Things Of The Week: 4th November 2016

Me, Nightmares, and early morning bed hair

Well, Offline October wasn’t as offline as I intended – social media’s a definite addiction of mine, and one I need to address as it’s been eating into my writing too much. I was worried that I might have writer’s block, but once I unplugged the wireless router (downstairs), fired up the laptop (upstairs) and made myself write I found the prose still came easily enough. So, basically, it was simple laziness.

I’m still not underway on the first draft of Wolf’s Hill, and that needs fixing – I’m hoping to get rolling in the next week or two, and try and finish the first draft, at least, by year’s end. At the moment I’m working on a couple of short stories; once those are gone, it’ll be the book’s turn. The Lowdown will resume next week: meanwhile, here are some things that have been going on.

credit: www.blakefriendmann.co.uk

The first piece of news is a sad one: the sudden and unexpected passing of literary agent Carole Blake. Although I never met Carole personally, many other writers have spoken of her with great warmth and affection in both professional and personal terms. Along with Julian Friedmann, she co-founded the agency that represents me; she also wrote 29 Ways Not To Submit To An Agent, which was handy (although I was relieved to note that I didn’t do most of them anyway) and I know that her book, From Pitch To Publication, was a big help to many writers. My thoughts go to her family and to her friends and colleagues at Blake-Friedmann.

With the run-up to Halloween, it seemed a good time to catch up on horror movies (as per my recent posts. I have a tendency to buy books and DVDs which then sit around for months or even years before I finally get round to watching or reading them, and I caught up with a few titles in October. In the book stakes there was Ramsey Campbell’s The Seven Days Of Cain (great title!)*, while in the realm of movies there were two corkers: Oculus and The Babadook.

Oculus centres around a mirror with demonic properties. By controlling the perceptions of those who own it, it drives them to suicide. Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and her brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites) lost their parents to it, and Tim was incarcerated in a mental institution for years; now, Kaylie has tracked the mirror down and sets out to prove there’s a genuine supernatural force present. The narrative cuts back and forth between the events of their childhood and the present day; if it has a weakness, it’s that this format means the parents’ psychological deterioration feels as though it happens a little too quickly. Cate and I found this seriously unsettling: there are a few jump scares, but that’s not where it’s at.

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The Babadook: wow. Amelia (Essie Davis) was widowed in a car crash the night her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) was born. Now, her son is plagued by nightmares of a monster coming for him, building weapons to fight it; as his behavioural problems place Amelia under ever-increasing strain, she finds a pop-up book called The Babadook, after the shadowy monster it centres on. Soon, the creature from the book begins to invade their lives, and Amelia’s own sanity begins to crumble. Original and very, very disturbing.

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We’ve also started watching the new E4/Netflix series Crazyhead, starring Cara Theobald and Susan Wokoma. The trailer looked as though it could be good or terrible; we only needed to watch about five minutes to know we liked it. Amy (Theobald) has just stopped taking anti-psychotic medication to suppress the hallucinations she keeps having. Except that they aren’t hallucinations: she’s one of a tiny number of people who can see those possessed by demons. One of them nearly kills her till she’s rescued by Raquel (Wokoma), another ex-mental patient with the same gift. Crazyhead manages to be both genuinely funny and full of genuine scares, and has real heart, especially in the relationship between the two leads. There’s also a strong supporting cast – Amy’s flatmate and best friend Suzanne (Riann Steele), her amorous work colleague Jake (Lewis Reeves), Raquel’s brother Tyler (Arinze Kene) and head demon Callum (Tony Curran) – plus a willingness to bump off supporting characters that helps ramp up the tension among the humour. Crazyhead’s only downside is that, being a British series, it’s only six episodes. Here’s hoping it gets a second series.

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Three really nice things happened this week.

Nice Thing No. 1: My contributor’s copy of Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror arrived. Nightmares has been very well received, with a host of excellent reviews appearing, including a starred review in Publishers’ Weekly. Not many of them mention my own tale, ‘Hushabye’, but I can live with that – I’m happy to be published in that company!

Me with The Feast Of All Souls, plus yet more bed hair.

Ellen Datlow’s latest anthology collates stories from between 2005 and 2015 that have had a ‘lasting impact’ on her. Authors such as Mark Samuels, Laird Barron, Livia Llewellyn, John Langan, Gene Wolfe, Margo Lanagan and many more appear within; I’m proud and delighted to see ‘Hushabye’ included.

