Hard Copy

I now own my own book(s) in physical form: We Used Dark Forces (Dennis Wheatley + HP Lovecraft + Agatha Christie rendered as WWII SF whodunnit black comedy) is joined by Is Your Journey to the Centre of the Earth Really Necessary? (Jules Verne + Edgar Rice Burroughs + Sax Rohmer + Robert E Howard rendered as WWII SF epic fantasy black comedy). You can see above how much chunkier the new one is than its predecessor, but you can’t see that the print for some reason is both larger and more spacious which makes it hard to tell how much longer it really is.

One reason it’s long is that I decided to follow the genre requirement, as I remembered it from childhood favourites like JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH, THE LOST WORLD and (the wretched) ISLAND AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD — it should always take a frustratingly long time for the characters to actually get started on their voyage. This sense of an endless wait was probably a function of my being a kid when I saw these films, and thus much much more interested in the dinosaurs etc than the people who were going to meet them. I wasn’t unique in this: when Spielberg made his first JURASSIC PARK sequel, he followed the advice of kids who had written to him saying Please don’t make us wait so long for the dinosaurs this time. Following their advice helped make the second film worse.

In fact, I think the characters failing to get started is some of my favourite stuff in this book, though it’s possible it could have benefitted from pruning. I’m a bit embarrassed about how fat the book is — like Paul Thomas Anderson when he realised MAGNOLIA was gonna be three hours.

Being sick for almost three weeks has allowed me to make excellent progress on volume 3, which seems to have a more robust structure than the first two — either this is because I’m actually improving, or it’s an illusion caused by the time travel theme, or it’s an illusion caused by me not being quite finished yet. I may be speaking too soon.

I’m a bit concerned that Amazon still hasn’t realised that the Kindle version (here) and the paperback (here) are the same book. Amazon admits this can happen but claims that it always gets sorted out in a week or two. Waiting.

Your complimentary extract: mad scientist camping anecdote.

I hadn’t been camping since boyhood, when I had briefly moved out of the rambling family abode at Bolventor (not far from my present campsite, actually) to observe the local fauna’s reaction to the special feed I’d been leaving out. That adventure had led to a hair-raising encounter with a mutated badger, which, nourished upon the special nutrients I’d supplied, had grown large as an ox and was as a consequence ravenously hungry. Our faithful groundskeeper, Couch, eventually found me, treed by the snorting behemoth, and felled the black monster with his twelve-bore, but not before it had wrenched off his left arm.

I learned to be wary of Couch’s hook after that.

The paperback lives here on Amazon UK. The US version is here. And here’s the Australian.

My Page Seventeens

I was bound to do this eventually, I suppose.

(Don’t worry, we’ll get back to MONSIEUR VERDOUX soon.)

On page seventeen of We Used Dark Forces, my first novel, we find this upsetting and mysterious passage:

“I think, either way, his career as physicist is at an end,” said Whitsuntide, as the concentric ripples faded. “The more urgent question seems to me whether you can peal him from the walls and ceiling without getting yourselves enveloped in his skin. I don’t fancy the job and I think I’ll leave you to it. I believe breakfast is served.”

I don’t yet have my author’s copies of the second book, Is Your Journey to the Centre of the Earth Really Necessary?, but I’m fairly sure the seventeenth page will turn out to offer this enticing nugget:

“I want the two of you to get your three collective arse-cheeks to London,” commanded Saucy Cuthbert, as I call him behind his bulky back, “The A.E.I.O.U. is back in business!”

One thing slightly troubles me: the title of my first book riffs on/steals from Dennis Wheatley’s novel of wartime black magic, They Used Dark Forces. I turn the tables on the idea, appropriately for a novel about a species of table-turning, and accuse our own side of wickedness. If the Whitsuntide books have any serious idea at their core, it’s probably that war makes everybody do awful things.

Anyway, the new book takes its title from Jules Verne and also from this British wartime propaganda campaign:

Anyway, what bothers me very slightly is that the third book ought certainly to take its title from H.G. Wells (it has to do with time travel). Though it also has a heavy Moorcock influence. (Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius character, and Robert Fuest’s Cornelius film, THE FINAL PROGRAMME, which Moorcock detests, found its way into the character’s DNA when I first thought of doing a kind of Harry Flashman does Frankenstein thing, and when I showed TFP to Freddie Fox, who played Whitsuntide in my short film, THE NORTHLEACH HORROR. He got obsessed, and rightly so, with Jon Finch’s performance.)

Anyway, the third book does NOT reference Wells or any other fantasy writer in its title, which is Kill Baby Hitler! I just think that’s too good a title not to use, and might actually sell books in significant numbers, providing everyone is down with infanticidal comedy novels. It’s a much better title than Time Machine Washable.

It will, I sincerely hope, still have a pastiche Penguin cover designed by the mighty Danny Carr.

