The Samuel Beckett of Self Promotion
By AlexThanks to Rob.
My children read books, listen to audio books, play DVD’s, video games etc..It is all a matter of proportion.
Any responsible parent will monitor their childs excess’s.
If not, then the child will abuse the rules.Personally, my favorite book is ‘End Game’ by Cuger Brant. One of his other books ‘Something Wicked This Way comes’ is a close second. This is from a totally impartial point of view. Just like a politician really.
Bruce Grant, England, United Kingdom
At first I thought Bruce had omitted his famous pen-name in a bid to get free advertising from the BBC, but then I noticed the bit about impartial politicians he’d tacked onto the end. I mulled it over while searching Amazon, and slowly came to realise that the whole thing is in fact a subtly disguised inside joke, and one with a very serious message. Bruce Grant is, of course, not being impartial in recommending his own output, and so the perceptive reader is led to the inescapable and frightening conclusion that politicians are not impartial, but have their own political, and party political, agendas. Omitting his trademark signature is simply a game he plays with the reader to challenge our budding intellects. I’m so glad I didn’t work this out until after I had clicked ‘Confirm Order’. Now, what promises to be one of the greatest works of political satire of this century, brimming with insightful absurdist humour, elegant prose and multiple layers of meaning, is winging its way to me. I can’t wait.
116 Responses to “The Samuel Beckett of Self Promotion”
Congratulations on your wise purchase Alex.
This is a terrorist thriller which would make a good film (so I was led to believe by an anonymous and helpful Amazon commenter)
I especially like how ‘Cuger’ gently wrests the titles of his novels from inferior talents like Samuel Beckett and Ray Bradbury. That’ll get him noticed.
Oh is the strike off?
Anyone else check out the Cugar Brant flicker page and notice a cold damp feeling of depression spreading over them, like lying in a puddle of urine?
…you did what?
Really? bastards the lot of them, not going to vote for any politician ever again,9% Growth for me from now on, at least their,(well Neil’s)agenda is otal out and out bollocks, thanks for pointing out Cug’s you are a genius.
So Cuger writes a book with the spectacularly unoriginal, Macbeth-quote title: “Something Wicked This Way Comes”.
Then in the introduction to his very next book, just a year later, he writes “To quote William Shakespeare in that ‘unmentionable’ play: ‘Something evil [sic] this way comes’”
How could anyone be such a lemur’s lady-place that they would misquote a quote they’ve used as one of their book titles?
Bruce Grant has children?
Yay, Cuger! He’s great. I hope his vanity publishing goes on and on. Do you think he’s found this site yet? he does strike me as someone who regularly (at least 7 times a day) googles his name(s).
He’s been at it elsewhere, too!
http://inthefield.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/02/spirit-of-the-mob-lives-on-in-london/
Followed almost immediately by this gem, after I imagine someone rumbled him:
“My sincerity is my children’s* future.” Wow. Just…wow. You can actually feel his ego through the monitor. What a twat. I feel an overriding urge to locate him and make his life a twisted misery. It would greatly amuse me, and my amusement is my non-existent childrens’ future.
*The possessive apostrophe goes after the “s” on plurals, you twunt. You’re supposed to be a writer.
Oh, yes. He most definitely seems to have found this site. If you go back to one of the original posts, right at the end he joins in.
I just can’t let it go without correcting, sorry.
An apostrophe goes after the ’s’, only on a plural ending with an ’s’ (i.e. “books”).
When the plural ends in a non-’s’, the apostrophe works as normal (i.e. “Children’s”)
I hate to say it, but you may be thicker than Cugar. Perhaps you should read ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’? You may learn something…
Well shit my bricks, looking back I did get that wrong. Don’t I feel like a cunt. Fortunately, I’m not supposed to be a writer. Or socially functional. I’ll be over here with the wires.
It’s not him in the other thread(!!!!), but SYB is well up in his googles so he must know.
