If I only were a goth ...

Not that I haven't been through that phase, and not that it hasn't left the odd trace on my psyche. Welcome to my latest flashback ...


Synopsis: London, 1929 – It isn’t easy being a fashionable flapper and emulating your silver screen heroines when you live in a poky East End terrace with your war-widowed mother, your over-achieving sister, and such disreputable and drunken lodgers as you can find to help pay the bills, as sixteen-year-old Lucy “Lucille” Kitson can testify. However, their newest lodger – a young writer from the jazzy metropolis of New York – is far more to her liking, and it’s only a shame that he has to be concealing a secret that makes him a marked man, and endangers all who befriend him.

Pulled into a dark supernatural world, and into an even darker scientific one, Lucy Kitson finds her priorities and her survival equally challenged - hard lessons that she must endure if she is to help put an end to the “Healers”, their murderous nocturnal predations, and their sinister designs that threaten the lives and souls of thousands.

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I began writing this novel during 2007 while teaching English in Beijing and feeling nostalgic for the UK, the Jazz Age, and my gothy youth ... It was initially conceived as a children's book, but became gradually darker and more enmeshed in adult themes and hard(ish) science fiction as the plot thickened. It isn't graphically horrific, though, and generally suitable for anyone who could stomach the inferi scene in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

It was written while heavily under the influence of C S Lewis' Cosmic Trilogy (especially That Hideous Strength), but is not overtly Christian themed, and certainly not evangelical. Another influence, as mentioned in my first post here, was scriptwriter Robert Holmes, who had a penchant for sometimes whimsical yet sometimes gritty gothic horror in the East End ...

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Please visit Mushroom Ebooks - Lucille and the Healers for sample chapters. Or find it on Amazon for Kindle (and if you do, please consider leaving a nice review, or at least not leaving a horrible one ...). And please do email me any feedback you have. It might encourage me to write more, to learn to write better, or to stop before I become a threat to civilisation ...