Hello!  This weekend, I'll be at Fantasycon By The Sea in Scarborough, along with a whole host of genre luminaries including Mike Carey, Joe Hill, Adam Nevill, Elizabeth Bear, Paul Kane, Mark Morris and James Smythe.

I'm looking forward to celebrating the launches of books by Mark Morris (two books, no less), Paul Kane (ditto), Adam Nevill (his new short story collection Some Will Not Sleep - download three free stories here), my Orbit Books stablemate James Bennett and more!

I'll be appearing on a panel on Saturday, alongside Alison Littlewood, Edward Cox, Jaine Fenn and our chair Stan Nicholls. It's called Building A Mystery and will explore how much planning it takes to make a book. Should be fun, so do join us in The Grand's Palm Court Ballroom from 11am to midday.

I'll also be bringing a bunch of exclusive Jack Sparks bookmarks along with me! These precision-engineered beauties are specifically designed to mark any book page you desire. So feel free to say hello and ask me for one. And if you have a copy of my novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks you'd like signed, feel free to ask for that too. See you in Scarborough!

THIS NEWS JUST IN: on October 26, I'll appear at the British Science Fiction Association's monthly free event in London, being interviewed by the mighty Scott K Andrews. Check out the details here!

Hang the flags! Bake the cake! The Last Days Of Jack Sparks is now available in the US and Canada as an actual physical hardback book. As I understand it, this is currently the only hardcover edition available anywhere in the world. 

The novel is about an arrogant celebrity journalist who sets out to write a non-fiction book debunking the supernatural, then ends up dead. He may have got himself in trouble when he laughed during the exorcism of a teenage girl, that's all I'm saying...

Barnes & Noble stores are apparently displaying the correct amount of respect for the deceased, and getting right behind this release. So I hear you'll be able to find the book on the front table in most B&N stores. If you see one, I'd very much welcome being shown a snap of it, via the gift of Twitter!

B&N have given the book a great review, calling it "the spiritual successor to Mark Z Danielewski's House Of Leaves", which I take as a huge compliment, being a real House Of Leaves fan.

B&N have also picked Sparks as one of their Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books Of September 2016, alongside Alan Moore's mighty new Jerusalem tome! They also included the book in their feature Eight Speculative Works Narrated By Dead People.

Neither have Amazon US been slouches, exactly, when it comes to Sparks support. They've named it one of SFF's Best Books Of The Month - again alongside Jerusalem!

If you are already a Jack Sparks fan, or become one, I would really appreciate any help you can spare with spreading the word. Trust me, word of mouth makes such a huge difference, especially for a debut novel like this.

Here's a piece I wrote for Invasive/Star Wars: Aftermath author Chuck Wendig, over at his tremendous Terrible Minds site: Certainty In The Social Media Age

I also wrote about The Scariest Part of creating The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, for awesome Dying Is My Business author Nicholas Kaufmann 

And here's a new interview I did about the book over at Paul Semel's site 

Here's the book at Barnes & Noble in hardcover and for Nook, where you can also read a sample.

And here it is at Amazon US and Amazon Canada. Again, you can read a sample on those pages.

​And finally, here it is at Indiebound

Hopefully Jack Sparks is about to find a whole new posthumous Stateside readership. Let's see...

On Monday September 5, I went on Simon Mayo's Drivetime show to talk about The Last Days Of Jack Sparks for the Radio 2 Book Club segment. The Book Club only picks twenty-six books per year, so it was truly amazing when they so wholeheartedly embraced a scary thriller like Sparks. 

Simon and everyone involved with the show couldn't be more welcoming. They immediately smooth over any last-minute nerves you might experience as you enter the studio. Before I had too much time to consider that we were being heard by millions, live on air, Mr Mayo and his right-hand man Matt Williams chatted to me like the consummate pros they are. Can't say I expected to be asked to tell the story about being surrounded by the Pope's armed guards at the Vatican, but it certainly made for a strong ice-breaker.

I'll confess to being momentarily unnerved when Matt related how he read fifty or sixty pages of Sparks before deciding he'd had enough... but then he added how the rest of the team had practically ordered him to carry on! He came to consider Sparks as, "one of the best books we've done on the Book Club this year". Phew and wow and phew again. I'm really glad we addressed the issue of Jack Sparks' likeability, too, because some folk might find the opening chapters infuriating in isolation. Jack's a terribly selfish, blinkered and egotistical individual, but there are reasons why he's that way. There's much more to discover about him and about the book, so hang on in there!

We talked about certainty in the social media age, exactly how scary The Last Days Of Jack Sparks has proven to be for many readers and what I'm doing next. We also heard reviews of the book from volunteers who had been randomly chosen to receive it. Another nervewracking moment...

As I'd hoped, appearing on the Radio 2 Book Club has given Sparks an incredible boost. In the hours that followed my appearance on the show, the novel entered Amazon's Top 100 Books chart (as in, all the books, regardless of genre, fiction or non) at Number 89! How staggering. It also entered the Number One spot in Amazon UK's Movers & Shakers chart, which documents the fastest climbers in any given twenty-four hour period. 

I really can't thank everyone enough for all of this, but nevertheless I have to try.

Thanks so much to Simon Mayo, Matt Williams, producer Joe Haddow and everyone else on the Drivetime show.

Thanks so much to the Reading Agency (who do such great work in encouraging people to read - a cause I can most definitely get behind) and to all the amazing UK librarians who helped pick The Last Days Of Jack Sparks for the Radio 2 Book Club.

Thanks so much to everyone who has bought, read and spread the word about Jack Sparks, before and since the Radio 2 Book Club. You are literally helping to ensure I continue to have a career in writing. 

Listen to me being interrogated on Simon Mayo's Drivetime Show here (the Radio 2 Book Club segment begins about one hour and eight minutes in) on BBC iPlayer for the next four weeks

And here's the Radio 2 Book Club page for the book, including a free extract

Here's the paperback at Amazon UK.  And the Kindle edition. And here it is at Waterstones.  And Forbidden Planet.

Here's the Jack Sparks tribute page. And here's the Jack Sparks page on this very site.

Have you already read and enjoyed the book?  Scroll down for some suggestions as to how you can help keep the Radio 2 buzz alive! Thank you!