The void rumbles, hungry for sustenance. It needs flesh and will stop at nothing to be satiated.

My new horror novella, Feeding the Void, is set for release on 30^th October, and I’m so excited to finally get it out there. If you’d like to pre-order it for your Kindle for only 99p or 99c, you can do so right here!!

Anyway, that’s the promo out of the way. Now I’d like to share a little bit of the background on how I came to imagine and write this story.

I have a birthday tradition with one of my very good friends. Kel is my brother in metal. We’ve been playing music together for 30 years now (wow, that’s a long time). He’s the guitars, I’m the drums and without wanting to sound cliché or cheesy, we just have a great musical vibe together.

Anyway, when it comes around to Kel’s birthday I buy him a card and proceed to deface it with blasphemous pictures, words, and anything else I can think of. Usually it’s a cute kid’s card with princesses or fairies. My proudest year was putting corpse paint on Elsa and Anna.

But when it’s my birthday, Kel always manages to produce a piece of art.

On one of my birthdays (OK then, it was my 40^th!!!) Kel created a card for me with 40 severed fingers on it. It looked awesome (as you can see), and my first thought was ‘that’s a book cover!’ And from pretty much the day I received it, I knew I had to write a book about severed fingers.

The original title was going to be ‘Daddy’s Fingers’, as at the time I was spending plenty of time singing (in my metal voice I might add) Daddy Finger to my little girl. The story started to take form in my head. What if a kid found that their father had a vast collection of severed fingers in the basement? Because, you know, that’s how my mind works.

The writing began.

In the beginning the story was narrated as a small child might speak. Although this seemed like a good idea at the time, it didn’t work. I suppose it could excuse the bad grammar and typos, but no, it needed to change. Part one is still told through a child’s perspective, but nowhere near as babyish as the first draft.

Why was Daddy collecting fingers? I didn’t know at first. And then, I’m not sure from where it came, but the idea of severing said fingers during some kind of ancient sacrificial ritual was born.

But what ritual? And why? Well, that’s where the void came in. Perhaps I had been influenced (indirectly) by Kathe Koja’s The Cipher. The idea of a massive chasm of nothingness is something I find incredibly creepy. Why is it there? Is it dangerous? And so I went with it.

I’m not going to give the plot away for obvious reasons (it’s released on 30^th October remember), but as the story evolves, the fingers are no longer the main attraction.

The void is the star of the show and it is hungry. It needs to feed. Always.

Categories: writing

Tags: abyss, book promo, book promotion, chasm, feeding the void, horror, horror novella, horror pre order, indie horror