Just a quickie – Johnny Mains, soon to be one of the stars of The Obverse Book of Ghosts, has just announced that his imprint, Noose and Gibbet, are to publish a collection of horror short stories by Fontana veteran Mary Danby.

This, unexpectedly, will be the first ever collection of Danby’s short fiction and it’ll be limited to 150 hardback copies, at a very reasonable £20 each, so pre-orders are the way for everyone to go!

Edited by Stuart Douglas and Lawrence Miles
Published in hardback by Obverse Books in February 2011

Part cult, part subculture, part pop phenomenon and part criminal syndicate – Faction Paradox is watching you…

Obverse Books is proud to announce a first ever collection of stories featuring Lawrence Miles’ Faction Paradox.

Contributors to this new anthology include:

* Dave Hoskins (Short Trips: Transmissions)

* Philip Purser-Hallard (Of the City of the Saved…, Peculiar Lives, Iris Wildthyme & the Celestial Omnibus)

* Stuart Douglas (Miss Wildthyme and Friends  Investigate, The Obverse Book of Ghosts)

* Matt Kimpton (Chief Skald of Suffolk)

* Jon Dennis (The Book of the War, Bernice Summerfield: Secret Histories)

* Jay Eales (Factor Fiction)

* Ian Potter (No Tomatoes, Short Trips, Rise and Rise of the Independents)

* Dan O’Mahony (Falls the Shadow, Newtons Sleep, Cabinet of Light)

* David N Smith (Bernice Summerfield: Collected Works) and Violet Addison (Short Trips – How The Doctor Changed My Life)

* Scott Harrison (A Christmas Carol:The Stage Play)

* James Milton (Short Trips: Transmissions)

* Blair Bidmead (The Panda Book of Horror)

Faction Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts is published in February 2011 by Obverse. For more information and updates, simply join our announcement list or go to http://www.obversebooks.co.uk/catalogue/faction.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/suffolk/hi/people_and_places/arts_and_culture/newsid_8864000/8864594.stm

Launched yesterday, 29 July 2010, by Paul Magrs, the Man Fooker Prize is a literary award  for works of fiction and memoirs by gay men.

As it says on the official website

It was literary award season again and longlists were getting bandied about like crazy. And it’s annoying because those lists seem a bit ready-made, middlebrow, monotonous and obvious. Anyway, late July 2010 and there’s the usual palaver about the Booker Longlist. It was obviously going to be the same old gubbins and some of the same old names. And the same nonsense about ‘literary’ fiction being a separate, rarefied preserve, quite apart from other genres.  Anyway, we thought – wouldn’t it be fun and great to do something a bit different?

Fun and different is something we’re very keen on here at the Obverse Towerblock – it’d be great if this prize took off a bit…

http://manfookerprize.wordpress.com/

[ETA: Apparently, due to a terrible horse frightening incident, the prize is now to be called The Green Carnation]

“Four linked novellas from the world of transtemporal adventuress Iris Wildthyme. Unlike the last two books from Obverse, only the last of these stories star Iris and her sentient stuffed panda friend Panda, and the first three give centre stage to other characters from her previous adventures. The first, Jim Smith’s The Found World is something of a literary mash-up, featuring several characters from the works of Stoker, Conan Doyle, and so forth. Working out who is who is part of the fun, and it’s a bouncy, surprising tale that opens the book in fine spirits. Nick Wallace’s The Irredeemable Love is a stranger beast, a disorientating mystery in the true sense, that forces you to pay attention and do some of the investigating yourself – my favourite story in the book, for the same reason. Cody Schell’s Elementary, My Dear Sheila, is a primary coloured, over-the-top Mexican murder mystery featuring the masked wrestler Senor 105, and is such exuberant fun you can’t help but enjoy it. Finally, as mentioned, Stuart Douglas closes the collection in considerable style with The Shape of Things, giving us a full glass of Wildthyme in contemplative mood, and Panda at his pretentious best. Easily the best of the Wildthyme books from Obverse Books – she and her friends seem to suit the novella length perfectly.” Four Stars out of Five

