Stories by: Glynn Owen Barrass, Andrew Coulthard, Richard Alan Scott, Sarah Walker, J. Edwin Buja, David Agranoff, Anthony Trevino, Michael Housel, John Chadwick, David Voyles, Nora Peevy, B.E. Dantalion. Second volume by Eighth Tower Publications, in a series of anthologies revolving around genre writers and artists who set the parameters and frameworks of the kind of tales that we prefer to read (the first volume was dedicated to HP Lovecraft). Here you will find another varied selection of interpretations inspired by the Gates of Hell film trilogy by the Italian legendary director Lucio Fulci. Many authors do elaborate on themes explicated in the movies, but there are an equal number that only take the barest of essentials from Fulci's works and go off tangentially instead. You will find two tales in which the film features, both in very different ways: Sarah Walker's 'The Evocation of Ansell Jeffers' and Andrew Coulthard's 'The Seventh Gate'. Some stories such as Michael Housel's 'Summer Urges' hint at the threat of the living dead (simultaneously using characters and tropes from the film City of the Living Dead, but only in passing), while John Edwin Buja's wartime-set 'Lost in Hell on the Way to Victory' similarly uses the living dead motif and mentions the Gates of Hell but otherwise makes no reference to anything from the films. More proscribed tomes lie at the heart of both John Chadwick's 'The Book of Belman' (Chadwick's own creation The Book of Belman) and B.E. Dantalion' 'The Black Hole (Robert Bloch's De Vermis Mysteriis). Of course, other stories feature hordes of our favourite brain-munchers running amok, like Glynn Owen Barrass' 'Terror at the Harriet Kingston Motel' and Nora B. Peevy's darkly comedic 'The Witch of Fox Point', which features a cast of memorable characters including a plucky teenager who, along with her witch grandmother and the ghost of a young girl, battle against a veritable swarm of the undead (and zombie cows) in order to save the world. In Richard Alan Scott's 'Son of No one', a real-life event that terrorised New York in the seventies is given an unsettling twist, setting the tale against a palpable sense of genuine fear and panic that really was felt by people at the time, told by a native of NYC in a way that creates a sense of reality that only serves to heighten the unfolding nightmare. David Voyles' 'Last Rites' has its own blackly humorous moments in a well-observed tale set in a typical English town. Music plays a central role in David Agranoff and Anthony Trevino's nightmarish 'Scoring The Season of the Unnamed', So we invite you to barricade yourself into your house, black out the windows, set a fire in the grate, turn on a dim light by which to read, stockpile some weapons perhaps, and settle yourself into a comfortable chair and let these eleven tales of terror accompany you into the small hours of the night.
