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Welcome to August! Who knows what's still to come this year?   To keep you going, or keep you distracted, or perhaps you're lucky enough to be relaxing on a beach somewhere, check out the plethora of promos and giveaways here. Sci-fi, horror, and cyberpunk.  On the Audible front, Flames of Apathy will shortly be with ACX awaiting for their approval. About a million emails later and STILL waiting on Neon Sands. I'm beyond frustration now, just waiting for them to get their arse into gear. Maybe next week!

Hire A Muse, Get A Nobel Prize Ex Machina meets A Beautiful Mind in this mind-bending sci-fi thriller. On the verge of abandoning his life-long project, an obsessive physicist hires the innovative service of an android Muse to help him finish his work. But when things start to go missing from his life, he must learn that not all is worth sacrificing on the altar of science before he has nothing left to live for.

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Story time...

"About two hundred metres to the south of the farm, as the hillside began to slope down towards the woods, I stopped and sniffed. Fifty metres or so to the right was an unmarked mutate grave, and to the left, another one about forty metres away. Even buried so deep I could still smell them; not entirely unpleasant, growing earthier as the worms fed. Dropping to my knees, I placed the body down carefully and pawed the ground, slicing away the upper crust to the crumbling dirt beneath, and dug. The rain fell heavier and swelled in the cavernous neck of the mutate. All sorts of scents lifted from the grass as the droplets disturbed them, and I closed my eyes, breathing deeply to take them in. I was still an adolescent back then, nascent in my senses, unaware from one day to the next how powerful one sense might be over another. Too dictated by the circadian rhythm of my blood and the rise and fall of the balance of my bodily chemicals. I could return tomorrow and only know the graves by the sight of the mounds. Or I could smell the nesting birds in the woods down below. I’d seen the mood swings of my brothers as they grew through puberty and into adulthood; teenage tantrums and fits of irrationality. Growing pains, I’ve read them called in books. Well, at sixteen, mine weren’t so much growing pains as mystery boxes to be unlocked, and sometimes locked away again."

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PROLOGUE: The Risen Part II

I first menstruated when I was nine years old; waking in bed to a small puddle of dampness, the morning light warming through the heavy curtains. When I felt the wetness there was shame, making itself known in the tears that came. It had been years since I wet the bed. I sat up slowly, and it felt as though I’d tipped something over, such was the gushing. The emptying. I squeezed as hard as I could and finally it stopped coming. It was too cold in the winter air and too warm beneath the layer of blankets to get up, so I guessed it was still real early, and figured it would dry. Two hours later and the day at full bloom was pressing into my bedroom, up the peeled wallpaper and the cracks of plaster, black mould spots in the corners of the ceiling. I wriggled my hips. It felt sticky. It would smell bad, I thought, wary of lifting the blanket. Mother would not be happy. I tentatively put a hand down there, feeling for the damp. Instead it was tacky, like wet cornbread dough, and when I brought my fingers to the light they were the colour of the mould.

I’m mouldy! It was a silly thought, but I was a child. I let in the ice of the air and there was the meconium stain on my faded-blue pyjama bottoms, black-red and the size of a newborn kitten. Shuffling backwards, the stain on the sheet was much larger, as black and as wide as Rhodri’s well. It looked like blood! I stifled a scream but the creaking springs of the mattress betrayed my consciousness and Father came in to make sure I was quick with the chores, as he always did. He took one look at the sheets, then back to me, and said; “So you are a girl, after all. Mother!”

I made myself as small as I could, backing up against the wall, while Father left to get Mother to deal with my problem. That he hadn’t acted much surprised settled what frightened nerves were needling in my stomach. It couldn’t be that bad. Quiet, I listened to the footsteps of the house; my brothers showed their heads around the edge of the door and laughed when they saw the blood on the bed. I quickly reached forward and covered it over, but it was too late. They ran off giggling, screaming “Raggedy Anne, raggedy Anne!” as though I was meant to know what that meant.

Mother finally entered, shutting the door behind her. She was the only woman in the house, and, I guess, after today I became the second, though it would be another five years until I menstruated again. She pulled the bedcover away and then sat on the bed, asking if I was scared. I told her there was nothing to be scared about, and she nodded in agreement, going on to tell me about the way of things with that resigned sadness she had about her, as though she was constantly experiencing something in the past. She told me to get up and then she pulled the cover from the bed. “Go to the bathroom,” she said, locking my bedroom door. I had my own bathroom, you see.

