You know Christmas is Coming When...

Hey, I don't want to brag, but I got my card from the Blairs.

No Ann Radcliffe at the BBC

After Saturday's mass signing at Forbidden Planet, and catching up with old friends at the enjoyable British Fantasy Society open event afterwards, a less pressured Sunday included a visit to The British Library's exhibition Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination before the drive home.

The exhibition follows a path from Otranto to the present day that will be familiar to the dedicated reader of horror and the fantastic, and which provides a crash course in the essentials to anyone new to the field. Where the BL excels is in its access to original materials - first editions, letters, manuscripts... if you don't get a kick from a note written in Poe's own hand, or original Frankenstein pages in Mary Shelley's handwriting with Percy's additions crowded into the margins, then this kind of thing is probably not for you.

It's atmospherically presented, driven by literature (obviously) but with further coverage of the films, art and architecture that extended the Gothic sensibility into wider culture. I doubt that many of us read Frankenstein and then were moved to seek out the movies; it tends to work the other way around.

A few years ago I proposed an adaptation of Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho to the BBC. Not an easy book to 'find the movie in', as anyone who's ever picked it up will know. Got nowhere with it then and, with the way that drama commissioning has moved since, I don't expect to, ever.

So, inspired by Terror and Wonder, I'm putting it online. This was my pitch document - making the case, breaking down the story, outlining a production approach. Should you happen to be interested.

www.stephengallagher.com/udolpho.pdf

I'm Here 'til Tuesday...

 

It's called a Kindle Countdown Deal; the price of an e-book gets slashed to the bone for a couple of days and then rises in increments over a week or so until it's back to full price again. Grab 'em, do; they're going for about 99p/99c but the clock is ticking.

The Spirit Box and Nightmare, with Angel are on offer from Amazon UK, while White Bizango and Red, Red Robin are on promotion from Amazon.com.

In other news, this new edition of The Bedlam Detective. "Only bad thing about his books is that they eventually end. Brilliant." (Jonny Lee Miller)

See the previous post for an update on the next Becker book.

The Accidental Blogger

I know I haven't updated the blog for some time, and if you've been checking, I'm sorry. It's partly laziness - so much easier to fire off a quick snarky mindbite on Twitter than to actually organise a thought or two into something worthwhile - and partly personal, but mostly it's business.

The personal - this summer I forced myself to take weekends off, and decided I rather liked it. If I don't consciously remove myself from the proximity of the study I can find myself drawn back to the keyboard. I'm not even aware of it happening, but I get pulled in by its gravity like one of those rolling coins spiralling down into a charity collection tub. And then, because I've sat myself down without a plan, I don't actually achieve anything when I get there - I just check my emails and fart around on Twitter.

I still check my emails and fart around on Twitter. But at weekends I do it on my phone, somewhere nicer.

The business part - well, last year was weird, including a bunch of projects you'll never hear of because they didn't happen. None of them was my own. In each case I was brought on board to develop a property which never made it to launch. For a while that suited me, again for personal reasons, but it quickly grew frustrating. I've developed stuff I didn't create before now, Crusoe being a case in point. But it's not what I'm in the game for.

So I blocked out some time and wrote a spec TV pilot, which no one in the UK wanted but which a producer friend took to MIPCOM where it was picked up by one of the US networks. More about that in due course.

Now that I had something to plan around, I could wind up the third-party commitments and schedule-in something of great importance to me, and that's the third Sebastian Becker novel. It's been on the stocks for a while, devised and researched and planned down to pretty much the last detail.

But here's the point I always have to make about novel writing and screenwriting; their working rhythms are totally different, and they can't coexist. They can't for me, anyway. A screenwriting career is a constant juggling of drafts, pitches and projects. For a novel I need to be able to dedicate big blocks of dedicated weeks.

The Becker books are complicated beasts to conceive and plot. If you've read either The Kingdom of Bones or The Bedlam Detective you'll appreciate that each is an ambitious one-off, not the kind of series where you can turn a handle and crank them out.

And their history is a complicated one too - of film rights bought and sold, of auctions and ousted editors and wound-up imprints and orphaned acquisitions... and for these reasons among many others the Becker books have a special importance to me, like the puppy that survived the hurricane. So much of this summer was set aside for the completion of The Authentic William James, and I'm happy to say that the pieces fit together.

None of which is what I set out to tell you.