Nice Thing No.2: My author copies of The Feast Of All Souls, published next month by Solaris, turned up too. Complete with that beautiful cover art by Ben Baldwin. Please get in touch if you’d like to review the book. Which brings me on to…

Nice Thing No.3: Gill O’Rourke recently started reading my stuff, starting with Tide Of Souls, which she raves about on her blog here. She also co-presents the radio show Lifestyle MK, where she continues the rave-age, and solicits a few words with me on reviews. You can listen to me blather on here. Many thanks, Gill!

So, about that:

One thing I’ve become very aware of recently is the importance of reviews in driving book sales. The algorithms on Amazon (and let’s face it, this is where a lot of people are buying their books now) give you more visibility if you’ve had more reviews. 50 is usually the magic number that means you show up near the top of the search results in your chosen category.

So, if you’ve read my stuff and liked it, please leave a review. Or just leave a review (honest ones are better any day of the week!) I’ve certainly decided to start doing this more with books I’ve read and liked. It’s a simple and direct way to show your appreciate for a writer, and something concrete you can do to help them out.


* ETA: And yes, I'll be writing an Amazon review!

Things of the Week: 2nd September 2016

Been a bit of a sad week, this one, in some respects, as two much-loved and iconic actors passed. I'm not even going to try and summarise Gene Wilder's career - he was the definitive Willy Wonka, and brilliant in a host of other films. He died, aged 83, after a battle with Alzheimer's Disease. I came across this story shortly afterward - which, if anything, makes me like him even more for the way he determinedly educated himself about, and raised awareness of, the ovarian cancer that killed his third wife, Gilda Radner.

Another actor, not as instantly recognisable by name but a presence in a huge number of great movies, was Jon Polito, who died today at 65. Heavy-set, bald and gravel-voiced, Polito played a host of roles on stage and screen; he was often cast as cops or gangsters, but could imbue even the nastiest character with sympathetic traits - perhaps most of all that of Johnny Caspar, the Italian-American ganglord in the Coen Brothers' classic Miller's Crossing. A.V. Club attempts to overview Polito's 35 year career here.

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On a happier note, last month Cate and I both subbed stories to the US magazine The Dark, a notoriously tough market to crack (only something like 0.05% of submissions are accepted.) The great thing about The Dark, though, is the speed with which the rejections come back - usually within 24 hours. So when days passed without either of us receiving a reply, we knew our stories had either been lost, or...

Well, I didn't get in - but I'm encouraged by the fact that the story was with them for as long as it was, suggesting I might have come close this time. However, out of the 244 stories submitted to The Dark in August, one was accepted....

And it was Cate's.

Cate's story 'As Cymbals Clash' will appear in the December issue of The Dark. I couldn't be happier for her, or more proud.

Another coup for Cate, this week, was the release of two of her stories as an e-chapbook, Shadow Moths, from Caroline Callaghan's Frightful Horrors Publishing. As you can see, it has some weird and gorgeous artwork by Joshua Rainbird. The stories, 'We Make Our Own Monsters Here' and 'Blood Moth Kiss', are both brilliant, and have an introduction from yours truly. Can't think how that happened. D.F. Lewis gives the collection one of his real-time reviews here.

Meanwhile, the proofs for Devil's Highway will soon be with me - in just over a month, the second Black Road novel will be released in hardback and ebook formats. I've now started work on the third book in the series, Wolf's Hill: the first 2000 words have been written. Only another 115,000 or thereabouts to go....


Meanwhile, advance reviews for Ellen Datlow's anthology Nightmares: A New Decade Of Modern Horror, which includes my story 'Hushabye', continue to come. Michael Collings says in his review:

Each story in Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror does indeed represent a “nightmare,” although the definition of that word shifts within each. Some deal with worlds like ours, twisted in one detail to force characters to face impossiblities. Others take place in fantastic worlds, where the impossible is an everyday event and horror, therefore, must must reach beyond to terrify. Readers will find sufficient entertainment, frequent enough moments of frisson, ample enough opportunities to challenge preconceptions, to make the book worth reading.