There, she told me to strip and poured some freezing water into the plugged sink. I sometimes made wee in the bathtub, which was green and black with dirt, so I didn’t much want to stand in it, but I did as I was told. The pyjama bottoms peeled away with some difficulty, much redder than the sheets, and stuck to my thick, matted hair. My skin was already hard with goosebumps by then, the lighter hair across my body prickled to attention, so the water made little difference. It stung a little over my nub, as sensitive as the end was, but I was used to that by now. Mother lathered soap into the hair on my inner thighs and up to my belly button and cleaned away as much blood as she could. I couldn’t help but notice how she averted her gaze from it, and wouldn’t touch it. “There you go,” she said, “you can do the rest yourself. I’ll leave a towel on your bed, and get you clean sheets.”

Alone, I finished washing and then dried and clothed, while my belly ached, hammering blows bouncing around my abdomen. A little cramp. I always wore long trouser legs and sleeves in those days, to cover all the hair. Even then little wisps crept beyond the hem of my sleeves, so I wore gloves whenever we left the farm, just in case we bumped into anyone. And a scarf for my neck.

Whenever I think back to my early childhood, I always come back to this day, for so much seemed to change for me from here on out. Father had it right: I was a girl. Not long after, I began to malt, waking up in the mornings not to blood, or urine, but body hair. A little later and my breasts began to grow sore, my nipples turning from pennies to old tuppences. I grew my hair long, because that was what girls did. My brothers stopped mocking and Mother even began to take me between her knees with a comb, and brush and brush for minutes at a time. She’d always wanted a daughter, and I was close enough, I guess. I don’t blame her, how do you treat an orphan baby covered head to toe in hair and with seemingly both sets of genitals? It can’t have been easy.

They named me Ffion, and Father’s surname was Adie, as in A-D, so that was how the locals knew me. Not that there were many locals to be had up here on the hill. Us Adies liked to keep to ourselves most of the time, anyway, tending to our farm and keeping the borders secure. If my family were muntjacs, then I was a vole, or perhaps a mole, my own sect within a sect, the outsider within.

Father and Jack did the heaviest work; they both had the arms to show for it too. Up early to count the sheep and pigs and chickens, while I and Dylan fed them, and then it was the two hour walk, checking that the border was secure. Where the wind – for it blew a gale up here in the hills just north of Aberffrwd – had dislodged one of the giant tree trunks or bent a section of barbed wire, they were on it, fixing it in a jiffy. Aled was the youngest, though still older than me, and his morning routine was to collect all the water for the day from the nearby stream. When I was done feeding the animals, sometimes I might help Mother in the kitchen, but most often I went off by myself, and always had, ever since I was little. They never stopped me; if anything ever happened to me then I would be a mouth less to feed. Chances were slim – mostly – because that perimeter wall was sturdy. I saw them sometimes, prowling on the other side, testing the barbs and drawing blood. Licking their wounds. One sight of Father’s shotgun and they ran.

The Risen Part II on preorder, special 0.99 price

The Risen Part I available now

Currently active Bookfunnel giveaways

Horror ebooks! (Apr 11 - Apr 16)

Horror & Supernatural Thrillers giveaway! (Apr 5 - May 1)

Springtime is Prequel Time (Apr 1 - May 1)

Spring Speculative Fiction Promo (April 1 - Apr 30)

Selection of active giveaways

See below for some giveaways of free books currently going on. You'll find my titles within, but also just a great selection of other titles. Happy reading!

https://books.bookfunnel.com/nohappyendings/xdkl41c8zm

SPACE EXPLORATION

https://books.bookfunnel.com/spaceexploration/c6le3483pw

https://books.bookfunnel.com/scifiwinter/ax7xili6db

https://books.bookfunnel.com/speculativefictionshowcase/1y55i4ydd1

Book Review: Mutation by Nerys Wheatley

"Despite their bravado, most of the men facing them now looked on edge, ranging from nervous to downright terrified, glancing around them as if they expected a wave of ravenous monsters to flood from the surrounding buildings at any second. It was one thing to shout and goad an empty street, but quite another to come face to face with their nightmares."

Mutation is book one in the Twenty-Five Percent series; featuring samurai swords, bromance, romance, gore, suspense, guns (in the UK!), motorbikes - and eaters (not zombies!). It's also a meaty book, coming in at nearly 400 ebook pages. From page one it's a series of encounters covering the usual humans-are-the-real-bad-guys and running-from-zombies tropes, all tuned to the max. If you're going to write this kind of story, do it well! And Nerys has.

Pinning the story to earth is Alex and Micah, an unlikely duo who begin at loggerheads (literally) before developing a believable bromance as the story unfolds, while they keep tally of who has saved each other more than the other. This central partnership is key, and the book wouldn't work half as well without this being convincing, but there's also plenty of exciting misadventure too as they narrowly avoid death time and again.

