Koji A. Dae
Beulah is set in a fictional small town near Boise, Idaho sharing features with various small towns in southern and western Idaho. The dry, sunny, rocky Idaho landscape very much inspired this book.
Inspired and set in this location (in the future), a bird watching tower by a lake with a view towards the real Gull Island.
This is a stop along my daily commute, and the story is inspired by a creepy guy who who once got on at this particular stop rather than the location itself. He morphed into the unpleasant protagonist of this horror tale. (As far as I know, he actually did very few of the things I have him carry out!)
It appears in the anthology 'Ethereal Nightmares: The Second Sleep.'
Look out for mysterious blood rains! We're not too far from our destination. Meifong is here to guide you through the smoggy skies. We'll reach the Taiwan ADIZ soon
Paramedic Lucy Barker thinks she's seen it all, after years of responding to violent accidents and medical emergencies on the streets of York. But when she arrives on the scene of a brutal attack, Lucy finds herself drawn into a nightmare world beyond her comprehension.
Inside a blood-drenched room lay two bodies; one dying from a neck wound, the other with a stake through the heart. Standing over both, a creature torn from the pages of myth: Adam, a vampire with two and a half centuries of terror in his past.
And he’s not the only one.
The story is set in the woods in and around the city of Aalst, just after 1830 when Belgium gained its independence, and is based on uniquely Flemish folklore.
I'm not native to Aalst myself, but have always found the dialect to be among the most distinct and unique of the many dialects we have in Flanders.
The story, narrated by me, sadly can't really give you much of that local flavour, as I couldn't imitate the accent to save my life.
But I do hope you enjoy the story. I myself can never resist a sassy heroine, or a bit of historical scenery.
I regularly visit Hastings and this sprialling love story is essentially a love story to the town itself. It appears in the lovely anthology 'Two for the Show.' (Note: it isn't speculative in the slightest, but it's definitely geolocated.)
Ice was inspired by Kavan's time in New Zealand.
London Lies features short stories originally read out at Liars' League, set in and inspired by London.
This is roughly the area outside Santiago, Chile where the family drives to try to get a look at Halley's Comet. It's just past the area where the author saw the comet as a child in the mid-1980s, an event that inspired this story.
Nebraska City was a home of J. Sterling Morton, who founded American Arbor Day. The book is set in Nebraska City in 1901, at the house of Morton which is called Arbor Lodge.
https://www.taiwanplus.com/shows/culture/science-within-folklore/80000161/science-within-folklore-aunt-tiger
This YA fantasy is set in and inspired by Finland and Finnish mythology
The setting for this kid-friendly comedy/horror - in fact, the whole anthology it's in, called 'Wimbledon Common' - is the Common.
The story begins in Dalyan, Turkey, before going on across several locations in North Africa, including Istanbul, Turkey
Tunis, Tunisia
Sousse, Tunisia
Kairouan, Tunisia
Cairo, Egypt
Fes, Morocco
It's a Djinn curse-based adventure horror novel
This adult aetherpunk novel is set in a futuristic version of Helsinki that blends Finnish mythology with dystopia.
This is the stop where I caught the bus for my daily commute for many years. The enormous cobwebs on the ticket machines, sited at the righthand end of the shelter, were the inspiration for my comic story about spiders taking over the world, which appeared in the anthology 'Laughs in Space' in 2024.
The Broads (also known as the Norfolk Broads) is a wide, flat, somewhat desolate and haunting part of East Anglia, just right as a setting for this quiet horror story.
It can be found in the anthology 'Noncorporeal II.'
This comic fantasy is my first novel, and was written in Huntingdon over many, many, many evenings and weekends.
A bestseller in Estonia, where the book is so well known that a popular board game has been created based on it, The Man Who Spoke Snakish is the imaginative and moving story of a boy who is tasked with preserving ancient traditions in the face of modernity.
This story is inspired by the author's own experiences growing up in South Africa and attending a single sex, religious school in Johannesburg.
Inspired by and set in the patchwork of isolated, economically fading small country towns that criss-cross Australia, The Town follows a woman investigating the rumour of a mysterious town wiped off the map by a fire. As she drives further into the bush she discovers she is not the only one seeking it.
Written in Colombo, inspired by Colombo, and maybe pay a visit to one of Colombo's chain cafes the next time you are here!
Terraced houses, abandoned streets, unfriendly pubs, Victorian parks... Very much inspired by Liverpool, though I can't vouch for this journey as it nears the outskirts!
She's out there somewhere. Will you join me in searching?
Whisperwood is set in a fictional village inspired by the wooded regions of central Romania, and at one point mentions an old name for the city Sibiu as being the largest nearby hub.
I (the author) am from not far from that region, and live even closer.