Reflections…

My first collection of short stories dropped this week. Featuring nine tales of horror, darkness, love and redemption, I’ve been stoked by the reception to Mistress of the Crows.

This collection contains some of my favourite stories, some of which also represent important milestones in my writing career to date.

Take Mirror Mirror for example. The oldest story in the collection, Mirror Mirror originally began life as a story called Weird Mirror that I wrote sometime around 2005/2006.

In 2021, I dusted it off, gave it a full re-write/edit and submitted it for the WriteHive Horror Short Story competition.

Making the shortlist for the final, Mirror Mirror was subsequently published in Duplicitous, becoming my first published piece of fiction.

It was also the piece that opened the proverbial floodgates.

Prior to Mirror Mirror, I’d never had a piece of fiction published. Since then, I’ve had more successes than rejections, won short story competitions and seen my first novel, Badlands become an Amazon bestseller and finalist in the ReadFreely Book of the Year 2023 competition.

Mirror Mirror also marked a return to the genre I first started writing in way back in 1997; horror.

My first new piece of horror fiction was Curse of the Ancient, the final story in the book. A prequel to my upcoming supernatural thriller Trinity, Curse… marks my first venture into vampire fiction since my Lost Boys/The Craft tribute pieces back in the late nineties.

Building on my love of pre-historic archaeology, Curse presents vampires as a god-like race from the Neolithic, and marks my vampires as more savage, almost bestial creatures rather than the more elegant vampires of Anne Rice.

The Beast of Bodmin represents a warped science approach to vampires, while Brood and Night Tube delve deeper into vampire folklore.

As always, if I’m writing about vampires, witches are not far behind and Mirror Mirror again acts as a jumping off point into the witchier realms of the collection.

Why Grandmother turns the tables of the Red Riding Hood fairy tale and presents a witch glorying in her dark power.

At the other end of the witchy spectrum, Not in This Lifetime is a paranormal romance of reincarnation and souls mates.

It’s also the second oldest story, originally written not long after the first version of Mirror Mirror and again given a complete refresh and edit for this collection.

And opening it all is the Mistress of the Crows. Sitting somewhere between horror and dark fantasy, Mistress was inspired by the idea of waking up to deserted world, an idea I had a good few years before Covid made it a grim reality.

The collection is a mix of old and new, a reflection of my writing career to date whilst at the same time pointing the way to the future.

It was a blast revisiting these tales and compiling the book. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Mistress of the Crows is FREE on Kindle Unlimited. Also available on Kindle and Paperback. Grab your copy here.