"Carrie was staring at Alex's face. "What happened to your nose?"
"Someone punched me," he said quickly, before Micah could say anything. "Big dude, fists like rocks."
Micah snorted. Alex ignored him."

The writing is solid - my only gripe being the slightly heavy handed use of the passive voice, such as "Carrie was staring at Alex's face." Personally, I'd prefer "Carrie stared at Alex's face." But this is minor in what is a well-written story.

As the plot progresses, it also begins to throw in the elements that the story would need to make it stand out from other zombie-genre titles, to make it different. We already have the Survivors (Alex) - those who were turned but then cured just before it was too late, left with 'powers' and distinguishable white irises. Gradually, more is revealed, and it's not so far-fetched (in this world) to be believable either.

If you enjoy this genre of book, you can't go wrong!

Promo time!

This weekend, my books are on promo. The Risen, a mid-apocalypse zombie horror is free on Kindle, and Neon Sands and the follow-up, Plains of Ion, are reduced to 0.99.

Join in the fun!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adam-J-Smith/e/B01ITQM3UG

SHORT STORY: Cancer

Little Greg was eight years old when he developed a plan to save his parents’ lives. And it was so simple too! His heart thumped, imagining the scenario playing out. Would it go as he thought it would? Or would they laugh in his face? Once they knew he was serious they would soon clock on and change their ways. He was sure of it.

He chose a rainy day to emphasize his point, maybe with a pronounced cough or two. Outside the window, grey clouds laboured heavy across the sky, with the gentle pattering of rain striking the glass and windowsill and pouring from the gutter and into the street. The window was open a crack, and his father’s cigarette smoke feigned escape in slow-moving swirls, almost blue against the grey.

Read more: https://culturedvultures.com/short-stories-cancer/

Book Review: My Hungry Friend by Daniel Barnett

My Hungry Friend by Daniel Barnett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My Hungry Friend is a tightly written story that deals with the horrors of Alzheimer's, both literal and metaphorical. Mike Roberts commits an atrocious act in the opening pages which doesn't exactly endear him to the reader (who kicks a homeless person's cup of change?!) but we soon learn the mindset behind what he was feeling that day, and why he felt the need to 'kick out'. Having previously read Daniel's Longreave, one of his strengths is creating multifaceted characters, and as the story evolves, so do the layers within Mike.

Trying to keep this as spoiler-free as possible, Mike struggles to look after his mother who suffers from Alzheimers. The concept of cracks opening in her mind, through which she becomes more and more lost, translate to Mike through his fears of hereditary Alzheimer's, but then those fears also become real as the homeless woman enacts her revenge on him. This reflection is well done, and even leads to some slight ambiguity towards the end with regards to Mike's lover.

If this was a straight literary book, there could have been more exploration of this; his mother wasn't used as I thought she might have been used, in fact it was all kept very real. But as a horror, it was sufficient: bring on the spiders!

Arachnophobes, beware! Spiders, spiders everywhere. Daniel's writing style ramps up the tension as the darkness begins to unveil itself, and as things not of this Earth begin to creep across Mike's skin. There are also a few moments of cringe-horror taken from reality, the kind of thing that must happen every day but we don't like to think about. And as horrific as some of these moments are, there are also some sweet moments; Mike's love for his mother and Cassie, (she leaves the room and suddenly the room returns to existence).

Longreave was a high bar, and more of an epic (having multiple POV) so My Hungry Friend feels smaller compared to that. Almost like an extended short story. But still, a very enjoyable read, and if Goodreads would allow another half-star it would get it from me.

View all my reviews

DailyFlash: Within Means

“How do you want them?” asked Mireille.
     The wanderer held her rations out. The temptation to eat them right away had slowly vanished the older she got. Now it was the exact opposite. “Dried.”
     Mireille took the fruit from her hands and placed them in the condenser. In an hour, the grapes would be raisins, the apples one third their size and hard, and all the liquid would be collected in the bottles. They would make a nice meal out on the sands, sometimes accompanied by jerked meat.
     It used to be a challenge to spread the meals out; make it last as long as possible. Now, she’d find shelter and be surprised by how much she still had left. Might even take fewer rations than offered.
     “Can I trade these for extra clothes anywhere?” she asked.
     Mireille looked at her as though she was crazy.

