NOT JUST ON KINDLE

 

Many of my eBooks are available exclusively on Amazon Kindle, but not all of them by any means. My big Californian crime thriller The Tribe from Cemetery Dance Publications can be had from a wide variety of different outlets, as can earlier supernatural novels such as the Havana-based Tropic of Darkness from Simon & Schuster.

Plenty of good reading for the New Year then, even if you're not on Kindle.

                                   SEE THESE eBOOKS ON B&N NOOK

                                        SEE THESE eBOOKS ON KOBO                

AVAILABLE TO READ ON KINDLE UNLIMITED

I've already talked on this blog about my 2 collections specially compiled for KU readers. For science fiction fans there are the 15 stories - some of them good long ones - in UNLIMITED FUTURES.

And for aficionados of the darker arts there are the horror, supernatural and dark fantasy tales contained in CHILLS UNLIMITED ...  not only 15 stories in this book but 2 complete short novels too. But they are not the only works of mine included in the KU scheme.

There's my newest collection of dark and horror fiction, NIGHTCRAWLER & OTHER TALES OF DARKNESS.

There are all 6 - so far - full-length novels in my RAINE'S LANDING FANTASY SERIES, adventures set in an isolated Massachusetts town that's filled with magic, both the good kind and the very bad, and trapped under a witch's curse. In fact, the first five novels in the series can be read on KU in a single eBook, THE RAINE'S LANDING NOVELS 1-5.

Sticking with the supernatural theme, there are short novels of mine that are available too under this scheme. THE NIGHT MANAGER for instance, set in an old Victorian hotel that has some very scary - and inhuman - guests.

And then there is one of my personal favorites, UNDER THE ICE. Set in Helsinki, Finland, in the dead of winter, it's a re-visitation of the revenant theme. The website Horror Novel Reviews named it as one of their Best Ten Novels of the year.

For those of you who like their fiction imaginative but not so dark, there's THE ELECTRIC SHAMAN, set in a futuristic very modern Africa and featuring the Zimbabwe-based detective Lieutenant Abel Enetame.

And for those who prefer their detective fiction straight up there's THE DESERT KEEPS ITS DEAD, a hard-boiled thriller set in Arizona in the present day.

Back to the supernatural theme, but definitely with a far lighter touch this time. The 4 stories in TOUCHED BY MAGIC: HUMAN DRAMAS IN THE PARANORMAL WORLD have fantasy at their heart, but of a more humane, even romantic kind.

 

And if you're simply looking for a quicker read, many of my individual short stories are also available on KU ... superhero fiction like RAYVEN BLACK IN THE CITY OF NIGHT, ghost stories like THE WOMAN IN BROWN and many more.

YOU CAN FIND THEM ALL BY CHECKING OUT THE FULL LIST OF MY WORK ON KINDLE

A BRAND-NEW COLLECTION OF CHILLING FICTION

Anyone familiar with my work will know that short stories are a pretty major part of my output. My tales have appeared in almost anywhere from Weird Tales and Cemetery Dance to Asimov's SF, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and even ... wait for it ... Woman Magazine. And that's just periodicals. They've also cropped up in lots of online mags and some prestigious anthologies.

Top independent publisher Dark Regions Press put together 4 collections of this shorter fiction, Shadows and Other Tales, Our Lady of the Shadows, The Universal and Other Terrors, and the extended US version of my award-shortlisted British collection Going Back.

But now there is a brand-new book of my stories available. And when I say "brand-new," I really mean it.

In the first place, NIGHTCRAWLER & OTHER TALES OF DARKNESS contains stories of mine you might have missed because they appeared not in horror/supernatural outlets but in publications such as  Hitchcock's or the Postscripts series from PS Publishing.

But in the second place, it also has 7 new stories that were written specially for this collection and have never been seen before in any sort of print. One of them (see below) is WHAT DONNIE WANTS, offered for Free just a short while back. The others are THE PEOPLE IN THE GLASS (my newest twist on traditional ghost fiction), SADIE, THE MASK, THE EMPTY ROOM, my latest Birchiam tale MEDUSA, and the title story itself ... NIGHTCRAWLER.

It's been a good few years in the writing, but NIGHTCRAWLER & OTHER TALES OF DARKNESS is now available on Kindle, through Kindle Unlimited, or as a handsome paperback.

TAKE A LOOK AT THIS BRAND-NEW COLLECTION

SCI-FI & DARK FANTASY FOR KINDLE UNLIMITED READERS

I've been away from here a while ... I know that. But as it turns out lockdowns are extremely weird things, with some aspects of your normal life getting mysteriously overlooked. And this blog has proved to be one of them.

But now I'm back, and with fresh news.

