Yesterday I did my stuff at St Ivo School, Cambridgeshire. The above headline is no comment on the school or the wonderful welcome I received there: I’m referring to one of the most astonishing pieces of art inspired by my stories that it’s yet been my privilege to see. Feast yer eyes on THIS:

Yes, it’s a recreation of The Gladiator Pits from The Black Tattoo! Close examination of the above pic will reveal fabulous and amazingly life-like clay models of various Hell denizens including Gloag Shargle, Ripitith Gunch, Jocasta, Lord Slint and several Chinj.

These monsterpieces were spawned as the result of a competition amongst St Ivo’s Year 7. Choosing one winner and one runner-up out of all this awesomeness was almost impossible, but I gave first prize to Izzy for her deliciously sinister vision of The Scourge:

The runner-up prize I awarded to Anna, for her endearingly vile Leo the Unspeakable:

That’s some beautifully rendered mandible slime, I think you’ll agree. And the single bloodshot eye is a lovely touch.

I gave three talks, to a total of three hundred students.

The signing at lunchtime seemed pretty popular, and I was delighted to see that my new mutant baby, Crawlers, was the favourite of my three books sales-wise.

A huge and gleeful thank you to everyone I met at St Ivo for a thoroughly brilliant day. 😀

Kind of Crawlers-related, especially (heh!) when the legs come out… have you seen this amazing time-lapse video of a giant spider crab shedding its old shell?

I first spotted it on one of my favourite blogs, Pink Tentacle. As one of the YouTube commenters aptly put it, “Aaaaww, must feel so good.”

PS: For my latest post to Trapped By Monsters – about two brilliant books that I read recently – click here.

This weekend UK national newspaper The Independent published a feature listing The 50 Best Summer Reads, as chosen by a panel including TBM‘s own Ali Sparkes.

Guess what was number 22?

Before anyone gets tempted to start yelling ‘fix’, here’s a review on TBM in which Ali talks about Crawlers in a bit more detail. As she told me when I emailed to thank her for that, if she’d thought the book stank she “just would not have mentioned it. ;)”

Thanks, Ali! I owe you some fudge, that’s for sure. 😀

This one’s from Books For Keeps:

“[…] When ‘a long line of spider-like creatures’ starts to emerge from the air vents of the theatre’s foyer, the stage is set (so to speak) for a schlock horror story which, in some moments at least, is definitely not for the faint-hearted, though it must be said that its pacing is brilliant and all the more remarkably so in a narrative which is skilfully compressed into something just under six hours of a particular evening. Horror apart, however, Enthoven’s novel merits considerable notice in its nicely observed delineation of gender roles and social nuances; this in other words is a novel for a readership some distance beyond what the horror genre usually targets.”

It’s a very positive review and I’m pleased, of course. But – like most of the reviews by adults that I seem to get for my books – it’s a bit “I wouldn’t normally like this sort of thing, but…”

For contrast, here’s this:

“Crawlers had me reading non stop for two days… I LOVED IT. It was insane, thrilling, and how do I put this… AMAZING!!!!!”

An especially big thank you to Christina, 14, from Canada, who sent me these kind words via my Facebook profile. 😀

Two quick pieces of news about The Black Tattoo. First up, I’m thrilled and delighted to say that I’ve been interviewed about the book for Fresh Dawgs’ Book Blog, a new site written and produced by young readers in the USA.

My thanks and best wishes to MG, who kindly described Black Tat as “so exciting you can’t put it down.” For his interview questions and how I answered them, click here.

Second thing, THIS:

It’s the book’s Romanian edition! It’s a paperback, and a fine-looking item as you can see. I have now learned that the Romanian word for bats is the rather beautiful ‘lilieci’. Something new every day in this job. ;D

Meanwhile: my latest post for Trapped By Monsters is a FREE STORY IDEA – yours to take and do with what you will. Hit the link and help yourself.

The cartoon in the ‘In the City’ column of the current issue of my favourite satirical magazine Private Eye made me giggle like a loon. But I couldn’t help but be struck by a strange resemblance.

In the style of their Lookalikes feature, I present the following:

‘Tim, Defender of the Earth’

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‘Awesome Cartoon by Robert Thompson, In The City / Private Eye June 2010’

—

Snee hee hee!

