Welcome to Raine's Landing

16 ebook titles

2012-01-20T09:04:00.000-08:00

I've finally uploaded all my work that I legally -- and sensibly -- can onto Amazon Kindle. Novels, novellas, collections of short stories. Science fiction, fantasy, horror, suspense, paranormal, dark fantasy, you name it. Most of it has appeared in print at some time in the past although, especially with the novellas, I've taken care to give my work a good final polish (and sometimes a revision) before it appeared in ebook form. And I now have 16 titles out there. They are: The Black Lake -- horror collection; Strange Tales -- self explanatory; Hot Blood 1: The Seductress and Hot Blood 2: Captive of the Night -- vampire novels; To Steal an Angel -- SF collection; A Night in Tunisia -- long supernatural story; Under the Ice -- revenant novella; A Black Glass Slipper -- supernatural thriller novella; No Man -- contemporary SF novella; Touched by Magic -- fantasy tales; Dark Futures -- SF/horror fusion tales; Alsiso -- suspense tales; Too Good to be True -- adult horror stories; and three short collections about Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century. They're almost all at the sample price of 99c, and you can find out more about them here.

And now I'm going to have a rest. I need it.

A CHILLING SUPERNATURAL THRILLER

2012-01-11T07:57:00.000-08:00

My latest publication on Amazon Kindle is a novella that first appeared in my collection No-Man and Other Tales in 2007. It's a hard-hitting thriller with a supernatural twist to it, and not about any lightweight subject either. Here's the blurb:

"Owen Glazer is a young and single man with a bright, promising future. That is until, at an annual party at a top London hotel, his life gets turned completely upside-down. There, in the bar, he meets Eva Elenescu, the most beautiful, beguiling woman he has ever seen. It quickly becomes apparent that she is a high-class call girl, but that’s not the entire story. Eva is not doing it willingly -- she is wholly the property of a vicious gang of Russian mobsters headed by a boss who is a brutal psychopath. Owen decides to get her away from them. But the harder he tries, the deeper he finds himself sinking into a nightmarishly dark quagmire of corruption, big money, and savage violence. Until finally he sees the truth … there is one way to rescue Eva, but it might cost him his immortal soul."

Glass Slipper isn't for the faint-hearted, but then I didn't intend it to be a comfortable read. And how did the idea come about in the first place? Well, I simply thought up the title first. I wrote it down without having the first notion what story might go with it ... that sometimes happens. I forgot about it, but then -- some couple of years later -- two things happened. First, I started reading (to my horror) the first articles about the criminal trade in Eastern European women. And then a few months after that, I had a talk with a journalist friend of mine who'd, just the day before, had a terrifying run-in with a bunch of exactly that type of thug. And I suddenly knew what my title was going to be about.

The cover, once again, is by the excellent Steve Upham. And you can find out more about Glass Slipper and my other ebooks here.

AMAZON KINDLE AND THE PRICE OF SUCCESS

2011-12-15T11:44:00.000-08:00

You learn strange things about people on the Internet. For instance, I was on the Kindleboards forum a few hours ago, came across a discussion of free and 99c ebooks, and hit on this comment: "I think a low price says the writer didn't have a lot of confidence in it, or didn't care too much how it did. Rightly or wrongly. If it's not worth much to him or her, why should it matter much to me, as the reader?"

And since all of my self-published books on Kindle are 99c, I wasn't exactly pleased. I mean, I've had novels published by four major publishers. My stories have appeared in most of the better magazines in the genre I work in. And most of what I've put out electronically has been published in hard print at some time in the past. The quote above just didn't make the slightest bit of sense to me, and so I tried to put the guy with that opinion right. Only to be rebutted by an American living in the UK, who told me she and plenty of people that she knew regarded 99c ebooks as potentially inferior, and $2.99 to be the proper starting rate. Bizarre! I don't buy cheaper tickets at the cinema on an Orange Wednesday and expect the movie I'm about to see to be inferior. If someone wants to put their work out at a very accessible price, why not? And does the extra two bucks make the ebook that they're buying suddenly -- magically -- better?

So why do I price my ebooks thusly in the first place?

One -- I'm trying to reach a brand-new market, and this seems like the best way to do it. Someone unfamiliar with my work, who buys one of my Kindles for less than the price of a cup of coffee in a diner, might like it enough to either buy some more 99 centers, which is fine. Or they might take enough of an interest to buy one of my novels or conventionally published collections. And that is what is happening. I know this because some of those people write and tell me so. In fact, one guy brought everything that I have out there electronically.

Two -- I'm not inclined at this stage of the game to shell out on having my ebooks formatted professionally. Don't get me wrong, I put a lot of effort into getting them in as good a shape as I can manage, which means spending hours checking through and taking all of the tab indents out. So once I have download them to Amazon, they're mostly good, but you come across the occasional page where a couple of paragraphs have too much indenting in them. And the fact is, I am pretty conscientious when it comes to my work, and since these ebooks are a slightly imperfect product it seems only fair to charge the minimum price for them, rather the same way you would charge a lot less for a second-hand book.

You know what? I'm half tempted to try a small experiment -- reprice all my Kindles at £2.99 and see if they sell better or attract a more discerning audience. But I doubt they will. I'll let you know.

LAUNCHING HOLMES

2011-12-14T15:29:00.000-08:00

Last week, I took part in the online launch of Dark Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes (see 'Sherlock Holmes Week,' further down this blog). And this week, Gaslight Gallery -- a website about the entire Gaslight series -- is running a short interview with me. Yes, another one! I certainly have a load of people asking me for my opinion these days, more fool them. Incidentally, 'The House of Blood' -- my story from that anthology -- also appears in my Kindle collection More Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century.

ED GORMAN Q&A

2011-12-13T08:55:00.001-08:00

When my first novel -- The Harvest Bride -- came out in 1987, it was not only nominated for a Bram, it got a fine big bunch of good reviews as well. And the best of them -- so glowing that a quote from it is still on the banner of my website home page -- was from that excellent and prolific writer of horror and suspense, Ed Gorman. Now he's done the same again, publishing his summings up of my collection Shadows and Other Tales and my newest venture, Our Lady of the Shadows, on his blog, alongside a small interview with me. You can read the whole thing here. When you're a writer, you discover down the years there is a small handful of people that you find yourself beholden to. And Mr. Gorman's one of them in my case. Almost a quarter of a century has passed since my debut, and the guy's still handing out the praise. So huge thanks, Ed. More power to you.

SHERLOCK HOLMES WEEK

2011-12-07T10:39:00.000-08:00

There were two events pertaining to the Great Detective last week. Firstly, I published on Amazon Kindle the third of my Immortal Holmes series. The 3rd Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century contains three brand-new long stories. Here's the blurb:

"Sherlock Holmes didn’t die when he plunged down the Reichenbach Falls. He turned out to be unkillable, and is still with us to this very day, travelling the world and delving into all its most confounding cases. But these are not merely ordinary crimes … supernatural forces are at work. In “The Hunters and the Hunted” Holmes is confronted with a deadly insect swarm in Kenya … but what is directing the creatures toward their victims? In “Above the Boulevards” a powerful and mysterious vigilante is protecting women on the streets of Paris. And in “The Crimewave” Holmes is called back urgently to his beloved native London. And he no longer has Watson by his side … so here’s your chance to make the journey with him."

And secondly, Bitten by Books hosted a launch event for Dark Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes. The anthology is from Edge Publishing, and contains my very first Immortal Holmes story, 'The House of Blood,' set in Las Vegas. The event went on a full 24 hours with readers taking part and asking questions; I was one of the authors who answered them, and you can take a look at the whole thing here.

GUEST BLOGGER -- DAVID WINGROVE

2011-11-17T07:41:00.001-08:00

David Wingrove and I have been friends for more than thirty years, and he's been writing science fiction (which I used to do a lot of; that is how we met) for as long as I've been writing supernatural stuff. He's partly known for his series of Myst fantasy novels, based on the popular game. But what he's best known for is his Chung Kuo series, which depicts a space-age future ruled by the Chinese. And now Corvus books are relaunching the whole saga again in 20 volumes. The first -- Son of Heaven -- is already out in paperback, while the second -- Daylight on Iron Mountain -- has just been released to ecstatic reviews from The Guardian, which called it 'excellent.' In the course of researching this massive set of novels, Dave has become something of an expert on the subject of China, and has been blogging daily about it and other Chung Kuo related matters. So from this point on, I'll let him tell it in his own words.

A Product Of Unnatural Growth

China, in the last thirty years, has undergone the kind of transformational changes that the industrial West took a leisurely century and more to assimilate. It has seen exaggerated, almost unnatural growth.

One of the most common visual symbols of this are the rows of massive tower blocks that seem to be thrown up overnight in response to the twenty million or so Chinese peasants who flood into the cities every year. In our own version of the Industrial revolution, between 1780 say and 1880, we saw people move from the country to the town in large numbers. My own family, on both the Wingrove and the Jackson sides, was part of that. Battersea, in South London, where they settled, went from being a rural area with a population of 5,000 in 1860, to one of the most heavily industrialized areas in the country, with the two biggest engine yards in the country and a population of 170,000 in a mere twenty years. But it was nothing like what is happening in China. What’s different is the sheer scale of things. What the Chinese are experiencing is four or five times as fast and at least ten times the size.

The positives are massive - China has gone from being a third world power to potentially the world’s biggest superpower in one generation, liberating something like a billion people from poverty in the process – but so too are the negatives. Pollution, massive social problems and potential economic instability: these are the Big Three Negatives that face the Chinese people and their government.

Culturally, too, China is changing, though it’s hard to gauge whether such changes are temporary and fleeting. One thing is for certain: China is changing in response to what its people are experiencing, not merely from their increasing travels in the West, but from what they see and hear on their media. There are undoubtedly some parallels to Japan in that regard. But… China is China. And when China does something, it is always “with Chinese characteristics”. Much more than Japan, China hangs on to its traditions and its ways much more stubbornly than its Asian partners.

The Western media pays a lot of attention to censorship in China – to how it affects not merely how people behave socially, but also what they create artistically. I made a slightly humourous mention of China banning Time Travel in yesterday’s blog, but in some ways it’s not so funny. For all that change is in the air, with a centralized Communist government in charge such change is closely monitored and, from time to time, cracked down on. The result of this is that we’ve seen brief flowerings of modern Chinese culture – in art, cinema, music and literature – flowerings that incorporate a strong influence of the West, but the active word there is brief. What would attract debate in the West, in China finds itself banned, just as soon as the authorities manage to work out what’s been happening.

Because art – in all its forms - is an expression of freedom, and what the CCP don’t seem to want is freedom, because freedom is a road that leads away from a centrally-planned economy, and away from CCP control. It’s a road that leads directly to Democracy, and they can’t have that.

Now that’s a separate debate, and I’ll come to that in its turn – maybe in the coming week – but it has to be borne in mind when you’re talking about whether China will go the way of Japan and assimilate Western culture. Because that’s what a lot of people are saying, and they’re missing one huge and obvious point. Japan had no say in it. They had Western culture forced upon them as a result of them losing World War Two and being reduced to the status of supplicant nation. To reject the West wasn’t an option for Japan, and to a great degree (so I believe from what I’ve seen and read) they’ve benefitted, maybe even enjoyed the process, becoming a hybrid nation culturally. Japanese youth look like their Western counterparts and, with a few idiosyncrasies, act like them, and that – on the surface – can be said of the latest generation of rich, middle class Chinese. Only there are big differences. China – as a political entity – can choose what it wants to keep from the Western “package” and reject the rest. It doesn’t have to assimilate. And though that may not be what a lot of the new generation want, that’s what they’re going to get, because what the CCP says goes.

If you’re in any doubt about that, I’d remind you of what recently happened to China’s leading modern painter, Ai Wei Wei, who was feted by the West, and now languishes under house arrest, having had his new studio (valued at something over a million dollars) demolished by the authorities. His crime? To have an opinion on human rights. Now this is one of their most influential artists – he helped create Beijing’s Olympic Bird’s Nest Stadium, for god’s sake! And the fact that the Chinese government can adopt such bully-boy tactics and get away with it directly affects what kind of art is subsequently produced. Chinese artists (and musicians and film-makers and writers) learn very quickly these days that they’re not to piss off the authorities. Because bad things will happen if they do. And this is how the CCP ultimately controls the new culture. By stern disapproval, and punishments, and house arrest, and all of those other methods that remind us so clearly in the West of what Stalin and Hitler did.

Now, I’m not making a direct comparison there. China isn’t, thankfully, Stalinist Russia, and it’s not a Nazi state. As I said, there are positives about the new China just as there are negatives. But a certain heavy handedness of the kind that tyrants and repressive governments use, has been very much in evidence since what in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Again, it’s an expression of that governmental fear of losing control that riddles the CCP. If you look at the history of recent Chinese film-making, for instance, you’ll see a direct correlation between freedom of expression pre-Tiananmen, and an absence of the same thereafter. Again, I’ll blog about the details of this sometime soon. But it’s akin to what happened in the USA in the forties and fifties, with ‘the list’ and great film-makers like Frank Capra finding themselves unable any longer to make their movies. [Which is just to say that our hands are far from clean in this respect].

In all of this, it’s important to note that things are far from sewn up in China. Right now the powers that be are still in charge, still capable of exerting such negative influence. But things are changing. China is catching up with the world, and as it does – as the number of millionaires goes through the roof and the success of their economy results in four hundred million new middle class to join the world’s vast pool of purchasers - so the CCP and the Nine Men at its heart, will be forced to take measures to placate their newly-rich citizens. To give them a modicum of the freedom that comes along with the Western economic package.

How much or how little we can’t yet guess; only that the CCP will attempt to control things, to keep the great balancing act going. Because – for right or wrong – these guys are the ultimate control freaks. Modern China was born from a frenzy of social control, from the radical liberation of its people from old ways of behaving. New Sky thinking is what they called it, and, call it what you will, it’s a form of brain washing. But that said… four hundred million people with economic clout. Surely something has to change?

Okay. More tomorrow. Until then…. Tsai chien!

