Galvanic (aka ‘The Crank House’)

Lazar felt like shit. Again he heaved but only a thin stream of blood-specked mucus came up. His insides burned and his throat felt raw, as if he had been gurgling on glass shards. Slowly he stood, wiped his arse and flushed the remnants of diarrhoea away. At the sink he splashed his face with [...]

Vapid (aka ‘Sex Scenes Are Notoriously Difficult To Write’

Katie was struggling. Already the production company had rejected the script twice. The first time around was down to a vapid first act. Personally, she didn’t think there was much wrong with it, but she tightened it up and added a couple of blistering sex scenes before posting it back. A week later it came [...]

Redact (aka ‘Datapoint 2200′)

When the letter found me, lecturing in Computer Science at Oxford University in England, it was straight to the point. My father had died a month ago. I never knew my parents though, not my biological ones that is. I was the result of all that hippy free love shit, back in the late sixties. [...]

Equivocate (aka ‘Who Killed Liberious?’)

Liberious was dead, there was no doubt. His short, stocky body lay twisted by the side of the bed, his sly narrow mouth still foaming and his stubby neck visibly bruised from a violent strangulation.
The Dictator was far from happy; in fact he was incensed. Which usually, in the People’s Republic of Tyranstan, meant heads [...]

Travail (aka ‘A Short History of Writer Antisocial Behaviour’)

Monday 7 November 2005
Deadline is looming but still suffering with this damn writers block. If I don’t get the finished manuscript off to the publishers by the end of the week they are pulling the plug on the publishing deal. Pressure is on. Critics hated the last book and sales were poor. Haven’t spoken to [...]

Inclement (aka ‘A Rather Ghastly Fairy Tale’)

Olaf pulled his cloak about himself and cursed his decision to take the short cut through the Black Oaks, a place only few ever emerged to tell the tale.
However his quest was both noble and compelling. Lord Otto had announced that the hand of his beautiful daughter, Christiana, would be offered in marriage to the [...]

Avoirdupois (aka ‘The Fat Princess & Other Feastly Delights’)

Princess Gertrude’s enormous appetite was of great concern to the King and Queen. Such was her hunger she was feasting her way through five royal banquets a day. As one would expect, of such a healthy appetite, the Princess had become rather renowned for her excessive avoirdupois and considerable bulk. There was no horse throughout [...]

Trencherman (aka ‘The Trencherman’)

The Trencherman case had been one of the most disturbing cases that Detective Inspector Flint Tempest had ever investigated in his 20 years in the Metropolitan Police Service. It had all the ingredients to mesmerise a nation, who lived the case through the sensationalised reporting of the gutter press: black magic, a cannibalistic serial killer [...]

Mollify (aka ‘To Bury Old Ghosts’)

When my father hit the bottle, he hit it hard and then, invariably, would hit my mum or me even harder. He was a tough man, someone of few words and even less affection. Abandoned as a baby he was brought up in the tough orphanages of London’s East End and learned to fight to [...]

Subaltern (aka ‘The Frankenstein Project’)

The brain had been perfectly preserved in a peat bog in Suffolk for two thousand years. For my team and me this was the news we had been longing to hear for years. Artefacts found with the brain suggested this was possibly the remains of a subaltern in the Roman Legion from 45AD, although expert [...]