Paul Stephenson's Blog

NEWSGASM! Audio Blood, Bleakwood Returns, Interviewing heroes, and more

Hey there! It’s been a little while since I posted, and during that time I’ve been up to all kinds of stuff. I just forgot to, you know, tell anyone.

As I always say, I’m really just *brilliant* at marketing.

Blood Audio

A couple of years ago I started to record an audiobook for Blood on the Motorway, which I never finished because, well, audio editing is really time-consuming and a bit shit, frankly. Since then, though, I’ve launched Bleakwood, and All Creatives Now, and I thought that I might as well make use of the audio that I’ve got and release it as a podcast. This is in keeping with my recent move to a Digital Free model, and with trying to get my stories out there to as many people as possible. Check it out on Spotify or anywhere you listen to your podcasts.

Bleakwood Returns

As well as that, Bleakwood, my monthly horror podcast with stories from a host of Britain\s best horror writers (and me) is back for its second season with a story by Luke Kondor that’s a proper mind-bender. I loved recording it, and I think you’ll love listening.

All Creatives Now

If you’re not familiar with All Creatives Now, it’s a podcast I run with fellow horror author Kev Harrison where we interview creatives of all stripes about their creative journeys, their thoughts on their respective industries, and loads more. In the last few months we’ve had fantastic chats with the likes of Paul Holbrook-Philips of True Spilt Milk Design and horror short legend Sonora Taylor, but a huge deal for me was getting to chat with the writer I’ve probably read more than any other, Arsenal blogger Andrew Mangan (Arseblog). I really enjoyed this chat, and I think there’s a hell of a lot for creatives of all stripes to get into.

Sunset Chronicles

Now that Blood on the Motorway is fully out again as a free set of ebooks with brand new covers, not to mention paperbacks with wide distribution, next it’s the turn of my epic Sci-Fi serial The Sunset Chronicles to get the facelift and free treatment. They’re not quite ready yet, but I do have the first set of covers completed, and they’re too shiny and lovely not to share, even if I do say so myself.

The first book is actually going up as we speak, with the remainder of the first season following over the next few weeks. Make sure you’re signed up for the Hollow Stone newsletter to find out more as they come out.

The Children’s Horror

As well as the lovely new designs for The Sunset Chronicles, I was really pleased recently to be commissioned by the excellent Northern Republic press to work on the cover for Patrick Barb’s new collection, The Children’s Horror.

The cover was great fun to work on, but also allowed me to work on what I think is becoming a signature look to my artwork. The book itself is s a themed collection of weird/dark/horror tales for any parent maxed out on Nickelodeon, Disney+, and YouTube Kids. I’ll have more news on when it’s available shortly.

One small ask

Now, you might be wondering – where’s the catch? We’re getting all this great stuff for free, surely Paul wants something? Well, yes and no. I’m still figuring out whether or not I’m going to try and monetise my writing moving forward (and if, in the meantime, you really want to send some money my way, why not check out one of my new paperbacks?) but I do have a favour to ask.

My good friend Dan Howarth, who has written for Bleakwood and is an all-round top chap, is currently fundraising for a new feature film he’s working on with director Stewart Hamilton. There are less than 48 hours left to go on the fundraiser, and it’d be great if you could donate to help Dan and Stewart out. Says Stewart: “

“Newstone is an original sci-fi horror story written by novelist, Dan Howarth and myself. Something about science fiction rooted in everyday reality has always appealed to me. This theme is perhaps most famously captured by celebrated author John Wyndham (Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Kraken Awakes, Chocky) to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for inspiring me throughout my life. Newstone is our take on an otherworldly threat taking root in our reality, however, ours is undoubtedly a less cosy catastrophe.”

Now, you all know my love of Wyndham, and this project looks absolutely fantastic. So why not head over to the project page and lend them a few of your English pounds?

That’s about everything for now. Until next time, happy reading!