The actual aim of this post was to shill for a Kindle promotion for the novels next week. It's to mark my birthday (don't ask). On Monday October 13th the price of four of my ebooks (two on Amazon UK, two in the US) will be slashed to... well, buttons at first. But only at first. The prices will rise by increments over the following week until they're back at the regular level. Apparently this enthuses people to jump in and buy early. Well, Amazon seem to think so. And they seem to be rather better at this than I.

These are the titles:

The Spirit Box and Nightmare, with Angel will be on offer at Amazon.co.uk. White Bizango and Red, Red Robin at Amazon.com.

I'll post a reminder and links on Monday.

Happy weekend.

Grandma, What Big Eyes You Have

The large-print edition.

My favourite KoB cover to date, I think.

The Postman Only Rang Once

And here's what he brought.

Take It From There

Jimmy Edwards – yes, Jimmy Edwards – sat on a chair in the corner of the room, and we all sat around him like cubs at a campfire waiting to hear a story. I remember him being smaller than I'd expected; small feet, and delicate hands. He was well-groomed and dapper, with the look of a man who'd spent part of the morning with his tailor and the rest of it in a barber's chair. His un-named companion fussed a little too much, worrying about protecting him from some non-existent draught, until Edwards told him to stop. He was a familiar figure from my childhood; the blustering, cane-swishing headmaster of television's Whack-O!, the faux-disorganised, trombone-playing comedy turn of Variety shows. But here, in the rehearsal room of Hull University's Gulbenkian Centre, he dropped the persona and talked about craft.

He spoke of his early days as a stand-up act, filling in between nude tableaux at the Windmill Theatre. Of walking offstage when a cocky co-star's practical joke made an audience feel uncertain and excluded ("You're the one who lost 'em. You get 'em back.") Of the fan who buttonholed him and demanded to know what Kenneth Williams was like ("He must have thought that we all live together in a big house.")

Why is this an hour that I remember so well? It's not as if the rest of my time in the department was incident-free or less interesting. I don't recall the exact circumstance, but I'm guessing that Edwards was in a touring company with dates at Hull's New Theatre and his visit to us was one of those ad hoc, opportunistic things arranged by a member of staff.

I suppose that, like most of us, I came to drama with some amateur acting behind me and only the vaguest sense of the history and infrastructure of the subject I'd signed up to study. In the end, those were the aspects that came to interest me most. A hidden world had been opened up for me, wider and more complicated than any I could ever have imagined. A world, created and populated entirely by social outsiders, that one might conceivably join. Let's be honest, could it get much cooler than that?

I think one of the reasons for the clarity of the memory is that Edwards' unaffected, professional chat was like a point of transition. I've been lucky enough to make a career in the business and there has to be some point where observing begins to turn into belonging, even if you're not aware of it at the time.

Of similar retrospective weight and significance – at least for me – was the visit of actor John Franklyn-Robbins for the same kind of rehearsal room session. I believe he'd been invited by AV Centre head Mike Bowen and he didn't come alone, but was accompanied by an assistant producer from the BBC whose name I'm ashamed to have forgotten, since her contribution was of no less value. They spoke with thrilling honesty of the crapness of BBC bureaucracy, and about the obstacles to creative enterprise in television drama. Then, as now, it wasn't sunny anecdotes that people wanted to hear. Professional horror stories are always the ones that entertain and instruct the most.

Franklyn-Robbins was rarely a headliner, but his career as a rock-solid character player was a formidable one (a long career that would range from Broadway and the RSC to roles in Doctor Who, The Avengers, and Star Trek: TNG). His was an unshowy professionalism that compelled respect, and his stories came from direct experience. When someone asked a final question about the future of television drama, he and his companion both indicated the whole of the room and replied in unison, "It's you."

Roll forward to 2012. I took part in a week-long TV Drama Lab in Berlin, devoted to finding new pathways to international production.On the Thursday afternoon there was a public session in which I sat on a panel with two American writer-producers and we talked about the showrunning experience on both sides of the Atlantic. It was the usual rollercoaster mix of stories of terrible odds, breathtaking setbacks, and executive shortsightedness. The crowd was receptive and the energy in the room was palpable.

