You can pre-order my new novella IRONBONES as an ebook by clicking here. It’s published by Carrion Publishing on 8 May, when the paperback will also go on sale. Thank you for all your support.
Ironbones is here!
Tag: horror
Where should I start?
I’ve had eight novels published, all of them by Snowbooks. I get asked a lot of questions about my writing—where I get my ideas from, being one, very common query.
But another I’ve been asked frequently is: “In what order should I read your books, Thomas?”
Well, here’s the order in which they were published:
- Maneater
- Skarlet
- Prey (the sequel to Maneater)
- Zombie Britannica
- Krimson (the sequel to Skarlet, and the second part of the trilogy)
- Pandemonium Road
- Pariah
- Kardinal (third in the trilogy that began with Skarlet)
You could read them in the above order, of course.
But if you do read Maneater first, you might then want to read Prey, since it continues the story of Laura Greenacre.
You might want to start with Skarlet if vampires are your thing. You’ll then, probably, want to see how the story ends by reading Krimson and Kardinal.
If the undead grab you, you could start with Zombie Britannica.
So there’s the order for you; where you begin is up to you… enjoy.
The prophets are back…
Hello friends, readers, reviewers, writers, vampires, demons, ghosts…
First, I should say happy new year. We’re well into it now, but this is my first email of 2020. Hope it’s going well for you so far. And if it’s not, I hope it gets better.
Volume 3 of The Prophet Wars, my young adult dystopian thriller (it’s “gripping,” according to reviewiers) will be published on February 28. It’s titled “Battle In The Caves”. Does that suggest action to you? Well, if it does, you’d be right to think that. It’s “action-packed”. You know me. I try to make my stories as exciting as possible; page-turners, I hope.
Of course, I’m making some advanced reader copies (or ARCs, as they’re called) available.
If you’re a blogger, a reviewer, or a reader who’d like to let the world know what they think about the book, you can download a copy here at Bookfunnel.
Formats available include Epub, Mobi and PDF.
Remember, there are ARCs available on the same site for Volumes 1 & 2 as well, if you havne’t read them and would like to leave a review.
Volumes 1 & 2 are available on Amazon (here for UK; here U.S.; other territories too) and here (Smashwords) if you prefer epub or other formats. There’s also Barnes & Noble for epub versions.
Thanks again for your support, and we’ll speak soon,
Thomas
The wonderful world of werewolves
An anthology of werewolf stories is published in January — and I’m very proud to say that one of my stories is featured. Editor and author Graeme Reynolds (High Moor) contacted me last year and asked me to contribute a tale to the collection. The criteria was that it had to be based on an already-created werewolf universe.
My horror-thriller Maneater was published by Snowbooks in 2008, and introduced Laura Greenacre – the tagline was “Meet Laura. She’ll eat you alive.” She wasn’t the troubled, sweet-natured, “I-don’t-really-want-to-hurt-people” type of werewolf that had started to plague fiction and films at the time (and that kind of werewolf still does). She was animal. And she went down well with readers. You can read more about her here.
And here’s just one review, by Sheila Merritt of Hellnotes:
“Laura is gory and gorgeous, beauty and the beast, the stuff that dreams (and nightmares) are made of. Male readers will find her extremely attractive, and women readers will admire her for her attributes and attitude.”
Couple of years later I wrote a sequel, also published by Snowbooks, called Prey. Went down well, too.
So when Graeme commissioned me, there was only one place to go — back to Laura.
My story’s called The Hunt and elaborates on an event mentioned in Maneater that took place when Laura was a teenager. The story also flashes back to Roman times, 60AD, telling the story of how the Maneater werewolves came to be, their history, their culture.
This week, I’ve just received the proof — and it looks great. That’s the cover, above. I’m really excited to be featured in this collection alongside some top horror names such as Paul Kane, Ray Garton, Jeff Strand and David Wellington.
You can pre-order Leaders Of The Pack: A Werewolf Anthology, here in the UK, here in the U.S.
