MODERN GOTHIC Book Launch with Fly on the Wall Press

We're delighted to be working with our friends at Fly on the Wall Press to host the launch of their new anthology MODERN GOTHIC. Featuring tyrannical landlords, obsessive descents into madness and haunting comings of age, these strange and unsettling tales are perfect for fans of the macabre as we enter spooky season! Reading on the night will be Lauran Archer, Lerah Mae Barcenilla, Michael Bird and Pete Hartley.

Doors: 6.30, starts: 6.45

Tickets start from £3.00. Modern Gothic will also be available to purchase on the night and all four authors will be happy to sign copies after the talk. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or [email protected] and we can arrange this for you.

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About the book:

Embark on a chilling journey through nightmarish tales that will captivate the ghoulish modern reader. Encounter landlords with sinister requests, ethereal housemates, and a glass-encased jungle built by an eccentric father. These gothic stories blur the lines between dreams and reality, weaving a tapestry of macabre encounters and festering secrets.

"These macabre tales feature oppressive, labyrinthine dreams, and even more unsettling realities. This is a damp, festering collection full of death and decay – rotten petals, decomposing carcases, creeping fungi – with a really interesting theme of living situations or, as one story puts it, “unhomely homes”. The characters in these stories are all experiencing their own forms of haunting, and must question the boundaries between the real and the imagined. I thought ‘Rot’ and ‘The City Where One Finds the Lost’ were excellently visceral, and I enjoyed the anti-capitalist undertones that ran throughout the collection." - Alyssa Lloyd, Small Press Book Club

About the authors:

Lauren Archer is a writer of the gothic, surreal and strange based in Liverpool, UK. Her short story 'Out of Water' was published by Crow and Cross Keys literary journal. In 2022, her short story 'The Allotment' was longlisted for the Mslexia Short Story Prize.

Lerah Mae Barcenilla grew up in Cuartero, Capiz in the Philippines full of magic, superstition and tradition before moving to the UK. Her work touches on topics of the diaspora, memory, mythology, folklore and the state of duality. Her writing has appeared in Harana Poetry, with Verve Poetry Press, was Highly Commended in The Literary Consultancy’s PEN Factor Award–Novel (2021) and won the Creative Future Writers Award–Platinum Poetry (2022). When she is not writing, she works as a marketing officer for the charity responsible for two of Birmingham’s iconic concert halls and as a researcher for Maniwala Movement, an Instagram account sharing resources on the cultures, customs and beliefs of pre-colonial Philippines.

Fiction by Michael Bird has been published constantly over the last few years, most recently on urban witchcraft, ‘The New Client’, in Panel Magazine, (Budapest, 2023), on deranged fandom, ‘I Named Every Donut in My Shop After Scorsese Movies. No One Bought The Departed’, in Daily Drunk Mag (New Orleans, 2023), and on family politics during the pandemic, ‘A Drive Through the Park’, in Porter House Review (Austin, Texas, 2022). Mixed media ‘These Walls of Me’ was Winner of Second Prize on www.theshortstory.net (UK, 2018), and he has also been published by British journals and sites Lune, Grist, Storgy, Bandit Fiction, and in two anthologies of the annual Bristol Short Story Prize. In 2022, his body horror story about a McDonald’s mascot from the 80s, ‘Fry Girl 4 Eva’ (USA), was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He also works as an investigative and narrative journalist, with features published on organised crime, stray dogs, vampire-hunters, killer home-made drugs, food emergencies, the war in Ukraine and organic farming.

Pete Hartley boasts an extensive writing career with numerous accolades, including winning the BBC Radio North West Playwriting Competition and the Cheshire Community Council playwriting competition. His plays, such as "Making the Grade" and "Gertie and the Guild Machine," have received critical acclaim and have been produced in various venues.

Host or Publisher Blackwell's Manchester