Tag: werewolves

Where should I start?

Posted on by Thomas

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 wonderful world of werewolves

Posted on by Thomas

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.

The Trees and Other Stories in paperback

Posted on by Thomas

TheTreesWPMy 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.