​Want to launch a lucrative subscription model business on a platform that combines community with courses and event scheduling, all in one place?

Look no further than Skool.

I’ve chosen Skool as the place to host my new community for fledgling writers, because this is the best platform I’ve found in that area.

Kajabi is arguably too expensive, and certainly too bland, compared to Skool.

Circle, meanwhile, threatens overwhelm with all those fancy features that you almost certainly don’t need.

Created by the razor-sharp business mind of Sam Ovens and more recently invested in heavily by successful businessman and YouTuber Alex Hormozi (the biggest investment of his career, in fact), Skool is proving extremely profitable for many.

As I write this, the most profitable community there, run by Evelyn Weiss, is making $67,656.

That’s per month.

Yeah.

Skool’s user interface benefits from a wonderfully clutter-free design that reflects Ovens’ love of utilitarian simplicity.
It also packs in pretty much everything you need under one roof.

Each community centres around three main sections that you and your community members can hop between. Funnily enough, each one begins with C.

Let me walk you through these:
​
COMMUNITY
This is the main feed where your members post and chat… without being distracted by notifications about their friends’ latest existential crises, as they are in those increasingly unbearable Facebook groups.

CLASSROOM
Here, you can host video courses and other video content for your members to watch. They can also download your supplementary PDFs, etc.

Skool makes it really easy to hop between these three hubs, which makes everything super smooth and user-friendly.

​The platform distinguishes itself further with a strong element of gamification.

Whenever someone hits Like on a member’s post or comment, that member scores a point. Suitably encouraged to engage and make quality posts in the community, they then progress up through various milestones on your leaderboards.

To give them extra incentives, you can choose to have them unlock various benefits or course material as they rise.

I could tell you lots more — such as how you can initially make your community free to enter, then introduce a monthly subscription fee for newcomers — but by this point you’d probably like to take a look around Skool yourself.

Use my referral link (did I mention that Skool also has a really generous affiliate scheme?) that will allow you to build and test-drive your own community for free over 14 days.

After that, you’ll need to pay only $99 per month if you choose to go all in, like me. Skool is of course free for regular members of groups, but creators pay to host their communities.

If you then need help with setting up your new community, just contact me and I’ll be happy to assist you for free.

Oh and join my Community Starters group for lots of friendly help and support with starting your community, including access to a handy community set-up checklist PDF. Become a founding member now to secure free lifetime access.

See you in Skool!
​

Patreon has marked its tenth anniversary by updating its platform and app in several cool ways. There's a new Community Chat section, for instance, which now allows me to chat to participating patrons like we're on WhatsApp.

Another cool feature is the provision for creators to have a shop integrated with Patreon itself.

So far, I only have two rather random items in my shop:

Item 1: A streamable audio interview of mine with Type O Negative frontman Peter Steele.

Item 2: A questionnaire for your fictional characters to fill out, so that you may gain a deeper understanding of them. 101 questions in a printable PDF, with handy spaces between Qs for you to fill in your characters' answers.

Most of my patrons get the Type O stream for free, while all of them get the 101 Qs PDF for free. Gotta love them perks!

More random shop news when I have it.

Arrow Video and 88 Films are my favourite genre home media vendors, due to the type of horror/SF/action films they tend to handle and, of course, the sheer amount of extras they ladle on, both in terms of the packaging and the special features. 

88 Films, in particular, are excelling themselves at present with 4K presentations of the likes of Burial Ground and Zombi Holocaust, both with stunning cover art. 

If you haven't seen either of those movies, and are open to gory cult 1980s mayhem, then you owe it to yourself to see them, whether you pick them up on 4K or on Blu-ray.

Arrow also just released an amazing 4K and Blu-ray set of Lucio Fulci's wonderful House By The Cemetery, that I can't wait to crack open. 

Anyway, as you can probably tell, I love these labels. Imagine my glee, then, when I saw that Arrow and 88 Films both have Halloween sales on this month!

Arrow's sale is called Shocktober and I can slash £5 off your basket total. Here's how:

Use my special link here to click through to Arrow's site and get £5 off when you spend £30 or more. There's no need to input a pesky code - if you use that special link of mine, you'll get the money off your total before you pay. If for some reason your discount isn't showing, just enter my code at checkout: JASON-R89. JASON-R89JASON-R89
Meanwhile, 88 Films' all-too-tempting sale is based at Amazon UK, rather than being on their own site.

