I didn’t know her. She just contacted me through social media stating she urgently needed my assistance. According to her, I was the only one who could help. She wanted me to inspect a body but warned me that the details would shock me. I told her, as an experienced Forensic doctor, nothing could surprise me any more. She insisted this was something unique.

Some new, Officially Licensed Merchandise, is now available under our Alchemy Rocks brand.

‘Love is eternal.’

‘Eternal? So, in other words as a vampire I should love the same person for as long as I live?’

‘Eternal…that is the idea, I believe.’

In the western world the new year may seem to have been and gone an age ago but in the east it is only just arriving…

When you feel like you’ve reached the pinnacle of your gothdom, there’s still an avenue to eke out those extra goth points – goth food and drink! Dark hues of substance to make sure you’re also black on the inside!

Christmas is coming…as much as we hate to admit it. The fake joy and forced laughers are just around the corner.

Do not worry!

We have our own way of coping with all of this.

The last few Christmases have seen the Krampus making his presence felt far beyond his snowy Alpine homelands. For the benefit of the uninitiated, the Krampus is a hairy, horned devil who carries a sack and a switch. He accompanies Saint Nicholas on his Yuletide rounds in early December, and while Nicholas gives gifts to good children, Krampus whips the naughty ones, and pops the really bad little boys and girls in his sack to take away.

Every November, our resident horror fanatic Gavin Baddeley makes an annual pilgrimage to Aberystwyth on the Welsh coast to attend the Abertoir Festival. While not the biggest or longest established of the UK’s horror festivals, Gavin assures us that it’s among the best. It features theatre performances, themed club nights, site visits, talks, live music and more. But the backbone of the six day event remains the film screenings, with 26 horror movies shown in 2017, including vintage classics and exclusive premiers of the best forthcoming features. We asked Gavin to pick out a few of the most bizarre, scary and entertaining upcoming horror films he’d seen there, for horror fans to look out for on cinema screens, in the DVD racks, and on streaming services in the coming months…

As the icy touch of Jack Frost begins to make the mornings glisten and the nights draw in fighting with the daylight for time, this is the moment where goth truly comes into its own. Winter not only echoes the gothic ethos in its darker days and longer nights, bleak and seemingly devoid of life – but also in the fact that its desolate beauty is merely a cloak, a time of hibernation for regeneration to occur, the darkness before the light, a time of magic, a time which is sometimes misunderstood and ignored by many.

Alchemy have been settled into their new premises for less than a year, but already various members of staff have whispered of their unnerving experiences and their awareness of inexplicable company, of the sound of footsteps from an empty floor above, in short, of early brushes with possible entities from the past.