Monthly Archives: May 2015

Neon Books has published my novella, The Mesmerist’s Daughter and it looks great.. you can get your copy here (print and digital) for only £4. Get in quick to receive one of the origami wolves!

Still not tempted? Here’s an extract to whet your whistle…

My mother was a wolf. That was the first secret I kept for her. At night she would jimmy open my door with her muzzle and swagger into my bedroom, her blunt claws clicking like tarts’ heels on the floor, her panting rigid and dependable. Her thick, wiry pelt was heavy and as smothering as coal gas.

During the day she hid her grey wolfishness under a human costume. I played at being a hairdresser and brushed her human hair looking for gaps in her pretend skin where wiry fur might poke through. She was very thorough. I never found a thing. When I woke before her alarm went off I sneaked to her room to try and catch her as she snapped and crunched her bones, flattening the long wolfy snout, before cramming it into a flat-face human mask. I was always too late; when I got there she was drawing her lipstick on her mouth, smoothing her skirt over her bottom.

But every night the same thing: in she’d come, tap, tap, tap, snuffling under the cover, her stinking breath hot on my skin, and she’d eat all my belly flesh from rib to hip, tearing and ripping, chewing with her mouth open, eaten dry, nothing left of me just leg, leg, arms and a head. All the while I watched her, mesmerised. I didn’t feel a thing except sleepy, so sleepy, and by morning I was whole again, like myself only newer and weaker. That was the first of many secrets.