What is industrial horror? Is it smoke stacks and gas towers? Is it the metal cranes of the shipyards turned golem? The stuff of our nightmares has been evolving since the industrial revolution and the rise of the machines…
Machines aren’t our friends. We were told they would bring freedom and leisure time, three day weeks and the like, but what they brought was redundancy, replacement, and the scrap heaps of life. How can you not look for horror in something capable of so much wholesale destruction of hope?
And that’s what’s waiting for you in here, the wholesale destruction of hope at the hands of twisted industrial landscapes, smoke stacks and gas towers and metal golems that have no souls, no spirits, and can so easily drape themselves in our skins and walk in our shoes, doing everything we can do, faster, and with ruthless efficiency, removing the need for us. That’s the world these stories live in, and it’s a bleak place.
Author Biography:
Steven Savile has written for Doctor Who, Torchwood, Primeval,Stargate, Warhammer, Slaine, Fireborn, Pathfinder, Arkham Horror, Rogue Angel, and other popular game and comic worlds. He won the International Media Association of Tie-In Writers award for his novel, SHADOW OF THE JAGUAR, and the inaugural Lifeboat to the Stars Award from for TAU CETI (co-authored with International Bestselling novelist Kevin J. Anderson). Writing as Matt Langley his young adult novel BLACK FLAG was a finalist for the People's Book Prize 2015. He wrote the story for the multi-million copy bestselling computer game Battlefield 3 and has worked with Paradox Interactive on several of their forthcoming computer games. His latest books include SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE MURDER AT SORROWS CROWN, published by Titan in September 2016, PARALLEL LINES a brand new crime novel coming from the same publisher in March 2017, and GLASS TOWN, a mythic fantasy novel published in hardcover by St Martin's Press in April 2017. Cate Gardner is a British horror and fantastical author with over a hundred short stories published. Several of those stories appear in her collection Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits (Strange Publications 2010).
She is also the author of five novellas: Theatre of Curious Acts (Hadley Rille Books, 2011), Barbed Wire Hearts (Delirium Books, 2011), In the Broken Birdcage of Kathleen Fair (Alchemy Press, 2013), This Foolish & Harmful Delight (Egaeus Press, 2013) and The Bureau of Them (Spectral Press, 2015).
Her chapbooks Nowhere Hall (Spectral Press 2011) and The Sour Aftertaste of Olive Lemon (Bucket 'O' Guts Press 2009) have now sold out, and she is currently working on a novel.
Her favourite authors are Robert Shearman, Sarah Pinborough, Joe Hill, Neil Gaiman, Gina Ranalli, Laura Mauro, John Wyndham and Lemony Snicket.