Sam

PS: Long-term followers of my online shenanigans may recollect that this is not the first time that Tim, or someone very like him, has made an appearance in Private Eye. 😀

The onslaught continues! Here’s a link to another interview, this time about Crawlers, for terrific new horror fan website Snakebite Horror.

This one contains an exclusive sneaky early announcement of thrilling developments afoot at Trapped By Monsters. Take a look. ;D

OK, this is something I’m really proud of: I’ve been interviewed by G-Fan Magazine – the official periodical of The Godzilla Society of North America! To my enormous glee and delight I was approached by Allen Debus, one of the magazine’s writers, who’d read Tim, Defender of the Earth, liked it, and wanted to put together a feature about me. I’ve just received my copy of G-Fan’s Spring issue. Here, below, is how the piece ended up.

Ahem: as you’ll no doubt figure, these are my own ham-fisted scans of the actual pages of the magazine. I tried to darken the print a bit to make it more readable – with, erm, somewhat mixed results as you can see! If the pages aren’t reproduced clearly enough for you, my apologies. The text will be going up on the Tim Interviews Page just as soon as The Mighty WebSphinx can get on the case. 😀

Just a quick post to let you know that The Mighty WebSphinx has come through with some important updates to the website of my debut novel The Black Tattoo. She’s straightened up the Editions and Links pages. No less than eight recent questions and answers have been added to the Black Tat Q&A Page. We’ve also put together a radical new look for the Black Tat Reader Art Page. From now on, any Black Tat-inspired imagery that my readers choose to share with me can be uploaded to my Flickr photostream to appear in this stunning slideshow:

Meanwhile for a slightly obscure early hint about Phase Four of My Sinister Masterplan To Conquer the Universe, click here.

Mwaha. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Ali Sparkes, Mark Robson, Tommy Donbavand and I have returned from our show at the Lincoln Book Festival. One of us returned inside a monster. But all of us will bear the psychological scars of what transpired…

After an opening section in which the monsters allowed each of us thirty seconds to plead pathetically not to be eaten, we were hurled straight into a Word By Word Story Round. Two kind young volunteers from the audience did their best to keep our choices out of the gutter, but in vain: I think this pic below captures the exact moment I shouted the word “UDDERS“.

A cavalcade of humiliations followed. Mark made us fart. Ali made us run like girls. Tommy made us race to turn three more unlucky audience volunteers into mummies using special toilet paper that (as he gleefully explained) had ‘only been used once.’ For my round, we recreated the mind-controlling spider-like parasites from Crawlers using rubber gloves attached to sausage balloons stuffed down the backs of our shirts…

I invited the audience to take on the role of the Queen in the book, giving commands to her hapless victims that we poor authors had no choice but to obey…

Of course they were absolutely merciless. I think this (below) is us all obeying the order to ‘roll on the floor like babies.’

After a Q&A section in which we attempted to regain whatever limited authorial dignity we’d possessed at the start of the show, it was time for our closing statements – a last chance to beg for our lives before the audience was given the opportunity to vote for whoever they thought should receive the dreaded condiment of doom.

It was at this point that the drama of our predicament became too much for Ali, who – for reasons that remain unclear – suddenly burst into a spontaneous rendition of Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You.’ This was clearly a step too far for our audience, and – still claiming desperately that her Blue Peter Badge might scratch the monster’s delicate intestinal passages – Ali was dragged from the stage by our monster jailer Simon to begin her, ahem, Alimentary Adventure.

Maybe I was just relieved not to be sharing Ali’s fate, but the rest of the gig really was a lot of fun. Our listeners bought loads of our books…

…and we even got the chance to judge the fabulous entries of a monster drawing competition. Here are our three favourites (check out the ‘floating eyebrows’ on the right-!)

A MONSTER THANK YOU to Andy and Julie and everyone we met and spoke to. You know what? Considering that we suffered an ordeal of psychological torment that ended in one of us being eaten alive, we really did have a surprisingly brilliant time.

Poor Ali. Best of luck in there. We’ll be waiting with high-pressure hoses and emergency fudge whenever you emerge. ;D

Sam

PS: William Hussey, author of the excellent Witchfinder: Dawn of the Demontide, witnessed the whole thing. For an alternative view of how the afternoon went, check out his brilliant new blog.