“Jape! Wake up, you fuckin’ spanner!” Dinn shook Jape’s inert body, desperately trying to ignore the mistweed scattered beside the bed in the vain hope that pretending Jape hadn’t smoked himself out of his gourd would mean he hadn’t. “Muh?” When awakened at stupid o’clock in the morning, Jape was not his usual, articulate self by any stretch of the imagination.

He’s late, but she doesn’t complain. It’s an old dance now, between the two of them. The late nights, the lost weekends, out on his work. She doesn’t know, she doesn’t want to know and that suits both of them just fine. He plays the role of the provider, she plays the role of the dutiful wife, they share a few words at breakfast, a few words at night, a bed, and that’s all.

A writing exercise in creating the most unlikable group of heroes possible, meeting in the most stereotypical way possible. In the eastern part of Dunlunn, where the slums meet the stinking river, there’s a pub: The Toll. The Toll is a shitty place, but it belongs to the people of the river’s end, and while they haven’t got two pennies to rub together, they’re proud of the one penny they do have.

This had been provisionally accepted for an anthology on the theme of ‘succubi’ but fell at the last hurdle. Given the currently nebulous future of erotic publishing, even though this isn’t transgressive and is more about the figurative rather than the literal succubus, I present it here for you to read if you’re so inclined. Needless to say, adult material and all that.

This is just an early draft of the first part. The whole story can be read as part of the neo-pulp collection, Pulp Nova. Genealogy, that’s the thing. People like to know where they came from, who they’re related to, what their heritage is, and what it means to be them. It’s nonsense, of course, who we came from doesn’t make our destiny, doesn’t dictate what we do.

It was raining when Jaggers arrived at The Manor. The steam carriage halted in a muddy rut, clacking and chuffing. He eased himself down, precariously balanced upon the stones so as not to dirty his shoes and turned to his driver, who seemed nonplussed to come to such a place. “Keep the boiler hot, my man, I shan’t be long.”

Another of my Pulp Nova stories, at least an early draft of the first part. You can buy these neo-pulp stories in a single book at Lulu. Deep in the devilishly decadent district of Soho, above the luminous light of the lanes and the inebriated intonations of the imaginative industry that calls it home, lies the flat of that most flirtatious and fiery fighters for freedom, Madu Bandara, also known as Mimsy Burogrove, perhaps the world’s only psychedelic detective.

This is an early first draft of the first part of this story, you can find it and the rest of my neo-pulp stories in the collection Pulp Nova, available at Lulu. Boop-dee-dee-beep-deep-woop, boop-dee-dee-beep-deep-woop. Tessa groaned and wound the sheets around her head, hoping the noise would go away, but it wouldn’t, the clamorous ring of her TeleBand just keep going and going, the greenish light of its screen flashing as it strove to get her attention.

This is an early draft of the first part. You can find all my neo-pulp stories collected in Pulp Nova via Lulu. Heat haze shimmered over the salt flats, making the surface look like water. Doctor Green took a swig from her bottle of water, grimacing at the tepid warmth of it, and she’d only been out of the car for a short while.

This was an early draft of the first part of the story. You can buy all my neo-pulp stories collected in Pulp Nova from Lulu. Ace slumped over the chipped formica of the counter and gripped another full glass of scotch in his scarred and meaty fist. He was a great bull of a man, swaying slightly in his drunken haze and running his hand through the thick beard and tangled locks of a man who’d spent a long time in space.

When I heard her scream, I knew my secret was out. With a roll of my eyes to the heavens, I pulled myself out of my seat and down the hall to where she stood. She shivered and clutched her coat as though it were the only thing she could rely on in the universe. She turned to me, wide-eyed and shaking and spoke, her voice quavering.

The plan was to just move out of cover and slot him, shoot him in the back of the head just as the unspeakable cunt deserved, but then things got complicated, just as they always do. He knew I was there. He poured himself a drink from the cabinet, whiskey over ice. If I didn’t already hate him, that would have tipped me over the edge, but compared to everything else, adulterating good drink didn’t seem significant somehow.

The frame descended from its cradle and set down upon the ground in an easy, loose-limbed stance. Unnaturally still, it was a foreboding presence, even without a controller. Sleek and deadly, its blank eyes stared out into space, and its matte surface seemed to blur its edges into the shade of the dimly lit room. “This,” said the Tech-Sergeant“, is a model M-33 teletrooper.

