Category: Cover

I lived in Seoul for a couple of years. I lived in a house that looked like a modern-ish take on the Addams Family mansion. It’s the house in the picture. As a westerner in the bustling streets of the city, I felt almost invisible....

I live on a farm and every year we cut and bale a crop of hay. It’s a proper rural pleasure but it can be a stressful time as well and what, I wondered, must it feel like if the crop that you are bringing...

Even in the future, estate agents will write appalling copy. It is the nature of the beast. I became fascinated by the idea of skyscrapers, then by ruined skyscrapers and then by a single surviving skyscraper in a ruined world. With a single, surviving billionaire...

This is probably the biggest blend of fact and fiction that I've written to date. I worked in this garden. I knew a couple very similar to this couple. But no one died and the continued existence of all human life on the surface of...

If someone knows your real name, that gives them power over you. People have believed that for thousands of years. What if a man was keen to keep his identity a secret for reasons that were very twenty-first century? What if he went back into...

Spoof. Homage. Rip off. If you like reading then sometimes there are bound to be time s that you want to write about what you have read. This is one such. 'Nineteen eighty-four' by George Orwell  is way beyond a classic, it's an icon. And...

'Write about what you know,' isn't that what they say? In those ten years I spent gardening I don't think that I dug up many thrilling stories about fuchsia or lawn maintenance or when to prune flowering currents but I did meet some fascinating people....

Memory palaces. Hannibal Lecter had one as did Sherlock Holmes and, I believe, so did Marcus Aurelius. They are a testament to a life and take a lifetime to build but what might happen when  decay sets in? We dread dementia and memory loss and...

This was where it began, I suppose. This was a story I told myself on a holiday in Wales and when I got back home I wrote it down and showed it to a friend. This was the first 'short story', before this one I...

This story began with me having fun with a ‘fake-news’ Facebook post, a sort of Orson Welles, War of the Worlds ‘live’ on radio thing. There was another strand to it as well. ‘Call yourself an eco-warrior? How hard would you fight? What would you...

The end of the world is nigh! I have been hearing this my entire life, from Nostradamus to the Millennium Bug, from planet-wide plagues to global warming. Perhaps this last one, this climate change, will in fact kill us all? If that’s true, we’re doing...

Modern day stories wearing old clothes. Chavs and gangbangers dressed in furs and leather and carrying swords. In Bramble’s world, council estates are stands of tree-houses that are fifteen stories high. Drugs are expensive and sex is, usually, free. Violence and death are just a...

Sometimes things are washed up on a beach, sometimes they are washed away. The borderlines between states show the world at its most captivating, the frontier between the land and the sea, the boundary between life and death. This haunting and mystical story walks those...