PALADIN FLIES AGAIN

The new expanded edition of The Paladin Mandates is now out from Pro Se Press. In addition to "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" (which was only in the original Kindle edition), and "Deck the Halls" (published in the Occult Detective Monster Hunter anthology in 2015) there are two pieces unique to this new edition: "Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking" and "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf".

Available in paperback and Kindle from Amazon US and Amazon UK

IT'S PHANTASTIC

It’s all happening as 2020 kicks off. No sooner is Stephen Jones’ THE LOVECRAFT SQUAD: RISING published, but Trevor Kennedy’s PHANTASMAGORIA magazine is running a special (#2, if we’re counting) based around the book and Lovecraft. Among its many delights will be a brief life and times of one Damian Paladin – which means I get to share cover billing with some quite delightful people. Probably be the one and only time, so I’d best make the most of it (and since it’s alphabetical, I get to be on top).

PHANTASMAGORIA #14 will also include my short story “Chasing the Dragon” (originally published in Emby Press’s SUPERHERO MONSTER HUNTER: THE GOOD FIGHT), and elsewhere in that issue there may even be some of my artwork. So don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Both mags will be available later in March, with an official launch at StokerCon, Scarborough, in April.

Also launching at StokerCon is THE ALCHEMY PRESS BOOK OF HORRORS 2: STRANGE STORIES AND WEIRD TALES. Damian Paladin – along with Leigh Oswin, Andy Raven, and Leo Saint-Germain – crop up, the proverbial bad pennies, in “Digging in the Dirt”: an indirect sequel to the “Hastur La Vista, Baby” crossover with Adrian Cole’s Nick Nightmare published in THE LOVECRAFT SQUAD: RISING. Almost as if it was planned (and if you believe that, you give me way too much credit).

2019: THE YEAR THAT WAS

This year’s annual round-up is pretty brief. One of those outwardly calm years when nothing much seems to be happening.

It started with a short SF piece seeing publication in KZINE #23 in January – “A World in Aspic”. Set in the Derry & Toms roof garden, in an alternate 1920s/30s, with the sort of clunking robots that graced the old movie serials I’d catch the odd episode of at the Jacey cinema in Birmingham during rare childhood Saturday afternoon visits.

I also worked on a couple of novellas I’d promised people in moments of weakness. One was for Fringeworks: a steampunk Sherlock Holmes sequel to my VALLIS TIMORIS mash-up; the second for Dion Winton-Polak’s TWISTED EARTH shared world. All that interspersed with editing a couple of novels for a friend.

During the latter half I teamed up once again with old mate Adrian Cole to co-write another Damian Paladin/Nick Nightmare team-up for Stephen Jones’ THE LOVECRAFT SQUAD: RISING. Entitled “Hastur La Vista, Baby”, we somehow kept things going over two separate timelines that eventually merged; and I took the chance to shake things up a little in the Paladin-Oswin universe.

Speaking of Paladin and Leigh, they continue to fight the good fight in “Digging in the Dirt” for THE ALCHEMY PRESS BOOK OF HORRORS 2 (out early 2020), and their decidedly VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA-inspired adventure “Cradle of the Deep” is due to appear imminently in STARTLING STORIES #1.

I also kept the Sherlock Holmes banner flying with the decidedly non-canon “The Direction of Sunbeams” for the self-explanatory SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE OCCULT DETECTIVES anthology coming from Belanger Books.

And in late 2020 I’ll be making another appearance in a Stephen Jones edited anthology, THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF FOLK HORROR, with “All I Ever See”.

The year ended with one of those coincidences that crop up infrequently: two interview requests, each coming hard upon the other. One was for Trevor Kennedy’s PHANTASMAGORIA #13, the Christmas special, and the second for an article by Stephen Jewell on DC Thomson’s STARBLAZER digest comic of blessed memory, commissioned by the JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE. Both issues emerged just in time for Christmas.