John was startled awake by the sound of screaming. His eyes jumped open, and for a momen,t he was blinded by the light. Then things began to swim into view. A hospital room, no surprise there, a smell of blood and antiseptic in his nostrils and then he realised it was him who was screaming. It sounded wrong. This was not his aged, croaking, earthy voice; it sounded like a cat or a girl.

Intestines steamed like fat sausages on a griddle as the cold rain hit them in big, spattering drops like marbles. The rain diluted the blood, shit and bile into a bilious cocktail. It washed into the gutters, clogging them with severed fingers and offal that floated like macabre little boats of organ meat, bobbing merrily in the sanguine rivulet. A jumble sale of limbs, bone and muscle was tangled in a disorganised heap in the street, stray dogs already fighting over the ‘bargains’ amongst the dross.

“David. I’m afraid we’ve decided to let you go.” I said, straightening my tie as the limo slunk through the streets like a panther, spiralling down and down, sheets of water rising like oily wings from every wheel. He didn’t answer me; it’s hard to say much of anything with a plastic bag over your head. Hard to do much but try to breathe through that tiny gap where it’s attached to your neck.

There’s a sort of background hum to any home, whether you live in downtown, uptown or anywhere in between. Power lines, devices, appliances, heating pipes, water pumps. You get used to it after a while, and you no longer notice it, but you do notice it when it’s gone. That sudden silence can wake you up more surely than any alarm clock, and that’s what happened to me the other night.

“I fucking hate Conflict Worlds,” I said to nobody in particular, hunkered down in what was left of the bunker. I didn’t have anyone else to say it to because they were all spread around the area doing a passable impression of a strawberry smoothie, with the bits in. I’d been shot in the tit and it fucking hurt. There was a gaping hole in my breastplate, which, honestly, at this point should just have been called a ‘plate’.

Asta slammed up against the concrete panting hard, his heart was pounding in his throat and his mouth was dry, concrete dust stuck to the blood that was dripping from his Deathsuit turning him into a grey ghost. The suit massaged him, held him, cooed soothing emotions, trying to keep him on an even, sensible keel, but it was a losing battle.

She blinked as her eyes swam back into focus, dancing lights, motes and colours like a bad Alice flashback, greens and purples and reds as the light faded away and was replaced by darkness. Above her the vaulted ceiling of the cathedral slowly gathered enough effort to regain its edges and solidity. Black-and-green, shining and chitinous, oily, the Dark Lament cathedral resembled nothing less than ten thousand priapic beetles locked in an orgiastic embrace.

I’m not going to tell you to go to school. You don’t need qualifications to sit in front of the TV and eat ready meals. I’m not going to tell you to stay out of the gangs, fuck knows if you want to live past twenty, you’ve got to hook up with someone. I’m not going to sell you some bullshit about joining SLA and hitting the big time; if you had prospects, you’d already have been picked out from a crèche.

The Prop is looking over with barely concealed contempt. A squatting, armoured presence in the corner of the dingy, unlicensed bar. A hulking mass of dense, dirty armour, flakes of paint peeling away layer by layer, showing years and years of previous livery. Behind thick quartz panes, his gaze stares, unwavering. Is it contempt or hatred? Jealousy or insecurity? Does he wish he were one of us or just that we weren’t here at all?

Bloodshot eyes open to a blank room that smells like dentistry and antiseptic. Confused and blurred, vision flickers left and right, head unable to turn, seeing no doors, no way in or out, no light fittings, no fixtures, just a directionless glow of light that banishes all shadows. Why can’t you move? You don’t know why. Is this a dream?

Here the water doesn’t come down as rain; it comes down in sheets. It pours through the slits in the firmament of Suburbia and falls in a shimmering curtain. Umbrellas won’t protect you, raincoats won’t help in the slightest. If you walk through one of these glistening shrouds, you’ll get soaked to the skin. It’s like walking through a cathedral of glass, plummeting from the sky.

“The Necanthrope is, besides money, the most powerful weapon in SLA’s arsenal,” the drill sergeant barked, marching up and down in front of the recruits. “It is also their weakness, a mark of their reliance on the strange, the unknown. A living metaphor and symbol for SLA itself, either ugly as sin, a ravaging terror, or a beautiful and beguiling lie.