David Wingrove 31st July 2011

FRESH KINDLING

2011-11-07T09:22:00.000-08:00

The latest addition to my titles on Amazon Kindle is partly autobiographical and probably one of the most personal stories I have ever written. A Night in Tunisia is a novelette that first appeared in 2006 in a collection called Extended Play: The Elastic Book of Music, from the same house that published my award-nominated collection Going Back. It's based on my long-term friendship with an American jazz saxophonist and, though it's presented in the form of fiction, nine-tenths of the tale is true ... although, being the kind of writer that I am, it goes all supernatural at the very end. Here's the back-cover material (or whatever it gets called on Kindle):

"There couldn’t have been two more different people. A British writer of supernatural fiction who had lived in London his whole life, and an African-American jazz saxophonist who’d resided in Europe since the Sixties. But when they met in a hotel in North Africa one evening, a friendship sprang up between them that would last more than a decade. And when one of them suddenly died, the other somehow knew that wasn’t going to be the end … and then set out on a journey to see the matter right through to its strange, haunting conclusion.There couldn’t have been two more different people. A British writer of supernatural fiction who had lived in London his whole life, and an African-American jazz saxophonist who’d resided in Europe since the Sixties. But when they met in a hotel in North Africa one evening, a friendship sprang up between them that would last more than a decade. And when one of them suddenly died, the other somehow knew that wasn’t going to be the end … and then set out on a journey to see the matter right through to its strange, haunting conclusion."

Hope that those who read it very much enjoy it -- it certainly got a good reception when it first came out. Oh, and as a btw, my top-selling collection on Kindle -- Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century -- now has a snazzy new cover.

STORYTIME

2011-10-30T09:20:00.001-07:00

It's turning out to be a good month for my shorter fiction. in the first place, my modern ghost story 'Lightning Dogs' is now available to read for free at The Indie Book Lounge. That particular tale of terror was first published in 2002, and is currently featured both in my latest hard print collection, Our Lady of the Shadows, and in my Kindle collection of horror fiction The Black Lake.

Out too is Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes edited by Charles Prepolec and J.R. Campbell for Edge Publishing. It's a follow-up to Gaslight Grimoire, and contains my first ever Holmes tale, 'The House of Blood.' In it, the great detective has turned out to be immortal, is still here with us to this very day, and gets involved with the investigation of a very curious series of murders in none other location than Las Vegas. It was the inspiration for my Kindle collection Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century. And there'll be more Holmes stories going online before too much longer. In the meantime -- happy reading!

DID RIGHT IN PARIS

2011-10-17T09:25:00.001-07:00

For some peculiar reason, my home city and one of my favourite directors just don’t seem to mix. Woody Allen came to London a few years back and made two movies. The first -- ‘Match Point’ -- ought to have been called ‘Match Pointless’; it was perfectly watchable until you reached the end, and then you sat their scratching your head and wondering why you’d bothered in the first place, what Americans call a ‘long run for a short slide.’ And his second effort -- ‘Scoop’ -- was so plain bad that I’m mentioning it here for the first and the last time.

Then he departed for Spain and came up with a big improvement, ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona,’ which I’ve already discussed earlier on in this blog (Sketches of Spain, 19 February, 2009). And now he’s cast his eye across Paris, and come up with his best movie in years. I’m not going to do a spoiler by telling you what Midnight in Paris is about … if you’ve not the first clue, then go to your local movie house and find out at first hand. But suffice to say that what happens to Owen Wilson in the film is my -- and most likely every creative person’s -- most heartfelt and unattainable secret dream. ‘Midnight’ is a delight from start to finish, and Allen’s most charming movie since ‘The Purple Rose of Cairo.’

And it dovetails neatly with my own recent experiences. Louise and I hadn’t been to Paris in years, and so last month we decided to spend three days there, just to reacquaint ourselves with the old girl. We rented someone’s tiny fourth-floor pied á terre, just two minutes walk from the Place de la Contrescarpe (top left) at the very heart of the Latin Quarter. There was a plaque for Hemingway on a house nearby, and about fifty yards further down from that another plaque for James Joyce. If you’re a writer, that’s the kind of thing that makes your jaw drop open. And we spent a glorious time there, touring the sites during the day and eating at a sidewalk table every evening. I just thought I’d share some photos with you.

A FAN FOR THE LADY

2011-10-03T15:04:00.001-07:00

The paperback of my newest collection, Our Lady of the Shadows, has been out for a few months now. It's made up of eleven stories -- four of them brand-new -- and a complete novella, and is mostly ghost fiction or stories about ghost-like subjects (there's an imaginary friend, and even an 'angel' puts in appearance). And it's had some good reviews so far. But Wendy Zazo-Phillips has just looked at it for MonsterLibrarian.com, and has given it a genuinely rave one.

She starts out her summary like this: "There are the books that are required reading, perhaps for a class or because your cousin/friend/coworker just wrote one and bullies you into reading a copy. There are the ones you read for pleasure, but afterwards you place it on the shelf and forget about it, or give it to a book sale, and you say, “Yeah, I read that,” when anyone asks you about it. But then there are those special books that you come back to every so often, the books you pick up on a lazy Saturday morning to read in bed for a while. I’m pleased to say that, for me, Our Lady of Shadows has become one of those books."

Wow! You can read the rest of the review by clicking here.

Incidentally, the interview I recently did, also with Wendy, has been moved from MonsterLibrarian's blog to a permanent posting on their website.

INTERVIEW WITH THE MONSTER

2011-09-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

There's a brand-new interview up on the blog of MonsterLibrarian.com in which I discuss horror fiction in general, my Raine's Landing series of supernatural thrillers, my Sherlock Holmes stories and new collection, and my self-publications on Kindle. You can read it here.

IN PRAISE OF ANGELS

2011-08-15T10:40:00.001-07:00

The third novel in my Raine’s Landing series of supernatural thrillers – Midnight’s Angels – is finally out in hardcover. I’ve talked about it in earlier blogs, but in case you’ve forgotten, here’s the story:

Now the Landing is facing its worst peril yet, monstrous flying creatures in the service of an evil older than the Universe itself. They have an unpleasant way of getting people over to their side, and their powers keep on growing until little can withstand them. Most of the major adepts succumb ... there are only two left to defend Raine's Landing. And the town's chief troubleshooter, ex-cop Ross Devries, has an enormous challenge on his hands. He needs to get his former sidekick, Cassie, back into the fight. And if they are to have any slightest chance of winning through, they're going to have to make some very strange new friends.

And, as usual with my books about this curious, witchcraft-filled Massachusetts town, the terrific reviews have come flooding in. You can read the full review in each case simply by clicking on the link.

“’Non-stop action’ is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, and though I have never read a book that actually lived up to that hype, Midnight’s Angels comes pretty close. The action starts strong and barely lets up. As a matter of fact, I was less than a quarter of the way through the story before I started trying to figure out how in the world Ross and Cassie (and friends) were going to be able to defeat a seemingly unstoppable menace. Richards has crafted a wonderful town filled with fascinating characters. His writing is clear and precise, with wonderful dialogue. The backstory is interesting, but never overshadows the narrative. And many mysteries remain, for future stories in the Raine's Landing saga. I, for one, look forward to visiting again” -- Erik Smith, The Monster Librarian

“I thought his characters, of which there are quite a few, were fully fleshed out and believable, with the main characters being ones I came to really enjoy spending time with. When it comes to fiction for me, characters are first and foremost the most important factor in drawing me into the story, and Mr. Richards characters are absolutely wonderful. The action is fast and furious, with plenty of witchcraft, magic and supernatural beings. His writing is atmospheric and spooky, once you start you will find it hard to put it down. I stayed up late a few nights in a row, as I couldn’t wait to find out what happened next” – Literary Mayhem

“Not only is Midnight’s Angels an imaginative story filled with interesting characters and enough twists and turns to keep those of you who like thrillers happy, Tony Richards has written a horror story which demonstrates his maturity as a writer. Look at it this way, Midnight’s Angels has the jacked-up imagination one would expect from Tony Richards, but it also has the control and pacing of an author coming into his own. This guy was making things real, handling me (and his characters) like it was a walk in the park. I prefer horror that disturbs me to no end, but I can see people who read mainstream dark fiction talking about this book, or at least the series, for years to come. In fact, I can hear the inevitable Stephen King comparisons now” – Clayton Bye, The Deepening

“It’s another satisfying entry in the Raine’s Landing series; this time, the characters are permanently changed by what’s happened and the bittersweet ending leaves the way open for yet another story…and that is definitely one I think readers will be looking forward to—and demanding” – Tony-Paul de Vissage

“Yet again Richards had upped the stakes with this book, putting not just Raine’s Landing but the existence of life itself in jeopardy, but he does so with such panache that it is impossible to feel anything other than admiration for his imagination and storytelling skill. It’s a book that combines supernatural spectacle and human drama, old favourites and new inventions, in just the right balance, with the message coming over loud and clear from author Richards that there is still plenty of mileage left in this unique and marvelous creation. I loved it” – Peter Tennant, Black Static.

And that’s just the first five reviews. Dark Regions Press are currently running a special offer on the hardback … if you by both Midnight’s Angels and my latest short fiction collection – Our Lady of the Shadows -- you can get a 20% price reduction simply by using the voucher code RICHARDS20.

The amazing cover, by the way, is by M. Wayne Miller.

A SHORT WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

2011-08-12T14:52:00.001-07:00

My two latest publications on Amazon Kindle are both sorties into erotic genre fiction.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE contains two horror shorts. In the title story, a visitor to Rome embarks on a wild affair with a woman he has met in his hotel, never once realising that there are supernatural forces at work, and a terrible price to be eventually paid. In ‘Beautiful Stranger,’ a young man in London is followed home by a gorgeous female Riser -- a zombie created by the wonder drug Revenox -- and begins to fall in love with her. But does she love him back?

Whereas ALSISO is a short erotic thriller, in which Harriet has fled her dull suburban marriage with her brand-new lover, Beth. Now, they live a lazy, bohemian existence in the quiet town of Alsiso, on the Caribbean coast of Mexico. But when Harriet begins to fall under the spell of a handsome drifter named Cody, the scene is set for mystery, intrigue -- and maybe worse. ‘Alsiso’ is accompanied by the story ‘Nine Rocks in a Row,’ about a couple who come across a genuinely terrifying prophecy.

Both of these are 99 cents, as are all ten of my self-publications on Amazon Kindle. And the great covers are -- once again -- by the excellent Steve Upham.

GUEST BLOGGER -- TONI V. SWEENEY

2011-08-03T09:20:00.000-07:00

My very first guest blogger is Toni V. Sweeney, a terrific author of sf, horror, fantasy, vampire fiction and more. We first began corresponding when she started to review my Raine's Landing novels, and we have been corresponding ever since. Here she is, talking about the influences on her work:

A special thanks to Tony for having me as his guest. We’ve only met through the Internet but I count him as a friend and applaud the novels he’s written. In a recent blog, Tony spoke of places he’s visited where he got the germ of ideas later flowering into novels. I haven’t traveled that much, and certainly not outside the ol’ US of A, but I have used the locales I’ve lived in as settings for some of my novels…specifically the Nebraska Panhandle (yes, there’s one there, too) in Serpent’s Tooth, Walk the Shadow Trail, and Vengeance from Eden, which were written for Nebraska’s celebration of statehood) and Middle Georgia and the Golden Isles in Jericho Road.

None of these have the haunting chill of Tony’s books—except Serpent’s Tooth, though demon worship in Nebraska does sound a little far-fetched when spoken out loud—but I think I managed to depict the loneliness of the sand hills, as well as the tight-knit conformity of a small Southern town fairly accurately.

There’s one thing more than any other that’s influenced the way my books are constructed, something people have come to call my “style.” (Hey…I’ve got a style now, how about that?) I suppose I’m a child of my time…and my time was the early 50’s, when moving pictures were the most popular form of entertainment before the Boob Tube usurped it. In those days, there were not only dramas and westerns but sweeping epics of adventure, costume dramas of pirates, Robin Hood, rogues and rascals and villains. Nowadays, you rarely see those, except for an occasional Indiana Jones rip-off or if Cinemax steps in with The Borgias. It was the time of Frank Yerby, Samuel Shellabarger, Rafael Sabatini…men who wrote what would probably be termed the picaresque novel, tales of men conquering mountains and nations, and discovering new worlds—simply because they were there. Their stories were made into Technicolor sagas enthralling this little viewer for hours (in those days, you could pay your money and stay in the theatre the entire day if you wished.) And when I began to write, I unconsciously patterned my stories after theirs.

One series—The Adventures of Sinbad—seems to mirror those stories enough that several readers have told me they “absolutely adore” my main character. I admit it’s easy to see him swinging across the deck of a ship, with dagger between his teeth while he hangs onto the heroine with one hand and a rope with the other, a la The Crimson Pirate. In fact, I think I had him do something almost like that in one story…

Other novels open with an incident leading to a flashback. In fact, one novel is simply one extended flashback, returning to the present only in the last chapter. Others are more linear, with cuts to other points of view showing things happening at the same time in other places, the dialogue interspersed with stage direction-like movement. In telling my tales of adventure, romance, violence, danger, and—on occasion—lust, I harken back to those days in those darkened theatres as I shoveled in the popcorn with my eyes glued to that glad bead-silvered screen. Good or bad, that’s just the way my mind works, and so far, it’s successful. The results are—in several reviewers’ opinions, “readable and enjoyable tales…outside the box”…which I owe to two things: my imagination and those childhood entertainments.

And then television came along…and opened the box even wider…

Toni V. Sweeney was born after the War Between the States and before the Gulf War. A native Georgian, she has lived on both coasts, thirty years in the Midwest and is now trying for thirty more in Nebraska. Her first novel was published in 1989 and she currently has 27 novels in publication. Her last novel The Wizard’s Wife, was released in February, of this year, and her latest novel, Runaway Brother, written under her pseudonym Icy Snow Blackstone, will be released by Class Act Books in August, 2011.

A WRITER WRITES ABOUT ... WELL, WRITING

2011-07-31T12:39:00.000-07:00

I've two non-fiction pieces about the writer's art on the Internet at the moment. 'Pre-Planning a Novel' on that excellent website The Indie Book Lounge. And 'Whatever Turns You On' -- about travel, inspiration, and location -- in the BLOG DEUX section of Tony-Paul de Vissage's website. Oh, and if you go to the review pages there, T-P has also reviewed all three of my Raine's Landing novels, and will shortly be doing the same for my Kindle publication 'Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century.'

IT''S A MYSTERY!

