I don’t post updates here often. The reason is I’m working or getting on with life. Either way, I’ve got my head down and I’m making stuff happen, and this social media malarkey just sort of falls by the wayside.

Nevertheless, a fair number of projects have lined themselves up and will be forthcoming in 2026 and 2027, so I thought it might be helpful to list them here.

First off, I’ve contributed to a collection, The Thirteenth Floor Anthology, edited by the estimable, honey-voiced Guy Adams and based around the Thirteenth Floor strip from 80s British weekly comic Scream. All the stories feature vengeful sentient computer Max exercising his (violent) idea of justice on ne’er-do-wells and miscreants. In mine, “Lobsters”, the people deserving and getting their comeuppance are executives of a planet-raping energy company. The book is available right now.

Next up is Atomfall: The Omega Order, out in the summer. It’s a novel connected with the videogame Atomfall, which is a very British version of Fallout and takes place in an alternate 1960s UK where the disaster that almost happened at the Windscale nuclear facility in real life, did actually happen. Since then, the Lake District has been closed off by the government, and all sorts of strange shit is occurring within its heavily patrolled borders.

My book is set a few years after the catastrophe, and takes us somewhat further south, to the city of York (one of this Home-Counties-based author’s favourite places that isn’t in the Home Counties). Children are disappearing mysteriously off the streets, and Graham Beynon, our protagonist, is determined to find out why. I was asked by the publisher, Rebellion, to write something with a John Wyndham/JG Ballard vibe, which was not at all in my wheelhouse (sarcasm). I’d never done a videogame tie-in before, and I had a ball with it.

Also upcoming in 2026 is a short story collection, Tongue Disease, from the wonderful PS Publishing. The book assembles a series of tales I wrote around a decade ago, all relating to a top secret government installation where experiments are conducted on language and imagery, with a view to creating new weapons and methods of controlling the populace. This is me giving full rein to my tendence to muck about with words, typography, and grammar.

As for my to-do list, right at the top is a novel starring that gigantic, fire-breathing, city-stomping, monster-battling reptile… Yes, the only and only Godzilla! Godzilla: World War Kaiju is the title, and we’re just sorting out the final few details of the contract, with a view to the book coming out early next year. By way of preparation, I’m immersing myself in the history and lore of the Big G, which includes watching all the movies in order. Some of them are better than others, but none of them is anything but fun.

Following that, there are rumours of a fifth Cthulhu Casebook. It’s verrrry early days on this, everything is tentative, but it’s definitely on the cards. The title I have in mind is Sherlock Holmes and the Dartmoor Diabolists, which may give you some idea of where the plot will be going. Expect devil hounds, abominable cults, and the Plateau of Leng.

Speaking of the Cthulhu Casebooks, Japanese publisher Hayakawa is going to be producing a manga version of the first volume, Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows. Again, contracts are still under negotiation, but all being well, the serialisation should start in early 2027. As yet, there aren’t any firm plans for an English language edition, but I would be surprised if one doesn’t appear at some stage. I’ve been sent some preliminary character sketches, which I’m not at liberty to share publicly, and I’m very excited. The art style is beautiful, and I can’t wait to see the finished product.

Finally, after twenty years or so of agenting myself, I am being agented again. Alexander Cochran and Maria Brannan at the Greyhound Literary Agency are representing me henceforth, and I couldn’t be happier. They’re both of them committed, enthusiastic, tenacious, accursedly young, and all round just terrific to work with. I know I am in safe hands.

With Alex’s and Maria’s encouragement, I’ve just finished work on a novel which is all my own thing. Not a tie-in, not a pastiche, not a continuation. I’m not in a position to talk about it at present, but I can say that it’s got vampires in it and I think it’s one of the best, and funniest, and paciest, and goriest, books I’ve ever written. More on this breaking story as it develops…

But that’s all for now. Plenty to be getting on with there. Look after yourselves, make the most of your lives, and if you are in a position to do something about the ridiculous, posturing politicians who are currently misgoverning the world, then do it, but otherwise try not to pay any attention to them. The thing they hate most of all is us not caring about them.

