My dearest darling literature admirers,
You thought I was dead and so did I. Exactly twice since you’ve heard from me, in fact. First in a health scare1 and, most recently (as in, within the last week), in a minor house fire2. But NEITHER managed to kill me, so I can only assume I’m in some quantum immortality situation and will have to soldier on.
Miss, miss, what did we miss? Well, we missed:
the launch of Parallels by James Kinsley (22 May)
the launch of The Youngster by Bibi Berki (17 July)
the launch of The Grieving Eye by Lena Atoug (14 August)
the relaunch, including beautiful new cover, of The Last Doorbell by William Parker
...just in time for the Polari Prize! Should we talk about how The Last Doorbell was longlisted for the 2025 Polari Prize? One of the proudest moments of Bill’s and my lives? Something we were both desperately overjoyed about? Maybe some other time.
BUT! We are in time for:
the launch of It’s Hard to Tell You This by James Kinsley, a novella (25 September3)
Michael’s father didn’t leave much behind. A handful of battered paperbacks, a few family photos, and an ancient tape recorder - the scattered remains of an old man’s empty life. But that tape recorder sparks something in Michael, a need to take stock of his own thoughts. His memories. His regrets.
Turning the recorder on, Michael begins to speak. About the loves he lost. The girls who slipped away. The women he hurt. Each memory spools out of him and onto the tape, raw and unedited.
The launch of The House of All Sorrows by Richard Gadz (23 October)
Jekyll is a man with a horrible, guilty secret. The results of the sinister experiments he conducts in the basement of Westwych House, the Jekylls’ country home in Somerset, are known only to a handful of people. All his family ever see is a dedicated scientist. All his servants ever hear are screams in the dead of night.
As guests gather for a genteel weekend, a web of events entangles a young historian in local legends of monsters and werewolves, and Frederick Jekyll’s nightmare past prepares to wreak bloody revenge on everyone present at Westwych House.
AND... a launch party!! Same time, same place, Friday 3 October. If you’ve been before, you’re welcome to come again. You SHOULD have had an email invitation; let me know if you did not and wish that you had.
I’ve also announced that Deixis Press has another novella coming out next year, Six Mile Store by A M Belsey4 (19 March 2026):
SOMETHING UGLY’S WAITIN’ FOR YOU
Honey’s working weekends down at the Six Mile, trying to figure her life out. Her boyfriend’s about to leave the country, her college advisor hates her guts, her momma ain’t listening, and she’s got this cop breathing down her neck just about all the time.
She finds a friend in her new colleague Lisa, but when one of their regular customers turns up dead, everything goes sideways faster than a greased hog at the county fair…
It’s kind of southern gothic, maybe rural noir, perhaps a little out of the ordinary for UK readers. You can pre-order Six Mile Store now on Amazon (coming soon at other retailers; it’s a little early yet) or direct from the press, and you can follow A M Belsey at her Goodreads account and/or her personal Substack5 where she is apparently going to try to start focusing her content on writing and books.
Ok6 I guess that’s enough. Goodbye forever7
Yours,
Angel
Extremely not impressed with the universe for giving cancer scares to THREE people I deeply care about (if one can say that one cares deeply about oneself) and further: giving ONE of those people actual cancer, giving ONE of the others a different life-altering diagnosis, and... giving me something that isn’t actually a problem that will affect me in any real way. Like, yay, I don’t have a cancer that is likely to kill me within a decade, but I have to try to be happy about that while you’ve screwed over the others? yeah no
Hey guess what! You should 1. have a fire extinguisher and, CRUCIALLY, 2. know exactly where it is! Now I have 6! But I no longer have a laundry room. Hey, at least I wasn’t trapped in my loft while my house burned to the ground, which is what would have happened if my builder had left my house three minutes earlier than he intended to. (I like to think that I would have simply gone out the Velux and kicked my knees up across the rooftops like Dick Van Dyke.)
Tomorrow!
A disaster human being, but truly a genius author
The Substack feeds the blog at Goodreads so maybe just one or the other? A M Belsey is nothing if not irredeemably lazy.
My poor proofreader had to fix every single one of my “Ok”s in Six Mile Store. It’s just that I fervently feel that “ok” is a word in its own right, spelled o-k, pronounced with two syllables, and capitalized (or not) using the same rules as any other word! Ok?????!!?!
Daniel Kitson does this at the end of every single one of his newsletters; I may have to steal it in earnest after the cancer/house fire thing.
Blimey, you're having a year...