And links to three other more extensive reviews:

Doctor Who Reviews

Finn Clark’s Reviews

War Arrow’s Paperback Reviews

All positive in one way or other (who wouldn’t be pleased with comments like

“The standard of writing is extraordinarily high”

and

“playful and rich in ideas”

and

“the four novellas are linked enough to satisfy, and are individually distinct enough to provide the variety we’ve come to expect from the short story collections”

All very satisfying, frankly…

As a special treat when I get back, both readers who bothered updating their RSS readers when I moved from my old personal blog to this Shiny Corporate One will be able to revel in reviews of the books I’ve taken on board with me:

The Death of Bunny Munro – Nick Cave

Mission to Mercury – Hugh Walters

Fleshmarket – Nicola Morgan

The Lost Luggage Porter – Andrew Martin

Diving and Amazon Adventures – Willard Price

The Largest Theatre in the World – Shaun Sutton

Bet you can’t wait…

Available for pre-order from obversebooks.co.uk soon!

Edited by Cavan Scott

Published in hardback by Obverse Books in October 2010

Think ghosts just hang around spooky old houses or crumbling graveyards?

Think again.

Obverse Books is proud to announce a new collection of contemporary ghost stories that will unnerve and terrify. The Obverse Book of Ghost collects 14 tales of spectral terror, guaranteed to leave you awake at night.

Editor Cavan Scott says: “The Obverse Book of Ghosts follows in the phantasmagorical footsteps of those classic supernatural anthologies of the past, but drags the unquiet dead screaming into the 21^st Century. After all, isn’t it about time we were once again afraid of things that go bump in the night?”

Contributors to this exciting new anthology include:

• George Mann (The Affinity Bridge, Ghosts of Manhattan)

• Paul Magrs (Creator of Iris Wildthyme, The Brenda and Effie Series)

• Tom Fletcher (The Leaping)

• Guy Adams (The World House, Torchwood: The House That Jack Built)

• Rebecca Levene (The Infernal Game series, Tomes of the Dead: Anno Mortis)

• Johnny Mains (Back from the Dead: The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories)

• Mark Michalowski (Being Human: Chasers, Doctor Who: Shining Darkness)

• Mark Wright – (Doctor Who: Project Destiny, co-producer of Iris Wildthyme audios)

• Nick Walters (Doctor Who: Reckless Engineering, Doctor Who: The Fall of Yquatine)

• Scott Handcock (Doctor Who: The Rising Night, Doctor Who: The Phantom Planet)

• Stuart Douglas (Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus, Miss Wildthyme and Friends Investigate)

The Obverse Book of Ghosts also features short-story debuts from TV scriptwriter Philip Meeks and journalist Nick Peers.

The Obverse Book of Ghosts is published in October 2010 by Obverse Books – just in time for Halloween. For more information go to http://www.obversebooks.co.uk//catalogue/obog.html

While Iris Wildthyme remains the anchor of the Obverse-iverse, with “Miss Wildthyme & Friends Investigate”, Obverse Books broadens the scope of storytelling. Not only do each of these four stories stretch to novellette length, (a first for an Obverse Books collection), but the collection takes the opportunity to explore the bizarre worlds that exist around Iris Wildthyme even after she’s left the party.

