It all seemed so simple then. I replied to an e-mail from Sam Enthoven, egged on by Tommy Donbavand and with a smug smile, agreed to join their merry band of children’s horror writers.
“It’ll be fun,” Sam beamed down at me (he’s very tall, you know).
“We can do events and all kinds of stuff,” Tommy grinned, clapping his hands.
“Free beer, probably,” Sam nodded.
“So…why’s it called Trapped By Monsters?” I asked. Sam’s knuckles were just a little bit too white as he gripped my shoulder.
“Oooh, just a name…y’know, readers love it,” Tommy’s smile was tight, his eyes wide, almost pleading.
“Don’t ask too many questions, just follow us.”
I lagged behind them, wondering at Tommy’s unusual profile in the dark. Did he always have four arms? And why did Sam’s cheek seem so…scaly?
“Er…hey guys…this is a wind-up, right?” I called after them.
“Nothing to worry about,” hissed Sam, pushing on the huge Iron gate that shuttered the cave entrance we had arrived at.
“So what happens in here?” I croaked. The gates clanged shut behind us.
But darkness filled my eyes and hideous laughter echoed around the rocky walls. Sam and Tommy had gone, replaced by the most hideous, slime green blobs ever.

I knew what it was to be Trapped By Monsters!

But don’t worry. I’m digging an escape tunnel with a sharpened stick even as we speak… I’ll be out…soon… Maybe there are other authors here I can team up with…

Continue reading

…and it’s an absolute blast, with a headlong plunge of a plot and some of the vilest monsters that I’ve ever been (un)lucky enough to come across.

But of course, such monstrous exuberance carries a heavy price. Yes, dear reader: as you’ve seen, THE DEAD’s unfortunate author David Gatward has now been consigned to the darkness of the caves to rot here with the rest of us. And he’s not the only one.

THE DEAD’s not out ’til July 1^st – my copy’s a proof – but if you love horror I’ve no hesitation in recommending you order yours now. You won’t be sorry. Unlike David. ;D

Sam

Continue reading

Hello? Hello? I mean, WHAT? I was… I was… the last thing I remember was clicking on that link… the one that said “Wanna see some funny pics of authors? Ha ha check this owt LOL”

And here I am… ur… where am I? Is there a light switch in here?

What I just put my hand in? That had BETTER be couscous and gravy.

As for that smell? The grimly hellish miasma of doom? When did you people last hoover? Is that – I’m sorry, but is that bacon AND Marmite?

And what’s that… thing… grinning like that Doctor Who crack of doom, only the wrong way up, and with more teeth? What?

Did I just hear a *SLURRRRSHHH*?

Chae? Is that Chae Strathie? With a stuffed sheep? And a hideous rictus of terror?

EEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEEE MUMMYYYYY!! I’ve been TRAPPED BY MONSTERS…

Continue reading

I’ve been trapped!

By monsters!

Fiddlesticks. I was just about to go to the bakers to buy a ginger parkin for elevensies and this happens. Typical.

Here’s a picture of me taken by a mole with a camera shortly after being carried off to the caves.

I just found that cuddly lamb by the way. I mean someone gave it to me to look after. Errr… it fell off a shelf into my hands. The monsters made me hold it! OKAY!

Continue reading

THE UNSPEAKABLE HORROR!

A Trapped by Monsters story

With art by David Melling

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

“No way!” I breathed in amazement.

This was getting weird.  Ten minutes ago, I was teetering on the brink of certain death and now, here I was, face to face with three new authors.

“Russian Hopscotch?” demanded Chae Strathie.  “What’s that?”

I gasped.  This new bloke could read my mind!  How could he possibly know that my jailer – Spengler the Jaded – forced me to play what could only be described as one of the most dangerous games the monsters had ever invented at this time every week?  Perhaps he’d heard my screams as the dice rolled and I was given no choice but to hop from square to square?  Perhaps he’d peeked into my cell as I prayed not to land on the patch of quicksand hidden beneath one of the numbers?

Or perhaps he wasn’t really an author at all… Perhaps he was one of the monsters in disguise, luring us into a false sense of security as we dared to believe that we could finally escape from this madness.  Yes, that was it!  Chae Strathie was definitely a shape-shifting beastie, here to taunt us with thoughts of freedom while he sharpened his vile-

“Your t-shirt says ‘Russian Hopscotch’,” continued Chae.  “What is that?”

I glanced down at the ceremonial costume I was made to wear for each round of the deadly game and smoothed down the frills of my potato sack skirt.  “Oh,” I croaked.  “It’s, er… just something my jailer likes to play from time to time…”

Sam glanced furtively up and down the tunnel.  “That’s a point,” he said.  “Where is Spengler?  How did you get out?”

I shuddered as I thought back to the moment my captor had landed on what looked like an ordinary cracked paving slap with the number 5 chalked on – only to discover it was a patch of pungent, lethal quicksand.  The monster had screamed as he was dragged beneath the ground, the gloopy mud that was to become his tomb racing to plug every orifice of his pock-marked body.

He’d gurgled a cry for help as the wet, sucking earth flooded his lungs and – for a moment – I’d considered trying to help him.  But I was too scared of being sucked beneath the floor of the damp cell myself – and there was no point creasing up my Hopscotch costume now I’d ironed it.

Eventually, Spengler had fallen silent, his wide, staring eyes the only part of his body that remained visible.  I knew this was my chance to escape. I just had to get the keys I knew my jailer kept clipped to what I had originally thought was his belt, but eventually turned out to be an external lower intestine wrapped around his waist.

