Cthulhu Cymraeg The Night Country: Lovecraftian Tales from Wales

A new anthology entitled Cthulhu Cymraeg The Night Country: Lovecraftian Tales from Wales, edited by Mark Howard Jones and featuring my story Strzyga, is out now on Crossroad Press.

Here’s a helpful blurb:

Before the American master of cosmic horror H.P. Lovecraft came the Welsh genius of the weird Arthur Machen, who filled his pages with tales of ancient evil. Now comes this collection of seven NEW stories from the ancient land of Machen, following in the footsteps of Lovecraft and his uncanny creations. Featuring original stories by: J. L. George, Mark Howard Jones, Paul Lewis, John Llewellyn Probert, C. M. Saunders & Charles Wilkinson

I wrote the first draft of Strzyga, named after a female Polish/Slavic demon similar to a vampire, a few years ago. It’s a pretty grisly story about a nightshift worker who finds something unnatural in his warehouse, the general concept focusing on what happens when the mundane collides with the extraordinary. At just under 10,000 words it wasn’t quite long enough to stand up on its own, but too long for most short story markets.

Until now.

Cthulhu Cymraeg The Night Country: Lovecraftian Tales from Wales, is available on eBook and paperback.

A Century of Short Stories (and not out!)

Is that a cricket reference? I think I just made my first cricket reference. Anyway, my 100^th short story, Midnight at Deadwood Station, was recently published in the anthology Horror on the Range (available via Undertaker Books).

I must admit, I never thought I would ever reach this landmark. Granted, it took me almost thirty years, but that’s still a solid 3.3 shorts published each year on average. My strike rate probably would have been a lot higher had I not drifted away from fiction for a few years in the middle there. I had given up my factory job which provided a steady but low income, and had to earn a living. Fiction just didn’t pay enough (still doesn’t), so I started writing features for magazines and did bar work on the side to pay my way through university. After that, I moved to China and started writing fiction again during the long, lonely Spring Festival of 2009, while snowed in my apartment in Tianjin.

By some weird twist of fate the first story I ever submitted also became the first story I ever had published. Monkeyman came out in a Welsh fiction magazine called Cambrensis in 1997. It was inspired by a quirky story I read in The Sun newspaper about an area of northern England being terrorised by a someone in a gorilla suit often spotted climbing up people’s drainpipes. He was probably either a peeping Tom or a burglar wearing a disguise, but might have been something worse, which is where my imagination went. Cambrensis was run single-handedly by a dear old chap called Arthur Smith. I think that early success had more to do with him feeling sorry for me than any real skill on my part, especially as I submitted the manuscript in BLOCK CAPITALS and the poor bloke had to re-type it all. Cambrensis was a labour of love for Arthur. I doubt he ever made any money out of it, especially because in lieu of monetary payment, the reward for publication was a lifetime subscription. As it turned out, the ‘lifetime’ in question was his. He died a few years later, and Cambrensis died with him.

This was the era of the small press. Genre magazines printed in small batches, which were kind of like fanzines for horror writers. Some were quite prestigious. Not many paid, but I was still cutting my teeth and just seeing my name in print was payment enough. Credits in Raw Nerve, The Asphalt Jungle, Roadworks, and others followed. But within a few years, the Internet would come marching in and give the industry a massive kick up the arse. The small press disappeared virtually overnight to be replaced by websites and the submitting process became cheaper and more efficient. Back in the day you had to type out a story on a typewriter, send it off to a magazine, (not forgetting to enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope so they could send it back) and wait several months for a reply. Sometimes the reply never came. Other times they wouldn’t send your story back, or they would but it would be all coffee-stained or crumpled and you’d have to type out another one. These days, you just end an email.

When I returned to the fiction fold after my exile, I had to adjust to the new landscape. But adjust we do. The world would be a very boring place if everything stayed the same. Looking back at my body of work, it’s possible to pick out trends and little threads tying them together which, with the benefit of hindsight, I can relate to where I was in my life when I wrote them. Some of my early stories, like A Thin Disguise, Another False Dawn, and A Hell of my Own Creation, are essentially about a young person struggling to find their place in the world, something I was doing a lot of at the time. A lot of my older stories are written from the POV of a lone male protagonist. That’s not me being misogynist. It’s just a reflection of a life lived mostly as a lone male protagonist. There is often sense of displacement, and not fitting in. Another observation I can make given some distance is that much (probably too much) of my short fiction is set in pubs or clubs. Painted Nails, Club Culture, The Cunning Linguist, and others fall into that category.

