Seven years ago, I was sorting through a bag of donated men’s underwear (used) at my charity job when my phone pinged. An email from George at Unsung Stories: they loved Pseudotooth and they wanted to publish. After two years of fruitless querying, my weird book had finally found a home. I bought the cheapest bottle of supermarket champagne available and ordered a Chinese.

Today came the sad news that Unsung Stories is closing down. It didn’t come as a shock, but it’s a huge blow nonetheless. The loss of Unsung is going to leave a big hole in British speculative fiction. It’s the little guys who take the creative risks, putting their strength behind books the bigger publishers won’t touch. We’re all poorer when an indie goes under. Most of all, it sucks to see my friends having a hard time.

Without Unsung Stories, I wouldn’t be where I am today. Which isn’t to say I’m writing this on a veranda in Tuscany, but I’m pretty damn content. I’ve got a new novel out in July, a comic too, and I’m sitting on a nice little mountain of published short stories. I’ve met so many new friends through Unsung and had so many opportunities I would never otherwise have had. Without Unsung, I would never have found myself on the main stage at MCM Comic Con telling that one anecdote about my uncle in France and the spider sex cheese. (Don’t ask.) Unsung produced Pseudotooth so beautifully, fully understanding what I wanted to say with it and why. I’m incredibly grateful.

Pseudotooth is mine again – all rights have returned to me – and I need to decide on its future. I could self-publish or search for a publisher who deals with reprints. At the moment, I don’t know. I just don’t want it to vanish. As it stands, the last copies of the novel are for sale in the Unsung shop for £2.99, which is a lot of paperback for your buck. When they’re gone, they’re gone.

Treasure your small publishers, folks. Buy something weird today.

The Old Ways Issue celebrates landscapes, the way we navigate them, and the stories we tell about them. Pilgrimages and rituals of crossings, tales of malevolent lights luring travellers off the path, patterns in the landscape, invisible lines of force, the mystery of megaliths. In these pages we explore the sea, the marshland, rivers and fields, stone circles, the moors, and the enigma of outer space to unearth the stories that fascinate us and to acknowledge how they’ve shaped us.

HELLEBORE is a collection of writings and essays devoted to folk horror and the themes that inspire it: folklore, myth, history, archaeology, psychogeography, and the occult. 

Featuring words by Katy Soar and Niall Finneran, Kenneth Brophy, Francis Young, Verity Holloway, Madeleine Potter, Icy Sedgwick, and Darren Pih. Artwork by Clare Marie Bailey and Nathaniel Hébert.

Edited by Maria J. Pérez Cuervo.

My historical horror novel, The Others of Edenwell, is out on the 4th of July 2023. Look at the beautiful cover Titan Books have given it. Pre-order, but do not, under any circumstances, venture into Choke Wood…