Stain: Stigma; blemish; a discolouration by foreign matter; an ugly blot; an indelible mark; a dark reminder of something unpleasant. From the pen of Paul Finch, nine flights of tortured imagination to see you through the long winter nights: The fictional curse that became a mind-shattering reality ... The ancient entity that roamed the desolate wood ... The maniac who liked to melt womens" faces ... The movie-makers who sought the most blighted town they could, and found it ... Tales of chilling horror set in a contemporary and recognisable world. That is Paul Finch"s speciality. In his own words, he likes to describe hideous events that could be taking place in the very next street to your own. He draws on his real-life experience as a police officer and journalist to portray a modern society literally plagued by evil. Sometimes it"s the evil to be found in Man, but most often it"s evil of a far less common-garden variety. In this latest collection of his stories (which includes three brand-new novellas), the supernatural is at least as prevalent as the everyday. At any moment the calamitous past might invade the powder-keg present; around ordinary corners may lurk the most extreme horrors of myth and magic; everywhere his characters look - down road and path, in town and country - there"s something different, something not quite right, something that"s less normality and more an aberration. Yet this isn"t grue, these aren"t chills of the in-yer-face variety. That"s not Finch"s style at all. In this book heads will roll and the blood will run red, but the enemies of mankind are often only heard or half-glimpsed. It"s his quest to keep you wondering, keep you guessing, keep you nervously turning the pages. Read on, we dare you ... Paul Finch, a TV and movie script-writer by trade, is no stranger to prose. To date, he has had nearly 300 stories published on both sides of the Atlantic, most in the horror, fantasy and sci-fi genre. His first collection, Aftershocks, won the British Fantasy Award for 2001.