Tech, I’ll see your inthefields (which is hilarious) and raise you his blog (search on myspace if that link doesn’t work). He started it on May the 14th and since then he’s regularly updated it every, erm, never.
I think “my outlet is the pen” may be a joke from one of Shakespeare’s comedies.
What a revelation. Party members are not impartial. Wow.
He’ll be telling us next that immovable objects don’t get about much.
Shouldn’t there be a full stop at the end of that sentence?
Oh well, we all make mistakes…
I got my copy through days ago and devoured i feverishly. It brimmed over with multiple layers of meaning or, rather, did not.
Rod – I meet your MySpace link (also hilarious) and lay down my trump card – an actual Cugar Brant short story!
http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/magazin/lit/24002/1.html
I think that might actually be the same story available via Amazon’s “look inside” – I’m not actually about to try and read through it to check.
Wayhay, Sod Amazon, Mrs That Bloke has just txt’d to say that she has found ‘End Game’ by our man Cuger in the Shelter charity shop, 50p a bargain!!
He’s been plugging himself on the Daily Mail website too as “storyman”. I suggest you all have a look. He’s even posted a free story for them.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/debatesearch/debateUserSearch.html?user=2738039
I’m so lonley
Sorry, don’t know how to do quote boxes, but this is from a post he made about Gordon Ramsay. Cuger remembers a story about GR serving some people rat and they thought it was chicken.
“Ever since i wondered if rat tasted like chicken but never had the nerve to try doing it.”
I’d like to nominate that for quote of the year. And if any of us ever get published it also goes on the cover as a promotional quote.
@Tech
I clicked your link and it is indeed the same story available on Amazon’s look inside, although here you get it in all its unabridged glory. There is also the option to translate it into German, and I found it actually made more sense that way.
That might have something to do with the fact I don’t speak German.
People, go EASY, he is a Gorilla! Explains a lot.
Oh, that polar bear story brought a tear to my eye – so moving, so touching, so searing, SO badly spelled. I too, feel like I have been poisoned by ’shrill’.
Was that really the Cugemeister posting on that earlier thread? Mr Brant, sir, can I get copies of your books, signed, PLEASE? I’ll explain the difference between species and genus for you in exchange. Y’know, for your next opus.
This is a randomly plucked quote from the short story. As far as I can tell, without reading it properly, some sort of medical bio-engineering has gone wrong and created an army of re-gens (”They have a sense of purpose, and their logic is most definitely not in their DNA, they have none!”) which are (somehow) threatening to take over. A plucky group of humans are resisting (I’m guessing) and at Fightback HQ 1 (probably) someone is explaining what they’re up against…
Cuger makes me smile. Seriously, if he turns up, let’s be nice to him, with his pudgy little fingers mashing away at the keyboard, tongue protruding with concentration, legs swinging from his chair. Bless.
A bit like having two identities.
Sorry, I’m taking it out of context. This is the bit that follows:
And then, he found he couldn’t resist. It was already on his screen. The “story”. Begging to be read. He knew he shouldn’t, but it sucked him in, it drilled into him, through his eyeballs, his optic nerve, direct to the synapses where it could do the most harm. Infecting his consciousness in exactly the same way a super-8 film of a steamroller crushing a melon being run backwards through a projector at high speed does, except not like that at all. Finally, it was completed. 5 minutes lost, forever. Wasted.
I’m sure I posted the original quote here on another board, but I can’t see where I did it. I vividly remember the ‘excess’s’.
My real name’s Rob too so this is all a bit of a headfuck as I don’t remember sending it to SYB.
Oh well.
To be fair though, if it was a choice between one of Cuger’s offerings and Dan Brown’s latest “masterpiece”, I know which I’d be taking with me on a long-haul flight.
The reader of Mr Poo’s comment looked up from the screen he had been looking at where the comment had been written, paused for a second, pointlessly, then thanked him, in writing, on the screen.
I was just about to make that exact point Paranoid Mandroid. In fact I was thinking of preparing a game of ‘Brown or Brant’, but stopped quickly in case I died.
