TERROR TALES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

ed. by Paul Finch

Telos Publishing
(www.telos.co.uk)
2023, 326 pages, $15.79

ISBN 978-1-84583-227-8

Click Here to Purchase

TALES is a unique take on horrors from a famous location on the globe.

Here are the best tales:

“The Catacomb” by Peter Shilston. A tourist to Sicily, wandering off the beaten path on a summer excursion, makes his way to an abandoned church with its own very sinister history, blasphemous to the accepted doctrines and history, and one in which his very life could be in danger.

“On Our Way to the Shore” by Maxim Jakubowski. A man on a Mediterranean cruise ship encounters what he could only describe as a mermaid: not the benign mermaids of Disney folklore, but one with dastardly and grave intentions who holds an atypical, dangerous allure.

“The Covers” by Steve Duffy. An assassin visits Marseille and its Turkish baths. After the killing is complete, he returns to the never-ending maze of rooms in the baths, trailed by unusual ghosts.

“The Wretched Thicket of Thorn” by Don Tumasonis. Tourists rent a boat to tour a Greek Island, and find themselves stranded in a place they were warned not to visit. Circumstances only worsen.

“The Haunted Heaven” by Reggie Oliver. Archaeologists on Skliros have to deal with a woman goddess and her possessed entourage. How far can their discoveries go?

The collection has interstitial accounts of criminals in horrible histories that go along with many myths and facts.

“The Teeth of the Hesperides” by Jasper Bark. Sarah, a botanist PhD candidate, possesses a small silver sickle in a sackcloth. It wears a symbol of a Mycenaean design, and the sickle may have served at one time as a wedding present. It all comes down to demons and apple seeds and the horrific circumstances of one seed’s demonization. Sarah seeks help from an expert who wants her to accompany him on an illegal break-in into an orchard. Sarah knows about carnivorous plants. What is the history of the seeds? What type of living hell will the trees and its leaves give to her?

“Reign of Hell” by Paul Finch. Will Axis troops in Greece align with the powerful demons of water?

“Mistral” by Mark Morris. A couple take a much-needed vacation to France with their young daughter. They are rooming at a vacation rental with some courteous but rather dark and foreboding tenants. What horror is in store for them?

“Should Not Be” by Gary McMahon. Sally, an archaeologist, follows her guide, Simon, to the Turkish riverside resort of Koyuluk, “the darkness,” to investigate a strange lacquered box found in a cave. The object has potential supernatural properties that Sally wants to debunk. But does she have alternate plans?