I was the first boy in Britain to meet a Dalek in the flesh (so to speak) when my Dad took me to the BBC workshops one dark January night in 1964. That early experience probably explains quite a lot. After a childhood spent daydreaming about aliens and vampires, I discovered Marvel Comics and happily gave up all connection with reality to immerse myself in the marvellous worlds of Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, John Romita, Jim Steranko and Neal Adams. Every Saturday I used to head doggedly from newsagent to newsagent, searching out the latest Iron Man or Spider-man comics, which I would buy for 10d each (that’s about 4p in your fancy modern digital money). Since those halcyon days I've written a lot of books. Really, a lot. If you put a copy of every one of my books in a suitcase then you’d need to get a friend to help you lift it. My favorites among my own books are Heart of Ice, a sci-fi interactive adventure story where the Côte d’Azur is a jungle and the Sahara is covered in snow, and my current project, Mirabilis, a comic book epic in the making. I'd say that my fantasy writing has been most influenced by Lord Dunsany, Jack Vance, Mike Mignola and Neil Gaiman, but I should stress that none of those gentlemen is personally to blame.
<p>A mythical jewel of a story… A true story told on a beach in Yucatan, A Shadow tells Stephanie's story but it was also the story of the golden time. Its nostalgia sings like cicadas in the heat.</p><p>An American ‘Under Milkwood’, this distilled novel of the Sixties evokes the sounds, music and optimism on the free-wheelin streets and parks of Coconut Grove. You can hear Bob Dylan still strumming acoustic; smoke a joint with Fred Neil; and Everybody’s Talkin is carried on the wind.</p><p>Stephanie, a young hairdresser living in lodgings finds herself pregnant. Refused help from her hard Catholic mother in New York, unable to abort her baby, she accepts the kindness of Miriam, her Jewish landlady, whose own barren life spills into compassionate assistance for the daughter she never had.</p><p>The poignancy of its ending, its generosity and acceptance, echoes the bitter disappointment of those of us who hoped for so much more, but who remember its joy, and its promise, as though untarnished by time.</p>
The dawn of a new century. A mysterious green comet appears in the sky. As the comet draws ever nearer, strange events start to become part of everyday life. The Year of Wonders has begun. People wake up to find a world of marvels outside their window. There’s a troll under London Bridge. Mermaids are swimming up the Mississippi. Is that a dragon trying to hatch the Taj Mahal? And every rainbow ends in a pot of gold. Fantasy is part of the everyday world and nothing will be the same again. But fantasy is a coin with two sides, and there are also age-old nightmares waiting in the darkness to become real again.
<div style="margin:0px;padding:0px;font-family:verdana;font-size:12px;line-height:20px;text-align:justify;background-color:#fffefa;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><span style="font-size:13px;">"</span><span style="font-size:12pt;">A new surprise on almost every page... </span><span style="font-size:12pt;">One of my favourite books of the year." - Book Zone For Boys</span></span></div><div style="margin:0px;padding:0px;font-family:verdana;font-size:12px;line-height:20px;text-align:justify;background-color:#fffefa;"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Tahoma;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin:0px;padding:0px;font-family:verdana;font-size:12px;line-height:20px;text-align:justify;background-color:#fffefa;"><span style="font-family:Tahoma;"><span style="font-size:10pt;color:#222222;background-color:#ffffff;">"It's the weird nightmarish things that seep into the story that make Mirabilis really special. </span><span style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#222222;font-size:10pt;">I was completely captivated</span><span style="background-color:#ffffff;line-height:19px;"><font size="3">." - Lew Stringer</font></span></span></div><span style="text-align:justify;background-color:#fffefa;font-size:small;line-height:normal;font-family:Tahoma;"></span><div style="margin:0px;padding:0px;font-family:verdana;font-size:12px;line-height:20px;text-align:justify;background-color:#fffefa;"><span style="font-size:small;line-height:normal;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:12px;line-height:20px;text-align:justify;background-color:#fffefa;">"Morris deftly establishes a volatile chemistry between the trio, who are forced to work together as they are drawn into an esoteric conspiracy, centring around an ancient gold coin and the mysterious Royal Mythological Society." - Stephen Jewell, SFX</span><div style="margin:0px;padding:0px;font-family:verdana;font-size:12px;line-height:20px;text-align:justify;background-color:#fffefa;"><span style="font-size:small;line-height:normal;font-family:Tahoma;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin:0px;padding:0px;font-family:verdana;font-size:12px;line-height:20px;text-align:justify;background-color:#fffefa;"><span style="font-size:small;line-height:normal;font-family:Tahoma;">"My continuing love for Mirabilis just grows and grows. I'm really looking forward to the collection." - Richard Burton, Forbidden Planet International</span><div style="margin:0px;padding:0px;"><span style="font-size:small;line-height:normal;font-family:Tahoma;"><br /></span></div><div style="margin:0px;padding:0px;"><span style="font-size:small;line-height:normal;font-family:Tahoma;">"The characters and events are believable and the script has a nice flow that is easy to read and lures you into it. There's a nice narrative/storytelling feel to the script, almost musical." - Joe Milone, Kitty's Pryde</span></div></div>