Spanning a full century, this collection is split into a quartet of stories:

The first story, The Found World features Professor George Challenger, a character who previously appeared in such Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories as “The Poison Belt”, and “The Disintegration Machine”. Jim Smith, author of the Bernice Summerfield audio “The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel” (which featured another of Doyle’s creatures, Mycroft Holmes) presents an untold tale of this fascinating and infamously confounding character described by Doyle as “just a homicidal megalomaniac with a turn for science”. World war has commenced for the first time in history, and the government need Challenger’s team to return to their Lost World. Meanwhile, a drunken Iris Wildthyme runs The Tradesman’s Entrance and a peculiar bottle turns up in the Amazonian mud…

After an initial appearance in Paul Magrs’ “The Delightful Bag”, the Manleigh Halt Irregulars return for a longer visit. The MHI consist of Miss Clarissa Miller, feisty Edwardian journalist and investigator, her two indefagatible policemen helpers and the mysterious old man, Dogberry – and the unstabkle, time jumping police station they inhabit. A new adventure of the Manleigh Halt Irregulars, The Irredeemable Love Connection, is written by Nick Wallace, author and editor for the Bernice Summerfield range as well as the acclaimed final 8th Doctor BBC novel Fear Itself. Across the wilds of Britain, the MHI team hunt a strange yellow bottle, with fearsome consequences!

Scientist, musician, explorer, masked wrestler: Señor 105 will be familiar to readers of the Celestial Omnibus as Mexico’s caretaker of the unknown. Defending his homeland from threats domestic and alien, somehow the major world powers don’t quite take the luchador’s claims seriously. Not since the incident with the Cactus People. With his Parisian companion Sheila at his side, Señor 105 invites a diverse group of people to a dinner party held on the Day of the Dead. Each of these guests owes him a favor and he is collecting on their promises to attain a mysterious objective. In Elementary, my dear Sheila by Cody Schell, a murder sets in motion a series of events that leads this group on an adventure through a strange underground city full of even stranger travelers, some more familiar than others, including one very close to his heart.

Iris Wildthyme, Pan-spatial Daredevil-trix, and her best friend Panda need no introduction. However, they may need a stiff drink to tackle the challenge of solving the mystery of the mysterious perfume bottle, as they cross swords with Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, amongst others. The first Iris story of this length in eight years, The Shape of Things is revealed in this concluding story by Stuart Douglas.

Miss Wildthyme & Friends Investigate will be available from Obverse Books in an attractive hardcover edition, featuring the distinctive cover artwork of Bret Herholz, author of “The Adventures of Polly and Handgraves: A Sinister Aura”.

To pre-order, visit: http://obversebooks.co.uk/catalogue/mwi.html

Due for publication on 31 May 2010!

Have no fear, though – as one of the authors in this book once said of me, there’s no need to worry I’m just being polite, because I’m really quite rude and unpleasant.  So I’ll mention if anything’s a bit crappy, I promise.

First things first, then: the framing sequence.  I do like the framing, eh, frame which links together Benny story collections more than the often tenuous thematic links which generally bound together the Big Finish Short Trips collections.  Editor Mark Clapham’s excuse for telling a few stories is no better or worse in concept than any other one, and he has a nice turn of phrase which makes the segments in between stories proper always readable.  At times the reasons given for telling any one specific story seem strained to the point of snapping but any collection with a reasonable range of stories will inevitably suffer from this. Perhaps something like the Richard Salter-edited ‘Transmissions’ Short Trips book where a theme is glued together by a framing sequence is the best way to go, but in the case of Secret Histories, a couple of stories do feel as though they’ve been dropped into the uber-narratibe for very little reason.

Never mind that, though.  This is a book full of arresting imagery – flocks of flying alarm clocks, lasers made from flowers, a creature made of rainbows – and sparkling writing (‘that’s fairly atypical behaviour, even for the most persistent of white goods’ being a particular favourite line).  It feels a bit short in terms of page count, it has to be said, but the decision to have only nine stories, each a little longer than the more common Big Finish short story, pays off with a succession of thoughtful, intelligent stories.

In passing, it’s good to see Big Finish continuining to experiment with the format of their Benny anthologies in a way they never did with Doctor Who (possibly because the BBC wouldn’t let them, of course).  After the successful ‘three novellas in one’ collections which I liked a lot, Clapham’s preference for fewer but longer stories is another success and one I hope Big FInish try again in the future.

