Coming in 2025: DEMON DRINK by Kris Ashton

The Ironstone Hotel is a country pub on the verge of bankruptcy and owner, Shirley Goodsall, is desperate. When a businessman from a local microbrewery offers free beer in exchange for promoting it to hotel patrons, it’s a deal that seems too good to be true.
And it is. The beer is imbued with a nefarious agent that will plunge Shirley and the residents of Black Wattle into a nightmare of infection, blood-curdling transformations, and unspeakable shame.

Author bio: Kris Ashton is an Australian author best known for his tales of dark speculative fiction. He has published nearly forty stories in a range of high-profile fiction journals including Aurealis, Andromeda Spaceways, Antipodean SF and Dark Moon Digest. His story ‘Howling Mad’, which appeared in Aurealis #107, was selected for Tangent Online’s 2017 Recommended Reading List and extracted in Eugen Bacon’s scholarly work Writing Speculative Fiction. ‘Highway Memorials’ claimed third prize in The Fiction Desk’s 2018 Ghost Story Competition. His sci-fi horror novel, Invasion at Bald Eagle, was published in late 2018 by Digital Fiction Publishing Corp. in Canada.
Kris is also an active participant in the broader literary scene and has been writing essays and book reviews for many years. His reviews of Icefall by Stephanie Gunn, Collision by J. S. Breukalaar and Playback, Jury of the Heart by Ivory Snow appeared in the pages of Andromeda Spaceways, while his essays analysing Stephen King’s horror fiction have been published in Aurealis and Dark Moon Digest.
Kris’ favourite authors include Stephen King, Liane Moriarty, Dan Simmons, John O’Grady, Henry Lawson, M. L. Stedman, Markus Zusak and John Steinbeck.
Outside the fiction world, Kris has been a journalist for more than twenty years and is currently deputy editor at the NRMA’s Open Road magazine, which has an audience of more than 1.2 million readers across NSW. He is a noted travel writer and motoring journalist and often incorporates his extensive knowledge of regional Australia into his stories and novels.
Kris has a strong online presence, including Twitter and Facebook pages, Goodreads and Amazon profiles, and a blog he regularly updates with news, reviews and the occasional personal anecdote.
In his spare time Kris enjoys reading, writing, watching film and television (he is a former film critic) and fitness. He lives in the wilds of south-western Sydney with his wife, two children and a crippling mortgage.