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 see last year’s annual review here.

Dylan Decker at Deadwood Station

When Dylan Decker is robbed and thrown off a moving train, he thinks his night can’t get any worse. Or weirder. But then he finds himself at an outpost called Deadwood Station, a place where the dead don’t stay dead, and the weirdness level goes through the roof.

Midnight at Deadwood Station, my hundredth published short story (not including reprints) is set in the same universe as the novellas Silent Mine, Blood Lake, and A Christmas Cannibal, and included in Horror on the Range, a new Western-themed anthology on Undertaker Books.

Horror on the Range is out now

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!

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

Blood Lake cover reveal

Saddle up! Dylan Decker is ready to ride again, and you’ve been invited. Blood Lake follows him as he journeys east after the horrific events at Silent Mine, and encounters a creature unlike anything he has ever faced before.

Check out the awesome cover art by Rebecca Cuthbert.

Pre-orders are available now on the Undertaker Books website.

The Research Process

Any writer will tell you that research is a crucial aspect of the craft. But it’s importance is elevated in historical writing, which often stands or falls in the small details. Your work has to be factually accurate, or things quickly fall apart and it loses all credibility. At the very least you’d be called lazy, and probably a lot worse. Readers can only suspend belief so much, and if inaccuracies find their way into the text it jars and the whole house of cards is at risk of falling down. For example, it’s no good writing a story set in California in the year 1879, taking time to carefully construct the scene and introduce the characters, then have one of them use a Lee Enfield rifle, which didn’t come into widespread use until 1895 and even then was mostly issued to British soldiers with very few finding their way over the pond until much later. Not every reader would know this, but I’m willing to bet a good many would. Weaponry plays a vital role in my new novella, Silent Mine, the first in a series of stories starring the same protagonist Dylan Decker, as it does in most Westerns, so it was absolutely vital to get it right. Other minor details I had to address for the sake of authenticity were what the average general store might sell, the price of a shot of whisky, and the measure it came in.

Part of the inspiration for Silent Mine was the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, an open world adventure role play set in the Wild West. The game is impressive in many ways, not least the level of detail it contains. It’s also impeccably researched, with several elements finding their way into the book. One example is the practise of carving an X into bullets to create an early form of expansion ammunition, which was just too good not to use. Once armed with a scrap of information as a leaping off point, it was off to the internet to find out more.

When carrying out research, I think it’s important to forget everything you think you know and try to approach the topic with fresh eyes. There are a lot of common misconceptions out there, especially about the so-called Wild West, that aren’t strictly true. For example, if you watch any Western movie you’d be forgiven for thinking that people were getting killed left, right, and centre. But the fact is that the murder rate was lower back then than it is in most modern cities in the same location, even taking into account the higher population. From what I can make out, the dramatic gunfights and face-offs that were the bread and butter of the genre are a Hollywood invention, exceptionally rare IRL. Who on earth would risk death when it would be safer and easier to bide your time and shoot someone in the back when they weren’t expecting it?

In addition, relations between settlers and Native Americans weren’t nearly as fraught as Hollywood would have us believe. Sure, there were flashpoints, and some pretty ugly historical events, but generally speaking the two groups just wanted to make the best lives for themselves, with each using the other to their best advantage. There was also a lot more diversity than is generally portrayed in the movies. Cowboys immigrated to the US from all over the world and spoke every language under the sun. At least the famed Spaghetti Westerns of the sixties and seventies were on point in that respect. I did take a few liberties. I call it artistic license. Dylan is a comparatively recent name, popularized by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in the mid-20^th Century so it’s unlikely there were many cowboys using it. And though a ‘sour toe cocktail’ is a real thing (I promise!) again, it wasn’t around in 1879 though probably should have been.

There’s no denying that the whole art of research is much easier in the internet age. Twenty years ago I wrote a book about a Welsh football (soccer) club, and my research entailed travelling to a major library every morning and manually scanning countless reels of microfilm. When I found something of interest I scribbled it down in a notebook. These days, we literally carry the sum of mankind’s knowledge around on a device we keep in our pockets (and use it to look at pictures of cats, as the meme goes). But you still have to know what you’re looking for, and there’s a lot of misinformation out there to sift through. Sometimes it can be like looking for a nugget of gold in a sea of sludge. And with internet sources being notoriously unreliable, you always have to check that what you’ve found is the real deal and not a chunk of fool’s gold.

Silent Mine is out now

This post first appeared on the Undertaker Books website.