More on the collection

More news on the forthcoming short story collection from Gray Friar Press:

The collection is due out in May, and has been provisionally titled Pictures Of The Dark. It'll be collecting stories from the first ten years of my writing life. The extremely cool Conrad Williams has agreed to do an introduction.

There will be more news soon(ish). Keep watching the skies...

Out with the old...

So today, at last, America got a new president.

After eight years of being run by an insane chimpanzee and a pack of raving crooked fundie lunatics, the Bush Gang are OUT!

Oh yes. Thank you God.

I'm not going Obama crazy, like some. I remember all the fanfare and optimism with which Tony Blair was elected here in Britain back in '97. And how a lot of people's hopes were cruelly betrayed. 'Guarded optimism' just about covers it. There's a big opportunity to make some real changes. Let's face it, nearly anything's got to be an improvement on Bush and co.

The 'New Right' brigade have really set the political agenda since the late '70s- Reagen in the US, Thatcher over here. Before that, the consensus had more to do with the legacy that Roosevelt and Attlee left. So, that lasted about 30 years. Guess how long it's been since 1979..?

And maybe I'm just talking bollocks. But nonetheless- this goes out to all the Americans I know. Congratulations and here's a better tomorrow. God knows we need all the luck that's going...

Holy shit!

It's all happening here. You wait for years to see a book with your name on the cover, and then two come along at once. Possibly three, in fact...

News has just arrived from Gary Fry of the wonderful Gray Friar Press that he's going to publish a collection of my short stories later this year. I'd submitted a proposal ages ago and damn near forgotten about it, so this is the nicest kind of surprise. Gray Friar do a fantastic job publishing some of the best writers in British horror- Gary McMahon, (Lord) John Llewellyn Probert, Paul Finch, Conrad Williams and Nick Royle to name but a few- so it's a huge buzz to get published by them.

Title and table of contents are to be confirmed, and a release date of April/May has been suggested. Jesus. Between that and rewrites on my novel, I don't think my feet are gonna be touching the ground in the first half of 2009. And then there's getting a second novel sorted out to consider!

Still pinching myself and feeling dizzy here. Watch this space for more details.

Tide of Souls is due out from Abaddon Books in November, and there's a novella being published in Pendragon Press's Triquorum series due out- also possibly in '09.

Apologies if I've gone a bit hyperlink-crazy in this post... couldn't resist it!

Happy bloody New Year

Well, I've recovered now from both my hangovers. Yes, that's right, I had two. Some friends I didn't get to see on New Year's Eve invited me over New Year's Day and I ended up crashing. Two mornings running where I tottered around moaning quietly and demanding a) coffee, b) toast and c) a quick and painless death.

OK, it wasn't THAT bad.

I'm kind of hoping things will get better in '09, but I ain't holding my breath. 2008 was a funny year. It was shitty for the world on multiple counts- the economy, Bush not being dead yet, the Iraq slaughter dragging on... not to mention a seriously high mortality rate among good and talented people.

Just a few of the lights that went out last year were:

Paul Newman (actor)
Forrest J Ackerman (former editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland- one of the all round greats of sf/horror fandom)
Bettie Page (ex-glamour model)
Harold Pinter (playwright, poet, Nobel Prize winner and anti-war activist)
Paul Newman (actor)
Adrian Mitchell (poet and anti-war activist)
Studs Terkel (historian- author of Hard Times and The Good War, oral histories of the Great Depression and the Second World War by the people who'd lived through them- activist, talk show host, and defier of bullies and thugs right up to the end. One hell of a guy, who I really wish I'd had the pleasure of meeting.)

There are a lot more, but you get the idea. There was a serious fucking cull this year of people this last year. And just when I was hoping it was over, the crime novelist Donald Westlake (who also wrote, as Richard Stark, the 'Parker' novels, including the classic Point Blank), died on New Year's Eve.

And a guy called Tommy Tee died as well, on the 23rd. He'd managed my favourite band, New Model Army, for 20-odd years.

And an old friend of mine passed away with cancer.

So on the one hand, it was an arsehole of a year.

But the weird thing is that for me, personally, it wasn't so bad.

I know I'm tempting fate in a serious way saying that, but I don't mean to. In a way I guess I'm giving thanks, because it could have been a hell of a lot worse. Two of my friends have lost their jobs- hell, one of them's staying with me now. I still have a job, despite working in the financial services industry by day. I'm bloody lucky.

Also, 2008 was the year I got a book deal. My first novel will be out in November 2009 (assuming the publisher's still there. And the bookshops.) It's called Tide of Souls, and it's a horror novel featuring loads of zombies.

All of which puts things into a little perspective, next time I have a hangover.

On a lighter note- a new review!

A very nice man called Matthew Fryer has just published his review of We Fade To Grey, an anthology from the brilliant Pendragon Press, which includes my novella The Narrows. Go on, treat yourself. You know you want to...

Remembrance Day

Today was the first time I’ve spent Remembrance Sunday in Barmouth. I say this because I’ve spent many days in the town over the years, and of course I’ve known a lot of Remembrance Sundays- 34 of them so far. But never at the same time, till now.

Barmouth, for those who don’t know it, is a small town on the Welsh coast- the county of Gwynedd, or Merionydd as they’re calling it again now. My Dad was born and grew up there, and my grandmother- Nanw, as we call her, which is the Welsh for ‘Mum’- lives there still.

She’s 93 now, and lives in sheltered accommodation, but when I was a kid, growing up, she had her own place and would put us up for weekends or longer- a week at half-term, longer still at Easter or in the summer. Me and my sister, and my parents.