Blood on the Motorway – Get the full Trilogy Now

Blood on the Motorway is now fully available once more! The apocalyptic thriller trilogy has returned and is now available for free from all good ebook retailers, or in paperback from those lovely brick-and-mortar stores they still have now. What’s more, they have fully redesigned artwork by yours truly!

Look at them! Aren’t they pretty?

But what is Blood on the Motorway, I hear you ask? THANKS FOR ASKING! The trilogy is an apocalyptic thrill ride, set in England’s turbulent north.

The end of the world is very bloody nigh for Tom, a layabout ex-student waiting for his life to start or the power to get cut off, whichever comes first. Meanwhile, Jen works two jobs, hates both, and most days is too hungover to deal with either. Whereas Detective Burnett is just trying to work out who the hell turned his sleepy Yorkshire village into a murder town.

When the skies fill with a mysterious storm, each of them wakes to find streets filled with dead. The world they knew has gone, and their old lives with it.

But what have readers said about it, you might be wondering. It’s a good question. The good news is that the trilogy has nearly a thousand reviews across all stores, with a 4+ star rating for each book in each store. Here are a few samples:

‘Great book, full of action and great characters. I can’t wait to read the next one in the series. I’m off to buy it now.’

Amazon Review

‘All l can say is what a great read, l thoroughly enjoyed reading this, well done. Keep me glued to the book until l finished.

Kobo review.

‘I found myself racing to get to the end to find out what happens to the characters (who are relatable and well-written), and simultaneously seeing the page numbers count down with dread that it would all be over soon! I love a good apocalypse, but I especially enjoyed that this one was set in the UK, and written with typical wry British humour.’

Apple Review.

So, what are you waiting for? If you love edge-of-the-seat action, end-of-the-world tension, and characters you’ll be rooting for with every turn of the page, pick up all three books today!

Went the year well

Okay, so we’ve dissected the various failings of the year and set ourselves up for some more in the year ahead, now it’s time for the fun part.

Every year I like to list out my top 20 albums of the year because, well, frankly, I miss being a music journalist. So here are my…

Top 20 albums of the year.

20. Witch Ripper – The Flight after the Fall. A rip-roaring stone rock album that’s like a tour of all the disparate places stoner rock has gone over the years, with some great riffs and some fantastically progged-out space jams, as well as epic choruses for days.

19. Goflesh – Purge. The titans of doomy electro sludge have done it again. Let’s face it, nobody does industrial quite like Godflesh, and this is up there with some of their absolute best albums.

18. Besra – Transitions. It seems that post-metal was back in a big way this year, and Finnish band Besra’s debut album is near the top of the pile for me, with its veers between the sludgier end to the more atmospheric. 

17. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard – PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation. Yes, I did copy/paste that title. Definitely at the heavier end of the spectrum for these prog weirdsters, and far better than any band should be doing as their 25th album.

16. ’68 – Yes, and… This year I finally got to see a Josh Scogin band, and the ’68 didn’t disappoint. Neither does this, which sounds like if the White Stripes had even 10% of the chaotic power that the music press seemed to think they had.

15. boygenius –  the record. A sublime record, somehow managing to be the perfect blend of its parts, then coming to something more than the sum of them. Letter to an Old Poet is the most devastating album closer in recent memory.

14. Dirge – DIRGE. I’m not sure why there are two post-metal bands called Dirge, but this debut by the Indian Dirge is devastatingly heavy. Magnificent stuff. No video for this one.

13. Blood Command – World Domination. I have to say that this album has still not entirely won me over, and yet here it sits on this list. Much like the Code Orange album, I still can’t tell how I feel about its random about-faces and gear changes, but I do know that I’m still listening to it. A lot. Ranging from thrash punk to pure pop, this is a weird one, for sure, but worth checking out.

12. Haken – Fauna. The kings of prog-pop-metal take another step closer to the pop end of their sound, and wear quite magnificent floral shirts as they do so. Ignore the fact that the cover looks like an NFT though.

