I'll be publishing my first full length volume of new fiction in 25 years in October. It's called Warning Signs, it'll be published by Comma Press and you can pre-order your copy here. The placeholder text on the Amazon page is not correct. The book is a standard 300-odd pages, not 160.
Comprising 7 totally original 'long short' stories created especially for this project, Warning Signs was written to entertain - to thrill, chill, intrigue, delight, uplift, shock, inspire and carry readers up, out and away, with bold characters, strong settings, a dash of wit and wildness (I hope) and plenty of back and forth. I won't lie, I like a lurid psychodrama with loads of movement. I had a blast crafting the stories and I hope you have a blast reading them, especially if you love... let's see, who would the dream team be... Daphne du Maurier, Angela Carter, Edgar Allen Poe, Jordan Peele, Anna Biller, Italo Calvino, Alan Moore, Diana Wynne Jones, the League of Gentlemen, Susan Hill, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, The Wicker Man, Black Mirror, It Follows, Blumhouse's films, the TV series Atlanta, The Babadook, M Night Shyamalan, Stranger Things, the first Twilight film, Dario Argento and other giallo cinema, Ana Lily Amirpour, Anne Rice, Hammer Horror and all contemporaries, spin-offs, spoofs and tributes thereof.
There are more details to come - watch this space. I love the 'long short' format as both a reader and writer and am delighted to be working with Comma Press. We’ve already collaborated on three new fiction anthologies in recent years - Resist (2020 - in my story Occupied Territory, a warrior woman in Roman-occupied ancient Britain joins Boudica's army and proceed to slash and burn their way through the country), The Cuckoo Cage (2022 - in my story Lady Swing a seemingly meek household staff member allegedly descended from witches terrorises a modern day grand country estate alongside a community of secret rebels and a mythical beast) and Collision (2023 - in my story Afterglow, ambitious scientists jockey for position at CERN with bonkers slash disastrous totally exciting consequences). The three stories I wrote for those anthologies are not in my forthcoming book as I wanted to give you all-new work.
I haven't exactly been away from public life - quite the opposite since my entire career is in mass media and that is my primary professional identity - but in terms of releasing a full length volume of new fiction, it's been a minute. Or a quarter of a century.
Warning Signs is my sixth book. It follows my short film series Aurora (2020-2023), first short film An Impossible Poison (2017) my fifth book Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices (2015) and the bound essay The Future of Serious Art (2020). You can find my overall career stuff and job factoids right here if you must.
For a quick overview of the book side of things specifically you can look at the My Writing Life interview I did for the Royal Literary Fund and maybe also this for Renaissance One, and for a specific bibliography you can look here. I started my journalism career in my mid-teens and published two novels at 18 and 21 (respectively: Seahorses in 1997 with Flamingo/HarperCollins after that famous book-deal-at-16, then Too Fast To Live in 2000 with Duckworth) but at the time I never felt that literary fiction novels were quite me, despite working with amazing editors, agents and PRs, making good friends among my contemporaries, having a fantastic time generally and being supported by respectful and considerate critics and readers. I'm so pleased that things have come around.
I signed the Warning Signs deal at the end of 2023 and spent the whole of 2024 doing deep dives into each story with total focus, writing large (almost novel length every time) and then cutting down, compressing and polishing carefully to deliver all thriller no filler. Cheesy phrase, but like I said, that lurid psychodrama quality is what I'm into. Above all, I want to entertain and I very much hope you enjoy the collection when it comes out.
Now, do you want a Jan 2025 expressionless sunglasses studio selfie? Okay go on then: