Well now, that was a weird year. Out in the world at large, so many terrible things happened that made you feel as though reality itself was being warped by some sadistic overlord.

In terms of worldwide events, 2016 was the worst year in living memory. In terms of my career as an author, however, it was the best.

Hello, cognitive dissonance. But if it's all the same to you, I'm going to focus solely on the professional stuff here, as I cast a glance back over 2016. This is, after all, mainly a blog about writing - and there are enough hardcore doomsayers out there across social media, saying all that doom without seemingly giving much thought to the potential mental states of their readership.

My debut 'solo' novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks clawed its way out through Orbit Books' rib cage in March. It's the story of an arrogant celebrity journalist who sets out to debunk the supernatural and ends up dead. So Orbit and I thought it only right and respectful to throw a wake for Jack at Orbit Towers in Central London. You can see snippets of my heartfelt eulogy in the video below...

So that was surreal. I also interviewed one of my own fictional characters from the book, Alistair Sparks, in a two-part audio interview (hear them both here), which was even more surreal. 

Even before the novel was released, the support was amazing. I mean, seriously. The mighty Christopher Brookmyre, Robin Ince, Andy Nyman, MR Carey, Jenny Colgan, David Schneider, Sarah Lotz, RTE 2FM's Rick O'Shea, Radio 1's Daniel P Carter, John Higgs, Cat Vincent, Andrew O'Neill, Rob Boffard, Rebecca Levene, Lisa Jewell, Chuck Wendig, Paul Tremblay, Amazon UK and the iBooks store were among the very first to get behind Sparks, which was incredible. And then, two months after the book's release, I received a voicemail message from Alan Moore (Alan Moore!), who also gave me and Orbit some blurbage including the tremendous phrase 'A magnificent millennial nightmare'. I'm still coming to terms with all this, along with other unexpected events like the book being chosen for Simon Mayo's Radio 2 Book Club (thank you librarians, thank you The Reading Agency!) and being nominated for The Guardian's Not The Booker Prize and a Goodreads 2016 Award.

So many other celebs, authors, bloggers and journalists were incredibly kind and generous to this novel, but I won't list them here for fear of missing people - and well, for fear of this post just becoming one big list. Thank you all. It's honestly been astonishing. One of the very best things about this year, though, has been complete strangers popping up on Twitter and Facebook to tell me how much they liked the book. That's still happening on a regular basis now, which gives me hope that Sparks ​will retain some appeal in 2017. Orbit's US paperback also emerges in April, which will hopefully inject further reanimation fluid into the old devil dog.

I'd also like to thank the sci fi and fantasy community, authors and readers alike, for making me feel so very welcome during my first public appearances as an author, at Edgelit, Nine Worlds, Fantasy At The Court, Fantasycon, the monthly British Science Fiction Association event and the MCM London Comic Con. I gave my first book readings at some of these, which was a new and scary experience. Here I am quacking away on an Edgelit panel alongside the extraordinary Sarah Pinborough (whose new novel Behind Her Eyes is going to blow a million wigs clean off when it emerges January 17!)

That mention of Lady P's novel has reminded me how pitiful my own reading efforts were this year. I don't think I even reached double figures, which is terrible. My only excuse is that publicising Sparks and writing Book Two soaked up way more time than I'd imagined. I will do better in 2017. Right now, I'm reading Sarah Lotz's The White Road, due May 2017. Super-creepy! Loving it.

If you bought The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, ​reviewed it, helped spread the word and/or helped make me feel like I was a proper author at the year's various events, then you have a special place in my black, mutated heart. Releasing your debut (solo) novel to the world, while hoping to lay the foundations for a long term career, that's a frightening business, but each of you made it less so. Thank you.

I'll leave you with news of a major Jack Sparks development, which I should be able to announce properly in January. There's now a folder in my Dropbox called Jack Sparks The Movie. The head-spinning events that led to that folder's creation were very much another reason for all my cognitive dissonance in 2016, let me tell you.

Wow! You made it through this thick swamp of self congratulation. Have a fackin' medal.

