Here’s a link to an interview with me about my book Crawlers at terrific new horror fan website Snakebite Horror.
It contains an exclusive sneaky early announcement of thrilling developments currently afoot right here at Trapped By Monsters. Take a look. ;D
Sam
One of my favourite authors, Peter O’Donnell, died this month. UK newspaper The Guardian gave him a nice obituary which you can read here. I’d like to mark his passing by recommending to you what are, no kidding, the very best action thrillers I’ve ever read.
Ever since my friend Simon introduced me to the Modesty Blaise novels and I discovered for myself how amazing they are, I’ve been pressing them into the hands of everyone I can. Here’s a shelf recommendation I first wrote nearly ten years ago now, while I was working as a bookseller in London’s Charing Cross Road:
To those in the know she strides the world of thrillers like a colossus. Bolder than Buffy, tougher than Trinity, yet written long enough ago to be either character’s /grandmother/, it’s ex-criminal mastermind MODESTY BLAISE who holds the crown as the best female action hero ever, and there’s still no one else to touch her. Only a dire film adaptation back in the Sixties stopped her becoming as famous as her nearest equivalent, James Bond: for my money, these books are BETTER. You like campily wicked villains? exotic international settings? gadgets, weapons and insanely cool fight-scenes? These books have it all, and all of it informed with a warmth, style, and suave good humour that make every one of Peter O’Donnell’s books a treat to read. Souvenir Press in the UK only bring out two of these a year: collectors pay mad prices for the rarer ones. The books are self-contained stories and (though Cobra Trap is the last one, for reasons that will become obvious) they don’t need to be read in any particular order. My advice? Keep an eye out, and grab any you can!
Don’t just take my word for it, or even that of The Times which has described them as “the finest escapist thrillers ever written.” Find the Modesty Blaise books for yourself, and see if you agree.
Peter O’Donnell has left a legacy of thrilling stories for everyone in the world to enjoy. If I keep pedalling hard enough, it’s my hope that something similar might be said for me one day.
Sam
Via the seemingly inexhaustible fountain of wonders that is Boing Boing here’s a link to some beautifully illustrated pages from a Russian edition of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I particularly love this version of Gollum…
…But watch out for the spiders of Mirkwood, which/who are pretty damn stunning, too. 
Sam
Those of you who read my first Invisible Fiends book, Mr Mumbles, will possibly have read the sneak preview from book 2 which is tucked away at the back.
Book 2 is called Raggy Maggie, and sees Kyle pitted against… um… a five-year-old girl with a dolly. But the girl, Caddie, is no ordinary five-year-old, and the doll, Raggy Maggie, is certainly no ordinary toy. Together they’re a deadly pair, who think nothing of torturing and killing anyone who doesn’t join in their twisted games.
The German cover of the book has just been revealed – complete with a different title, Caddie’s Game – so I thought I’d let you see both covers here, plus my first ever piece of fan art, which also depicts Caddie and Raggy Maggie in all their horrifying glory.
Here’s the version of the cover you’ll see in the UK, Canada and Australia.
And here’s what you’ll see if you live in Germany.
Which one do you prefer? Leave a comment and let me know.
And now for that fan art I mentioned. It comes from Tom Roberts, who came along to my recent event at Birmingham Central Library. I love it, and am going to frame it and stick it on the wall above my computer, in the hope Caddie’s creepy stare scares me into staying away from ebay and actually doing some work now and again.
Oh, and for those of you who found Mr Mumbles scary, I should probably warn you that Raggy Maggie is much, much more terrifying. You’ll never look at porcelain dolls in quite the same way again…
…and other stereotypical American phrases. But HEY! It’s CELEBRATION TIME! Share out the Krispy Creme Donuts, the bottles of Coke, the nice shiny portraits of President Obama.
Today I LOVE America! Today (OK tomorrow UK time, but TODAY US time) the lovely shiny hardback American version of Frozen In Time comes out. Oh just LOOK…
My copies arrived in the post and I’ve been trying not to dribble on them ever since. They spell colour as ‘color’ and grey as ‘gray’. It’s SO COOOOOL! Thankyou America!
