After Dark: The Best Horror Fiction of Tony Richards

by Tony Richards, Joe Morey (Editor)

Tony Richards' stories first started appearing in three classic long-running British series, The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories, The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories and the legendary Pan Book of Horror. And it was the editor of the ghost series - Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes, no mean practitioner of dark fiction himself - who was most vocal of his praise. "I have no hesitation in saying," he wrote in the introduction to the first tale he published, After Dark, "that this is a brilliant story, told in a crisp, even elegant style. I regard Mr. Richards as a very welcome addition to my growing stable of authors."
Since then Tony's fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Midnight Street, Cemetery Dance, The 3rd Alternative, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Black Static, Dark Terrors and Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, as well as in a slew of top anthologies including Best New Horror.

A young boy creates an invisible friend. A dying man visits a faith-healer. Three friends on a fishing trip set up camp beside a jet-black lake. While out there in the ocean something waits.

What is going on beyond the barbed wire fence at Trevon Point Research Facility? Why are the inhabitants of a small Spanish town attending a bullfight at the stroke of midnight? Are the secretive rulers of old Paris coming back. Just how dangerous can it be, searching for new love on the internet?

And in the freezing icy waters off the coast of Scandinavia... do men who are dead stay that way?

26 tales of terror from the supernatural dark including six in Tony's fictional town of Birchiam-on-sea.

410 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 25, 2021

About the author

My latest book -- from UK publisher Endeavour Media -- is a bit of a departure for me. THE ASTONISHING ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY -- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4... -- takes the Great Detective all over the world, from the States to Africa to the Far East, taking in locations in Europe and the Caribbean along the way. How did I come to write these 13 new mysteries? It's explained in my blog, below.

I'm a writer mostly of supernatural fiction, author of a series of fantasy thriller novels set in the magic-filled town of Raine's Landing, Massachusetts. Currently, that series is up to #6 -- WITCH HUNTER --.with a seventh on the way.

But I write regular crime fiction too, with numerous tales published in AHMM, and a second novel featuring my ex-FBI agent turned private detective, Matt Barrett, is now out from Cemetery Dance Publications. It's called THE TRIBE. (The first novel was THE DESERT KEEPS ITS DEAD).

I've seen to publication almost 100 short stories, enough to fill 8 collections, the latest being THE UNIVERSAL AND OTHER TERRORS (Dark Renaissance Press), and my work has appeared in Asimov's SF, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Weird Tales and numerous top anthologies including Year's Best Horror.