Cover of the next issue of Trevor Kennedy's anthology series Gruesome Grotesques revealed.

Here is the amazing cover for the next bumper issue of Trevor Kennedy's anthology series Gruesome Grotesques, subtitled this time Carnival of Freaks.

Included will be my story Three Eyed Jack. 

This is due to be published on the 4th October. 

Book Reviews

I have created a new page on my blog with links to all the book reviews I have written over the past few years. 

Whenever any new reviews are published I'll add these to this page. 

My Review of Sleep No More by L. T. C. Rolt

My review appeared in Phantasmagoria magazine # 19

SLEEP NO MORE – Railway, Canal & Other Stories of the Supernatural by L. T. C. Rolt

Introduction by Susan Hill

The History Press 2013 (First published 1948)

Perhaps better known for his association and eventual break up with Robert Aickman in the Inland Waterways Association, which did so much to save and restore our canal system, Rolt may also have had an influence on Aickman with this splendid collection of ghost stories – though, like M. R. James, the term ghost is used loosely, as the forces at work within these tales are often far more demonic.

Susan Hill, in her Introduction, makes special mention of one particular story, Cwm Garon. And this, I must concur, is my favourite tale, with its echoes of Machen and even Algernon Blackwood – there is one paragraph in particular that puts me in mind of Blackwood’s masterpiece The Willows. It also has one of the most chilling of closing paragraphs I have ever come across, hinting at worse to come after the story has “ended”. But in truth, none of these stories are poor, and a few are quite outstanding.

Hawley Bank Foundry, for instance, is a great example of Rolt’s expert knowledge of industrial places being put to good use, with this generational tale of something inexplicable within the ruins of an old Victorian foundry which, because of the needs of the Second World War, is restored to working order again – with dire consequences! I can not only see and feel this place, I can smell it too.

Rolt was a practical man, an engineer, who wrote about iconic figures such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Robert Stephenson, and Thomas Telford, and that shows in many of his stories, effortlessly adding details which make their settings incredibly well realised, especially mines, tunnels, ironworks, etc., and at the same time lending a semblance of added credibility to the supernatural elements he introduces to them.

Many of his stories are also set in isolated places, especially the Welsh mountains, the west coast of Ireland or the wilds of Scotland, places with which he was obviously familiar as a hiker, and into which the intrusion of the strange, the unknown, of malevolently hostile supernatural forces make what is already sometimes a difficult place to survive even worse. 

There are just fourteen tales in this collection. After I had finished reading them I wished for more. In my opinion Rolt is certainly up there with the best names in the genre and I hope one day his stories will be better known. I can’t believe it has taken me all these years to read them! I’ll certainly reread them again someday. 

 

My review of John Shirley's A Sorcerer of Atlantis

This review was published in the current issue of Phantasmagoria magazine. 

A SORCERER OF ATLANTIS with A PRINCE IN THE KINGDOM OF GHOSTS by John Shirley

£20.00 paperback; £4.24 Kindle

Published by Hippocampus Press, 305 pages

The bulk of this book (220 pages) is taken up with a three-part novel A Sorcerer of Atlantis, which tells the story of Brimm the Savant, his close friend Snoori, and Selinn of Ur, who is a swordswoman and princess and someone with whom not to argue. Brimm was originally a not particularly ardent student of Urgus the Enchanter, from whom he learned a few rudimentary spells before deciding to embark with his friend, a fellow Hyperborean, to fabled Atlantis, which is when things begin to go wrong. Instead of being taken onboard as passengers on a galley sailing south they find themselves unexpectedly shanghaied as slaves chained to the ship’s oars. It turns out that these two hapless adventurers have an unfortunate knack for leaping from the frying pan into an even worse plight, including as sacrifices to the half-human, half-octopoid demon-princess Cleito, who becomes their arch enemy, along with the hideous mermen followers of the god Poseidon. Moving at a rapid pace, Brimm and Snoori’s fortunes rise and wane as they toil across Atlantis and become unwittingly embroiled in monstrous plans to destroy the island.

Humour is mixed with high adventure and bloody skirmishes, with homages to both Howard and Lovecraft on the way.

I found the main protagonists engaging in their attempts to save Atlantis – and the evil mermen are a wonderfully horrific menace, given to eating their victims alive as they scream in agony!

The final part of this book, A Prince in the Kingdom of Ghosts (68 pages) is a completely different sort of fantasy. Set in the present day, Kerrin Kim is a Korean American who works as a diamond cutter, like his father before him. And like his father suddenly dies at a young age, awakening to find he is a prince in an outlandishly strange world inhabited by ghosts and other spirits. Here he learns that his late father is the king but was inexplicably cut down only a short time before by a mysterious poison that has left him in a coma. Bewildered to find that his father is still alive whole decades after he died on Earth, Kerrin is drawn into a bewildering conflict that has him completely confused over which side to support. It is a bizarre tale of ghostly intrigues, with real-life protagonists like Boadicea and Marcus Aurelius thrown in. It is definitely one of the strangest stories I have ever read, but amazingly well conceived by John Shirley who manages to tie all its oddities together in an impressive way.