Pain is, frankly, something that I prefer not to experience for myself, if I can avoid it. But when I’m safely ensconced in a comfy reading spot I seem to have no problem with it being inflicted on other people…!
Tom Yamada, central character of new series The 5 Lords of Pain (published by Barrington Stoke) has a truly brutal ordeal ahead of him. Once a generation, men in his family have to fight the Contest – a series of one-to-one duels with demons with the fate of the world hanging on the outcome. But (though not for Tom-!) it gets even better. Not content with waiting until Tom is full grown, the demons have decided to start the Contest now, when Tom is only seven years into his training and he’s just fifteen years old…
I’ve had my eye on this series since reading this awesome interview with its author James Lovegrove in which he talks about Barrington Stoke, their editing process and exactly what makes their books so special. I read the series opener The Lord of the Mountain over the weekend and it was a blast: like Tom, this story’s fast on its feet with the potential to be utterly deadly. Follow-up The Lord of the Void is out now. I can hardly wait to lay my hands on a copy. Click through to The 5 Lords of Pain website if you’d like to know more.
Sam
Well, it took nearly a week, but I’m finally back again – finally ejected from the back end of one of the slowest digestive systems I’ve encountered in 18 months of being Trapped By Monsters.
As you’ll have seen from Sam’s emotional post, I was voted – ME! – to be eaten by monsters at last weekend’s event in Lincoln. The shock was profound. How could the good people of Lincoln do such a thing to me? And after I hand 
made a Tellytubby vampire and even sang a Whitney Houston hit to them, too…
Anyway, they say when life throws lemons at you make lemonade (I don’t know who says it and I don’t know why but I suspect they are overly cheerful American’s who should get out more…) and so I decided, by day two in the monster gut, to do the same. Much to my surprise, in Grapfabblthub’s third stomach I found a fully equipped state of the art recording studio! Although the soundproofing left a bit to be desired, in other ways the acoustics were fab and I found myself recording a track which is sure to be an international hit just as soon as it hits You Tube.
It’s dark, emotional, starkly beautiful in its own way… and I want to share it with you now. It may make you cry. It’s made all the guys in here cry. They’re still shaking and rolling around on the cave floor now… So here it is:
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By the way, has anyone got any Wet Wipes?
I woke up a few days ago with this image floating around some of the more surreal corners of my mind. Try as I might the dream that had preceded this visual peek eluded me. Yes, there were sheep, plenty of them. And yes the weather was um, challenging. But as I lay there trying to snatch at a series of improbable images I knew the dream was lost to me. Sure enough, by the time I was munching my museli and wiping the puddles of milk from the kitchen floor left by my helpful offspring, this curious picture of snowing sheep was all that was left.
Actually, this sort of thing happens to me quite a lot. What sort of thing, I hear you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. I have a habit of drawing any old nonsense that comes to mind whilst sitting in front of the Tv. The best part about this is the fact I’m not really concentrating so it is often a surprise to me when I finally register what I have drawn. For some reason I have been drawing sheep recently and, no doubt, after an evening of sketching the silly things I took them with me to bed, so to speak. It’s all a bit bewildering, really. But, of course, it is part of the answer to that familiar question ‘where do you get your ideas from?” Sometimes, it requires little thought, just a bit of mind doodling, be it written or drawn.
What any of it really means, quite frankly, I shudder to think. I will not be trying to analyse the signifcnace of such imagery. Somethings are better left well alone. Let sleeping sheep lie, I reckon.
If you are trying to write something why not try a bit of mindless doodling yourself. It could be anything you like. A list of words, a sentence, a paragraph (they really don’t have to make sense next to each other – just write anything down for, say 2 minutes, without stopping). Or try drawing – anything. Doodle shapes: leaves, twigs, whatever is at hand. Anything to get you started. You’ll be surprised how quickly your mind will wander and start making up it’s own shapes. You never know, it might just spark an idea. Forgive me if I have already mentioned this on a previous post but it is something a say quite often. Story ideas, for me, is a bit like making a jigsaw puzzle. The joining together of often unrelated pieces that, when put together, form a bigger picture.
