Things of the Week 5th April 2017: Interview by Louisa Rhodes, New The Feast Of All Souls review, The Adventure of the Orkney Shark

Photo by Vicky Morris.

A few things to announce this week...

First up, there's this really cool interview done last month, after my half of the Hive Writer's Day Workshop with the brilliant K.T. Davies. Louisa Rhodes, one of Hive's young writers, fed me questions about horror, writing and spaghetti, typed up my rambling responses and made them look reasonably intelligent. So here's the result. Louisa did a fantastic job, and was a pleasure to talk to.

The Feast Of All Souls has a new review, over at RisingShadow, in which Seregil of Rhiminee describes it as "one of the best horror novels I've read in recent years... entertaining, thrilling... ambitious and well-written. Excellent British horror fiction!"

Many thanks to RisingShadow, and to Seregil!

And finally... Simon Clark's anthology Sherlock Holmes's School For Detection is out now.

It's 1890. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson return to Baker Street after a night pursuing a vicious criminal. Inspector Lestrade is waiting for Holmes with a proposition of national importance.
Lestrade tells Holmes that a school of detection has been formed to train a new breed of modern investigators that will serve in Great Britain and the Empire. Most students will become police officers. Some, however, will become bodyguards and spies. Holmes begins instructing his decidedly curious assortment of students from home and abroad. He does so with his customary gusto and inventiveness.
Scotland Yard, in the main, allocates crimes to solve and Holmes mentors his students. Occasionally, he shadows them in disguise in order to assess or even directly test their abilities with creative scenarios he devises. Certain crimes investigated by the students might appear trivial, such as the re-positioning of an ornament atop a garden wall, yet it will transpire an assassin has moved the ornament to create good sightlines in order to commit murder with a sniper's rifle.
Other mysteries are considered outside the domain of the police. For example, the inexplicable disappearance of a stone gargoyle, which is linked to an ancient family curse. Or a man suffering from amnesia who discovers that not only has he acquired a secret life but also gained an implacable enemy, too. Holmes, with the ever- trustworthy Doctor Watson in his wake, is kept busy with his students' cases, ranging from minor to serious, sometimes rectifying their mistakes and saving them from a variety of disasters.
These eleven wonderful new adventures and intrigues include tales such as 'The Gargoyles of Killfellen House', 'Sherlock Holmes and the Four Kings of Sweden' and 'The Case of the Cannibal Club'.

The anthology also features my story The Adventure Of The Orkney Shark. Other contributors include Cate Garder, Paul Finch, Alison Littlewood, Carole Johnstone... and many, many more.

The Adventure of the Orkney Shark is set in 1927. Lieutenant-Commander Noel Atherstone, recalled from retirement in Australia for the Imperial Airship Scheme, is given a top-secret mission: to assist Sherlock Holmes in investigating the mysterious disappearance of ships in the North Sea. Fishermen blame the gigantic and voracious Orkney Shark - but as Atherstone, Holmes and Holmes' reluctantly-acquired pupil Mr Blacksmith search the seas in airship R.36, they discover a threat far deadlier than any sea monster...

“There,” said Blacksmith, pointing from an open starboard window.

“Where?” Holmes and I ran to his side, peering out – but we had already passed over the spot.

“Reduce speed,” I told Church. “Mr Potter, bring us around. Mr Hunt, maintain altitude.”

Slowly the airship turned. It wasn’t a quick process; R.36 was six hundred and seventy-five feet long from nose to tail, and almost eighty wide. But in the end, she cruised back the way she had come, at a more sedate pace.

“What did you see, and where?” demanded Holmes. Blacksmith pointed to an area of swirling water between two flat, tabular skerries.

“There,” he said. “It does not move.”

“I see nothing,” said Holmes.

“Nor I,” I said. “Just rock, weed, barnacles…”

“Barnacles, yes. There are none elsewhere on these shoals.”

He was right, now I considered: for whatever reason, the tiny shellfish didn’t appear on any visible part of the rocks and skerries. They lay only in this one area, in a long wide cluster. As we drew closer, I saw its outline was distorted by the water’s churning, but there was something about the shape – a regularity, a symmetry.

The barnacles had not grown here; they had grown somewhere – or on something – else. Something that had spent a great deal of time in other parts of the sea, more conducive to their survival.