Naturally, geography has also had a massive impact on my work. I tend to write about my where I am living at the time. You can’t help but be influenced by your environment. Most of my earlier stories had a ‘small town’ setting, which I later gave the name ‘Wood Forge’. The Old Tip Road, What Happened to Huw Silverthorne, What Happened Next, Never Go Back, Hero of the Day, Where a Town Once Stood, and the Widow of Wood Forge, were all set there, along with many others. When I lived in China, that became my preferred setting. God knows the place is so weird it provided a lot of inspiration and led to stories like The Others, Roach, Surzhai, Little Dead Girl, The Wailing, Siki’s Story, and If You’ve Ever eaten Toad. Then there was the four years I spent in London, which comes with it’s own special kind of terror. Vicar on the Underground, Scary Mary, #Subject 270374, Gush, Sleepless, Holiday of a Lifetime, and Harberry Close were written, directly or indirectly, about my time there.

Finally, there are personal circumstances. Life is hard, and we all go through some shit. Some might disagree, but I have grown a lot in the past 30 years. Different places, relationships, jobs, experiences. Writing helps me deal, and a lot of the associated frustrations are filtered through my fiction. I doubt I’ll manage a hundred more short stories. There comes a time when we all have to stop what we are doing and do something else instead. But like I said I never thought I’d be able to write the first hundred, so we’ll see.

If you’re interested, you can find a full list of my published work HERE.

I periodically collect short stories into compilations called the X books. You can find the latest edition HERE.

2025 in Review

Greetings! And Happy New Year. Dang, 2025 was gone in the blink of an eye. It’s so weird how the older I get, the quicker the time seems to go. With that in mind, let’s get down to business with a quick recap. In the name of promotion, in the past I’ve tried to limit any magazine or blog interviews I do to around release dates. I have since come to realise that this probably isn’t the best strategy. Best case scenario, your name is everywhere, all the time, for a couple of weeks or so, and then it’s nowhere for a year. Or until you release another book. Your audience either gets tired of you or they forget all about you. So my new strategy is to try to toe the line by doing a couple of interviews a year when the opportunities arise, and spreading them out. Here’s one I did with Andrew Cooper about my novella Silent Mine.

2025 was a good year for short stories. Cutter was included in Big Smoke Pulp (Volume 1), the sci-fi chiller The Incomplete Sneeze was included in a time travel-themed collection on Smoking pen Press, and the drabble Girl’s Night appeared in Flash Phantoms. Later in the year, Horrific Scribblings published The Screaming Man, describing it as ‘quiet horror sci-fi’, a very fitting description, and Collection in Person was included in Clubhouse 3 on Crystal Cook’s 13 Days publishing.

Also, my stab (sorry) at erotic horror, The Cunning Linguist was reprinted in the Blood Lust anthology on Black Hare Press, and I sold Revenge of the Toothfish as a reprint to an antho called Murderfish, the title being a massive clue as to the theme. I probably take more satisfaction in selling reprints than original stories, because it means getting paid for the same thing twice.

You might remember a fella called Dylan Decker, star of the aforementioned Silent Mine. DL Winchester, head honcho at Undertaker Books, let slip that they were putting together a Western horror anthology and asked if Dylan Decker would like to be involved. Of course he would. Decker doesn’t turn down many assignments. The result was Midnight at Deadwood Station, and it is probably the Decker story I am most proud of to date. All writers know that feeling when you don’t have to dig around for the words, they just appear in your head and you write them down. That’s when we do our best work. The story came out about 8,000 words, which is pretty long for a short story, but it works, and Horror on the Range is out now. Fittingly, it was also my hundredth published short story, not including reprints. There will be a blog post about that particular landmark coming shortly.

In the longer form, Dylan Decker saddled up for another adventure, this time at Blood Lake where, right after an encounter with an angry grizzly, he gets yanked into a duel with a flying cryptid. There was quite a complex back-story surrounding Blood Lake, which I wrote about in depth here. Decker’s near-legendary encounter with the group of murderous Germans, A Christmas Cannibal, was also re-released as a stand-alone, and you might be happy to know that book three (or four, if you count A Christmas Cannibal) is already in the publisher’s hands.

2025 also saw the re-issue of a revamped and remixed version of Tethered, my novella inspired by internet rituals, the Cecil Hotel, and the death of Elisa Lam, by 13 days Publishing. I did a deep dive into the history behind it here.