2011-07-10T08:55:00.000-07:00

Writing can be a very peculiar business. I'm sure non-writers think that I just tap out a tale, send it to a magazine, and that's the end of the business. Hardly. A good few years back, I wrote a story called 'The Very Edge of New Harare.' I conceived it as a science fiction tale. The central character is called Lieutenant Abel Enetame, and he inhabits a federalised Africa of the not too distant future. I originally sold it to a small press mag called Maelstrom. The editor there sat on it for about two years, then wrote to inform me that the magazine had collapsed.

I then showed it to the notoriously fickle editor (no names) of a British SF magazine. He said he'd take it if I shortened it a bit and changed a couple of small elements. I only ever do that when I can see that someone has a point, and he did on this occasion, so I made the changes. Sent it back to him. Never heard another word from the guy on the subject. Weird.

But finally I got to thinking, 'Hold on, the central character in this story is a cop. And in the course of the story he investigates some mysterious deaths. So I might be thinking of it as SF, but it's a mystery tale too.'

Now, I haven't even submitted anything to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine for -- I just went and checked -- twenty years! But I duly printed 'New Harare' up as a double-spaced manuscript and sent it off, expecting nothing. Six months passed. That seemed to confirm the 'nothing' bit. Then -- blow me down! -- Linda Landrigan, AHMM's editor wrote to me, apologising for taking so very long, and saying she loved the tale and wanted to buy it.

I've said it before and I'll say it again ... this is the world's most unpredictable business.

THE POWER OF (SCREAMING) DREAMS

2011-07-04T08:26:00.001-07:00

As regular followers of this blog might have noticed, I've been self-publishing an awful lot on Amazon Kindle lately. And why not? Heaven knows, I've more than enough back-material to put out on the Net. And what author would turn down the chance to add an extra string to his bow and the opportunity to attract a new audience?But e-books are still books, and books need covers. Which presented me with a slight problem. Some writers are good at art as well. Not me. I couldn't draw a straight line if my life depended on it. My drawing is several shades worse that my singing, and if you were ever unlucky enough to hear me sing you'd realise that is pretty awful. Even my matchstick men look like they have something very badly wrong with them.

Fortunately, one person I've got to know through the convention circuit is a certain Steve Upham. I first met him when he was launching his Screaming Dreams imprint of books at a British Fantasycon a while back. I admired the covers displayed on his stall, guessed -- rightly -- that he had done them himself, and complimented him on them. And it turned out that he knew and liked my fiction, so we've been friends ever since.

Now, Steve is something of a Renaissance Man. He's a publisher, an editor, he puts out a magazine, he's a photographer too. But most of all, he's an artist. Go to the Screaming Dreams website and you'll find a gallery of his work. Science fiction paintings, fantasy ones, horror, even generalised subjects, a lot of it fantastic stuff. And so, when I needed some artwork myself, Steve was the first person that I thought of turning to, and not without reason. Just take a look at the terrific covers on display here. All of them his.

What I'm really getting at is this. If you need some artwork for any reason, Steve's your man. Dip into his gallery and you're bound to pick out something that you like. Or, if you can't find anything suitable, Steve would be more than happy to whip up a brand-new painting for you. He works fast too -- most good artists do that.

Tell him I sent you.

TWO MORE ON KINDLE

2011-06-29T15:30:00.001-07:00

I blogged last year (Elementary, My Dear Richards, 17 August 2010) about how I'd been approached for a Sherlock Holmes story by an editor I know, how flummoxed I was at first -- I'd never once in my career considered writing one -- and , when I finally sat down and did it, how much fun I had. I came away from the experience firmly convinced I ought to write some more fiction of that kind. And now, almost a year after the original event, here is the result, My short collection Sherlock Holmes in the 21st Century is now out on Amazon Kindle. It comprises a novelette and two decent-sized stories which see Holmes facing supernatural peril in the Arizona desert, in the Caribbean, and in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And there will be more to come a little later on.

My second new publication on Kindle is another collection. The full title? Dark Futures: Horror meets SF, which pretty much explains itself. And it turns out that that book is selling better than anything else I've put on Amazon so far, so who says that readers don't like genre boundaries being messed with? All my books on Amazon Kindle are available for 99 cents, and you can find out more about them by means of a simple click here.

TALLINN

2011-06-04T15:31:00.000-07:00

I spent last weekend in Tallinn, capital of the Baltic state of Estonia. It has a beautiful Old Town district, much of which is genuinely medieval, and I thought I'd share a few images with you.

SHORTS ON KINDLE

2011-05-31T14:18:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know that I've been getting a load of new fans recently with my series of Raine's Landing novels. But my principal reputation is as an author of short stories, starting with my efforts in the Pan and Fontana Horror anthos and the Fontana Ghost Books back in the early Eighties. So I suppose it was inevitable that my latest download onto Amazon Kindle would be a collection of some of my very best horror tales.

The Black Lake: 13 Classic Tales of Terror includes some of those early shorts I mentioned . But there are works of mine, as well, from the pages of F&SF, Cemetery Dance, and various anthologies, right up to the present day with publications first seen in mags like Dark Discoveries and Black Static. My critically acclaimed short piece 'The Lords of Zero' is included in the mix, along with golden oldies like 'The Brother' and the title tale. And -- just like all the other fiction that I'm publishing on kindle -- 'The Black Lake' is available at the minimum price that Amazon allow.

REALITY UPDATED

2011-05-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

My website, richardsreality.com, has been through a fairly major update. There's a revised bibliography, news of my two latest books -- a new collection of short fiction, Our Lady of the Shadows, and the third Raine's Landing novel, Midnight's Angels. There's a link as well to the four publications I have put out on Amazon Kindle, including the recent The Black Lake: 13 Classic Tales of Terror. And there are seven new additions to the website's art gallery, with extra contributions from M. Wayne Miller, Steve Upham and Erin Wells. And I think that's probably quite enough links for one short paragraph. More news soon.

THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF VAMPIRES

2011-04-18T11:49:00.001-07:00

When we left Tanya Merrit at the end of Hot Blood 1: The Seductress, she had travelled from New York to the Latin American dictatorship of San Vasquez, attempting to rescue Kathy from the vampires. She fell in with some interesting new allies, managed to kill some of Janos Wolkran's crew, but found herself, by the end of the novel, forced to head off again -- to Eastern Europe this time -- in a final attempt to destroy him.

And now the second, and final, part of the story -- Hot Blood 2: Captive of the Night -- is out on Amazon Kindle. And I don't want to give away the entire plot, so the best that I can do is reproduce the 'back cover' material:

"The vampires have fled to Eastern Europe. And, pursuing them, Tanya is forced to make a perilous journey over the Atlantic, racing the sunrise the whole way. But are her struggles even worth it? Kathy is already in the final stages of turning into a vampire. Janos Wolkran's blood has swept right through her body. The final shreds of her humanity are disappearing, giving way to something far more savage. Tanya finds some more unexpected allies as she makes her way through Prague, then Budapest. But the question keeps on slamming at her ... even if she catches up and manages to destroy Wolkran, is there any way of changing Kathy back?"

The terrific cover art, by the way, is once again by Steve Upham of Screaming Dreams.

VAMPIRES IN CYBERSPACE

2011-04-09T09:56:00.001-07:00

My first effort on Kindle was my supernatural novella Under the Ice (see below). And now I'm following it up with the first part of a good-sized vampire novel, Hot Blood.

At 150,000 words plus , Hot Blood ought to have been out years ago. It was originally written as part of a two book contract with Pan Macmillan. They'd already published Night Feast, a second-hand copy of which you can most likely pick up on the Internet. And Hot Blood had gone through the whole editing process. I even have copies of the original cover -- by Fred Gambino -- in my files. But then the horror market crashed and burned, Pan got taken over, the new parent company slashed its horror list, and sadly the finished novel never made it to the shelves. And yes, I know that things have changed since then. The horror scene has definitely picked up, and vampire tales are particularly popular these days. So I did approach a couple of big publishing houses with Hot Blood. But the book is set in 1985, and the reaction that I got was "no one's going to go for that." Well, now that the book is freely available on the Net, let's see if that opinion can't be proven wrong.

The story is an epic one, starting in New York, then heading off to Central America before taking in various locations in Eastern Europe. There are not only blood-suckers, but magical beings and some demons too. And yes, as you can guess from the cover, the whole thing has a rather sexy edge . Someone will probably accuse me of bandwagon jumping on that score, but the truth is that this tale was penned a good long time before anyone had ever heard of Sookie Stockhouse or the Cullens. Those other guys are jumping on my wagon, looked at from that point of view.

The terrific cover is by the multi-talented Steve Upham of Screaming Dreams. He's currently at work on the cover for book #2, and I hope to be using a lot more of his artwork as I put new stuff out on Kindle.

THE ICY AMAZON

2011-03-16T10:18:00.000-07:00

Years back, I paid my first visit to Helsinki, Finland. It's a beautiful little city. And being April, the place ought to have been in the grip of spring. But an unexpected heavy cold snap came along. And that far north, I mean heavy! Temperatures plummeted and snow came piling down. It ought to have been hell, but wasn't. Because the centre of town looked magical under its layers of snow, even when I was ploughing through the stuff up to my knees. There were gulls walking across the thick ice in the central harbour, icicles hanging from the masts of boats. I even took a night-time ferry out to one of the nearby islands, quite an experience in those conditions. In fact, there's a picture of some of it in my website photo gallery. I came back aching to write about what I'd seen , and did so in the form of a 30,000 word supernatural novella, 'Under the Ice,' which appeared in my 2005 collection Ghost Dance. And now I've republished that short novel in e-book form on Amazon Kindle. The story concerns David and Bobby, two British twin brothers, who are both in love with the same Finnish woman, Krista. But then Bobby drowns in a boating accident beyond Helsinki harbour. Just one problem. That isn't the end of his involvement with this tale.. You can find out more about the book on the Amazon website. Its available for only $1.14 (that's 71 pence to my compatriots). The terrific cover, by the way, is courtesy of Paul Lowe. And I'm planning to publish a great deal more in this format during the course of the coming months. You'll be hearing about it first on this blog, naturally.

LIGHT AND SHADOWS

2010-12-06T15:36:00.000-08:00

My latest short fiction collection -- 'Our Lady of the Shadows' -- is now available for pre-ordering from Dark Regions Press. But I simply had to share with you the video that accompanies the book. It's the first time that I've even seen it, and I think that it's terrific. To have a look yourself, click here.

3 ... 2 ... 1 ... LAUNCH!

2010-09-09T05:16:00.000-07:00

Major conventions are events that see a good number of books being launched, and British FantasyCon -- staged in Nottingham next weekend -- is no exception. And I'm very pleased to be able to say that I have work in three of them this year.

I've already mentioned Never Again in the previous entry in this blog. It has a terrific line up including Lisa Tuttle, Joe R. Lansdale and Ramsey Campbell, as well as many of this country's rising horror stars, and all the proceeds from the book are going to charity.

I don't know why I've not tried out The Black Book of Horror before now ... it's the natural successor to the old Pan and Fontana Books that helped launch my career in the first place. But I put it right this year, with editor Charlie Black accepting 'The In-Betweeners,' the fourth of my tales set in the fictional town of Birchiam-on-Sea on the southern coast of England. (The others, if you're wondering, are 'The Waiters,' 'Birchiam Pier,' and 'Pages from a Broken Book,' and they can all be found amongst my two current collections with Dark Regions Press). The terrific cover, by the way, is the work of Paul Mudie, who was the artist behind the covers for two of my own earlier collections, Passport to Purgatory and No-Man and Other Tales.

Non-fiction rears its prosaic head as well, in the form of a contribution to Cinema Futura, a book full of writers like myself talking about their favourite science fiction movies. So ... much signing, much celebration. It's going to be a busy and a fun weekend.

ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR RICHARDS

2010-08-17T09:00:00.001-07:00

A writing career constantly throws up surprises. There is always something new. For instance, I've never been much of a political writer. Politics -- which in theory at least is about rights and wrongs -- and dark fantasy -- which is mostly about degrees of shadow -- do not mix particularly well. But I was asked earlier this year to contribute to an anti-Fascist anthology called Never Again and happily consented. And the end result -- my contribution is a tale called 'Sense' -- is being released next month by Gray Friar Press at British Fantasycon.

But it can get even stranger, taking you in some directions that you thought you'd never go.

Last October, I was at World Fantasy in San Jose when I bumped into Sherlock Holmes afficianado and expert Charles Prepolec. We'd met several times before and got on very well. But this time, Charles said, "I'm putting together a new Holmes anthology [he had edited two already]. How about you try me with a story for it?"

What went through my head was precisely as follows: Flaming hell! A ... what? ... Sherlock Holmes? I've never for the briefest instant contemplated anything like that. I wouldn't know where to start. I've never written in a Victorian idiom, or used that kind of setting. What on earth do I do? Help!

That was what I thought. But I've been writing long enough to understand that a flat refusal can slam shut a door you might regret closing at a later date. So I mumbled something along the lines of "sure, yeah, I'll give it some thought." And that was that.

Honest, I did give it some. But mostly, it was thoughts exactly like the one above. Several months passed, during which I concentrated on a load of other projects. But around the end of January this year, an idea actually began to form. I gave it another week to take shape properly, then sat down at my laptop, not expecting very much. I'd discarded the Victorian setting, but the whole idiom bit still bothered me immensely.

And guess what? My very first Sherlock Holmes story not only came flowing easily from my fingertips, all eight thousand words of it, but it had to be the most fun that I've had from writing in years. And Charles and his co-editor Jeff Campbell seemed to think so too, because "The House of Blood" will be appearing next year in GASLIGHT ARCANUM: UNCANNY TALES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES from Edge Publishing. And I hope Charles asks me again, because I'd love to try my hand at another one.

PORTO OF CALL

2010-06-04T09:41:00.000-07:00

Louise and I have recently returned from a short trip to the Portugese city of Porto. And as usual, I thought I'd share some of my photos of the place with you.

THE GHOSTS OF RICHARDS PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

2010-05-14T05:36:00.001-07:00

I pretty much cut my teeth writing ghost stories. In fact, some of my earliest and best-remembered tales were written for R. Chetwynd-Hayes' Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories back in the late Eighties, and continue to be reprinted to this day. But that was only three of them. I've continued to delve into the realms of the supernatural since then, most notably with stories like 'Hanako from Miyazaki' in Cemetery Dance.