In the Q&A I was surprised to hear some obvious British voices putting questions from the back. As the crowd broke up and I moved toward the next event, I took a couple of minutes to seek them out; it was a party of young British actors and they'd driven all the way to Berlin, fifteen hours in a van, just to attend the session. Their spirits were up and their enthusiasm was high. Which was just as well, as they were driving back that same evening.

And as we spoke, I found myself thinking, I know you. Because I've been you. I offered some further encouragement and we swapped cards.

Meanwhile, my Australian cousin is always asking me what Hugh Grant's doing. I've never met Hugh Grant. We're in different parts of the business. She must think that we all live together in a big house.

Thank you, Jimmy. Thank you, John.

Thank you, all.

Guest Post: Adventures at the Intersection

Author, historian, and adventurer at the intersections, Brandy Schillace spends her time in the mist-shrouded alleyways between literature and medicine.

Brandy grew up in an underground house in abandoned coal mining territory near a cemetery. It does things to you (like convince you to get a PhD). It also encourages a particular brand of fictive output. HIGH STAKES, Book 1 of The Jacob Maresbeth Chronicles, came out in 2014 with Cooperative Trade Press.

Brandy is managing editor of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry and Research Associate for the Dittrick Museum of Medical History. She is also editor of the Fiction Reboot | Daily Dose blogs. When she isn’t researching arsenic poisoning for the Museum, writing fiction, taking over the world, or herding cats, she teaches for Case Western Reserve University. Her non-fiction, DEATH’S SUMMER COAT, comes out with Elliott and Thompson in 2015.
_________________________________________________

I write fiction. Sometimes, I even get it published. My young adult series about a 16 year old boy suffering from a blood disorder (that may or may not be vampirism) released in April. Funny thing is, I am a scholar, too. I work in a museum. I publish books on the history of birth and the history of death. I teach classes. I edit a medical anthropology journal. I develop medical humanities curriculum. And I have learned to dread the cocktail party query “So what do you do?”

It seems so innocent—but answering it the right way would take, I don’t know, three years. So I end up picking one thing over another, a process just as fraught with landmines. “I’m a writer” gets you the Oh, so you don’t really work look. And because murder is wrong, I’ve switched, instead, to saying that I am some stripe of academic. That’s only slightly better. Oh, so you really work but don’t actually make money. What can you do? The alternative is to explain exactly how I ended up in this crazy self-created position—and, because Stephen is a patient guy, that’s what I am aiming for today. How did all these incongruous threads lead to fiction?

There is a term for people like me; we are frequently referred to as alternative academics, or “altac.” It’s much nicer that “weird” which was the appellation of my years in secondary school. You can blame the urchins for unkindness, but I did grow up in an underground house near a cemetery in abandoned coal mining land. I spent a lot of time reading about the Black Death and writing scary stories while eating lunch on someone’s tombstone. Does that sound morbid? Probably. I had a brilliant childhood, great parents, and a brother whom I adore—but we also faced poverty, lost jobs, my father’s heart failure, and my mother’s cancer. I lost aunts and uncles, I lost grandparents, I lost my cousin to a knife-fight on Christmas Eve. People got ill. People were in the wrong place at the wrong time. By the age of eleven, I had learned that nothing is permanent, and for years after I would listen when my parents were sleeping to make sure they were both still breathing. An early interest in history, fate, and the spread of disease only makes sense in a context that, for a young adult, didn’t make much sense.

My parents both recovered. They now live in Kentucky with my brother and his wife and children. My life was far from tragic; it was just starkly real. And those years spent reading bubonic plague and gothic novels did something to my brain—it convinced me to get a PhD. Crazy, I know. And because I am me, I did it a bit upside-down and backwards. I have a PhD in 18th-century British Literature… but I wrote my dissertation about women’s bodies, minds, and health. Literature was part of a medical and historical narrative for me, only I didn’t realize it until after getting my first academic job. Three years on the tenure track, and I felt stifled by niche. In my “spare” time (academics teaching 4/4 do not have spare time), I managed a medical anthropology journal—and I kept publishing about the history of midwifery and birthing tech. And vampires. And syphilis. As one does. And somewhere in the middle of that, I kept writing fiction. I worked on a story that incorporated my strange childhood home (unpublished), and I began writing about a teenage boy struggling to make sense of a mystery illness—which has evolved into The Jacob Maresbeth Chronicles.

