Happy Valentine's Day, everybody, for those celebrating it (and Happy Friday whether you are or not!)
Just over nine years ago today, my novella Angels Of The Silences saw print for the first time, as a chapbook from Pendragon Press. It sold out at some speed, and was unavailable until those lovely people at Omnium Gatherum reissued it in 2016. Last year it came out for a third time, as part of my collection And Cannot Come Again, from ChiZine Press.
Readers of this blog will be only too aware of what happened with ChiZine, but for anyone who missed out on getting a copy of the collection, there are only two months to go until the new edition of And Cannot Come Again (the ebook of which is available for preorder) from Horrific Tales gets launched at StokerCon in Scarborough in April.
Good and/or interesting things are happening in respect of a couple of friends of mine:
Sarah Pinborough's new novel Dead To Her has just been released in the US. If past books like 13 Minutes, Behind Her Eyes and Cross Her Heart are any indicator, we're in for a treat.
A couple of developments on the home front have made me smile: Nancy Baker at ChiZine has informed me that And Cannot Come Again has been entered for the World Fantasy Awards. I doubt it'll stand any chance at all given the breadth and quality of work out there, but it's nice to be even slightly in the running.
And Catherine Cavendish, in a guest blog for Kendall Reviews, has listed eight favourite horror novels: alongside works by Ramsey Campbell, Adam Nevill, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Hand, Ronald Malfi, J.H. Moncrieff and Hunter Shea, she lists The Feast Of All Souls. That's pretty damn good company to find myself in - so thank you, Catherine!
Well, that's all the news fit to print for now. Have a good weekend!
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!"
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...
Voting
for the British Fantasy Awards closes on 1st March this
year, and various other awards are gearing up to put together long- and short-lists. I hope to put out a few recommendations shortly, but in the
meantime here’s a quick round-up of my own eligible work from 2016
(or as I like to call it, the Annual Obligatory Horn-Blowing)
Novels
I
had two! The Feast Of All Souls and Devil’s Highway
(although I’m painfully aware Devil’s Highway was only released
in hardback in December and the paperback’s only just seeing
daylight now.) Nonetheless, both are eligible works.
Stories
I
only had three original tales published in 2016:
‘Wrath
of the Deep’ in The Hyde Hotel
‘Between
Angels and Insects’ in Tomorrow’s Cthulhu
‘And
Ashes In Her Hair’ in Something Remains
That's all, unless anyone counts was
my blog about Spectral Press as non-fiction – it seems to have ended
up being read more than anything else I’ve done to date!
Right,
that’s the horn-blowing out of the way… as you were. Happy Valentine's Day, and read good stuff.
Reviews have continued to come in for The Feast Of All Souls, from both Fantasy Book Review, who really liked it -
I finished The Feast of All Souls in short order, always a good sign
that I enjoyed a book, in fact enjoying it every bit as much as the
Herbert and King novels I read in my teen years and... the
[Adam] Nevill books I have read in recent years. I turned the last page both satisfied and impressed... an author I would not hesitate to read again.
- and from SFX, who weren't so keen:
There's a lot going on in this novel: hauntings aside, there's time travel, torture, grief, and even a bit of Arthurian Grail lore. The interesting stuff comes in fits and starts, though... it's infuriating, especially because Alice is such a horrible character to spend time with... The reason behind the . haunting, when it's revealed, is inventively grotesque, and the various strands of nastiness weave together satisfyingly enough. Still, there probably needs to be an epilogue where Alice apologises to literally every other character in the book.
Actually, I kind of like that idea. I might write it and post it here... :)
[Just FYI: there's no link to the SFX review as I haven't been able to find it online, not because I'm sulking over it!]
Hayley Stevens
As part of the promotion for The Feast Of All Souls, I interviewed one of the people who helped me Hayley Stevens. Originally a fervent believer in all things paranormal, now she's a rationalist and skeptic who applies scientific method to find the explanation for weird phenomena. John Revell's approaches in The Feast Of All Souls owe a lot to her.
in my research for it - real-life paranormal investigator
Not that everything Hayley's encountered has had a wholly rational explanation... but you'll have to read the interview, here and here, to find out about that. And to find out more, check out her website.
