SHADOW GAMES review at Gravetapping

Ben Boulden at Gravetapping has a great review of the new edition of my novel Shadow Games. Here's a small taste:

 

"I have a particular fondness for Shadow Games. It is not only a terrific novel, but it was my introduction to the work of Ed Gorman. The year was 2000. I made a habit of studying and writing in a library not far from where I worked as a pizza delivery driver; a job I won’t recommend, but a job that treated me well just the same. My usual table was tucked at the back of the fiction stacks. I sat, my back to the wall, facing a bookshelf packed with the latest genre titles making study nearly impossible since the stories beckoned me.

"There was one title that, day after day, caught my attention. It was a mass market paperback, black background with orange-red print and the large white Leisure Books logo—a publisher I miss badly—at the top of its spine. Its title, Shadow Games. When I finally relented and read Shadow Games, sitting right there in the library, its tale of Hollywood ambition, perversion, and lost potential, all told in a darkly humorous tone, made me a lifetime fan of Ed Gorman’s work."

Read more at Gravetapping!

Shadow Games and Other Sinister Stories of Show Business is available from Amazon and direct from the publisher, Short, Scary Tales. 

Shadow Games and Other Sinister Stories of Show Business available for pre-order!

"Shadow Games is a page-turning, gut-wrenching barnburner of a book."—Robert Bloch

 

Ed here: My first cousin Bobby Driscoll was a major child star of the late 1940s and early 1950s. He died at thirty of drugs. While I don't use any of Bobby's life in this novel I do look at child stardom here. Theses a slightly revised edition of Shadow Games (1992) which I wrote at the time I was writing scripts for  two different directors and learning a little about the ways of Hwood. 



Cover art © by JT Lindroos

"Shadow Games unflinchingly examines the dark side of humanity and reaches a finale that is both moving and terrifying."
—Ramsey Campbell

"What keeps you reading is not the traditional question of whodunit but the slick and artful ease with which Gorman portrays the alienated, uncaring world of his creation."

--The London Sunday Times

Cobey Daniels had it all. He was rich, he was young and he was the hottest star in the country. Then there was all that messy business with the teenage girl . . . and it all went to hell for Cobey.

But that was a few years ago. Now Cobey's pulled his life together again they're letting him out of the mental hospital and he's ready for his big comeback, but the past is still out there, waiting for him. Waiting to show Cobey a hell much more terrible than he could ever have imagined.

The American 90s come brutally alive: "Gorman knows how to shunt electricity into the raw nerve endings buried far below the reader's already clammy skin."
—Locus

© Ed Gorman


PRAISE FOR SHADOW GAMES

"Ed Gorman's is a strong and unique voice."
—Richard Matheson

"(Gorman) should be required reading for anyone who wants to experience the art of the short story as practiced by a master craftsman."
—Mystery News

"Gorman is the poet of dark suspense."
—The Bloomsbury Review

"John D. MacDonald meets Jim Thompson in a maelstrom of malicious evil and perverse maipulation that doesn't let up until the final few pages...thoughtful, tightly knit and elegantly structured."
—Million (UK)

"This is a bleak moral tale but written with such hot feeling and such cool style that it entertains even as it keens."
—Morning Star (UK)


Title Details:

RRP Price: £11.95
Publisher: Short, Scary Tales Publications
Release Date: May 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-909640-52-8 (6" x 9" Trade Paperback)
First Edition
Pages: 354


This brand new edition is available for pre-order from the Short, Scary Tales website. The first 100 copies sold direct from the site will be signed by me and the cover artist, JT Lindroos!