How do we make sense of illness? Or death? Or sudden disability? I reflected once again on the power of ritual and hope in the face of these things, but also about the power of humor. Graveyard humor—as my family knows no other kind. Can you laugh in the face of death? I think so. I crafted the series to be light-hearted and adventurous, silly and funny even when dealing with serious issues. Teens have enough angst; I had a childhood full of it, and some pretty serious anxieties, too. But you can’t live that way. We have to take risks and be bold, be different, be willing to step out. And—for better or worse—I took my own advice. I left the tenure track job (on purpose) to pursue something else in a new field. I now work as a research associate and guest curator at the Dittrick Medical History Center. I do public engagement, lectures, exhibit work, etc. But half of my time is now dedicated to freelance writing, too; at present I’m writing a non-fiction work on (big surprise) the history of death ritual. I am finishing up the third book for the Jacob Maresbeth series, too, book three of my fantasy series, and the first book in a set of “cozy” mysteries. Does the history of birth, the history of death, or the history of medicine have anything to do with these fictions? They do. I am a medical humanities scholar—and the point at which all things connect and collide is that same unruly, indecipherable, unconquerable self: the human being.

You can see, I think, why this doesn’t work as a cocktail party answer. But then again, maybe it does. The next time someone asks me—or any of us—what we do, perhaps we should answer with who we are. I am a writer. I am an adventurer at the intersection. I am only me—

And that’s usually enough to be going on with!

HIGH STAKES

“I’m not a vampire,” insists Jacob Maresbeth, teenage journalist for the school paper. But what is a vampire, really? What happens if you have all the right symptoms, but are a living, breathing sixteen-year-old boy?

Diagnosed with a rare disease, Jake can’t help but wonder. After eight years in and out of the Newport News hospital, he’s had it up to here with doctors, diseases and dishonesty. After all, Jake’s father, respected neurologist Franklyn Maresbeth, has been hiding some of his more unusual symptoms for years… particularly that part about drinking blood.

In High Stakes, Jake records his summer vacation in the home of his maiden aunt, the bangled and be-spectacled Professor Sylvia. If that isn’t bad enough (and it is), Jake and his theatre-loving sister Lizzy must keep the “unofficial” details of Jake’s disorder a secret from Aunt Sylvia’s seductively beautiful graduate student, Zsofia. Will Jake survive a whole month pretending to be an invalid? Will Zsofia weaken his resolve with her flirtatiously dangerous Hungarian accent? Will Jake lose his heart–in more ways than one?

The New Editions (4) The Spirit Box

The New Editions (3) Red, Red Robin

The New Editions (2) Nightmare, with Angel

The New Editions (1) White Bizango

R.I.P. Charles Barsotti

New Sebastian Becker Story

Subterranean Press is a Michigan-based publishing house best known for high-end hardcovers and limited editions, mostly covering horror, fantasy, suspense, and SF.

Their stuff really stands out. Probably because the list is editorially-led in the old school fashion; publisher William Schafer is guided by his own taste and enthusiasms, and he's built up relationships with many – I'd even say most – of the top names in genre fiction.

Subterranean also publishes regular short fiction in the form of the quarterly Subterranean Magazine. The Spring 2014 issue contains One Dove, a new story of mine featuring The Bedlam Detective's Sebastian Becker.

And the fiction content in the online version is free. You don't have to register, sign in, or even endure advertising.

Yep, I find it hard to get my head around, too.

But there it is; all you have to do is point your browser to the Subterranean website and click on the Subterranean Online tab. You'll get direct access to the content of the current number, and to all of the back issues you'll find there.

Or you could cheat and click here to go straight to One Dove.

If you should happen to have 10 hours to fill...

The Way the Future Was...

NASA ran an online vote in which people were invited to pick the design for the Z2 spacesuit. Although to be honest, the only real difference in the three choices was in some irrelevant bits of trim.

Those of us who grew up through SF's golden years will find the new look somewhat familiar...

Though I can't for the life of me figure where their inspiration might have come from.

Backlist Bonanza #1

Four of my backlist titles are lined up for launch, and the first of them is now up and available as an Amazon exclusive; Nightmare, with Angel will be followed over the coming weeks by ebook editions of White Bizango, The Spirit Box, and Red, Red Robin.

Nightmare, with Angel is the manhunt/Eurothriller that earned me the 'finest British writer of bestselling popular fiction to emerge since John le Carre' quote from John Williams in The Independent. It's been used by my publishers ever since and no one's ever heard me protesting. But I don't think anyone's ever sought out le Carre's opinion on the matter, either.