Oh shit, having read those ’snippets’ of Cuger’s work, I fear Mrs That Bloke has just blown 50 of my hard earned pence on that Brant book in Shelter, I fear that is going to be nothing more than high class bog roll.
Apparently he ‘detonated a dirty bomb’ in tunbridge wells: http://www.kentnews.co.uk/kent-news/Author-destroys-Tunbridge-Wells-__-again-newsinkent12766.aspx?news=local
A storyline involving Tunbridge Wells being destroyed (twice) quite appeals, especially when Cuger describes it as “typical middle England. It represents anywhere in the UK” (fuck off it does) and, of course, he lives there as well.
Just wasted ten minutes reading Cuger Brant’s “Clone”. It’s almost like a car crash – I couldn’t look away as the story lurched between its predictable plot points with scintillating dialogue like that from the extract below:
P.S. I checked and he has the giant number wrong.
Ahh cuger what you lack in verbosity you easily make up for by being a massive cunt. Royal tunbridge wells? You could be the new L Ron Hubbard. Fucking narcissists.
That was the only thing that was “right” about the entire extract you quoted.
(The surgeon hesitantly replied reassuringly.)
@Chris ‘Apparently he ‘detonated a dirty bomb’ in tunbridge wells: http://www.kentnews.co.uk/kent-news/Author-destroys-Tunbridge-Wells-__-again-newsinkent12766.aspx?news=local‘
I’m disappointed that Cuger is not wearing his feathery hat in that pic. I liked the last line through – “it must be remembered that these books are fictional”. Yes -fictional, or ‘crap in a truly wonderful and compelling way’. I agree, he’s far far better than Dan fkn Brown.
the surgeon, unpaid bill
Depends what Cugar means. He’s right if he’s talking about the number of Davids on the last square (2^63). He’s wrong if he means the number of Davids on the board (2^64 – 1).
He’s even more wrong if it’s the total number of David-years represented by all of the Davids on the board (about 2^65).
The bit he did get right was “That’s an awful lot of years”. Indeed. A big lot. I’d go as far as to say that it was bigger than big, it’s a a large lot of years.
Oh, I was in Tunbridge Wells at the weekend. It is actually quite normal. A distressingly high number of oriental rug shops, mind. Perhaps that’s the problem.
I’m pretty sure Cuger is Garth Marenghi.
Who can forget such classics as ‘Crab!!’, which sees a giant crab terrorising Clacton? Or ‘Afterbirth’, in which a mutated placenta attacks Bristol?
‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ is practically the title of a Darkplace episode.
I sort of want to buy the book as a joke Christmas present but I’m scared it’d just encourage him
I assumed he was talking about the total number of Davids when you added up all the squares. The question “what would the David have” is pretty ambiguous though, as it doesn’t really make sense. Oh well, at least we can agree that the writing is terrible.
The blog’s wonderful too
Oh, and I was so excited.
Methinks you have cordially invited the throes of misery into my heart.
You put Andy Buxton Kadir, Neil Craig and Cuger Brant together in a locked room. You tell each of them, separately, that the other two are…
A) Orgasmically-dysfunctional, mentally ill, pregnant, migraine sufferers.
B) Murderous, organ-harvesting, BBC-Nazi, world-government agents.
C) A pair of assimilated The Davids.
-
Q1. Who’s the last man standing?
Q2. Would you buy a DVD of this event?
‘Poisoned by sea cod, which in turn were poisoned by shrill, which in turn were poisoned by foul smelling, poisoned algae.’
Pure fucking gold.
Methinks this article would be better if it was called “The Bamuel Seckett of Self Promotion”, if I’m right*.
* – Which I never am so I don’t know why I mentioned it.
But what poisoned the algae?
@FP. I’ll take two! Andy KD, Cugerama, and Neily-weily – the mighty triumvirate of chuckles.
Bigger Davids have smaller Davids upon their backs to bite them; and smaller Davids have smaller Davids, and then add Cuger Brant and you can seriously fuck up some sayings and axioms.