I am not really sure why it was decided to publish these two particular tales in one volume, as the swords and sorcery story of Atlantis is certainly long enough to have been published as standalone novel. And A Prince in the Kingdom of Ghosts, though an excellent fantasy, is not a swords and sorcery story. Put together they are an odd meld of two sub-genres. Still, they are both worth reading and are definitely entertaining in their different ways, so if you don’t mind mixing your genres like this it’s no problem. 

 

Baal the Necromancer accepted by Mythic magazine

Pleased to have just received an email from the editor of Mythic magazine accepting one of the few fantasy stories I have ever written, a sort of sword and sorcery tale called Baal the Necromancer.

This will be my second story to appear in Mythic magazine. The first was A Grim God's Revenge in the Fall issue of 2017.

 

 

 

Latest issue of Phantasmagoria has an interview with me, plus a short story, five reviews and an illustration!

The latest issue of Phantasmagoria has an interview with me, plus a short story, five reviews and an illustration!

Phantasmagoria #19 is now available through amazon, other internet outlets, plus some branches of Forbidden Planet.

The short story is The Last Coach Trip, much of which was based on annual trips to Ripon races by Bold Street Working Men's Club in the early 80s. They were great days out - though none ended quite like this! According to Trevor Kennedy it is a very poignant tale.

The illustration was the cover for an issue of David A. Sutton's iconic fanzine Shadow.  

There is also a glowing and satisfyingly in depth review by Trevor Kennedy of Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 2. 

My artwork

A video I created about The Return

 Here's a brief video I created about my Lovecraftian crime-noir horror novel The Return. 

 

My review of Called By Cthulhu: The Eldritch Art of Dave Carson

My review of Called by Cthulhu: The Eldritch Art of Dave Carson was broadcast by Trevor Kennedy on his midday show on Big Hits Radio UK last Sunday and will be published in the next issue of Phantasmagoria magazine, due later this week.

Here it is in full:

CALLED BY CTHULHU: THE ELDRITCH ART OF DAVE CARSON

Shoggoth Press, 2021

Dave Carson's magnum opus, Called by Cthulhu, contains nearly all of the artist’s illustrations for the past 50 years, much of it in the Lovecraftian Mythos vein for which he is famous.

I have loved Dave’s artwork ever since I first came across it back in the day. And indeed, when I took over editorship of the British Fantasy Society’s newsletter Prism in 2010, the first artist I contacted for a cover was Dave Carson, who immediately and generously provided me with a wonderful illustration called “De Vermis Mysteriis” (see page 261).

Measuring 10 x 6 3/4 inches and 384 pages long, Called by Cthulhu is a large soft cover book with hundreds of Dave Carson's amazingly distinctive black and white pictures, including, I was pleased to find, the illustration I commissioned for issue 1 of Beyond magazine which I edited and published in 1995, for Karl Edward Wagner's story Gremlin (see page 219). It was one of the last stories Karl ever wrote and sadly wasn't published until after he died the year before. I know Dave struggled over this illustration because, a close friend of Karl’s, he was still deeply upset at his death. Nevertheless, he forged ahead and created an unforgettable illustration I was proud to publish.  

The book opens with an Introduction by Neil Gaiman, who enlivens it with some fascinating anecdotes, including the time he saw Dave on a panel at the 1983 British Fantasy Convention. After heavyweight notables Karl Edward Wagner, George Hay and Ramsey Campbell had finished expounding their views on “Lovecraftian subtext”, Dave was asked for his comments, to which he typically responded: “Fuck that, I just like drawing monsters.” Despite this amusingly modest rejoinder, Gaiman goes on to conclude that “the magic of Dave Carson’s monsters is that he loves them, and each drawing and each sculpture becomes a love letter to the night side, something perfect and true, that manages, remarkably, to communicate that love to us.” I fully concur. And its truth can be seen from the amazing amount of meticulous detail with which he creates each illustration, painstakingly constructing a thing of intricate, outlandish beauty dot by well-placed dot. The artistic talent and immense patience he must possess in drawing these is nothing short of awesome.

Called by Cthulhu is a book to pore over page by page, to take in and appreciate the skill with which each illustration has been created, and the unenviable hours of arduous work that has gone into them. Dave is a magnificent artist, whose illustrations are an endless delight to behold. 

 

Both Called by Cthulhu and Phantasmagoria are available from Amazon.