I ate a decaying cow. It had fallen down a hill, and was stuck between rocks, its head twisted round. It had been there some time. I tore at its distended belly, made an exit for the gases. I stuck my whole head in, felt it deflate until its innards pressed against me and I […]
(Be patient, I do get around to recommending stuff to read somewhere in here eventually …) Candice Carty-Williams is spot on, at least for me, when she warns re self-isolation: 1) Don’t go out and buy a thousand books. Much like holiday reading, you almost certainly won’t get through them all. Your to-be-read pile will […]
Some Corner of a Dorset Field that is Forever Arabia
A cop vibe first, then, no: junkie. Both? Whatever: the guy gave off weird. Then he proved it by waving a naked stump at Tati, the melted remnant of his handless arm clubbing the air near her face. Ahh, prescription pain killers, and now she was all ready for a confab, to compare notes, when […]
Armstrong in bedArmstrong looked at her lying beside him, asleep. She was grainy in the moonlight, a black and white photograph magnified a thousand times for forensic examination, revealing a pyramid on Mars, a face on the moon. … He rubbed her flank, distant. She did not stir. The night smoothed the edges. His dull […]
Three stories published in 2019, all available free for your reading pleasure: The Final Hypotheses of Professor G in Silverblade (a companion story to My life as a lizard, The Boulevardier, and Mr Cranky) KAIJU! in Fleas on the Dog (to quote the publisher: “WHY WE LIKE IT: As lovers of all types of writing […]
It was another one of those dead men, Anthony Burgess, who recommended Lanark to me. Not me personally, but through his book, Ninety-Nine Novels. Burgess was of course just one of many hundreds of people with whom I held conversations in my head, given the number of his books I read back then, one of […]
He had an excellent innings, but still sad. The elderly Glaswegian pedestrian Alasdair Gray has passed away.
I am neither Oklahoman nor pagan, but the folks at Oklahoma Pagan Quarterly have graciously awarded me first place in the fiction section of their Spooky Samhain contest, for my horror story, Born Free (click on the link to read it for free. Free Born Free. Sigh.). Born Free is set in a little universe […]
Is resilience a virtue? I certainly think so. Its a characteristic, its positive, and it is something I greatly admire. I admired it on a comic book level as a young fellow watching Lethal Weapon – Mel Gibson not simply succumbing to a torturer, and then Mel Gibson racing on foot to chase a car. […]
Nobody is looking 