Stranger Times #01: The Stranger Times

- Blurb -

There are Dark Forces at work in our world (and in Manchester in particular) and so thank God The Stranger Times is on hand to report them. A weekly newspaper dedicated to the weird and the wonderful (but more often the weird) of modern life, it is the go-to publication for the unexplained and inexplicable . . . At least that' s their pitch. The reality is rather less auspicious. The editor is a drunken, foul-tempered and -mouthed husk of a man who thinks little (and believes less) of the publication he edits, his staff are a ragtag bunch of misfits, each with their own secrets to hide and axes to grind. And as for the assistant editor . . . well, that job' s a revolving door, and it has just revolved to reveal Hannah Willis, who' s got her own set of problems. It' s when tragedy strikes in Hannah' s first week on the job that The Stranger Times is forced to do some serious, proper, actual investigative journalism. What they discover leads them to a shocking realisation- that some of the stories they' d previously dismissed as nonsense are in fact terrifyingly, gruesomely real. Soon they come face-to-face with darker foes than they could ever have imagined. It' s one thing reporting on the unexplained and paranormal but it' s quite another being dragged into the battle between the forces of Good and Evil . . .