I’m just going to replace a word here and there:
‘The Cuger issued an edict: BREED. The Cuger thought.’
‘”Yes,” the professor answered in a mild tone, collecting himself and building himself up for the finale. “King-Pin. It’s an engineering term, the key which holds the entire machine together, not forgetting, we are most definitely dealing with a machine.’
‘A computer, by all intents and purposes is, just a machine. Without the King-Pin, the machine grinds to a halt. I am trying to bring you down to the basics. The Cuger is the kingpin. If he is taken out of the equation then the whole machine breaks down well, that is the theory.” He had finished his speech and looked back at the speaker and nodded.’
Nodded! He fucking nodded!!
I’m glad Bruce Grant exists. I often wonder what kind of horrors most HYSers could wreak if they only had the gumption to actually do anything beyond post on HYS
Grant appears to, and yet fails miserably. I find that reassuring
I have a horrible vision of the power of SYB resulting in a large number of twats buying his books “ironically”, some halfwit at a publishing house looking for the British Dan Brown, thinking he fits the bill and publishing him with heavy marketing (after getting a proper writer to fix up his drivel), and finally Burnt Cager* selling the film rights for millions. I just hope you can live with your consciences.
*Mmmmm, Jeremy Clarkson in a wicker man.
@FunnyPeculiar, I would most certainly buy the DVD. The very thought made me giggle at my computer like I haven’t done for ages.
There’s a HYS at the moment asking people if they would be prepared to change their diet in order to save the planet. Obviously the answer is a resounding “no”, and a number of HYSers are taking the opportunity to wax lyrical on one of their favourite subjects: population growth.
There was a recent issue of New Scientist which discussed this issue, and there was a great quote (forget who it was by) that said something like: “When people talk about reducing the world’s population, you can rest assured they aren’t talking about themselves, their friends, or their neighbours.”
Lovely how he calls himself Geoff Liberty, but believes the Government should step in to stop everyone else breeding.
Geoff Liberty is only jealous because he isn’t getting the chance to procreate,so in essence he doesn’t have to change his lifestyle to help the population problem as he isn’t getting any anyway.
@The Wrongnob. I really hope that happens, just so I could say I was there.
To be honest though I feel kind of bad ridiculing him for this. I mean I don’t think he’s a nasty person – just a bit up himself and lacking in research and writing skills. If it weren’t for his ‘my favourite book…’ comments and constant assumption that nobody else has heard of the things he thinks are of world saving importance, he would just be someone indulging in a hobby he loves. Basically I feel a bit smug and self satisfied taking the piss.
Although, having said that, I can’t claim any real superiority to him in any way, so maybe taking the piss is alright. Maybe it will even inspire a new book in him called “What’s in a Brane?” about how the Millenium Bug infects the minds of the contributors to a sarcastic blog and fills their brains with random objects that make them behave in odd ways. The hero of the book has to round them all up (by working out what’s in their brain and so predicting their behaviour) before their internal clocks are reset to BREED and they give all their money to IT companies.
Hmmm – this writing business is harder than it looks.
Nor does Cuger, apparently.
Oh, I saw a similar ‘discussion’ (because it’s nothing of the sort, is it – a discussion involves dialogue) on TimesOnline after Lord Stern’s comments. It collected a similar amount of depressing cuntery, in fact, over 700 comments worth of the stuff.
Here’s a classically stupid example:
It goes on, but I don’t want it to.
Then I found this:
Yes, it needs wider examination, as long as the result of the wider and full examination isn’t anything that disagrees with Johnny. Because obviously, if the wide and full examination that’s going on now gives us the result that we should eat less or no meat to reduce our carbon footprint, then that’s not wide enough. No, it needs to be wide enough an examination that it will by default agree with whatever position that Johnny takes up. Otherwise it’s a waste of time, and you’re just trying to dupe everyone.
