Sabine Büssing

Sabine Büssing (b. Dortmund, Germany 1960)

Sabine Büssing majored in Russian and English language and literature, taking her teacher’s degree in 1982.  She worked as a lecturer and researcher at Ruhr University, Bochum, from 1982 though 1987, receiving her M.A. in 1983 and Ph.D. in 1987.  Her doctoral thesis was published in English as Aliens in the Home: The Child in Horror Fiction (1987).  Other books have appeared in English and in German. These include, in English:  Of Captive Queen as and Holy Panthers: Prison Fiction and Male Homoerotic Experience (1990), A Darker Shade of Bale (1994), and The Ultimate Guide to Negative Thinking (1997).  And in German: Balladenzauber: Schulklassiker unverschämt originell interpretiert für Deutschlehrer und ihre Opfer (1995)  [Ballad-Magic: School Classics Outrageously Interpreted for German Teacher sand Their Victims];   Das Deutsche Reiseschauderbuch Satiren (1999) [The German Travel-Shudders Book of Satires]; Leuchtturm im Dschungel: Roman über das Leben des Schriftstellers Robert Louis Stevenson (1999) [Lighthouse in the Jungle: A Novel about the Life of Writer Robert Louis Stevenson]; Kinderreime rund ums Jahr: zum Vorlesen und Vortragen (1999) [Nursery Rhymes throughout the Year: For Reading and Writing]; and Die nackte Wahrheit hinterm Notenschlüsselloch: was Sie niemals über unsere grossen deutschen Komponisten erfahren wollten (2000) [The Naked Truth behind the Clef Hole: What You Never Wanted to Know about Our Great German Composers].

A Darker Shade of Bale, published by the The Book Guild of Sussex, is a collection of ten macabre stories. Some are historical, some modern. Some have plot twists that are not entirely successful.  Ramsey Campbell blurbed the volume accurately: “a feast of the grotesque, the psychological and the marvellous in the best European tradition.”