On the non-fiction front, I wrote about creating multiple revenue streams, making the switch to full-time writing, celebrating the little wins, pantsing, how to write about unfamiliar topics, and when to grant copy approval and when not to for Writer’s Digest, and cuckoos for Fortean Times. FYI, all my WD articles are archived here. Weirdly, the most popular post on this here blog with 1019 views perhaps indicates that I may not be the only person haunted by the number 27.

Lots planned for 2026, so onwards and upwards.

You can check out last year’s review here.

The Revenge of the Revenge of the Toothfish!

No, that’s not a typo. A few years ago I wrote a surreal, gory little story about a group of fishermen out trying to catch Patagonian toothfish (more commonly known by the more palatable name of Chilean sea bass) when they reel in something altogether more bizarre.

Revenge of the Toothfish was originally published in the anthology Trigger Warning: Body Horror, and now it’s back! Reprinted in the brand spanking new book Murderfish: An Aquatic Anthology on Wonderbird Press. Murderfish is part of the Unhelpful Encyclopedia series, where each volume focuses on a specific category of animal. Of course, the stories about these creatures go in fantastical directions, take place on other worlds, and often indicate that your fish really are trying to kill you.

“If you want your nature documentary to feel like a PG13 action-adventure romp, you’ve come to the right place.”

Murderfish: An Aquatic Anthology is out now.

Modern Publishing – The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

The Good

The rise of self publishing. There’s still an elitist mentality in some quarters, especially the established old brigade who think that self-publishing doesn’t really count, but what it has done is level the playing field. Writing and publishing books used to be the exclusive domain of the well-off and/or well-educated. Now, there are more publishers then ever before (and I’m not just talking about vanity publishers, though those parasites still exist) and if all else fails literally anyone can write a book and self publish it on platforms like Amazon and Smashwords. It’s very punk. You don’t even need much technical know-how. All you really need is motivation.

The Bad

Also the rise of self publishing. There are two sides to every coin, as they say. There may be more publishers around now than ever before, but most of them don’t have two pennies to rub together. There’s no big advance, and no marketing budget. Most are struggling just to stay afloat. And the self publishing route is even more fraught with danger. The main problem with self-publishing is that most releases sink like stones. Effective marketing is not only expensive, but a complete mystery to most of us.

Plus, there is very little, if any, quality control. There are millions of books published each year, and the number is climbing. Some are brilliant. Some are terrible. Most are somewhere in between. It’s not for me to say what makes a book terrible, suffice to say that just because you CAN write books, it doesn’t mean that you should. I apply the same logic to robbing banks.

The Ugly

Discrimination. For starters, can we all agree that racism, sexism, ageism, classism, elitism, nepotism, and most other isms, are bad? They are divisive, restrictive and create disharmony and hostility. Mankind should have evolved past all that by now. I believe the world should be an even playing field, and your gender, sexuality, age or skin colour shouldn’t affect how other people view you or your work.

Yet apparently in the publishing industry it’s still okay to judge people this way. How often do you see limited submission calls? Some are restricted to gender or sexual persuasion, some to particular countries or territories, others to various minority groups.

An increasing number of markets have things like this in their guidelines:

Seeking original submissions exclusively from people aged 22-24, from Prestatyn, who like the colour purple and currently identify as squirrels.

Okay, that’s an extreme example, but you get the point. Now before you stand up and scream BUT IT’S NOT THE SAME THING! How about you take a minute to ask yourself why? Why isn’t it the same thing? Discrimination is discrimination however you dress it up, and we all have ways of making it more palatable.

The real irony here is that most of these publications claim to advocate equality, yet in practise promote the exact opposite. Instead of erasing the lines that divide people, they are pouring cement on those walls and rubbing their hands with glee as they grow higher and higher. In my mind that is both hypocritical and counterproductive. When did two wrongs make a right?

It makes no difference to me whether the author of whatever I am reading is male, female, black, white, straight, gay, something in between, or whatever. I honestly couldn’t care less. I’m all about the writing. If someone asks me what the last book I read by a [insert label here] author was, I probably wouldn’t be able to answer because I don’t look. Should I? Sexual orientation or race don’t factor into my decision-making.

Can you imagine what would happen if a publisher put out a submission call along the lines of, “Seeking material from straight, white males ONLY.”

There would be a public outcry, and rightly so. That publisher would probably be branded a far-right Nazi and cancelled quicker than Firefly. And if you don’t get the reference, Google is your friend. So why are submission calls specifically requesting work exclusively from other demographics considered okay?

The Solution

Personally, I think publishers would be better served having an ‘open door’ policy, where the story is king (or queen), and people are judged solely on the strength of their work, rather than any number of other variables. That would be refreshing, and altogether more progressive, wouldn’t it?