And now, I'm delighted to be able to announce that the excellent Dark Regions Press -- who have already published two collections of my work, Shadows and Other Tales and more recently the terrifically stylish-looking Going Back -- are planning to bring out a new book gathering together all my ghost (and ghostlike) short fiction. 'Our Lady of the Shadows' is due out early next year, and will consist of a full-sized novella and a whole bunch of shorter tales, including four brand-new ones written specially for the collection. They're 'After the Storm,' set in Penang, Malaysia; 'The Tappleworth Angel,' set on the Devon moors; 'Real Life,' a bitterly humourous take on New York literary life; and 'The Winter People,' the first short tale set in my fictional town Raine's Landing, Massachusetts.

There'll be internal illustrations for at least five of the stories, and if Dark Regions' past efforts are anything to go by this is going to be one hell of a fine-looking collection. I'll let you have more news when it reaches me.

Incidentally, Black Static magazine's book critic Peter Tennant has just posted an extensive review of 'Going Back.' You can read it here.

FIESTA or THE DIN ALSO RISES

2010-03-23T07:06:00.000-07:00

Just recently back from the stunningly beautiful Spanish city of Valencia, where they've been celebrating their annual festival Las Fallas (pronounced 'fayas' -- the fires). It marks the transition from winter to spring, as well as being the holiday of St. Joseph, the national saint.

About one and a half million extra people flood into the city centre. The streets become thronged, sometimes unbearably so. There are parades and bands and huge displays of lights and flowers. Kids let off firecrackers in every available free space, and there are massive organised versions of such -- called mascletas -- which can be heard right across town and literally make the ground shake. And most of this goes on well into the small hours. Valencians are true night-owls, and the place is still like Oxford Street come Christmastime at three in the morning. The figurines you see in every square, incidentally, are called ninots. They are made of papier mache and are vast. And at the end of the fiesta, they get set on fire, to the accompaniment of a massive firework display. I thought I'd share some of the images from my visit with you.

GOING BACK, AGAIN

2010-03-11T06:10:00.000-08:00

My 2007 collection Going Back got a load of praise and good reviews, earned me a British Fantasy Award nomination, and turned out to be Elastic Press' top selling single-author collection. But editor/proprietor Andrew Hook closed Elastic down a while back after four very successful years, and the book's been out of print since then.

But now, the excellent California-based Dark Regions Press -- who published Shadows and Other Tales in 2008 -- has stepped into the breach and brought out a new, expanded edition. There's a great new cover by Frank Walls. And, in addition to the original fourteen tales, there are four newer ones from the pages of Black Static magazine and The British Invasion.

This bigger, even better version of the original book is now available for sale in paperback and collector's hardback, and you can find out more about it simply by clicking here.

THE GREATNESS OF SMALL

2010-02-22T05:32:00.000-08:00

London has its major locations for the performing arts ... the Old Vic and the National when it comes to theatre, the Festival Hall and the Barbican when there's music involved. And they're fine and important places, for sure. But they're not what really makes this city the thriving cultural hotspot that it is. No, it's the hundreds of tiny little venues which do that, the nooks and crannies and the upstairs rooms where new ideas can be tried out, fresh talents flexed, minority tastes catered to and old triumphs revived. These places might turn a small profit, but they're mostly labours of love, kept going by people who genuinely care about the branch of the arts they're into. And I've been visiting a couple of them recently.

Come out at Waterloo Station, head down The Cut past the Old Vic and you'll eventually come to a big, Victorian-looking railway bridge. And tucked beneath the left side of the arch you'll find the Union Theatre, which has been there for a while and which I've visited a few times. They were showing a revival of Doug Lucie's 1980's hit 'Progress' on this occasion, a darkly funny satire about one of that decade's oddest creatures, the 'new man.' The auditorium must only take a hundred people at a squeeze, and the occasional train rumbles overhead during the performance, but that only makes your evening a more unique occasion. And the Union has a nice little bar which gets very bustly once the show is over; you can even chat with the cast of the play you've just been watching. And when do you get to do that at the National?

Then on Friday I went with my old pal Andy Snipper to a fairly new music spot, the Map Cafe in Kentish Town (pictured; copyright (c) Andy Snipper 2010). Downstairs it's a cosy eatery with friendly staff and good, inexpensive grub, the latter a massive rarity in London. But go up a steep flight of stairs at the back and you find yourself in a tiny club, laid out coffee-house style but with a bar. Pianist Leon Greening was the act that night. He and his trio started out playing some fairly standard mainstream jazz, but were then joined by renowned trumpeter Damon Brown who brought a welcome breath of 'cool' to the occasion, and the set really took off. All of this to a 'packed house' of about two dozen fans, ranging in age from eighteen to eighty. It was a lot more fun, believe me, than any mega concert at the Festival Hall.

So let's hear it for small. You can't globalize it. You can't corporatize it. You can't even control it very much. Small is what keeps our culture genuinely fresh, and the world would be a ... well ... a very much smaller place without it.

(You can read Andy's review of the Map Cafe and Leon Greening here).

BLAST FROM THE PAST

2010-02-02T08:56:00.000-08:00

Issue #4 of the great horror anthology Terror Tales is now out from Rainfall Books. It's edited by John B. Ford and Paul Kane, and I'm delighted to say it carries a reprint of one of my best early stories. I was living in Bayswater, five minutes walk from Hyde Park, back in 1983. The UK was headed into the affluent times of the mid-Eighties, but not everyone was benefiting by a long shot. In fact, I'd noticed a growing number of homeless people on the streets of my neighborhood ... I suppose the park was a big draw for them. And it struck me, very forcefully, that they had been shunted out of normal society so completely they were almost like a separate race. Which inspired me to sit down and write, fairly quickly I recall, a short tale called 'Discards,' in which I dealt with the whole subject in fantasy terms. I posted it -- yup, there was only snail mail in those days -- to Ed Ferman in New York, who wrote back a few days later telling me he was accepting it for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. And it appeared in the September of that year. How very good to see it in print again after all this time.

One thing, though. As regards those people living on the streets, the story hasn't dated in the least little bit. It is just as accurate and relevant today as it was twenty-seven years ago.

On a lighter note, Black Static magazine's distinguished fiction critic, Peter Tennant, has just released his list of the Best Horror and Dark Fantasy books of 2009, and Night of Demons is on it.

NEW NOVELLA

2010-01-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

Here's the cover for my first novella in more than two years, due out from Screaming Dreams Publishing in March. 'Yuppieville' follows the fortunes of a young couple who move from L.A. to a newly built town in Nevada, looking for a safer, more contented kind of lifestyle. Naturally, they don't find it. Yup, there's something very wrong behind the facade of the place. You'll have to wait a couple of months to find out what that is.

The artwork is by Steve Upham, who runs Screaming Dreams. I thought I was a perfectionist, but man! Steve showed me fifteen versions before we arrived at one that he was happy with. Thanks to him for the terrific work. And the book will be out just in time for World Horror, Brighton.

DEMONICALLY GOOD REVIEWS

2009-12-25T16:00:00.000-08:00

Night of Demons has been on the shelves for nearly six months by this time, and the reception from reviewers has been unanimously terrific. Here's a summary of them so far:

"The action doesn't let up for a page as Richards pulls one menace out of the bag after another. Raine's Landing is a playground for (his) vibrant imagination, while the rest of us stand on the sidelines with eyes wide open at his audacity and wonder what he'll do next" -- Black Static magazine

"Richards is a master at suspending disbelief and combining horror, fantasy and humor in a way that will mesmerize readers from cover to cover" -- Romantic Times Book Reviews - sf/fantasy

"Fans of Laurell K. Hamilton and the Sookie Stockhouse novels will thoroughly enjoy this enthralling novel. This urban fantasy horror thriller will appeal to fans of differing sub-genres as a riveted audience finish 'Night of Demons' in one sitting" -- SF Revu

"A fast-paced read with plenty of action. Tony Richards has written a great book with people you just want to read more about" -- Bestsellersworld

"Richards manages a true fantasy -- dragons, swords, magic and a whole town filled with magic users. But he doesn't stop there. By weaving this fantasy into a modern setting, (he) creates something unique. Take that, Harry Potter!" -- The Deepening

"If you are a fan of dark fantasy then you will enjoy 'Night of Demons'" -- Night Owl Reviews

"Well written and entertaining. Urban fantasy fans are sure to enjoy it" -- Shroud Magazine

"Another mind-blowing story in the innovative setting of Raine's Landing. The (town's) adepts are a fascinatingly strange group. The story contains terror, violence -- but no more excessive than warranted by the plot -- pathos, tragedy, and redemption. Recommended" -- News from the Crypt

"The pace was excellent. This is a supernatural suspense story that will keep you turning the pages and waiting to see what comes next" -- Fandomania

"'Night of Demons' is a great story and will be enjoyed by many, including non-fantasy readers"
-- MyShelf.com

"Non-stop action, unexpected twists. The book is a page-turner" -- Mysterious Galaxy

"I enjoyed every page of 'Night of Demons' and all I can say is it matches its predecessor in tension, good characterization, and sheer excitement. Now, of course, I'm begging for a third book" -- Amazon.com

"This is what Modern Dark Fantasy SHOULD be. After reading this 2nd book in the series, I'm officially hooked. I'll be eagerly anticipating more journeys into Raine's Landing" -- Goodreads

SEEING RED

2009-12-16T07:26:00.000-08:00

The Internet is a great way of communicating with people and, if you're a writer, getting news about your work across. Perhaps the best way ever invented. That is, until something goes wrong. And when that happens, it's usually behind your back, without your knowing, and with little recourse.

A short while back, someone hacked into my website and left a pop-up advert there. And if you think that's the problem, then you're wrong. My site manager, the wonderful Marie, promptly got on it, removed the offending article, and that, so far as I was aware, was that.

Nope. A couple of days later, one of my followers on Twitter got in touch to inform me she'd gone onto my site and her virus protection software (I'll call it VPS from this point on) had warned her that she oughtn't be there. I went on myself and got the same result. During the few days that one unwanted little pop-up ad was present on richardsreality.com, a lot of VPS systems had detected that and deemed my site unsafe.

And I'm not just talking about a mild warning either. This was the full treatment. A red flag. A big X. An advisement to only continue looking at my site with 'extreme caution.' The kind of stuff, in other words, that sends sensible browsers fleeing, quite possibly never to return. All it needed to look worse was a skull-and-crossbones and a message from the Surgeon General.

Which would be bad enough at any time. But this time? My latest novel had gone into the bookstores one month earlier, and was getting great reviews across the board. Many of those were referencing my website, as were the interviews that I was doing. Loads of people would have been visiting my site around that stage, and being chased away by the red flags. Add to that the fact that readers who've enjoyed my latest book tend to go on richardsreality and use the 'contact' button there to email me and let me know they liked it ... and now there was little chance of them doing so. Which was just plain depressing. I rarely complain about the fact that writing is an isolated business, but I value those kinds of emails very much.

I could sit around and wait for the situation to resolve itself, of course. Wait until the VPS companies got around to retesting my site and giving it a clean bill of health. Which might take a couple of weeks or so. But in case you don't know it, when it comes to a mass-market paperback, the first couple of months on the shelves are pretty crucial and, in the case of some bookstores, all the time it really has. And two weeks is a big chunk out of that. So I decided to try and do something about it myself, by visiting the websites of the larger VPS companies.

To give McAfee credit, they provided me with an easy-to-fill-out online form with which I could explain the problem and ask them to retest my site promptly, which they did. But as for the rest? I spent a considerable time trying to figure out who I should contact to get something done, with no success whatever. Download our product? Sure. Customer support? Absolutely. But "we've just messed you over, and here's where you get in touch to put the problem right"? There was no such facility, anywhere I looked.

Okay, I know that the VPS companies mostly do a stand-up job. Without them, let's face it, we'd have computer viruses climbing out of our screens and chasing us down the stairs. And I understand how many websites exist out there, all of which need testing ... around 65 million at the last count. None of which alters the fact that their red flag was causing me considerable grief. So I have two suggestions for the VPS guys.

One: put a clear, obvious link on your sites where people who've been flagged can apply for a retest, pronto. And two: once you have red-flagged a site, implement a system where it is retested more frequently than most to find out if the problem has been cleared up. Because putting the IT equivalent of the Mark of Cain on someone's website and then ambling away for another fortnight isn't exactly helpful behaviour.

Does anyone have any software that can protect me from the virus protectors?

BARCELONA ON MY EYE

2009-11-23T11:13:00.000-08:00

Just recently back from a 3-day trip to Barcelona. So I thought I'd share some of my snapshots with you.

YES, I KNOW THE WAY TO SAN JOSE!

2009-11-07T08:28:00.000-08:00

I'm recently back from this year's World Fantasy Convention in San Jose, CA (pictured). People who have never been to such an event always manage to ask the same question, namely: "Do you get a lot of people going around in costumes?" No, those are movie and TV conventions that you're thinking of. World Fantasy is mostly writers, editors, publishers and the like, and though we might be equally as crazy as those movie fans we hide it a little better and we don't dress up.

The plain fact is, I've been to more that my share of World Fantasies and World Horrors, and location apart they all have a tendency to blend into one seamless event these days. There are panel discussions and readings, a few of which I attend. And I read from my own latest novel, of course, and signed a load of stuff. But what really matters at any con are the people. The parties, the meals out, the chance encounters in the hotel bar. I always sum it up like this ... the real business of attending a convention is hooking up with excellent old friends and making excellent new ones. In my case, those in the latter category have become rather too numerous to mention, although I will mention Chris Roberson and his wife Alison, John Skipp, Cody Goodfellow, and Barbara and Chris Roden of Ash-Tree Press. New acquaintances this time around included debut author John Langan, Doug Cohen from Realms of Fantasy magazine, Ellen Kushner, Brent Weeks, the excellent Jeffrey Ford, who went on to win two World Fantasy Awards, Travis Heermann -- who'll be running an interview with me on his blog soon -- and not least Michael Shea, author of one of my favourite short novels, 'The Color out of Time.' It was a delight to meet them all, and thoroughly worth the eleven hour flight. And believe me, those last six words do not come at all easily.

Robert Morrish, former editor of Cemetery Dance magazine, now writes a column called 'Spotlight on Publishing' for that same publication. And in the current issue, he has some very nice things to say about one of my short story collections from last year, Passport to Purgatory.

