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The Curse of Four, my Black London novella from Subterranean Press, is going to be on shelves in 11 days. Exciting enough, but the lovely Bill from SubPress informs me that the trade edition has already sold out its print run. You can still get the limited edition, which is a hardback, includes a signature page (hand-signed, and I have the repetitive stress to prove it) and including the exclusive chapbook "The Names of Hell", the short story where we find out how Jack met his mentor, Seth McBride. Good stuff, all, and to top it off, here's a teaser from the first chapter:

There are plenty of ghosts in London, if you know where to look. From the Romans on, London has belonged to the dead,been built upon them. The living walk on the ashes of the old city, burned down and built up by conquest, fire, war and time.

The Blitz alone took more than forty-three thousand souls, and centuries of plague, fighting and poverty before stacked the dead thick and fast upon the ground.

Every nook and cranny of the city teems with the dead.

You feel them, a vague discomfort, a patch of cold, a feeling you can't pin down except to know that it isn't yours. You can smell the dead, taste them, ashes and dust on your tongue in the dark corners and underground places of London. You can see them,tattered clothing and empty eyes, filmstrips of misery preserved

and looped forever on the screen of the magic, the energy, the blood and bone of their city.

You can see the dead. If you know where to look.

Jack Winter had lived the balance of his life trying not to look. Like whipping your head away just at the most frightening part of a horror film, he tried not to see the dead. But the dead saw him. They always did, sooner or later. A man with his talent was like a bright beacon of light in the darkest place on earth, a lamprey for spirits.

Various things blunted the sight, but blunting did fuck-all when sight was mingled with a touch of magic in the blood—not much, just enough to make things interesting and turn him into BBC One for every psychic impression in greater London.

Heroin had blinded it, for a good long while, but you couldn't stay willfully blind to the world around you forever. Not unless you wanted to wake up one morning and find yourself with your eyes put out.

Jack hunched inside his coat, the only passenger on his section of pavement in the Mile End Road. Whitechapel, never much of a tourist destination even in the blush of spring, closed up tight at night. The pubs were still busy, but the punters were shut in with the warmth except for a few tenacious smokers rattling

inside their anoraks and swearing at the Chelsea-Liverpool game running silent on the telly inside.

He passed closed-up stalls where his neighbors sold vegetables, knockoff handbags, prepaid mobile phones and everything else a burgeoning immigrant neighborhood could want during the day, and crossed against the light to the block that contained his flat.

Ginger Annie stood on the corner, and she turned to him with a slow, warm smile that went miles toward keeping out the cold. "Hello, luv. You look near frozen."

"Annie." Jack tipped his head to her, keeping it professional. That was really the only way it could go between reluctant psychic and ghost.

"I could keep you warm." Annie stretched out a hand to him. Parts of her faded from color to silver and back, a faulty celluloid reel. Ash and soot decorated the pale gray of her skin, a deep wound marring the copper river of hair that now was done up in elaborate victory rolls, now was matted with blood and tangled in bits of her battered skull. "So warm," Annie promised. "The best you've ever felt."

"You know," Jack told her, stopping to light a cigarette. A touch of his finger and the cherry glowed to life, the first hit stinging his lungs with heat, "a nice girl like you really shouldn't be out so late, Annie."

She laughed. It was like fingers on his bare skin. "Jack. You know I'm not that nice."

Ginger Annie had been killed in 1942, when a pimp by the name of Lyle McReady, by all accounts an arse-faced tosser if there ever was one, stove her skull in with the heel of his boot. Even in the blue-collar crush of the East End, violent bloody murder wouldn't normally go overlooked, but fortunately for McReady a German V2 rocket had demolished the building where he'd stashed Annie's body. She still stood on her corner, the only white face now amid the usual ebb and flow of Jack's Bangladeshi and Pakistani neighbors, waiting patiently for a smile, a kind word, a customer she could touch and whisper to and steal a little warmth from.

Annie never killed the living she came into contact with, which was more than Jack could say for a lot of nasty-cunt creatures he'd come across in his life, so they had come to a sort of agreement, which was mostly that Jack left her alone and she left him alone, except for nights like tonight. She'd told him once it had been very cold when she died. "I could feel my own blood getting cold on my face. Do you have any idea what that feels like?"

In the winter, she was always extra chatty.

Jack exhaled. "I'll be going, then. You take care, Annie."

Her fingers trailed across his leather as he walked on, a set of pinpricks on his body and on the part of his mind where his talent lived, that strange ephemeral tether to the Black, the place where magic and all of the things that came with it lived, the London that was not London and at the same time more London than the city of the living could ever be. The Black was what any normal person forgot, resigned to nightmares and took pills to avoid. To Jack, it was the closest thing he'd ever had to a home.