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Out Now: Death Rattle – a Flash Fiction

22nd April 201811th September 2020 Liam Smith 2 Comments

My flash fiction story Death Rattle is featured in the just-released The Brighton Prize 2017!

Last year I wrote and entered a flash-fiction story to Rattle Tales, a Brighton-based writing collective, for an evening of readings they were hosting. My story, Death Rattle, was selected! And I got to read it live in Brighton to an audience of rattle-waving writing enthusiasts.

It was a great night. It was wonderful to see how other writers performed the stories they had written, and the audience questions that followed each story were often illuminating. It’s notoriously difficult for writers to take their craft to the stage, and I was excited by the opportunity. Sadly, the 2018 Rattle Tales night falls a little close to my wedding day, so I’ve refrained from submitting to it!

I wrote Death Rattle to be read out loud and tried to emphasise sound throughout the story. I also tried to avoid certain tongue-twisting combinations of words that I might struggle with on the night! I’m really proud of the finished tale. I think for such a short piece of writing it tells a much larger story than it first appears.

I’d love for you to check out the The Brighton Prize anthology; not only to read my submission but also check out the stories from the writers I shared a stage with last June as well as the acclaimed tales that were selected The Brighton Prize – the short story competition run by Rattle Tales. And if you liked Death Rattle, why not try some of my other writings?

Happy reading!

Why I Won’t Be Watching American Gods

23rd April 201720th September 2020 Liam Smith 2 Comments

I first read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods in my late teens. It was winter time and I fitted it in between college classes and bus stops and it struck such a chord with me. The book is full to bursting with rich imagination, and images from that first reading that have stuck with me ever since. Which is why I won’t be watching the new TV adaptation of the book.

Books aren’t necessarily better

I’m not the kind of person to say the book is always better than the film (although it often is). In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say I think The Shining is a better film than it was a book, despite Stephen King being one of my favourite authors. But books and films and television series are different media and connect with you in different ways. Obviously, screen adaptations are more visual. A book can throw pages of description at you but it still relies on its reader interpreting that information and forming an image from it. If it’s on a screen, well, that’s the image that will wind up in your mind’s eye.

Robin Jarvis and The Whitby Witches review

8th May 201617th October 2020 Liam Smith Leave a comment

The Whitby trilogy by Robin Jarvis is one of the best trilogies… ever. This is a Whitby Witches review of sorts, but one which explores the trilogy’s place in literature instead of trying to rate it against other books.

I first read Robin Jarvis’ The Whitby Witches when I was a child. I can’t have been any older than ten, because by the time I finished the series I had yet to leave primary school. And actually, I didn’t read them – my mum read them to me. It was probably her eyes that first alighted upon that fateful tome, bound with a leering hound front cover that arrested both our attentions in that little library up the road. We devoured it swiftly and ordered the sequels shortly after. After reading and loving those too, I requested the boxset from my Grandma for Christmas. She even lived near Whitby! Finally, I owned those fantastic stories for myself.

The trilogy: *The Whitby Witches*, *A Warlock in Whitby* and *The Whitby Child*

I re-read the trilogy a few of times as a child. Yyou can see how well-loved those books were in the picture above. But I hadn’t done so since before my late teens. By the time I took them from the shelf a couple of months ago it must have been ten years since I’d indulged. I thought I’d give them a read for a bit of a nostalgia hit, but even before I’d reached the halfway point of Book One I knew that I was reading something truly special. It wasn’t my childhood love of The Whitby Witches that was informing my enjoyment of it. It was simply that it is a fantastic, gripping and scary book. I finished the trilogy’s finale, The Whitby Child, this very morning – and I can’t wait to laud its brilliance.

Kim Newman and Anno Dracula – review

14th March 201513th October 2020 Liam Smith Leave a comment

I’m halfway through the literary feast that is Dracula Cha Cha Cha, the third book in Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series. I’d been intrigued by Anno Dracula ever since I’d spotted it in Waterstones and admired its Victorian cover design, but I actually read it for the first time after borrowing it from my girlfriend a couple of years ago. I loved it from the first page. This is my Anno Dracula review.

Anno Dracula contains one of the best opening sequences I’ve ever read. A Jack the Ripper-style murder in London fog, seen through the eyes of the killer. It hooked me immediately. What follows is in essence an alternate history but also a reinterpretation of that most infamous of vampire novels, Dracula. Count Dracula escapes his hunters, the protagonists of Stoker’s story, and takes Queen Victoria as his bride. Meanwhile, a killer in Whitechapel is hunting down vampire girls and gorily dispatching them.

The author: Kim Newman

Newman’s skill as novelist isn’t just down to his writing style. In fact, I get the impression that his rich use of vocabulary and effective employment of descriptions are more a result of his foremost agenda. That is, synthesising different vampire mythologies and references into a new cohesive entity.

MacBride is the New Black: a Stuart MacBride review

21st December 201417th October 2020 Liam Smith 2 Comments

I have just finished reading Flesh House by Stuart MacBride. It was brilliant, though I don’t know why I sound surprised – I’m not a MacBride novice by a long stretch, and I was in fact re-reading this one. I’ve actually read most of his novels. My first, the aforementioned Flesh House, must have been back when I was twenty or so. It was (and is) an extremely gripping police procedural, veined with a delectably black sense of humour and splattered with enough visceral detail to keep Jack the Ripper himself happy. We could analyse it to work out what makes it so good. But this post is more of a Stuart MacBride review; an effort to pinpoint the attributes that make one of the best active authors out there.

Anyway. After reading Flesh House for the first time, I tracked through the remains of MacBride’s oeuvre, devouring his books on sight. Of course, this reading fervour rather blinded me to the chronology of his Logan McCrae series; I don’t think I read a single book in consecutive order, having started with the fourth and finishing with the first. Not a problem – they’re all great stories and they work well as independent novels. But that hasn’t stopped me going back and reading them all again from the beginning.

A top-tier author

There’s a small clutch of authors I consider to be my favourites. I find that nowadays I don’t have absolute favourite authors or bands or films. I tend have inner circles, pantheons of admired figures and pieces, usually champions of different genres. Stuart MacBride is in that inner circle, alongside Neil Gaiman and Stephen King and probably a few more. And out of all of them, I think MacBride writes the best story.

Category: Book Reviews