A WAR BETWEEN IMMORTALS

Last year saw the publication of my chiller Under the Ice from Samhain Publishing. And it certainly drew some critical praise, but it was short, a novella in fact.

This year sees something much, much bigger, because my dark fantasy epic Hot Blood is out from the same publishers. Here's the back-cover blurb:

Who dares to challenge a vampire? Two very different immortal creatures have arrived in New York City. One is Tanya Merrit, the last of the Ykrall, a race that lives among—and depends on—human beings. The other is Janos Wolkran, an ancient and extremely powerful vampire. He has with him a brood of servants, humans that he has converted. But one of his servants is dying. And Wolkran has chosen Tanya’s lover, Kathy Harrison, as a replacement. When he kidnaps her, Tanya sets off in a pursuit that will lead her around the world…and into a battle to the death between immortals. Hot Blood starts out in Manhattan before moving on to Latin America. And then, after a brief stop-over in London, England, the action transfers to Prague, and beyond that to Budapest, finally ending up in the Zempleni Mountains, part of the Carpathian Range. Like I said, this is one big book  and took me several years to finish. The novel is available either  as a superb-looking trade paperback or in e-book format, either directly from Samhain, or from Amazon, Nook, or Kobo. Want a piece of fiction you can really get your teeth into? Well, this should keep you busy for a while. Enjoy!

AT LONG LAST BLOOD!

Let me transport you back in time to the late 1990s. Remember those days? (And I really don't want to hear that you weren't even born then, smartarse!)

Pan Macmillan had a couple of years earlier published my second full-length novel, Night Feast, a great thick blockbuster of a horror tale involving some of the nastier gods of Ancient Egypt transmuted into human form, the plot spanning the decades from the Great Depression to the -- back then -- present day.

And they were within a couple of months of publishing my third one, again big and thick, but spanning continents rather than decades this time. It was called Hot Blood, and featured two different types of vampire, one good and the other extremely evil.

I'd checked all the edits. I'd read the final proofs. The cover was done, and I felt all ready to go ...

When Pan decided to cut their horror list almost altogether and the book got dropped (I kept the advance, you'll be glad to hear).

This was the start of the massive slump in horror publishing that happened around  that time. In fact, pretty well none of the major publishers were interested in even looking at that type of fiction for a good seven or eight years thereafter -- and believe me, my long suffering agent Leslie Gardner of Artellus really tried.

And when vampires did finally make a huge comeback -- well -- they weren't the types of vampires featured in my novel, not by an awfully long shot.

But now I'm very proud to say that, after 15 years or so, Hot Blood is finally to see print. Samhain Publishing -- the same guys who brought out my chiller Under the Ice last year -- are producing it as an e-book first, and hopefully as a paperback later on. I took the opportunity, naturally, to revise the book and bring it up to date before I even showed them the manuscript. And they have run with it since then, with the end result that I sent the final  proofs back just two days ago, and the novel will be available in September.

I hope my readers feel that it's been worth the wait.

IT'S RAIN(E)ING AGAIN

As I promised a couple of postings back, Dark Rain - the first novel in my Raine's Landing fantasy adventure series - is now available on Amazon Kindle, and for a fraction of its original price. There are five books in total in the series so far, with a sixth on its way this year. So here's your chance to start finding out about this strangest of Massachusetts towns and its peculiar inhabitants, grouchy hermit Lehman Willets, tough former criminal Cassie Mallory, the bizarre entity simply know as The Little Girl, and all the rest, not least the skillful but demented master magician Woodard Raine. Want to know what other people think of these books? Well, here are some Amazon reviews.

IT'S A DARK RAIN THAT'S GONNA FALL

Dark Rain, the first in my Raine's Landing series of dark fantasy/supernatural thrillers, was first published by the Eos imprint of HarperCollins in 2008. It immediately got a following and some pretty good reviews, and I have written four more novels set in that strange Massachusetts town since then, with a sixth - Witchhunter - planned this year. But now that first novel is finally out of print at Eos/HC and no longer available digitally, and the rights in it have reverted to yours truly.

Which means not straight away - I'm working on the final draft of something new at the moment, and don't want to disturb that process - but sometime in April I will be bringing out my own version of Dark Rain on Amazon, where it will join the likes of Deadly Violet and Speak of the Devil as a $2.99 e-book.

It's gonna fall, in other words. In price. Watch this space.

NON-SPARKLY, NON-ROMANTIC, NASTY, EVIL, BLOODTHIRSTY VAMPIRES

Late last year, Samhain Publishing took my short novel Under the Ice -- which had previously been a self-published Amazon e-book -- and brought out their own version of it. And this year they're doing the same again, with a much longer novel this time.

Hot Blood runs to over 120,000 words and is a vampire epic, starting in New York, taking in Central America, and finally moving on to Eastern Europe ... Prague, then Budapest, then finally the Carpathians. And these aren't any Twilight kinds of vampires I'm describing. No, these bloodsuckers are very definitely not nice ones.

After all the swooning and white weddings, I get the feeling some readers will be extremely glad to see some non-sparkly vampires back. But for those who prefer a little romance mixed in with their dark fantasy, the heroine of the novel is a supernatural being herself, although of a very different kind. She ...

No, I cannot tell you too much in advance, now can I? Hot Blood will be out as a Samhain e-book in September 2014.