I’ll let you imagine my elation at having a short story included in this volume – ‘The Folio Anthology of Horror Stories’ – edited by Ramsey Campbell. I grew up in houses filled with their distinctive slip-cased editions and still have my Dad’s Folio copy of ‘The Hammer of Witchcraft’.
I’d read at least six of these stories by my mid-teens, so if you’d told a 16 year old Adam that one of his stories would eventually be included in the same collection as those stories, he’d have accused you of divining, falsehoods, conjuring and devilry.
A magical circle has also turned for me, as Ramsey published me as a horror writer for the first time in ‘Gathering the Bones’, back in 2004. My hideous evolution continued from then.
With thanks to Paul Finch for first fishing the story out of me and to Gary Fry for processing and canning it at the plant.
Here’s the full track listing of the Folio collection:
The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)
Edgar Allan Poe
The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)
Charlotte Perkins
Gilman Count Magnus (1904)
M. R. James
The White People (1904)
Arthur Machen
Ancient Lights (1912)
Algernon Blackwood
The Music of Erich Zann (1922)
H. P. Lovecraft
Smoke Ghost (1941)
Fritz Leiber
Brenda (1954)
Margaret St Clair
The Bus (1965)
Shirley Jackson
Again (1981)
Ramsey Campbell
Vastarien (1987)
Thomas Ligotti
Call Home (1991)
Dennis Etchison
1408 (2002)
Stephen King
Flowers of the Sea (2011)
Reggie Oliver
Hippocampus (2015)
Adam Nevill