The Concrete Dead and Other Myths

The October release of legendary quarterly magazine Bards & Sages is now available and includes my story about strange goings on in post-WW2 East Berlin called The Concrete Dead. Check out the Queen inspired cover too! (#ref for oldies)

No more Penny Dreadful

Angry and sad about this - I'm not going to go into great detail or make personal attacks, but I will be removing all traces of the 'Last of the Kjett' chapbook from my websites and bio. All I will say is that I suffered the same fate that, apparently, many writers' who get involved with Penny Dreadful/Ghostwriter Publications have suffered and continue to suffer. I can fight my own battles just fine but when paying members of the public get shafted supporting me, that's it.
If you were one of the unfortunate, please contact me immediately.

Non-genre Goodness

I've had a couple of literary shorts (literary in the broadest sense of the world, you understand!) accepted into the debut issues of 2 new and potentially exciting American magazines.

The first, titled Fragility, will be appearing in .insidious. mag in the near future.

The second, snappily titled The Comfort of Dead Whales, will make an appearance in Fix It Broken magazine

I love writing straight fiction and hope to do more in the future along with the best genre pieces I can think up and express.

I almost swerved off my chair...

Don't know how this hasn't come to my attention before now, but stumbled upon this review of the Night Terrors collection at the mighty Fangoria Magazine earlier today and it's a cracker! They may not have enjoyed the whole book but my contribution was singled out, in a good way.

But what fresh nightmare is this? Not all is lost for NIGHT TERRORS. Harper Hull’s shocker “Amy Lou’s Ice Cream Parlor” is an absolute sucker punch to the gut. The tenderness of Hull’s text is a trap that catches the reader in a swift six pages. By beginning with the all-too-familiar, painting a portrait of a pleasant ice-cream shop, Hull drags us down into the spectral depths of his protagonist’s heartbreaking depravity—and never brings us back. Discovering this story at the tail end of the collection is just about enough to justify the entire purchase price.

Quickie freebie flash piece of happy, jolly 'apoco-romo' fiction up at Smashwords - Terminal Sunday

E-Harper & the arrival of Lark, Investigator of the Unusual

I've been wanting to release an e-book for a while now, mainly just to see how it flies and what the experience is like. This week I decided that my paranormal investigator story The Watcher on the Walls would be the ideal test. The genre, the length, the fact it's the first in a series - all seemed like good reasons to let it loose and see what happened.

Yesterday, after a night of formatting 13K words which wasn't anywhere near as awful as I'd imagined, it went live on Smashwords and will hit the big name marketplaces next week.

It costs a measly $1.75 (about a quid in Britain) and is available right here!

You can download it for Kindle, Nook, Stanza, Sony Reader, PC, Mac, Palm - pretty much every piece of hardware you can imagine.
If you don't have an e-reader and hate reading plain docs as much as I do, I highly recommend this free application from Amazon - Kindle for PC

I'm happy with the way it looks and now just need to promote the story itself - here's the short blurb from the website

England, 1975. Neville Lark, self-proclaimed 'investigator of the unusual,' is drawn into a brutal murder case in the city of Chester. All signs point to an horrific incident from the past when an entire Roman garrison was slaughtered by supernatural forces, but who is resurrecting the ancient evil and why?

If you enjoy paranormal mysteries, historical supernatural tales or monster horror I think you'd enjoy this. Witches, satanists, Roman ghosts, mysterious church soldiers, golems and a foppish, self-destructive protagonist with a house full of skeletons are all at play in here!

The fantastic photo of Chester's famous Eastgate Clock which forms the basis of the cover was taken by Traci, my much better half, last year. I need to mention that so she doesn't sue me for my pennies.

The Boys From the Spires

Nice little interview in my hometown newspaper today! Click for full image :)