, the effect would be the same, I suppose.) Witch shot gives you a better idea of how sudden, nasty and inexplicable it is. I just bent down to recharge my ereader, and suddenly all movement was agony. Yep, you can definitely see how superstitious peasants would assume evil magic was at play. There you are, sweeping out your hovel with a broom – or bending down to recharge your ereader – and bang, you’re a has-been. Not that I believe in witches, of course. Just fairies. Horrible things they are, mad keen on dancing. Dancing? Me? With this back? No, I’m well out of it. Unlike graverobbers, Aicke and Bowen. When the Fairy Queen invites them to dine and dance, they can dance… Or they can be dinner. Find out what else is on the menu now. A Grave & Dreadful Business is no longer an Amazon exclusive! Click here to see if your favourite bookshop already has it! Chat soon, Morgan Read more – and get two free ebooks – here: morgandelaney.info/newsletter.  |
Dark, Strange and Fantastic Fiction
Trusted by 500+ fans to find the fun in the funereal, the absurd in the macabre, and delight in the darkness. Join fiction author Morgan Delaney three times a week for genre-bending stories of cozy horror, dark fantasy and a brain with mind of its own...
Made you look, you dirty duck. Made you look for nothing. That’s the version we sang as children after tricking someone into looking at nothing. Or “gnaw-tin” with the proper Irish accent. Different places around the world have different versions of the song. Perhaps you were a dirty crook rather than a duck. Or at risk of being turned into turtle soup. But the game is best played in Germany, where they don’t seem to know it. When we moved to Heidelberg, our flatmate Anne loved to suddenly...
Listen. Do you hear that? Numbers, floating in the air around us. Trying to tell me something. Listen. It can’t be a coincidence because in my next book, The Cat Wore Black, radios come to Hawkinge-By-Hythe. People love them. Radio gives them all sorts of things. Music, news, entertainment. And when the station stops broadcasting at night, the radios transmit strange random numbers. Which gives them the willies. Then I read in Wired that plastic surgeons use the formula of the Fibonacci...
as the days contract, leaking inky night into the cold evenings, we need more music. And there’s a final Bandcamp this year, on December 5th, so here’s what I think you should get. AVTT/PTTN is The Avett Brothers (American folk-rock) with Mike Patton (Faith No More, Fantomas, Mr Bungle, etc.). And that’s exactly what you get: Mike Patton doing things to rock songs. Sold, but I still want that next Fantomas album, please. Next! There’s something very wrong with a world where the Sleaford Mods...