These are my longer pieces of fiction – novels that grew out of the same ideas as the shorter work you’ll find on this site. Because many of you are reading on phones, and because my links in the margins don’t always survive that journey, I’ve gathered everything here in one place.
Link to all my novels over at Smashwords here. I’ve also listed some of my more recent titles individually below, each with a brief description:
This is the story of a man’s retreat to quiet village life in order to write poetry. But echoes of societal collapse follow him. As well as the old gods and daemons visiting him in his dreams, they visit also the world in the guise of creeping authoritarianism, political instability, the amorality of money, and the collapse of once trusted institutions.
Mythology, poetry, these things offer a different way of looking at things, a transcendent perspective that protects us from the temptations of outrage, coming daily from our devices. But does the mythic perspective offer us any solutions, or is it no more than a personal lifeboat, rescuing the soul, while the ship goes down? In a world where even the notion of truth has been turned on its head, we come to realise there is only the daemon who never lies.
A story of profound isolation, but an isolation chosen, rather than imposed. It’s also a story about artificial intelligence, but rather than take the usual path of moral panic, we try to engage with it imaginatively. Doing so, we realise yes, we’re raising a dangerous creature, one that might well destroy us, but only because we have forgotten how to be human.
The human in this story is Simon, trapped on a remote Scottish Island, and the rest of the world apparently gone silent. His companion is Noodle, an android he rescues from drowning, with whom he develops an ever deepening relationship. What emerges is perhaps something obvious: humans make very poor robots. Yet that is what we are increasingly expected to be, in order to fit into a machine world. Fortunately, there’s also nothing like deeply engaging with a non-human intelligence, for reminding us what it means to be, well… human.
A spy story of sorts, but not in the usual vein. Our hero, George, is the quiet, backroom type, familiar to anyone who’s worked in a big bureaucracy. But he’s also a man of secrets, and that makes him dangerous. He also knows the secret of secrets – that some imprison us, while others set us free. We touch on metaphysics, on Zen, on mysticism and magic, on climate change, and the various types of love. We do not jet-set about the world – those days are over for George. Instead, we spend our time tending gardens, walking the moors and plying the canals in a narrow boat, all while trying to avoid getting snared in the banality of the world’s more seedy machinations. Naturally, George does not quite succeed.
Begun after the rout of even vaguely leftist politics in the UK general election of 2019. It set out as a swansong to the traditional labour and socialist movements that emerged from the darkness of the industrial revolution, and to which we seemed to be headed back. Our protagonist is Rick Jaeger, a former climate activist who now views the whole thing in apocalyptic terms, gives us thirty years at most before the planet erases us. So he throws in the towel, gets the most polluting truck he can buy, and takes to the hills. His voice is angry, angry with you for not seeing things the way he does, for not waking up and having the common sense to vote for your own best interests. Yes, you may find Rick a bit annoying at first.
Then, half-way through the writing of the story, COVID hits and the world changes. The story has to catch up, changes course somewhat but, strangely, we find in the chaos and the isolation of those COVID years, a microcosm of the world, both as it was and as it has since become. The novel therefore seems to form a significant milestone in both personal and cultural history.
We take a brief moment from our past, a moment that seemed significant, and which offered a choice. One option was to seize a change of course, a course that would take courage, and shake things up a bit. The other would involve keeping to the safe groove we’re already in, and seeing where it leads. It’s a moment we look back upon for the whole of our lives, and we ask did we do the right thing?
So you take the safe path, and you live your life, but what if a part of you takes the other, and you live that life too, but you’re unaware of it. And then what if the nexus of both lives is somewhere in your dream life, and the recurring image of an old inn. Not that you remember it clearly on waking – just something that disturbs the mood, flashes images before your eyes, throws up coincidences that seem to mean something, but for the life of you, you can’t remember what.
Writing this story was like that feeling you get when you give a shiver and say: “Ooh, someone stepping over my grave”. If I’m right, reading it should have the same effect.
On the surface, this is a story of various kinds of love, in later life, some platonic, others not. It’s also a literary mystery, as the titular Grace briefly enters our protagonist, Mike Garrat’s, life only to upend it and disappear. So, to the question: Is she dead, as the police suspect? Did Mike kill her, as they also suspect?
But what if she wanted to vanish, and have Mike – a total stranger – the only thread linking her back to the world? Sounds unlikely, but then why would she be leaving a trail of literary clues for him to follow? Or is he just making them up? Is Mike your classic unreliable narrator? I mean, he seems a nice guy, but you never can tell, can you?
Or rather, perhaps those who can’t tell are the wrong people for Mike to be associating with, that his true life and loves lie in the direction of Maggs, his bookshop manager, and Lesley, a jumpy homeless girl, dangerous in so many ways, he’d rather not go near her at all. So, yes, a romance of sorts, a brush with the law, with extremes of wealth, with abject poverty, and poetry.
The Rivendale Review 