While Michelle Garza, reviewing for This Is Horror, says:

An excellent collection overall, featuring some of the best voices in horror. It has something to suit a wide variety of tastes, blending stories about real life trauma and bloodshed, to stories that pass into the realms of cosmic terror, horror in the old west and even those with a grim fairytale-like feel. In these pages you will find a nightmare for every horror fan.

Finally, I stumbled across this piece: Sci Fi And Scary's Top Ten Most Anticipated Horror Novel Releases. (Well, releases and re-releases.) Alongside titles from the likes of Ronald Malfi, Tom Fletcher, Jonathan Aycliffe and Robert Aickman, there's my upcoming release from Solaris, The Feast Of All Souls.

Why am I interested? Because it looks like a twisted haunted house tale and I love a good haunted house tale.

It is, kind of.... and more. Hope the reviewer enjoys it - and you, when it hits the shelves in December.

So that's all for this week. Now, to play us out, here's the one true Willy Wonka.

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Things of the Week: 19th August 2016

Six weeks to Fantasycon!

Nine weeks to Devil's Highway's release!

Sixteen weeks to The Feast Of All Souls' release!

Big, big thanks to everyone who pre-ordered Highway and Feast, by the way. According to Amazon, they're actually my top-selling titles right now.

*tries not to think about how this probably actually means that the already published stuff isn't selling at all*

*fails*

*thinks about how this probably actually means that the already published stuff isn't selling

at all*

*cries*

*drinks*

Um, where was I?

Seriously, folks - if you did pre-order either title, thank you. That's lovely of you, and I hope you enjoy the books when they arrive.

Books are wonderful, aren't they? I hate to admit it, but I haven't been reading as regularly as often as I should have - that's Facebook for you. Since I started keeping myself off FB during the week, though, that's begun to change - and I've been reading some particularly cool stuff over the last couple of weeks.

Cate and I went to a couple of author events at Waterstones in Liverpool - our old friends Paul Kane and Marie O'Regan were there with Barbie Wilde on the 4th, promoting Paul's new novel Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell and Barbie's collection Voices Of The Damned.

The night before, US children's author V.E. Schwab was in conversation about her new novel, This Savage Song. I hadn't realised - colour me slow on the uptake - that it was the same Victoria Schwab who wrote this blog I shared a while back. Victoria's funny andf interesting, and since she's published by Titan, PR whizz Lydia Gittins was there. (Last time I saw Lydia, at Eastercon, she told me that if she wasn't wearing her pink coat, people didn't recognise her. She wasn't, and I didn't.)

Anyway: This Savage Song is urban fantasy, and YA fiction - but it never talks down to its audience

or is anything less than satisfying to a reader of any age.

This Savage Song tells the story of two teens in a broken world, where violent acts start breeding actual monsters. Some are shadows with teeth that feed on flesh and bone. Some are corpses that feed on blood. And some can pass for human. Those rare creatures feed on souls.

It’s the story of Kate Harker, the only daughter of a crime boss, and August Flynn, the son of a man trying to hold his city together. Kate is a human who wants to be a monster, and August a monster who wishes he were human.

It's that simple, and that good. Half crime-thriller, half low fantasy, with vivid characters, sharp prose and an absorbing narrative. The story is due to conclude in a second volume: I'll be picking it up.

Along with anything else I can lay hands on by Mercedes Murdock Yardley, after reading her novel Pretty Little Dead Girls earlier this week:

“Run, Star Girl.”


Bryony Adams is destined to be murdered, but fortunately Fate has terrible marksmanship. In order to survive, she must run as far and as fast as she can. After arriving in Seattle, Bryony befriends a tortured musician, a market fish-thrower, and a starry-eyed hero who is secretly a serial killer bent on fulfilling Bryony’s dark destiny.

Schwab's book is a tough and streetwise: Yardley's is fey, whimsical, wide-eyed and wry, but with a sinister edge. It has an almost fairy-tale feel - but is most definitely not for kids. It's funny, charming, and dark. You'll laugh... but don't get too comfortable.

And that brings me to the third read of the week: Frances Hardinge's Cuckoo Song.

The first things to shift were the doll's eyes, the beautiful grey-green glass eyes. Slowly they swivelled, until their gaze was resting on Triss's face. Then the tiny mouth moved, opened to speak.

