Recently shifting its focus predominantly to horror, award-winning independent publisher Black Spot Books’ upcoming list includes projects from debut authors to Bram Stoker Award-Winners as well as well-known names in the film/TV community.
The first project of 2022 is Cassondra Windwalker’s Hold My Place (out on 25 January 2022), a thrilling and emotional tale of obsession and possession in which Sigrun, a 30-something librarian, finds herself in a whirlwind romance, only to discover that her new lover carries some supernatural baggage.
We’re delighted to give horror fans the UK exclusive for the cover reveal (above), plus an extract of the book…
This wasn’t the romantic yearning penned by the writers of Regency romances or those luridly illustrated books whose covers featured bodybuilding Highland chiefs dressed in nothing but kilts. This was a blood-sickness. If I could have driven him from my thoughts, I would have, so wretched and ragged I felt with the constant pluck, pluck, pluck of his absence on my consciousness. He was the first thing I thought of when I woke up. My brain conjured endless contrived conversations between us as I roamed the deserted stacks at work. I dreamed of him and woke, sweating, consumed with a strange, excited anxiety, staring into the darkness and unable to retrieve any details of his phantasm.
By the end of the second week, I realized I must have secretly hoped time and distance would prove some antidote to his wonderful poison, that space would clear my vision, show me all we were was crass and common and selfish and fleeting. Hoped I’d save myself from myself before it could go too far. While he could still maintain some pretense of honesty. Hoped all the peacock feathers and stardust would show themselves only false hope and detritus in the end, cheap and pathetic and completely beneath me.
Instead, day and night, each cell in my body tended toward an intersection that hourly grew farther away. We’d exchanged numbers, true, in some unspoken nod toward a potential apocalypse we both wanted to pretend was impossible. A mistress—no, that’s not right. As much as my inner melodrama-mama craved the title, I knew I hadn’t earned it. I wasn’t even an illicit lover. Just an unacknowledged friend. Regardless, an unacknowledged friend can’t send texts. Can’t cling for survival in the awful isolation of quarantine to another woman’s husband.
You might assume that didn’t matter to me, that I wouldn’t have attached myself so hopelessly to him if it had, but it did matter, more than I can express. Even now, after all this time, I sometimes dream of those jade eyes bidding me goodbye. I wake up, breathless, choking, my throat full of aquamarine waters and my fingers dripping with seaweed. I think: I nearly drowned there, and something in me is disappointed I survived when I might have been subsumed by her. Other days, I imagine I see her eyes flashing at me beneath my lashes in the mirror, and I wonder which of us truly made it to the surface in the end.
Lindy Ryan, President and Founder, launched Black Spot Books with the goal of bringing genre-bending, innovative fiction to market, and has prioritised acquiring projects from debut and underrepresented authors. “Black Spot Books has always looked for projects that make our hearts pound and pulses race. The same passion for discovering fresh storytelling and amplifying underrepresented voices will continue to drive our catalogue as we acquire projects that promote diversity and representation within the horror community.”
Further novels, novellas, and anthologies will follow, including Under Her Skin (out 5 April 2022, Black Spot Books’ inaugural women-in-horror poetry showcase which includes over eighty poems from women (cis and trans) and non-binary femmes in dark verse, as well as a foreword by Linda D. Addison, illustrations by Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Marge Simon, and cover artwork by Lynne Hansen.
Hold My Place by Cassondra Windwalker is out 25 January.