This flash fiction was inspired by the world of Neon Sands, the first in a trilogy currently accepting nominations on Kindle Scout. Like this world and want to read more? Please vote for Neon Sands on Kindle Scout and get a free copy!

https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/M0AVK7KHQVAB

DailyFlash: Lightning Rainbow

"The rains are coming on! The rains are coming on!" shouted the little boy. He jumped into an excited run and tried to pull his sister with him.
     She stood, knowing there was no need to rush. There was a little bubble of excitement within, but it wasn't quite as big as it used to be.
     The boy lead the way, bounding up the stairwell from level three where he shared accommodation with his family - and a few others. Neon strip-lights lit up as he passed beneath them. The girl watched him disappear into the courtyard of the dome through heavy double doors that swung back into her face.
     In the courtyard her brother was already standing with his friends, waiting for the weekly shower.
     "30 seconds..." said Kirillion's voice over the loudspeaker. The girl looked up to the apex of the dome and the saucer-shaped shadow of the watchtower from where Kirillion spoke. Where the important things were done.
     Then it began. The pipes that ran adjacent to the shaft leading to the watchtower gushed with water. She put a hand on one and could feel it vibrate. At the top, the pipe passed from their dome and into the outer dome - the Agridome - and there; they watched as the water cascaded in a rainpour they could see, but not feel.
     Lightning rainbows shimmered on the inner lining as the rain made its way down to the crops below, and all the kids "wooowed" in wonder.

This flash fiction was inspired by the world of Neon Sands, the first in a trilogy currently accepting nominations on Kindle Scout. Like this world and want to read more? Please vote for Neon Sands on Kindle Scout and get a free copy!

https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/M0AVK7KHQVAB

Horror Book Review: My Dead World by Jacqueline Druga

My Dead World by Jacqueline Druga
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Just finished and jumping straight into the review with my thoughts still fresh - just like the many wounds that are gashed or slashed or mutilated in My Dead World.

It gets an extra star for the gore and its brazen attitude towards a world taken over by a zombie virus (the Z-word that must not be mentioned. It's interesting to me who choose to call the walking dead 'zombies', and who make up other words for them. Guilty of it myself. In the real world, for sake of ease of description when chatting to other people you'd end up just calling them zombies, right?)

While I did enjoy the read for the horror and gore, it also had me shaking my head in disbelief over some choices the characters made, and it became apparent that there were outside forces at play who didn't want everyone to live til the end of the book, despite having prepared so well and having so much info about the virus beforehand. Ergo complacency.

Nila and her family are forewarned by her CDC brother to start preparing an apocalypse shelter, using the cabin they own in the mountains. This thing is stocked, fenced, and everything. Yet shit still continued to hit the fan. Complacent little things that the characters, or, more prominently Nila, kept doing to endanger them kept pulling me out of the story whenever it was hotting up.

I guess it highlights the reality of the layman, that whenever I wanted Nila to turn it around and step up, she couldn't, letting emotion lead the way, leaving space for mistakes. Maybe that's what the majority of people would be like, but you'd like to think they'd catch on quicker. (Just a little too much indecision and second-guessing going on perhaps.)

And then all the death made for a bit of a sombre read in the end.

Fast-paced, lots of action, could do with another round of editing as a few errors, but a pretty accurate portrayal of a world falling apart from a ravaging virus.

View all my reviews

Indie Book Review: The Mask of Sanity by Jacob M Appel

The Mask of Sanity by Jacob M. Appel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jeremy Balint:; hospital division chief, husband, father, would-be serial killer.

After one of those freakish sort of life coincidences that sends you tumbling down an alternate path, Jeremy sets his heart on the perfect murder. Only, to murder one person, he should really murder some others too so it looks random.

This is the kind of cold calculation you can expect from Jeremy's narrative, told from his POV. The story is solid, though (view spoiler)[perhaps lacks a bit of tension, as I rarely felt any doubt that Jeremy would complete his mission. (hide spoiler)] It was an entertaining read but felt restricted by (view spoiler)[it being from Jeremy's POV. While something like American Psycho goes the literary and raucously crazy route, if you took the gore and ambiguity out of that, you'd be left with a relatively straight tale of 80s excess, murder, and incompetent police work, which is kind of the feeling I was left with here, everything a little too tightly controlled. Except there was little chance for the police to be incompetent, because the murders were clean, albeit lucky sometimes (especially with respect to Jeremy's car not being registered at the various scenes). The murders were also matter-of-fact - anti-climactic almost. Again though, this is Jeremy's POV so the general tone is consistent with his character and can't be faulted. My one fault perhaps, and which could have been included with consistency, is Jeremy's insistence of the importance of his daughters, though there is relatively little interaction there. Maybe this too is a ploy, a case of himself pulling the wool over his own eyes. If not, a couple of fleshed out scenes with his daughters would have given him a little more warmth.