As for 2020 itself? Who can say. I continue to fly by the seat of my pants, with little to no planning – but at least I’m keeping boredom at bay. And life still, on occasion, surprises me.

And so may I take this opportunity to wish you all a Happy New Year, and continuing good fortune in these trying days. 

2018 AND ALL THAT

As the year grinds inevitably towards its end we come, with equal inevitability, to the annual round-up and hopeful glances towards the future. Not a very long post, you’ll be glad to hear since 2018 has been fairly quiet with regard to publications.

In June I achieved a lifelong ambition, and had a Jerry Cornelius story published on the Further Adventures of Jerry Cornelius website. Titled "Pierrot in Bombazine" I had fun playing with steampunk tropes, among other things.

July saw a story of mine appear in PICKMAN’S GALLERY from Ulthar Press: an anthology of Lovecraftian fiction that took its cue from the original HPL story, “Pickman’s Model”. My own contribution, “Eigenspace X”, was an askance look at the modern art world, and what happens when sculpture meets multi-dimensional mathematics.

The Western I’d always wanted to have a go at was published by Pro Se Publications in August: REVENGE IS A COLD PISTOL. I was surprised (and delighted) to discover that not only were there paperback and Kindle editions, but also a hardback. To my mind, the publishers should have scrapped the paperback and just gone with hardback (while maybe reducing the price a little): the whole product looks so much sharper, the cover art more vibrant.

WEIRDBOOK #40 included my “And the Living Is Easy”: a short story which started life as a one-act play, believe it or not. Concerning two sun gods hiding away from a poisoned or dying sun, it probably works best as short fiction (a good man always knows his limitations).

And my final appearance of the year was in THE ALCHEMY PRESS BOOK OF HORRORS. Unable to resist diving back below the deep blue briny and mixing up a Kate Bush track with a Japanese monster, I came up with “Her Favourite Place”. 

* * *

And for 2019? It’s often difficult to be precise, because publishing is rarely an exact science, but I can say that Graeme Hurry’s KZINE #23 is out in January and includes a short SF story of mine: “A World in Aspic” (which you might describe as valvepunk, if we’re throwing labels around).

Damian Paladin will be returning in “Cradle of the Deep” in the first issue of the relaunched STARTLING STORIES (you guessed it: more underwater frolics), and a revised and expanded edition of THE PALADIN MANDATES (includes two previously unpublished adventures for Leigh Oswin and Paladin) should be heading your way. And elsewhere, if the stars are right, another team-up with Adrian Cole’s Nick Nightmare. Those two do get around.

Finally, there is another short novel ready to be unleashed on the unsuspecting world: involving an updated masked avenger which, no one will be surprised to hear, involves quite a lot of flying. And hand to hand fighting. And gunplay. Details as and when. 

* * *

And that’s it. Just remains for me to wish everyone a Happy and Prosperous 2019. Be good to each other.

Review of RADIX OMNIUM MALUM

"Anyone who wants to spend time with the uncanny and horrific will find this volume contains gems"

Pauline Morgan has reviewed RADIX OMNIUM MALUM & OTHER INCURSIONS for both the SFCrowsnest website and the Birmingham SF Group's newsletter. With Pauline's permission, I happily repost the review.

Anyone who has heard of Mike Chinn will probably be familiar with either his steampunk versions of Sherlock Holmes or his Damian Paladin stories. Since the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are now out of copyright, there have been a number of stories and novels (of varying degrees of competence) using this character. Mike Chinn’s rank in the higher echelons of the sub-genre but there is a danger of them being lost. Damian Paladin has, so far, two collections devoted to his exploits which are well worth hunting down. Mike, though, has written and had published a wide range of other stories, some of which are included in this new volume. From a man who keeps guinea pigs they are often surprisingly dark.

