north of midnight

It's that month again, the one where the witchy goings on go on, and the ghosts and the ghoulies come out to play. It's that time when the leaves on the tree light up, and then fall and make rust of the gutters and the pavements. It's the time when kids come knocking on your door for goodies and the cold comes nipping at your bones. It's also that time when I have a new book out and it is, appropriately, witchy-ish, ghostly-ish, and halloween-ish. (I decided not to write ghoulies-ish, because, well, you know . . .) Anyway, it's called North of Midnight, and it is a collection of darkly slanted tales, all with a kink of the supernatural to them. Just right for this time of year, perhaps.

There are nine pieces in North of Midnight, of which about half of the content is published for the first time. Technically, all but two of the pieces should have been published before, but owing to magazines and anthologies collapsing it just never happened. And rather than send the tales out elsewhere, I elected to put them together and make a collection. It's not a massive collection. It's about 240 pages long, if we're to believe the page count, and I think that's a nice length. I'm not a big fan of enormous anthologies and collections. The commitment required to start new story after new story can be a bit too much to ask a reader over the course of 400 or 500 pages. That's how I feel anyway. Give me a 130-pager or at a push a 250-pager any day of the week. Sometimes less is more, and as it's true about the prose in a short story, it makes sense to me that it should be true about how many pages there should be in a collection.

I won't say much about the pieces inside, other than that if you're read my supernatural-flavoured tales in books and magazines, then you'll have an idea of what they are about. If you haven't read any of those pieces before, then hey, it can be a surprise.

North of Midnight is available as a paperback:

HERE for you if you're in the UK

HERE for you if you're in the USA

and via your own local amazon store if you're in the EU (here's the German link. Here's the French. Both are written in English).

All being well, an ebook version should be available before or around the New Year, via Kobo and Amazon Kindle.

Thanks for reading.

Happy Halloween.

we shall make monsters

And now free to read on Mad Scientist Journal, there's my short steam-punk(ish) story, We Shall Make Monsters*. This piece has had an interesting non-publishing history, killing every anthology and magazine it's been accepted by, so that, incredibly, some many years after it was first written, this is its first appearance anywhere. Depressingly, it's still sort of relevant to today's music scene.

Anyway, fingers crossed, Mad Scientist Journal won't succumb to any bad magic now they've taken this piece!

After the fictional accreditation, the story begins thus:

Enough time has now elapsed that I might finally reveal my part in the whole sorry StepFor’d affair. Like the last grains of sand sliding from one bulb of an hourglass to the next, I feel my life slipping away. If I am to give an explanation–or perhaps some would see it as a confession–then it should be here and it should be now, before it is too late and the chance to do so has passed.

From the outset, I would have it known that I was not the sole creator of “the clone bands.” However, I accept that turning the tide of public opinion so late in the day is no easy matter and that blame will be more easily laid at my feet–solely at my feet, if you will forgive the pun–rather than spread among those others involved. It is the way with the masses, and believe me, I should know the masses after I have spent so long exploiting them.

Yet the truth remains that I was not alone in my actions; I was not the only one responsible for what followed. My remaining hope is that people accept this. Perhaps, in time, it will be so.

The whole of what follows will be dispassionately relayed, dictated on my mechanical word-loom with an eye only for detail, neither recrimination nor redemption an aim. Just the truth.

This is my testimony.

You can read the rest of it for free here.

An ebook of the Mad Scientist Journal anthology, containing We Shall Make Monsters, will be available at a later date.

* And yes, well spotted those of an eagle-eye. The title's taken from a line from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Hush now, no spoilers . . .