Coming soon…
I’ll be self-publishing the first volume of my dystopian/sci-fi/fantasy/YA-but-suitable-for-grown-ups novel The Prophet Wars in the next few weeks.
This book’s been through the mill. I wrote it back in 2015. We were very optimistic it would find a home. My agent liked it; lots of readers I asked to look over it liked it.
But the publishing industry is unpredictable. To quote William Goldman, the screenwriter, “Nobody knows anything.” I certainly didn’t. The Prophet Wars did not find a home. Yes, people liked it a lot, but… always a but.
Usually these days “buts” are related to uncertainty. Publishers aren’t as willing to take risks – although to be honest we didn’t think The Prophet Wars was that risky. However, here’s the pitch:
Britain 2026. Crime is rife. Unemployment soars. There is hunger, there is misery, there is devastation. Our world is on the brink of catastrophe. Earthquakes, storms, wars and plagues blight the planet.
And dark forces are gathering…
The future looks bleak. And 15-year-old Billy Kingdom can see it coming. He dreams about disasters – and days later, they happen.
Through social media, Billy learns that other kids are experiencing similar visions. Online, he grows close to a girl named Tawny Lang.
But one night Billy, Tawny, and other youngsters from across Britain with the same gifts, are kidnapped by armed men. They are taken to an underground compound called The Caves run by Ruby Bleak and her teenage nephew Robin, a child genius lacking any empathy.
Holed up in the subterranean complex, Billy and Tawny develop a bond. The Caves, however, hides a sinister secret. The kids quickly learn that they are only guinea pigs in a plot to control the future. But Billy isn’t having any of it and plots his escape.
But will his desire to see his family again tear apart the trust and friendship he has forged with Tawny and create, for himself and the world, a deadly enemy?
An action-packed story set in the near future and dealing with themes such as family, relationship, trust, and the environment, this is the first volume of Thomas Emson’s Young Adult thriller.
Volume One, which is titled Project 9:6, is available for pre-order here (UK) and here (U.S.).
If you’re a book reviewer or blogger, or just a fan of YA fiction who’d be willing to review the Prophet Wars when it’s published, you can download an ARC (advanced reader copy) on BookFunnel.
If you would like to read an extract, here are a few pages…
Zombie Britannica among Ezvid Wiki’s top choices
Really delighted to hear from the fabulous people at Ezvid Wiki this week telling me that Zombie Britannica has been included in their recently published wiki, Books with Inventive Takes on the Zombie Genre.
You can see the list here. There are some great zombie books selected. Very proud to have been chosen.
Zombie Britannica is a very “love-it-or-hate-it” novel. What we call Marmite here in the UK. As you’ll see from the reviews, opinion is polarised. But I’m glad to say that the “positive” column has the edge.
One of the criticisms doled out was that everything happens so quickly. But you see, that’s the whole point. Partly, the idea for ZB sprang from the research cited at the beginning of the novel – and it is actually a real study.
Carried out by a group of University of Ottawa mathematics students, it says a zombie outbreak would be devastating – and rapid.
Unless we “hit hard and hit often”, the researchers say, we would be very quickly overwhelmed by the undead – and civilisation would collapse.
So really Zombie Britannica is realistic in that regard. It is backed by science.
Anyway, thanks so much Ezvid Wiki. And if you’d like to know what happens after Zombie Britannica, a sequel, in the form of the short story “Where Moth and Rust Destroy”, can be found in my collection The Trees And Other Stories.
Writer, you are not alone: visiting FantasyCon
Last weekend I was in Scarborough at the British Fantasy Society’s FantasyCon. I travelled up from Kent with fellow writer Danny Rhodes, who’s had horror stories published in Black Static and Cemetery Dance, but is also an acclaimed contemporary novelist (his novel Fan about the Hillsborough disaster is wonderful).
It was quite a trek up north, but I was quite impressed by Scarborough. Very nice seaside town. And the convention itself, held at the Grand Hotel, was brilliant.
