Too often I just settle, but now I wanted more. I find it easy to commit, I’m prepared to put in the hard yards once the initial blush has worn off, but it occurred to me, why am I doing this even when there was no fist blush. Back in university days, a friend studying […]
Pretty chuffed to see my story ‘Crop Rotation’, included by Ellen Datlow in her long list of honourable mentions of horror stories for 2016, associated with volume 9 of The Best Horror of the Year. I was very happy that ‘Crop Rotation’ was published in the anthology ‘At the Edge‘, edited by Lee Murray and […]
Hanging out with HP Lovecraft and Ramsey Campbell, amongst others …
I was saving Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series of Belfast noir novels for a longer post. However. Fighting sleep. Must do something. Just spent 31 hours airport to airport Sydney to Amsterdam. Had #4 in the series, Gun Street Girl with me. The only complaint was that I finished it before Hong Kong. There’s a […]
I have not read the Booker prize winning Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, but why should that stop me … from commenting on another book completely, The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. The main connection between him and the Booker which springs to mind is that blurbs on books […]
There’s sex and too much religion. This one is hard to judge as it’s hard to “get”. Thank you ABC Australia for your ever so incisive assessment of Emily Fridlund’s “History of Wolves”*. There’s “sex”, is there? That’s unusual. Some “sex” in a modern novel, hmmm. But not too much, apparently. Nor not enough. Just “sex”. […]
In centuries to come, when literary experts comment upon my oeuvre, as they no doubt shall, they will remark of my Dutch period that my characters spend much of their time climbing up or down stairs, and complaining about aches in their legs. In the words of Dr Zachary Smith, the pain, the pain … […]
Dear Mr Kim Newman, I am very glad at all the Anno Dracula books, even though years ago I had to work hard to track down the original so now I have two, and I keep telling myself no, you don’t have to have the paperback of Johnny Alucard to go with the others just […]
Great news – At the Edge, a wonderful anthology of speculative fiction by New Zealand (New Zealandian?) and Australian writers, won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Collected Work. And you will immediately see my self interest at work when I congratulate editors Lee Murray and Dan Rabarts for their win, and thank them […]
Watched: The Dressmaker – how had I not seen it before? It was compulsory viewing for all Australians, but I must have been on shrimp-tossing duties that day. It made me want Kate Winslet to love me, the way she automatically and effortlessly fell in love with Liam Hemsworth. A bonus was that I have […]
Nobody is looking 