And on Fandomania, you can now read an interview conducted between myself and Kelly Melcher, the same smart individual who gave Night of Demons such a glowing review last week.

DEMONS ON YOUR DOORSTEP

2009-10-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

At long last, Night of Demons -- the second installment in the Raine's Landing saga -- is on its way to the stores and other outlets. That comes as a huge relief so far as I'm concerned. There always seems to be a horribly long, exasperating wait between reading through the galley proofs -- which look pretty much like a finished book without the cover -- and seeing the completed thing. Frustrating. Like being nibbled to death by mice, as Harlan Ellison once said.

But anyway, the novel will soon be available in all good stores, through sites like Amazon, and through the Doubleday and Science Fiction Book Clubs. Or you can order a copy right here.

A quick Raine's Landing factlet, by the way. When I first started on this second book, the working title was 'Shadow Town.' And when I told my editor, Diana Gill, that I was dropping it she was a little disappointed, since she liked it. It is good and -- who knows -- one day I might get around to using that pairing of words for another novel. But until that day comes, it's all about the demons.

JUDGING A BOOK

2009-09-22T15:34:00.001-07:00

'You can't judge a book by its cover' goes the saying. But the plain fact is that people in bookstores do. Research shows that the majority reason (about 90%) why browsers even pick up books they're unfamiliar with is that the cover attracts them. Cover art and layout, therefore, are much bigger deals than most people suppose.

Which makes what follows rather interesting. Night of Demons, weeks before its launch, has picked up yet another good, enthusiastic review, this time by Kelly Melcher on the website Fandomania. And Kelly starts like this:

"While the saying goes 'one should never judge a book by its cover,' that is an excellent place to start here. It easily sets the mood, and really grabbed my interest. The mood? Dark and ominous. I know I don't normally comment on covers, but this one just caught my eye from the moment I opened the package it came in and tempted me to read just based on the artwork alone."

It would appear artist Don Sipley mixes a little magic with his paints, and that is very good to hear. And Kelly also goes on to say, "The pace was excellent. There was enough action to keep turning the pages and waiting to see what comes next." She liked the book inside and out, then.

FIENDS RE-UNITED

2009-09-16T15:26:00.001-07:00

Way back at the very start of my writing career, one of the very earliest stories that I sold was a straight horror tale, set in Canada and called Child of Ice. It was bought by an editor called Herbert van Thal for an anthology series called The Pan Books of Horror. The tale saw print after a while, and I was glad to see it out. But other than that, I merely took note that one of the other contributors was a certain Ian McEwan -- impressive! -- and then pocketed my £40 and went on my merry way. How was I to know that, years later, the series would come to be regarded as a classic with a huge cult following.

And now all that is being drawn together by man-about-horror Johnny Mains, who is bringing out a book on the subject, has compiled a massive website, and has several other projects on the go into the bargain. One of which is BACK FROM THE DEAD: The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories. It's an anthology which brings back together some of the best contributors to PBoH. They provide new stories where they can, and where they can't one of their old-time classics is included. There's to be a Forward by Shaun Hutson, an introduction by David A. Sutton. Oh yes, and there's a brand-new tale of terror by yours truly on the contents list.

BACK FROM THE DEAD will come out from Johnny's own publishing company, Noose & Gibbet, and will be released -- you guessed it -- just in time for World Horror in Brighton. And the cover appears here by the man's kind permission.

OTHER TALES

2009-09-13T11:01:00.001-07:00

Most of my time is centred on the Raine's Landing novels these days. But they're not the only thing I do, nor the only books that I see published. Take a look at my bibliography, and you'll realise that I've written a sizeable number of short stories down the years. And the number one publisher of collections of those in the U.S. these days is the very excellent Dark Regions Press, who turn out great looking and reasonably-priced books and have a catalogue of fine authors that is continually expanding.

They've already released one bumper-sized collection of my work, Shadows and Other Tales, which was extremely well received. Peter Tennant at the great British horror mag Black Static said of it "For the sheer pleasure of reading a story by a master of the art, Shadows and Other Tales is hard to beat." While Trevor Denyer of the highly-regarded indy journal Midnight Street added "Shadows is more than worth the entrance fee and the journey. Highly recommended."

And now I'm in discussion with editor Joe Morey about publishing two more collections of my work. I'll let you have the details just as soon as they're ironed out.

BITES OF THE APPLE

2009-09-13T09:26:00.001-07:00

Louise and I are recently back from a flying three-night visit to NYC. The occasion? The wedding of Louise's 'baby' cousin, Samantha, now in her early forties and a trainee cardiologist. A whole load of other members of the clan flew in from Toronto with their friends, and it was great to see them. Sam and her charming partner Jeremy live in the West Village, just about my favourite section of Manhattan, and the whole shindig took place there. The ceremony was on Charles, and then we went on to the Perry Street restaurant on the corner of Perry and West, right next to the river and with beautiful views of the Hudson. The terrific lunch we had there didn't stop a bunch of us from heading across to Mulberry Street that evening for some pasta.

Which meant that when Diana Gill, my editor at Eos, took me out to Papillon on 54th for another lunch the next day, I wasn't exactly hungry. It's always a pleasure to see her, though, and I finally got taken around the HarperCollins offices and met her assistant Will Hinton and the publicist assigned to me, Greg Shutack. Worth the trip.

BACK IN HARDBACK

2009-08-03T15:51:00.001-07:00

This is something of a late night posting, time differences between London and New York being what they are. But Diana Gill, my editor at Eos, has just got in touch with me -- all pleased, thrilled and whatnot-- to tell me that both the Science Fiction Book Club and the Doubleday Book Club are going to be bringing out editions of 'Night of Demons.' And it seems they like it even better than 'Dark Rain' ... they've offered me almost twice as good a deal as I got last year. This would be a cigar moment, if I smoked them (which I don't).

And for some even later breaking news ... as well as this blog and my regular website, I also now have a 'microsite' at HarperCollins.com. It's full of quirky features, is informative and fun. You can visit it by clicking here.

LOCAL WEIRDO

2009-08-03T09:45:00.000-07:00

Louise and I have recently got back from a ten-day holiday in Sopot, a beautiful little town near Gdansk on the Baltic coast of Poland. Not only did we have a terrific time; we also made an interesting discovery. Namely that, though most people think of him as German, Sopot is the original birthplace of the great Klaus Kinski, sometime muse of Werner Herzog and best known for his leading role in the remake of Nosferatu. The accompanying photograph is of his home on Koscluszki Street, now a bar dedicated to his memory and called the Galeria Kinsky. On two storeys, with balconies up top, it's as dark as a cave inside, littered with Kinski photographs and memorabilia, and just to add a final macabre touch there are funereal crimson drapes throughout the entire place. The perfect Goth hangout, in other words ... except that Sopot doesn't seem to have any Goths. What a waste. Maybe some of my black-clad, mascara-wearin' buddies could stage a convention there.

You'd think that there'd be more around town regarding the famous man than just a bar. A statue, maybe? But poor old Klaus doesn't seem to be held in very high regard by the otherwise kind and friendly locals. The tourist guidebook -- Sopot in Your Pocket -- refers to him as a 'nutter.' And that's not just an idle snipe; Kinski actually did spend time in an asylum at one stage. He fostered most bad habits in the book. He ... ahem .. 'dated' several hundred women, and was apparently quite proud of that, because the first draft of his autobiography had to be scrapped for being overly graphic. He even once attempted throat surgery on himself. Yes, I'm afraid you read that correctly. How wasted or deranged does someone have to be before that begins looking like a good idea? But Klaus was either very hardy, very lucky, or had natural talents with a scalpel, because he managed to survived it.

Here's the tale about him that I really like the best, though. When he finally did pass away, in 1991, someone asked a friend of his, "What exactly did Mr. Kinski die of?" The friend thought about it a few moments, shrugged, and then replied, "A little bit of everything." Now that's a life well lived. Next time I'm in Sopot, I'll head for the bar again and raise a glass to him in tribute. Cheers, Klaus!

AND HERE'S THE COMPLETE PICTURE

2009-07-27T07:07:00.000-07:00

Just left double-click on this image to enlarge it.

COVER STORY

2009-07-27T06:47:00.001-07:00

The cover for last year's Dark Rain was not half bad ... but, in retrospect, it made the book look too much like a traditional horror novel, which it certainly was not. This year sees a big improvement on that situation. Because this year, Eos/HarperCollins have commissioned the amazing Don Sipley to do the cover. The same terrific artist who's been painting the covers for Jocelynn Drake's bestselling Dark Days adventures. I'm delighted with the end result. My editor and her wonderful, hard-working staff are all ecstatic. And now you can see it for yourself.

Night of Demons is now due to be launched on October 28th, just before World Fantasy and, appropriately, Halloween. And I'll be sending out some review copies soon. If you seriously want to write a review, get in touch and let me know.

TORCHWOOD

2009-07-11T16:12:00.000-07:00

I've never watched this show before, which is pretty odd when you consider that not only am I into all things fantasy and science fiction, but I know several of the people who write the Torchwood novelizations. But the prospect of a five day running mini-series -- Children of Earth -- finally tempted me. And to my own surprise, I was not in the least bit disappointed. There were a couple of lame jokes, and some -- er -- 'borrowing' from other films and shows. But overall the cast was good, the plot was strong and menacingly creepy, and there was even some unsubtle but rather timely social comment around the question of who's important to society and who is not, what used to be called Social Exclusion and was supposed to be reduced instead of getting worse.

Should Captain Jack re-appear on our screens, I'll definitely give him another look. But if I have one major gripe, it's that the good guys resorted in the end to defeating the villain by announcing something along the lines of "if we defribrillate the varg blaster and reverse the polarity of the neutron blerks, we can create a sonic resonance that will disrupt ..." etcetera and so forth. Um, yuh, why didn't I think of that? But if Torchwood does that regularly, then it's not the only show that's guilty. Doctor Who does it a lot, and so for that matter did TNG. Personally, my own heroes mostly beat the bad guys by punching them repeatedly or shooting them, preferably both. The simpler solutions are so much better ... and more fun.

GUILTY PLEASURES

2009-05-28T12:54:00.000-07:00

We all have them. Forms of entertainment that we know should be a little low-brow for our taste. But we enjoy them anyway. Except … you know what? If there’s one type of person that I’ve really come to hate, it’s the type who only ever reads, watches, listens to serious stuff, and then waves all that around as a symbol of how smart he is. How dumb does a person have to be not to recognise the value of straightforward fun?

On the book front, in my case, I’ve read almost every single one of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise novels, and enjoyed them thoroughly. To give O’Donnell proper credit, they’re a good sight better written and characterised than you’d suppose.

And in TV terms, it’s Alias. And US visitors to this blog are going to have to bear with me a few moments, because the fact is it’s a show that’s barely known in the UK. It got broadcast on Sky, but back in the day when a lot of people didn’t own a satellite dish. As for terrestrial TV, it was so incredibly badly scheduled (always late, at wildly different times) that it never picked up an audience. But in North America, the show ran five seasons, from 2001 to 2006, and was so wildly popular that its guest stars included Christian Slater, Isabella Rossellini, Quentin Tarantino, Joel Grey, Ethan Hawke, Faye Dunaway, Richard Roundtree, Rutger Hauer, and our own John Hannah and (in a straight bad-guy role) Ricky Gervais. And this was well before the day when movie people began emigrating to TV en masse.

At face value, Alias looks just about as daft as it gets. A James Bond style female secret agent gets done up in a new disguise, whizzes around on wires, kung-fu kicks some bad people, and saves the day every week. But -- rather like the equally daft-sounding Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- the show had a lot more going on than that.

Razor sharp scripts. A superb cast led by the award-winning Jennifer Garner (pictured) and added to regularly by Lena Olin (a terrific actress Hollywood never made enough use of). The male side of the line-up ranged from young turks like Michael Vartan and David Anders to distinguished older thesps such as Victor Garber and the incredible Ron Rifkin.

And -- like Buffy -- once you get past the high-kicks and high jinks, Alias has a deeply human side. You find yourself becoming drawn into the interplay between the characters, and a pretty mesmerising bunch they are. Carl Lumbly’s brooding black giant. Kevin Weisman’s burbling, bumbling übernerd. Rifkin as Arvin Sloane -- only a TV show be damned -- is one of the most complex and fascinating villains who has ever been created in a work of fiction. And Garber’s emotionally distant Jack Bristow is a masterpiece of multi-layered subtlety and understatement.

What I love about the show, as well, is the way it doesn’t recognise the usual limits. It pushes over into science fiction sometimes, as do other spy series. But, by way of the Rambaldi section of the plot, it pushes across into the realms of the supernatural as well, and I’ve rarely seen that done before. If you’re going to have fun, why not have really BIG fun? Go the whole nine yards? This was back in the day when the word ‘entertainment’ referred to something more intelligent than a bunch of slapstick and action sequences heaped together with no rhyme or reason … I’ve just stumbled back from the latest Star Trek wondering what on earth the fuss was all about. I won’t be going to see the sequel of that movie. But I’m just finishing up watching my Alias box set for the fourth time. And it won’t be the last.

MORE CONCERNING VAMPIRES

2009-05-18T15:41:00.000-07:00

I have caught up with the movies that I promised I would. Despite reading some awful things about it on the Internet, I thoroughly enjoyed Twilight. The characters were interesting, the whole tone of the film was nicely moody, using the local weather to great effect. It segued pretty neatly from humour -- the baseball game -- to the threatening arrival of the bad vamps. And, despite the fact that we've met vampires who are on the side of good before now, it's still rare to meet any who are positively likable the way the Cullens are. What surprised me most, though, was that to my mind Twilight had a distinctly Sixties feel. Maybe it was the rather psychedelic soundtrack. Maybe it was Kristen Stewart's hippy-chick look. Maybe it was the way the Cullens -- who aren't related, after all -- reminded me more of a small commune than a family. But mostly, it was Robert Pattinson's dense-eyebrowed moodiness, which put me instantly in mind of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Times change. Even vampires have changed over the last handful of decades (see my earlier posting 'Red Xmas'). But teenagers don't seem to change at all.