How about we go one step further and advocate a universal ‘blind’ submission policy where all identifying information is removed from manuscripts and not even the editors know whose work they are reading. That way, there can be no discrimination either way, and only the very best work is selected for publication, thereby giving the reader the best quality product. That should be the primary goal anyway, rather than virtue signalling or furthering whatever political agenda an individual might have.

After all, any self-respecting writer would prefer to have their work published on merit rather than just to tick a box somewhere.

Ask them.

Why I Write Horror

There are a lot of ways to approach this question. The obvious answer would be ‘Because I want to.’ But that would be overly simplistic. Looking at it, it also comes across as belligerent as hell and gives the reader nothing. An alternative would be ‘Because it’s what I read.’ But that’s only slightly less belligerent, and again gives the reader nothing. So I opted to tackle the question from a different angle.

The more I thought about it, the more complex the answer, and the question, became. I realised that at some point in my life there had to be a defining moment. Some event that set me off on this dark path, rather than an alternative path lined with glitter, rainbows, dancing bunnies and jolly unicorns.

Maybe it was the time I sneaked into my older sister’s room to look for her diary, which I planned to use for extortion purposes, and found instead her collection of battered horror paperbacks. I was too young to appreciate the literary merits of said collection, and instead pored over the covers, one of which memorably portrayed a man with an axe buried in his head.

Or was it watching An American Werewolf in London for the first time? On repeated viewings, I began to appreciate the humour more. But back then, it was just horror. Pure, primal, pulse-quickening horror. Two scenes in particular stuck with me, and still do; the Nazi demon home invasion sequence and the chase through the London Underground. Coincidentally, when I moved to London to work for a magazine years later, that very underground station (Tottenham Court Road) was on my daily commute, and it was a very disconcerting experience interchanging there late at night. The place hasn’t changed much.

Another trigger for my love of horror might have been listening to my ex-coal miner grandfather’s stories of the ghostly bwca he and his mates swore they heard deep in the bowels of the earth. Years later, I found that these stories were not unique to Welsh mines. Stephen King wrote about the same phenomena in The Tommyknockers. In fact, people hear the same phantom tapping and knocking noises underground all over the world and always have, yet nobody knows what causes them. I explored this concept further in my recent novella Silent Mine.

Then again, perhaps growing up in a house which may or may not have had a resident poltergeist sparked my interest in horror and the paranormal. I’ve made my peace with that, and haven’t completely ruled out the theory that any perceived activity was a manifestation of my own pubescent telekinetic energy, as per one of the main theories behind the poltergeist phenomenon.

On the other hand, my obsession with horror, the paranormal, and all aspects of the unexplained might be down to a strange encounter involving a huge wooden wardrobe in the back bedroom. That certainly happened before any of those other things, and may well have influenced my thought process for evermore. Maybe if the Wardrobe Incident had never happened, none of those other things would have happened.

So what happened, exactly?

To this day, I don’t even know.

But I know something did.

(Not the actual wardrobe)

One of my earliest memories is having some kind of bad experience with that damned wardrobe and being too young to run away. I remember sitting on the floor, the wardrobe towering over me, overcome with a mixture of helplessness and profound terror. The next thing I know I am at the top of the stairs, too little to tackle them by myself, yelling for my mother. When she finally came, I was too traumatised to even articulate what had happened. All I could do was point.

It might have been something innocuous; a sudden breeze opening the door, gravity making something fall inside and make a noise. Heck, I might just have caught a fleeting glimpse of a rogue dormouse or something.

Or it could have been something so utterly terrifying that I refused to enter that room again, suffered from insomnia for years, and checked myself in to a kind of mental emergency room where my fractured mind still seeks to paper over the cracks. That part of my memory is now hidden from view, obscured. Maybe it will come back one day, maybe it won’t. 

Maybe I don’t want it to.

And maybe that’s why I write horror.

An alternative version of this post first appeared on the website Kendal Reviews

The Return of the Christmas Cannibal!

The Dylan Decker novelette, A Christmas Cannibal, has been released as a stand-alone by Undertaker Books as part of their Graveside Reads series, making the perfect gift for the ghoul in your life!

Or for yourself.

Christmas in the badlands is never much fun. But when someone steals his horse and leaves him for dead in a snowstorm, this one has the potential to be Dylan Decker’s worst ever. Or even his last.

But he isn’t ready to die just yet. He tracks the thief to a nearby town, where the festive season is in full swing, with revenge on his mind. Little does he know that his ordeal is only just beginning, and the ho ho horror is about to go to another level.

