Today, win an ebook, question the Pope and catch up on some scary news. Writing stories and herding lurchers is a strange way to make a living, don’t you think, dear listener? At this time of the year the lurchers must be gathered in from the hills and moved en masse to their winter sofas, whilst the stories wait patiently at home, fretting at each other’s semi-colons and causing mischief.

Even before the lurchers have settled in their natural dozing positions, upside down with legs in the air and tongue hanging out, the little stories have broken into a box of adjectives, got their plots all tangled up and are in a mess, quite frankly.

But we must be strong, for it is the tenth day of October. Which is incidentally is a day that didn’t exist in 1582 for the Polish, the Italians, the Portuguese and the Spanish, because they changed to the Gregorian calendar. That Pope Gregory, huh? He must have been a laugh.

It is also the start of the October Frights Blog Hop. All sorts of fun sites are listed at the bottom of this article. And the silver-tongued authors featured there will offer you candies and many treats, tell you about their lovely books, and beguile you with their musings on life, being authorial, and the paranormal or dark fiction they write.

Not us. For we are greydogtales, so most of our posts during the week will be about curious things from a hundred and more years ago, or lurchers, or both. And they will include random comments about other people’s weird books. It will be odd, because greydog, aka John Linwood Grant, is an odd fellow.

As part of our Edwardian Arcane series, we’ll be looking more at Jerome K Jerome, who is perhaps best know for his book Three Men in a Boat.

He also wrote some wry, and some dark, ghost stories. As a taster on the wry side, we love his deconstruction of classic ghost stories in the delightful collection Told After Supper (1891):

“(Then there is) the young man who woke up with a strange sensation in the middle of the night, and found his rich bachelor uncle standing by his bedside. The rich uncle smiled a weird sort of smile and vanished. The young man immediately got up and looked at his watch. It had stopped at half-past four, he having forgotten to wind it. He made inquiries the next day, and found that, strangely enough, his rich uncle, whose only nephew he was, had married a widow with eleven children at exactly a quarter to twelve, only two days ago.”

We’ll cover Jerome in more detail later in the series.

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Competition, Much To Our Surprise

All this week you do have a chance to win one of greydog’s novellas in ebook format – A Study In Grey, released this April. It’s a mystery, a psychic investigation, and a Sherlock Holmes story of sorts, all rolled up into one. 5 stars on Amazon:

“A feature of the novella that I found particularly appealing was the seamless blending of the Holmes stories’ concrete, real-world setting with the contemporary but supernatural-drenched Carnacki tales of William Hope Hodgson – not to mention Conan Doyle’s post-Holmes fascination with spiritualism. The narrative steers a pleasingly skilled course between the two, with the nature of the central mystery kept uncertain until the climax of the story. I don’t think it’s giving anything away to reveal that Blake is sensitive to the supernatural, and Miss Jessop is a powerful psychic. The séance scenes are thoroughly chilling, as is the mask-wearing Count Alten. The conclusion I found gripping and not a little shocking.”

Want a free copy? Right then. John Linwood Grant’s series Tales of the Last Edwardian features a man called Mr Dry, the Deptford Assassin. He is ruthless, exceptionally effective, and reputed to have killed Jack the Ripper. A whisper that Mr Dry is in town is enough for most folk – but what is his first name?

To win one of five copies, all you have to do is to e-mail us with Mr Dry’s FIRST NAME and your choice of format – epub or mobi – in the subject line.

Email: a study in grey competition

Not that we know if that link will work, but it’s worth a try.  We’re on carfanel(at)greydogtales.com if it doesn’t. At the end of the Blog Hop, we’ll have the lurchers select five people at random and send them the book. It’s that simple. How do you find out? Search the site, or glance through either of the free Tales of the Last Edwardian stories you can find here on Smashwords:

two free tales of the last edwardian

No cost, no real effort. It’s like Inspector Morse, but less hassle.

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While we’re here, something which will cost you, but not much, is the Kickstarter for the forthcoming Occult Detective Quarterly. If you like scary tales where people unwisely go into haunted houses, or investigate that strange noise, where hardened detectives find themselves not quite as hardened as they thought, this is for you.

occult detective quarterly kickstarter

For as little as $2 (or Britland equivalent) you can help make this happen, and be credited as being in at the start of a brand new cool magazine. Subscriptions are cheaper than the final retail price, and there are all sorts of rewards still available.

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To be honest, you find us between several rocks and a collection of hard places at the moment, because the guilty greydog is damnably busy at this very moment:

• Helping run that Kickstarter campaign, as JLG is the co-editor;
• Developing an anthology concept, strange stories of people’s experiences under the British Empire, for a publisher;
• Writing another novella of psychic goings-on in Victorian and Edwardian times;
• Attempting to rid the lurchers of whatever’s making them itch, before it gets to us;
• Producing sundry articles for other people;
• Interviewing writers, artists and editors for the website, and
• Making up features more exciting than this one for our Edwardian Arcane theme.

So we can manage only one last mention. As we were speaking of Jack the Ripper (which we rarely do), if you like historical and creepy at the same time, you can’t go much wrong with Alan M Clark’s latest novel A Brutal Chill in August (see right hand sidebar for purchase link).

Going deeper than the usual ‘Who was Jack?’ or period murder stories, Clark looks at the lives of those who died.

“Pursued by one demon into the clutches of another, the ordinary life of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols is made extraordinary by horrible, inhuman circumstance. Jack the Ripper’s first victim comes to life in this sensitive and intimate fictionalized portrait, from humble beginnings, to building a family with an abusive husband, her escape into poverty and the workhouse, alcoholism, and finally abandoned on the streets of London where the Whitechapel Murderer found her.

“With A Brutal Chill in August, Alan M. Clark gives readers an uncompromising and terrifying look at the nearly forgotten human story behind one of the most sensational crimes in history. This is horror that happened.”

Here’s a nice song as well – The Soul of You, as sung by the Bonehill Ghost:

http://alanmclark.com/Soul.html

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We will return, in a day or so, with more mysteries. In the meantime, go Blog Hopping…