Prose
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Taking Magnificent Grace into schools
They say it is good to leave your comfort zone, and recently I have been doing that and found myself loving it. For Skelton Yawngrave was invited to several schools to talk about Magnificent Grace during the week of World Book Day. Instead of an immaculately-dressed skeleton man, however, the children got his alter ego: me. Creating an…
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Magnificent Grace — now in paperback!
Magnificent Grace paperback now available here Few moments in life are like popping open a box of books you happen to have written. More accurately I should say written by my alter ego Skelton Yawngrave III. Skelton was wildly pleased with himself. Though cheerful, I remain cautiously optimistic. Properly armed with my 322 page book,…
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Magnificent Grace, by Skelton Yawngrave
If you happen to know a child of 9-12 who likes reading, and want a tale set in the run up to Halloween and Guy Fawkes night… then I have a full length story (a.k.a. my kindle experiment) for them. It’s creepy, funny, magical and dystopian and is about trying to bring together a divided…
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The Dream Home
Very happy to have a new dark tale in the Autumn 2019 94th edition of the literary magazine The Frogmore Papers, edited by Jeremy Page. There are two other stories in this edition: A Citadel by Natalya Lowndes, and A Few Brief Words by Andrew Blair. I found both had a lovely balance of humour…
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What You Look For
My short story What You Look For has just been published in Horla. The story is loosely based on a house I shared as a student in Leamington Spa — with what I hope is a horrific twist. I did once see what I think of as a ghost, which appeared as I describe in…
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‘The Dark Fish’ in Horla
In my last post I mentioned I had been reading short story collections lately, and particularly the strange tales of Robert Aickman. This prompted me to exhume some of my own short stories from the cobwebby Kenny Vaults. One of these was a story called The Dark Fish. I wrote the first version of this in my mid…
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A lost friend, agent hunting, and new collections of short stories
My friend Janet Summerton died on October 1st at the age of 79. I was heavily involved in her care during her last two months, and that of her husband Ken who survives her. Janet was a lateral thinking champion of the crafts and craft makers – and a benign influence on a generation of…
Peter Kenny: a writer's notebook 