​2017 will see a reduced social media presence from me, so I'd be delighted if you signed up to my mailing list, to which I plan to send e-missives more regularly from now on. Happy New Year!

Hello to your face!

My novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks has somehow made the semi finals of the Goodreads Choice Awards 2016. Which is astonishing, since this puts it alongside ludicrously stiff competition from books by the top drawer likes of Joe Hill, MR Carey and Paul Tremblay!

It would be amazing for Jack Sparks to reach the finals. So if you're willing to help, and genuinely believe the novel to be the most deserving in this year's Horror category, you can change my life with a couple of clicks! 

CLICK ONE: Straight to the Goodreads Horror voting page

CLICK TWO: Click on the voting button for the novel of your choice!

I believe you have to be a Goodreads member to vote. The deadline is just over 24 hours away at the time of blogging.

If you can indeed help, either by voting, or spreading the word, then you are literally a saint in my eyes. A glittering golden giant of a saint. And that's all there is to it. FAREWELL FOR NOW, you awe-inspiring beauty.

Hooray, I'll be at the MCM London Comic Con tomorrow (Saturday Oct 29th) and will be doing Stuff as follows...

12 midday (Silver Theatre): a panel about horror and dark fantasy, alongside Alison Littlewood, Verity Holloway and moderator Leila Abu El Hawa. It's right up my alley and I hope it's right up yours too. (Sorry, that sounded vaguely impolite.)

1pm-2pm: I'll be signing copies of my novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, possibly while humming Satanic psalms. If such things exist. WHO KNOWS. You can buy the book at Travelling Man's stall at the event, and doing so sets you up among the GODS.

Maybe see you there! And while I've got you, this happened on Wednesday night...

Yes, as promised/threatened, Timebomb trilogy author Scott K Andrews quizzed me at the British Science Fiction Association's monthly event. Thanks very much to the BSFA for inviting us, and to all who came along - I had a great time, even though evil Andrews ambushed me with questions from my own book about interviewing people! What a swine.

I started the event with a five-minute reading from Jack Sparks, which was nice. 

Courtesy of BSFA genius Chad Dixon, you can see the archived Periscope video of our chat here.

You can also hear the audio recording here. 

One last news snippet: my novelette Auto Rewind has made its Kindle debut.  It's all about the 80s, Doctor Who, nostalgia and nail guns. Bye!

Hello! This article features no spoilers about The Walking Dead, except for speaking generally about how very unpleasant the show’s Season Seven premiere was. But you probably gathered that anyway.

The Walking Dead’s Season Seven premiere has stirred a tidal wave of online think pieces. Many of these ask whether the show has finally overstepped some kind of imaginary mark. Some of them downright state this as fact.

In Its Season Premiere, The Walking Dead’s Brutal Violence Finally Went Too Far

Maybe The Walking Dead Went Too Far With The Gore This Time

The Walking Dead: Has Gore On Television Finally Gone Too Far?

In addition to these headlines, I’ve seen plenty of online folk declare that they won’t be watching The Walking Dead any more. Which would of course be fine in itself, if some of these declarations didn’t also suggest some degree of finger wagging.

So many of these reactions seem to treat this AMC TV show like an infant that overfilled its chamber pot. Too much, too far, bad Walking Dead!

If The Walking Dead really has gone too far for someone, then it’s gone too far for them, which is an important distinction. It’s no longer to their taste. It no longer matches their viewing preferences. But there is no objective mark that the show is not allowed to cross, apart from AMC’s weird swearing regulations... 

Those hand-wringing headlines really miss the point in highlighting the violence and gore, while invariably dredging up the lazy and sneery label ‘torture porn’ (don’t even get me started on how that term not only tries to brand a non-existent subgenre based on the excellent and very different horror movies Saw and Hostel, but insults horror fans by making presumptions as to why they enjoy horror.) The Season Seven premiere was no more gory or violent than the average episode of The Walking Dead. What was dialled up, to the highest possible setting, was the emotional content. The events of this episode were downright horrible. I expected them to be unpleasant, but actually didn’t expect the show to go so far, to the point of being mentally scarring.

