K. C. Adams, "The Vampire's Revenge"

Kristina Adams is the author of 20 novels, 3 books for writers, 1 poetry collection, and too many blog posts to count. She publishes mother/daughter ghost stories as K. C. Adams. She also works part-time as a content marketer. When she’s not writing, she’s playing with her dog or inflicting cooking experiments on her boyfriend. 

About The Vampire's Revenge, by K. C. Adams
Is this family of ghost hunters about to become vampire prey?

Edie
Do I ever get a break? I’ve just been attacked by a knife-wielding weirdo and found out my new friend is a vampire. And now the bookshop has been vandalised.
But it turns out the vampire who trashed the bookshop murdered Maisie’s mum and turned her into a vampire. So now, she wants revenge.
And she wants my help to get it.
But how far will she go? And who’ll get caught in the crossfire?

Niamh
Fadil’s chronic pain is getting worse. He won’t let anyone help him, but it’s now so bad that some days he can’t even get out of bed.
Has being 4,000 years old finally caught up with him, or is something else going on? Do the answers lie in the normal or the paranormal? If we can’t convince him to get help, will he continue to get worse? And just how much worse could he get?

The Vampire’s Revenge is the eighth book in the Afterlife Calls series. It contains cave-dwelling vampires, a haunted bookshop, chronic pain representation, sassy pets, teenage angst and mid-life romance. Every book in the Afterlife Calls series contains a standalone mystery and threads that tie into a larger plot at the end of each part in the series.

You can read more about The Vampire's Revenge on the author's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From The Vampire's Revenge

From the Author's Note 

Whenever I tell someone I’m from Nottingham, they immediately think of Robin Hood. While Robin of Loxley may be the most well-known part of Nottingham history, there are far more interesting parts.

Underneath the city are (at the time of publication in 2025) over 900 documented caves. These are human made, carved out of the unique Sherwood Sandstone. What makes Sherwood Sandstone unique is its ability to hold its shape. Go a few miles to the west and the sand won’t hold its shape; go to the east and you won’t get through it without a drill.

Nottingham’s cave network was built by hand, which is another thing that makes it remarkable. While we don’t know the exact age of all the caves, some are thought to be around 3,000 years old – almost as old as Fadil! 

All the facts about the caves and the Goose Fair in this book are true. Except for the vampire part and the cave in which they live.

There are caves (and catacombs!) around the Church Rock Cemetery and Forest Recreation Ground which I’ve been fortunate enough to tour, but the one the vampires in Afterlife Calls inhabit is fictional. Most caves in Nottingham are quite small and unconnected. I needed something big and labyrinthine for them to live in, so I took some creative license with that part.

I grew up in a town similar to Hucknall, and my friends and I always complained that there was no interesting local history. But there probably was.

So much of our local history has already been lost. It’s really important to me that we preserve it, because we can learn so much from the lessons of the past. For example, the Luddites, something else Nottingham is famous for, didn’t rebel against the new technology in lacemaking their employers were bringing in. They rebelled against poor pay and working conditions. Sound familiar? Sound like it could be written now?

Everywhere has history. The problem is that local history just isn’t shared. If people don’t share it, it dies. Much like the origins of the catacombs in Nottingham, for example. We’ll never know if they really were carved out to house the dead and Notts folks got squeamish about it, or if it was just another excuse to mine sandstone. Personally I think the latter. The sand was an important part of local building and also exported for things like glassmaking. No one is giving up that lucrative business without a fight. They must’ve done eventually, though, as the city is no longer mined for sand.

If you want to find out more about the City of Caves, you can do a tour which will tell you about their history as homes, businesses, and even air raid shelters.

You can also walk down a cave called Mortimer’s Hole beside Nottingham Castle, which gave my legs a hell of a workout but was full of interesting stories of political intrigue.

On Writing Memoir about Growing up in Leicester in the 1960s

By Sharon Tyers

The Leicester Seamstress

My mother was a sock linker in a hosiery factory in Leicester for forty years. Sometimes she called herself an overlocker. As a child I had no idea what that meant and all I knew about socks was that she brought home the rejects from the factory floor, the ones that didn’t pass muster, for me to wear. As a result, when I was writing her story, there were many challenges along the way.

Firstly, the hosiery industry in Leicester doesn’t exist anymore but when I was growing up it was proud to say it was "a city that clothed the world." How was I to capture those times when the factories had disappeared from sight? Secondly, by the time I decided to write my mother’s story she was incapacitated and bedridden in the final throes of vascular dementia and had no voice – she could not share her memories with me. Thirdly, the moral dilemma as to whether I had the right to write about my mother’s life caused me much unrest and sleepless nights.

My first decision was to return to the city of my birth, which I left in 1979 at the age of nineteen, and retrace my steps, but that too was beset with problems. Leicester Market, a favourite haunt, where mum would drag me from stall to stall filling her shopping bag with unwashed potatoes, wet lettuces and muddy carrots, was being dug up. Huge, faceless, white boards hid its faded glory and bulldozers drowned out the shouts of the few remaining stall holders. Mum’s factory, where she started work on her fourteenth birthday in 1946, had been converted into student accommodation and was ironically called The Hosiery Factory. The chimney was still there, though, and I stood outside and imagined it smoking when mum arrived and disappeared through the enormous gates to spend the next forty years of her life. Her life may not have been glamorous but I would swear as I stood there, I could hear the giggles she shared with the other women.

