News and Events

Pandæmonium * House of Doors * Rotten Row

For anyone wondering what he has been up to lately: he was spotted by ace photographer Lucy Huntzinger at Twin Peaks in San Francisco. By the look of things, he has been plotting world domination.

Recommended Reading

Congratulations to Daniel Fox, whose Hidden Cities is listed by Locus Magazine as one of the recommended novels of 2011. (This automatically enters it for the Locus Best of Year poll).

Daniel Fox is better known as Chaz Brenchley - and if you haven't already discovered the trilogy he wrote under that name, you have a treat in store. But don't start with Hidden Cities, which is volume three, begin at the beginning with Dragon in Chains.

Pandæmonium

Here, with the publisher's consent, is a rough version of the cover for Pandæmonium, the srquel to Desdæmona, which has been winning such praise for new author Ben Macallan - or perhaps that should be: "Ben Macallan" (can't quite place that name? perhaps this will help) - who is also Chaz Brenchley.

Publication is not scheduled until November, but there may well be a sneak preview on March 17th, when Chaz will be at Borderlands Books in San Francisco with Caitlin Kittredge. He says: "We'll be reading new stuff. We'll do Q&A and signing too, of course; and after discussion about whether I ought to be Chaz Brenchley or Daniel Fox for the occasion, I think the vote has fallen on Ben Macallan. So I'll probably read a bit of Pandæmonium."

Meanwhile, you can read more about Desdæmona here.

Haunted Houses

Chaz Brenchley is widely respected as a creator of deliciously terrifying ghost stories, and as a participant in the Phantoms at the Phil events which have become a traditional part of Christmas on Tyneside. The Phantoms team have also dedicated themselves to introducing a chill into the summer air, and it is one of these unexpected summer stories that Chaz has contributed to House of Fear, an anthology of haunted house stories from Solaris books. House of Fear was published at the start of October, and is available for order from Amazon UK.

If a short story isn't enough, Chaz'z latest full length novel will satisfy the craving for more spookiness:

House of Doors was published in September, and is available from Amazon in the UK and in the US.

It is the first of two novels centred around a strange country house in the north of England that affects everyone who comes into contact with it - some for good, some for ill - in different time periods. He says:

"Ideas don't go away. Nor moulder, nor die. I don't quite know how it works, but they stay dormant in some back corner of my mind, only waiting for the opportunity to flourish.

More than a dozen years ago, I wrote a longish ghost story about a strange dark house called D'Espérance, in a wooded valley in the north of England. That story - The Keys to D'Espérance - is set just after the First World War, and I always meant to write more. I wanted to make a series, where the history of the house would echo the history of England through the twentieth century.

Time passes, things change. An old friend asks if I'd like to write for this new list she's building - and there is D'Espérance in my head again, fresh again. We did a two-book deal in two days, and I'm excited. I get to write about the Second World War, and about the 'Sixties. And about my really, really scary house...

The "old friend" is Kate Lyall Grant, now commissioning editor at Severn House, says: "I am thrilled to be reunited with Chaz Brenchley whom I first came across at Hodder and who, I think, is one of the most talented - and underrated - British horror/fantasy novelists writing today."

The sequel, House of Bells, is scheduled for publication on 28th March 2012; it is already available for order from Amazon UK.

Rotten Row

Chaz Brenchley's SF novella, Rotten Row, was published by PS Publishing in September 2011, and is available from the publisher.

Chaz explains that he always meant to be an SF writer, only he got distracted with other things:

...And by then we were in the 2000s and paranoia was the zeitgeist and I really wanted to write about that; and the ways I thought I could do it were all 'SFnal'. So at last I poked my toe in, another short story, only because Ian Whates cornered me at an event and wouldn't let me slither out of it; and I'm still no scientist but I found a way to make it work and the story - Terminal, since you ask - was shortlisted for the BSFA award and praised elsewhere, and the whole experience was so uplifting that I wanted to do it again.

More specifically, I didn't want to abandon this whole universe I'd built after one short story, there was so much more to say. I wrote a seedcorn story for Nature magazine, From Alice to Everywhere, With Love - and then I was in London for a one-day SF con, and the extraordinary Liz Williams was the other side of London signing books at Forbidden Planet, and I tore myself away from the con at lunchtime to go and find her.

What I didn't know, of course, was that more or less at the same time she was tearing herself away from FP to come and find the con. So we did rather magnificently miss each other; but in order to reach this failed rendezvous I had to walk through Hyde Park, and so found myself on Rotten Row for the first time in my life. And was still thinking about that, everything I knew about it as a place of parade and display, when I came out onto the street again and saw my first bicycle-rickshaw.

And those two things went clunk-click in my brain, history and contemporary melded into the future, and I missed Liz but headed for Oxford still thinking madly; and by the time I made it back to Juliet's I had the bones of Rotten Row firmly set in place.

Read more about Rotten Row - or read From Alice to Everywhere, With Love.

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