Five Free Stories - coming soon

Many moons ago I wrote some stories for Ro Pardoe's excellent magazine Ghosts & Scholars. Indeed, the only reason Supernatural Tales is that, at the end of the century, Ro decided to stop publishing fiction and confine a slimmed-down G&S newsletter to articles and reviews about M.R. Jamesian matters. I thought that we needed a new magazine to publish supernatural stories and started one. Ro's just reversed her non-fiction only policy, so this year the old G&S will be back, publishing Jamesian stories. Check it out!

Anyway, the five stories I wrote back in the Nineties have been sitting around on various hard drives for a while, unread by anyone apart from one published on the G&S website. So I've decided (since people sometimes ask me about my stuff) to publish them as a free eBook. It will be a basic PDF item, and you'll be able to get it via the Lulu.com site using the link that is, if you're reading this, just to the right and up a bit.

The five short stories are:

'The Regulars' - what could be more harmless than a bit of research into Victorian pub signs? Even if they do seem to have some strange, hidden significance...
'The Befriender' - an unprincipled hack writer probes a cult that purports to be a revival of an ancient mystery religion.
'Skirmish' - a group of office workers go on a paint-balling weekend; but is it really a good idea to develop that killer instinct?
'The Glyphs' - a lonely academic comes to admire the graffiti that livens up a grim railway station; then something starts to destroy it.
'The Ptolemaic System' - a modern researcher is interested in the ideas of an obscure 17th century polymath. But what was his true legacy?

I've yet to decide on a title for the mini-collection. The Ptolemaic System or The Regulars both suggest themselves. Well, I'll get it sorted out by next week, probably.