It's set in the months following German reunification. A while ago I posted an account of the research behind the book; if you weren't around for that, here it is again (or you can skip straight to it and find the book here).

Nightmares and Angels

Just after the Berlin Wall came down, I threw a bag into the back of the Volvo and drove down to the Hamburg ferry. Not quite as spontaneously as that, of course. I had a plan. I'd lined up meetings with Hamburg's Sex Crimes division and detectives in the Criminal Investigation department of the Dussseldorf police. I had places to look at, questions to ask, and a date with the Senior Pathologist in the morgue at Heinrich Heine University.

But in the most ambitious part of the trip, I headed East. Right across Germany, through the border, and into territory that had, only months before - weeks, even - been sealed off, self-contained, an enigma to the West.

For someone raised on spy fiction, this was no small deal. In Cold War mythology, East Germany was enemy territory. In reality the border was a zone of tension, and people died trying to cross it.

What I found was empty checkpoints, broken barriers, watchtowers with their windows stoned-in... there were concrete blocks that had been placed to prevent any vehicle from making a dash through, forcing the car into a zigzag path that no longer served any purpose. This once-fearsome locale now felt like a corner of an abandoned airfield, already becoming overgrown.

And what I found on the other side resembled the Britain of my earliest memories. It was as if time had stopped in the 1950s, which I suppose it pretty much had. Fields, farms, and villages were untouched. Where there was industry, it was like a concentrated dump of poison in an otherwise bucolic landscape. My most powerful visual memory is of the bright yellow hillsides of oilseed rape, unnatural in their intensity, a sight that always takes me back not only to the place, but to that precise time of the year.

I don't know what they must have made of the Volvo. At least half of the cars I saw on the road were Trabants, those tiny two-stroke polluters with bodyshells made of cotton waste and resin. The Volvo was a red 480 ES, one of those sports coupés with which they sometimes surprise the market, pictured here as it appeared in Bryan Talbot's The Tale of One Bad Rat. Driving around in it made me feel like Commander Straker in UFO.

I covered my checklist of sights and places, I gathered atmosphere and detail. It was all for a novel called Nightmare, with Angel.

 

I stayed in some odd places; one night in an inn where they kindly but apologetically gave me a tiny stockroom behind the bar with a bed in it, another in a workers' subsidised country vacation home, vast as the Overlook Hotel and just as empty. Along the way I found everything that I needed for the novel, and much that I'd never imagined. It didn't all find its way in, but it all made a difference. That's research for you.

I look back at some of the stuff I've done in the course of my career and wonder how I had the nerve. I had no one to guide me, I'd made no advance reservations. I didn't even speak any German. I did have a map and a phrasebook. I wasn't a complete idiot.

Here's how I began my pitch for the novel:

Imagine this.

You've got a nine year old girl who lives alone with her father in a big old house by the sea. Every day she looks more like her mother, and her mother was a tramp. Because of this her father all but ignores her, the woman who keeps house in the daytime also keeps her distance, and the child has to face a solitary life with only a scavenged photograph of her mother for comfort and a wishful image of what it might be like to be loved again. Her father isn't a hard man; but he's a mess, he's losing his grip, and he doesn't seem to see how he's losing his daughter as well. When he notices her, he's impossibly strict. But most of the time he's absorbed by his own bitterness, and he hardly notices her at all. Her days are long, and as bleak and empty as the coastal landscape around the house where she roams. With her father seemingly lost to her, she needs a father‑figure to take his place; and on the day that she falls into one of the big sea‑drains by the town dump and has to be rescued by a stranger, she thinks that she's found one.

His name is Ryan. He lives in a rented shack by the railway line and makes a living however he can; odd jobs, casual work, fixing up abandoned appliances, cleaning out aluminium cans and bagging them for scrap. He gets her out, he takes her home and, without waiting for thanks, he walks away.

But it isn't going to be so easy for him. 

So the story that swept all the way to the East began closer to home, on a part of the British seacoast that I knew quite well. Sunderland Point is one of those places that can only be reached by a causeway at low tide. Strange, desolate and charming, it's one of the most atmospheric places I know. At the time I was experimenting with one of those panoramic cameras that took a picture like a school photo. It was a format that somehow suited the landscape.

