Limited Edition is an anthology comprising six short stories and one poem. These are amongst the best works, including both fiction and non-fiction, that I have ever written and I am delighted to take this opportunity to share them with you. However, I wrote them on the strict understanding that publication would remain, as the name suggests, limited to the very, very select group of people for whom they were originally intended. Consequently, only brief extracts are supplied on this page.
I hope you enjoy seeing how my fiction style has changed and the kind of material in which I am now interested. Note, in particular, a decisive shift away from the melancholic themes of universal death and destruction that were such a feature of my writing until quite recently, towards more adult themes and more complex structures and, hopefully, towards more uplifting endings. Note also a greater incidence of strong female characters. Whether or not these are captured accurately is for the reader to decide, but in any event, there was a conscious decision to write about interesting women rather than the somewhat one-dimensional, mostly younger, women in previous work.
If you are genuinely interested in reading more of Limited Edition, can I urge you to contact me to discuss your particular interest. Please see the site introduction for contact details.
The Path Of The Righteous Man
In brief: Sci-fi religious allegory. 3,000 words.
The story: Jennie is a scientist who has invented the ultimate weapon in the fight for universal justice: a machine that inflicts punishment proportionate to the crime committed. Soon, though, she finds that everybody has something to hide and, with this knowledge, the power she suddenly wields begins to corrupt her...
They had not slept together for weeks. Each night, he lay on the leather sofa in the study, donating the bed to Jennie. Now, though, he could not sleep. He could not even close his eyes, not for an instant. She had promised him that she would destroy the machine, but she had lied. She had sworn she would never let it out of the lab, but she had, instead, brought it home and set it up on the glass coffee table in the lounge, warning him not to touch it. He could see its evil silhouette now, through the door, that he had deliberately left ajar. He could not have been any more terrified if it had been a nuclear bomb in his house.
He arose, grabbed a torch from the desk drawer and went to examine it. It really did not seem so formidable; just a squat metal box, painted black, with two dials and a wire antenna like a miniature television aerial, a power cable trailing across the carpet to the socket by the window.
He frowned. Why had she plugged it in? Had she used it that evening, without him realising?
He tiptoed, shivering slightly, up the stairs; carefully avoiding the spots where he knew the floorboards would creak. He pushed the bedroom door open, very gently, and spied around it. Jennie was laying haphazardly on top of the bedclothes, sideways, her implausibly long limbs spread across the length of the double bed and her hair tumbling and shimmering in the moonlight like a lake in a gentle evening breeze. She was as beautiful as ever, the light, satin nightdress clinging to her perfect body, but he felt not the slightest lustful urge towards her.
She twitched violently, twice, and for a moment he assumed that he had woken her; but after a moment she returned to breathing regularly. Her left hand gripped hold of the pillow suddenly and she let out a slight, terrified whimper. He could not imagine what she was dreaming but guessed that he was glimpsing an insight into a tortured woman; one who had, in her quest for universal justice, inadvertently created the most powerful weapon ever invented. That she had not missed this vital point was the tragedy of the situation; she realised, as did he, the great potential for harm that the machine represented, yet still refused to destroy it.
Paul & Mick
In brief: Light-hearted modern retelling of the St. George story (well, sort-of). 2,700 words.
The story: On a normal shopping day in an average town in suburbia, Paul rather unfortunately gets possessed by a demon and starts collecting souls. Can Mick use his ingenuity to defeat the forces of evil and save his friend?
Paul suspected that Mick had stopped paying attention to his perfectly constructed argument. "What are you staring at?" he snapped. "If there's some fit bird just behind me in a short skirt and tight top," he added, more softly, "please could you nod slightly so that I can turn nonchalantly and make a quick appraisal of my own?"
Mick shook his head, almost imperceptibly.
Irritated, Paul swivelled to see whatever it was that was holding Mick's undivided attention and came face-to-face with a squat, intensely ugly demon, that had appeared from thin air thirty-two seconds earlier and now was sitting, staring directly at Mick, still smoking slightly from its ascent from Hell.
"What the holy moonshine is that?" Paul asked rhetorically, sounding more angry than amazed; peeved, perhaps, that of all the places in the world to encounter one of Satan's emissaries, it was not in the heat of Judgement Day or in the Armageddon of World War Three or in his final unrepentant moments on Death Row, but on a sunny Tuesday afternoon in a fast food restaurant in The Glades Shopping Centre, Bromley.
The wisps of smoke originating from the creature's red, scaly skin, wafted towards them and Paul retched. "Buddy," he spoke directly to the beast, "you stink."
It Makes No Difference
In brief: Fanatically postmodern piece in which a character in a short story becomes terrified of the words, "The End". 2,500 words.
Based in part on an excellent short film made by students at the University of Southampton, Allegory, by Pat Wintersgill and Kate Dunstan.
The story: The character in a short story finds a printed copy of the very story she inhabits. She suddenly realises that, when the story ends, so will her life. To add to the confusion, she is joined by a character from another story entirely and, later, by the author himself.
Things were starting to get out of hand. It is at this point that I put in a brief appearance, just to sort things out.