Blacksmith was right: I saw it now. A great mass, encrusted in barnacles and weed, in the shape of a huge fish – a long teardrop body, but with fins, almost like wings, jutting out from its sides, and another, a thin sharp triangle, rising from its back. But it was larger than any fish – four hundred feet, if it was an inch...

You can buy the anthology here.

Feast On Our Souls!

(It's funny if you say it fast.)

Yes, today's the day - The Feast Of All Souls is out now! You can buy it on Amazon UK or US, or direct from the Rebellion Store.

And there's loads of stuff to go with it.

Here, just fr'instance, I am over at Sci-Fi Bulletin, talking about the overlap between Horror and SF (Hodgson and Lovecraft and Kneale, oh my!):

How do you tell a ghost story when you don’t believe in ghosts? Or when you don’t believe in everything that the existence of a ghost would normally imply – God, religion, an afterlife?

There’s always been an overlap between horror and science fiction; if they emerged as distinct genres in the nineteenth century, it was as different branches of the same tree. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, although rooted in the Gothic – and one of horror’s most instantly recognisable ‘brands’ – was nonetheless a vehicle for Shelley’s political and moral speculations on the possibilities of technology – which is about as science fictional as you can get. It wasn’t unique among her work, either – her later novel The Last Man prefigures dozens of other post-apocalypse novels (including M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901) and Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885).)

Meanwhile, and on a lighter note, I'm over there at Civilian Reader, talking about the fun process by which I've come up with titles:

...I stopped banging my head against the desktop, picked splinters out of my forehead, poured a large whisky and started throwing out potential titles.

Twenty or thirty of them.

None of which seemed right.

I can’t remember why I settled on The Faceless, but sheer exhaustion may have played a part.

Jon loved it, and so do I. I now can’t imagine the book being called anything else...

Coming up: I'll be blethering away further in an interview, then donning the interviewer's hat myself to talk to a real-life ghost-hunter...

Meanwhile, in Canada, library staff vote every month for their favourite upcoming books, via BookNet Canada’s Loan Stars readers-advisory program. Their picks for December are:

1. Books for Living, Will Schwalbe (Knopf)
2. Small Admissions, Amy Poeppel (Atria/Simon & Schuster Canada)
3. The Twilight Wife, A.J. Banner (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster Canada)
4. Kill the Next One, Frederico Axat (Little, Brown and Company/Hachette)
5. In Sunlight or In Shadow, Lawrence Block (WW Norton/PRH Canada)
6. The Gardens of Consolation, Parisa Reza (Europa Editions/PRH Canada)
7. The Ice Beneath Her, Camilla Grebe (Ballantine/PRH Canada)
8. The Feast of All Souls, Simon Bestwick (Solaris/Simon & Schuster Canada)
9. Last Year, Robert Wilson (Tor Forge/Raincoast Books)
10. Out of Bounds, Val McDermid (Grove Atlantic/Publishers Group Canada)

Have I mentioned lately that I love Canada?

And finally, the first advance reviews have come in...

Mallory Heart at The Haunted Reading Room: "an expansive horror novel constructed on a tautly plotted framework, delving into history, quantum physics, and the space-time continuum... not a story for the easily upset, [but] a novel with powerful impact."

"Don't confuse this with a simple ghost story," warns Tony Jones at Ginger Nuts Of Horror. "It has layers that go much deeper... The Feast Of All Souls certainly did not disappoint."

"Very well-written and atmospheric," says The Story Collector. "Spooky... plain disturbing... what horror should be."

Lora at Lora's Rants and Reviews, however, felt "It doesn't take long for Alice's experiences to become truly frightening. However... I felt let down by later chapters in the book. The story was an interesting read in itself, but suspension of disbelief didn't really happen and there were too many changes in scene or direction for it to flow smoothly." (Can't win 'em all!)

The review that affected me most, however, was by Lilyn G at Sci-Fi and Scary: "I’m always nervous when I go into a book where the main character has lost a child. As a child loss mom myself, I’m sensitive to how it’s handled. I’m also afraid (especially in horror reads) of the needless detailed almost graphic depictions that some authors like to include in their books of dead children. Luckily, The Feast of All Souls has a talented writer who handled the child loss angle well and didn’t need to stoop to depictions of dead kids to get his point across. Simon Bestwick did a fantastic job of illustrating how even though it feels like your whole life can be overcome by grief, you still manage to go on."

