My Wonder book of Snails and Slugs

My latest publication, My Wonder Book of Snails and Slugs, is available for your free reading pleasure (?) in the new edition of Penumbric. I think of it as a sometimes melancholy, sometimes sinister tale of love, loss and survival, and also of snails, a sea of slugs, a sea monster, bat faced cardigan monkeys […]

Highly competent loners, what’s not to like?

The opening of “The Old Man” with Jeff Bridges as an older gentleman experiencing a home invasion who turns the tables with unexpected hidden talents got me in. The darkness of the imagined scene where he efficiently kills off innocent police officers and his evening’s date just to avoid detection, kept me there. I ended […]

A meagre homage

JG Ballard died in 2009 on April 19 (I am a tad late to say ‘OTD’). I read his “The Voices of Time” in a paperback collection edited by Damien Knight, 100 Years of Science Fiction. (I was very happy to buy those two volumes, by the way, in the mid-70s, with part of the […]

The Luge! The Luge!

For your Winter Olympics reading pleasure in the short breaks between episodes of The Curling (not a Laird Barron novel), why not read my story with a title that threatens to break the Twitter character limit, “The murder of Father Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin considered as the single men’s Olympics Luge final“? A story that manages […]

Story #26 – “The Time-Traveller’s lament”

May I recommend for your reading … pleasure? … my most recent publication, and my final for 2021 (and who knows, perhaps my final ever?), The Time-Traveller’s Lament ? So many things to say about this, for a change. Thanks to the folks at Sci-Phi Journal. This is the second story of mine they have […]

Testostero

The opening of the first paragraph of Testostero by David Foster may be the most Australian thing* I have ever read, and it is not even set here: The most astounding feature of Venice to Noel Horniman, who at age forty is seeing it for the first time, is not the architecture – which seems […]

Horror as optimism

I knew what books she liked … – gloomy horror stories, Gothic novels with crumpled covers featuring a drawing of a Bat. Perverted monks, severed hands that murder people, coffins flushed out of graveyards by floods. Evidently reading this sort of thing confirmed her in the conviction that we are not living in the worst […]