There’s someone who thinks that the problem with millions of cows, sheep and pigs can be extrapolated to bears (including polar bears) and deer (because when I drove from Houston to El Paso a few years ago, I drove for fully 15 minutes past pens of cows ready for slaughter, then for another 15 minutes past pens of bears ready for slaughter) and someone who thinks that this is hilarious…
…but I think what he was hearing was the dark, hollow laughter of my soul appreciating the irony of a good cross section of our fucking failing species being completely ignorant to the fact that they’re a good example of why our species is such a fucking depressing failure.
Fuck you guys. I’m buying a boat and sailing for Minerva Reefs.
Does anyone know if the postal strike is affecting amazon deliveries? Only it’s my birthday and I asked TYF for the entire work of Cuger Brant* and nothing’s arrived yet.
*Or Grab E Cunt as we call him.
Ah but…
@Bit Special AKA La Spesh, it probably is affecting Amazon deliveries, but Cuger will have a special team of David’s to ensure his works get to the people.
My mind is boggling now, what was previously described, and was it described in our favourite authors inimitable manner?
JC
‘illegals taking over are national parks’?
I hate it when these fucking foreign parks come over and steal our grass and trees and shit.
ER Cuntgrab
That comment suggests to me that blind or disabled people are merely ’scum’, whereas the able-bodied unemployed are SCUM.
What a cant burger.
I took out a lifetime subscription to his edited highlights years ago, and I’ve received nothing but empty envelopes.
That discussion was about George Osborne’s tough budget cuts as Chancellor. The actual question included this part:
The middle classes face big cuts in benefits under his plans, with no tax credits for families earning more than £50,000 a year and a new child trust fund limited to the poorest third in society.
Dipshits there saw “benefits” and the intelligence deficit disorder kicked right in, didn’t realise he was talking about their child benefits and tax credits and went for the jugular.
Writers are supposed to be observant. Bruce couldn’t observe a fucking truck heading for him on a straight trajectory, and he certainly couldn’t observe that Epic Press were going to skin him for his hundreds of pounds and make him look like a twat.
Damn, if I didn’t come up with a great new anagram of his name and then fail to have an interesting comment to post.
It just gets worse…
Shit, me too.
@Jesus Chris, I don’t think the Cuger need have worried then, ‘cos there is no way he is on £50,000 with the drivel he churns out.
shit on blockquotes..
Thanks ER Cuntgrab I’m cured.
“Cunt barger”, you say?
Meanwhile, over on the Graun’s ‘Last Night’s TV page’…
I wonder whether he ever posts on B-BBC?
An erudite rant, shame the chap is lemmings loose labia
@Jesus Chris (re: climate/diet change)
There are some choice fillets of idiocy from BBC’s HYS on this topic now. Aside from someone coining (as far as I’m aware) the term ’smugbeards’ which is pretty good, there’s the usual fantastic display of ignorance and hipocrisy:
Now, as we all know, vegetarians tend to die young due to a lack of Frosties in their diets, but Lesley’s star point is how fishing damages ocean floors, but intensive cattle farming doesn’t damage the atmosphere or Earth.
I sometimes imagine the brains of these people. I think such a brain would be arranged in a two-compartment arrangement. The brain-controller sits in one compartment, knowing everything. Truths are written in crayon on greaseproof paper and stuck to his office wall. It’s his job to fish ideas out of the second compartment (the one allowed access to the world) and send them to either the Anger Cortex, Ridicule Node or Outrage Lobe. Other ideas are allowed to immediately flow back out.
Also, ‘cowtow’ is a good pun.
“numbers usa says we lose 3 million acers a year to these illegal invaders in our country? not only that but illegals taking over are national parks and cutting trees down to plant weed dope crops georgia?”
Wait…what? I’m confused – does Frank really think alien invaders means Mexicans and Haitians are cutting down trees to plant dope, as opposed to 3 million acres being taken over alien invasive plants? Does he really imagine that Yellowstone has shanty towns of brown people cutting down pines and broiling Yogi and BooBoo over Old Faithful? Christ on the proverbial…
Fuck me! REALLY ???
