AustLit

'Mike Crowe doesn't believe in ghosts, but it seems there's one ghost that believes in him. Can he escape the attention of a psychopath long enough to help her?

'A not-exactly legal PI, Crowe is blackmailed into tracking down a serial killer known as The Scavenger. At the same time, he finds himself increasingly plagued by visions - and eventually visitations - of a young girl he failed to save from being murdered a decade before.

'Are these things connected?

'Crowe must scavenge through the debris of a world going to pieces around him - at first just to survive and then to find the answers to questions he'd rather hadn't been asked.' (Publication summary)

'In ‘Dry Bones’, Robert Hood shows us a terrifying future, where all the technology at our disposal can’t solve the deadly heat, violent weather and rising ocean levels, while survivors slowly disappear, transformed into mere skeletons overnight.'

Source: https://clarerhoden.com/from-the-wasteland-the-writers/from-the-waste-land-meet-the-stories/

An end-of-days ghost story.

'When are dead people not ghosts? That's easy. When they try to eat you!

'Haunted Flesh: Stories of the Living Dead collects six of Australian horror maestro Robert Hood's creepiest, most outlandish tales of flesh-bound cadaver mayhem. Some tear bloodily into the tradition established by director George A. Romero with his Living Dead series of films, while others paddle in a murky pool of science-based resurrection, alien possession, undead whimsy and voodoo politics. Important questions are addressed: Does the essence of life lie in the mind or in the heart? Do the dead make good workers? When a creepy evangelist knocks on your door, what does he mean when he offers you the secret of eternal life? Should you invite zombies to a BBQ? Is the Prime Minister really dead? The answers may shock you, they may make you laugh uneasily, but either way you'll never look at life and death the same way again.

'As a special bonus, this volume includes an important article that exposes the truth behind the zombie movie tradition!'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Peripheral visions is a unique reference collection that includes all of Robert Hood's 44 ghost stories to date, three of them especially written for this volume. These memorable tales display Hood's uncanny ability to make the fantastic real, to embrace weirdness and create human characters whose lives - both inner and outer - haunted by mortality, are laid bare and revealed to be our own worst nightmares. Ranging from melancholy reflection on life and death, through disquieting tales of dark humour and vengeance, to chilling visions of ghostly apocalypse. Hood's stories are sure to draw you into a terrifying world that in the end is revealed to be irrefutably our own. Though many of these stories draw on the traditions of the past, they are far from traditional in approach. As you turn each page remember this: not everything here is as it seems. There's always something more, barely glimpsed, out there on the periphery.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'What was a clone of Emperor Nero doing in the Meta-Terrarium among the gods?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'You never make a deal with the Devil. But what about the child of a god?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Morley Turrand is a photographer artist and one of his special prints is called 'Escena de un Asesinato', which means murder scene. It is a picture of a place where a Mexican revolutionary, called El Roto, was shot and killed in 1994. Before he had taken the picture, he had been given a doll that might have been modeled on El Roto by a beautiful mysterious woman who calls herself La Coronela, the name of a heroine of the Revolution of 1910. One of the prints of the picture seems to show a mysterious figure in it but that must be a flaw in the print. A woman buys the print and her and her husband are found mysteriously murdered. So are others who buy unblemished versions of the print.'

Source: SF Revu (http://www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=14272). (Sighted: 18/2/2014)