It’s beginning to cost a lot like Christmas, and we are off to spend the holiday season at the Overlook hotel as usual. We hope the caretaker has got the tree up. 2017 has been a banner year for The Dark Side in that we have seen our sales virtually double at a time when most print magazines, especially in the genre we love, are really struggling. We certainly take no pleasure in seeing some of our favourite mags go down the tubes, or from hearing that some of the big horror websites are having difficulties too. We don’t take anything for granted though, and we try very hard to make each issue of the magazine as good as the last, which is possible thanks to the superb stable of writers we have at our disposal. In the end though it is all down to you, our growing band of loyal readers, who subscribe or pick up every new issue at your local newsagent. We handle all the subs ourselves so a lot of your names are very familiar to me from sticking all those labels on, and of course so are the names that crop up in the letters pages. I already have five pages of Post Mortem letters for issue 181, which is a record. I like to think that we have a very real and personal relationship with our readers and we intend to hold a get-together in London early in 2017 so I can put a face to some of those familiar names. Even Rick Melton is travelling down for this so I can get to abuse him in person for a change. Anyway, here’s hoping you will all have a very cool and ghoulish yule and remember, it’s not how big the tree is or the presents under it. It’s about who’s around it.