Lying flat on the ground, I’d plunged my fist into the quicksand that surrounded my now dead guard.  Trying not to look into his lifeless face, I’d fumbled around in the gloop for the keys, first pulling free a spare eyeball before finally finding what I was after.  I had unlocked the cell door with trembling fingers and then, checking the corridor was clear, I’d run as fast as my ceremonial Hopscotch flip flops would let me.

“We found Tommy racing for the exit to the caves,” Andy explained to the new authors.

“I was not!” I scoffed.  “I was, er… coming to free you guys!”

“But our cells are in the opposite direction,” said Ali.

“Are… are they really?” I squeaked, scuffing the toe of my right flip flop back and forth in the dirt.

“You know they are,” replied Mark.  “You made us all tattoo a map of the caves on the back of our hands not long after we were captured.  You were definitely heading for the-”

“That’s not important now!” I interrupted quickly.  “Never mind who was coming to rescue who!

“Who wasn’t coming to rescue who, more like,” muttered Barry.

“You can keep quiet, marmite breath!” I scolded.  “What is important is that we’ve made three new friends…”

“Six new friends!” announced an Irish accent from the shadows at the back of the cave.  We spun round in surprise.

“I’m Niamh Sharkey,” said the tear-streaked author, stepping out of the darkness.

“Jon Mayhew,” added one of the two figures behind her.

“David Gatward,” announced the third.  “And we want to know what’s going on, right now!”

Click here for Episode Seven, by A Monster

Continue reading

Pocket Jeunesse have done marvellous covers for my Dragon Orb books. This is the final one, released on 3 June. I glanced at the amazon.fr rating for it the other day and was delighted to see it was inside the top 500 (477 to be precise, not that I’m obsessive or anything!) which is a first for me, I think. My books have never really troubled the amazon bestseller lists to date, but I live in hope that I’ll get into the top 100 one day.

Continue reading

I don’t know what the monsters have been feeding Ali, but her imagination has been on fire recently. Perhaps she’s got a secret source of fudge and has been living it up in a dizzy sugar high behind our backs, or maybe there has been a bit of prayer and divine inspiration going on. Whatever she’s been up to, Ali Sparkes has done it again and produced an absolute humdinger of a story.

Whilst trying to get over a bout of car-sickness, Kevin’s nan encourages him to write a wish list as a distraction. Amongst his list of top ten wishes are: a Nintendo Wii, wanting his mum and dad to get back together again, and for Emma Greening to notice him. Kevin writes his list on a napkin, but by chance the wind sends it flying into the nearby river and Kevin’s life suddenly becomes a whole lot more complicated!

A local river god, Abandinus, takes the list as a prayer and decides to intervene directly in Kevin’s life with hilarious consequences. On the god’s direction, Kevin recruits his friend, Tim, to help him set up a shrine in his garden and Abandinus takes up residence there. One might think that having one’s own personal god literally at hand to answer prayers would be great, but it appears that even minor gods work in mysterious ways.

This is a laugh out loud read that I’ll be recommending wholeheartedly to everyone and anyone who is willing to listen. Total Sparkes genius.
Without doubt the funniest book I’ve read this year.

Continue reading

Amazed, today, to spot the brand new covers for my new six part series, out in Feb 2011, already on Amazon. The very day I got the real covers in the post. And they’re all super shiny and embossed and smell nice. (Well, after months down here in the caves, anything from the normal world smells nice.)

Here are my two favourite covers. Go HERE to see the rest.

Continue reading

One answer I’ve always liked to the question of where ideas come from, is that they’re often the result of chance combinations: two or more things that come together unexpectedly in your mind. Well, here are three that have been colliding lately in mine…

Long-term followers of this blog might conceivably remember this post, in which I linked to this article by Warren Ellis for Wired Magazine about Rescue Fiction. He talked about Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s classic puppet-animated tv series Thunderbirds and the potential for awesomeness of stories involving colossal and ambitious engineering: crisis, ingenuity, resolution and rescue.

That’s the first colliding thing. Here’s the second…

The Deepwater Horizon disaster: the rig explosion, the resulting catastrophic environmental damage to the Gulf of Mexico – and the unfolding story of the increasingly desperate attempts to come up with a solution when massive depth and crushing water pressure mean only remotely controlled machines can be used. Right now as I’m typing this – not to excuse BP or the other associated corporations for their part in creating this problem in the first place – some of the finest problem-solving minds on the planet are working against the clock. As this real-life case shows, engineering has drama.

Third colliding thing: this. It’s a post that appeared recently on one of my favourite blogs, Pink Tentacle, imagining some of the most fabulously ambitious engineering projects that the human race might conceivably engage in in its future, including floating cities, a space hotel and (my favourite) a plan to supply the entire world’s energy needs by means of a ring of solar panels on the moon.

Now: I have other books to write. I have my next two full-length projects lined up in my head already, and I don’t have the time or inclination to write this story right now. But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to read it if it was written by someone else. Quite the reverse, in fact!

So, You, reading this now: how about it? How about writing some thrilling Rescue Fiction? I’m not talking about Thunderbirds, except how much I loved it when I was small, the world is already too full of sequels and remakes. No: I’m talking about you taking charge of this idea and writing something completely new and amazing.

…I know: having the idea is the easy bit. Or rather, once you’ve got your initial idea like this, you’ve then got to have more ideas: believable characters who have personal stakes in the story’s events, a satisfying structure, a way of telling this tale without too much exposition, plus all of the other bits and pieces you’ll need to thrash out so you can make the concept work.

But: I would love to read a near-future story of daring, ambition, spaceships, explosions and engineering ingenuity in the white heat of crisis. I think it would be awesome.

Someone write this. Please?

Sam

Continue reading