As someone who has no children and probably never will, it meant a great deal to hear from someone who'd gone through what Alice has been through that the portrait of her loss rang true.

There are more reviews on Goodreads - most of them good! - so you now hopefully have lots of good reasons to buy The Feast Of All Souls. And if none of the others work, you can just buy it for that brilliant cover by Ben Baldwin...

I'll also soon have some news on the delayed release of Devil's Highway. Watch this space!

The Lowdown with... Tade Thompson

Tade Thompson is the author of the award-winning novel MAKING WOLF, the upcoming ROSEWATER, and a number of short stories and novellas. His background is in medicine and social anthropology. He lives and works in the south of England.

 1. Tell us three things about yourself. 
-In Wimbledon, during the hot summer of 1976, I got sunburnt for the first and only time. I also kissed a girl on the playground for the first and only time.
-I am a lapsed martial artist with training in Taekwondo, Shotokan Karate and hapkido.
-In the Star Wars franchise I only like A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. The rest leaves me cold.

2. What was the first thing you had published? 
My first accepted story was a short piece of general fiction called 'Foster's Run' in a defunct magazine called Carillion, paid in contributors copies. This would have been maybe 2002. My first paid story was in another defunct online venue, Neverary, in 2003, for a slipstream story called 'Sidetracked'. I received the princely sum of five bucks American I think. My lesson from this sale was always look at the edits. I did not, and the published story did not reflect my vision, but that's entirely my fault and not the editor's. My first semi-pro sale was to Ideomancer (now defunct! I had nothing to do with this, I swear. I realise this is making me seem like a serial destroyer of venues that buy my fiction). I sold a story called 'The McMahon Institute for Unquiet Minds'. This was 2005 and my first reviewed story-basically, Tangent Online liked it, which felt good.

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of? 
Agh! Okay, I'm one of those people who is never happy with work that I've published. The moment it's gone I think of a hundred things I could have done differently. It's a tie. I guess I'm most proud of my sci-fi novel ROSEWATER (Apex Books, 2016) which I think said exactly what I wanted it to say, and my horror novella GNAW (Solaris, 2016) which is a ghost story that I researched to the point of death. They're both coming out later this year and who knows how they'll be received?

4. …and which makes you cringe? 
The story 'Sidetracked' that I mentioned above. I'm kinda glad the webzine no longer exists (sorry, Lon!) The edits included adding bowler hats and unrealistic dialogue. I hated it.

5. What’s a normal writing day like? 
I wake up early and write new material for an hour. I write longhand with a gel ink pen in a nondescript notebook. In the evening when my family's gone to sleep I transcribe the morning's work, then I revise some older writing (I have dates on a calendar for draft revision). Then I read for two hours, beta-reading or fiction, then non-fiction. I rarely go to bed before midnight. I time-box, using a modified Pomodoro. This routine is not inflexible. Sometimes I get engrossed in one particular thing (usually a good book, or art or something).

6. Which piece of writing should someone who’s never read you before pick up first? 

Short stories: Slip Road, The Monkey House,  'One Hundred And Twenty Days Of Sunlight' In the African Monsters Anthology.  There is, of course, my debut alt history crime novel MAKING WOLF which won the Golden Tentacle Award at the Kitschies.

7. What are you working on now? 
Two things: A novella called 'The Murders of Molly Southbourne' which is...dark speculative fiction. This is in the revision stage and I hope to have news regarding a market soon. The second thing is a contemporary fantasy novel called LABOURS which is basically the 12 labours of Heracles meets The Warriors and it's kicking my arse. My first drafts usually go in starts and stops, with much wastage. No change here. I hoped to be further along by now, but getting it right is more important than speed.

Things Of The Week: 1st July 2016

One of Cate's creations.

Well, the week has ground on following the EU Referendum. We're still here, but our politics has collapsed into chaos. Boris Johnson, the chief cheerleader for Brexit, has pulled out of the race for Prime Minister, and the less said about the remaining contenders for the post the better. The two front runners are Michael Gove, a poisonous, bullying incompetent with a fondness for ignoring any facts that don't suit him and whose tenure as Education Secretary made him an object of loathing to every teacher in the country; and Theresa May, who publicly stated her desire to abandon the European Convention on Human Rights and can also take credit for the 'Snooper's Charter'. Basically a choice between one of the weirder and more charmless inhabitants of Jabba the Hutt's palace and a female version of Senator Palpatine. (Servalan from Blake's 7 also springs to mind re May, but that's another story.)

