From the opening to THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN . . .

He saw Jonette in her running gear, expertly sizing up a glacier. Ice was all crystal and diamond around her. Her gaze was sharp and her legs were smooth and bare, shorts pink, shoes green, her singlet an iridescent blue. When she touched his face he felt a touch of warmth, as if winter couldn’t affect her. At first he wanted to ask her what she thought she was doing here, and when she’d be home, but he saw a figure waiting beneath an arch of snow.

“Who’s that?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, frowning, “but do you know you’re covered in blood?”

He looked down at his ravaged arms and legs. He hadn’t noticed it before, but he lay crumpled in ice and rock.

There was thunder like a great trumpet blast across the peaks of the ranges, and he saw how Jonette shuddered, but refused to yield.

From the opening to THE RAYS SLIP AWAY . . .

His eyes cross thirty years’ distance. That cold blue gazes at me from a glossy centre page of the Sunday Supplement colour magazine, a four-paragraph profile of Michael Kei, now sixty-six years of age, recently retired CEO of Eternity Sound & Screen. That name a wolf whistle, I imagine, to others in the know. In exquisite London I expect there have been many who know, and my fevered dreams tell me they multiply like fleas.

Thirty years I’ve kept myself an inert parasite; I’ll never rejoin his blood-stained circus of fleas and flies. Call me a contaminated woman, but one who’s otherwise free.

The story he spins today is that something of a health scare (“I don’t need to elaborate on personal matters, wouldn’t you agree?”) has made him relinquish his interest and equity in ES&S and return to his starting place. I see the lie. How can there be a health scare? Michael Kei will either luxuriate in ecstasy or be dead; there’s no possibility of an in-between.

What I mean to say is that this man has no middle ground. He’s this evening’s thunder, moaning across the skies of my countryside’s plains and valleys. He’s the howling wind worrying at every crack and corner of my house, making it shiver.

From the Prologue to BLACK MOUNTAIN . . .

The dream always goes like this: a man in a pale blue shirt and pale blue trousers is standing in a small bare room. A creature with no face is with him. This creature, something like a man, shuffles across the cold hard floor and reaches out to him.

The way it puts its hand out is clearly not a threat, only a supplication. If the creature had the ability to speak through the small red gash that is its mouth, it looks for all the world as if it would make a plea for help.

Its palm is unlined and perfectly white. Like its face, it too has no features.

The creature feels blindly around with its hand until it finds the man’s wrist and pulls it hard to its own throat. The man snatches his hand away, but the thing uses all its strength to press his hand back to its throat, holding the fingers around its delicate windpipe.

Begging.

The man’s face is full of horror, which changes to terrible pity as the creature’s eyes fill with tears.

Then a change comes. 

As the man’s hand is held locked to the creature’s milky throat, human features slowly take shape. A face forms.

It’s his own. The creature acquires his face.

And soon the man is looking at himself, is strangling his own image.

PS

In keeping with recent newsletters, we've used artwork from past, current and future publications throughout the newsletter. This week, NICKY'S NEWSROUND features cover art by Graham Humphreys for Sean Hogan's ENGLAND'S SCREAMING and THAT'S ALL FOLKS features Christine Clevercrow's endpaper artwork for THE RAYS SLIP AWAY. She also provided the covers for all three of our Venero Armanno books

You can check out more of their work here:

• CLEVER CROW https://www.clevercrow.com/
• GRAHAM HUMPHREYS https://grahamhumphreys.com/