We now return to our scheduled program

How are we doing, readers? If you’re new here and you’re wondering why you’ve got TWO of these in the space of three days, worry not, this will likely never happen again. Or certainly only every couple of years, when there’s a huge deal I want you to know about.

This week saw Pyres discounted for the first time since release to 99p/99¢. It’s also been on today’s BookBub email for UK readers, which has resulted in my biggest day of book sales for a couple of years. And, yes, those books are generating only small royalties, but it helps push Pyres up the charts on Amazon and, hopefully, the algorithm will be kinder and show it more people in the coming days and weeks.

A huge, heartfelt thank you to anyone who has picked it up. Every sale, page read and add to wishlist really does help. Without you guys, indie authors like me are toast.

You can still get the book for a bargain price until tomorrow morning, when it goes up to £1.99 / $1.99, then it’s back to normal on Monday.

In other writerly news, today I did a reading at a café, down the road in Monte Estoril with my friend and fellow writer, Sona Schmidt-Harris. A small group of people came down to watch and it was a really nice experience. I think back to my first reading, at Authorcon ‘24, and even my second at the Indie Horror Chapter event in Birmingham that year, and feel like I’ve come a long way in terms of my delivery, etc. We’re going to try to do more of these events here in the coming months. Especially after my next book launches in the winter. I’ll keep readers here posted about them as and when they happen. Below you can see a little video clip of me trying to drum up support before today’s session, and a photo of me mid-reading.

In other news, I’ve been ploughing away at my novel, and I feel confident I’ll hit my 35k target by the start of the school holidays, which should give me a great platform to finish the draft in the summer.

I’ve also been invited, just ten days or so ago, to contribute to a really exciting anthology. I need to come up with and write my idea by August, so a few irons are already glowing in the fire. I hope to put fingers to keyboard on it soon. More info on it, of course, when I can share.

And finally, I appeared on The Hungry Celluloid Podcast with author Frank Duffy last week. Frank is a guy who really knows his stuff when it comes to horror and genre media in general, and we nattered for two hours which could easily have been more. We covered my early years, university, how I got into writing, my former career before I was teaching, moving abroad and my books. Check out the full video below, or go to the Media page on my website.

In my non-author life, I’ve recently managed to get back to running more consistently. Not as much as I’d like, but still, it’s been a regular thing every week since the start of March, I suppose. As many of you know, running makes such a difference, especially for my mental health, and it’s also a way for me to unravel plot holes or make decisions in my writing. I’ve signed up to do a bonfire-laden night run up the coast in Peniche at the end of next month. It’s 15km, and a race I haven’t participated in since, I think, 2022. It’s going to be fantastic to get back to it.

Other than that, suffice to say the school year is winding down. Like all teachers (and students), I really feel like I need a holiday. But we’re almost there. And some exciting trips are coming up, which I’ll write about here in due course.

Recommendations

Reading - Drone by Dan Howarth

Dan is a really good mate of mine, but I hope he knows I wouldn’t be featuring his book here if I didn’t really rate it. Following on from last year’s Last Night of Freedom and Lionhearts, he’s back with Drone, a novella and a very different book. Still rooted in his northern English homeland, this story finds a rural, agricultural community, coming apart at the seams over an unrelenting, horrible sound. The Drone. Rather than zooming out, Drone homes in on the collapsing life and fraying sanity of one of the farmers, Gallagher. This fusing together of weird, uncanny horror and the up close, unsanitised view of his life make it a gripping read from start to finish. Get your noise cancelling earphones in and check this one out.

Listening - The Ghost of a Future Dead by At The Gates

Ask any metal fan about their favourite death metal albums of the nineties - perhaps favourites ever - and you can be fairly confident that Slaughter of the Soul will be in the mix. It’s a record you can play to someone who’s never heard it today and they would still feel it was a fresh album, full of brilliant ideas, executed perfectly. Since then, At The Gates went on hiatus, then came back and did a few more albums. Always solid, without perhaps ever quite reaching Slaughter’s heights. Last year, Tomas Lindberg passed away, having laid down vocal tracks for a new album and the band then had the incredibly difficult task of finalising the recording of the album around it. I’ve only listened through the album two or three times, but I already feel like this is the closest they’ve come to their magnum opus. Check it out on your chosen streaming service, here.

Watching - Daredevil: Born Again - Season Two - Disney+

While I enjoyed a lot of the series of super hero films around the Avengers: End Game era, much of what’s come since has left me fairly cold. Not so with the Benson & Moorhead directed and produced Daredevil: Born Again. Season two picked up where season one left off, only with even higher stakes. As a child, Daredevil was always among my absolute favourite heroes and in this series, all the things I loved about his story are present, but as a character he’s challenged harder than perhaps ever before. The weaving in of an ICE-like deportation force to the story made it poignantly relevant to today’s world and the acting from all of the central characters was sublime. If you’re not tense in the final episode of this series, you probably need to check your pulse. Check out the trailer here.

Bargains and Freebies

Author Raghu P is back at it, with fifty-six dark fiction stories, including my two latest releases. For all your thriller, horror and mystery needs, take a look at the full list here.

Writer Liane Mahugh has gathered twenty creepy as hell stories for you to check out, many of which are at a discounted price. Grab a bargain creepy read here.

Prolific horror author and founder of the UK’s Horror Author’s Guild Newton Webb has picked sixty-four FREE genre titles, including my witchcraft-infused story, Warding. Check out the full list and grab some free books, here.

So, that brings May to a close. Thanks for reading, apologies again for the double dose of news. I won’t bother you now until June, when I’ll be back with the usual combination of news, recommendations, and bargain books.

In the meantime, be kind to one another and do reach out to me on Bluesky, Xitter, Instagram, or even TikTok. Stay safe, and I’ll see you in June.

Kev