So here's a link that will show you all of the 88 Films 4K & Blu movies that are on sale at Amazon until Halloween. I totally caved and bought four for around £51. God knows, I'm not proud of having weakened, but I am pleased with my purchases, which I'll be showing to my patrons in the next edition of my Patreon-only unboxing videos Opening Mail With Patrons! 

Happy shopping - and a very happy Halloween! 🎃

​

I first made this 1700-word short story available to my wonderful Patreon supporters back in March this year. Now, the time feels right to share the terrible tale more widely.

Hope you enjoy! If 'enjoy' is quite the right word...

===

THE SUN holds its head high, amid a pale blue wash and scattered wisps of white. As you press on across the dry forest floor, your boots smash leaves to dust.

The September climate feels warm but not hot enough to overheat you. This feels like the best of both worlds: the tail-end of summer heat, tempered by autumnal cool.

All things considered, you feel delighted with yourself for having chosen the best time of year to tackle the Appalachian Trail.

Not the whole trail, of course. That would be crazy, given that it’s well over two thousand miles long and would take between five and seven months to cross.

As far as you’re concerned, this seventy-six mile stretch of rural Georgia will provide enough of a challenge without threatening to break you. You’re here for a good time, after all, and to de-stress the hell out of yourself. Having vowed to unplug yourself from social media for these two weeks of vacation, you feel no need to impress anyone with your stats.

None of your contacts will receive notifications as to how far you’ve walked, or the route, or how long you’ve taken. To help enforce this, your phone has been stowed away at the very bottom of your pack and switched off. The only selfies you’ll take at any stage of your journey will be strictly for you and captured with an old-fangled, battery-powered camera complete with SD card.

This hike is for you, and you alone, and that feels good.

You’re mindful of the dangers. That’s why there’s a big fat can of bear spray in your bulky but not stupid-heavy backpack.

Your Google research has indicated that black bears on this trail tend to be shy. The worst thing you can do is surprise them. The most perilous times of day tend to be dawn, dusk and of course night, although you’ve yet to see or hear a single bear during your two days on the trail.

When a yearning in your belly signals snack-time, you heave the pack off your shoulder, settle it down and fish a protein bar out from a side pocket.

You picked your favourite flavour: honey and raisin. You love the way these bars contain only the real thing. Not an e-number in sight on the wrapper.

Jiggling up and down to centre your pack on your back again, you take your first bite and move on.

Thus far, most of the forest terrain has been flat, but now your calves face their first workout. The hill before you offers a significant upward gradient, but old tree boughs have been embedded into the dirt at close intervals to form makeshift steps. 

Munching honey and raisins, you take your first step up and are content with how solid this natural staircase feels.

Thousands of people walk up and down every month, you tell yourself, and so of course the damn thing feels sturdy.

Emboldened, you climb faster, revelling in the spike of your pulse. Soon you’re almost halfway up the hill. You feel fit, capable and ready for anything.

Having placed the sole of your boot on the next step up, you see too late that you’ve trodden in a dollop of something soft, bright green and all too slippy.

As you totter backwards and fight to regain your balance, the weight of your pack conspires against you.

Your boots leave the stairs. The next time you glimpse your feet, they’re above your head.

The whole forest makes like a washing machine on spin.

You bounce off one stair, then another, until you crash down onto your side at the foot of the hill with a nauseous crunch.

Your heart pounds as you wait, like a fallen child, to see how bad the pain will be.

You try to move your legs, to no avail.

Neither will your arms play ball. All you can do is flex your fingers.

Fear wraps ice-cold tendrils around your brain.

Hard, sharp, smooth objects rattle around in your mouth. You mistake these for stone chips, until the probing of your tongue reveals them to be shards of teeth. Your mouth now feels lined with tiny, vandalised tombstones.

Your throat contains a ball of something much softer, wedged in the pipe. You dimly recognise this to be a half-chewed ball of protein bar.

For the last few seconds, adrenaline has smothered the loud testimony of your pain receptors, but now they scream. So do you, as your shattered limbs light up.

When you try to roll onto your front, or move in any way, your wrecked legs, arms and pelvis roar their protest. Forced to lie still, you goggle terrified back along the trail.