This weekend I went up there for a sort of working holiday. I needed a short break, and also a novel I’m working on has a couple of chapters set there. Usually I only visit the town briefly these days, when we visit her at Christmas for the day.

So, a touch of research, a chance- an excuse really- to go climbing (the big hills above the town, known as Dinas Oleu, or the Fortress of Light) and a chance to visit my gran. All to the good.

My gran lives alone. She’s been married twice; the second, after the war, was to my Dad’s stepfather, who died of Parkinson’s disease about a year later. But her first husband was the true love of her life. My grandfather, Bernard Bestwick, who died at Normandy on the 10th of June 1944. He was 28 years old.

‘Love was over for me that day,’ my grandmother told me. ‘It’s never been the same since.’ She was at home when she heard; she’d finally got the address of his base and was writing a letter to him, when her mother came in and took the pen from her hand. ‘It’s no good writing to him now,’ she said. ‘Yes it is, Mum, I’ve got his address now.’ They didn’t have a telephone at their house; Bernard’s parents had rung the next-door neighbours to tell them he was dead, and to speak to my gran.

My father was one year and nine months old.

My grandfather’s name is on the war memorial in Barmouth. Right at the top, on the side that faces my grandmother’s flat. Which she’s glad of. She can almost see it from her kitchen window.

But it’s never been the same for her since that day.

When I was younger, it never really had much impact from me. My Dad’s Dad having died in the war was just a fact, like my grandmother being an old woman who lived in a nice place by the seaside was a fact, and my Mum’s parents living near us in Cheshire was a fact. The war was something you read about in comics and saw in old black and white films. But as you get older, you think more about these things- at least that’s how it’s been for me- and look harder into your family, into your past. Over the last few years, it’s become a lot more real. The young man, so like my father to look at- and by extension quite like me, because there’s a lot of my Dad in my own looks- who died at 28, six years younger than I am now, sat here writing this down on a notepad on a train running from Barmouth to Crewe on my way home from this break. Died when his tank was hit by a German shell. He was a Corporal, and driving the tank. He and two other troopers were killed- hopefully outright. Their bodies were badly burnt. The officer, in the turret of the tank, was also killed, but thrown clear. His first name was Bernard, apparently, like my grandfather’s. They didn’t find his body for two or three days.

My grandfather is buried at Hermanville Cemetery near Caen, Normandy. I’ve been there once, when I was about 12, I think- too young to really understand. I need to go there again. Lay a wreath. Pay measure of respect to a man I never knew.

‘We were innocent,’ my grandmother said of them both. Would I go off to war as readily as my grandfather’s generation did? I don’t know. My generation is more used to getting what it wants, maybe, and less used to having responsibilities of that kind- but also it’s harder to trust the kind of leaders we’ve got now. As I write this, the United States of America has just elected its first black president, and ousted one of the most corrupt, brutal and vile administrations in its history. There’s a sense that we’ve turned some kind of a corner with this election, that despite staring at the worst economic crisis since the Wall Street Crash, we may be looking at a better future, at a world where we can have a little more hope for the things I was told my grandfather died for- freedom, justice, real democracy. I bloody well hope so, anyway. Because I think of my grandmother, still mourning the man she loved. I think of the picture of my grandfather that’s always been on display at her home. All year round there’s a poppy tucked into the frame; each November she buys a new one and puts the old one in her lapel.

For the last 64 years, Remembrance has not been a ritual performed once a year, a moment of silence observed on a single day. For my grandmother, it has been a daily part of her life.

And if politicians are going to condemn young brides to that, if they’re going to condemn infants like my Dad to growing up fatherless, then they’d better have a damn good reason, that’s all I can say. But then, don’t they bloody always?

My grandmother is quite frail now. She walks with difficulty. She recently had a fall, and this year, the very brief walk to the war memorial was beyond her. She’d bought a small spray of poppies with a card: ‘Bernard Bestwick, Normandy 1944, greatly missed by all his family.’

I took it there for her. The big memorial service at St John’s Church was still underway, so it was quiet. There was a wreath already there. There’s a railing round the memorial, but today, of course, the little gate at the side of it was unlocked and open.

I put the spray down at the foot of the memorial, on the side facing my grandmother, and weighted it down with two or three pebbles- a harsh wind was blowing in from the sea, spattering rain on the town. I looked up at the inscription on the memorial. I might have said something. ‘Thank you,’ perhaps. I can’t actually remember.

The kind of world we’ve have lived in if our side had lost the Second World War doesn’t bear thinking about for any real length of time. ‘For our tomorrow, they gave their today’; that’s the phrase. And it’s not just true of the likes of my grandfather; it’s true of the other, silent casualties like my grandmother, the ones who’ve been paying the price over the years since then.

Bernard Francis Bestwick, HQ Sqn 13th/18th Royal Hussars. Rest in peace.

So, here goes...

Well, having set the damn thing up- and my god, do they make it easy here, even a complete computer twunt like me can do it unaided- what to put for that all-important first post?

Well, I could do the whole sententious 'welcome to my dark and mysterious world' shtick... and all the readers would die pissing themselves laughing. Can't be doing with that. Just because I write horror...

In fact, let's dispel a few myths right now, for the uninitiated.

Horror writers do not, on the whole, keep human skulls in the house.
Nor were we (necessarily) locked in the cellar as a regular basis as children. Or dressed as girls by our parents (unless of course we were girls)

There are more, of course, but you get the idea.

OK. So we've got that out of the way. What else?

Well, I could do some big poncey 'statement of intent'- as if anything I put on here is likely to be profound. Forget that one.

Or I could just try to be funny.

Emphasis, probably on 'try'.

Well, that's the first one out of the way.

I'll try to do something interesting next time.

But no promises.