** News from Splatterpunk HQ
The latest Splatterpunk anthology, SPLATTERPUNK: FIGHTING BACK (co-edited by Kit Power), has been nominated for a Splatterpunk Award at Killercon (organised by Wrath James White and Brian Keene), along with 3 of the stories: Extinction Therapy by Bracken Macleod, Melvin by Matt Shaw and Molly by Glenn Rolfe. All of the royalties from FIGHTING BACK are being donated to the cancer care charity, MacMillan. My sister-in-law, Susan, was the inspiration for doing the anthology and in recent weeks my father has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The anthology is for everyone who’s been touched by the terrible disease, so the charity is close to my heart. We all come into contact with cancer, whether it’s family, friends, neighbours. It could be anyone. I’ve now decided to donated all the royalties from our previous anthology: SPLATTERPUNK’S NOT DEAD to the same charity.
Talking of Splatterpunk Awards my debut novella, THE LUCKY ONES DIED FIRST (Deadite Press) has also been nominated (along with some excellent books), but the story of a Bigfoot roaming the North Yorkshire countryside didn’t start with me. The novella is roughly based on THE GROWLING, a screenplay by Paul Shrimpton and Matt Russell. Hopefully, one day the film will see the light of day. Paul is a close friend of mine and I’m grateful that he gave me the opportunity to write the novella. It’s been a huge learning process. I’m not a big fan of writing short stories so this helped hugely. I’ve always loved reading but had no interested in English at school (maybe it was the books we had to read or those Shakespeare style plays?) so getting to write the book was great. Paul is a film maker and musician. His first short story, Walter’s Last Canvas, appeared in SPLATTERPUNK’S NOT DEAD. He has since completed his debut novel, titled DEADBEAT, and is now working on adapting another of his screenplays, BASEMENT BEAST, into a novel, both possibly published through Thirskploitation.
(Bigfoot art by Graham Taylor, GTFX)
Next up for me is probably INSATIABLE, a novella I co-wrote with Robert Essig. INSATIABLE started out as a novelisation of another one of Paul’s scripts but the producer changed screenwriters and halted the process. I stripped it back to the opening chapters, which were an add-on and didn’t appear in the screenplay, and the collaboration began. Prior to that I wrote a nasty crime novella with Robert that’s been accepted by a publisher, but no contract has been signed yet. This novella started in a similar way to INSATIABLE with a loose chapter which I originally wrote for a competition. More to follow on that!
On the short story front, you can find my latest, The Itch, in the excellent BLACK ROOM MANUSCRIPT VOLUME 3, published by The Sinister Horror Company. This anthology features some great writers including Paul Tremblay, Guy N Smith, Adam Nevill, Glenn Rolfe and David Moody, with all proceeds going to the charity Shelter.
- More to follow…