An excellent cross-genre blend which shall appeal to horror, military, and action fans alike... a thrilling tour-de-force novel full of military grade action sequences
and complex characters, but also moments of intense emotion and the
lightest touches of romance which combine to deliver a compelling story
that pulls you in and refuses to let go, adding Bestwick handles the conclusion of the story with the touch of an expert
storyteller while also setting up the story to continue into book three
with a new threat. It is clear that he has more in store for fans of
‘The Black Road’ series and we will not be disappointed.
Over at Ginger Nuts Of Horror meanwhile, Laura Mauro says: In many ways Devil’s Highway is a high-octane action movie of a book:
the Mad Max: Fury Road of genre novels, only with more dialogue. And
this is not a bad thing.
Laura particularly rates the portrayal of Helen Damnation: In the hands of another writer, Helen might have become a dull
caricature of a ‘strong female character’. Here, though, her flaws and
failings are put under a narrative microscope and viewed alongside her
strengths and triumphs: she is a brave warrior, a survivor, a leader of
men. She is also weak and selfish and dangerously impulsive. She is
imperfect, and all the more interesting a character for it.
I did chuckle over this bit, admittedly: There is a particular moment of loss which hit me especially hard, and I
think it speaks of Bestwick’s skill as a writer that he is able to make
me care so much about a relatively minor character. Mainly because I remember an email from Laura that read "I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU KILLED [DELETED] YOU UTTER BASTARD." There can be few higher compliments for a writer...
The review concludes: A potent mix of grim, dystopian sci-fi and visceral horror, combined
with a vibrant imagination, lift a standard ‘Good vs Evil’ narrative and
have turned it into something quite special indeed.
So all this has been much-needed good news, among the general gloom and doom of world affairs and other matters of a more personal nature.
Derek M. Fox
We're off for dinner with friends tonight, which is good as this week began on something of a sad
note.
Back in the 1890s 1990s, when I was starting out as a writer, I used to attend the Terror Scribes meetings, where UK horror authors (usually based in the North or Midlands) gathered together for alcohol and curry. I still remember the one where I decided that pints of Stella Artois followed by Lambs Navy Rum chasers were a good idea... actually, 'remember' probably isn't the right word. They were started off by Chesterfield author John B. Ford, who invited a bunch of writers he knew to join and Simon Clark in a Sheffield pub in order to generally get drunk and shoot the breeze; the whole thing was that much fun, it became a semi-regular thing for several years.
One of the stalwarts of the Terror Scribes (and of the UK horror small press in the '90s) was Derek M. Fox, who died shortly before Christmas last year. Author and creative writing tutor, much-loved by his family and with a wicked sense of humour, Derek was a good guy and will be very much missed. I hadn't been greatly in touch with him for many years, but even though I was aware he'd been in ill-health for some time it was a shock to hear of his passing.
The funeral service was on Tuesday, and a few of us from the old days - Paul Kane, Marie O'Regan, Rob Rowntree, Lisa Negus and me - were there to pay our respects. Much love to Derek's wife Kath, and to his extended family.
RIP Derek. Get us all a round in, wherever you are.
...and don't let the door hit your arse on the way out.
As Dave Allen once said "Annus horribilis? I'd have called it annus anus - an arsehole of a year." 2016 was the year of Brexit, Trump and a roll-call of deaths among the great and the good (the genuinely so, in the sense of actors, artists, writers and others who enriched the world and made it a better place) while truly vile individuals gained ever higher levels of power and adulation. For an awful lot of reasons, that means that when it comes to wishing people a Happy New Year for 2017, I'm setting the bar for what actually constitutes a Happy New Year pretty low. As in 'we don't all die, our countries don't turn into fascist dictatorships or post-apocalyptic hell-holes, we don't see our neighbours or ourselves dragged away and locked up or kicked to death in the middle of the night for something we said and we don't end up with World War Three'. You know, that kind of level.
But...
Hopefully not how Liverpool looks next year.
There were good things too.
