The following stories are currently out of print, but can be read by clicking the links. If you would like to reprint one of them in your publication, or you still retain the copyright over one of the stories, please contact me via email.
The Zeem Stories:
I’m sure Johnny intends to bring the chair back upstairs at some point, but as the body-builder girlfriend spent the night (after some very loud reconciliatory sex), he hasn’t had a chance yet. He’d have a hard time getting it away from the deev, anyway.Deev don’t like being told by mere mortals to stand up and move. They’re stubborn like that.
It’s the choice of word that unnerves me. Not a Persian. The Persian. In the same way Attila was The Hun and Julius was The Caesar and Zorba is The Greek.
We’re talking about the kind of noise you’d get if Fay Wray strangled a cat whilst simultaneously dragging her fingernails down a blackboard.
Roland. It’s still too light for him to venture outside safely; he stands in the shadow of the door, bloodshot eyes gleaming in the darkness like a slightly under-the-weather Nosferatu (think 1979, not 1921).
[REMOVED FOR REPRINT] Christmas Eve. The night before Christmas, and as it happens there is something stirring in my shitty ten-by-fifteen metre tenement flat: me.
Fantasy:
[REMOVED FOR COPYRIGHT] ‘So you called these… pigs, didn’t you?’ said the prince, rubbing his handsome jaw in thought. ‘Quite unusual. Of course I knew of pigs—they often featured in the Sunday afternoon spread, trussed up with an apple in their mouths—but it’s jolly different to meet them alive. Never imagined them to be quite this… filthy.’
“I’m the King of bleeding England,” the Prince spits out, his cheeks splashed with pink. He’s trying his absolute best not to scream. He’s clutching the Royal Seal so hard it feels like it’s burning his fingers.
Horror:
[REMOVED FOR REPRINT] As we walked back to the main road, Brendan kept saying, ‘We’ve travelled back in time,’ and the longer we walked, the more we started to believe him. The distant skyscrapers of the city had vanished that morning—there was no explosion, no dust, nothing that would explain, if not the why, then the how.
[REMOVED FOR REPRINT] Dionysius, god of wine, is working in his studio when the doorbell rings. For a second he stands frozen, an arm outstretched, the tip of his brush touching the canvas, a sigh hissing out between his clenched teeth like a winter’s draft.
Love in the time of the Serpent King
[REMOVED FOR REPRINT] This time she has come in the form of a giant black dog with great leathery wings like a bat. Silver tusks extend from her cheeks and a ridge of horn protrudes from her brow. Her fur is sleek and gleams blue in the dim lantern light of the cell, as bright as the armoury of the peri.
