Damnation Games in the house…

Damnation Games in the house…

Look what the postie brought, just in time for Christmas! Chuffed to have my story Men Without Faces in this anthology of crime and supernatural horror, alongside some of my favourite authors in the genre. Big thanks to Alan Baxter for the invitation and pulling this beast together.

Damnation Games cover
Extract from the story Men Without Faces
Ambiguity is the essence of the supernatural (Vol.1 Brooklyn)

Ambiguity is the essence of the supernatural (Vol.1 Brooklyn)

Ariadne, I Love You – Blog Tour

Have you ever seen a ghost? Or heard one? Maybe not. But perhaps you’ve had some experience or other you couldn’t easily explain, some weird occurrence which you mull on even now. Did it happen the way you remember? Or did you imagine it? That ambiguity, unfocused and inconclusive, is the essence of what we think of as the supernatural.

Read the full article at Vol.1 Brooklyn.

On The Line

On The Line

The toy phone shrilled and shrilled.

Mike watched his daughter from behind the Sunday paper. He’d started on the crossword, but the sound of the phone hacked at his concentration like jagged glass. He tried to focus on the grid, at the handful of words inked in blue biro, but his attention was across the room, on the play mat with Janie and the damn phone. She’d found it in the 50c box at Vinnies, a lump of red and yellow plastic moulded to look like an old-school flip-top mobile. She loved that toy phone almost as much as Mike hated it.

With every chirrup, Mike felt his tenuous calm splinter. Janie had been playing with that bloody thing non-stop since they got back last month, and it was really starting to grate.

“Hello, Janie speaking.”

It didn’t seem to bother Mandi. She had a talent for tuning out all that was unpleasant in the world, leaving only those details that kept her happy: coffee, music, the mysteries of the human heart, and the wonder of their angelic, sandy-haired Janie. But he just didn’t have Mandi’s patience. No matter how hard he tried to ignore the bleeps and ditties of every bit of plastic crap Janie was given each year, something always cut through, always managed to jangle his nerves, sustaining that constant of low-level stress, which along with the never-to-be-satisfied hunger for sleep, seemed to define Mike’s experience of parenthood…

On The Line was shortlisted for an Aurealis Award for Best Horror Short Story in 2017.

Read more in Issue 12 of Midnight Echo.