Nyctophobia

There’s not been enough talk about books in these columns lately. Let’s start to remedy that. Last week I was in a delightful old bookshop in Palma with a friend when the bookshop owner asked me, ‘Are you famous?’ Mischievously, I looked at my friend. ‘Am I famous?’ She considered the question. ‘Well,’ she said […]

Solaris Books have a brilliant art department whose ingenious covers really help to sell a book. When I came to write my next novel for them, they took the idea of fear of the dark literally with their lightbulb image (left), which I loved. Originality often goes against the grain for book illustration, which tends […]

What’s in the picture-book today? A miscellany – some thoughts passing through my head as I sit in my study trying to cool down enough to concentrate on writing a new novel. ——————– Writers produce a lot of work that’s not published. For years I kept drawerfuls of abandoned manuscripts, movie scripts, TV productions, radio […]

An interesting situation has arisen concerning the variations in authors’ works around the world after ‘an astonishing degree’ of variance has been discovered in different editions of David Mitchell’s novel ‘Cloud Atlas’. The book’s manuscript remained unedited in the US for three months after an editor left Random House. Meanwhile in the UK, Mitchell and […]

I’ve been talking to readers a lot this spring, and one subject that kept returning was whether writers can work on many types of book, or if they should stay in one area. Crime was once a part of general fiction until genres separated out in bookshops, so that SF/horror, fantasy (and believe it or […]

Although I’ve written fewer of them in the last few years, I’ve always enjoyed a good supernatural story or film. In the last few years, the genre has become lost, without much of a way forward. Once it reflected simple fears of darkness and unknown lonely places, but subtlety is required to build the right […]

Recently someone asked me if my books were set in America, because she didn’t want to read anything that wasn’t set in places she couldn’t recognise and identify with. I had to admit that the Bryant & May books were mostly set in London. I can sympathise with this point of view. Comedians often use observational […]

Tim Haigh’s excellent site www.bookspodcast.co.uk runs interviews with authors about their work, and there are some gems to explore here. I’ve done a number of these with Tim and particularly enjoy them because he knows his stuff and loves genre writing, which makes an interview so much more enjoyable than those with presenters who have […]

Nyctophobia is a fear of the dark, and is a phobia you can ‘catch’ from someone else. I’m hoping to make the nation scared of the dark from this Thursday October 9th, when it appears in bookshops. I’m very proud of the way this novel has turned out, in a nice edition from Solaris. The […]

                            By the pricking of my thumbs, something evil this way comes… If you cast your orbs to the right of the site’s homepage you’ll find a link to an extract of my foreboding-filled haunted house thriller, ‘Nyctophobia’, out from the lovely […]