Pandas came off the endangered species list, for instance. A vaccine against Ebola was discovered. There's more, too. I'm struggling to remember what they all are, right now, but they were there. This interview with Steven Pinker suggests some of them (although whether those trends will continue is matter of opinion.) We shouldn't be starry-eyed and utopian - but nor should we give in and assume it's all fucked.
And on a personal level, it was a pretty good year.
My agent sold the audiobook rights to last year's crime novel. I placed a new story collection (contractual stuff ongoing; details to follow when possible.) I had two novels published. I had stories podcast with Pseudopod, and sold five reprints to Great Jones Street.
Better still, Cate and I celebrated four years as an item and two years living together. Oh, and...
We got married.
That was pretty fucking awesome, especially thanks to all the wonderful friends and family who came along to make it such a special day. (My Mum said: "I didn't realise how popular you were!" Um, thanks Mum. I think.)
I did end up back in a day job, at least for now. The hours are tough, but weirdly I've actually got more productive, which has included not only writing the new novel (Wolf's Hill, the third Black Road book) in the mornings, but jotting down a short story longhand during the day in between times. Two projects at the same time, which is something I've never managed to do before.
I just finished that first short story today. It appears to have turned into a novelette or novella. I think
I can deal with that.
So, for 2017: let's hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and try not to despair. No, that won't prevent bad shit from happening in the coming year. It may not even prevent the worst possible shit from happening. False optimism is pointless. But giving up hope is the one sure way to ensure all the worst possible shit will definitely happen this year.
So, let's crack on, and hope that this time next year we're all still here to celebrate better days to come. And if not, let's count our blessings and try to maintain the same mindset.
Further nice things have happened. Following on from 'Dermot' getting a truly chilling reading from Alasdair Stuart on the Pseudopod podcast, you can now listen to Lewis Davies' rendition of 'The Moraine' too.
Originally published in Paul Finch's Gray Friar Press anthology Terror Tales of the Lake District, 'The Moraine' follows Steve and Diane, a couple with a troubled marriage, who get lost when an unexpected fog catches them on a Lake District hillside. Trying to find shelter, they instead find themselves on a slope of loose rubble, left behind by the Ice Age glaicers: a moraine.
And they aren't alone there. Something lives under the rocks - and it's hunting them.
Simon Bestwick has taken what appears on the surface to be a traditional
haunted house ghost story, and twisted it into something altogether
stranger and unique. Bestwick’s use of language and character, as well as the concrete foundation of his setting... helps to solidify Ramsey
Campbell’s statement that Simon Bestwick is “among the most important
writers of contemporary British horror.”
The last few weeks have been hard work. I've had to get a job in order to pay the bills, and I'm still struggling to fit my writing in around the demands of a day job after three years as a full time author. The job itself is okay, however, although the hours are long, and the people I work with are great. So it could be worse.
Meanwhile, good things have happened.
I'm delighted to announce that my story 'Dermot' is available over at Pseudopod: you can stream or download Alasdair Stuart's excellent reading of the tale here. Another story of mine, 'The Moraine', will be podcast next week.
'Dermot' really is an example of one of those stories that hit a chord - or a nerve - with a lot of people. Along with 'The Narrows', it's the only piece I've written to make an awards shortlist.
So I'm even more delighted to announce that 'Dermot', 'The Narrows' and 'The Moraine' are among five stories that I've sold to Great Jones Street, to be added to the archive of online fiction available through their app. Kelly Abbott and Ken Truesdale are doing great work in trying to popularise short fiction to a general market once more; I wish them every success.
The five tales are:
Dermot
The Narrows
Lex Draconis
Never Say Goodbye
The Moraine
Hugely proud of them all. (I've always had a soft spot for 'Lex Draconis', as it's very different to my usual thing, so it's good to see it reaching a wider audience.)
And finally this week, that excellent chap Anthony Watson has reviewed The Feast Of All Souls over at Dark Musings.
There is, it has to be said, a lot going on
in this book, a mixture of themes and genres and in the hands of a lesser
writer it could have turned out to be a car crash. This isn’t the case here
though, Simon keeps full control over all the themes and ideas, merging them
perfectly into a gripping – and horrific – whole.
