by T. Kelly Lee

On Saturday April 24 ( the day after World Book Day ), the "Terror Scribes", ( an informal group of writers, editors, artists, etc. of horror and related genres ), met in Peterborough. In roughly order of arrival that day's gathering included artist Des Knight, translator and novelist Martin Wilson, ( who's two gothic novels "the castle of oblivion" and "the homunculus" have been described by my friend Kaz as "the night-land rewritten by Francis Hodgson Burnett" and "the faerrie queene meets George MacDonald").
Art historian and critic Dr. Gail-Nina Anderson and the writers Lisa Negus and Rob Rountree arrived next. Then Sue Phillips, ( one of the editors of "Strix" ), turned up with her son John and his friend Adam. Two Locals, writer Jill Paddock and Bakul Patel, ( who runs "Nightmare Abbey" the local gothic website ), joined the party.

The group then went to the city centre bar H.G.'s, the H.G.Wells theme pub. Here they found "Terror Scribes" founder, John B. Ford waiting for them. John was understandably excited as he had just had an anthology accepted in America.
The hosts of the day were Helen Gould, coordinator of the Peterborough SF Writers' Group, and Cardinal Cox, Chairbadger of Peterborough SF Club and occasional writer. In order to ensure the essential number of 13, I was summoned and joined the drinking.

Fun was had and news swapped. Copies of flyers and publications shared around. At the end of the afternoon the Cardinal conducted a brief tour around the city museum with it's Roman erotica, funerial accesories from the nineteenth century and bone carvings by the French napoleonic prisoners-of-war. These included bizarre mobile guillotines.