Let the Right One In turned out to be another take on adolescent encounters with bloodsuckers, but a completely different one, with the emphasis on the frigid gloominess of a Stockholm suburb. Whether you think it the better film is purely a matter of taste. But it turned out to be the more seriously-minded of the two movies that had a lot more gore. It's not the first time that an arthouse movie has approached the subject of vampires. But 'Let the Right One In' is a superior example and, writing horror as I do, it was nice to see a theatre full of intelligent people treating the whole subject with attentive respect. Something else always amazes me too, and both films prove it. Even decades down the line, with thousands of such efforts behind us, some inventive mind is always finding a brand new twist on the vampire theme. And I expect that, years from now, I'll still be noticing that.

I'm currently looking through the page proofs for Raine's Landing Book #2, 'Night of Demons,' by the way. Which means the Advanced Readers' Copies should be available during the next few months.

A PARTY TO END IT ALL

2009-05-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

Usually, parties are thrown for happy reasons. Birthdays, anniversaries, seeing a new government come to office (and we regret that last one soon enough, don't we?). But after doing business for nearly forty years, The Fantasy Centre on the Holloway Road, London N1, is due to close at the end of this month. The lease has run out, and will not be renewed -- it's as simple and brutal as that. And considering that the store is Europe's oldest second-hand trader of science fiction and fantasy books, that is slightly tragic.

But proprietor Erik Arthur responded to this sad turn of events with typical aplomb, throwing a party for all his regular customers. Bonhomie and a community spirit prevailed throughout the evening. The shop is still open a few more weeks, and since you can find a lot of books there that are pretty hard to find anywhere else, I'll doubtless be dropping in. If you live in or near London, try to make a last pilgrimage too.

MATTERS CONCERNING VAMPIRES

2009-04-29T09:07:00.000-07:00

For most of the last couple of years, I've been chained to my desk a lot meeting deadlines for the first two Raine's Landing novels. Which means I missed a lot of movies that I otherwise would definitely have gone to see. But thanks to the magic of postal DVD technology -- as I've pointed out earlier -- I have finally been catching up. And there's one horror flick I was absolutely kicking myself about having missed. Until I finally watched it, that is.

Friends have told me that they liked the thing. But 30 Days of Night, I'm afraid, left me pretty cold. Okay, maybe it was supposed to ... it's set in the far north reaches of Alaska, the premise being that while the sun's away all month, the vampires get to play. Not so bad a concept ... until you start to realise that it's basically just a bloodsucking rehash of the excellent SF chiller Pitch Black. And there are holes in the telling of the story you could drive a hearse through -- sideways! These vampires are supposed to have hidden themselves from human beings for centuries ... except they are such startling and gruesome creatures, it is impossible to see how they could manage that. And once they've killed most of the inhabitants, why don't they take the trouble to search the houses in this very small town for survivors properly?

But the problem that really rankles is, at which point did a lot of horror movies stop having a real, recognisable plot? The Descent? The unappealing Creep? When did this genre of films turn into just a series of frightening or gruesome scenes all clumsily stapled together? Compare '30 Days' with Kathryn Bigelow's excellent 1980's vampire effort Near Dark and you'll see precisely what I mean.

I'll hopefully get to see Let the Right One In before it disappears from our cinemas. And Twilight has just turned up in the mail. So I'll be talking more about vampire movies on this blog before much longer. Let's hope I have better news to report.

As I mentioned earlier, there've been some good things being said on the Internet about the first RL novel, 'Dark Rain', particularly on Horror Mall's forum 'The Haunt'. So I thought I'd reproduce a little of it here. Gene said "Tony Richards is a fine writer. I would recommend his work." A guy calling himself wcr01gsr went further, proclaiming that "Tony Richards is a fantastic author!" And Jim opined "I can't wait for his next book to come out involving the town of Raine's Landing." Thanks for the kind words, guys. And as for the next Raine's Landing novel, happy to oblige!

AN AMERICAN FRIEND

2009-04-23T16:25:00.000-07:00

Robert Morrish bought five stories of mine — ‘Yesterday, Upon The Stair,’ ‘Siafu,’ ‘A Place in the Country,’ ‘Misdirection’ and ‘Nine Rocks in a Row’ — during his editorship of Cemetery Dance, and I never once got to meet him. Now that he’s recently quit the magazine, I finally did. Bob was over in London on business from California, and we got together for drinks in Covent Garden before heading across for an Italian meal in Soho. Great guy … a real pleasure to spend time in his company. Writing’s not all hard graft, I’m relieved to say.

There's currently some on-line chatter, by the way, about the first Raine's Landing novel, 'Dark Rain,' here.

ON A MIDNIGHT STREET

2009-04-15T10:36:00.000-07:00

If you've never heard of the much-praised British magazine Midnight Street, here's your chance to put that right. Edited by Aldershot-based good guy Trevor Denyer, it carries science fiction, fantasy, supernatural tales, horror ... in fact, every kind of fiction that is speculative or paranormal. There are interviews, articles, even poetry, as well as reviews and a Showcased Author every new edition -- I was one such back in #6. And all of this for a remarkably low subscription rate. Check out the link if you don't believe me.

Oh yes, and the cover story for the current issue -- #12 -- is called 'The Crows' and is by guess who. I think that it's one of the most frightening tales I've ever written in my life. It will be interesting to see if anyone agrees. (The cover of Midnight Street #12 appears here by kind permission of Immediate Direction Publications).

THE AMAZING ALAN PRICE

2009-04-11T07:55:00.000-07:00

To a packed to the rafters Bull's Head, Barnes, this week to see one of my musical heroes, singer, songwriter, and virtuoso pianist Alan Price. Price first came to the public's notice as the outstanding keyboard player for hit British 60's band The Animals ("House of the Rising Sun"; "We Gotta Get Out of This Place"). He then went on to form his own group and duetted with Georgie Fame, before launching out on a solo career the high point of which was probably his writing and performing of the classic, award-winning soundtrack for Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man. And the man was in buoyant form this week, bantering with the audience and launching into memorable numbers from throughout his career, including a couple from my favourite album, Between Today and Yesterday. As a songwriter, he shares many qualities with Paul McCartney. He understands how strong a tool simplicity can be, and recognises the power contained in local and traditional forms of music, weaving all of that into his compositions in a way that lesser artists couldn't manage. And as a singer? Well, the guy's sixty-six, and took a little while to get properly warmed up. But by the second set, that familiar Geordie twang was filling the whole room, to the delight of his audience. He's due to go on tour soon, so look out for him around your way.

RETURN TO RAINE'S LANDING

2009-04-08T06:03:00.000-07:00

Louise and I just had house guests over the weekend, the terrific vampire writer Nancy Kilpatrick and her partner Hugues over from Montreal for a week's visit to Merrie England. Nancy spent half her time trawling around London's more interesting cemeteries ... looking for vampires, I'd presume! Otherwise, it was a real pleasure to have them here. But now it's back to work.

And that means Raine's Landing Book #3 -- 'Midnight's Angels.' I'd love to tell you more about it, but that would involve giving away too many details about Book #2, 'Night of Demons,' which isn't even out until November. Suffice to say that by Book #3, a lot of characters that you've been introduced to are encountering a string of 'problems.' Cassie's not her normal self. And Lieutenant Saul Hobart is decidedly not well. More headaches and trouble for our brave and even-headed hero Ross Devries to put right. But that's what heroes are for, isn't it? Although ... Ross would never admit he is one.

This blog is now linked to SF Site, by the way. Thanks, Rodger! And for the last couple of months, the news page on my website was down. It's now up and fully functioning. Oh, and there's more news about 'Dark Rain' currently up on the Eos Blog.(*Photograph copyright (c) Tony Richards 2009.)

ARE BOOKS LIKE A GLACIER GLOBAL DUMBENING MIGHT MELT?

2009-03-26T09:21:00.000-07:00

I recently put this piece on my Wonderlands blog, and it aroused a good amount of lively comment. So I thought I'd post it here as well:

In the most recent issue of Cemetery Dance magazine, British horror editor Stephen Jones repeats his assertion that 'almost no one reads books any more.' In fact, he repeats it at length, opining that, because of competition from the visual media, mass market books will go 'the way of the vinyl record,' reading will revert to being 'a gentleman's pursuit,' and there'll only be the independent presses left to pander to it.

Now, I've known Steve for more than twenty years. He generally goes in with both guns blazing on most issues, which is one of his strengths. And he's right to be concerned about the state of modern culture. But I think he's over-shot the mark this time. Except he's not alone in that. I've been hearing almost all my adult life how movies, TV, and now computers are going to leave us with a world where no one bothers to pick up a paperback any more. Which, I think, is to ignore some basic facts. Let's look at this calmly for a moment.

FILM has been around as a very popular form of mass entertainment since the early Thirties, almost ninety years by now. And there's no sign yet of Barnes & Noble closing down because of it. Yes, film plus TV -- namely videos and DVDs -- has made some inroads into people's reading habits. But on the whole, films and books have enjoyed a reasonably cosy symbiosis. How many people, for instance, will read The Kite Runner because they saw the movie first. On a personal level, I might never have read a word by John O'Brien -- a superbly powerful author -- if I hadn't been to see the movie of Leaving Las Vegas. Films, then, do not seem to be the problem you might first suppose. It only takes a couple of hours to watch a movie, after all. Plenty of time left for reading.

TELEVISION has undoubtedly made inroads into reading habits ... no slightest question of it. But as badly as some people would have us believe? It hasn't been around as long as movies, but it has been around since the Fifties. Barnes & Noble is still there. And remains there despite the fact that several generations -- including my own -- have grown up being suckled at the glass teat. I'd suggest the following. That whatever damage TV might have done is, well, done. We've seen most of the worst of it. And the figures seem to bear this out. Ask any US mass market editor, and you'll be told that the numbers of people who read dropped about a decade ago, but then levelled out. Reading has not, in other words, gone into freefall becase of the boob tube. I'd suggest something else as well -- that, although there are some good shows out there, so much TV these days is cheap 'reality,' 'talent,' or 'celebrity' junk that the only people who'd watch it non-stop are the type who have only a 50-50 chance of holding a book the right way up in the first place.

COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY falls into two basic areas, the INTERNET and VIDEO GAMES. And I do concede that there's cause for concern here. Both activities are obsessive and time consuming. Neither activity taxes the more intellectual part of the mind, the part you need for reading. But even to this dark cloud there remains a silver lining, namely the large sections of the Internet given over to books and reading. There are publishers out there on the web, booksellers, review sites, online magazines and novels, readers' social sites like Library Thing and Goodreads (not to mention this one), hundreds of sites given over to matters relating -- especially -- to fantasy fiction. And that's not even mentioning the thousands of blogs written by avid readers, some of whose book consumption is truly phenomenal. All of which provides some kind of counterbalance to the guys out there playing Grand Theft Auto over and over again (and who I hope stay put behind their PCs, because I don't relish the idea of meeting them in any dark alley).

The fact is, every time that I get on a Tube train -- that's a subway train to most of you -- every time I go on a beach or sit beside a swimming pool, I'm surrounded by people who are not only reading books, but a wide variety of different ones. And therein I think lies the real problem. It's not that people do not want to read ... it's that the pace of modern life leaves them with little time to do so. When they get a chance to devour a novel -- commuting, or on vacation -- they tend to grab it with both hands. Which gives me hope. What do you think? Why not enter the poll at the top of this page, although I'd welcome longer opinions as well.

RAINE'S RAVES

2009-03-26T09:17:00.000-07:00

British privacy laws -- which are pretty strict -- prevent me from quoting the emails I've received. But here are some reactions in the public domain to 'Dark Rain,' both from reviewers and general readers. An appropriate click will get you the complete review.

"This is a modern day Gothic urban fantasy that mesmerizes the audience into a one-sitting read. An exhilarating dark thriller" -- Harriet Klausner.

"A tense, thrilling story. The ending practically says 'Sequel on the way!' and I certainly hope that's true because there would seem to be much more to the story of Ross Devries and the others, and I know readers are going to want to see it" -- Toni V. Sweeney.

"What a fascinating book! Builds to a really pageturning ending, one that I couldn't stop reading. Bravo to Mr. Richards! Now where's the next volume?" -- Kathy.

"Raine's Landing is a place of magic, and it's one that instantly sucks you into its wild heart" -- Marie O'Regan, Total Sci Fi.

"A great read! Richards is a great writer, and I can't wait to read more by this author" -- Sarah.

"Gripping tale. I could not put the book down. I hope there will be a sequel" -- D.

"It's got magic, mystery and mayhem, with a cool noir feel" -- i-Newswire.

"An innovative, compelling novel of dark fantasy. I recommend it" -- Margaret L. Carter.

"It will keep you on the edge of your seat. A definite must read for those into dark fantasy, paranormal fiction, or just a good book" -- Colleen Cahill, SF Revu.

"The narrative is never less than compelling as it hurtles towards a resolution. All that remains is to wait patiently for the sequel and find out what else Richards has in store for us" -- Peter Tennant, Black Static.

MO' GARDOT

2009-03-15T17:34:00.000-07:00

As a footnote to the LADY SINGS posting below, I opened my copy of the Observer -- one of the UK's leading Sunday broadsheets -- today to find a large advert in it for Gardot's latest album, 'My One and Only Thrill'. And according to a friend, there's a piece on her as well in London's top listings magazine Time Out. A year ago, I hadn't even heard of her. As for you, dear reader? Remember where you heard about her first.

ON LINE

2009-03-15T12:05:00.001-07:00

Raine's Landing might be an old-fashioned kind of town, with very little in the way of computers. But I don't live in such a place, and neither does anyone else much in the Western world (the rest of the world soon?) these days. And so I've just claimed a page on the HorrorWorld site. And I've joined the relatively new fantasy social site Wonderlands, and immediately got some replies. What friendly people!

LADY SINGS ... WONDERFULLY!

2009-03-14T16:54:00.000-07:00

Went out last week -- with my old friend music writer Andy Snipper -- to see Philly-born jazz/blues songstress Melody Gardot, the second time I've attended one of her performances in less than a year. And it might seem unusual for an American singer to visit our shores so frequently, but Ms. Gardot -- who has a very interesting background --lives in Paris these days. So hopefully, we will be seeing a whole lot more of her during the next few years. That's great news for fans of real music and real talent, rather than the manufactured garbage that gets thrust on us so much these days via The X Factor and similar shows.

