Zombies on the Streets of London...

Coming Soon: Apocalypse Barnes

Can you believe at one point last year I was updating this blog twice a month?

Anyway.

Apocalypse Barnes is now available for pre-order from Amazon at $0.99 or £0.99, depending where you are. That's a discounted price that will increase shortly after the official publication date of 17 July.

This 30,000 word novella is a story I began writing over four years ago, when it was based on the end of a dream I'd had (I hate even the thought of writing anything inspired by dreams, and almost everything I half-remember from that fevered night's imaginings has fallen by the wayside during the creative process). Zombies roaming the streets of Barnes, that affluent suburb of South West London just over the river from Hammersmith and Chiswick.

I've not spent the last four years working on this book. It's spent whole calendar years undisturbed and gathering dust on my hard drive while I worked on things like Story Of My Escape, or Of Mice And Men And Sausages. But it's been the idea that just won't quite go away. It was enormous fun writing about the area where I live. Really looking at places I visit every week, to see where a zombie might pop up, and how they might be avoided.

But it's a balancing act as well. Barnes residents will recognise almost every location used in the novella. But it also has to make sense to readers who've never visited the area. So I made a very early resolution to resist the temptation to write friends and family into the narrative; writers who do that sort of thing not only risk damaging their personal relationships, but it also gets pretty boring to read a book full of someone else's private jokes. So apart from one or two people's quirks who were just too hilarious to resist - and zombie Roger McGough - the classic disclaimer is true. Any resemblance to persons living or dead (or in this case both) is purely coincidental...