He applied the Page 69 Test to Coffin Nails and reported the following:Page 69 of Coffin Nails, my second collection of supernatural horror stories, starts off with a man with no legs killing himself. We then find ourselves at the subsequent funeral, which takes place in the Welsh town of Monmouth. It is at this funeral that the central character meets the beautiful and enigmatic Marcella, the ex-girlfriend of the deceased, who ‘drinks him in with her eyes’ and as she walks towards him after the ceremony he makes note of her knee-length black boots as they click on the tarmac.Read more about Coffin Nails at the publisher's website and John Llewellyn Probert's website.
This is all from ‘Final Act’, a spectacularly gruesome tale of revenge from beyond the grave, and while nothing overtly supernatural happens on this particular page it does feature elements that I feel are representative of my fiction, namely a horrible death, a beautiful woman, and a Welsh setting. Not all the eighteen tales in the volume are set in my home country of Wales but quite a few are. I can quite confidently state however that all of them are horror stories, some of them are gruesome, some of them are sexy, a few are humorous, and a couple try to combine all of these in, I must add, the best possible taste. Of course when it comes to horror taste is a matter for one’s own personal judgment and I would venture to suggest that the best way for any discerning horror fan to see if these stories are suited to their particular petrified palate would be to try them out for themselves.
Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.
--Marshal Zeringue
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