INTERNATIONAL BURNS DAY I thought that it must have been International Burns Day with the victims on parade, their different scars on display. Marks I had not seen before. Hair up, showing pigmentless flesh below the ear. Flashmark along the arm. Puckered skin running down the rear of a shoulder. Are these the marks that […]
Very happy that my story “Build a better mousetrap” has been accepted by Hybrid Fiction magazine. I am looking forward to it seeing the light of day!
Oh dear Lord, now that I’ve typed his name up there, I feel like I will be expected to write a literary essay, coupled with genre pop culture street cred, and we all know that isn’t going to happen. ‘Chronic City’ was the first novel of his I read. What was this and why hadn’t […]
When he heard the cracking before the lights had even been doused — a noise he would later realize was the sound of small facial bones breaking — when he looked up and saw the man’s face turning into someone else’s, the boy stopped paying attention to the stuffed horse he had been pulling hair […]
If only the boy could talk. He had a tongue in his head: Joe had checked. What horrors had silenced it? The usual, probably. Not that I am counting or anything, but my 20th published story, Mid-life Crisis, is now live and available for your free reading pleasure at Chrome Baby magazine. When do we first […]
I guess ‘Zoltan – Hound of Dracula’ and ‘The Amazing Dobermans’ may have been on my mind when I entitled this story that has nothing to do with vampires or circus dogs or killer dogs, though there are dogs within it. It was published in Sci.Phi under the more sedate but possibly equally misleading title, […]
[HEY FOLKS, 3 months on this post is suddenly getting a lot of hits from all sorts of countries, I’d be happy if you could briefly let me know why! Many thanks] “And of course I’d lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn’t too late, there were novelists who didn’t get […]
The liminality of those places of parting, those dingy back rooms and midnight industrial areas! Something travelled through, passing from gap to gap … . It is not a tiger. It is not just appetite and the transfer of energy from one creature to another. It is not an alien maw descending from the ceiling […]
Read Kirsten Krauth While Andy Griffiths is now a global phenomenon for the wildly popular and hilarious books he writes with illustrator Terry Denton, it took years before his work reached an audience. Nick Cave was a particular inspiration. “He’s been lucky to do his own thing. And that’s probably what I value the most […]
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 […]
