Abby finds a creative solution to her father’s problems. Ben makes a pact with the Devil for a new Mum. Katie is pursued by unrelenting voices. John just found his colleague’s hand in a strange girl’s lap. Jarvis is falling apart on his wedding day. Rosalind comes face-to-face with her number one fan. And that is just the beginning.
E.J. Newman’s debut anthology is a dark and twisting journey across the urban landscape, mining the rich seam of human frailties with insight and humour. The stories traverse the magical and the mundane, where supernatural beings are indistinguishable from their mortal counterparts in their complexity and complicity.
In 2009, Emma Newman started a short story club on her blog which now has over 300 members. Free to join, members receive a short story in their inbox every month, inspired by a winning prompt submitted to the blog. The winning commenter has the opportunity to read the story prior to its release to the club. In early 2010, between short story club stories and flash fiction written for her blog, Emma realised she had enough to create a small anthology. Keen to experiment with self-publishing, she produced an e-book entitled ‘From Dark Places’ containing 11 short stories, sold via Smashwords. During this time, eMergent Publishing commissioned Emma to write a second short story for their Chinese Whisperings anthologies, after the success of The Red Book in 2009. After such a positive experience with the company, Emma approached eMergent in late 2010 to hire them to edit an extended second edition of From Dark Places. Instead, eMergent Publishing offered Emma a contract to publish a new edition of the anthology in traditional and digital formats. The 2011 edition of ‘From Dark Places’ contains 25 stories, including one written specifically for inclusion in the new collection.
“Newman is unafraid to explore the darker side of fiction and, by extension,
life. The stories are by turns touching and funny and heart warming. And dark.
In places very, very dark. Leave the light on.”
DAN POWELL, 2010 Yeovil Literary
Prize winner
(Short Story)
“Gods, demons and angels inhabit these pages, as much at home as the cheating spouses, spurned lovers and ugly, foul-mouthed orphans. Newman is a powerful emerging voice in dark fiction. I’ll be watching out for more of her stuff. You should too.”
ALAN BAXTER , Author of ‘RealmShift’ and ‘MageSign’