The Panda Book of Horror

I've another short story coming out!

It's in the Iris Wildthyme collection The Panda Book of Horror.
If you don't know Iris she's a sort of chaotic bag lady who travels through time and space barging into other people's stories and messing them up. A comedy, magic realist, science fantasy, label rejecting force of nature. She's sort of a Doctor Who spin-off character but actually she spun into Doctor Who from earlier novels and has spun back out.
She's created by the very clever Paul Magrs who has co-edited this collection with the extraordinarily svelte Stuart Douglas, who you may have seen around the internet arguing passionately with people about Doctor Who as if either his or their opinions actually mattered.
It was largely to meet Paul and Stuart that I went to Manchester the other week.

Here's their press-release:

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Ding Ding! All aboard! Room for a little 'un at the back!

Iris, Panda and their transtemporal double decker Routemaster bus are just about ready to leave the terminus and set out on their most terrifying adventures yet!

Yes, The Panda Book of Horror will soon be on its way to the printers, with a publication date in mid November 2009!

Along for the ride this time are...

Paul Magrs
Mark Clapham
Mark Michalowski
Simon Guerrier
Ian Potter
Dale Smith
Phil Craggs
Eddie Robson
Nicholas Nada
Blair Bidmead
Matt Kimpton
Mark Morris
Jac Rayner & Orna Petit

Many of these names will be known to Who book fans from the Virgin, BBC, Telos and Big Finish ranges, but new to Who fiction are Nix Nada and Blair Bidmead, both of whom submitted stories via the Obverse website, and Phil Craggs, fiction editor of blankpages magazine. As for Orna Petit, who can say? All we know is Jac insisted and who are we to argue...

With cover art by Paul Magrs and a pretty damn nifty pastiche of the original Pan Books of Horror design by Cody Schell, we think you'll enjoy The Panda Book of Horror...though perhaps enjoy is the wrong word...

Available for pre-order soon from Obverse Books - why not buy a copy of the Celestial Omnibus while you're waiting

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I've read work by a lot of these writers and really rate them, and I've been lucky enough to read the two stories by Matt Kimpton and Jacqueline Rayner and Orna Petit in this collection (Matt and Jac are good pretend e-friends), both of which I thought were really funny.
I was disappointed not to bump into Orna at Manchester, I thought she was going to be there but no-one I know saw her. I think she knows Jac from some kind of weird Prisoner Cell Block H thing that I've decided not to ask about. Anyway, I rather like her writing style and thought you could tell she was French writing in English somehow from some of it, though Stuart now tells me she's actually Flemish.

Anyway- buy the book, the bits I've seen by others are a hoot!