Continue reading “Writer, you are not alone: visiting FantasyCon”
Movies That Should Be Re-made #1: The Valley Of Gwangi
I recently heard they’ve re-made Ben-Hur, 1959 the epic starring Charlton Heston. Well, it’s actually described as a “re-adaptation” of the original novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, written by Lew Wallace in 1880.
Now I’m not against re-makes (or “re-adaptations”; whatever). Sometimes they work (Ocean’s Eleven worked well; Christopher Nolan’s Batman re-boots were genius). But I was unsure about Ben-Hur. Ben-Hur is just, well, Ben-Hur, isn’t it; like Jaws is Jaws. Do not touch. Anyway, it got me thinking about films that I’d could do with a re-make.
A few years back I reviewed The Valley Of Gwangi on a website. Now this dinosaur romp was a favourite of mine when I was growing up. and it’s definitely one I’d be interested in seeing re-made – not because the original is poor: it’s not; it’s brilliant. But because it would be fun, I think.
Continue reading “Movies That Should Be Re-made #1: The Valley Of Gwangi”
The Trees and Other Stories in paperback
My short story collection The Trees And Other Stories has been on Kindle for a while now, but in the next few weeks it will be available as a paperback. Here’s the cover. What do you think? I’ve published most of my books in the mainstream way – get a publisher; they do all the work. But I’m a big fan of DIY, these days. Self-publishing in the past was a precarious business. You dished out lots of money to firms who sometimes didn’t have your best interests at heart, and you’d probably have to schlep a pile of books around the stores, hoping the manager would take a few copies; hoping they’d sell a few copies. But Amazon changed all that: first with Kindle; now with CreateSpace. I know people are snooty about Amazon, but I’m not. They’ve democratized the publishing industry, and made the big, powerful players sit up and think. An way, I enjoy working on my books for Kindle and CreateSpace; I like doing covers and formatting – I’m a bit of a geek like that. In fact, I enjoy it so much, I’m thinking about providing a cover-design service. Have a look at the cover I designed for The Trees and see if you think I’m talking through my hat.
The Writing Process Blog Tour
So Danny Rhodes, author of the excellent Fan, asked me to contribute to the Writing Process Blog Tour. I don’t know much about it, but writer after writer answer the same four questions. Here are the questions. Here are my answers…
What am I currently working on?
I’ve just finished, and dispatched to my agent, a fantasy/sci-fi/dystopian thriller for the so-called YA audience. I’m about to start writing a detective novel.
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I’ve mostly written horror, but they’re fast-moving and action-packed. Horror appears to me to be traditionally quite sluggish. Some horror writers spend an age piling on the adjectives and adverbs, thinking up different words for ‘dark’. I try to keep the story moving, very, very quickly. I don’t waste time on long, descriptive passages telling the reader how menacing a house looks. I get the characters inside the house and show them how menacing it is.
Why do I write what I do?
I wrote horror initially because I loved the genre as a youngster. But I also like action thrillers and fast-paced stories. I combined horror stories and the thriller framework. Really pacy stories. Gory, full of violence, very grown-up. I really enjoyed TV serials when I was growing up. They used to show stuff like Flash Gordon with Buster Crabbe. It was old, very old, but I loved the cliff-hangers at the end of each episode. I attempt that with my stories. I want to be on the edge of my seat when I read a book. I try to do that when I write my own, too. I think, to be succinct, I write what I write because I like reading it.
How does my writing process work?
I had an eight-book contract, and tied myself to writing two books a year. In order to do that, I had to be disciplined. So I developed this specific routine, which I use to this day. I set myself targets. I work out how long I have to write a book. Say six months. It’ll be an 80,000 word book, at least. I set myself a target of 8,000 words a week. Weekly targets are more achievable than daily ones. If I write 8,000 words a week, and working from a vague outline, I’ll have the first draft finished in 10 weeks. When I’m writing the first draft, I don’t stop to correct anything, I just write and write. After that’s done, I take a week off. Then I go back and do a pass of the first draft, cleaning things up. And I keep doing this until I have a decent manuscript. I’ve written about my routine in a book called How To Write A Novel In 6 Months.
… so there it is; hope you enjoyed.