Having buried your phone at the bottom of your pack doesn’t seem so damn smart now. Even if you had placed the handset right at the top, you realise, you’ve have no means of unshouldering the pack anyway.

You turn your screams into deeper yells, in the hope of attracting a fellow hiker. There’s no way you can be the only human being in these woods today.

Never mind the fact that I haven’t seen another soul since dawn. Yes, best to shove that thought all the way to the back of my panicked thoughts.

Even over your plaintive cries, you detect a low buzz.

The sound of an insect. A bee, perhaps?

You don’t think of the sound as any kind of threat until the bee lands on the ground beside you.

This is no ordinary bee. This looks like some kind of fucked-up bee mutation, born of a toxic spill.

Two inches long and plump as a peach, the creature oozes neon-green slime and quivers with some kind of angst.

Hatred, says a doomy voice in your head. This bee hates every other form of life.

Without even so much as a buzz to announce its next move, the bee flies straight into your mouth with such accuracy that it doesn’t touch the sides.

The honey. It smelled the honey. All that real fucking honey I loved so much.

The bee’s slime-basted body tastes like bile. Even as you gag, you try to wedge the creature between your teeth, through concern that it may try to reach the ball of honey and raisins jammed in your throat.

The bee’s buzz goes up a couple of octaves as your teeth hold it firm. Feelers and wings tickle your palate.

The nerve-endings in your mouth report a major violation as the bee jams its stinger through the pink meat of your tongue.  

You roar, more through outrage than anything else, because the pain cannot compete with the molten hell of your broken limbs.

Will the bee die? Knowing this is no ordinary bee, you decide to hasten its departure by biting down through its body.

When the bee collapses into halves, your mouth fills with diseased hemolymph fluid that burns your mouth like acid and the tiny, inflamed organs that had been packed inside the insect’s warped body. The tubules. The salivary gland. The intestines.

You spit out as much as you can, but the bee’s stinger ensures that the back half of its body stays tethered to your tongue.

Somehow, despite lying on the ground in its own guts, the bee’s front half continues to buzz.

This buzz sounds different. Higher in pitch. Almost like a…

Almost like a clarion call.

Sure enough, the hum of bees grows all around. Your heart sinks as half a dozen blurred shapes float down towards you.

One hideous green goo-drenched bee forces its way into your mouth, as the next ripples with impatience.

The first bee scurries into your throat. The second deftly avoids your gnashing teeth and follows the first one down, thirsty for both honey and revenge. The slime on both creatures burns the lining of your gullet.

Another of the insects makes a bee-line for your left eye.  

No matter how much you screw the eyelid shut and shake your head around, its stinger pierces the thin flesh to puncture your eyeball.

Aqueous juice squirts out down over your cheek.

Excruciating pain makes you thrash around until the shock catches up to crumple your mind.

Now you simply lie here, a resigned and broken host as one bee after another wins the fight to enter your neck, like rowdy teens filing into a new and happening nightclub.

Your hope is that these fuckers will soon choke you to death. Instead, they slime-scorch their way down through your oesophagus to your stomach. Here, they locate and feast upon your first few bites of protein bar and sting every surface in sight.

When will this end?

Please let this end.

A new, heavy, musky smell arises. You hear a powerful chomp and growl.

Upon prising open your one good eye, you’re greeted by the sight of four huge black paws on the ground beside you.

This particular example of a black bear looks far less shy than you’d hoped. Neon-green drool hangs in stalactites from the beast’s furry chin and its crazed eyes are the same unnatural hue.

One great paw clamps down over your face. The other roughly cups the back of your head.

With a deafening crack, the bear twists off your skull like a honey pot lid.

The creature settles back on its hind paws, then hinges upright.

For how long does a severed head retain consciousness? You never did gain clarity on that disturbing fact, probably because you never dreamt you’d need to know.

The bear’s deranged face seems to grow in size as the creature raises your head towards its own. Driven insane, but so relieved that your torment will soon end, you want to say thank you to the bear, but your hopelessly slack jaw refuses to co-operate. Besides, speech would require lungs and vocal cords. You briefly picture your body lying headless below as bastard bees swarm into the neck stump.

The darkening of your vision suggests that your brain holds mere seconds’ worth of oxygen. Just long enough, then, for you to picture the faces of the people you love most, while a seven-foot radioactive bear rams its long, sticky, agile tongue down what remains of your throat, howls with fury over getting stung and bowls your head at the nearest tree.
 
