The wonderful world of werewolves

An anthology of werewolf stories is published in January — and I’m very proud to say that one of my stories is featured. Editor and author Graeme Reynolds (High Moor) contacted me last year and asked me to contribute a tale to the collection. The criteria was that it had to be based on an already-created werewolf universe.

My horror-thriller Maneater was published by Snowbooks in 2008, and introduced Laura Greenacre – the tagline was “Meet Laura. She’ll eat you alive.” She wasn’t the troubled, sweet-natured, “I-don’t-really-want-to-hurt-people” type of werewolf that had started to plague fiction and films at the time (and that kind of werewolf still does). She was animal. And she went down well with readers. You can read more about her here.

And here’s just one review, by Sheila Merritt of Hellnotes:

“Laura is gory and gorgeous, beauty and the beast, the stuff that dreams (and nightmares) are made of. Male readers will find her extremely attractive, and women readers will admire her for her attributes and attitude.

Couple of years later I wrote a sequel, also published by Snowbooks, called Prey. Went down well, too.

So when Graeme commissioned me, there was only one place to go — back to Laura.

My story’s called The Hunt and elaborates on an event mentioned in Maneater that took place when Laura was a teenager. The story also flashes back to Roman times, 60AD, telling the story of how the Maneater werewolves came to be, their history, their culture.

This week, I’ve just received the proof — and it looks great. That’s the cover, above. I’m really excited to be featured in this collection alongside some top horror names such as Paul Kane, Ray Garton, Jeff Strand and David Wellington.

You can pre-order Leaders Of The Pack: A Werewolf Anthology, here in the UK, here in the U.S.

Movies That Should Be Re-made #1: The Valley Of Gwangi

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By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30937323

I recently heard they’ve re-made Ben-Hur, 1959 the epic starring Charlton Heston. Well, it’s actually described as a “re-adaptation” of the original novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, written by Lew Wallace in 1880.

Now I’m not against re-makes (or “re-adaptations”; whatever). Sometimes they work (Ocean’s Eleven worked well; Christopher Nolan’s Batman re-boots were genius). But I was unsure about Ben-Hur. Ben-Hur is just, well, Ben-Hur, isn’t it; like Jaws is Jaws. Do not touch. Anyway, it got me thinking about films that I’d could do with a re-make.

A few years back I reviewed The Valley Of Gwangi on a website. Now this dinosaur romp was a favourite of mine when I was growing up. and it’s definitely one I’d be interested in seeing re-made – not because the original is poor: it’s not; it’s brilliant. But because it would be fun, I think.

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