Escape Velocity: The Anthology is available FREE on Amazon Kindle! But not for long, so hurry. My Caveat Emptor! scared one lady reader so much she couldn’t finish reading the story. Are you brave enough to read all of it?

There are forty-eight sci-fi stories in Escape Velocity: The Anthology. My absolute favourites are Jack In The Box by Robert Harkess, closely followed by An Empty Kind of Love by Adam Colston, but there are loads of stories I really like.

Find the Kindle anthology here.

Other news... I had a surprise when I saw that Blaze McRob had done a Woman in Horror post about me. It’s over at Angelic Knight Press and also at DarkMedia City. Thanks, Blaze. I feel I don’t really deserve it, as I have more horror stories unpublished/abandoned than published! This has given me a much needed kick to get more horror out there.

I recently read Turner by Karl Drinkwater. This is a chilling horror novel about the sinister goings-on on a remote Welsh island. It was gripping. I had to keep turning the page to find out what would happen to each character, and there was a nice amount of splatter.

I loved the moment when Tom Stanley glimpsed Stawl Island for the first time:

 It surprised him, as if it had been lying in wait, a dark eye amongst the glittering, choppy waters.

You just know things are going to get bad...

Even Nature seems to conspire with the islanders to prevent the visitors from escaping. Scary stuff. As each scene unfolded, I could easily imagine watching it on a big screen. It would make a great film. This will do, for visiting remote islands, what Jaws did for swimming in the sea.

Available in print or as an e-book. More information about Turner here.

Is it a delf or a shesk? This is the newest addition to my writing corner.

I normally write on an ironing board in a corner of the bedroom, because there’s simply no room for a big desk. I have to fold the ironing board away at night so Mr Z doesn’t trip over it in the dark. Less pain for Mr Z (good), but a pain in the neck for me, because all my writing projects get stacked together at the end of the day and I have to sort it all out in the morning. If only I could leave some of my stuff out, so I could find what I want easily...

My son’s crummy old desk has been stored in our lean-to for some time. It was too long to fit in my writing space, and too full of graffiti to sell or give away, but I reckoned if we cut it down, it’d fit nicely into the corner. After much sanding down, I applied my home-made chemical-free polish to the desk-top and the job was done.

It’s not very deep, and I usually sort my projects into three piles on there, so I use it more like a shelf. Hence, ‘shesk’ or ‘delf’. I still write on the ironing board, but my new addition means I can leave stuff in tidy piles.

So, one desklet/shesk/delf for hardly any cost, and nothing taken to the tip. (And we still have the drawer section of the old desk in our lean-to, to store odds ‘n’ ends).

It passed its first test yesterday, when someone from a magazine rang. I was able to snatch up the relevant stuff from the right pile and zoom downstairs to take the call. No rummaging, no stress. Magic!

R B Harkess:

What’s in a name?

When a friend in my writing group suggested my style would work well with YA stories, I didn’t give it much thought and carried on beating my head against the thing I was working on at the time – ultimately unsuccessfully.

Several months later, I was beating my head against the keyboard again. It was time to start a new story. I had a good idea but wouldn’t plot – no matter how I tried. Then I remembered the YA comment and the story fell into place in, quite literally, a five minute epiphany. I spent the rest of the holiday I was on scribbling detailed plot notes and thoroughly annoying my wife.

So I went off and wrote the story, and it ended up being my debut novel. It’s called Aphrodite’s Dawn, and it has just been launched as an e-book.

But it wasn’t until I had actually sold the story I realised I didn’t have a clue what ‘Young Adult’ was all about. I remembered what I enjoyed reading when I had turned the corner into my teens and I’d read a few examples in the genre before I’d started writing, but that hardly constituted a definition. So I went looking.

And ended up really confused and somewhat surprised. YA doesn’t seem to know what it is. It is a world of extremes, ranging from the overtly moralistic through to tough, angry stories that even made me wince, and yet were included in the genre because the main character was in his or her teens and/or the tale involved ‘rites of passage’. It can’t even decide what age range it encompasses, with the younger boundary being between ten and thirteen, and the ‘older’ end being anything from seventeen to twenty-two!

And, eventually, I realised that this hugely open definition is actually one of the strengths of the ‘Young Adult’ label. People that age are hugely smarter than adults often give them credit for. OK, there is a lack of real-word experience, but they aren’t stupid (on the whole). I remember my ‘youth’, and I still remember the step change when I had read just about every book in the children’s section of the Bristol Central Lending library. I was not quite twelve when they handed me my full adult tickets. And suddenly I’m reading about very grown-up issues. There was no middle ground, not that anyone could point me towards and say ‘you might want to try those first’.

The ‘Young Adult’ genre offers a migration path, lets people progress through at a pace they’re comfortable with, without necessarily diving off the deep end. Every genre and style is there in the YA marketplace, and at just about every intensity you could need.

Many people brush the genre off as just being a marketing ploy, or a simple guide to tell the bookstore which shelf to put the book on. I think ‘Young Adult’ is more than that, and I’m really happy to be contributing to it.

(R B Harkess blogs at www.rbharkess.co.uk. Find his other contact details there. Aphrodite’s Dawn is published by Proxima Books, and is available from Amazon)

Published by Delirium Books
Artwork by Daniele Serra

From the back cover:

In the hills of Pennsylvania, phantoms from the past mingle with those of the present, all swirling in a dark maelstrom over Division. Haunted by the part he played in his brother Mark’s death, John McDonnell takes a midnight hike and stumbles across four dead girls upon the forest floor. Their severed limbs spell Repent. The coroner finds Mark’s onyx skeleton key inside one of the victims, right where her heart used to be. The last time John had seen the key it was clasped in his brother’s hand before they lowered him into his grave.


Torn between protecting his family’s name and giving the girls a proper burial, John digs into Division’s past. As lives shatter around them, and a strange woman tries to steal the key, John and his best friend, Michael Johnston, must find the tools to set things right or break beneath the pressure of these ghosts’ sudden weight.

I love Lee Thompson’s short fiction, so when a copy of his debut novel, Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children, came through the letterbox, I couldn’t wait to read it. Unfortunately I had to wait, because of other commitments. I finally got a chance to start reading it on October 11th... and saw that the story opens on October 11th! So far, so spooky.

Before long, I was hooked. It's a complex tale, and I was confused in places, but this is a well-written and gripping novel. Although things got a little surreal at times, I couldn't put it down. Characterisation is excellent, as you’d expect if you’ve read any of Thompson’s other work. The author does a great job of getting inside the head of these flawed characters, and he really seems to know what makes people tick. I particularly liked this line:  “We don’t know who we are until we dig through all the layers we’ve accumulated to protect us over the years.”

If you enjoy thought-provoking, well-written prose, put Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children on your ‘to read’ list. I highly recommend it.

Find out more about Lee Thompson here.

Darkside Digital (ebook)

Amazon (paperback)