The first time I saw her, at the Bloomsbury Theatre, she performed with a three-piece backing band in front of an audience that had struggled in despite a Tube strike taking place that day, and was so brilliant she brought the house down. On this occasion she was at the Union Chapel, N1, a stunningly beautiful church in Islington which continues to hold Sunday worship, but which doubles as a music venue during the less Godly days of the week. It wasn't quite as great a show as the previous one. This time, along with the jazzmen, Gardot was backed up by an eight-piece string section, and the formality of that arrangement hampered her a little. But make no mistake, she is a terrific singer, with the lyricism of a Julie London and the fire and passion, when needed, of a Peggy Lee. And she's no mean songwriter either. If you get the chance to check her out, then take it. And in the meantime, here is Andy's review of the evening's performance for Music-News.com. (*The album cover displayed is from Wikipedia, and appears here under the Fair Use rule.)

THE DEMONS ARE COMING

2009-03-10T09:38:00.000-07:00

I've just got the final confirmation from my editor -- Diana Gill at Eos -- that Raine's Landing Book #2, 'Night of Demons', is good to go. In fact, that was pretty much a foregone conclusion, since I've already seen the back cover blurb and the front cover artwork. And the latter is brilliant, so very good that I can't wait to post it on this blog. I'll have to wait, though. Publishing can be a slow business, and all kinds of people have to give the nod to things like covers before they are finalised. But as soon as I can, I'll share it with you.

I can't tell you too much, either, about the plot of 'Night of Demons'. But suffice to say it continues the story of Ross and Cassie, introducing a lot of previously unknown detail about Cass's troubled past. It brings in several brand-new characters I personally like a lot, as well as fleshing out some who only got the briefest mention in Book #1. And there's a spectacularly nasty and murderous new villain, with a good sized repertoire of unpleasant tricks up his sleeve, for our heroes to face down. The book will be out in November of this year.

I'VE BEEN WIKI-ED

2009-02-21T09:10:00.000-08:00

In earlier days, when I needed to do some research, I'd drag my shoes on and walk down to the local library to rummage through the reference section there. But for a good while now, my shoes have needed re-soling much less than they used to. I've used Wikipedia for everything from the mythology behind Manitous (Saruak in Dark Rain) to the likelihood of there being a Jewish family in Massachusetts in the Sixteen Hundreds (Judge Samuel Levin in the same book). Additionally, there are dozens of links to the great online reference tome on this very blog. And now there's a brand-new entry ... Tony Richards (author). Ah, true fame at last!

SKETCHES OF SPAIN

2009-02-19T08:25:00.000-08:00

No, this isn't another entry wholly about movies, although it is inspired by one. Went to see the latest Woody Allen last night. And thank heavens, after the disasters of Match Point and Scoop, the Grand Chief Nebbish has stopped setting his films in London ... my home city, sadly, doesn't seem to inspire him in quite the right way. Vicky Cristina Barcelona marks a partial return to form. It's nothing like his greatest hits -- but hey, the guy is in his seventies by now -- and is structured rather more like a short story than a movie, which might be intentional. But it's beautifully filmed and acted and enjoyable to watch, a meditation on the old Chinese curse 'may you live through interesting times' viewed through the medium of (what else?) tangled interpersonal relationships.

But the real point is this. The film is largely set in two Spanish cities, Barcelona, which I've visited and set fiction in, and Oviedo, which I haven't yet, although having watched this movie I plan to change that as soon as possible. People tend to think of Spain merely in terms of its beach resorts, the costas, with their massive commercialism and their pandering to British diets/drinking habits. But the fact is, get away from these artificial constructs (which the Spanish don't even regard as a genuine part of their nation) and you'll find yourself in one of the most unique countries in Europe, with amazing architecture, great food and wine, terrific culture and an enviable lifestyle built around staying up half the night and enjoying yourself amongst friends ... and that's the case if you're seventeen or seventy. I know people in several cities out there, and have been lucky enough to visit (several times in some cases) Madrid, Seville, Valencia, Bilbao, Granada, Toledo, Segovia, Cordoba, Tarragona, the astonishing Salamanca, and the aforementioned and utterly wonderful Barcelona. If all you've ever done out there is fried on a beach then, believe me, you don't know what you're missing. If there are any other Hispanophiles out there, why not drop in with your thoughts? (The accompanying photo -- mine -- is of the Gaudi House in Barcelona, and there are plenty more from all around the world in the photo gallery on my official website.)

BLACK STATIC

2009-02-11T05:35:00.000-08:00

I've contributed more than a few short stories to first the excellent, groundbreaking The Third Alternative, and then to its new incarnation Black Static, the UK's leading dark fantasy magazine. But in Issue #9 of the latter, I have the honour of being the Featured Author, with reviews of both the first Raine's Landing novel, 'Dark Rain', and my collection 'Shadows and Other Tales', plus a lengthy interview ... I just can't stop my lip from flapping sometimes ... with the magazine's reviews editor, Peter Tennant. If you haven't yet come across this superb publication, at least give it a look. The links are right here. And I know that times are tough at the moment. But where else can you get so much entertainment for so little money? If you're into dark and supernatural fiction, a magazine like this one deserves your support. (The cover of Black Static #9 is reproduced here by kind permission of TTA Press).

Oh, and news about all this has just been posted on the Eos Blog.

RED XMAS

2008-12-24T07:04:00.000-08:00

* I can't say I care much for Xmas, with its merry supermarket queues and festively snarled-up traffic. But the season is as hard to get away from as an avalanche, and I'm afraid I won't have time to blog too much until the start of '09. So I thought I'd put an article here to keep you going until then ... something decidedly unseasonal, for the benefit of those who feel the same way at this time of year. And what could be more unseasonal than vampires? We all love vampires a good deal more than dumb old Santa, don't we? So, if the sleigh bells have started to slay you, here's my contribution to the "holiday" season:

BLOODY HERO: HOW 20th CENTURY SOCIETY
TOOK THE VAMPIRE TO ITS HEART

Contrary to popular belief, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) was not the first English-language literary incarnation of the Eastern European ‘vampire’ legend. That honour goes -- back in 1819 -- to a story called The Vampyre, originally attributed to Byron but actually the work of his physician, John Polidori.
There were plenty of others in between -- the penny-dreadful Varney, le Fanu’s Carmilla, even Baudelaire had a go. But Polidori had already defined the male of the species at the beginning of the century. He was of noble title. He was pallid. He was moody and magnificent. And he was a seducer.
He was in fact the image of the good doctor’s most famous patient, Lord Byron himself.
None of which could have prepared the world for what Stoker would unleash on it some eighty years further on.
"He is brute, and more than brute; he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not; he can ... appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to him; he can, within his range, direct the elements ... he can command all meaner things ... and he can at times vanish and come unknown."
No club-footed Lothario this. More like a dark, prehistoric god.
The censorious Irish Protestant Stoker seems originally to have begun writing Dracula as a form of therapy -- he was ‘plagued’ by a rather mild erotic dream. Too much has already been penned about the sexual imagery of his creation, most of it made instantly redundant by the one line: "It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion."
It’s the ambivalence of Stoker’s attitude to the great vampire that fascinates the reader rather more. Dracula is utterly evil; we are left in no doubt as to that. Yet even this Victorian tub-thumper has to struggle hard to hide a touch of admiration for the Count, and mostly fails. A brute he may be, and yet Dracula is portrayed more often than not throughout the novel as a proud, majestic brute.
And an ambivalent attitude can swing, pendulum-like, in either direction -- as the passing of time was to reveal.
Numerous imitations followed, but the next time that the vampire made a real impact on Western culture it was not in book form but on film.
F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) -- and the same is true of the Hertzog re-make -- have no place in this discussion; his vampire is a pathetic, loathsome parasite. The same could never be said of Bela Lugosi in the classic 1931 movie version of the Stoker novel. Here he is at last, made eight feet tall and of monochrome flesh. The flashing eyes. The purring voice. The sensual lips. Just watch those hands, how masterfully they caress the very air. And yet, true to the book, Lugosi remains wholly the villain. Fascinating he may be. But worthy of sympathy? Admirable, even? Victorian morals hadn’t been eroded that far. Yet.
By 1958, they were starting to be abandoned. Writers like Kerouac and actors like James Dean had already laid the groundwork for the fast-approaching culture of the Sixties. And 1958 gave us another faithful adaptation of Dracula, the Hammer version this time.
Watch Christopher Lee at work and marvel. He is utter elegance in motion, perfectly turned-out, charming but aloof. With his unflinching stare and small tight smile, he might well be a relative of that other Fifties-through-to-Sixties icon, James Bond.
And it’s already getting rather hard to totally dislike him.
The popular novelist’s perception of the vampire remained pretty much unchanged, meanwhile. As late as 1975, Stephen King in Salem’s Lot was giving us a sucker with no obvious redeeming features.
Then, the very next year, the blood hit the fan when Anne Rice actually dared to ask a vampire not only what he was thinking, but what he was feeling.
Louis is at very least the anti-hero of Interview with the Vampire, but is a pallid figure compared with his feisty mentor, Lestat. And in Lestat, Anne Rice captured the spirit of an age so new it would have appalled Stoker to the core. Sex and drugs and rock-and-roll? Well, in vampires we have beings who are innately sexual, who sink needle-like fangs into slavishly willing veins ... and as for rock-and-roll? If that means ‘youth culture’, then what template could be more perfect? Vampires stay forever young.
It is no co-incidence that, in later Vampire Chronicles, Lestat actually becomes a rock star. He may be a brute, but he is a successful and a wholly honest brute.
There is no absolute rejection of conventional morality here, however. Rather, there is moral panic. Because interestingly, both in the novel and in Anne Rice’s script for the screen adaptation, the more romantic Louis is never shown actually killing a human, though we are told he does it all the time after experiencing some initial qualms. Rice simply cannot bring herself to show it.
The pendulum had swung partly, not wholly, the other way therefore. Sympathy for the Devil? Not quite -- more a case of sympathy for the unVictorian impulses in all of us, which a new legion of gurus was encouraging us to embrace.
The floodgates had been opened for a whole new breed of vampire, both in print and on celluloid. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Hotel Transylvania gave us ‘vampire as romantic lead’ and spawned an entire sub-genre of imitators. Whitley Strieber in The Hunger even presented us with a vamp with a good excuse; his Miriam Blaylock is driven not by evil, but by loneliness and an all-too-human need for companionship, m’ lud.
On film we had ‘vampire as good guy’. In John Landis’s Innocent Blood, Marie is depicted unquestioningly as the heroine of the piece, while in Jim McBride’s Blood Ties the vampires are a peace-loving minority persecuted by Christian fanatics -- the word ‘pogrom’ is actually used. Both films get around the moral problem of their heroes’ dietary tastes in interesting ways. The Blood Ties clan have opted to feed solely on each other, while Marie only preys on very bad people, in this case Robert Loggia’s pugnacious Mafioso and his gang.
1992, though, gave us the most simpatico bloodsucker of them all in the shape of Gary Oldman in Francis Coppola’s so-called 'Bram Stoker’s Dracula'. It is anything but. "The heart of him is not"? Oldman’s Count is nothing but heart, a magnificently melancholic, tragic and romantic figure, driven down the centuries by one thing alone: love. Which, we had already known since the Sixties, is all you need. And which generally provides its own morality. Van Helsing has become a crackpot, a curmudgeon, and a spoilsport. Oldman’s death-scene, at the climax of the film, is more Romeo and Juliet than The Beast Must Die.
But could this trend last forever? Pendulums swing both ways. By the Nineties, drugs were enslaving whole communities, strangers with dark flashing eyes were putting bombs on planes -- and eventually doing worse things with commercial aircraft -- and the connection between sex and blood had become an unhappy one.
In the same year as the Coppola movie, Poppy Z. Brite finally saw in print the ground-breaking debut novel she had been working on since her late teens. Zillah of Lost Souls is as engrossing and as beautiful a creature as Lestat, but infinitely more corrupt. Where Lestat simply tries to be the best vampire he can be, relative words like ‘best’ do not feature at all in Zillah’s vocabulary. He is a creature purely of appetites, will do anything to appease them, and feels not the slightest twinge of conscience since he has none. What Stoker’s vampire does to Lucy Westenra is awful, but he does it to survive. What Brite’s Zillah does to Ann Bransby-Smith, on the most vulnerable night of her young life, is done purely for the fun of it, and is unforgivable.
The attitude in movies started changing too. Disquiet had already been expressed as early as 1987 in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, where her nomadic vampires were depicted both as an enviably happy band and as utterly sadistic killers. By 1995, Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction was making comparisons between vampiristic appetites and the sociopathic urges of war-criminals. By 1996, From Dusk Till Dawn was stripping away the tawdry allure of a Mexican bordello to reveal the horrors beneath. And by 1998, Blade was in action against a lethal foe.
Ambivalence remains in all these movies though. John Carpenter with Vampires (1998) seemed rather more sure. "Have you ever seen a vampire? Well first of all, they’re not romantic, all right?" snarls James Woods’ leather-clad slayer. And in this film they definitely aren’t, since they bear more resemblance to George Romero’ s zombies than to Oldman in a topper.
And so we end the century rather less in love with vampires -- and ourselves? -- than we once were. But still not wholly certain. Who among us can’t identify with interviewer Slater when he begs of interviewee Pitt "make me like you"? Forever young. Forever beautiful. It’s a dream hundreds of thousands of us take out second mortgages and risk disfigurement for, every single year.
Of the current century? Wes Craven’s Dracula 2001 takes us almost back to the beginning, with a traditional Count possessed of all the darkness and chilly attraction of Stoker’s original.
But it is perhaps in the warm tv embraces of the cult phenomenon Buffy that we find ourselves most comfortable. Most of the vampires that she fights are monsters, yet she finds romance with Angel and even an unlikely friend in Spike.
We are prepared to embrace our own darker side, it seems. But only sometimes. And even then, only ever conditionally. Do we see ourselves -- at the end of the day -- as brutes yes, but as brutes with hearts? That’s where the real ambivalence lies, and the pendulum keeps on swinging.

This article first appeared in Prism: The Journal of the British Fantasy Society, copyright (c) Tony Richards 2003

THE EDITOR WRITES BACK

2008-12-15T10:38:00.000-08:00

After a suitable pause -- during which I thought I'd be able to relax, but have actually been busy with short stories, a possible new collection, and related stuff -- my editor at Eos/HarperCollins, the wonderful Diana Gill, has got back to me with her comments on the second Raine's Landing novel, 'Night of Demons.' She has a few minor suggestions -- that's her job -- and I'm following up on those. But her overall reaction was as follows:

"I really enjoyed returning to Raine's Landing, and think we have a great start here. I think you've got a great set up with the magic and voices, the adepts etc.. And I particularly love the opening -- it's so creepy and effective, and utterly pulls you into the story."

