Maybe it's because he's a Londoner

Mike Chislett, so far as I know, doesn't have internet. So I can express my admiration for him without making him go all red and flustered. He's a remarkable writer, and perhaps one of the true originals - someone who, while widely read and keenly interested in the greats, still goes his own way. I've just been correcting the proofs of his story 'Blood and Glass', which rounds off his Devil's Mirror sequence. It's quite long - thirty-odd pages - and it was a marathon job to type it up. Needless to say I made plenty of errors, some profoundly stupid. Tiredness does it to you every time. But the story itself is wonderful, not least for the way it suggests - not too explicitly - a story behind the story that maybe-explains it all. Or maybe not. I've still got to sort out 'A Game of Ghosts', the title story of the forthcoming special issue.
I'm spending a lot of time in Mike's head at the moment, as I've also been checking through his story for ST12. This is a stand-alone effort, and intriguing because of its implications. I'm sure a typical reader in, say, the fourth century BC would have found it all entirely plausible. I suppose you could call Mike a magic realist, in that he harks back to a time when belief in magic was realistic. Maybe it's because he lives in the broiling chaos of the capital. For me London would be hell, but for him it is all three of Dante's realms at the same time.