Meanwhile, the Labour Party's tearing itself to pieces, with Jeremy Corbyn (the first Labour Leader

of my voting life with policies I could get behind) having received a massive no-confidence vote from his Party's MPs while still enjoying the support of the rank and file members. According to Corbyn's supporters, all those calling for his resignation are right-wing traitors, and according to the MPs, Corbyn's supporters are a fanatical cult. The truth, as always, is probably somewhere in the middle of all that.

Almost lost in the chaos in British politics was the news of a brutal suicide attack on Istanbul's Ataturk Airport; three vicious cowards with guns and explosives killed forty-four innocent people and wounded 239 more. And so it goes on, the world sliding down into cruelty and stupidity.

Today is actually the 100th anniversary of the Battle Of The Somme, the bloodiest day in the British Army's history. One of the most brutal and wasteful battles of World War One. After the slaughter was repeated a quarter-century later, we decided on working together, aiming for closer economic and political ties with our neighbours. A few moans about red tape and straight bananas seemed a pretty small price to pay. But no longer, it seems.

Okay. That's enough politics from me. I'll try to stay off it.

Anyway... life continues as before. Devil's Highway has been coming together, with close to another 40,000 words written. Good words, too, I think. For whatever it's worth among all the shit out there (and I have no idea how much that is, if any), the book is getting written. The story is being told.

Cate's begun a new venture - The Handmaiden's Tale, a shop on Etsy, wherein she sells cool handmade gifts and cards. Go thou and check it out. There are nice things there.

And it was nice to see this on Twitter - best of all, from someone I didn't already know! At least one person is looking forward to the release of The Feast Of All Souls. Many thanks to Tammy at Books Bones & Buffy. You've brightened my week.

(More) Things of the Week 22nd April 2016: The Feast Of All Souls Reveal!

As you know, I've another novel due for release this year, this time from Solaris: The Feast Of All Souls (formerly known as Redman's Hill.)

As you can see, it also boasts an awesome cover by Ben Baldwin.

The suburb of Crawbeck, on a hill outside Manchester, overlooks the woodlands of Browton Vale. Alice Collier was happy here, once; following her daughter’s death and the breakdown of her marriage, she’s come back, to pick up the threads of her life. 

378 Collarmill Road looks like an ordinary semi-detached house. But sometimes, the world outside the windows isn’t the one you expect to see. And sometimes you’ll turn around and find you’re not alone. John Revell, an old flame of Alice’s, reluctantly comes to her aid. The hill is a place of legends – of Old Harry, the Beast of Crawbeck, of the Virgin of the Height and of the mysterious Red Man – and home to the secrets of the shadowy Arodias Thorne.
Alice’s house stands at a gateway between worlds. On the other side of it, something has woken. And she and John, alone, stand in its way...

You can read Solaris' official press release here, featuring Jon Oliver saying nice things about me.

The Feast Of All Souls will be published in December 2016.

The Lowdown with... Gareth L. Powell

Gareth L Powell is an award-winning author from the UK. He is the author of the novels Silversands, The Recollection, Ack-Ack Macaque, Hive Monkey and Macaque Attack. In 2013, his alternate history thriller, Ack-Ack Macaque won the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award for Best Novel. The book has since been published in Japan (as Gunmetal Ghost), and has inspired a comic strip, fan art, graffiti murals, and at least one tattoo. Gareth’s short stories have appeared in a host of magazines and anthologies, including Interzone, Solaris Rising 3, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. One of these stories came top of the 2007 Interzone readers’ poll for best short story of the year. Since then, many of his shorter works have been brought together in the collections, The Last Reef (2008) and The New Ships (coming 2017).

1. Tell us three things about yourself. 

i) When I was a teenager, I had coffee with Diana Wynne Jones. I won a competition at school. She read a short story I had written and sat down with me to give me some feedback. She was merciless but inspiring, and I still have the handwritten notes she gave me.
ii) My writing desk faces west.
iii) I once kayaked the covered rivers that run beneath the centre of Bristol.