Isn’t science amazing? All these clever ideas that allow us to carry on functioning without being so destructive to the world around us. Only this morning, I pissed in a specially-designed trough that carried the liquid away, instead of leaving my mark on the wall near to where I sleep.
I’ve even heard of a breakthrough technique called “wanking” that can prevent you from spurting all over whatever messageboard you’re reading when your baser urges get the better of you.
@Shackleton – Word!
To be fair, I think she means it damages the coral – coral being the furniture and fittings of the ocean floor.
The Worlds ego eh? Not a slip of the keyboard there Harry, thinking of yourself and you self important ranting?
I wondered how long it would take for the immigrunt to be blamed for eco-calamity.
Shouldn’t Cuger be a Regular Twat by now?
@Cheb Ghobbi, nah he surpasses regular twatness-he is the living breathing twat-o-tron
“we lose 3 million acers a year to these illegal invaders”
They come over here, stealing our laptops…
“What part of OMNIVOROUS means humans don’t need to eat meat?”
Even as an unabashed meat lover (stop laughing at the back) I’d guess it’s the “omni” bit…
Now you try that at home. If you can actually manage to say “It gets even stranger Jamie” pensively, you sound like a bit part actor in the worst B movie of all time. That’s sheer writing class – awful plot, no characterisation but to actually make the characters sound like awful B movie actors too…..man, he has talent.
I have nothing to say and yes, I added the apostrophe. But Cuger himself has a Kalashnikov approach to punctuation, so I’d consider it an homage.
Why didn’t Nanuk eat his dead mum? Waste not, want not. Stupid polar bears deserve to be extincted.
@ Shackleton
Fucking right. We need a diagram…
I want Harry to have India turn up and decide to live in his front garden, just to test how tiny man is and see how little an effect it’ll have on his begonias.
The HYS on “Blair for EU President” is producing the expected amounts of anti-bLiar bile, and to be fair, I agree that there is no way he should simply be “installed” as president. But some of them the criticism he’s receiving does make me laugh
Yeah, how dare he not give us a vote on mass immigration. How dare he not give us a vote on something that started 5 years before he was even born! The bastard. And where was my vote on the Repeal of the Corn Laws, might I ask Mr Blair?
Blair also didn’t give us the vote on the decolonisation of the British Empire (National Anthem playing in my head) nor the abolition of slavery!
In the great spirit of democracy, hark at the idiots having their say on TOL on the papers that sketch out money-saving electoral reforms. It was the standard fair until I found this:
Bob doesn’t realise he only has to move his fat arse off the sofa… maybe get a bus. But if he ever wants to achieve his life’s dream of gently tugging on Nick Griffin’s balls while being rimmed by Andrew Brons, then he’ll have to go to Brussels.
Fair? Fare.
Fucking painkillers.
I came very close to buying a Cuger Brant book. I might yet. It is fucking funny.
I wet myself just reading the highlights here. Christmas sorted.
Can’t wait to see that quoted on the back of the paperback version..
“It is f***ing funny” ~ Nelson of SpEak You’re bRanes
Again, nothing to say.
Nothing to see here. Carry on.
See how many grammatical, syntactical and factual errors YOU can spot in this passage, worthy of comparison with the best of “The Eye of Argon”.
“”King Pin?” A by now, nervous, unsure as if he were on the same wavelength as the rest, officer interceded from the very attentive audience.
“Yes,” the professor answered in a mild tone, collecting himself and building himself up for the finale. “King-Pin. It’s an engineering term, the key which holds the entire machine together, not forgetting, we are most definitely dealing with a machine.
A computer, by all intents and purposes is, just a machine. Without the King-Pin, the machine grinds to a halt. I am trying to bring you down to the basics. The David is the kingpin. If he is taken out of the equation then the whole machine breaks down well, that is the theory.” He had finished his speech and looked back at the speaker and nodded.”
Quite, quite magnificent.