Which is the kind of response that makes a writer go all warm and fuzzy inside. Ah well, nose back to the grindstone.

By the way, I've been receiving a good number of emails recently from readers telling me how much they enjoyed 'Dark Rain.' And one correspondent in particular suggests that I include more about Cass Mallory in later books. No need to worry on that score. Cassie's just about my favourite character, and there's plenty concerning her in Book #2, both about her current circumstances and her dark earlier history with the motorcycle gang.

DARK RAIN, THE MOVIE

2008-12-06T06:27:00.000-08:00

No, not yet. Although personally, I've always been of the opinion that 'Dark Rain' could easily form the basis for a darned good supernatural TV show, a very beefed-up Charmed, or a Point Pleasant that looks like it's actually going somewhere. But the Campaign for the American Reader network has a page called 'My Book, The Movie', and they recently asked me who I would cast as the characters in the first Raine's Landing novel:

The characters in 'Dark Rain' are many, varied, and in some cases extremely weird. And in a few instances, an actor springs immediately to mind. Ideally, Dr. Lehman Willets, the only African-American in Raine’s Landing -- the town has been cut off from the outside world by a curse for the past three hundred years -- would be played by Morgan Freeman, although I understand that he’s been hurt recently. The short but dignified Judge Samuel Levin? Ron Rifkin would be perfect.

Others are a little harder to pin down. The guy who plays the big bald grouchy cop on CSI:Miami would make an excellent Lieutenant Saul Hobart, who is … well … a big bald grouchy cop. And Rod Steiger would have a entertaining cameo role as Reverend Purlock. But which actor does insane well enough to portray the rambling master of Raine Manor, Woodard Raine himself? I can only think of Michael Keaton.

As for the two leads? To play Cass Mallory accurately, Angelina Jolie (Cassie is twice as tough as Lara Croft, but without the UK accent) would have to wear her hair Sinead O’Connor style, cropped to within half an inch of her skull. But who knows, she might think that fun. As for Ross Devries, the usual action movie leads like Hugh Jackman (X-Men) would make a decent job of being him.

But no, I’d rather Ross were played by an unknown. He’d like it that way.

7 TERRIFIC ARTISTS

2008-11-27T04:27:00.000-08:00

richardsreality.com has been expanded and brought up to speed, with new articles, a new story, a completely updated bibliography, discussion boards, and even an art gallery. Not my art! I can't so much as draw matchstick men ... or rather, they come out as matchstick mutants. No, these are the best covers for my books -- some of them wrap-arounds -- and illustrations accompanying my short fiction. Terrific artwork by Paul Lowe, Deirdre Counihan, Paul Mudie, David Bezzina (displayed, copyright (c) David Bezzina 2005), Wayne Miller, Sandro Castelli, and Keith Minnion.

PAGE 69

2008-11-23T11:06:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned earlier, the site network Campaign for the American Reader recently ran its Page 69 Test on 'Dark Rain,' asking me to talk about that page and how it relates to the rest of the book. Only problem? Because of copyright laws, they couldn't reproduce the actual part that I was discussing. But I don't have that problem, so here it is, with the kind okay of Eos/HarperCollins:

The thing just took our heat, wincing with discomfort. And kept on pressing forward, trying to snatch the guns from both our hands. Its claws made a whistling noise, splitting the very air. We were the ones going backward by this time, and I didn’t like that. You can’t fight properly if you have to keep retreating.
It couldn’t disarm both of us if we separated. So I stepped sideways, behind my desk. Gun-smoke had already filled the room, my eyes were stinging gently. I was shaking slightly, wondering how to beat this thing.
The creature paused a moment, trying to decide which of us to follow. Its head went even lower, and its green eyes blinked. And then its shining gaze pinioned me. I’m not sure why. Cassie was the greater threat. But perhaps it had noticed that I still had the arrowhead in my left hand.
The beast suddenly lurched forward, ramming so hard into my desk it completely overturned it. My chair flipped over savagely, forcing me to jump back. I dodged across to one side, tried to fire again.
The hammer came down on an empty chamber. And the creature was stepping up onto my capsized desk by this time. I glanced desperately at Cass.
One of her slim eyebrows arched. She tossed me her second Glock. She uses the extended magazines, so she had plenty of shots to spare. The creature swiped at me with its long talons, missing me by barely an inch. I put three rounds straight into the center of its chest. It staggered back again, and let out something that I suppose might have been a moan. But then it just recovered, like the last time.
I could see there was no stopping it this way. We might as well be taking potshots at the side of a barn door. There was another handgun in the top drawer of my desk, a Magnum. Except my desk was lying on its side. And the creature had climbed on top of it once more.
I snatched up my fallen chair and hurled it at it, acting out of desperation. One of those huge arms simply batted it away.
Cass, though, had a clear run at the door by this time. I’d at least succeeded in drawing it away from her.
Copyright (c) Tony Richards 2008.

And here is what I wrote about it:

Page 69 of ‘Dark Rain’ -- my first full-length novel in over a decade, and hopefully the start of a whole series of them -- happens to be one of the most action-packed pages in the entire book. It falls right in the middle of the first action sequence, in fact. A vicious and hard-to-kill creature called the Dralleg -- the servant of an evil magician named Saruak -- has just materialized in the office of the book’s two heroes, Ross Devries and Cass Mallory. And they are desperately trying to fight it off, all weapons blazing.
If you like this kind of stuff, then it’s the perfect introduction. There is plenty more adventure and excitement in ‘Dark Rain,' culminating in a final battle on the rooftops above Union Square, and the book has variously been described as ‘fast and fun’ and ‘a one-sitting read.’
But if you’re of a more pensive nature, there’s no need to worry. What I’ve done in ‘Dark Rain,’ you see, is create a whole new imaginary town, Raine’s Landing, Massachusetts. It might look normal on the surface, but is actually a very strange place indeed. Because way back in the Sixteen Hundreds, the real witches of Salem fled there to escape the trials. They married into the local population, and the place has been imbued with magic -- some of it of the dark kind -- ever since.
And so I introduce the reader to the town, its different neighborhoods, its rich districts and poor ones. And there are some carefully-drawn portraits of its inhabitants too, ranging from more rational ones like Judge Samuel Levin to bizarre characters who’ve been driven insane to varying degrees by their own magic -- Dr. Lehman Willets and the manic Woodard Raine.
There’s something to enjoy on every level, in other words. The next book in the series -- ‘Night of Demons’ -- is due out next year.

AND WHEN I'M NOT READING?

2008-11-20T07:54:00.000-08:00

I've just been to the 606 Club -- a subterranean, madly-crowded, hugely-atmospheric venue down by the river in Chelsea -- to see the award winning Anglo-Bengali pianist Zoe Rahman (pictured*). And she was just as superb as the last time I saw her, going at each piece with huge verve and seemingly effortless brilliance. If you're into jazz and haven't heard of her yet, check her out.

By the way, another network of sites -- a very good one called Campaign for the American Reader, dedicated to, well, getting folks in the U.S. to read more -- has been running an experiment for a while getting authors to talk about the sixty-ninth page of their latest novel. And the one up at the moment is 'Dark Rain.' I'll reprint it here once they're done with it.

WHAT I DO WHEN I'M NOT WRITING

2008-11-14T11:35:00.000-08:00

'Night of Demons' is finally finished, which gives me at least a couple of weeks before my editor gets back. And I've already pointed out that I have plenty to do in that time. But one of the toughest aspects of being in the late stages of a novel is that you're not much inclined to read anybody else's. And curiously, I haven't read much horror in quite a while. I picked up a lot of those books, in the States. So my reading list from this point onward goes as follows:

Keepers -- Gary A. Braunbeck.

Nightwalker -- Jocelynn Drake.

The Deluge -- Mark Morris.

Rabid Growth -- James A. Moore.

The Scent of Shadows -- Vicki Petterson.

Tower Hill -- Sarah Pinborough.

Drake and Petterson are both fellow Eos authors, by the way. And then there's 'How to Make Monsters,' the new collection by Gary McMahon, one of my favourite new writers. And I must get around to reading one of Nancy Kilpatrick's vampire novels, which I understand are excellent.

GROOVY OLD MOVIES

2008-11-12T04:48:00.000-08:00

* You might have noticed in my personal stuff a genuine fondness for old movies. And it goes like this:

That evening in late March, there was an unexpected cold snap. The streets of London glittered silver with hard frost, and you could practically write your name with your breath on the near-motionless air. That didn’t stop us going out. A brigade of special forces wouldn’t have stopped us going out. Less than three months till our finals, we both ought to have had our respective heads buried firmly in our textbooks, and ... to hell with it!
The Everyman cinema in Hampstead was running a triple-bill for one night only. Namely, three of the most wonderful stretches of monochrome celluloid ever to be projected onto any silver screen. King Vidor’s Gilda. Joseph Mankievicz’s All About Eve. And Howard Hawks’ To Have And Have Not, scripted by William Faulkner rather vaguely from the book by Ernest Hemingway, starring Humphrey Bogart, and introducing a skinny eighteen year old starlet by the name of Lauren Bacall.
We slithered our way there along the gleaming paving stones, bought coffees in the foyer to try and warm ourselves up, then sat there in our overcoats for practically six hours, almost the only people in the theatre on that daunting night, totally immersed in melodramas of such style and grace and power, all the cash and computer-imagery in modern Hollywood has never re-created the like.
And we just couldn’t stop babbling, on the slow journey home. Those fantastic, grandstanding first few minutes of voice-over monologue in Eve! That incredible exit up the stairway! That iconic first shot of Rita Hayworth, tossing back her hair! In which film did the camera worship her the more ardently -- the one we had just seen or Lady From Shanghai? Which was the better of the two, To Have or Casablanca? Hell, they both had the same plot! And was that Bacall doing her own singing in the film, or was it really Andy Williams?
We were heading back to her place.
Terri started mimicking the female leads on the way from the station. Hayworth’s purr. Bacall’s growl. Bette Davis’ feline snarling. "Fasten your seatbelts! It’s going to be a bumpy night!"

From 'Postcards from Terri', h/b Sarob Press, p/b as part of 'No-man and Other Tales' , Pendragon Press. Copyright (c) Tony Richards 2004.

TWO TALES OF ONE CITY

2008-11-10T14:07:00.000-08:00

A while back, my publishers asked me to write a couple of short pieces -- musings really -- on the creation of Raine's Landing for their own blog, outofthiseos.typepad.com. In case you missed them, here they are again.

On the whole Salem witches idea:
The weird thing is, when I first showed the opening chapters of 'Dark Rain' to Eos, there were no Salem witches. The town was there, the characters were in place, and I knew I wanted a kind of magic to prevail that sometimes went extremely badly wrong. But my original idea was that any spells cast were linked to the life force of the person casting them, what they call in the Orient the ‘chi.’ And if someone’s inner force was all messed up, then the magic went the same way too.
It took Diana a while to get back to me, by which time I’d gone more than a little cold on that idea. And by the tone of her email, she concurred. So I called her office.

"I just think it’s a little twee," she told me. "See if you can come up with something else."
So I promised her I’d get back in the next couple of days. But the moment I hung up, my mind just started buzzing. It was like one of those word-association games.
Raine’s Landing is in Massachusetts. What else is in Massachusetts? Boston? No use in this context. Hold it … Salem! The witchcraft trials. Nineteen innocent people hanged because of a substance called ergot in the rye bread. But what if there really were some witches there, and they saw what was coming and …?
Having told Diana I’d be back to her in two days, I phoned her again in precisely ten minutes. Inspiration really does come in a sudden flash sometimes.

On the process of creating an imaginary town:
Supernatural stories really do find good settings in fictitious towns, now don’t they? That’s because, when you read such a tale, you are wandering from the real world to a place that looks like it, but under the surface is not. My first ever visit to such a community was a superb and everlasting one … Ray Bradbury’s Green Town, Illinois. The images of that place linger clearly in my memory a good few decades later on. I’ve visited many others since then, and have created a few myself.
Shaddaton. Tennsville. Hope’s Hatch. I’ve published several set in an imaginary coastal town called Birchiam-on-Sea, and they’ve been very well received.
And then there’s Raine’s Landing. And though it’s a labor of love, there is a lot of effort involved in summoning up such a township in the reader’s imagination.
Yes, I know contemporaries of mine have created whole fictional countries, worlds and galaxies and even universes. But the point about a medium-sized town is that you have to be very specific. What are the districts? What are they like? The major and minor streets? The characters -- how do they dress, speak? What are their foibles? And who are there friends?
So -- not normally a very organized guy -- I’ve wound up drawing maps and making lists and keeping detailed notes, just to make sure I get everything correct. There a difference between ‘fantastic’ and ‘surreal,’ you see. Surreal means there are no rules. In fantasy, there are firm ones. They’re just different to the ones you’re used to.

AN AUTHOR SIGNS WHILE A NATION DECIDES

2008-11-09T10:01:00.000-08:00

November 4th, 2008, will be remembered by most people as a pretty auspicious day, one on which history was made. And what was I doing that momentous evening? I was in the wonderful Dark Delicacies bookstore, Burbank, CA, signing copies not only of 'Dark Rain' -- Book #1 in the Raine's Landing series -- but of my collections 'Shadows and Other Tales' and 'Passport to Purgatory,' plus the latest 'Mammoth Book of Horror,' which contains one of my stories. And some people turned up clutching magazines from the Eighties with my fiction in them. That's a lot of signing! I wound up -- appropriately -- with writer's cramp. But thanks to Del and Sue of DD for being such wonderful hosts.

Even better, afterwards, there was a party to celebrate both the birthday and 20 year professional career of Britain's top horror and dark fantasy editor, Stephen Jones. The picture is of -- left to right -- Steve, myself (dog-tired after a convention, a flight from Calgary to LA, a lengthy signing, and dragging around the Valley with Steve and chums the whole previous day), and Pete Atkins, author and scriptwriter of Hellraiser and Wishmaster fame. And appropriately, we're posed in front of posters of some Clive Barker films. (Photo by Peter Coleburn, copyright (c) 2008 Peter Coleburn.)