'What are you doing here?' It was uttered in tones of outrage and surprise, and in a voice as cold and musical as the clinking of cups. 'Who do you think you are? This is my family.'

When Triss wakes up after an accident, she knows that something is very wrong. She is insatiably hungry; her sister seems scared of her and her parents whisper behind closed doors. She looks through her diary to try to remember, but the pages have been ripped out.

Soon Triss discovers that what happened to her is more strange and terrible than she could ever have imagined, and that she is quite literally not herself. In a quest find the truth she must travel into the terrifying Underbelly of the city to meet a twisted architect who has dark designs on her family - before it's too late . . .

I'm loving this one. More urban fantasy for young adults, this one set in the fictional city of Ellchester between the wars. It features a cunning twist on the changeling myth, and some great characters. Cate has a copy of Hardinge's latest book, The Lie Tree, which won the British Fantasy Award last year. My main memory of Hardinge's acceptance speech is of her standing at the lectern in her customary black fedora, describing a typical pitch to publishers: "Now, this might sound a little bit mad..."

And I realised the other night I was once in a magazine with her! Her first short story, 'Shining Man', appeared in issue 8 of Paul Bradshaw's The Dream Zone way back in 2001, alongside a bit of fluff by yours truly called 'The Flower And The Labyrinth.'

Katie Norris and Sinead Parker continue to conquer the world, or at least Edinburgh, chalking up another review, this time in the Guardian. Hopefully they'll be touring after this - hope so, and that I can get to see them.

One review compared them to another comedy gem I recently discovered: Phoebe Waller-Bridge's  bleak, filthy, hilarious series Fleabag. It manages to showcase a bunch of wonderfully unlikeable characters and make you give a damn about them (well, except for Olivia Colman as Fleabag's saccharinely hateful stepmother.) Fleabag herself is self-loathing and self-destructive; pathos and sadness are never far from the surface. It manages to be touching when you least expect it; the highlight of one episode is an incredibly tender and beautiful monologue from Hugh Dennis (not an actor you necessarily associate with that kind of performance.) Really worth checking out, if you haven't discovered it already.

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And finally, another advance review of Ellen Datlow's Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, from Paul St John Mackintosh:

You couldn’t wish for better evidence for the contention that weird horror is the representative genre of our time. Unreservedly recommended.

I'll take that!

Have a good weekend, everybody.

Be excellent to one another.

May Monday be a long time coming...

Things Of Last Week: 15th August 2016

No things of the week on Friday, for the simple reason that we were having guests around for dinner and the day turned into one long blurred round of cooking and cleaning for yours truly. (Yes, Cate actually has me house-trained. Sort of.)

A few nice things have come along. First up, you can now pre-order both Devil's Highway and The Feast Of All Souls from Amazon. Devil's Highway is released on 17th October (still - despite my handing in the MS three weeks late) and The Feast Of All Souls will be out on 6th December. Two very different novels, both of which I'm very proud of. So go on, do your bit for my flagging self-esteem. Pretty please? I have neither pride nor shame...

Fear Magazine has risen from its grave: issue 37 includes stuff from Ramsey Campbell, Gary McMahon... and me, in 'Paintings,' collaboration with Johnny Mains. You can buy it here.

The first advance reviews for Ellen Datlow's Nightmares: A New Decade Of Modern Horror are out, from Irene Cole: "...the most groundbreaking horror of the new millennium" and The Book Lover's Boudoir: "Datlow offers another impressive, diverse and hugely enjoyable collection of short fiction... a great collection of horror fiction. I’d highly recommend it."

The anthology includes my story 'Hushabye', alongside work by Mark Samuels, Gene Wolfe, Brian Hodge, Kaaron Warren, Lisa Tuttle, Gemma Files, Nicholas Royle, Margo Lanagan, Steve Duffy, Laird Barron, Stephen Graham Jones, Reggie Oliver, Ray Cluley, M. Rickert, John Langan, Anna Taborska, Livia Llewellyn, Dan Chaon, Robert Shearman, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Garth Nix, Nathan Ballingrud and Richard Kadrey.