A couple of years later I traded in the sports coupe for a sensible family wagon. Lots of legroom for the rear seats, plenty of luggage space, and room for the dogs.

This year, I traded back.

Find the book here

Remember This?

Ah, Saturn 3. While I won't make any claims for its quality, it did play a crucial part in my early career - I novelised it during the ITV strike of 1979, and the experience was key to my going freelance a few months later. Until then I'd fitted my writing in around the day job, but this 75-day trial run persuaded me that I could both make it work and make a living. I was 25. Older me looks back in horror.

But it worked out, and the novelising gigs got me through some of the low spots. They could be good, fast money for the amount of time and effort involved. For a young writer it was hard to resist the impulse to improve on the material, to add scenes and characters and story to make 'a proper book'. On a couple of occasions (Silver Dream Racer, Warriors' Gate) I had my chain jerked and was told to restore my flight of literary fancy to something closer to the script.

There was a certain joy to the work, like a head-clearing run in the rain. Exercising those professional muscles, and just enjoying the exercise. I think that was a youth thing. I'd hate it now.

As well as these titles, I novelised one of my own radio serials and my two Doctor Who scripts. Regardless of the fact that the raw materials were already provided, a decent and professional job could put you on an editor's radar; Colin Murray, who commissioned Saturn 3 for Sphere, then bought my first real novel.

My slickest gig, I reckon, was the two Kids from Fame books, based on the '80s TV series. Twenty-six scripts arrived from MGM; the publisher's idea was that they'd make two books of 13 chapters each, one chapter per episode. Which clearly couldn't work because it would just be a compilation of synopses. So I split the scripts into two piles and combed through each, gathering elements for two new meta-stories. In 21 days I turned in two 50,000 word novels and picked up £4,000. They were published under the name of Lisa Todd; she got fanmail from kids in dance class, and I had to respond in character.

That was the most I ever made on a novelising job. Sometimes a deal could include a royalty - none of mine ever did, but a royalty on a tie-in with a movie hit could bring an unexpected payday. One fellow-scribe once told me how a Kevin Costner book-of-the-film paid for his house.

Are they endangered, or are novelisations actually extinct? I know that tie-ins and spinoffs still flourish, not to mention the rise of fan fiction to an industrial scale. But the script-into-book format, which was once the only way to relive and keep a souvenir of the viewing experience, was surely rendered obsolete by tape and DVD?

There's a fansite devoted to the making and appreciation of Saturn 3. You can find it here.

People have sidled up to me at conventions bearing a copy of the book. They expect I'll be embarrassed by it. I'm not.

UPDATE:

Here's something I once said on the subject, in an interview some time back:

It was just a gig, back in 1979. I was working for a TV company and the union called a strike which went on for twelve weeks. My agent came up with the job and I took it. I got a copy of the screenplay and two non-professional snapshots, one of the robot costume and one of a tunnel set. That was it. The script was terrible. I thought it was bad then but in retrospect, and with experience, I can see how truly inept it was. That may not be Amis' fault. Years later I met someone who'd worked on the production and she told me that every script doctor in town had taken an uncredited swing at it, so it's impossible to say whether it was stillborn or had been gangbanged to death. I did the straight piece of journeyman work I'd been hired for, turned it in, and banked the money. It's not my book, by any definition. It's more like a housepainting job. That's all novelisations are.

Read more

Coming this summer

For the first time in Ebook form:

Some of my best friends are...

Dogged by controversy after last year's all-male shortlist, the organisers of the Arthur C Clarke awards have responded in 2014 by raising the profile of female authors, publishing a separate list of the submissions from women writers.

Guardian Books Blog, January 17

When I served on the World Fantasy Awards jury a couple of years back, I saw a number of comments that our shortlist's 'gender balance' was tipped in favour of male writers.

The truth of it is that works by women dominated the early stages of the selection process. The catch being that each judge favoured different ones. When it came to distilling our individual lists through several stages to find consensus, that very diversity thinned the field. No way were we working a gender bias, conscious or unconscious. It was hard enough just to push our way through to a result that our process could show to be fair.

And, bottom line, we were discussing the works, not the authors.

Twisted Histories

Out now from Snowbooks, this themed anthology of original fiction includes a new story of mine, Blame the French.

"A selection of spine-tingling tales from some of today's finest horror writers."

You can buy it here