Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.
Audiobooks by Michael Van Der Voort
Browse audiobooks by Michael Van Der Voort, listen to samples and when you're ready head over to Audiobooks.com where you can get 3 FREE audiobooks on us
“It is important that when you call, you are first completely sure to whom it is you are calling.”
I think I can honestly say that, up until the point that it closed temporarily during the global pandemic, I’d had visited The Anchor pub for at least a single pint, virtually every night for the past 45 years.
There were, of course, exceptions. In 1992, I had a smash in my car and had to spend a night in the hospital, and midway through 1986 I got married and spent my wedding day and night away from the place. I didn’t visit The Anchor on either of those days, though in the case of my wedding night, half the people who would otherwise have been in the pub joined me at my reception venue, so it was pretty much the same thing anyway.
¨As a linguist and historian, I’ve always been fascinated by words and phrases. I am particularly interested in how certain idioms and expressions come to be picked up, where they originated and what, if any, history lies behind their origins. It was this interest that led me in 2018 to consider writing a paper on the dialect, idioms, and aphorisms used by people in my hometown. It was also what led the kid known as Skit to spend a night ‘Alone with The Devil’.
In the small rural town where I grew up, in the hills of Northern England, the phrase “Alone with the Devil” is a very common one. It's a quaint, if mildly sinister, little idiom that if you stick around town long enough, you’re almost certain to hear.¨
¨He was a Cambridge man and, having no other living relatives and few friends outside of those whom he could also count as colleagues, he spent much of the ink from his pen not expended upon notes and essays, corresponding with his ever loving and miraculously ever patient sibling.
A sibling, who, for her part, had become somewhat accustomed to her brother’s habit of sharing his thoughts and musings in these interminable scrawlings. She, to her credit, maintained the habit of reading and responding to them in a timely fashion. Albeit whilst also maintaining the necessary habit of skim reading some of the more self-indulgent philosophical musings, of the type that this particular missive threatened to become.¨
Terror At Midnight: 4 Short Horror Stories
Story 1: Alone With The Devil
Story 2: Prestons Attic
Story 3: The Taking Of Teeth
Story 4: Blood In The Milk
Get your copy today!
Dark Horrors: 8 Short Horror Stories
Story 1: Alone With The Devil
Story 2: Preston’s Attic
Story 3: The Taking Of Teeth
Story 4: Blood In The Milk
Story 5: Arnold´s Letter
Story 6: Grandma El
Story 7: Relics
Story 8: Erasmus Crane and The Cthulhu Murders
Get Your Copy Today!
Forced by accusations of fould play to exhume the body of a recently deceased man, a young detective finds something far worse than he expected. A collapsed jaw, tattered lips and leaking gums, an empty black cavern where once once the mouth had been, evidence that someone had attacked the body with pliers and stolen all of the teeth.
In the Taking of Teeth Occult detective Erasmus Crane faces another terrifying case. and a race against time to prevent a murder. A case which will bring him face to face not only with a crazed mad man, but with the darker older forces that drive him.
It is late in the Nineteenth Century and monsters stalk the narrow cobbled backstreets of a gaslit Victorian London.
On the heath strange stories about the Bloofer Lady, whom Stoker's novel would reveal as Lucy Westenra, tempts the children with sweet delights, behind which lie the sharper points of fangs.
Blood in the Milk is a gothic tale that explores the relationship between mothers and monsters, vampires and those other creatures who feed on the young in the dark.
Sometimes even love stories, have dark undercurrents. Sometimes it is the humans and their hideous wishes that are the real monsters. But that doesn't mean that the other monsters aren't watching.
Relics is a modern fairy tale that mixes the struggle of PTSD, obsessive compulsion and body horror with the grimmer corners of European folklore, to make a potent mix that will leave your skin crawling.
Sometimes monsters do not live in the dark places, like under the bed or at the edge of the forest. Sometimes they live in normal houses and look just like us. Sometimes those monsters act like us too. Until someone chooses to cross them.
Grandma El is a story of witchcraft, loyalty, and urban folklore that will make the reader wonder just how close to home the dark things really are.
When Erasmus Crane, the famous occult detective is called to investigate the murder and mutilation of a young woman he is instantly both repulsed and terrified. Not only by the gruesome nature of the killing and the strange squid like formations the murderer has made of the entrails but also by what those strange symbols mean. Erasmus, has seen them before.
The Cthulhu Murders drag Erasmus and his faithful companion into a dark and secretive world of esoteric books, ritual sacrifice and deals with dangerous entities far beyond human understanding. Entities that once invoked, threaten to wake up, hungry.
Despite being so called 'Holy ground' churches retain a deeply gothic element. Especially in lent, when the singing stops, the flowers are removed and the statues stand covered from head to toe in a long purple robe of mourning. Then, during the quiet of a winter's eve, the flickering shadows show more than they should and sometimes sounds far darker than prayers float up from between the pews...
Despite being 'only a cleaner' at the public Zoo, Slick Bill knows more about the animals than most of the doctors and zoologists that work there. As a night worker, he definitely knows more about their nocturnal habits and particularly their appetites. So, when the new arrival, a quiet and reflective Tibetan worker by the name of Pema, makes an odd and deeply gruesome request of Bill, he is just the right man for the job.
The zoo, after dark, it seems, can be a deeply disturbing place.
