Edmund Lester

Long ago mankind was constantly warring against Demonkind. Then mankind started inventing things, thing that gave them a definite advantage over the vampires, demons, werewolves, ghouls and other paranormal creatures. Rather than just wait for the inevitable, the demons decided running away was better than being dead and so left the dimension, setting up Nekropolis, a vast artificial realm ruled over by the Darklords. Matt Richter is a cop from Cleveland, or rather he was. Two years prior to the start of this tale Matt had followed a suspect through a portal and ended up in Nekropolis surrounded by all the monsters he could ever have imagined. Not long afterwards he ended up dead. Still around, but dead - in short a zombie, although self-willed and with all of his cop instincts intact. Devona Kanti is a vampire, daughter of a Darklord and keeper of his collection. One of the items, the Dawnstone, in the collection is missing, a powerful artefact that could kill her father. Devona hi...

A while ago I began posting reviews of books that had, for one reason or another, never been sold. It seemed to go well, I gained a couple of blog followers and got generally good comments. Well the time I feel has come to revisit this idea in a slightly changd format. I was lucky enough to encounter a horror/dark fiction ezine called nossa morte when it launched in 2007. I sold to their very first issue. In fact I sold to every single issue they did - at least one review in each with three in one issue. They are defunct sadly - been that way for more than a year now and the site is no longer on the net. So I thought I should recycle the reviews I wrote for them and post them here. Tonight I will (shortly) be posting the review for Tim Waggoner's Nekropolis, a sublimely brilliant comic dark fantasy.

Okay, it's been a while since my last post. I could claim one excuse or another for not posting to this blog more often. And in reality the reasons I would give are not just excuses but true. I mentioned in an earlier post my mother dying over Christmas. This has left a lot of processing - sorting out her house, funerals, cancelling paper deliveries, chaning utilities etc. And then there's the emptying of her house... On top of all this there is the flu that has been plaguing my life since Christmas Day, one week of feeling really ill then lurking in the background with occasional ickiness repeats. And then there's the fact I've been trying to concentrate on writing a novel, which isn't going too badly - up to 14,500 words and an aim to get over 80,000 by the end of March - yeah I know it's tight but I need to set deadlines so I will get on with it. But some things have been happening I wanted to post. Firstly there's some news on my reviews being released/p...

After putting up with me and my writing attempts over the last four years my wife wrote a short story (to be fair she has planned out a novel and written the first few chapters but this is her first short). Anyway, it surprised me by being a little surreal. It was good though, so I submitted it to Eschatology Journal for her - the market that accepted my short story Chicken last week. And today they accepted it. So on the 12th of May this year her story, entitled "The Dance" willl be published on their site. Wow, eh. I feel really chuffed, I have to say Anyway if you want to go check their site out, obviously without the story live yet but still well worth a visit, here's the link - http://eschatologyjournal.org/ Oh, and her pen name is Carey Lester. I'm freaked and very chuffed. I may have said that before

My story Chicken will be posted to Eschatology on April 6th

Just received the email that my short story Chicken (1000 words) will be appearing in online zine Eschatology Journal this spring. More details to follow In the meantime, here's the web address - http://eschatologyjournal.org/

It's been a while since my last blog. Not far off two months. I've been twittering a bit - easier to do as the iPhone lives in my pocket 24-7 and I've written a review or two (ok, maybe 20) but in truth my time on this PC has been limited. And the reason has been my mother. At the end of October she was taken into hospital after a fall and diagnosed with an infection (which had caused the dizziness that meant she fell). Well we thought that that was all but it was soon clear that her faculties were very impaired. She didn't recover them when the fever was cured and she was diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer's. They tell me that the infection increased the speed of onset - I'm not a doctor but I trust they know what they're doing. So we set about loooking for nursing care for her and visited a number of homes that could provide the level of care she needed. We even thought we'd found one - out by King's Lynn - and were going to visit it this week to c...