2. What was the first thing you had published? 
When I was at school, I had some poems and flash fiction stories published in various fanzines (this was in the days before the Internet). Later, when I started writing seriously, I had a few short stories published in a Welsh literature magazine, and then some science fiction stories published on websites. Eventually, Interzone picked one up and the rest, as they say, is history.

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?
That's like asking which of my children is my favourite. I suppose the novel Ack-Ack Macaque is the one that most people associate with me. It's certainly the bestselling of my books, and it won the 2013 BSFA Award, so I guess I'd have to pick it. That said, I'll always be fond of The Recollection, as it's the book I'd been wanting to write since I was about twelve, and I threw all sorts of personal stuff into it, as well as talking spaceships, weird alien worlds, and apocalyptic space battles.

4. …and which makes you cringe? 
I published a short chapbook of poetry while at university in 1992. Looking back now, it's definitely cringe-worthy.

5. What’s a normal writing day like? 
Usually I rise at 6:30am. I see my wife off to work, get the kids ready for school, and then write until they return at 3:15pm. I have an office in the back of the house, with a view of the garden, and I sit at the desk and drink decaffeinated tea while trying to put thoughts into words. Sometimes, if things are going particularly well, I'll carry on writing in the evening, after the kids have gone to bed. But now they're getting older, they're going to bed much later, so I don't get so much peace and quiet in the evenings.

6. Which piece of writing should someone who’s never read you before pick up first? 
If you like space opera, pick up The Recollection (Solaris Books, 2011); if you prefer something a little more earthbound, try Ack-Ack Macaque - it's a near-future thriller set in a world ever so slightly different from ours.

7. What are you working on now? 
At the time of answering, I am currently working on four novels. I've just submitted one to my agent, so I'm gathering notes towards a potential sequel. At the same time, I'm writing a thriller, another space opera, and something else which I can't talk about. Suffice to say, there's lots going on behind the scenes.

Happy New Year, Folks

A picture from a slightly more wintry winter.

Coming up briefly for air here; I meant to do an end-of-year vlog for New Year's Eve, but I'm working on a novel redraft that needs doing by Monday, and by the evening I hadn't got round to it. Yesterday passed in much the same way.

So, a few quick words on 2015.

It was a tough start to the year. Cate's mum passed away just before last Christmas, which was a huge blow. Pauline was a kind, funny lady who had deserved better from life than she ever got, but never let it get her down. I'd liked her a great deal and wish there'd been time to know her much better, and she and Cate were very close. Seeing the person you love in that kind of pain and being helpless to make it go away is awful.

Plus, we were still living in the neighbourhood where Cate and her mum had lived for decades, in The House Of Damp And Mould (and perenially malfunctioning boiler.) I hadn't published a novel in three years, unless you counted the serial Black Mountain, and still didn't have an agent. (Although I was working on a new novel for Solaris, so it wasn't completely bleak.)

A lot has changed since then.

Cate's lovely and moving piece here says more than I could about coming to terms with loss. We moved in June from Tuebrook to the Wirral, to a little house we both love. There are plenty of green spaces close to hand, we're fifteen minutes from the beach by bus and our landlord's great. It's a new start, and it's done us both good. And we've set the date for our wedding next year - this year, I mean.

Hell's Ditch, which I'd started to fear would never see daylight, found a home with Snowbooks and came out last month. It's the first book in a story that's been steadily evolving since I was nineteen. I started writing it back in 2010, broke off for 2011 to write The Faceless and finished it in early 2012 before the long hard task of shopping it around began. Now it's out, and suddenly the rest of the Black Road needs to be travelled. In a few weeks I have to go back to the world of Helen and Gevaudan, Danny and Alannah, of Dr Mordake and Colonel Jarrett and Tereus Winterborn, and start writing about it and them after a three year absence (although I did pop back for a couple of brief visits without too much trouble.) It's exciting, and it's scary. All being well, The Devil's Highway will be out in October. (The paperback of Hell's Ditch will be released this March.)

I finished the novel for Solaris, The Feast Of All Souls (the original title, Redman's Hill, was felt to sound too like a Western for American readers!) and that'll be available in December 2016. Watch this space for a reveal of Ben Baldwin's brilliant cover art.

In between the first and second drafts of Feast, I wrote another book - a crime novel, belted out hard and fast, at white heat. It was great fun, and it got me an agent.

