And a Pinch of Salt

Issue 15 of Farrago's Wainscot as my latest short story, "And a Pinch of Salt," up there on the interwebs for your perusal. Click through for a tale of Anselm and cocksucking:

God works in mysterious ways—down strange back-alleys mostly, in enchanting side-streets off the boulevard, past the corner boys and through, between the narrow of tenement walls warped to concave overhangs, weird tiered storeys of them rising each side of the cobbled lane to swallow an urban explorer of New Sodom, as a crack in the cityscape, a gorge of interstice all dumpsters and darkness and fire escapes zigzagging up to the jut of rooftops limned with moonlight, and framed between them, in the distance up ahead, a queer red iron Tour Eiffel straight from Delaunay's cubist canvas, standing as a foundry-wrought sentinel at avenue's end, down past the rhombuses of redlit brothel windows where, inside, nine muses are kissing an amorous john called Humphrey to ecstatic death just as is chalked on the pavement underfoot in couplets...

The Wolf and the Three Wise Monkeys

This is the first reading vid for my Patreon patrons, released by their kind support for the general public to enjoy. If you enjoy it, do spread the word via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, whatever. And if it whets your appetite for more, you can sign up for access to all future reading videos, which should be coming out monthly, at only a dollar a pop. Go here:

patreon.com/HalDuncan?ty=h

Lord Byron's Prophecy

Lord Byron's Prophecy, Sean Eads

"... readers will be engrossed by Eads’s skillful weaving of the past and present through the troubled psychology of sympathetic, fully human characters."

Publishers Weekly

I'm dead chuffed to see Sean Eads's Lord Byron's Prophecy get a very nice review in Publishers Weekly. Where I've been doing the book doctoring for a while, this is the first novel I can officially say I was a proper bona fide editor on. Steve Berman at Lethe Press brought me in to give some feedback, and I immediately saw exactly what that review picks up on. It's a complex novel, very hard to summarise in plot terms, but fascinating and compelling stuff, powered by all manner of psychological tensions and, yes, with a real richness to the characters. Sean was an absolute pleasure to with too, open to all the suggestions I made, so I'm well happy to have been a helping hand in getting the book to its finished state. Anyhoo, it's available now for pre-order, and I encourage you all to go get a copy set aside for yourself. It's well worth checking out.