Wasn’t it photosynthesising bacteria or something which caused some of the most drastic change to the atmosphere in earth’s history? Just if we’re going to talk microbes…
Yup. The little bastards pumped the hitherto friendly atmosphere with a ridiculously active and toxic chemical which scientists call “oxygen”. Blue-green algae wiped out almost all earth life. Oxygen-tolerant, chem-warfare-farting little buggers. It is a little-known fact that cyanobacteria were proto-muslim and their calcinous deposits led to the formation of primitive mosques which utterly replaced the oxygen-intolerant, church-building anaerobes. A lesson for us all methinks.
Has The Cuger become aware of his SYB following? This post on HYS’ “Does Twitter matter?” discussion made me wonder:
Although I do quite like the bit about all lifeforms using the internet.
Sounds like it from here.
Can you imagine the excitement he must be feeling – his little heart fluttering as he lurks in the shadows, noticed at last by the litterati of SYB! Kind of makes it all worthwhile, all that laborious ejaculation of his seed in a pearl(s-of-wisdom) necklace into the faces of the internet blog whores.
“But now what?” I hear him ask. “I have their attention, and I love it, but what would The David do next?”
He’ll probably write a book about it. It’ll be an Epic.
I use the internet regularly to order my Cuger Brant books. Apparently he’s in league with John Adair of Speakyourbranes, Hull, and Neil Craig of Fantasyland, Glasgow, and has a similar disconnect with reality.
ooooo, I like the sound of being a litterati
He also plugs himself mercilessly on his own myspace page. I found this confusing, grammatically incorrect, self-promoting drivel on his myspace blog:
“My First Blog, Here Goes;
I like writing ‘What if’ Stories. To me, writing is an art of creation, no different than a painter who puts his concepts on canvas. In contrast I put mine on paper. My tools are not paints and brushes mixed and applied with a delicate, masterful hand. My tools are a process of using my beliefs, my life experience and my hopes (as a painter) but my outlet is the pen.
I spend countless hours writing, adjusting, re-examining, altering, pruning and adding. In the end I have created something that, I hope, book readers will find different, entertaining and food for thought.
My last book ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes..’ Has proven rather prophetic, it was written two years ago.
It is a collection of frightening ‘What If’ stories. The nightmarish scenarios include amongst others; a nano- technological experiment going wrong, Genetic engineering with a sinister twist, Global warming out of control and the title story, ‘Something Wicked This Way comes….
What do you think the most worrying thing which comes first, concerning the governments of the world agenda’s? Terrorism? Global Warming ? No! It is the outbreak of a pandemic!
‘Something Wicked This Way Comes,’ is about a Bird Flu virus which crosses the human barrier and spreads as easily as the common cold. This is a tale of what will happen if a virulent, pathogenic virus mutates into a human strain, with a proven mortality rate of sixty percent, spreads around the globe.It is a story of how the virus starts and spreads amongst the local population of …you’ve guessed it, Tunbridge Wells! It gives a horrifying description of the spread of the virus, the symptoms, the consequences of blind panic, fear and our ability to survive a pandemic in this day and age.
Of course that is all behind us now, you think perhaps? Not so! The Spanish flu pandemic started up as an irksome little abnormal virus with a sporadic, insignificant mortality rate, quite unnoticed in the spring of 1918. In the autumn something changed, to this day no one knows what, as a consequence however, 50.000.000 people died worldwide. THAT was when it took you a week to sail to America, a month to sail to China. How long does it take you now? At this point I must apologise, I do tend to get on my high horse at times and rant. Have you heard of a Dirty Bomb? Well if not, you had better learn fast! That is the subject of one of my little books.
As I perceive things, it is not ‘what if’ any more, it is… When.
If you like my subject matter come by again.
If not, Don’t blame me when you thought you have just escaped a situation by the skin of your teeth only to find something is missing off your body, or growing on it, or perhaps, noticing it glowing in the dark!!”
I love the thought that he actually meant that last sentence dead seriously.