Four short stories came out, including 'The Face Of The Deep' in GAME OVER, which was singled out for praise by the Financial Times, and 'Horn Of The Hunter' in THE SECOND SPECTRAL BOOK OF HORROR STORIES - one of fourteen stories picked out of over 800 submissions! The others were 'The Climb' in Black Static #49 and 'No Room For The Weak', published on Mark Allan Gunnells' blog as part of the Hell's Ditch blog tour.

So 2015 ended a hell of a lot better than it started. It wasn't an unbroken uphill climb, of course: there were setbacks and downturns along the way. Especially in the wider world. There was the election result back in May: Britain, already a darker, meaner and more frightening place, is becoming more so. And then there were the horrible massacres in Paris, Baghdad and Beirut, and the vicious racism and hatred that's arisen in response to them. And the Christmas period has brought a succession of horrendous storms with torrential rain and flooding across many parts of the country. There will, very likely, be more to come. But there's still good in the world; there's compassion and kindness and love. Sometimes I think there's actually enough of it. But I always was an optimist.

However good things are going, something can always happen to pull the rug out from under. But just
because it can doesn't mean it will. So I'm starting 2016 with guarded optimism: there's a lot of hard work ahead, and not everything will be easy. But I have my health (touch wood), I'm with the woman I love and I've reached a couple of professional milestones.

2016 will see two novels published - The Devil's Highway and The Feast Of All Souls. And in a couple of weeks, my novella Angels Of The Silences will be reissued by Omnium Gatherum (and here's the new cover art - ain't it beautiful?) It's going to be a busy year in every way: hopefully it will be followed by more.

Happy New Year to all of you. I hope it brings you everything you want, need and hope for.

The Lowdown with... Gary McMahon

Gary McMahon was born in Sunderland in 1969 and has a lifelong love of genre fiction. His critically acclaimed short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. His first mass market novel was Hungry Hearts, which was then followed by the Thomas Usher books (Pretty Little Dead Things and Dead Bad Things) and the "Concrete Grove" series of horror/urban fantasy novels. His latest books are The End and The Bones Of You.

His work has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award on seven seperate occassions. When reminded that he is still to win one of these, he gives a wry smile.

 

1. Tell us three things about yourself.

I’m a first kyu in Shotokan karate. My legal middle name is Zed. I have no super powers.

2. What was the first thing you had published?

The first published piece I got paid for was short story called 'Neighbours'. It was published in a little small press magazine called Nasty Piece of Work back in the early 90s, I think…and it was inspired by a story called 'Coffee' by Simon Bestwick. Before that, I had a poem published in a school magazine. I won a carrier-bag full of sweets because it was voted the best thing published in the magazine that year.

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?

I know it’s a cliché, but I’m going to say my latest book, a 30,000-word novella called The Grieving Stones. It’s about a woman who attends group therapy to try and deal with the grief of losing her husband. A few members of the group go away to an isolated old house in the country, where they plan to clean up the rundown place and take part in more in-depth therapy sessions. But the house, and the area around it, has a strange history, and as she begins to discover the secrets held within the landscape, her grip on reality starts to loosen – or does it simply become stronger and clearer, allowing her to see what nobody else can? The novella is due out from Spectral Press early 2016.

  

4. …and which makes you cringe?

A number of my early short stories – some of which even saw print!

5. What’s a normal writing day like?

I get up. I cycle to work. I spend 8.5 hours in the office doing my day job. I cycle home and spend a little time with my family. I go to karate training. I come home and have dinner. I think about writing and end up watching a late-night DVD instead. Sometimes I do write, but these days it isn’t much.

6. Which piece of writing should someone who’s never read you before pick up first?

I think the Concrete Grove trilogy (published by Solaris) nicely sums up what I’m trying to get at in my work.

7. What are you working on now?

I’ve just finished a story for a chapbook, which will be published in October by White Noise Press. That one’s called 'There’s a Bluebird in my Heart'. I’ve been working on a novel called The Quiet Room for about four years and still have a long way to go before it reaches even the first draft stage. I’m also thinking about trying to put together a new short fiction collection, under working title of Blood From Stones.

'There's A Bluebird In My Heart' is released next week, on October 14th 2015.

Let's Drink To The Dead- An Early Christmas Present To You All

Those lovely people at Solaris Books have brought out a little something of mine.  And it's absolutely free of charge.

Let's Drink To The Dead is an ebook-only mini-collection- two longish stories, plus a novelette, set in the Lancashire town of Kempforth during the 1980s.