I am over the moon (pun sort of intended) to be able to announce that I’m writing a Conan novel for Titan Books and Heroic Signatures.

This is a childhood dream come true. When I was eleven or twelve, my grandmother gave me a book token which I promptly blew on the first six Sphere paperbacks of Conan’s adventures (you know, with the Frank Frazetta cover paintings). I was hooked, and I’ve been a happy Conan fan, and more broadly Robert E Howard fan, ever since. When offered the chance to write some of the Cimmerian’s adventures myself, I jumped at it.

This book, which I’m currently working on, forms part of the remarkable Black Stone event that super-scribe Jim Zub and his artistic allies are unfurling in the Conan the Barbarian series of comics from Titan. Knowledge of that storyline will give readers of this novel some nice Easter eggs but is not essential. I can promise you there is plenty of swordplay, sorcerous doings, and bloodletting, along with loathsome winged monsters.

I believe I’m the first British author to write new prose tales set in the Hyborian Age, and I’m very much hoping that this is just the start of more to come.

Preorders already available here.

Just click…

Sherlock Holmes and the Highgate Horrors OUT NOW trailer

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the Victorian/Edwardian era…

The original Cthulhu Casebooks trilogy is complete in and of itself. The three volumes (Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows, Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities and Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea-devils) together tell a single terrifying story.

I thought I was done with that particular world, but then a new idea emerged from the swirling murk of my subconscious, and lo and behold, Sherlock Holmes and the Highgate Horrors came slouching into life.

This one’s a standalone adventure whose action ranges across the length of Holmes’s professional career and beyond, right up until the aftermath of the First World War. The story dovetails around that of the trilogy, but the novel can be read independently.

It’s also a bit of a beast in terms of size, nearly twice as long as each of the other books in the series. I didn’t plan this, but as I was putting the plot together, I got more and more excited and just kept adding bits. There was too much good stuff to leave any of it out. The synopsis alone, in fact, weighed in at around 17,000 words, or 34 single-spaced A4 pages, pretty much the length of a novella.

There’s alien horror here. There are reanimated corpses. There’s a sinister shapeshifter. There’s a gruelling voyage aboard a whaler to the frozen north. There’s a journey to the edge of our solar system. There are appearances by a number of secondary characters from the canon, several of them in strange, unusual guises. There’s a secret society, a disturbing conspiracy, and a whole lot else besides. Not forgetting plenty of Holmesian deduction and derring-do.

I put a lot of work into this book and I’m very proud of it. And if, as is very possible, it’s my last ever Holmes story, then I’m happy to go out with a bang, having produced a sprawling, epic tale that spans three decades and encompasses everything that I love about Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft. Ending on a high(gate) note, you might say.

Sherlock Holmes and the Three Winter Terrors is now available.

Physical copies of the hardcover can be purchased in bricks-and-mortar bookstores, and also online at:

• Amazon UK
• Amazon US
• Amazon Canada
• Amazon Australia
• Titan Books

The ebook edition may be purchased via the usual outlets.

Here’s a wonderfully atmospheric short trailer for Three Winter Terrors, put together by the talented folk of the marketing department at Titan Books:

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Sherlock Holmes and the Three Winter Terrors (out October 2021) is a novel told in three parts. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

1889. The First Terror.
At a boys’ prep school in the Kent marshes, a pupil is found drowned in a pond. Could this be the fulfilment of a witch’s curse from four hundred years earlier?

1890. The Second Terror.
A wealthy man dies of a heart attack at his London townhouse. Was he really frightened to death by ghosts?

1894. The Third Terror.
A body is discovered at a Surrey country manor, hideously ravaged. Is the culprit a cannibal, as the evidence suggests?

These three linked crimes test Sherlock Holmes’s deductive powers, and his scepticism about the supernatural, to the limit.

And here’s that cover image:

It’s another bang-up job from designer Julia Lloyd, which manages to incorporate elements from each of the sections into a seamless whole.

I was asked by the Guardian to comment on the dismissal of the lawsuit brought by the Conan Doyle estate against Netflix and everyone else responsible for the Enola Holmes movie.

I think I show my grasp of complex legal proceedings through my use of the phrase “a complete prick”.