11. Graveyard – 6. A seventies-inflected stoner band who’ve snuck up on me more with every release, this is a lush album, full of soulful melodies and soaring riffs. Certainly of the seventies retro stuff that’s been garnering attention lately (Green Lung, Ghost, Uncle Acid) this is the band who’ve retained the sense of the blues the best for me. Lovely stuff.

10. KEN Mode – VOID. A companion piece to last year’s NULL, this picks up exactly where that left off, which is to say taking a power drill right to your cranium and then screaming into the hole. Delightfully, nihilistically bleak fun. No videos to go with it though, so…

9. Jeff Rosenstock – HELLMODE. Ska-inflected pop punk with the melodic sensibilities of the Wilson brothers that manages to look at the world around with a dash of hope to go along with the consternation.

8. Sufjan Stevens – Javelin. In which the ethereal pixie of folk-pop manages to weave together the many disparate stylistic strings to his bow into a coherent, stunningly gorgeous entity.

7. Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – Land of Sleeper. It’s been a long time since any band made me think of Iron Monkey, but when it comes to hefty-fucking-riffs, these guys certainly fit the bill, even if it’s more married to a doom template than a sludge one. Another band that thoroughly rocked my world live this year, too. For the video for this one I’m just going to put the whole KEXP performance on because holy shit.

6. Herod – Iconoclast. A battering assault of furious post-metal and sludge, bringing in bits of melodic death, industrial, and more besides. Where Herod excels though is in weaving together a coherent through-line across everything they do in much the same way that Cult of Luna do.

5. Grave Pleasures – Plagueboys. We listen to a lot of 80’s goth in our house, and if you dropped Plagueboys into the middle of that you’d honestly not notice the difference. Somehow Grave Pleasures manage to invoke The Cure, Siouxsie, Sisters, and even Joy Division, without ever sounding like a tribute act, something aided by the fact that all ten songs on Plagueboys are absolute bangers.

6. Initiate – Cerebral Circus. There’s been an absolute shitload of really great hardcore this year, so much so that this list had to be either full of it or pared right down. Albums by Allfather, Jesus Piece, .gif from god, Judiciary, Buggin, Chamber, Teeth, and Code Orange could all have made this list, quite frankly, but Initiate takes the spot because holy shit is this a great album. Danceable, furious, catchy-as-fuck hardcore.

5. The World is Quiet Here – Zon. I honestly don’t even know where to begin with this album. It’s prog, it’s metalcore, it’s death metal, it’s sludgy, it’s post-metal, oh and it has one of the weirdest vocal performances I’ve ever heard, like the bastard lovechild of Elvis and Pete Steel and Mike Patton all in one. It’s batshit crazy, frankly, and absolutely incredible.

4. Domkraft – Sonic Moons. By Christ, I love this album. A mix of luscious space rock married to absolutely gargantuan sludge/doom riffs, this is hypnotic without ever becoming tedious, adventurous without losing sight of its core vibe, and massive as fuck.

3. EYES – Congratulations. This year saw the two separate camps crawl out of the corpse of Every Time I Die and come back with slightly disappointing new bands. They needn’t have bothered, because EYES have stepped into the void marked CHAOTIC PARTY HARDCORE THAT WILL MELT THE BEJEESUS OUT OF YOUR FACE, and made it all their own. This is a freewheeling, all-conquering beast of a record that only missed out on the top spot because, well, you’ll see.

2. The Ocean – Holocene. 2023 was definitely the year of The Ocean for me. I spent day after day wrapped in the blanket of their ethereal post-metal, and when they dropped Holocene in the middle of the year, I was blown away. A gorgeous, sumptuous feast, wrapped up in riffs and rhythms that will transport you to another world. Getting to finally see them play at ArcTanGent was everything I could have wanted and more, one of the rare cases where a beloved band leans too heavily on their new material but you don’t care because the new stuff is JUST. THAT. GOOD.

