Thanks to Meghan at Penguin Books, I have three copies of The White People & Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen, edited by S.T. Joshi for three lucky readers! So check out the following excerpt from Machen scholar, S.T. Joshi, and then enter to win a copy! Good luck and enjoy!

Introduction
Arthur Machen’s own life is perhaps his greatest creation; for it is exactly the life we might expect a poet and a visionary to have lived. Born in 1863 in the village of Caerleon-on-Usk in Wales (the site, two millennia earlier, of the Roman town of Isca Silurum and the base of the Second Augustan Legion), Machen was fascinated since youth by the Roman antiquities in his region as well as the rural Welsh countryside. He attended Hereford Cathedral School, but in 1880 he failed an examination for the Royal College of Surgeons; he felt he had no option but to go to London to look for work, where he hoped that his ardent enthusiasm for books might land him some literary work. But only poverty and loneliness were his portion. Dragging out a meager existence as a translator (his translation of the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre [1886] long remained standard, as did his later translation of Casanova’s memoirs), tutor, and cataloger, he knew at first hand the spiritual isolation that his alter ego, Lucian Taylor, would depict so poignantly in The Hill of Dreams (1907). In his first autobiography, Far Off Things (1922), he speaks of this period with a wistfulness that scarcely conceals his anguish. Consider the description of his attic garret on Clarendon Road: Read more

Thanks to Liz at Sourcebooks who has donated us these terrific books up for grabs today: Emma and the Vampires by Wayne Josephson; Mr. Darcy Vampyre by Amanda Grange; Mr. Darcy’s Bite by Mary Lydon Simonsen; and Pemberley Shades by Dorothea A. Bonavia-Hunt (all in trade paperback).

Today we are joined by indie author, Roxanne Rhoads. Her latest book is Paranormal Pleasures: Ten Tales of Supernatural Seduction. Welcome!

Halloween…the one day when spirits can walk this world in the flesh when those who are no longer ‘real’ once again become corporeal.

The one day I enjoy more than any other day of the year.

Why?

There are many reasons but the main one is that the rest of the year I never feel like my ‘real’ self.

I can’t walk around vamped out in Goth attire looking dark and spooky even if that’s how I feel inside. I’m a married mommy of three. I don’t think the other mommies would appreciate a Morticia Addams among them; they probably wouldn’t let their kids come over and play with mine. That could pose a threat to the social lives of my little ones.

Perhaps I’m not being true to myself but I can’t do that to my husband or kids. So I hide the darkness inside only letting it out the rest of the year in my fiction.  Read more

Red Velvet and Absinthe explores love and lust with otherworldly partners who, by their sheer fantastical nature, evoke passion and desire far beyond that which any normal human being can inspire. Although the greats such as Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, and Daphne du Maurier are long dead, these contemporary authors keep the Gothic spirit alive and well by interpreting it in new and exciting ways. Red Velvet and Absinthe offers readers a collection of unique and original stories that conjure up the atmospheric and romantic spirit of the Gothic masters (and mistresses) but take things a bit further by adding to the brew a generous dosage of eroticism. Lie back and listen to the wind howling outside your window as you read these stories in the flickering light of a candle, the absinthe you’re sipping warming your body like the caressing touch of a lover’s fingers . . .

Check out my review of this amazing anthology here.  Read more