If you thought I just wrote dark and scary fiction then you couldn't be more wrong.
Touched By Magic: Human Dramas in the Paranormal World has 3 long stories and 1 short one, all of them exploring the gentler, more humane and more romantic aspects of the supernatural world. And they're set in great locations too, including Tokyo, the Southern Japanese island of Kyushu and the Malaysian island of Penang.
All of this fiction can now be read via Kindle Unlimited.
An awful lot of my eBooks on Kindle haven't been eligible for KU up till now.
But that situation has dramatically changed this week and now almost all my fiction can be read by people on the KU scheme.
Let's start with 3 horror collections:
Three Dozen Terrifying Tales is my top-selling Kindle in the UK (with fans in Germany and India too) and has picked up simply dozens of top rating and reviews. If you haven't come across this huge collection previously, here's your chance to find out why that is.
Classic Pan & Fontana Horror is quite well-regarded too. Stories from 3 famous UK anthology series, The Pan Book of Horror, The Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories and the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, plus tales from other mags and anthos of the decade, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in its heyday under Ed Ferman's editorship.
And last but not least, Dark Futures: Sf meets Horror for those of you who like to vary their palate with a little taste of fusion fiction.
My popular eBook 13 Ghost Stories is now available in a newly-revised paperback. And are they all the same kind of ghost story, as you get with so many other collections? No ... 13 completely different takes on the theme of beings that exist beyond life and time, including my full-length novella Postcards From Terri, a very unusual kind of haunting indeed.
It might surprise you if you're not familiar with the writing scene, but there's an awful lot of crossover between those who write crime fiction and those who write horror. Here in the UK, authors who are members of the British Fantasy Society (nine-tenths horror writers these days) are often members of the Crime Writers' Association too ... and I'm sure that must be equally true in the US.
Not quite so surprising when you really think about it. Writers like John Connelly and England's Stephen Leather frequently blur the line between straight crime tales and supernatural awfulness. And even Stephen King has had a couple of good stabs at writing crime.
But here's the point I'm really trying to get to. I've attended plenty of events put on by both those groups, the BFS and the CWA. So have many of the horror writers that I know. And usually, those horror guys come back from a crime meeting chuckling and smirking. "I don't believe it," they keep saying. "Those guys think they're really dark. They don't have the faintest clue what dark fiction really is."
The assumption being that horror fiction -- with its Nameless Dreads, its Lovecraftian Terrors, its lightless writhings and spectral iciness -- is naturally the darker style of fiction. And yes, I used to believe that too.
That was until I started working on my second straight crime novel, The Tribe, the follow-up to my first detective tale The Desert Keeps Its Dead. I was about twelve chapters into that when I stopped with a sudden jolt, a startled realization taking hold of me.
"Hold it just a second," was the thought that started going through my head. "When I sit down to write a horror story, I'm describing awful things for sure ... but awful things that mostly cannot happen and mostly never will. A lake cannot come alive. People cannot be re-animated. Sea creatures can't look like human beings (and I've done that more than once)."
"But just take a look at what I'm writing now. People being badly and deliberately harmed. People being terrorized, kidnapped, even killed. These are awful things as well ... but things that really happen in the real world all the time."
Crime fiction is massively more popular than horror stuff, not only in book form but in movies and TV, but is the type that deals with death and murder really any lighter or more pleasant? Hannibal Lector, a flesh-eating monster in a human body? James Patterson's repellent sexual psychopaths? The bleak oppressive grimness of most Nordic Noir? The elaborate and gruesome demonology of Criminal Minds?
It's not just writers who cross over, it's their subject matter. And it happens in real life as well. Just this week in the UK a harmless-looking young man was sentenced to life for stabbing to death (frantically) a pair of sisters who he came across in a public park. He didn't even know them, and so why do that? He believed he'd made a deal with the Devil ... if he killed enough young women he would win the Lottery (and do much better on the dating scene, just as an added bonus).
Unbelievable, but it really happened. Horrible, but true. And it's that one word, 'true.' that's at the heart of this discussion.
Horror fiction might be a lot more graphic in the way that it describes appalling stuff, except that what's being described exists only in imaginary terms. You're never going to fall foul of a vampire or a zombie or a ghoul. But serial killers really are out there. So are psychotic lunatics. Not to mention all those guys who have no feeling for their fellow beings and would hurt or kill them just to make a tidy buck, or even sometimes just for fun.
And all of those things being true, the suffering of its characters based on genuine human anguish, crime fiction (or a lot of it at least) has to be regarded as in many ways the darker genre.
It's taken a good long while (and the pandemic helped slow it down even further) but the seventh novel in my series set in the fictional town of Raine's Landing, Massachusetts, is now available in paperback and Kindle.
Why did the pandemic slow it down? Like most writers, I need a calm environment when I am working on a full-length book. What's required is an unbroken string of weeks when I can settle down peacefully and concentrate on the writing and getting all the details of the story right. That applies to every single draft, and CIRCUS OF LOST SOULS went through 14.
And in the first few months of this outbreak, I hardly felt calm or settled, so I set this book aside and concentrated on short stories instead, most of those appearing in my new collection NIGHTCRAWLER.
If you're not familiar with Raine's Landing, Mass, it is a most peculiar town indeed, filled with magic of the good kind and the bad and trapped under an unbreakable witch's curse. And it gets some dangerous visitors from time to time. TWO of them in this particular novel.
I won't say any more about the book than that. Not yet, at least. CIRCUS OF LOST SOULS is now available in paperback, on Kindle, and through Kindle Unlimited.
TAKE A CLOSER LOOK AT CIRCUS OF LOST SOULS
A collection of mine on Kindle usually contains a mix of horror fiction, dark fantasy tales, and with a couple of ghost stories thrown in for good measure. But not this time.
15 CHLLING HORROR STORIES does exactly what it says on the tin. The horror, the whole horror, and nothing but the horror.
And it includes fiction that I've never collected in eBook form before, tales like 'The Universal' from my most recent Dark Regions Press collection, 'The Garbage Men' from The Alchemy Press Book of Horrors, and the original, unedited version of 'Across The Tracks,' which first appeared in an anthology a few years back.
Originally published by Samhain in the States, HOT BLOOD is now on Amazon Kindle. Here's what it's about:
Two immortal creatures have arrived in New York City. One of them is Tanya Merrit, the last of the Ykrall, a magical race that lives among and depends on human beings ... they take a little of their blood, so to enhance their powers.
But the other is Janos Wolkran, an ancient and extremely deadly vampire. He has brought with him a brood of servants, people who he has converted into lesser beings, each of them existing solely for his bidding.
Except that one of them is dying right now. And looking for a new replacement, Wolkran's gaze alights on Tanya's human lover, Kathy Harrison. And when he steals her away and takes her with him, Tanya finds herself launched on a desperate pursuit that will lead her most of the way round the world ... and then even further.
But as Kathy is infected and begins to transform, the most appalling of all questions starts to raise its head ... can anything be done to change her back?
And HOT BLOOD is a truly epic story, starting on the East Coast but then moving on to a small Central American republic in the middle of a civil war (based partly on my own experiences in that part of the world back in the 1980s) before heading off to Eastern Europe ... Prague, Budapest and then the Carpathian Mountains.
And this weekend I'm offering it Free as an introduction to my other work.
GET YOUR FREE COPY OF HOT BLOOD HERE