Kempforth is the setting of my second novel, The Faceless, and the three tales- The Sight, Gideon and How Briefly Dead Children Dream feature a number of characters from the book.

A dour, isolated community, high on the Lancashire hills, where cruelty and abuse have always found dark corners to flourish in.  Kempforth is a town full of secrets; in these three tales, you’ll uncover some of them.

A brother and sister discover that escape from their sadistic abusers may come at a terrible price…

A teenage runaway confronts the ghosts of a long-abandoned hospital’s macabre past…

An old woman fights to save two children from a demonic predator…

LET'S DRINK TO THE DEAD

If you've read The Faceless, these stories will hopefully add a little extra texture and background to the novel; if not, this collection will give you something of a taster.

You can download the collection free of charge from Solaris' website, here.

Merry Christmas.

News Roundup #2: BIG Love for The Faceless

One book I've loved since I first read it in the early 1990s (Christ, has it really been nearly twenty years?) is Antony Sher's Year Of The King, his memoir of the twelvemonth leading up to his performance as Richard III for the RSC in 1985. Drawn from his diary and sketchbooks (he's a gifted writer and artist as well as actor) it's often funny, sometimes touching, and fascinating if you want to an insight into how a great actor works. One thing he'd done at the time was to give up reading reviews of his performances.

Anyway, towards the end of the book, the show has opened and Sher has various Big Names coming backstage to congratulate him. Among them is Michael Caine, who asks: 'Well, what about the reviews?'

'I don't read them,' explains Sher.

'Don't read them? You wrote them didn't you?'

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I hate blowing my own trumpet. I honestly do. I was brought up not to brag. But there've been quite a few reviews of The Faceless, and they've all been a bit good. So much so that I'm almost too embarrassed to quote them here.

Almost. :)

So- deep breath- here goes:

One print review so far, from Gareth Hughes in SciFiNow magazine, who gives it four stars out of five:

'It's refreshing to read something as original as The Faceless... Despite some heavy themes it never seems exploitative, tapping into a very modern, almost post 9/11 fear... Bestwick has produced a piece of work streets ahead of his peers.'

Online, Theresa Derwin at Terror Tree says:

'...proof positive that Bestwick is a strong new voice in British horror... The Faceless is a genuinely creepy, classic book.'

Over at This Is Horror, Ross Anthony Warren has this to say:

'The Faceless contains a level of craft and execution that, alongside the work of Ramsey Campbell, Conrad Williams and Gary McMahon, goes a long way in restoring the reputation of the horror novel... a name to watch out for in the future.'

From Anthony Watson at Dark Musings:

'Simon is one of the best writers of horror fiction currently plying their trade. In fact scrap that... Simon is one of the best writers - of any genre - currently plying their trade. This is a great book, one that I thoroughly enjoyed (if that's the right word) reading. It has everything...

The book is beautifully written, yes. It has a great plot, yes. Most importantly though, it's scary as hell...'

And from Jim McLeod over at The Ginger Nuts Of Horror:

'In this day and age it takes a lot of skill, and perhaps a truly deranged mind to come up with a monster that will terrify a reader, as much as The Spindly Men. The Faceless is a modern masterpiece of British horror... the must read horror novel of the year so far.'

From Spooky Reads:

'The Faceless is an edge-of-your seat read, and definitely needs to be read by any fan of the supernatural horror fiction genre. If you like Ramsey Campbell, Gary McMahon, and Adam Nevill’s work, then you’ll likely enjoy what Simon Bestwick has created here. It’s a compelling read; decently paced, its greater underlying themes, and messages, linger on after the tale itself has been told.'

All of which actually isn't so much receiving love as being gang-banged. In a good way. As it were.

Off for a lie down now.

The Faceless- Unleashed!

Yup! Today is the official UK release date of The Faceless. It went on US release on January 31st, and those who preordered on Amazon have been getting their copies over the last couple of days. But now it's out there.

Very, very happy about this.

Off tomorrow to the SFX Weekender. Brian Blessed is one of the guests. He's just started following me on Twitter. This is somewhat awesome. Sophie Aldred (ex-Doctor Who companion) will also be there. I had a truly industrial-strength crush on her when I was a lad. I may struggle to string a coherent sentence together. No change there then.

Have a great weekend, everybody. :)