Pre-order Utterly Dark and/or Kevin

Authors and booksellers LOVE pre-orders. They can help booksellers to notice a new book in a very crowded market, and give them an idea of how many they’ll need to stock. So, with three weeks to go until the UK launch of my new novel, it’s time I tried to persuade you to order a copy, ideally from your local independent bookshop, who I’m sure will be glad to hear from by phone, email, or in person. Id be very grateful!

If, on the other hand, you don’t have a local independent bookshop, here’s a handy link to order online.

Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep is a fantasy story set on the imaginary island of Wildsea, somewhere off the coast of England, round about the year 1810. One of its (joke) working titles was Magic Poldark, which gives you the general idea, but many other influences have seeped into it too; there’s a lot of made-up folklore, some seaweed monsters that feel as if they’ve shambled off the wobbly set of a 1970s Doctor Who story, and a general air of impending doom which is hopefully lightened a bit by the irrepressible heroine, Utterly Dark herself. It was written as a stand-alone, but I miss Wildsea and Utterly and friends so much that I’m at work on a sequel at the moment. The cover art is by Paddy Donnelly, and here’s a sneak peek at some of the lovely chapter headings he’s created for the book.

But WAIT, I hear you cry, I don’t like the sound of this at all! Supernatural shenanigans on made-up Regency islands are not my cup of Lapsang Souchong, and those seaweed monsters will give me nightmares. A nice try, but you don’t get out of me asking you to pre-order things that easily. For it is also three weeks until the UK publication of Kevin vs the Unicorns, the fourth and (we think) funniest of the Roly Poly Flying Pony books I’ve been writing for the past few years with Sarah McIntyre, the glamorous American Eric Morecambe to my grumpy Devonian Ernie Wise. You can preorder that from your favourite bookshops too! And I’ll be just as grateful! And so will Sarah! So that’s twice as much authorly gratitude coming your way!

And if you’re really keen you can order it from comic shop Page 45, for whom Sarah has designed these exclusive bookplates for the first 100 orders.

Merlin (1998)

I remember Merlin being shown on TV as a two-part mini-series over a bank holiday weekend. The version I found on YouTube is a single three hour movie, but I think it might work better in two chunks, as originally broadcast. It still works pretty well, though. Director Steve Barron is completely infatuated with video editing tricks and slightly primitive CGI effects that I’m sure were state-of-the-art when it was made, but he uses them quite inventively, and there are some very enjoyable performances. Since First Knight was such a washout, I guess this is the definitive ‘90s Arthurian film. Like Excalibur , the definitive ‘80s Arthurian film, it tries to tell the entirety of the Arthur story, but since it’s main focus is Merlin it covers a lot more too, and Arthur himself ends up being a bit of a side-character, with the rise and fall of Camelot packed into the second half. At first glance, Merlin seems to be aligning itself with what I’m coming to think of as the Low Arthurian tradi...

Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin...

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

One of the reasons the Arthurian Legends appeal so much to writers and film makers is that there is no single original version. If there ever was, it was a tale told by some Romano-British storyteller, sitting by a fire in a damp hall, perhaps expounding on the great deeds of a local ruler or late Roman general, and spicing up the action with some motifs borrowed from old Celtic myths. In the centuries that followed, the story grew, and changed. Lots of legends about other heroes got tacked on to it. French and German poets got hold of it and added Camelot, the Grail, and Courtly Love: Malory borrowed from them all in his Morte D’Arthur . Later, everyone from Tennyson to TH White to Rick Wakeman to little me retold the stories, altering them to fit our own vision and reflect our own times. So you can do whatever you like with King Arthur: everyone else has. At least, that’s the theory. Now here's Guy Ritchie’s 2017 box office catastrophe King Arthur, Legend of the Sword to destru...

Station Zero

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