As usual, I have the links for UK and US editions to share:

UK Kindle for WE USED DARK FORCES. UK paperback.

UK Kindle for IS YOUR JOURNEY…? UK paperback.

US Kindle for WE USED… US paperback.

US Kindle for IS YOUR JOURNEY…? US paperback.

I’ll post some other territories next time, on the assumption that if I make it really easy, some Canadian will buy one of the things on a misguided impulse.

(Big thanks to Donald Benson for the awesome image at top.)

Not the Sunday Intertitle!

I may have to phone the doctor tomorrow as this cold isn’t going away as fast as I’d like. Fiona still has a cough from before Christmas — antibiotics may be indicated.

Not feeling like watching a silent feature today OR using my ingenuity to find an intertitle in a talkie, so I think I’ll just provide another book extract. You can actually read the first ten chapters, it seems, of my new novel, Is Your Journey to the Centre of the Earth Really Necessary?, on Amazon. Well, there are 97 chapters, so it’s not that much. Certainly enough for the curious reader to ascertain whether this is the sort of muck she wants to spend her time on.

The novel begins thusly:

Chapter One: Some of Our Witchcraft Is Missing

The Narrative of Whitsuntide

Mad scientists? Yes, I’ve known a few. As with artists, a measure of eccentricity is to be expected. Creative genius, you know – there’s a fine line separating it from insanity. Those of us who have erased that line are a rarer breed.

But yes, genuine lunatics. One thinks of Professor Fieldish Pucker, whose studies in miniaturisation promised to bring so much of beauty and interest to the world, but who died in poverty, a forgotten man, wedged between the molars of a housecat named Chips.

Then there was Baxtable Stagg, a pungently hebephrenic autodidact whose many flying machines, original, graceful and profoundly hazardous, endeared him to the whole scientific community as long as they didn’t have to stand too close. Never a man to do things the easy way, old Baxtable eschewed wings, propellers and rocketry and crafted wonderfully elegant machines that attempted to achieve the miracle of flight by means of fatty deposits, sculpture, aromas, pantomimic gestures and glossolalia. Work? Of course they didn’t work. But they had a flare and a poetry about them which I find lacking in all your de Havilland Moths and Stinson AT-19 Reliants. And does Jiro Horikoshi have a crater named after him?

Havelock Sprank, there was a man! Paranoids design the best weapons, I find. After all, living in terror of attack from friends, family, and total strangers, they’re highly incentivised to do so. A Sprank killing machine surpassed all others in its cruelty, its destructiveness, its sheer joie de tuer. He designed hundreds of them during the wars, for both sides, and never got a single prototype built, so appalling were the very concepts involved. Finally shot himself with an ordinary Mauser, I heard, which has a terrible pathos to it, when you consider the fantastic engines of destruction of which he dreamed.

Then of course you have the Old Man, my old man that is, with his endless stream of mutants, travestying the human form and reaching ever for more shocking hybrids of man and animal, man and plant, man and mineral. I grew up surrounded by these unfortunate creations, with sterile satyrs frotting in the meadows near our house in Bolventor, and directionless birdmen dashing themselves against the windows. A wonder it didn’t put me off the whole business of scientific enquiry.

But no, something about Man’s eternal quest for truth gripped me, and I began, at an early age, to explore my own particular field, the branch of science that encompasses and corrupts all others, black science, or as it is sometimes known, perverted science.

This is, in a roundabout way, explains how I came to be lurking about a dingy backstreet in Portsmouth on a wet Saturday night in January 1942, trying to break and enter a witch’s house in the company of a nervous Scots-Italian linguist called McWheattie and a small troop of Lancers assigned to us for the occasion. It was freezing and wet and I couldn’t wait to get inside, but unfortunately inside was a witch.

I notice that I’ve stolen the first joke, in the first paragraph, from Oscar Levant. Oh, I’ve rephrased it, but it’s unquestionably the same joke. That’s a bit embarrassing. Oh, and I’ve just spotted a typo. Corrected it in the Kindle edition, but those who bought the thing yesterday will find the word “explains” missing in the last paragraph, and those who bought the paperback also. I *think* I can fix it for future paperbacks but with my head stuffed full of straw, as it is at present, I might not date to attempt it.

The book has no pictures but it does have conversations. The above image is a vintage illo by the great Virgil Finlay, to which I have affixed a caption in a pseudo Glenn Baxter style. Just for you!

The UK paperback is here, by the way.

The US paperback is here.

Let me know if the links don’t work for you.

Buy them before I fix the typo and you’ll have a rarity you can use to test the credentials of phony book dealers!

Argh. Hang on. Just checked the PDF of the paperback and there’s no typo. As you were. Weird. This is why self-publishing a book without a fully functioning brain may be ill-advised.