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.

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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

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...

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.