Two New Harrison Peel collections out now

I have two new Harrison Peel books out now at Amazon (Kindle) and Smashwords (ePub).

The Elder Codex  (Book 3)

Harrison Peel’s third collection of adventures features two novellas set against the backdrop of war torn Africa:

The Elder Codex — When ripples in the fabric of space-time warp reality in Somilia, Peel investigates, and retraces his past in the ruins of devastated land.

The Spiraling Worm (with John Sunseri) — A missing US soldier resurfaces in the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo, mutilated and deformed, and commanding an army of cultists soldiers on a war path against Peel and a small contingent of special forces soldiers.

The Infinity Agenda (Book 4)

The fourth collection features two short stories and one novella set against the backdrop of the War on Terror, the Space Program and radio astronomy.

The Road to Afghanistan — Peel contacts an assassin embroiled in a conspiracy festering at the very heart of the Pentagon, one involving alien creatures pulled from another dimension and released into Taliban controlled territory.

War Gods of Men (with David Kernot) — in Afghanistan a new super-weapon is decimating soldiers on the battlefronts, so Peel teams up with cyber-analyst Sergeant Emerson Ash and leads a search and destroy mission inside the enemy heartland.

The Eye of Infinity — an astrophysicist is found dead at a radio telescope facility in New Mexico with a condition called multiple eye syndrome, and Peel’s investigation leads him to NASA and a conspiracy at the heart of the very universe itself.

See the Harrison Peel page for details where these books can be purchased. If you want a review copy, please email me.

Best Horror of the Year Volume 3

Reading through the introduction to Ellen Datlow's The Best Horror of the Year Volume 3 recently, I noticed this description on Cthulhu's Dark Cults:

"Cthulhu's Dark Cults: Ten Tales of Dark & Secretive Orders edited by David Conyers (Chaosium) is an impressive anthology of original stories about the various cults that H.P. Lovecraft dreamed up. Most of the stories are true to their source yet bring something new to the material. Notable stories by John Sunseri, David Conyers, Cody Goodfellow and David Witteveen."

I also got a nice comment on my collaboration "Sweet as Decay" whcih appeared in Macabre.

"The most powerful originals are by Gary Kemble, Kyla Ward, Stephen M. Irwin, Kirstyn McDermott, Richard Harland, Susan Warlde, and a collaboration by David Witteveen and David Conyers."

Always nice to get a review like this, particularly from one of the most respected editors in the horror field.

Ellen Datlow’s Honorable Mentions 2010

Every year there several Year’s Best science fiction, fantasy and horror collections are released, and while it is always nice to get a story reprinted in one, the next best thing is to appear on the Recommended Reading list. This year, my first recommended reading appearance is in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year Volume 3, with my collaboration with David Witteveen, “Sweet as Decay” which appeared in Macabre.

Also making the list are three stories from my first edited anthology, Cthulhu’s Dark Cults. They are “Perfect Skin” by David Witteveen, “The Eternal Chinaman” by John Sunseri and “The Devil’s Diamonds” by Cody Goodfellow. Cody goes one step further, with one of his stories actually being reprinted in Datlow’s anthology.

Congratulations to everyone who made the list.

Elements of the Apocalypse

Just noticed the release of Elements of the Apocalypse from Permuted Press, with four novellas for some very respectable authors, three of whom I have had the pleasure to work with on previous publications. John Sunseri is my co-author on The Spiraling Worm, Ryan C. Thomas accepted a story from me for Monstrous: 20 Tales of Giant Creature Terror, and D.L. Snell and I are working together (amongst some other authors) on a new book I'm preparing. Needless to say all these guys are at the top of their game and produce some great stories, so I'd recommend checking this one out:

Elements of the Apocalypse

Four tales drawn from the classic Greek elements show the end of the world in ways you’ve never imagined!

EARTH: Chaos erupts when Mother Earth begins to purge the sickness that is mankind.

AIR: In a hopeless future, humanity has moved underground to escape the poisonous air that fills the atmosphere.

WATER: Humanity is plunged into desperation when all the water in the world suddenly evaporates.

FIRE: Ashes fill the sky as cases of spontaneous human combustion erupt on a world-wide scale.

• Remains - D.L. Snell
• Silence in Heave - John Sunseri
• Phrenetic - R. Thomas Riley
• With a Face of Golden Pleasure - Ryan C. Thomas

Cthulhu's Dark Cults Reviews Keep Coming: Scary Minds

Scary Minds, a website run by Jeff Ritchie and devoted to reviewing all things Aussie/New Zealand and horrorific (films, books, comics, etc) has just posted a very nice review of Cthulhu's Dark Cults. My favorite bit of the review follows, particularly the last sentence. Thanks Jeff.

The writers in the collection have really captured the true nature of the Cthulhu Mythos and have managed to twist that nature in a new direction. It's quite the achievement and the collection really does become a must have for lovers of the horror genre. I'm calling this the best Mythos collection since Brian Lumley's seminal Titus Crow works.

