The Ghastling - Victoria Dowd

A beautifully designed modern day penny dreadful. This issue is guaranteed to slip you a bit of the weird, the uncomfortable, the creepy, topped up with a garnish of terror. Nine short stories designed to raise the hair on the back of your neck, twist your perspective and leave you with a funny feeling in your gut. In Warren Benedetto's 'Uncle Pumpkin's Tongue', a seemingly innocent fairground ride turns into something revoltingly sinister. In Paul Buchanan's thoroughly disturbing tale, 'The Bynum Girl', a community anticipates the release of one of its most terrifying members: a girl who once tormented them all.  JP Relph's mind bending story, 'Delirus', tells of a doll, kept out of sight in the basement of a house gathering dust. She is discovered by a little girl who becomes quite taken with her. But what the little dolly harbours inside will make your skin crawl... Reggie Chamberlain-King's, 'Living With It', is a deeply troubling story of a mother unravelling in her domestic surroundings. Has she really just committed the most unmotherly act? Where is her son, really? Rory Say's thought provoking story, 'The Other Door', tells of a boy who keeps finding a door in strange places, but one that he cannot ever open. In Mark Blayney's, eerie story, 'Coin, Mirror, Manoeuvre', a man lives alone in the woods surrounded by his memories of an unrecognisable past - familiar, yet, unfamiliar. Something utterly life-changing has happened, but what? And which version of events is correct... ? 'The Catafalque' by Victoria Dowd is a spine-chilling story of a couple who convert a disused chapel, novel indeed, but is it ever a good idea to use a catafalque as a dining table? In Eve Chancellor's story inspired by true events, 'The Resurrection Man', a corpse-hauler delivering freshly dead bodies receives a visit from someone unexpected prompting a series of disturbing events. It is 1916 in Neil A. Wilson's, 'In the Bleak Midwinter', and an invalid soldier is convalescing in Marsham Hall after a mustard gas attack. He should be improving but the nightmares keep leaking in, getting worse, almost as though something is tormenting him on purpose...