An outrageous adventure with the most terrifying villain Brenda's ever faced - her best friend, Effie. Necks are being bitten all over Whitby. In an ordinary town, this would be worrying. Here, it's disastrous, and only Brenda knows why. She's trying to prepare for Christmas at her B&B, but her best friend Effie just hasn't been the same since her suave gentleman friend Alucard reappeared. Meanwhile, at Whitby's new mystery bookstore, new Goth-girl in town Penny is drawn into the strange works and worlds of Edwardian lady novelist Beatrice Mapp. The surprising discoveries she makes will impact on all the ladies of Whitby, especially Effie. And when unexpected help from the shadows of the past illuminates the dangers awaiting them, Brenda realises that she must save her friend - or the consequences will be eternal.**

In print for the first time ever: Paul Magrs' 'lost' novel, Fancy Man, continuing in the same inimitable style of his queer magic realist Phoenix Court books. Meet: Wendy, who grows up the youngest of three brash sisters in Blackpool and who leaves home when her mother dies. She moves to Edinburgh under the wing of her vulgar Aunty Anne - whose sights are set on the millions her ex-husband has recently won on the lottery. Wendy spends a happy summer finding herself amongst her new family - Uncle Pat, frail cousin Colin, Captain Simon and Belinda, who believes herself to be an alien abductee. Wendy is intent on finding her elusive fancy man but gets drawn into a series of adventures involving amputees and death cults, Marlene Dietrich and doppelgangers in a city where everybody seems to be writing novels about everybody else in this queer relocating of Henry James' Portrait of a Lady to the apparently Cool Britannia of the 1990s.  

'Brenda and Effie Forever!' is an outrageous Gothic adventure involving ancient vampires, miniature mermaids, the Phantom of the Opera and his hunchbacked boyfriend, a fiendish ghost who drives a limousine, Mr and Mrs Claus and all three Bronte sisters discovered alive and well in a secret base under the parsonage at Haworth with a sentient, stuffed Art Critic called Panda. 

Brenda and Effie are living it up on the continent. Holidaying in Paris, they are menaced by a mysterious Peeping Tom with a limp and a hump, who warns them that they must never return home to Whitby again. Untold disaster will take over the world if they go anywhere near the North Yorkshire coast...

But Brenda and Effie know that they simply have to return to Whitby, even if it means the end of everything they hold dear. 

Brenda owns a Guest House by the sea and her best friend Effie runs the junk shop next door. But together they have another role as the guardians of Whitby against the vampires, daemons and creatures of the night that continually plague the quaint but terrifying town. Together Brenda and Effie must face the most startling dangers ever as they are engulfed by hideous secrets from their long-hidden pasts.

Can our heroines survive all these fiendish shenanigans and live to fight the powers of darkness another day?

In this new volume of adventures for Brenda and Effie we do battle with vampires and mummies and haunted cats! We uncover the mystery of both Elephant Men and meet Tolstoy the Long-Eared Bat out of Hell! Brenda also gets to go back to her roots with Baron Frankenstein, and we even share an investigation at the Christmas Hotel with the famous Sherlock Holmes. Whitby has never felt so hectic, and everyone here is very glad to welcome you back..!

Following the death of his parents, 16-year-old Simon moves into his grandparents' claustrophobic bungalow, which quickly becomes a refuge from his bullying peers. United by their voracious appetite for books, Simon and his grandmother stumble across the Great Big Book Exchange—a bookshop with a difference. There they meet impulsive, gothic Kelly and her boss, Terrance—and the friendships forged in the Great Big Book Exchange result in startling and unsettling consequences for all of them.

This is Paul Magrs’ first collection of short stories for twelve years. I’ve always written them, alongside my novels. These twelve pieces all began with a moment of observation – a face, an overheard exchange of a few words, an interesting dynamic between two people glimpsed in a café. The stories all began in one of the notebooks the author take everywhere and gradually – very slowly, in some cases – worked themselves up into full-length stories. Some of these are macabre fables, from when Paul Magrs was toying with Gothic motifs. Some are pure dirty realism, introducing us to the messy circumstances of someone’s life. Some of these stories give us a tiny sliver of ‘real time’, but there’s always that sense of a huge backstory alluded to. These are the stories that Margs has blazed away at and tinkered with and put away carefully, after their first publication, as they bided their time for collecting up. Some of these characters are the author’s favourites: the Roman priest who takes his ex-lady friend on a trip round the Vatican supermarket; the squirrel gang of Levenshulme, lamenting the death of their most charismatic member; the boy who goes to visit a strangely-ailing talking dog on a market stall. As with all of his writing, Margs is zig-zagging across different genres and conventions and forms – taking what he needs and what appeals to him, in order to bring to life these particular characters and their predicaments.(These stories have appeared in The Sunday Express Magazine, Bound, North, In the Red, Metropolitan, Walking in Eternity and on BBC Radio 4. -- Paul Magrs

Brenda must face her demons, but first she needs toget to the bottom of the sinister goings-on that threaten to overcomean all-too-quiet seaside town.When poison pen letters start flying around thequiet lanes of Whitby, trouble is in store for Brenda and Effie. And with Jessie the Zombie Womanzee, trips down memory lane and amorous ghoul hunting, literary minded and strangely youthful professors of Icelandic history, as well as a terrifying encounter with bamboo wickerwork gods from the dawn of time, even Brenda's ample cup is running over. But her most challenging battle is the one she must fight with herself -- or, at least, parts of herself!  