I have numerous collections out on Kindle, but not one of them until this date has been eligible for Kindle Unlimited. And the reason for that omission is a very simple one. Books can only be available through KU if all of the material contained in them appears on Kindle and no other platform (which is precisely why you can't read Stephen King or James Patterson as part of your membership). And every last collection that I've put out till this point has stories in it that are equally available from the same publishers who put out them in eBook form in the first place, Dark Regions in the US, The Alchemy Press in the UK, and so on.

So I've finally decided I should put that right. UNLIMITED FUTURES is a a huge collection of my science fiction work. And if you're into horror, supernatural stuff and dark fantasy tales, then CHILLS UNLIMITED gives you 15 short stories and 2 complete short novels, and every single word of both these massive books can be read via your subscription to KU.

Oh, as a brief final note, other eBook fiction of mine can also be read through Kindle Unlimited, the 6 full-length novels (so far) in my Raine's Landing supernatural thriller series for instance.

                                         TAKE A LOOK AT UNLIMITED FUTURES HERE

                                          TAKE A LOOK AT CHILLS UNLIMITED HERE

ADVICE ON WRITING FICTION ... FREE

The extended edition of my handbook HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WRITING: THE ART OF CREATING PROFESSIONAL FICTION is Free on Kindle again, just for this weekend. If you are an aspiring author, or even a working one, grab yourself a copy.

                                               YOU CAN GET ONE RIGHT HERE

FOR PAPERBACK READERS

When eBooks like Kindle first started becoming popular, an awful lot of folks predicted that the humble paperback book would disappear completely, and in a few years too. Which has definitely not turned out to be the case. eBooks are a very big deal these days, surely. But the humble mass market p/b is still around and thriving, not to mention its larger cousin the trade paperback, which has largely replaced the hardbacked novel.

There are still loads of readers who simply prefer something tangible between their fingertips, the smell of paper and of print, the history and memories behind all that. And with that in mind, I have five offerings here that are easily within most people's pockets.

STORIES WITH A STING IN THE TAIL does exactly what it says on the cover. 12 tales of mystery, suspense and fear from the pages of magazines like Hitchcock's and Cemetery Dance, each of them with a twist ending. Black Static magazine's top critic Peter Tennant has compared these stories to the work of Roald Dahl. Tales of the Unexpected indeed. $6.99/£5.99.

CLASSIC PAN & FONTANA HORROR contains horror and ghost fiction mostly from the 1980s when those three famous anthology series Pan Horror, Fontana Horror and Fontana Ghosts were still in their heyday. But there's also fiction from that period from collections edited by Mary Danby and by Richard Davis and even a story from the 1980s F&SF, back when that magazine was at its best. And this book concludes with my tale from the 2010 Back From the Dead: The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror. $7.99/£6.99.

My ghost novel THE NIGHT MANAGER is next. It's centred round a once-successful writer who checks into an old grand Victorian hotel to complete what he hopes might be his comeback novel. It's way off season and the hotel seems deserted ... but it's not as empty as it first appears. A definite touch of Stephen King's The Shining here, although it is not at all the same story. $5.99/£4.99.

If you're into either science fiction or mystery fiction, here's the one for you. The central character of THE ELECTRIC SHAMAN is a police detective lieutenant for sure, solving murders, kidnappings and other crimes. But he's doing all of that in a united Federal Africa of the future, that great continent massively changed. The book takes the form of five long stories, each of their narratives connected, and four of them originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. $7.99/£6.99.

Set in Finland in the depths of midwinter but with a British central character, my supernatural novel UNDER THE ICE has been through a number of incarnations. Appearing first from UK publisher Sarob, it was then released in the US by Samhain. The Horror Novel Reviews site subsequently named it as one of the 10 Best Novels of the year. $5.99/£4.99.

Plenty of books for your shelves then, whatever your favorite style of fiction.

CLASSIC BRITISH HORROR

In the world of genre magazines and anthology series, there are always a precious few that take on what can honestly be called a legendary status. When it comes to science fiction, then it's Amazing Stories in the States and New Worlds in the UK. And when it comes to supernatural and horror fiction? Weird Tales, obviously, in the US. But there is a Brit equivalent to that.

The Pan Book of Horror Stories is an anthology series that ran yearly from 1959 to 1989, all but the last five editions under the editorship of publisher Herbert van Thal. It featured top authors like Stephen King and Ray Bradbury and even the occasional tale by such literary big guns as Muriel Spark and Ian McEwan, but it became first and foremost a showcase for brand-new talent. It sold in huge numbers and is still revered by horror fans to this very day (thirty years on) with numerous websites dedicated to it.

Running a close second were The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories and The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, both of them also yearly and the latter edited by that excellent author of spooky fiction Robert Aikman before passing on the stewardship to Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes, another genre great.

And it was in these three outlets that I first cut my teeth as a fledgling writer. Here are those stories and others from that period, each with its own introduction as to how it made it into print.

                                              FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

                                                  Also available on KOBO and NOOK