I really enjoyed The
Feast of All Souls, loved the imagination on display. Scary, thrilling but
in places also incredibly moving.
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:
Books for Living, Will Schwalbe (Knopf)
Small Admissions, Amy Poeppel (Atria/Simon & Schuster Canada)
The Twilight Wife, A.J. Banner (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster Canada)
Kill the Next One, Frederico Axat (Little, Brown and Company/Hachette)
In Sunlight or In Shadow, Lawrence Block (WW Norton/PRH Canada)
The Gardens of Consolation, Parisa Reza (Europa Editions/PRH Canada)
The Ice Beneath Her, Camilla Grebe (Ballantine/PRH Canada)
The Feast of All Souls, Simon Bestwick (Solaris/Simon & Schuster Canada)
Last Year, Robert Wilson (Tor Forge/Raincoast Books)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, Offline October hasn't been working out too badly, despite my occasionally lurking on social media despite my best intentions. Also, I finally managed to get Freedom working on my laptop in the past couple of days, so I've been able to buckle down and get to work without temptation.
Nonetheless, I'm breaking radio silence here, because of a couple of things.
Devil's Highway, as you probably all know by now (God knows I've wittered on about it often enough here) is released by Snowbooks in both hardback and ebook formats on October 17th.
'Their hair was bleached and matted,
their chalk-white skin dry and fissured like sun-baked earth.
Their eyes were
near-black, glistening clots with a gleam of red; when they grinned their teeth
were needles of bone. “Don’t worry, Helen. We won’t hurt you. But something
will.”'
In
the haunted desolation of post-nuclear Britain, the Catchman walks. Spawned
from the nightmare of Project Tindalos, it doesn’t tire, stop, or die. It
exists only for one purpose: to find and kill Helen Damnation, leader of the
growing revolt against the tyrannical Reapers and their Commander, Tereus
Winterborn.
Meanwhile,
Helen is threatened both from without and within. Her nightmares of the Black
Road have returned, and the ghosts of her murdered family demand vengeance, in
the form of either Winterborn’s death or her own. And close behind the Catchman,
a massive Reaper assault, led by Helen’s nemesis, Colonel Jarrett, is nearing the
rebels’ base. Killing Helen has become Jarrett’s obsession: only one of them
can emerge from this conflict alive.
With the fate of the rebellion in the balance,
Helen faces her deadliest challenge yet, pitted in single combat against an
unstoppable killer, commanding armies in a bloody and pitiless battle – and, at
last, confronting the demons of her past on the Black Road.
It's the second in the Black Road series that began with Hell's Ditch, and is probably the most relentlessly paced, action-driven thing I've written. But it's not just an action fest (although Cate didn't enjoy it as much as Hell's Ditch, owing to the prevalence of 'shooty bang sticks'.) There's emotional drama as we learn more about Helen's past - and Winterborn's, too. And there's a new enemy, a relentless, apparently unstoppable monster that stalks Helen: the Catchman.
Where the hell did this particular monster come from? Well, inside my head, as usual. But I can probably pinpoint the inspiration in this case: a BBC TV series from my childhood called The Nightmare Man, in which an inhuman killer stalks a fogbound Scottish island.
Based on David Wiltshire's 1978 novel Child Of Vodyanoi, The Nightmare Man remains a low-key, slow-burning chiller that should be just perfect for this time of year. I've written about it at greater length over at This Is Horror (thanks for the soapbox, guys!) so you can learn more there. (I have another contribution coming up at TIH later this month - an author interview that I think a lot of you will enjoy!)
Finally, some news that warmed the cockles of my heart and put a big smile on my face: over at Beauty In Ruins, the subject of this week's Waiting For Wednesday, where eagerly-anticipated release are discussed, is The Feast Of All Souls. Bob Milne's review joins those by Lilyn G at Sci-Fi and Scary and Tammy at Books Bones and Buffy, both of whom are looking forward to its release.
So that's all from me. Have a good weekend, everybody!
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 hasbeengettinga successionofravereviews, 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.
