More classic weirdness

Just a quick reading update, to prove that I still exist as a blogging entity! Most recently, I’ve finished Transition by Iain Banks (or Iain M Banks, if you’re American). I’ve always felt that Banks’ mainstream work was at its best in the early days, when there was less of a division between it and [...]

Happy birthday, Herbert!

I’m a day or so off (it was actually yesterday), but here’s a little sketch celebrating good old H.G. Wells on the anniversary of his birthday. The War of the Worlds – not only the novel, but the 50s film and Jeff Wayne’s incomparable musical version – have been a huge influence on me down [...]

New short story up

“Let Me In, Let Me In” was salvaged from the opening sequence of Ragazze Finali, originally intended as the second story of the ‘Final Girls’ series. It started strongly enough, but ended up being such a direct pastiche of gialli that the fun rather fell out of it. Regardless, I was fond enough of the [...]

Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse

I think I’ll take a break from plugging my writings and bitching about the general state of horror today to consider Joss Whedon’s latest effort, ‘Dollhouse’. Again, I’ve come late to his work, having dismissed Buffy and Angel as adolescent bollocks when they were first released and despised his screenplay for Alien Resurrection with a [...]

Final Girls update

I’ve just dumped 11 pages of the original draft of ‘Final Girls Part Two’. I’d started it as a continuation of the first one, telling the tale of what happened in the immediate aftermath of the finale of the original short story. But the more I thought of it, the more I think it devalued [...]

Illustration for Final Girls

Spent a little bit of time this afternoon doing a ‘cover photo’ for the first episode of Final Girls. See below.
Ideally I’d like to give all of the episodes (and possibly all future stories) at least one image. I’m not the greatest artist in the world, but I think it helps people know what they’re [...]

Dead horses, and other woes

I had a rather depressing experience in Borders the other day. I don’t often shop for novels there (cheaper online) but I do like to go and have a look during my lunchbreak, just to see what’s new. They’ve never had the greatest of horror sections – two sides of two standing shelves on the [...]

And yet further new tales…

Quick update before bedtime. I’ve just posted another new story. Two in the space of a couple of days – I don’t think I’ve managed that rate of production for about ten years. Anyway, the new one is called ‘The Other One’ and is generally a lot shorter and more successful than ‘Beanfield’.
It came together [...]

Recent reading

Since finishing The Ceremonies (see below) I’ve cracked through a few very different pieces of work, all of which have their strong points. For a change of pace I went straight in to Dave Cullen’s Columbine, a work of non-fiction which proposes to be the definitive story of the 1999 school-shooting by Eric Harris and [...]

T.E.D Klein – The Ceremonies

It took me a while to investigate T.E.D Klein’s work in any great detail. I was aware of him, that he was held in high regard and that he’d been around for a while. That last point was what put me off investigating any further. I figured that since he’d been around since the 1970s [...]