"Mick," I said sternly, "you are in the wrong story. Please return at once to your own pages."
Heather looked at me pathetically and I swear that I felt truly sorry for her.
"Who are you?" she asked, in a tone that suggested complete resignation to the surreality of her existence.
"I’m the narrator," I explained.
"Could you possibly narrate me what's going on?" she requested.
"No problem," I said, cheerfully. "Mick and yourself are characters in two different stories. I'd quite like him to return to his own story now, because it's making my life terribly difficult keeping track of everybody."
"So how did he make it into my story?" she asked, not unreasonably.
"That’s easy. He's transcended the boundaries of the story because he's an all-round good egg that I shall probably be using as a hero in another work of fiction in the future."
Mick beamed at the news that he was an "all-round good egg" and, for the first time all day, Heather smiled, too, properly, relaxed, a smile that illuminated the room.
The smile faded at once. "What was that?" she asked, terrified once again.
Paul shrugged, so it was left to me to explain once again. I told her to read the story.
... a smile that illuminated the room.
"Do you mean," she asked, "that I live in a world where metaphors happen literally?" She frowned and the room dimmed and there was a faint rumble of thunder.
"It's cheaper than installing dimmer switches on your lights," Mick observed. "There are definitely advantages to being a fictional character."
Heather smiled again – she was warming to Mick, if not to me – and sure enough, the room brightened and the temperature rose a couple of degrees.
Once Upon A Time
In brief: Modern fairytale. 1,600 words.
The story: The story of the Three Bears, as Goldilocks would have liked it to be told.
ONCE UPON A TIME, in April last year, in fact, there were three Bears with a penchant for porridge and a love of comfortable furniture. Their lives had been blighted by an immensely annoying little blonde girl who had broken into their home one day, eaten their hard-earned, freshly-prepared breakfast, broken a valuable antique chair and, to add insult to injury, finally slept it off in their own bedroom.
The Bears did not take this intrusion into their privacy as lightly as might be expected of soft, cute and cuddly animals. On the contrary, they pinned the golden-haired little girl to the floor and telephoned the police at once. Unfortunately, the Crown Prosecution Service was powerless; the girl was only seven years old, so could not be arrested.
Kevin Bear then decided to pursue a civil claim for trespass against the girl’s parents, Brunettemane and Silvertopknot. He was forced to abandon the legal action after vigilantes threw a brick through the wall of his house. (The house, it should be explained, was made entirely out of straw. The contractors who had built it for them, Three Little Pigs Ltd., had assured them that it was perfectly strong. Tragically, two of the directors of that company later lost their lives when an experiment to test the validity of this claim went badly wrong.)
The ITV Edit
In brief: A "concept" short story, satirising the current dumbing down of arts and literature. 700 words.
The story: Taking as its starting point the premise that people are really only interested in the sex and violence, the story lurches through a number of literary sources at breakneck pace, including George Orwell, Douglas Adams, H. G. Wells, Bridget Jones and Casablanca.
The J. K. Rowling Principle: applies the Andrew Davies Effect to small snippets of multifarious disparate source novels to produce a totally new work, whose accessibility and originality can then be trumpeted noisily. The more intelligent readers of a work that has undergone the J. K. Rowling Principle will notice distinct sensations of déjà vu at every turn of the page but fail to complain to the appropriate authorities because their brains have fallen asleep. Less roundly educated readers will be stimulated by the apparent limitless imagination of the author whilst failing to notice that it has all been done before.
In an attempt to harness the awesome popular power of both of these rules, the following is a short story based upon a number of sources that have been pulled together in completely arbitrary fashion, in a way so cunning that no reader could ever spot the joins. All major plot elements other than sex have then been removed. Finally, with the exception of proper nouns, any word longer than two syllables has been replaced by the alternative "turnip", to make the story easier to read.
A Sympathy For Snow
In brief: Poem. 36 lines.
The universal themes in poetry are love and loss; this is no exception. Written on one of those February days where the cloud is so thick that it never really gets light, this is infused with the melancholy that such days inspire.
Burying The Past
In brief: Deliberately old-fashioned story of the lifetime of an ordinary man. 9,500 words.
The story: A boy goes to work in a cemetery for a cruel master. His life a living hell, he loses everything but his dignity.
In those days, too, the Town Clerk and his deputies were personally responsible for all aspects of local life. The Clerk's name would be immortalised by being engraved into foundation stones for hospitals, town halls, police stations, schools and even bridges. The Clerk would build his own tiny empire and rule, sometimes not without corruption, over the citizens of his town.
Ernest Cripplecraft had missed out on the Town Clerkship. The council had privately taken exception to his prickly personality and had publicly promoted him from Deputy Clerk, out of Town Hall, into his lonely office at the cemetery, where he had ample opportunity to build his own personal empire, of sorts.
Cripplecraft halted in front of George and peered down his nose at him. The boy was short, scrawny, weak; not what was needed at all. George, for his part, quaked silently as his boss examined him.
The older man extracted his pocket watch and consulted it. The boy was not late. Wordlessly, he turned and marched across the paving to the door of the cemetery office, George trotting behind.