Devising ways to end the world, or at least human domination of it, is a favourite pastime of horror writers. ‘Radix Omnium Malus’ (loosely translates as ‘The Root of Evil’) is reminiscent of Brian Lumley’s ‘Fruiting Bodies’ but here the malicious growth has been magically invoked and is out of hand and is consuming everything. In ‘Blood of Eden’ instead of an indestructible plant it is Dracula threatening world domination using corporate means. ‘Cheechee’s Out’ is the start of an alien invasion, with Cthulhu-type creatures taking over men in high positions. Inevitably, there will be collateral damage.

Monsters of several varieties occur within a number of these stories. The trick is doing something new with them. In ‘Sons of the Dragon’ the road builders in Romania encounter vampire worms and ‘Considering the Dead’ relates the history of Cthulhu, but the biggest monsters are human. ‘Kittens’ begins as an urban myth, this time the story of kittens being dumped in a glass recycling bin and morphs into serial killer nastiness.  In ‘Only the Lonely’ the monster is a female sexual predator. Instead of being a warning for young girls it is the middle-aged man that needs to beware.

One of the causes of people believing they have had supernatural encounters is anxiety. ‘Two Weeks From Saturday’ is one of those stories that anyone who has been reluctantly included in an event will understand. For Cliff it is the impossibility of writing a decent story for the writers’ meeting run by his boss’s son that creates nightmares. Grief, too, is an emotion that can affect the mind. ‘The Streets Of Crazy Cities’ demonstrates an extreme reaction that Martyn has after the death of wife, child and several other people that he knows. It is a story that initially misleads and shows the skill of the author in its construction.

These and the others stories in this volume challenge the reader. They meld folklore and myth into, mostly, modern settings. There is one historical story there, ‘Suffer A Witch’ which demonstrates petty human jealousy and the danger of drawing conclusions. Like the characters it is unwise to assume that you have all the knowledge needed to understand the situation. In ‘The Pygmalion Conjuration’ both Dennis, who finds a conjuration to bring to life photographs of desirable women for sex, and Miss Grant, the librarian who pointed him towards the relevant book, find to their cost that they have missing information.

Folklore doesn’t have to have an ancient pedigree. The urban myth behind ‘The Owl That Calls’ has a more recent genesis, but even these may have some reality behind them as Tomas Ullerden discovers when expecting to debunk the sighting of a Mothman on Bodmin Moor. While many myths have their roots in a pagan or superstitious past, the coming of the steam age has imbued trains with a degree of mysticism, often involving death. Two train stories are included here. ‘Rescheduled’ sees Graeme having to go home to fetch the office keys and having distinct problems with trains, while in ‘The Mercy Seat’ Jim catches up with two friends from his youth. The memories revolve around the railway bridge by the station and the trains that run over it

Some of the stories in this volume need to be read more than once to find the subtleties in the story telling, but for anyone who wants to spend time with the uncanny and horrific they will find this volume contains gems.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Barrel

I’ve always been a ridiculously big fan of the 1960s Irwin Allen TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (this will come as no surprise to those who know me). Submarines, sea monsters, aliens – what’s not to like? And for years I’ve wanted to write a kind of tribute story, without actually delving into fan fiction. 

My first attempt, “Welcome to the Hotel Marianas”, appeared in The Bitter End: Tales of Nautical Terror (Pill Hill Press, 2009), and later republished in my first collection, Give Me These Moments Back (The Alchemy Press, 2015). I say attempt, since at some point it drifted away from a VttBotS tribute into slightly more Lovecraftian territory. Still, the clues were all there: character names, sub with a glass nose. More recently I submitted another underwater tale for The Alchemy Press Book of Horrors, and again, although that was set in an underwater habitation there was nothing about it to suggest an old, cheesy TV series.

Then, while watching Blue Planet II on BBC TV recently, I was struck by the (speeded up) image of a sea cucumber stuffing its maw with prey the tentacles on the tips of its arms had snared. I had to use that in a story somehow, and within a day I knew it was going to be a Damian Paladin tale; and there was going to be a submarine in it. An experimental one: bigger and able to dive deeper than any other sub that existed in the 1930s.