===

For some reason, I really enjoyed writing this thing. Toxic acted as a kind of palate cleanser - a bit of fun to get me back into writing again. 

Did you gain some kind of twisted enjoyment from the preposterous tale? Let me know in comments - and please share the link to this page. 

If you'd like to go even further, and literally buy me the time to write more fiction, then you can tip me via one of the links below:

​PayPal - pay what you want/can

Ko-fi - buy me a coffee (okay, wine)

Patreon - support me with a recurring pledge for as long as you want/can, thereby gaining access to past and future perks. Sign up at the Terrifying level or above and I'll make a personal welcome video for you and send you the link via Patreon DM! Now available on most tiers: FREE SEVEN-DAY TRIALS.

Thank you!

​

​First of all, let's get one thing straight: there are countless ways to support me without spending money. These include borrowing my books from your local library (yes, we authors do get paid for that - no need to feel guilty!), sharing my social media posts or watching my YouTube videos.

If you're willing and able to go further, though, there's always Patreon, which allows you to support me with a monthly pledge! Here are some reasons why you might well enjoy doing that...

1) I'll give you the most time-sensitive reason first! I'm running a special offer, which sees eligible new patrons receive a specially-designed, glossy, full-colour Christmas card dedicated and signed by me - or by Jack Sparks, or indeed by any of my other fictional characters. All you have to do is pledge to support me at Patreon, at the Oh Dear God, What's That At The Window? tier or above, before 6pm GMT on Friday 9 December. Naturally, my existing eligible patrons are each getting a card too - here's how I broke the news to them the other day, in this rare example of a post that I've made public. 

2) Patreon has allowed me to foster a fun, fenced-off community, where you can get involved as little or as much as you like. I love that I can write and chat directly to my patrons, soliciting their opinions on things like YouTube video thumbnails, or posting exclusive diary entries or vlogs for them to read among lots of other exclusive content. I even tell them the odd thing that I wouldn't post on a public forum.

3) My Patreon backers who pledge at the Terrifying tier or above get an onscreen credit at the end of all my videos on the aforementioned Jason Arnopp's Terrifying House Of Obsession channel on YouTube!

4) Last summer, I got together with writer James Moran (Doctor Who, Torchwood, Spooks, Severance, lots more) to shoot a Zoom video about writing, specifically for our respective patrons. The theme we decided to cover was the difference between writing prose and scripts. The result was really interesting and often quite funny into the bargain. The video ran for 50 minutes, and remains for patrons' eyes only! You can see the video thumbnail at the top of this article, although you'd probably figured that out already. 

5) When you back me at Patreon, you achieve two truly astonishing things. You help me to support my family and to feel more secure in a bizarre and unpredictable career like writing, which if I'm honest, can often feel like feast or famine. And that means the world to me. I do my best to treat my backers like royalty!

6) Also! When you back me at Patreon, the system pings an email into my inbox AND makes a notification pop up from the Patreon app on my phone. Whichever of these I happen to see first, it gives me a real buzz of happiness and indeed surprise! It's an amazing feeling that someone wants to back you, regardless of whether they pledge £2 or £10 or £25 or even more per month.

7) When backers support me at the Terrifying tier or above (this one is £5, in case you were wondering - you can see all the tiers here), I record a personalised welcome video for them, usually while sitting at my desk, just as I do in my YouTube videos. I then upload this video to YouTube, keeping it unlisted (private), and personally send my brand new patron the link via Patreon DM. The end result looks like a YouTube video that talks to them, which tends to be a pretty fun effect!

8) My backers get to see my YouTube videos early, before the rest of the world. Sometimes, for one scheduling reason or another, this may not be possible, but I do my damndest to make sure that happens. I also often tell backers about YouTube videos I'm thinking about making. 

9) Doctor Who fans: I created a combined PDF of both parts of my Doctor Who Magazine interview with Tom Baker, which I conducted at his home in 2009. I then wrote a new foreword for the epic piece and made this available to patrons only.

10) I make a monthly vlog exclusively for my supporters, titled Walking With Patrons. At the time of writing, this series has been running for one year. 