Ali, Mark, Tommy and I have returned from our show at the Lincoln Book Festival. One of us returned inside a monster. But all of us will bear the psychological scars of what transpired…
After an opening section in which the monsters allowed each of us thirty seconds to plead pathetically not to be eaten, we were hurled straight into a Word By Word Story Round. Two kind young volunteers from the audience did their best to keep our choices out of the gutter, but in vain: I think this pic below captures the exact moment I shouted the word “UDDERS“.
A cavalcade of humiliations followed. Mark made us fart. Ali made us run like girls. Tommy made us race to turn three more unlucky audience volunteers into mummies using special toilet paper that (as he gleefully explained) had ‘only been used once.’ For my round, we recreated the mind-controlling spider-like parasites from Crawlers using rubber gloves attached to sausage balloons stuffed down the backs of our shirts…
I invited the audience to take on the role of the Queen in the book, giving commands to her hapless victims that we poor authors had no choice but to obey…
Of course they were absolutely merciless. I think this (below) is us all obeying the order to ‘roll on the floor like babies.’
After a Q&A section in which we attempted to regain whatever limited authorial dignity we’d possessed at the start of the show…
…it was time for our closing statements – a last chance to beg for our lives before the audience was given the opportunity to vote for whoever they thought should receive the dreaded condiment of doom.
It was at this point that the drama of our predicament became too much for Ali, who – for reasons that remain unclear – suddenly burst into a spontaneous rendition of Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You.’ This was clearly a step too far for our audience, and – still claiming desperately that her Blue Peter Badge might scratch the monster’s delicate intestinal passages – Ali was dragged from the stage by our monster jailer Simon to begin her, ahem, Alimentary Adventure.
Maybe I was just relieved not to be sharing Ali‘s fate, but the rest of the gig really was a lot of fun. Our listeners bought loads of our books…
…and we even got the chance to judge the fabulous entries of a monster drawing competition. Here are our three favourites (check out the ‘floating eyebrows’ on the right-!)
A MONSTER THANK YOU to Andy and Julie and everyone we met and spoke to. You know what? Considering that we suffered an ordeal of psychological torment that ended in one of us being eaten alive, we really did have a surprisingly brilliant time.
Poor Ali. Best of luck in there. We’ll be waiting with high-pressure hoses and emergency fudge whenever you emerge. ;D
Sam
PS: William Hussey, author of the excellent Witchfinder: Dawn of the Demontide, witnessed the whole thing. For an alternative view of how the afternoon went, check out his brilliant new blog.
For the last few days I have been out of the cave, running events at the Turriff Book Festival in Aberdeenshire. I met lots of excited kids, talked nonsense for a total of 7 or 8 hours, and enjoyed the taste of air that wasn’t tinged with the acrid stench of monster dung. Or David’s after shave.
While there, I met up with Alexander Gordon Smith, author of the utterly, horrifyingly brilliant FURNACE series, which Sam reviewed on this very blog several months ago. Some of you may also remember a doomed attempt Gordon made to break us out of here. If not, you can read all about it here.
I was relieved to see Gordon, because we’d all assumed he’d perished in the break-out, but there he was, large as life. However, it quickly became obvious that Gordon – like me – was being closely watched by a mysterious (some might say monstrous) companion.
Gordon seemed relaxed and happy enough while we spoke, but his eyes told a very different story. He was scared. Possibly even more scared than I was. Could it be that there’s another cave somewhere, with other authors trapped inside? Could it be this pattern is being repeated across the globe? Has anyone seen JK Rowling lately? It’s a worrying thought.
Before we were led off to different events, Gordon and I had this snap taken, to mark our meeting. If you look closely, you might be able to spot our monster companions. They made an attempt to disguise themselves but, frankly, they’re not fooling anyone.
On Monday I’m being let out of the cave for five whole days, when I go off on tour with HarperCollins to promote my horror series, Invisible Fiends. I’ll be visiting eight cities over the five days, starting in London and finishing in Glasgow. Maybe I’ll find a way to escape when I’m out for so long. Maybe.
But I wouldn’t put money on it.