Jeff's favorite stories were from John Sunseri, David Witteveen, Shane Jiraiya Cummings and my own.

The Cthulhu Unbound Series Soon to Turn 3

In 2009 Permuted Press published the first two volumes in in their series of Cthulhu Mythos anthologies, Cthulhu Unbound 1 and Cthulhu Unbound 2, edited by Thomas Brannan and John Sunseri. The series featuerd noted authors such as C.J. Henderson, Willie Meikle, John Goodrich, Tim Curran. D.L. Snell and others. The second volume also featured a collaboration between myself and Brain M. Sammons. Both volumes have been best sellers on Amazon.com and have received praise from both the Cthulhu Mythos and horror community.

Further information on the first two Cthulhu Unbound anthologies, the collected stories and the contributors can be found here.

The series has done so well in fact that Brian M. Sammons and I have had the honour of teaming up again to edit Cthulhu Unbound 3.

This second collection will be a little different to the first two in that we didn't collect lots of short stories, but focused instead on four Cthulhu Mythos novellas penned by some of the better known indie press horror authors active today.

Cthulhu Unbound 3 was inspired by Ramsey Campbell’s classic anthology, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, which featured Lovecraftian tales that did not use the traditional tropes or plotlines, and produced some spectacular results from David Drake, A.A. Attanasio, Stephen King, T.E.D. Klein, and Campbell himself.

Brian and I are collaborating on one of the tales in the anthology, a new Harrison Peel adventure (the hero from my Lovecraftian novel, The Spiraling Worm) concerning his visit to a rather unusual island mysteriously appearing in the middle of the South Pacific . . .

Right now Brian and I are editing the novellas which are nearing completion. As things develop, I'll post more on who our mysterious authors are (although a bit of googling will solve the mystery) and snippets on the novellas they have written.

To Collaborate or not to Collaborate

Through my writing career I’ve ended up collaborating with various authours, and while I’ve gained much from the experience, I know many authors out there are reluctant to do so. Not me it seems. I’ve worked with Brian M. Sammons (“Stomach Acid” and “Six-Legged Shadows”), John Goodrich (“The Masked Messenger”), David Witteveen (“Sweat as Decay”), John Sunseri (“The Spiraling Worm”) and John Kenny (an unpublished science fiction piece) and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve got out of each collaboration and the end story we’ve created. I’ve also discussed the possibility with other authors of doing collaborations, including with David Kernot and C.J. Henderson, if we can ever get the time.

What I find works well for me is what I have learnt from the experience. Brian is taught me how to really cut to the heart of story, John Goodrich on how to tell a story without explicitly telling it, David in writing sincint poetical scenes, John Sunseri how to make language and character create a style all of its own, and John Kenny the importance of pace and reflective prose. I’ve learnt much more from each of these authors than just what I’ve listed, here I’m illustrating particular elements of learning that were unexpected for me in the process. The end result is that I feel that I’m a better writer because of these experiences, and it also taught me how to be humble and not so hung up on the in’s and out’s of a particular story. Oh, and to let a story tell itself.

The other reason I like collaborating is because of the creativity it allows.

I’m currently writing another novella with Brian M. Sammons, which is the reason for this post. I’m finding that even before we’ve started ideas are just flowing all over the place and we feed off each other’s perspective, so much so that the tale just seems to write itself. We are both very excited about where it is headed.

Most of my collaborations have been with horror and dark fantasy writers, a genre that seems to bring authors together rather than creating a sometimes overly negative competitive environment that I’m finding in some speculative fiction ‘scenes’. From my experience horror and dark fantasy writers tend to get excited about what each other are writing, and want to share. How nice is that!

Collaboration can potentially create its own problems. For example my most successful series, the Harrison Peel spies versus the Cthulhu Mythos series (The Spiraling Worm) is not a sole-creation of my own, but one that had a genesis with John Sunseri and now with Brian M. Sammons, C.J. Henderson and John Goodrich. We’ve all agreed that our characters are our own (mine is Harrison Peel, John Sunseri’s in Jack Dixon, C.J. Henderson is Joan De Molina and Brian M. Sammons’ is Jordan - amongst others) and that we need to seek permission to use each other’s characters, but we also agree that we can each pretty much do whatever we like in this shared world setting. So what happens if I get a movie or game deal for The Spiraling Worm (not saying it is likely, but it is a possibility), what do we do then? Hopefully we’ll all get financial rewarded, and that’s what I’d like to see.

So leading on from this point, I’ve decided that some series I will collaborate on (such as the Harrison Peel series) and some I won’t which I want to hold complete control over (such as my Earth Central series for example featuring stories including “Black Water”, “Aftermath”, “The Entropy Collapse”, “Terraformer”, “The Octagon” and others). Of course stories that aren’t part of any series (“Sweat as Decay”) don’t really matter, they are stand alones, but fun to write nonetheless.