11) I know, from my own experience of supporting people at Patreon (YouTubers like Steve Benway and Atari Archive, for instance) that it really makes me happy to back people who bring value to my life. Perhaps if I've somehow managed to bring value to yours, you might feel similarly good cheer if you support me via the Patreon route.

12) I'll often make exclusive videos for patrons only, generally off the cuff. Last summer, for instance, I attended a car boot sale for the first time since the pandemic began, and immortalised this visit with a video for patrons only. On another Sunday, I shot a video while walking from my home to Brighton train station, as an intro for the diary entries I then wrote for them on the train.

13) Every year, I send patrons at the Terrifying level or above a seaside Brighton postcard, to wherever they are in the world, to say thanks! At the next tier up, I can get my friend Jack Sparks to write the postcard for me...

You can find my Patreon page, and check out the various tiers, right here at this link. Thanks for reading!

Hey there, O reader of the blog.

A quick but cool update to tell you that two more of my books are now FREE for Amazon's Kindle Unlimited readers! These books are as follows:

AUTO REWIND
My disturbing retro-thriller, featuring Doctor Who, the Atari 2600 console and a nail gun. A child of the 80s takes ever more extreme steps to protect his family. 

TAKEN OVER BY SOMETHING EVIL FROM THE TV SET...
A collection of my horror journalism including essays on video nasties and John Carpenter's The Thing, plus interviews with Rob Zombie, Sean S Cunningham and horror FX legend Tom Savini.

You can find handy Amazon links on my site pages for Auto Rewind and Taken Over By Something Evil...

Hope you enjoy! Please leave a review for these books if you enjoy them, because trust me, it really helps an author like me out. 

What follows is the entire introduction to my non-fiction book From The Front Lines Of Rock.

“YOU LOVE it you slaaaaags!”

The Cult’s Ian Astbury slams his foot on the accelerator pedal.

I’m on the back seat of this car which Astbury is driving so enthusiastically around the Hollywood Hills at night.  Now, I’m sure he’s completely and utterly sober at this point, but the man’s fast and furious driving alone makes you think that this is a very foolish place for me to be.  It’s exciting, though.

Whoosh!  We turn another corner, narrowly missing a tree and hitting a wheelie bin, which goes flying.

Also in the vehicle are a record company press officer, an MTV producer and an unidentified man, right beside me, who is high on magic mushrooms and panicking, his eyes like saucers.  “Man,” he pants, grabbing my leg, “I can’t go to jail again!”

This is circa 1997. And even as I grip my seat, I think how deeply bizarre the situation feels. Only 10 years ago, I was a teenage rock fan, buying The Cult’s singles Lil Devil and Wild Flower on seven-inch vinyl. And here I am in Hollywood, quite possibly about to be killed by their frontman.
 
I never wanted to be a journalist, rock or otherwise. I mean, it was never a childhood dream. No, the childhood dream was telling stories for a living.  A great deal of my young life in Lowestoft, Suffolk consisted of writing fiction, drawing comic strips and reading Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books. I didn’t get into rock music until I was well into my teens.

Europe’s classic single The Final Countdown was the one that hooked me in. Say what you will about that parping gem, but it sucked in a whole new generation of rock fans. It was a gateway drug to the hard stuff. After that, I graduated to Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet album, then to the works of Dio, followed by Metallica, right up to the churning madness of Slayer’s mighty 1986 masterpiece Reign In Blood, which initially just sounded like white noise. I quickly became obsessed with heavy metal, exploring the entirety of its broad church.

I was especially taken with the more extreme end of the spectrum: the subgenres known as thrash metal (primarily fixated on speed and crunchy guitars) and death metal (fixated on morbidity, with a charnel house sound to match, plus glottal, growly vocals.)

One day, in the pages of UK rock weekly Kerrang!, I saw an advert for a new vacancy in the freelancing writing department. Kerrang! had realised they needed a new specialist in thrash and death metal – someone who actually understood that stuff. Over the last couple of years, as those genres gained strength in the marketplace, the magazine’s reviewers had often treated the bands with contempt, much to the dismay of fans who didn’t want to see their favourites dismissed in a ‘comedy’ fashion by snooty journos. Not all of Kerrang!’s writers looked down on thrash – the likes of Xavier Russell and Paul Miller were proper fans – but it certainly happened on a regular basis at that time.

