OK, so we’re all in to reading The Next Big Thing. Or even The Thing On The Shelf Next To The Next Big Thing. But sometimes this is a bit dangerous. Causes us to forget The Next Big Things which have already come before. For me, I was grounded in a world of Asterix, Willard [...]
Archive > June 2010
Oh Shucks, a black cat
It’s ever so dark in these caves (let’s not mention the smells again), and hard to read (and you have no idea how soggy the pages get – how, I do not like to imagine), so it was kind of William Hussey to while away the dismal time with his stories about Black Shuck, the [...]
A Postcard from Cosmo
I found this on my drawing board this morning! previous postcard / next postcard
Happy Birthday, Mr Harryhausen!
Today is the 90th birthday of Ray Harryhausen, creator and animator of some of the finest monsters in cinema. In fact in interviews such as this one Harryhausen has always said he prefers the term ‘creature’ to ‘monster’ – an indication of the respect and reverence with which he approached his storytelling. Each one of [...]
Black Shuck, the Devil Hound
Last year Lincoln Book Festival invited me to give a talk on the ‘Folklore of the Lincolnshire Fens’ - that large marshy area on the east coast which was drained for farm land in the 17th Century (incidentally around the same time that Matthew Hopkins was busy hunting witches in the counties just south of Lincolnshire). Although the Fens have a rich and [...]
Emergency Posting: The Dead… They’re coming…
Right, if anyone out there read’s this, you need to act fast; The Dead are coming. This is bad. Trust me, I know all about them. I wrote down everything Lazarus told me, word-for-word. I changed some of the details, some of the places, but it’s all true. Now I’m trapped in this cave and [...]
Chocolate Horror
If you like horror, you will inevitably come to the author who is the granddaddy of them all: H.P. LOVECRAFT. He created a world of seriously scary, bizarre and, frankly, twisted stories. My favourite of which is undoubtably AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS. However, no matter how scary HP Lovecraft’s tales of Cthulhu are, there [...]
Note To Self: Must Commit Less Murder
The world is full of stories about people trying to be good. Here are two books about someone trying not to be evil. Fifteen year old John Wayne Cleaver really, really doesn’t want to become a serial killer. But it’s not easy for him: he’s fascinated by death and dead bodies; his days and nights [...]
The Silly Monster Book!
Long-time readers of this blog may remember that way back in May last year I attempted to rescue the authors from their hideous monster captors. It was a complete and utter disaster (possibly because I tried to rescue them using rhyming couplets, never a good idea). Ever since then, the monsters have been out for [...]
Loon soon
Hello from deep in the bowels of the caves…. at least that what it smells like. Or is it slightly off Marmite? Hard to tell. To be honest, Marmite is one of the few foodstuffs that improves when it goes off. Anyway, enough yeast spread-based havering. My next book, The Loon on the Moon, is due [...]