But thank God it went there. This means a TV show managed to break through our numbed defences and inflict pain. It managed to stir empathy for other human beings, in an age which is increasingly all about me, myself and I. And different people react very differently to such transgressions. There’s going to be elation, rage and everything in between.

Plenty of people don’t enjoy being traumatised, which is absolutely fair enough. But of course, even a hard-hitting show like The Walking Dead only provokes trauma in a restricted sense, compared to real-life trauma. Most horror fiction only really offers horror by proxy. It’s a walk in the park, compared to the unthinkable sights seen on a daily basis in a war zone or an abattoir. Which is fine and necessary. Most of the time, we really don’t want to feed ourselves into an emotional wringer. There are things in this world that might ruin us if we truly faced them, as surely as staring at the sun. So we’re generally fine with the watered down versions seen in most horror fiction. Sometimes we’re even fine with one of a thousand generic ghost stories about a couple who move to a house in the country after losing a child.

While the horror genre is a very broad church, most of it offers a valuable social service: a safe place to explore horrendous things. It’s a psychological dress rehearsal for some of the very worst events that life may or may not have to offer. But it’s worth noting how rarely horror really does strive to make us feel something – how rarely it chooses to execute its almost unique ability to facilitate one hell of a psychological workout.

The Walking Dead premiere arguably offered a more painfully visceral brand of horror than any TV show before it. Jesus, even most movies. It trained an unblinking eye on a total nightmare happening to people we care about. It glanced at the painful truth of man's inhumanity. The whole episode was so tense as to feel like an ordeal, with a palpable sense of relief when it was over. It was an experience. Not just another way to pass an hour.

Any reviewers insisting it was “comical” are only exhibiting another example of the rainbow of reactions to true horror. Any reviewers insisting it was “pointless” are exhibiting that peculiarly modern tendency to judge the first part of a story in isolation from what will follow. Any reviewers insisting the violence was “gratuitous” are merely stating their personal preference for what other people’s art should be.

So, do I really think horror can never go too far, or was that just a nicely beguiling headline for this piece?

I truly do not believe in boundaries for this genre of fiction, partly because crossing lines can often be the whole damn point. For me, horror can be at its most effective when you have no idea how far it's prepared to go.

​The ugliest horror film I’ve ever seen is Mordum, the second instalment of the August Underground trilogy. It disturbed the living hell out of me, made me feel nauseous and brought out a cold sweat. While I don’t plan to revisit that movie, and almost wish I never saw it, I deeply admire the way the thing didn’t so much push the limits of horror as behave like they did not exist. Much the same goes for the super-extreme likes of A Serbian Film, Murder Set Pieces and the Human Centipede movies.

One of horror’s many jobs is to explore extremes, which is why I’m so proud of The Walking Dead for grabbing that baton. It’s a TV horror show that earned mainstream success, but has not behaved in a mainstream way. In fact, it has done quite the opposite. It’s perfectly understandable that many viewers will declare themselves out: that’s only a natural side effect of the show careering too close to reality for their liking. But nothing can take away the fact that this was one of the most unforgettable hours in TV history. Even those who hated it will remember it for a very long time. And all of this very much reminds me why The Walking Dead is my favourite show currently blazing a trail across TV.

As I said, horror can be so many things, all of which are equally valid.

At one end of the scale, horror can be the most subtle of suggestions. A chameleon element with the ability to creep into other genres.

At the other end, horror can also be a special effects blast. A kinetic gorefest that quickens the pulse while leaving the heartstrings mercifully untwanged.

But when horror decides to trash perceived boundaries and really make us feel something red and raw and aching, to the point of catharsis, let’s not be so quick to clutch our pearls. The clue was, after all, always in the genre’s name.

My novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks is currently half price in the UK Kindle store, at a mere £1.99 for a limited time! My novelette Auto Rewind is also new to Kindle this week.

Hey! Pull up a chair and listen to me interviewing Alistair Sparks, the brother of the late journalist and author Jack Sparks. 