I was still in high school and so hadn’t yet reached the crossroads where I felt any pressure to find a job. Nevertheless, I wanted this one. So I sent a couple of writing samples, as requested, along with an arrogant letter. This letter told editor Geoff Barton that he did indeed need me on board, because none of the other writers knew anything about thrash and death metal.

Obviously, this approach could have backfired, but it didn’t. I was blown away to get a call from reviews editor Alison Joy a few days later, who said she was going to send me a couple of records to review.

“What...,” I stuttered, suddenly not quite so cocksure, “so these reviews will be in the magazine?”

“Yeah!” said the jovial northern typhoon. “We don’t hang around at Kerrang!, matey boy!”

Indeed they didn’t. Within days I was listening to my first two albums for review – a Peel Sessions mini-LP by Birmingham’s rising Bolt Thrower and an album by the super-obscure Mallet-Head, who were destined to split a few years later – and excitedly typing out my verdict. Yes, typing, on an electronic typewriter. I also sent these reviews through the post in physical form. Later, I would graduate to a more hi-tech method.

You know what that new method was?

Faxing. The stuff of dreams.
 
In 1989, I did my first interview for Kerrang! It was a phoner with Morbid Angel, a band I really loved at the time and retain a real fondness for. I’m pretty sure I kept singer/bassist David Vincent and guitarist Trey Azagthoth on that conference call for way longer than the average interview should last. I had no experience at this game, and so no real sense of how many quotes I needed to fulfil the word count. So I just asked everything. Luckily, Morbid Angel were very talkative, being passionate about their craft. They were great first interviewees.

That same year, I made my first journalistic trip abroad, to Copenhagen for Sepultura.  The Brazilian metallers were very much on the rise with their brilliant Beneath The Remains album and I was blown away to get to write about them. My inexperience showed through, though, when my tape recorder didn’t work for some reason – maybe I even forgot batteries – and I had to borrow one off the boys’ tour manager and fellow journo Borivoj Krgin, who went on to spearhead the rock news site Blabbermouth.

1990 saw my first US trip. It was a bumper affair, covering the bands Nocturnus, Carcass, Massacre and Morbid Angel, because Earache Records wanted to make sure they got the most out of their airfare costs (there were no paid-for hotels, so photographer David Willis and I were sleeping on band’s sofas). Hilariously, I was terrified on the first night in Tampa, Florida, having taken Willis’ joke about drive-by shootings seriously. There’s a home video of that first night, in a restaurant, where I look like a rabbit in a headlights, as if I’m expecting Uzi-toting raiders to burst in at any second. 

From that jaunt onwards, the interviews and trips multiplied. In 1993, I moved from Lowestoft to a flat in London’s Queen Park, only slightly unnerved when Alison Joy asked what had made me decide to move (uh... writing more stuff for Kerrang!?)

I was gaining experience, but still pretty green. Whenever I scored an interview that dragged me out of my extreme metal comfort zone, I would feel nervous, but do my best to step up to the challenge. 

I found myself writing cover stories on more mainstream acts like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Black Crowes. By the mid-90s I was hopping back and forth across the Atlantic every couple of weeks. The photographer and I would enjoy several drinks on the plane, followed by plenty more when we arrived. After a while, travelling around, staying in hotels and visiting nice restaurants and bars without paying for anything, life became slightly unreal – a big, enticing bubble of carefree fun.

The photographer and I would almost always be accompanied by a record company PR, whose credit card would receive a bashing throughout each trip. We didn’t have to work much out for ourselves – airport and hotel check-in desks would be handled by the PR, as we handed over our passports. I suppose I got a glimpse of what it must be like for a rock star, being pretty much permanently ensconced in that lifestyle, with all the fiddly real-life stuff conveniently taken care of.

I used to love interviewing people. The freedom of it! Sometimes, you found yourself sitting in front of a proper rock icon, with your brain screaming, You can ask them anything you want! Do it! I would always try and push the envelope just a little, by hitting them with a surprising question. Something which had never been asked before and might shake them out of the stupor sometimes induced by multiple interviews.

The selection process for this book has been based on two factors. I wanted the pieces in From The Front Lines Of Rock to concern bands most people would have heard of, but I also wanted to represent some of my favourite interviews. So the features gathered here fulfil one or both of those requirements. Maybe one day, if the demand is there, I’ll release a follow-up, perhaps gathering my interview work in the extreme metal department.  For now, in these pages, it’s the bigger-sellers, who often also have the biggest personalities.

