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.

Charlie Hill, "Encounters With Everyday Madness"

 

Charlie Hill is a critically-acclaimed writer of novels, short fiction and memoir, whose work has been compared by his peers to Kafka, Georges Perec and Beckett. His new book of short stories, Encounters With Everyday Madness, is published by Roman Books, as part of the Stretto Fiction series. His website is here. 

About Encounters With Everyday Madness, by Charlie Hill

Encounters With Everyday Madness is a collection of short stories about the manifestations and causes of contemporary "madness." Looking at grief, PTSD, romantic obsession, domestic oppression and work, it asks the reader to reconsider what they know about "difference" and the psychological other.

Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories. 

From Encounters With Everyday Madness

A New Job

Today there is a difference. He wakes as usual to a residual fear from dreams that seep and overflow, his eyes are heavy-lidded – it is as if he knows he will not like what he sees when they are open – and yet, despite it all, his heart is light. This is because today is a new day. Today he will catch a bus he doesn’t know and travel to work in a new job in a different part of town. Today he will begin again.

He was in his old job for five years. Five will-sapping, personality-crushing, energy-draining years. People there joked about his leaving. They referred to it as his escape but they were missing the point because this is precisely how he views the change. It has been a long time coming. It is not just the particulars of the position – it is, nominally at least, a promotion – but the fact that it will allow him to make a fresh start. He understands this concept is a loaded one but it is no less a necessary goal for all that, for he was tired. He was tired of his job and he was tired of the people he worked with; he had played out the novelty of spending time with "colleagues" – a word he finds strangely infuriating – who, if asked to name his favourite music or novels or TV, if asked to describe his hopes, dreads and perversions in a sentence or two, would have been so far off the mark they may as well be talking about a different person: he was tired of the fact that the incremental degradations of this supposed familiarity made him somehow smaller and less vital than he was or could have been.

Now fully awake, he is ready to begin the process of renewal. He showers, deciding not, for once, to condition his hair. He dresses in a stripy shirt before choosing to wear instead one decorated with bold flowers; for breakfast, for a change, he takes an omelette, made with a shake of soy sauce, and a hefty dusting of the chilli powder he keeps for every other Friday night. He has never eaten this much spice in the morning and the effect is invigorating; he  blinks his eyes and there it is, his kitchen, hall and bathroom the same of course, but shifted on their axes too ...