1. Hundred Reasons – Glorious Sunset. The other day I was having a conversation with the masterful Dan Howarth about bands never hitting their peaks after they reformed, completely forgetting that Hundred Reasons have done exactly that, this very year. Sure, some of the furious post-hardcore has gone, worn down to a more middle-aged pace, but when you’ve melodies like Right There With You, Replicate, and the title track to this incredible return to form, who needs fury? A stunning album that finally lives up to the promise of their early work.

Other stuff

Books – I failed to read as much as I wanted to this year, and very little of it was brand new, but I enjoyed Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, Joe Hill’s The Fireman, Amy Jeff’s Storyland, and some old classics – Catch 22, Blood Meridian, Carmilla, and Look to Windward. I’m currently about 100 pages away from finishing Chuck Wendig’s Wayward, the sequel to Wanderers, and holy shit this book is incredible.

TV – There was nothing this year that beat The Last of Us, but season two of The Bear, the final season of Succession, the second season of Yellowjackets, Jury Duty, and The Fall of the House of Usher all ran it pretty close. On top of that, I watched every episode of the original series of Star Trek, the first two seasons of which were much better than I thought they would be, though I can’t say the same for the animated series, which was pretty turgid. I’m now working my way through The Next Gen in a futile attempt to watch every single episode of Trek before I die.

Movies – As per usual I don’t get out to the cinema much, but I have managed to watch a fair chunk of 2023’s releases (23, actually, which has a nice synchronicity to it), and here’s my top 12, according to my Letterboxd ratings, at least. Renfield was my pick of the bunch, a huge amount of fun. Oh, and I hated The Killer, which was by far and away my biggest disappointment of the year.

Podcasts – mostly this year I’ve been listening to music and sport podcasts, and I won’t bore you on the latter but there are some fantastic music podcasts out there that I’ve found and loved this year. I’ve been obsessively working my way through both 60 Songs That Explain the 90s and Bandsplain, both of which have deep dives into the music that shaped me, but I also binged through the history of heavy metal on And Volume 4 All, and, as always, anytime a new episode of Pop, Collaborate and Listen drops is a banner day at Hollow Stone Towers.

So there you have it, 2023 all wrapped up in a neat little bow. And here’s a lovely little playlist for the year if you want to check out any of the 20 albums above, or any of the other stuff I’ve been enjoying this year.

That was the year that was

I know it’s cheating to wait until the new year to roll out your review of the year just gone but I wanted to get my website launched before I did, and I did that yesterday. So please forgive the tardiness of this post. Pretend you’re munching on a mince pie instead of a carrot stick while you’re reading it.

2023, eh? What an absolute bastard of a year. In so many ways. But I find it’s good to try and balance things out a little. Some bad, some good. On the one hand, you’ve got the inexorable societal slide towards fascism, the planet continuing to boil from the heat of our own collective ineptitude, the replacement of human endeavour with ‘machine learning’ and someone putting the biggest idiot on the planet in charge of some of the most important bits of it. On the other, um…. the third episode of The Last of Us was pretty bloody good, eh?

So it’s fair to say it wasn’t a great year, on a global level. But on a personal level, well, it wasn’t great either, in a lot of ways. But I’ve been doing these end-of-year accountability roundups for nigh on twenty years now, in one form or another, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a little thing like the terminal decline of all of human society get in the way of it.

Normally in these posts, I would go through all the things I set out to do at the beginning of the year. But I’m not going to do that, this time, because, well, I didn’t do any of them. In January I buried my Dad, and the long tail of that meant that I quit writing for a long time. I spent the year also settling into a new job, and then a huge chunk of the year was spent being properly done over by mortgage companies (and Liz Truss) as I bought a new house. In fact, that latter is about the one thing I did manage to achieve this year.

Instead of going over what was bad about the year, then, I’m just going to highlight some stuff that was great this year.