Indeed, on Facebook, when I posted a picture of The Leicester Seamstress, who stands on the corner of Hotel Street, over 700 local people came forward to share their love of what she represented – the ordinary hard-working hosiery operator. I knew then I had to continue to write about not only my mother’s life but their recollections too.

So, I kept walking through the past, from Newarke where the Midland Red bus used to drop us off, through the Magazine arch and up into St Martin’s, where we never knew we were walking over the bones of Richard III who would be found thirty years later. Most importantly, I needed to stand in Fox Lane, that shortcut we took between Marks and Lewis’s where the strongman in a thin vest lifted weights for the entertainment of the shoppers and the accordion player squeezed out Lady of Spain.

Fox Lane, Leicester, 1965

These may not be the most sophisticated research methods employed by writers but I was there, you see, and I’ve realised the pictures are still in my head even if they are not still on the streets of Leicester. I completed my book in June of this year and called it The Wrong Socks.

About the author
Sharon Tyers taught English for many years at The Blue Coat School in Liverpool and now lives in North Wales where her first book, Linen and Rooks, is set. An essay, The Lost Dens of Leicester, was published by Little Toller/The Clearing in August 2025, again about her Leicester childhood. She is currently writing After the Fair, the untold story of Susan Henchard, from Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. She gives talks in libraries and bookshops and campaigns for better oratory skills in schools. She misses Leicester. Her website is here. 

Alison Brackenbury, "Village"

 

Alison Brackenbury, born in Lincolnshire in 1953, is descended from long lines of servants and skilled farmworkers. She has published ten collections of poetry, most recently Thorpeness (Carcanet, 2022) and Gallop, her Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2019). Her work has won an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. The programmes she has written and narrated for BBC Radio 4 have been frequently been "Choices" in Radio Times, which praised her account of village life: "evocative, amusing and utterly compelling." After she left the village, Alison’s life ranged from a First-Class Oxford degree to industrial work. Memory, experience and the startling results of research have enriched Village, her brand-new, non-fiction prose book, honouring her Lincolnshire home. Alison’s writing about her village has recently been featured in The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Financial Times, and discussed on The Verb on BBC Radio 4. Village has just been published in both digital and paperback forms. Alison's website is here. 

About Village, by Alison Brackenbury

Witches and wheelbarrows ...

Francis Weatherhogg, saddler and Census taker, had one special form to deliver. To a "witch" ... Under the shifting shadows of the walnut tree, Mary Ann opened the door of her tiny stone cottage. There she lived, unmarried, with a man whose extraordinary story spanned three continents. And Mary Ann herself – in 1891! – was still feared in her village for murderous "spells" ...

Village tells extraordinary stories of six homes, from 1841, when the first Census taker trudged up steep Hollowgate Hill, to 1971, when its author, aged 18, was driven below its thorn trees to Oxford. But she never forgot her village: Vicarage Road where Amy Mary, her grandmother, gleefully spoke of her rebellious survival of "service"; tall Rose Cottage, up "Long Lane," where Mrs Rudkin, pioneering archaeologist, brought the past to life for village children; the Mount, the farmhouse where the author’s family camped in a few grand rooms, and the mysterious cold Manor on its limestone ridge, "the Cliff" ...

The author’s memories began with cheerfulness. Her research revealed what women survived: especially abandoned, pregnant girls, struggling "Singlewomen," including Amy Mary’s own tiny, gallant sister. Yet it was in the finest houses that young wives in farming’s "Golden Age" crashed and burned.

 

And how did old Emma Jarman survive into her 80s, despite her Saturday night sessions in the Commercial Inn? She had her lift home booked with Mr Weatherhogg. In a wheelbarrow ...

You can read more about Village here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the book. 

From Village

What the travelling woman saw

December, 1854. A hard winter in Lincolnshire. The lane-side trees, at the village edge, are caves of white above the dark figure, bundled in shawls. She has seen many things in her calls at cottages. But never before a woman on fire ...

Beneath the bare, grey-barked arms of a young walnut tree, the cottage is tiny. Hawking or begging to survive, it is in the smallest homes she may find villagers as kind as my grandmothers will be: superstitious Amy Mary, who buys lucky tokens, or tiny, benevolent Dot, the shepherd’s wife, who gives workless men a thick slice of bread and butter, and a brief, safe place by the fire.

No answer to her knock. But through the window’s thick glass, she glimpses a dangerous light. Glinting flames lick the long skirts of a woman, crumpled on the rug. Is the traveller afraid that the villagers will call her a thief? She rushes across the lane. She shrieks to Mary Herrick.

Does Mary stamp on the creeping hems of flame? Married to a "Cottager," who farms a few acres, she can afford stout boots, stitched by John Barratt, the village shoemaker. But her middle-aged neighbour has not survived. Her fall overturned a tub. She has suffocated in a pale flood of what the Coroner and The Lincolnshire Chronicle will mysteriously call "Paste."

Blue, huge, the sky sinks. Down the lane, a young girl dawdles, carrying a tired child, returning, reluctantly, from the excitement of a village wedding.