The Sea of Blood

A new retrospective collection! InTHE SEA OF BLOOD by Reggie Oliver brings together some of the finest work from his six collections of stories, and two new works of fiction. A long-dead nun with a fatal gift for prophesy comes to you across a sea of blood... A television reality show host tries to restore a derelict London Music Hall and accidentally uncovers the true identity of Jack the Ripper... A great Shakespearean actor is haunted by his former mistress in the shape of an all too affectionate cat... A terribly strange meeting takes place on a playing field between an officer on leave from the World War I trenches and his former headmaster... An aristocrat tries to exploit a haunted room at his county seat, but has the tables turned on him by a member of the Royal Family... A theatrical landlady has her house taken over by a troupe of midgets who will not leave her alone, even after they are dead... A Pantomime Horse is haunted... The Devil and the Seven Deadly Sins go on holiday to an English seaside resort and create havoc... And many other equally strange and terrible events, all told in Oliver s famously elegant and evocative style. You are in for a sophisticated ride... Nightmarish, terrifying, dangerous, theatrical, often strangely profound, a ride which will inspire and haunt your mind. Winner of the 2012 Children of the Night Award for Best Work of Supernatural Fiction and short listed for numerous other awards.

About the Author

REGGIE OLIVER was, like M. R. James, a Newcastle Scholar at Eton. He took an honours degree in classics at Oxford and then went on the stage. Since 1975 he has been a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director. Besides plays, his publications include the authorised biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, published by Bloomsbury in 1998, and six collections of stories of supernatural terror, of which the fifth, Mrs. Midnight (Tartarus 2011) won the Children of the Night Ward for "best work of supernatural fiction in 2011" and was nominated for two other awards. Tartarus has also reissued his first and second collections The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and The Complete Symhonies of Adolf Hitler, in new editions with new illustrations by the author, as well as his latest and sixth collection Flowers of the Sea, which was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. His novel The Dracula Papers I--The Scholar's Tale (Chomu 2011), is the first of a projected four. Another novel, Virtue in Danger, was published in 2013 by Zagava Books, and a new novella, The Boke of the Divill, is due from Dark Renaissance in 2016. His stories have appeared in over fifty anthologies.

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