Update

Barring the odd announcement, this blog will be pretty quiet until early 2024, when, in the run-up to the publication of Push Process, I'll be posting a lot of notes on photography, including short essays on several photographers who influenced the images included in that book.

Forthcoming Publication of Push Process

I'm delighted to confirm that my novel with photographs, Push Process, will be published in spring 2024. It's coming out with a new press, which I can't name yet, but I chose to go with them because my book fits very well with their current and forthcoming titles.

There's a short excerpt in the previous post.

Official Publication Day and Essay on 'The Christian Weird'

Today is the official publication day for The Angels of L19, and I have an essay up at Ginger Nuts of Horror, which explores how the story uses the conventions of weird fiction to dramatise the Christian supernatural (angels and demons, etc.). It's called 'The Christian Weird'. Here's a brief excerpt:

In his book The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher describes the weird as an eruption or egress from elsewhere – from outside – into our world of something whose very existence disrupts our notion of reality. For Lovecraft, one of the founding fathers of weird fiction, this transcendental, alien outside was never supernatural, even if ignorant people sometimes mistook it for such. But even if we reject Lovecraft’s materialism, there is a larger problem in representing the Christian supernatural in these terms: because the invisible presence of supernatural beings is an accepted cornerstone of Christian belief. Even if few believers claim to have actually encountered an angel or demon, their existence is taken for granted. They are not elsewhere: they are all around us. We just can’t see them. As such, they are familiar, and their depiction in art and fiction is conventional – indeed, it often verges on kitsch (feathery wings, bulging muscles, luminescent pale skin and blonde hair, etc.). But this need not be so.

Forthcoming Publication of The Angels of L19

 I'm very pleased to announce that my novel, The Angels of L19 (called Brethren in some of the posts below) will be one of the first releases from Weatherglass Books next year.

From the publisher's website:

 There’s more than one way to be born again.

Liverpool, 1984. The teenagers at Garston Chapel are the same as the rest of us: The Smiths, U2, crushes, football, mates. The grimy, low-down politics of the Thatcher era casting deep shadows in this proud and broken city, but the kids have got other things on their minds … Jesus Christ Our Lord for one.

Almost normal kids, then.

But Robert isn’t at all normal. Because Robert is visited by angels - if that’s what they are. He can’t tell a soul about his secret. All anyone can see is his strange behaviour as he desperately seeks to understand what they mean, what they want from him.

As Robert’s two worlds merge, the real and the visionary intersect with increasing intensity and what is being asked of him becomes terrifyingly clear.

The Angels of L19 is a moving and entirely original story of young lives at the confluence of faith and doubt, angels and demons, life and death. And where redemption is possible, even for those we think might be lost forever.

The Angels of L19 is extraordinary: a blend of closely-observed realism and unsettling Fantasy, wonderful, tragic and absolutely unforgettable. I don’t use the word often or lightly, but this novel is a masterpiece.

Adam Roberts, author of Jack Glass and The Thing Itself

You can preorder the book here.