I did also think at the beginning that his sudden fall was 'too sudden' - that if he was capable of this he would have known earlier in his adult life, even his child life. We are glimpsed a moment in his childhood which goes some way to explain this, but even then Jeremy seems almost surprised by his own capabilities. (hide spoiler)] It's certainly fascinating to try and unravel the thought processes going on.

The cold moments in the narrative are lifted every now and then by Jeremy's wit - often in the form of mickey-taking, especially when he is in discussions with the rabbi who co-opts him into running some free clinics, which is a nice change of pace, while also revealing Jeremy's sociopathy. And as I said, the writing is solid and mostly unflourished, giving us an accurate insight into the working mind of a serial killer.

View all my reviews

DailyFlash: Anubis

When the death throes scuttled through his murmuring lungs and chuckled down his carotid, it was finally over. A restless night was day; the dewlight of dawn blued the thin curtains, lighting the empty eyes. The jackal's head distended over the corpse's mouth, jaw unlocking and teeth glistening. Its human stomach rippled and something within it gurgled until a clear amniotic expelled from within, cascading into the dead man. As his body filled, his body emptied; blood dripping up from bulging eyeballs into the nostrils at the end of Anubis' snout. When the embalming was complete it howled a morning howl.

Zombie Madness Instafreebie Collection - next 10 days

And so begins 10 days of zombie horror ebooks being given away over on Instafreebie! 

Get scared this halloween.

https://www.instafreebie.com/gg/O2baD7qdILwuAWMdgGhK

Halloween Horror Feast - Paranormal and Occult Free

Grab a free book for Halloween! Check out these Instafreebies!

https://www.instafreebie.com/gg/ZeKD8fgSd8t6yaErIalX

Horror collection promo

From the 16-18 October David Neth Books is hosting a promo for horror fans - head over to:

https://www.davidnethbooks.com/promo

And find yourself a deal. Looks like a good collection, but then I would say that with The Risen included!

New cover, new lease of life - The Risen

You can grab The Risen for free til midnight 3 October - after that, it'll be getting some promos to go along with its new cover, just to keep things ticking nicely over. This is a marked improvement:

So head on over and don't forget to review! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01H9VETZ4

Humanity's Hope by Pembroke Sinclair REVIEW 2/5

Even the cover is a bit misleading on this one. I hate to bash on another indie author, but Sinclair has quite a few books out all released in the last year and a bit. That could tell you something. This zombie story follows Caleb and his tryst with the authorities after he discovers a life-changing fact about himself - the clue is in the title - and then does a runner.

So much of this plot makes no sense: authorities who can't even use a little subterfuge and subtlety to get what they want (something they already had); a twist for the sake of a twist which leaves massive gaping holes in everything that happened previously; random events to push the plot, or convoluted decisions to push the plot (that even Caleb himself questions his motivations); and a protagonist with narcissistic tendencies (but in his defence, it's not his fault - at no point are we as readers left in any doubt about what he is thinking.) This is on-the-rail-writing, with tell-me back story and tell-me feelings: tell-me feelings that are repeated so often the only purpose is surely filler on the writer's behalf.

There's very little creativity here, phrases repeated, action repeated, tendrils of pain repeated, giving me tendrils of pain too. It's all very rote and by the book. Maybe I'm being harsh as this is aimed at the YA market - but don't they deserve something better? Both in writing, and plot? Honestly, Caleb is supposed to be a badass who has survived out there in 'the wild' among the zombies, but all he does throughout (and this isn't helped by the tell-me nature of the narrative) is whine, second-guess, and doubt himself. Maybe I'm forgetting what being a 17-year-old was really like!

Added to this is that it has no ending to speak of. Previous books of Sinclair are labelled volume if they are in a series, which this is not (yet). If there isn't to be a follow-up then I would definitely think about that ending. Helpfully, it would perhaps not burn plot holes in all that had just gone!

DailyFlash: Behind the Curtain

Faced with the curtain, he froze on the spot. Later he was able to laugh it off, thinking back to the sudden shock of panic that bolted down his legs, setting roots in his feet. He felt suddenly heavy, unable to even bend his knee; and his throat constricted with dry, sandy swallows. He was going to suffocate, drown in his own fear, his heart throttled by a tightening chest and lungs suffering nascent rigor mortis. Already, the fluid of decomposing enzymes dampened his palms, slipped like great sticky slugs down his temple.
     He heard his name, heard "What's keeping your daddy?" Such a sweet, but tired sounding voice.
     Daddy. Just like that, air swelled in his lungs until he was floating, whatever atmosphere his head was in was thin; was moist too, burning where eyes met lids until he blinked with life.