Below you will find a selection of free-to-read extracts and sample chapters from James’s published works – click through and get a taste!
Redlaw Extract
Chapter 1
Nikola, as he ran, wished many things.
He wished he was faster. He wished he had wings. Above all he wished he had never strayed beyond the fence. They had warned him against it. Everyone had. Countless times. The fence, they had told him, is there for a reason. Not to keep us in. To keep them out. So do not go over it. Stay this side. It is dangerous out there for our kind.
Nikola had listened. But he hadn’t listened. He’d seen little of London since arriving on the ferry from mainland Europe. In fact, once he’d been discovered stowed away in the back of the articulated goods lorry, all he’d seen was a detention centre, the inside of a van, then the housing estate. He was sixteen, and he did not care for being confined.
So tonight he had scaled the fence. All but vaulted over it, in fact. It was not that high, four metres or thereabouts. The barbed wire had scraped his hands but drawn no blood. An easy escape. Everyone was right: the fence was a deterrent to the rest of the world, not to those inside it.
Tentatively, curiously, Nikola had begun to explore.
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Age Of Odin Extract
1
So there I was, driving through the worst snow storm I’d ever seen, in a crappy rental Vauxhall Astra, with Abortion in the passenger seat offering useless advice and trying to get the stereo to work and, when he wasn’t doing that, rolling up joint after joint and smogging the car up with skunk fumes. Our rate of progress was roughly ten miles an hour. It was getting dark. We didn’t know exactly where we were going.
At what point, I asked myself, was I going to accept the fact that this was the worst plan in the entire history of mankind?
Knowing me, never. Stubborn, I was. Pigheaded, Gen used to say. “Except,” she would add, “that’s an insult to pigs. Compared to you, they’re quite reasonable animals.”
The snow filled the windscreen like static on an untuned TV. The Astra kept slewing and lurching, its wheels somehow finding every slippery patch on the road, despite my best efforts. Every half mile or so we’d pass another abandoned vehicle whose driver had had the common sense to admit defeat and dump their ride by the roadside and head off for shelter on foot rather than blunder on. This storm wasn’t letting up any time soon. The forecasters predicted it’d last at least another twenty-four hours and maybe longer. Blizzard conditions. Batten down the hatches, Britain. The future’s white. No one with any brains is going anywhere.
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Extract from The Age Of Zeus
Prologue: Corsica
Finally the monster was at bay.
It had been flushed out of the forest. It had been hounded downhill, bullets smacking at its heels and whanging into the trunks of oaks and other mountain broadleafs on either side of it. It had been shepherded by gunfire into the village and driven along the streets. At last it had been corralled in a cul-de-sac with high, ancient walls on either side.
Cornered, panting, torso lathered in sweat, the monster turned.
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Extract from The Age of Ra
1 – Petra
The sun went down like a tin duck at a shooting gallery. Night stretched itself over the eastern Arabian desert, the light from a clear full moon creating a finely filigreed landscape of silver and black.
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Extract from Provender Gleed
‘Where is Provender?’ said Cynthia Gleed, and sighed, knowing full well the answer. Not here.
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Extract from Wolrdstorm
[In this excerpt, thirteen-year-old Gregory Brazier makes an unhappy discovery. Belonging to a bloodline of proud pyrokinetics, he finds his own superhuman powers are very different to those of the rest of his family.]
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Extract from Gig
[In this excerpt from the 'Kim' half of my palindromic double-novella, the eponymous antiheroine Kim finds herself embroiled in a clash between two rival groups of music fanatics…]
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Extract from Untied Kingdom
(The peaceful festivities of the town of Downbourne are shattered by the arrival of some very nasty interlopers.)
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Extract from Imagined Slights: “Satisfaction Guaranteed”
When Nora stepped out into my headlights there was no way I could avoid her. The front bumper embraced her legs and she jack-knifed flat over the bonnet, arms outstretched, face to the windscreen, staring at me through the glass, looking me straight in the eye.
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Extract from The Foreigners
(Parry and his lieutenant, Pål Johansen, begin their investigations into the strange deaths of a Siren and a Foreigner.)
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Extract from How The Other Half Lives
It was another merely magnificent Monday in the life of William Ian North.
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Extract from Days
(In this extract, our store detective hero, Frank Hubble, starts work and gets his first glimpse that day of a potential shoplifter.)
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Extract from The Hope: “The Finite Heart”
(This extra chapter is a stand-alone short story that is also tied directly into the continuity of the novel.)
Mel Hobbes met and fell in love with Joe Portside on his very first night waiting tables at the Neptune’s Trident.
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