A while back I was playing around with the idea of writing an adventure novel featuring a boat based on the French submarine cruiser Surcouf. It was a big old thing: armed with a twin 8 inch deck turret (the largest allowed by treaty at the time) and a variety of machine guns, along with a hanger abaft of the conning tower that housed a reconnaissance seaplane. That vessel fed into my new US Navy boat and became the blueprint for it – just a little longer, and minus the hangar (which had caused the Surcouf no end of trouble). And just for my own amusement (and because I like to have help visualising stuff) I adapted an image of the Surcouf: trimming back the hangar, altering the colour scheme, and replacing the French Naval ensign with the US flag.

As for the story, “Cradle of the Deep” – I even lifted that from a VttBotS episode – of course there’s a huge sea monster, and crew members being thrown about inside the boat.

The submarine SG-1, under the able command of Captain Bannon and Lieutenant Commander Munrow, will be back: helping Paladin in another adventure, and maybe even plotting its own future course.

That Was The Year That Was

A new year, and inevitably thoughts turn to what’s going to happen over the forthcoming months, as well as back at what was achieved in 2017.

I had two books out – treading on each others’ heels, it felt like – quite early on. Radix Omnium Malum & Other Incursions was a collection of horror tales from Parallel Universe Publications, while Damian Paladin – my 1930s, New York based occult detective and monster hunter – reappeared on the scene in the collection (or portmanteau novel, if you prefer), Walkers in Shadow, courtesy of Pro Se Productions. Paladin also made his presence felt in issue two of Occult Detective Quarterly in “The Black Tarot”; which was a backdoor way of introducing a new masked character to my fictional universe: the eponymous Black Tarot. Expect to see more of him in the future.

On the short story scene I had a Sherlock Holmes tale, “The Adventure of the Haunted Room”, published in the The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part VII: Eliminate the Impossible, and a science fiction short, “More Than Meets” in Nebula Rift vol.4 #11.

The middle of the year saw me drifting further into the world of Pulp fiction when I wrote a digest novel, The Griffon: Renaissance, for Pro Se. An updating (and well ahead of Doctor Who, a sex change) of the Arch Whitehouse character into a modern, shared universe, it involves plenty of intrigue, air battles and fire fights (all with technology just a shade more advanced than our own – well, it is Pulp adventure stuff). Great fun to write and, I hope, to read, when it’s published.

And for 2018? The above novel, fingers crossed, along with two more from Pro Se. There’s a post Civil War Western, Revenge is a Cold Pistol and if all goes well, a revised and expanded reprint of the first Paladin book, The Paladin Mandates. There are a couple more short stories due to see print – one SF, one Lovecraftian – and partway through a new Paladin story I realised that the experimental US submarine and crew I’d created would definitely be back in a later adventure, maybe even spun off into their own series. The Paladin universe expands apace. I also have a Holmes novella to finish – one set in the same Steampunk universe as Vallis Timoris – and a Fantasy novella to rewrite and update (which already got put back last year, so I need to focus), tentatively entitled Warriors of the Endless.

I’m sure that won’t be the end of it: life takes odd, unpredictable turns (this time last year, if you’d said I’d be writing a Griffon adventure, I’d have patted you on the head and advised taking more water with it). But for now, it’ll do.

Happy New Year.

THE RETURN OF THE PALADIN - PART TWO

Back in 2009 I wrote in this ’ere blog about it being over ten years since THE PALADIN MANDATES was published by The Alchemy Press, and how a review of same in THEAKER'S QUARTERLY DIGEST provoked me into writing a sparkly fresh Paladin story: “Sailors of the Skies” for DARK HORIZONS #55 (The British Fantasy Society, 2009).

Paladin himself had been born many years earlier, in “Death Wish Mandate” published in KADATH #5, by Francesco Cova. He’d had a long gestation.

