Here’s another chapter which didn’t make the final manuscript of Village in the Woods. Again, I really liked this chapter, despite the rather distressing subject matter. As with the other chapter I cut, it slowed down the pace of the novel, even if the tone of it fitted with the pervading sense of unease which…
I hear sounds in my head when I can’t sleep, sounds like the foghorns of ships lost in the gloom, ghost moans rising up from within, summoned like spectres from the deep recesses of my mind. The low funereal call of a ship’s horn far out at sea, it’s always been a comfort to me, like a calling from beyond the void, the assurance that life exists elsewhere, that it too is searching for another, for companionship, the reassurance of a life shared.
Tributaries and pools “Life is one long river,” my father would always say. “You’re born into it, and no matter how you might fight against it, you can never do anything to stop the river from taking you with it.” He used to say a lot did dad, and he was rarely ever wrong. The…
THE VILLAGE IN THE WOODS is my fifth novel, and has also been the monkey on my back for the past 18 months; the deceiver of hope, the denier of sleep, the jester of false fortune, the tester of patience. You get the idea. It’s been a difficult novel to write. This novel has seen…
THE DOVECOTE I was sitting next to Louise Tidwell the afternoon she threw herself from the dovecote. She had been the least loved of the three daughters, so it seemed right for her to die first. No one asked how she had come to be up on the roof, but everyone agreed it was a…
RIPPED is a novel that’s been hanging around since 2014. I wrote the first draft in a fevered rush after THE DAMNED had been picked up with my first publisher, Duckworth, riding high on hope and inspiration. In my eyes it was, and still is, the best thing I’ve ever written. So I was all…