Speaking of Livia Llewellyn, she's written a great guest column for Nightmare magazine's 'The H Word', The Mountains, The City, The Void:

"The woman who moved to this tenement building ten years ago, a woman with a different job, a different body, a different name, is gone. The actress who lived in a sprawling Inwood block apartment sixteen years ago, who stood on a subway platform in complete silence with ten thousand other New Yorkers, all of us smelling of smoke and ash, has vanished. The seamstress who spent a summer in a small New Jersey town in the early nineties, sewing costumes for Shakespearean actors by day and constructing conjure circles and sex magic rituals in the old growth forests by night has been left far behind in the night, so far I cannot see her anymore. And there are other, older permutations of myself, whole years that are little more than dark smudges in my mind, layers of geologic strata that are now so alien to me that I would not know these women if they were to appear in front of me this second. And all the people who once knew me, friends and relatives and lovers, are gone. No one who knew those versions of myself exists anymore. My life is a Frankensteinian patchwork of lost moments and experiences. The joys, the triumphs, the silences, the assaults, the love, the violence, the shame, the struggles, the pleasures, the pain, the beauty, the monstrosities: the act of working my way through life toward death has erased it all, year by methodical year. I know nothing.

Except when I write."

You can read the whole thing here.

Some years ago, when I was working in a call centre, (shudders) I became friends with Sinead Parker, who left to study Drama at Manchester Met University. She emerged three years later with a degree and a partner in crime called Katie Norris, with whom she started writing and performing songs and sketches that were chock full of black comedy and absolute filth.

Norris and Parker's first show was All Our Friends Are Dead, and was screamingly funny. Their second show, See You At The Gallows, is currently on at the Edinburgh Fringe until 28th August and has been getting a succession of rave reviews, so if you're in the neighbourhood it's worth checking out. And watch out for Norris and Parker, because they are going to be huge.

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Things of the Week 11th March 2016 feat. Hell's Ditch Event at Waterstones Liverpool One

Well, another week, another blogpost.
First and biggest thing of the week, of course, is tonight's event at Waterstones Liverpool One, for which tickets are still available (hard to believe, I know.) I'll by aided and abetted by Conrad Williams and the legendary Ramsey Campbell, who'll both be reading from their latest works.

I've had book launches before, but this is my first in a proper bookshop where I'm 'headlining' - especially with the likes of Ramsey and Conrad on hand. So, maybe just slightly nervous. I'll cope somehow, I'm sure.

We're continuing our Babylon-5 rewatch, and thankfully the quality's improving. I'm not sure if Cate will ever fall in love with it - space-based stuff tends to be a hard sell with her - but I think she's starting to like it a bit more. No two ways about it, sadly - with no disrespect to the late Michael O'Hare - things started getting markedly better once Bruce Boxleitner took over as station commander. There's a lot less padding in series two, and the Shadows are finally moving to centre stage. The CGI, dazzling in 1994, still looks dated and weak now, but special effects are always the first thing to date.

I'm making good headway with the first draft of The Devil's Highway, hitting the halfway point yesterday. Still a long way to go on typing the bloody thing up, though.

Tachyon Press have revealed the cover for Ellen Datlow's Nightmares anthology, due out in

November. As you can see, it features some great artwork by Nihil. Here's that TOC in full:

• Shallaballah by Mark Samuels
• Sob in the Silence by Gene Wolfe
• Our Turn Too Will One Day Come by Brian Hodge
• Dead Sea Fruit by Kaaron Warren
• Closet Dreams by Lisa Tuttle
• Spectral Evidence by Gemma Files
• Hushabye by Simon Bestwick
• Very Low-Flying Aircraft by Nicholas Royle
• The Goosle by Margo Lanagan
• The Clay Party by Steve Duffy
• Strappado by Laird Barron
• Lonegan’s Luck by Stephen Graham Jones
• Mr Pigsny by Reggie Oliver
• At Night, When the Demons Come by Ray Cluley
• Was She Wicked? Was She Good? by M. Rickert
• The Shallows by John Langan
• Little Pig by Anna Taborska
• Omphalos by Livia Llewellyn
• How We Escaped Our Certain Fate by Dan Chaon
• That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love by Robert Shearman
• Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8) by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Shay Corsham Worsted by Garth Nix
• The Atlas of Hell by Nathan Ballingrud
• Ambitious Boys Like You by Richard Kadrey

That is a stonking lineup, and I'm blown away to be included.

Right. Off to practice tonight's reading...