This book has taken five years to assemble, on and off. I’ve written footnotes during each feature – sometimes in ‘real time’, as I re-read the piece for the first time in aeons – and then an afterword for each. It’s been interesting to look back and not only remind myself of things I said and did, but also consider how differently I might do things now. Some of this stuff makes me cringe, frankly, but I’ve also really enjoyed most of it.

As tempting as it sometimes was to edit these interviews, I’ve left them as they were upon publication, with the odd exception of some formatting. I couldn’t bring myself to leave titles surrounded by quotation marks. I’ve also removed the asterisks from the swearing, because we’re all adults here and we don’t need protecting.

Because an interview is only as good as its subject, I don’t think it’s immodest of me to say that there are some real crackers here. The Manic Street Preachers in Japan, back when Richey Edwards was in the band. A feisty two-part Pantera interview in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Jon Bon Jovi talking about drugs, the mafia and money in Los Angeles.  Getting arrested by armed guards at the Vatican with Cradle Of Filth. All particularly great fun.

I very much hope you enjoy From The Front Lines Of Rock, whether it’s loud nostalgia you crave, or are leafing back through history as a curious newcomer with a My Chemical Romance tattoo on your forehead. Maybe you’ve read my 2016 novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks and wonder what else I used to write. Whatever the reason: thanks!

Oh, and that ridiculous motor experience with Ian Astbury? Eventually, we came to an abrupt halt, having bumped into a wall – thankfully not too hard. The mushroom-paranoia guy claimed we’d hit the LA sheriff's house. I think this was implausible, to be honest, but would like to think it true. 

Yes, getting into a car with a ludicrous but loveable rock star was a really stupid thing to do. But then rock ‘n’ roll is so often stupid, and I’m glad I had a taste of that bewitching foolishness before moving on to slightly safer pastures in the worlds of prose, film and TV. The whole experience would also help me write a convincing journalist in the shape of Jack Sparks.

A quick word on how Kindle footnotes operate, in case you’ve never encountered them before: tap each number to be taken to the corresponding footnote at the end of the book, then tap the number again to be magically whizzed back to where you were in the text. 

Right, then. Let’s go. Crank your eyeballs up to 11...

Check out From The Front Lines Of Rock, you li'l devil. And please share your favourite Kerrang! memories down in comments right here!

Auto Rewind is my e-book novelette published in 2016.

What's a novelette, you may conceivably ask? It's a story with a word count higher than a short story, but lower than a novel or a novella.

If I had to nominate one of my short-form fiction works as having been somewhat overlooked (or the more positive spin, my best-kept secret!), it would be Auto Rewind. But then, it's probably odder and harder to categorise than, say, Beast In The Basement (twisty thriller) or A Sincere Warning About The Entity In Your Home (ghost story). 

Auto Rewind is also probably even harder to discuss openly than the notoriously tricky Beast In The Basement, without committing major spoiler sins. 

Suffice to say, Auto Rewind is about a child of the '80s who takes ever more extreme measures to protect his family's lifestyle.

I still really like this book and believe it to be quite emotionally powerful by the end.

It also features Doctor Who VHS, a nail-gun and a man being beaten to death with an Atari 2600 video game console. Pretty retro. 

Cover note: the one on the right above is the finished cover, while the one on the left is an alternate version which was ultimately discounted because I really liked the white purity of the design. Actually, I wonder if it might look too bright and 'un-horror' for some folk? That would certainly be ironic, seeing as it might be my most violent book, second only to The Last Days Of Jack Sparks.  

If you're solely into the scary supernatural elements of my novels The Last Days Of Jack Sparks and Ghoster (thank you!), then the grittier nature of Auto Rewind may not quite be for you. But if you like the sound of a punchy, twisty, freaky and ultimately melancholy tale, then I'd really appreciate you giving this one a shot. In some ways, it might be my most personal book.  Step this way and take a look. 

Have you already experienced Auto Rewind? Let me know how you liked it in comments here. Thanks!

An earlier version of this piece was first read last month by subscribers to my newsletter The Necronoppicon, which brings my readers updates at the end of each month. Oh, and you get a free book when you sign up!