Fun times ahead, seeing where all this collaboration business goes.

Cthulhu Unbound 2: Harrison Peel is Back

Cthulhu Unbound 2 edited by Thomas Brannan my good friend John Sunseri has just been released by Permuted Press and you can purchase it here. This is a series of genre-blending tales with the Cthulhu Mythos as the central link between all stories. The first volume has been very successful and well received. I'm glad to have been part of the second volume.

My story in this book is written with another good friend Brian M. Sammons and it is called "Stomach Acid". This tale features former Australian Army Intelligence officer Major Harrison Peel from The Spiraling Worm, a collection/novel which I incidentally penned with John Sunseri.

In the heart of the Amazonian rainforests, Major Peel is blackmailed, when a human agent of an alien species compromises his life expectancy. The only way that Peel can live beyond a single day is to turn against the American agent, code-named Jordan, who hired him to act again the very menace that now controls Peel.

Cthulhu Unbound

My good friend and co-author of The Spiraling Worm John Sunseri has just had his first edited anthology with Thomas Brannan released by Permuted Press. It is called Cthulhu Unbound and features stories from John Goodrich, D.L. Snell, Lee Clark Zumpe, C.J. Henderson and others. Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos mixed with every genre you could imagine, from westerns to space opera to romance and everything in between.

I will be appearing in the second volume later this year, Cthulhu Unbound 2.

The Spiraling Worm: A Retrospective

It’s been eighteen months since the publication of The Spiraling Worm, which is either a novel or a collection of interconnected stories linked by characters and setting depending on how you look at it, which I wrote with American horror writer John Sunseri. In summary it is a Cthulhu Mythos novel written in the style of a political thriller. When I tell people it is like The Bourne Identity meets H.P. Lovecraft I’m told this is a great way to sum it up.

As an overview The Spiraling Worm is about three spies, Harrison Peel of Australian Army Intelligence, Jack Dixon of the NSA and James Figgs from the British Secret Service. The three agents are embroiled into the world of cosmic horrors, of other dimensional monsters breaking through into our universe, our world hell-bent on destroying it. Peel and Dixon fight the good fight to stop them, and Figgs … well his motives are a little more clouded. Of course there is lots of action, gun play, exotic locations from the Congo to Russia, Antarctica and the Australian Outback, and as my friends like to point out, lots of explosions. I’m also told regularly that it is very visual, very cinematic.

The book was not something that was originally planned. It started out innocently enough with a few short stories featuring Harrison Peel which ended up in a few magazines and anthologies. One story however, got noticed quickly, and that was “False Containment” which involved government conspiracies, nuclear waste, wormholes into the past, FBI agents and a flesh devouring monster, and the saving of the world by the quick thinking of the hero, Harrison Peel. This story appeared in the Elder Signs Press anthology Horrors Beyond, which also featured a story from John Sunseri, and he was the one who noticed it.

When John read “False Containment” he liked it so much he wanted to borrow Peel for his own tale, “Resurgence” about the rise of the shoggoths (If you don’t know what a shoggoth is, I suggest you read H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness and find out, but in a nutshell they are one of the creepiest monsters ever to come out of 20th Century literature – vampires and werewolves have nothing on these guys). I liked his story so much I wrote a sequel, “Weapon Grade”. Suddenly John and I realised we were a couple of stories away from completing a collection, and so we got to work.

When we started submitting the collection to publishers Chaosium Inc. snapped it up quickly, pushing it up their publication schedule. Renowned and respected Cthulhu Mythos writer C.J. Henderson best known for his Teddy London wrote us a wonderful introduction, and before we knew it, the book was in print.

So what happened in eighteen months since its release? To our surprise the collection did remarkably well. It’s been a continuous seller on Amazon.com regularly dipping into the top ten horror anthology best selling list – word of mouth is definitely what keeps it flying out the Amazon warehouse doors. It spawned its own Wikipedia page, got rave reviews from OzHorrorScope, SFReader, GameGeek and Amazon, and three of the stories received honourable mentions in the Years Best Fantasy and Horror 2008. The book also received two honourable mentions in Australia’s most prestigious awards, the Aurealis and the Australian Shadows. I was interviewed by the ABC and OzHorrorScope about the book, and Chaosium decided to publish it as their first, and so far only, hardback fiction edition.

Looking back on The Spiraling Worm I’m still proud of what John and I achieved. It had its faults of course, which are much easier to see in hindsight, and if I did it again I’d approach the whole thing differently. But at the end of the day, it did well and is still doing far better than we ever could have hoped for.

Will there be any more Harrison Peel and Jack Dixon tales? We certainly hope so and there are enough fans out there who keep asking me when it will happen. Unfortunately for various reasons the sequel got delayed, and then finally ground to a halt. John and I have discussed some options on what we could do with a sequel down the track while we work on other projects. In the meantime we’re still writing more short stories in the series, and when they come out in print, I’ll post here. Peel and Dixon are just too much fun to write about to end the series now.