PSYCHOS Anthology edited by John Skipp ★★★★★

(Serial Killers, Depraved Madman and the Criminally Insane)

THE SHORT STORY, ALIVE AND WELL

               Stephen King is arguably one of the master storytellers of our time.  Yet, even he felt he’d fallen out of touch with short story fiction in 2006 when invited to edit ‘The Best American Short Stories 2007’.

In an interview promoting his own collection, ‘Just After Sunset’, inspired by his editing of the volume, he said, “People have forgotten how to read the short story. They’ve fallen out of love with the short story.  People are too lazy to pick up a short story and start over and over again. It’s (too much of) a grab bag.’

John Skipp, editor of ‘Psychos-Serial Killers, Depraved Madman and the Criminally Insane’ certainly ensures it is not a grab bag.  He knows something about great short stories, with his first published short story in ‘The Twilight Zone’ Magazine in 1982.  He’s a New York Times Bestselling author and has co-authored over a dozen successful horror novels, ‘Psychos’ being  his third anthology with publisher Black Dog and Leventhal in the fantasy-horror genre.  So he has credibility in choosing a gripping yarn.

These stories will restore your faith in the short narrative.  Some will stick in your mind, even if you don’t want them there.  These are thirty-eight gems that will keep you reading like the addiction that follows that first black jelly-bean.  Your need for ‘just one more’ will keep you up into the psycho-prowling wee hours. 

You will meet perfectly normal people—you’ll think at first—that hide twisted, dark secrets. And you will meet normal people who don’t realise they have crossed evil’s pathway. Dark humour and light prose dance in perfect combination. Alongside, genre royalty of Neil Gaimin, Thomas Harris, Ray Bradbury, and Edgar Allen Poe, Skipp has included some astonishingly polished emerging authors.

The pleasure of reading a good story is that you don’t want it to end. The wonderful thing with ‘Psychos’, at over six hundred pages, there are plenty of beginnings.

My review copy of Psychos thanks to the lovable people at Murdoch Books and Allen and Unwin Australia

To buy or learn more visit Psychos
Release Dates: Australia and New Zealand: December, 2012  U.S.A.: October, 2012

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Skipp is a New York Times bestselling author and editor whose 23 books have sold millions of copies in a dozen languages worldwide. His first anthology, Book of the Dead, laid the foundation in 1989 for modern zombie literature. He later edited three more zombie anthologies, including Mondo Zombie, which won the Bram Stoker Award for best anthology. He is the editor of three books in Black Dog’s horror series: Zombies, Werewolves and Shapeshifters, and Demons, which also won the Bram Stoker Award. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.