Ever since he drew SWORD OF SORCERY for DC Comics (1973), I’ve been a fan of Howard Chaykin. In 1975 he wrote and drew the first two issues of THE SCORPION for Atlas/Seaboard Comics. Set in the 1930s, it pitted an apparently immortal character – Moro Frost – against slightly more mundane villains. At the time I didn’t know much about the rich history of masked avengers who had graced the pages of pulp magazines back before the Second World War (with the exception of Doc Savage and the Shadow), so I was pretty ignorant of where Chaykin was coming from. After THE SCORPION ceased publication, he took the idea over to Marvel and created, with a slight change of costume and dropping the immortal bit, Dominic Fortune. Despite my ignorance of history, there was something about both characters that sparked an interest in me. I wanted to do something similar. But what, and how? I couldn’t quite nail it.

It took a phone call from David Sutton to crystallise the idea. He told me that Francesco Cova wanted to do an occult detective issue of KADATH, and there was space left if I wanted to submit. That was all I needed. An occult detective – of course! Set in 1930s New York, and dressed in a style not unlike the Scorpion. Over the following years I wrote a few more Paladin tales – selling a couple – before The Alchemy Press collected them for their first publication in 1998.

The character went into something of a hiatus for over a decade, until his resurrection in DARK HORIZONS. Again it was just the spark I needed. I wrote several more Paladin stories, including: “There’ll Be A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”, for an expanded Kindle edition of THE PALADIN MANDATES (The Alchemy Press, 2012); a cross-over with Nick Nightmare (co-written with Nick’s creator, Adrian Cole) “Fire All of the Guns At One Time” for the British Fantasy Award winning NICK NIGHTMARE INVESTIGATES (Alchemy Press/Airgedlamh, 2014); and the Christmas-themed “Deck the Halls” in OCCULT DETECTIVE MONSTER HUNTER (Emby Press, 2015).

And finally, in 2017, almost treading on each other’s heels, OCCULT DETECTIVE QUARTERLY #2 included “The Black Tarot” (in which I sneakily introduced the world to a brand new masked vigilante character – having learned a little more of the Pulp tradition in the intervening years), and Pro Se Productions published the eagerly-awaited (well – I was all agog anyway) collection/portmanteau novel, WALKERS IN SHADOW: six new tales of adventure, plus a revised “Sailors of the Skies”).

So what’s next? Well, there are plans to re-issue PALADIN MANDATES in expanded form, and “The Black Tarot” is intended to be the first in a new bunch of adventures for Paladin, Leigh Oswin and his expanding repertory company.

One thing’s for sure: the world shall hear from Damian Paladin again.

Sailing High

As a way of dipping their toes into electronic publishing, The Alchemy Press have released a Kindle edition of the Damian Paladin novella, Sailors of the Skies - originally published in the British Fantasy Society's magazine, DARK HORIZONS in 2009. The cover uses Arthur Wang's original artwork for DH, with design provided by yours truly (so no one else can take the blame).



Check out the link:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sailors-of-the-Skies-ebook/dp/B005M94AQE/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1316169893&sr=1-1

to download a copy. You know you want to...

Literary Bloat

There are times I could quite cheeerfully strangle my muse - or whatever it is keeps the words flowing from my fingers to the keys to the laptop screen. I've just finished the penultimate story in a new Damian Paladin collection. A tale of family curses and vampires - but not the moody, angst-ridden, cheekbones you could hang a coat off wasters that clog page and screen today. No - this is a smelly, digusting revenant that would never get some pre-teen girl going all fluttery (at least I hope not; but there are some odd kids out there...).

Thing is, I planned for a story less than ten thousand words - but the more I wrote, the further away the ending got. The damned story just wouldn't stop. By the time I nailed the sucker there were over 12,500 words, goddammit! Far too many for the plot.

But rest assured, come editing time, there's going to be blood on the carpet. There are at least two thousand words coming out - so help me!

Plan Now? To take a break from Paladin for a couple of weeks: try my hand at a superhero short. A proper short.

If that tricksy muse lets me...