Since Jack's book The Last Days Of Jack Sparks was published, there's been much speculation and debate surrounding Alistair, who has attracted everything from admiration to scorn. So I wanted to sit down with him in a cafe and ask a few questions. 

This interview is presented in two halves... and you very nearly didn't get to hear the second half at all, because Alistair ultimately didn't want Orbit Books and me to make it available. He made legal threats, while clearly forgetting the terms of the agreement he'd signed before the interview. So The Lost Cut is now available to your ears and I think you'll find it most interesting.

Enjoy! Incidentally, if you haven't read the book yet then don't worry - there'll be nothing to spoiler you here. It doesn't reveal anything that isn't in the prologue...

And there we have it. As I say at the end there, I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to Alistair's true character. And of course you'll find more evidence within the pages of The Last Days Of Jack Sparks. Or if you'd like to hear the delightful tones of Alistair Sparks and all the other people in this book via audio, you can check out the splendid audiobook!

Don't forget: on October 26 2016, Timebomb author Scott K Andrews will interview me at the British Science Fiction Association's pre-Halloween meeting in London! The event is open to all and free to enter. Get the details!

In February 2015, I interviewed the mighty Timebomb author Scott K Andrews at the British Science Fiction Association's monthly gathering. Ohhh, how I quizzed the man about his life, his career and his frankly astonishing collection of ancient Egyptian thigh bones. The whole affair looked very much like Chad Dixon's picture above, except the audience presumably experienced it in full colour.

On October 26, mere days before Halloween, the fiendish Mr Andrews will turn the tables on me for the BSFA, and interrogate me all about my life, career and frankly astonishing collection of ancient Egyptian shin bones. The event is completely free to attend - you do not have to be a BSFA member - and the night's schedule runs like this:

6pm
People gather at The Artillery Arms, 102 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8ND. These people can drink some booze, if they like, to steel themselves for what is to come.

7pm
Scott starts grilling me in the upstairs room of the pub. There is no mercy. A reading from Jack Sparks may also be involved.

8pm
Q&A with the audience.

8.15pm
Book raffle, in which you can "win a selection of SF novels for just £1 for 5 tickets", according to the BSFA. I'll be happy to sign copies of my novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks too, if you like. I may also bring a few copies along to sell if the interest is there (tweet me!)

All in all, I can't think of a better way to welcome the infernal majesty of Halloween 2016 into our lives, can you? Well, can you? Hmmm? I doubt you can, so diarise it.

​See you there!  Here's the BSFA's event page, just in case you think I've made the whole blessed thing up. 

​And if you can't make the event in person, check out Chad Dixon's Twitter feed - he'll hopefully be live-streaming the whole affair!

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!

Sweet galloping Christ! My Orbit Books novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks has become the latest selection of Simon Mayo’s Radio 2 Book Club.
 
This is a truly wonderful development, which will expose Jack Sparks to millions of potential new readers. And God knows, Jack was a duplicitous scoundrel who badly needed exposing. Thanks so very much to Simon Mayo, Radio 2’s book boffin Joe Haddow, The Reading Agency and all the UK librarians who helped make this possible. Yes, librarians, those awesome keepers of the sacred flame, gave Sparks their nod. This makes me pleased as punch.
 
I’ll be on Simon Mayo’s Drivetime Show on September 5 to chat about the novel, soI’m very much looking forward to that.
 
The Last Days Of Jack Sparks is a supernatural thriller about an arrogant celebrity journalist who sets out to write a non-fiction book debunking the supernatural. When he laughs during an exorcism in Italy, it seems to trigger a chain of increasingly frightening events that lead to his death. V For Vendetta and Watchmen creator Alan Moore has described the book as “a magnificent millennial nightmare”!

Here's the Radio 2 Book Club page for the book, including a free downloadable extract.  And here's the reading groups page where you can win one of 10 copies of the book! 

Hooray!

​I am currently only capable of saying hooray.

Hooray. 

P.S. Further Sparks-related reading:

The day Alan Moore left a voicemail message on my phone

Why and how I cast The Blair Witch Project's directors in The Last Days Of Jack Sparks