Moving on to a quick run through of the stories themselves, Lance Parkin turns in his usual solid and workmanlike story to kick things off with “A Game of Soldiers”.  There’s nothing here to astonish or astound, but Parkin rarely turns in a poor short story and this is as professional a tale as ever.  He knows how to write Benny, and if he does lean on ‘hey look – she likes a drink’ rather more than I hoped it’s an issue many writers have with Ms Summerfield.  It’s perhaps a litte bit Benny by Numbers, but there are worse things to read.

Paul Farnsworth, on the other hand, pops up next with a story that starts like a suitcase full of spanners.  Living household appliances have of course already made appearances in Paul Magrs’ Doctor Who and Iris Wildthyme stories, but filling an entire jungle with evolved kitchenware works fantastically well here.  I guessed what was going to happen very early on, but these aren’t mystery stories after all, and more importantly I laughed out loud several times at this story.  I’d never  heard of Farnsworth before, but all in all was mightily impressed by ‘Cooker Island’.

Jim Smith’s ‘A Gallery of Pigeons’ has a far more traditional setting and is a welcome return for the author to the era of Mycroft Holmes which he’s previously explored in the Benny audio, ‘The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel’.  I marginally prefered the audio to this prose effort, but it’s a close run thing and in any case that’s no particular put-down as the audio was really excellent.  Smith is obviously comfortable with this style of writing and with the period in general, the story makes an unusual-for-Benny use of time travel and the plot does for once slot very neatly in with the framing arc.  Another solid effort.

Eddie Robson’s ‘The Firing Squad’ is probably my favourite story in the collection.  As with all these stories it’s a little longer than is the norm in a Big Finish collection and Robson makes good use of the extra space to craft a beautifully layered tale, which  manages to shed some light on Adrian’s thoughts and motivations while still remembering to provide an engaging story.

‘You Shouldn’t Have’ by Cody Schell is exactly what you expect to get, given the author’s previous work.  A distinctive voice, funny, unexpected and slightly mad by turns, it’s undoubtedly the least obvious plot you could come up with for Adrian, the eight foot tall Killorian, and features a very well handled, intriguingly alien society.

Jon Dennis’ ‘Redacted’ takes a potentially grim occasion, as a military dictator sets himself up in power and people start disappearing, and turns it into a black comedy of mistaken identity.  Dennis has a real knack for this sort of slightly askew humour and it shines through here.

Mark Michalowski is among my favourite writers, so it’s no surprise to find that I love ‘The Illuminated Man’. Like his earlier Benny tale, ‘Let There Be Stars’, this is another story which concentrates on someone other than Benny, and like that other story this is a strange and lovely bit of writing.  For any fan of Tod Browning, the story of Dog Boy Peter living with pinheads, strongmen and other freaks in a travelling circus is bound to ring a bell, and his encounter with a haunting man with an angel’s heart is deftly and movingly done.

Richard Freeman is a crypto-zoologist for a living (how cool is that, incidentally!) and it really shows in his story.  It’s a  welcome sight to find a story set somewhere other than Britain or the States – Tasmania just as white Europeans first arrive – and the knowledge that the Aborigines Benny is living with will all be murdered within a generation is a sobering and effecting one.  Perhaps a little too much of the story is taken up with describing legendary (as opposed to real) animals in detail and to no real narrative purpose, but for all that the ending is nicely done and the generally downbeat tone has a pleasantly elegiac feel to it.

Finally, Nick Wallace brings the collection to a conclusion with another grim story in which Benny is again alone and in danger.  To say much about the story would be to give too much away, but suffice to say that it’s a fitting story with which to end the book, and for me at least occasionally reminisent of Wallace’s excellent Doctor Who novel Fear Itself.

I like the Benny books a lot and Secret Histories shouldn’t be embarassed to stand alongside the other books in the series.  You can’t really ask for more than that.