The hottest summer in modern European history is hopefully in our collective rear-view mirrors as August stutters to a cooler end with its customary mugginess, which is why I’ve spent the season writing a Nightmare Vacation about killer snowmen.
You might remember the rough cut of Jingle Kills from February, when Britain had sub-zero temperatures. It’s felt like slogging through deep snow but I’m now halfway through a first draft with a cast that feels like real people and a fair idea of what the end will look like and who will make it out alive.
No, it’s a secret.
It won’t be ready for Christmas this year but I will be looking for beta readers in early 2027, so look out for a sign-up reminder. The first part of In Machina, my long-gestating sci-fi X-ology, will also be poking the turtle’s head from my creative sphincter soon!
Signed Nightmare Vacations books go Transatlantic
It’s great to have a win when there are other indie horror authors involved, so I’m buzzing that the Nightmare Vacations are now part of Club Thrillrror Book Boxes in North America and Nightmare Nook Books, here in the UK.
Club Thrillrror is a box set collection available in Canada and the USA, where you can choose up to 16 signed books by indie authors.
Prices go from CAD $45/ USD $35 for the one book Itty-Bitty up to CAD $400/ USD $280 for the full Broke A$$ Bish, with goodies in every box. You can get both Blood River and Blood Point but orders close on September 15th.
Nightmare Nook Books is a UK horror bookshop who’s started their first Indie Author Spotlight with signed books.
Alongside The Bloody Edition of Blood Point is Hypochondria by Sarah R New, Tender Cuts by Jane Moths and the anthology Weird Tales to Haunt Your Reptilian Brain.
Buy their books, buy my book, but most of all, support indie book sellers who support indie authors. Go indies!
Mega-September for UK book events
Meanwhile, the bookish events calendar goers into overdrive next month with MEGA SEPTEMBER. Here’s where to find me and get signed copies of the Nightmare Vacations:
Birmingham Book Extravaganza, September 12th, at the Uffculme Centre, 52 Queensbridge Road, Birmingham, B13 8QY. These guys always have a great range of authors and vendors across the genres, open from 10:30am-4pm with entry just £2.
Write By The River: Indie Showcase, September 18th, at The Swan Hotel, The Embankment, Bedford. A free event dedicated to local authors in my new home town, from 12noon-3pm, but it’s part of Bedford’s first ever literary festival.
Innsmouth Literary Festival, September 19th, at King’s House, 245 Ampthill Road, Bedford MK42 9AZ. A one-day festival dedicated to weird and cosmic fiction, with guests including Stephen Jones, Les Edwards and Mark Williams. Tickets are £30.
MK Indie Book Fair 2026, September 26th, at Middleton Hall, centre:mk, Milton Keynes. A free multi-genre book fair with more than 100 authors of fiction and non-fiction. Runs from 10:30am-5pm.
What I’ve read this month
The Ritual
by Adam Nevill
Four old university friends reunite for a hiking trip in the Scandinavian wilderness. One bad decision and the tensions of reuniting lives that have fractured across the years puts them at odds as they stumble upon the remains of forgotten pagan rites that are far from lost. Something primal stalks these ancient forests and the hunt has begun.
About a third of my way into The Ritual, I started to wonder how it was going to sustain the pace of a story that opens on a horrific warning and skeeters rapidly into physical and psychological darkness. Even by that stage, I wasn’t worried that that Nevill would run out of story, but where he’d take his four cursed hikers and how any of them would survive long enough to tell their stories.
And that’s the twist: killing off most of the cast is only a preamble to the sole survivor’s final act. By the time he emerges from the forest, he’s broken and remade those friendships, only to lose them forever and shatter his own self-image.
While I enjoyed the final act, with its folkloric revelations and slightly cartoonish trio of antagonists, my highlight was the interpersonal drama and depth of those fragile male friendships, smashed by the impossible pressure of inescapable terror. As the best writing always does, it made me wonder how I can achieve that level of claustrophobic, unputdownable tension in my own stories.
Topping up my TBR pile
Under The Skin
by Michael Faber
Recommended to me by a neighbour, you’ve got to be in awe of a novel where the blurb is just twenty-six words. I know more about the story from the Jonathan Glazer big screen adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson — which I’ve never even seen — than this gives away:
Isserley spends most of her time driving. But why is she so interested in picking up hitchhikers? And why are they always male, well-built and alone?
The Judge, the Jailer and the Thief
by Gemma Walker
I’m been intrigued by this cover every time I see it at book fairs. The pitch of a fast-paced female-led heist thriller promises twists and turns as the three morally-grey protagonists cross paths and their secrets and lies are revealed.
Indie books for August 2026
Buy a book and support independent self-published authors. Indie author promotion links may expire.
The Mona Lisa Cage
by Leo Di Lux
The most famous smile in the world is not a smile. It is a lock.
Florence, 1503. Leonardo da Vinci accepts a quiet private commission: a portrait of a silk merchant’s wife. It should be the simplest work of his life. It becomes the only one that matters.
Something old has woken in his pigments. Something his grandfather Antonio met before him and did not survive. Something that feeds on beauty, and has chosen Leonardo as the door it will walk through into the world.
So he paints it a cage instead.
For sixteen years, across three countries, he works the same small panel and never once delivers her. The world will one day call her the greatest painting ever made. She was never meant to be admired. She was meant to hold.
The cost is everything. His painting hand. His capacity to feel beauty. In the end, everything that made him Leonardo.
A cage is only as patient as the hand that keeps it.
Five centuries later, in one quiet room of the Louvre, the hand is gone. The keepers are dead. And behind the glass, the smile has begun to shift.
Some colours were never meant to exist.
THE MONA LISA CAGE is Book One of The Painted Souls: a Renaissance supernatural thriller with the historical depth of Dan Brown, the literary horror of Mexican Gothic, and the slow dread of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.
Read it slow. Read it at night. Trust nothing in the corners.
Cosmic Chaos Installment 1 (FREE EBOOK)
by Graham Burnett
The Justice League and The Avengers meet in the ultimate collision of madness and chaos.
First instalment in a seven-part sci-fi horror, action and adventure series, with a direct sequel: Best Served Cold, A Cosmic Chaos Story.
This first instalment in the seven-part Cosmic Chaos series as The Justice League and The Avengers face off against each other.
This is only the beginning of a story of ultimate horror and survival as every character is put to the ultimate test.
Riveting Reads August sale
Fill your Kindle with Horror, Mystery, Suspense, Sci-Fi and Fantasy in the Riveting Reads August sale. Books from more than 80 authors at 99p/¢ on Amazon or free with Kindle Unlimited.
Mentions