This time, Dylan may have bitten off more than he can chew…

A Christmas Cannibal is OUT NOW!

Girl’s Night

Happy to report that my drabble, Girl’s Night, has been included in the latest edition of Flash Phantoms ezine.

I do love a good drabble, and there’s a lot going on in this one. I was determined to stick to my usual modus operandi of lulling the reader into a false sense of security before hitting them with a gut punch at the end, but it’s a lot more difficult to achieve when you only have 100 words to play with.

Still, mission accomplished. I think.

Girl’s Night is free to read HERE.

Blood Lake is out now!

Riding east through the Rockies in the aftermath of his ordeal at Silent Mine, career loner Dylan Decker gets tangled up with a grizzly bear, and then finds himself neck-deep in even more danger.

The town of Dudsville has been plagued by an anomalous creature dubbed the Winged Terror for longer than most folks there can remember. Dylan is tempted to keep riding. Not his problem. But he but feels indebted to the townspeople who showed him kindness in the aftermath of the grizzly fight, and when the Winged Terror drops in, he agrees to join a small posse in a bid to rid the town of the evil beast once and for all.

But is the posse hunting the Winged Terror, or is the Winged Terror hunting them?

A battle rages through the foothills of the Rockies as Dylan and his friends match wits with a beast unlike anything he’s faced before. Can they bring down the Winged Terror, or will the monster slip away to terrorize another generation? .

Blood Lake, the latest Dylan Decker adventure, is out now on Undertaker Books

A deep dive into Tethered

My latest novella, Tethered, is out now on 13 Days Publishing. What follows is the afterword from the novella, edited to remove spoilers.

Many of the so-called Internet rituals described in the story are real. That’s not to say that they actually work. But they are ‘real’ in the sense that they have been written about and discussed extensively online. I changed a few crucial details in my descriptions, especially that of the Elevator Game. I’m not saying I’m a believer, but I don’t want it on my conscience if one of my readers tries one of these things and ends up in an alternate dimension or something. Lots of people have tried the Elevator Game, with mixed results. They usually end up disappointed. However, as alluded to in this book, it might be worth noting that if it actually worked, they probably wouldn’t be in a position to tell anyone about it.

The death of Elisa Lam in 2013 is often linked to the Elevator Game because of the genuinely unsettling surveillance footage which emerged of her acting strangely in an elevator. Her demise is still shrouded in mystery and often cited as one of the most bizarre deaths in recent years. Was it an accident? Murder? Suicide? Or something altogether stranger?

Nobody knows, and ultimately, that’s what makes it so chilling. The other cases mentioned of people being found dead in water tanks are also real, and I am sure there are lots more that haven’t been so widely publicized. The Cecil Hotel (since rebranded as Stay on Main) in Los Angeles is a place with a very weird history, and Richmond House is also an actual building in Southampton, albeit with a slightly more mundane background. 

The summer of 2018 saw the arrival of a British reality TV show called The Circle, where a group of strangers were kept segregated and could only communicate with each other via a special social networking platform only they could access. One participant used his girlfriend’s pictures, and suckered everyone else into thinking he was someone he wasn’t. He won the first prize. I was fascinated by the way he manipulated the other players. It just goes to show that in an online world, you can be whoever you want to be. It also shows that even if there are red flags, the majority of people will ignore them and believe what they want to believe. I wanted to do something similar with the reader in Tethered. Anyone familiar with my work will know how much I love twist endings. I hoped to string you along for a while, feeding you just enough information so you think you know what will happen, and pull the rug out from under your feet. Then, just as you were getting your bearings, I wanted to do it again.

You may notice how integral the number 14 is to the plot. After setting sail from Southampton, a city integral to the plot of Tethered, the Titanic hit the iceberg on 14th April, the Cecil Hotel has 14 floors (Richmond House has only 13, I changed it for effect) my version of the Elevator Game has 14 steps, and both the serial killer Richard Ramirez and the ‘Man in Black’ from Tethered needed 14 victims. I thought this would be a bit more original than the usual 13. Regular readers of mine might also note that it fits in with one of my previous books,  Apartment 14F. That story is about an English teacher living in China and realising his apartment is haunted. The Chinese take numerology very seriously. Every number is symbolic. Mainly because of the phonetic similarity when pronounced in Mandarin, the numbers ‘one’ and ‘four’ have come to signify loneliness and death, two predominant themes in both that book and Tethered.

Tethered is out now on paperback and ebook.