Cathars on the radio (or should I say YouTube)

My episode of the Gnostic radio show/webcast Aeon Byte, is now available to listen to on YouTube. I discuss the Cathars with host Miguel Conner.

New Article Published: Breece D'J Pancake: A Short Life in the Hills

My article, Breece D'J Pancake: A Short Life in the Hills, has just been published by Thresholds: Home of the International Short Story Forum, and is available to read here here. The article was commended in Threshold's Feature Writing Competition 2012.

Breece is one of the great under-appreciated writers. Read him.

James Herbert & Basil Copper (& Iain Banks)

It's not been a good month for the world of storytelling. James Herbert died on 20 March, followed by Basil Copper on 3 April. In between, the terrible news about Iain Banks. All of these writers made an indelible impression on me over the years. I discovered Herbert in the 1980s, when I read The Magic Cottage. Recently I returned to the JH canon and read Once, the first of his books I'd read in many a year. Likewise, I first read Basil Copper in the mid 80s, as part of my then largely Lovecraft-influenced reading. The Great White Space and Into the Silence are two of the very best novels in the Cthulhu tradition, while Necropolis is a corking piece of Victorian Gothic. I also had the pleasure of meeting Basil several times in London: he was a gent of the old school, modest, warm and funny. I had long planned to interview him about his Lovecraft-inspired work, but the chance never arose, sadly.