Brenda has had a long and eventful life and she has come to Whitby to run a B&B in search of some peace and quiet. She and her best friend Effie like nothing better than going out for tea at the Walrus and the Carpenter or dinner at Cod Almighty and keeping their eyes open for any of the mysterious goings on in town. And what with satanic beauty salons, more than illegal aliens, roving psychic investigators and the frankly terrifying owner of the Christmas Hotel there are no shortage of nefarious shenanigans to keep them interested. But the oddest thing in Whitby may well be Brenda herself. With her terrible scars, her strange lack of a surname or the fact that she takes two different shoe sizes, Brenda should have known that people as, well, unique as she is, just aren't destined for a quiet life.  

The ordinary inhabitants of a small-town council estate turn out to hold extraordinary secrets in Paul Magrs' strangely compelling novel, Could It Be Magic?. Set in the grey wastelands of the north-east, Magrs has looked beyond the ravages of boom and bust Britain--with its council ghettos and widespread unemployment--to reveal a community brimming with passions. At first glance, the leading characters are exceptional only in their mediocrity: Elsie, old before her time, weighed down by a crippled son and depressive husband, whose only solace lies in a bottle of gin; tattooed Mark, who spends his days bodybuilding and nights babysitting his ex-wife's new baby; Penny, who left school too soon and fills her house with students; Andy whose gay lover left him for a better life. But the arrival of Penny's Mam on New Year's Eve (with her own startling secret) sets off a chain of astonishing events. Fantasy mingles with the mundane until it's hard to know what to accept as commonplace and what to dismiss as trivial. A frisson of sexual energy sparks from council roof to satellite dish as Magrs' characters discover their innermost secrets and how to live life to the full. --Carey Green

Welcome to Phoenix Court! It’s a weird mix of Brits round here on this housing scheme, but everyone’s reasonably friendly. Everyone’s got their secrets, though, and sometimes there’s magic waiting just around the corner… Meet: Penny Robinson who’s a sixteen-year-old with witchy powers and an impossibly glamorous and overbearing mother called Liz. They’ve just moved into the neighbourhood and the friendships they make will start off a bizarre chain of events involving love affairs with hunky bus drivers, people dressing up as dogs, raucous nights out with the ladies and a very surprising revelation on the dance floor during Goth Night in Darlington in Paul Magrs' second book of his hilarious urban fantasy series, The Phoenix Court.This edition includes a new introduction by the author and two Phoenix Court short stories.

From olde London Town to the juicy heart of the Big Apple, something is waiting to bite In a Manhattan gallery, a strange, undead woman, who's been lost for centuries, is found in a basement and becomes the centrepiece of Shelley's new museum show. Nicknamed Bessie, the Scottish Bride, she becomes an overnight celebrity as Christmas approaches. From the dusty vaults beneath the famed bookshops in Charing Cross Road, Shelley's bibliophile aunt Liza receives crumbling volumes by post, while her friend Jack prefers brand-new books and his brand-new lover. When a small leather-bound book of spells arrives, Liza finds it repellent. But its arcane magic brings Bessie to life, and enthrals Shelley's posh boyfriend Daniel - literally. It contains the quintessence of evil in the form of a dark bloodstain marking several pages: vampire blood. As Daniel's power grows, everyone's lives are infected. Soon the vicious vampire infestation rife in NYC threatens to spread to London - and only the Scottish Bride and her new friends can stop it...

No matter what she tries to do, trouble has a way of finding Brenda. It's hardly surprising with secrets like hers. When her old adversary Mr Danby starts filling the airwaves with his late night phone in show it can only mean one thing -- and sure enough best friend Effie soon finds herself up to her neck in it. But that is only the beginning; fate has an even bigger surprise in store. Romance is in the air for Brenda and, do what she will, she cannot deny that she and her man were made for each other -- literally. But as usual, Brenda and Effie will face up to whatever dangers come their way with fortitude and grace: even if that means journeying to places beyond their wildest dreams.  

Iris leaves her deathbed to dance across the ice on Tyne Dock. A septuagenarian film star reflects on myth, dance music and mutual masturbation at the FIN DE SICLE. A boy starts working out in a gym to prepare to give birth…. I inherit a book full of Japanese flowers, each of which embodies a particular desire. PLAYING OUT is a fascinating and beautifully written collection of stories about playing out desires, about travelling far afield in the mind or abroad, or just popping out round the corner, looking for whatever it is you fancy.

Marked For Life by Paul Magrs Welcome to Phoenix Court! It’s a weird mix of people round here on this housing scheme, but everyone’s reasonably friendly. Everyone’s got their secrets, though, and often there’s real magic waiting just around the corner. Meet Mark Kelly–a man tattooed with glorious designs over every inch of his body. He’s married to the slightly unhinged Sam and has a young daughter who’s about to be kidnapped at Christmas by an escaped convict and old flame of our hero’s. Over one snowy festive season the whole family sets off in perilous pursuit…accompanied by Sam’s mother, who’s become a nudist lesbian and her girlfriend, who claims to be a time-transcending novelist known as Iris Wildthyme…. Magrs first volume in the Phoenix Court series is a wild adventure and a classic of contemporary fantasy.

With the scale and scope of a great sci-fi epic, this is the story of Lora and her family, third generation settlers on the red planed, who are struggling to survive o a smallholding in the desert landscape, surviving storms and sinister rumours of unexplained disappearances - until one night Lora sees the Dancers. When her father and grandmother disappear, Lora and her family are driven out to seek a new life across the plains. But none of them are ready for what they find - the beautiful and dangerous City Inside.