Live Music

Last year I somehow managed to go to four festivals, and what more, come out of the other side as an actually functioning human being, despite being in my 40s. Okay, so by the end of ArcTanGent that was a pretty 50/50 thing, but this year I managed to see a raft of proper bucket list artists (Depeche Mode, Hundred Reasons, Gary Numan, Primal Scream, Devin Townsend, The World is a Beautiful Place and I am No Longer Afraid to Die, The Undertones, Converge) as well as a load of newer artists who blew my mind (Birds in Row, The Ocean, DVNE, Conjurer, Psychonaut, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, Curse These Metal Hands among many many more). Live music remains the greatest drug, and I think I probably saw more this last year than in any year previous.

Moving to the country.

Gonna eat me a lot of peaches. Okay, so it was not like we were living in a city beforehand, but we’ve now moved to what will hopefully be our forever home, a tiny little village that doesn’t even have a pub or a shop. Okay, so it might be marginally better to have both of those things, but exploring the countryside on long dog walks, and having the space to have my own proper office has been amazing. Proper quality of life improvement, even if it’s brought me to the financial edge, as it were. Did I mention that the paperback of Blood on the Motorway is out now, by the way?

Learning, growing, all that jazz.

When I came back to being creative, I spent a few months focusing on learning new design skills, and I’m so glad I did. For years now I’ve been only vaguely happy about the visual cohesiveness of my many endeavours, and now I think I’ve really carved a place for myself visually, as well as in a storytelling fashion. Which is nice.

So, what about 2024? Well, I’m pretty loathe to put many goals in place for this year. I’m very aware of how fragile my relationship is with my writing and creativity, even still. So let’s break it down into some rough areas, rather than hard goals:

Creativity

I’d like to be able to carry on being a creative, bringing back all of my different books and series, as well as launching a few new things. I hope to bring in a load of new readers and listeners to the fold, and it’d be nice if I could sell enough paperbacks to cover my operational costs for the year.

Health

I know, I know, this is probably the twentieth time I’ve had this as a goal and in that time the needle has most definitely gone in the wrong direction. But I mean it this time. I’m starting January in a good place, with the right mindset to shift a bit of weight and get a lot healthier. It would be good if I could get my ADHD diagnosis sorted this year, but that’s out of my hands.

Happiness

We’ve got a lot fewer plans in the diary this year, and I want to take the time to enjoy the area we live in, to go see more of this beautiful part of the world. I basically live in Hobbiton, so I should get out of this office more. I want to read a lot more, spend less time on social media, enjoy more great music, see some live bands, and just… be happy.

Doesn’t seem too much to ask, right?

*Opens a generic news website*

Oh, yeah, right.

Good luck, everyone.

Rip it up and start again

I’ve had a song going around my head for a few weeks now, while I’ve been taking something of a scorched earth policy to my creative empire — The Orange Juice post-punk classic, Rip It Up. If you’re not familiar, these lyrics in particular are currently freewheeling somewhat sardonically about my cranium:

And there was times I’d take my pen

And feel obliged to start again

Rip it Up, by Orange Juice

If you’ve been following my journey since the early days of Blood on the Motorway, then you’ll know that I’m somewhat partial to a rebranding. Part of this is down to an undiagnosed but who-the-hell-am-I-kidding-of-course-I-do case of ADHD, part of it is that I’ve somewhat fallen in love with the visual design side of my creativity and I like making new covers.

When I decided to quit writing early in 2023, I took all my books down from sale. Part of this was self-interest (I didn’t want to find myself checking sales constantly or being sucked into updating stuff periodically or maintaining a website, all that jazz. The other part was the sage self-realisation that if I ever did come back, I wouldn’t want to just… come back. So I just took it all down.

Since deciding to come back sometime around October, I decided that it was time to bring everything I had done so far back with a sense of coherence. A house style, if you will. I wanted to take everything I’d learned from a design perspective and cook up something that means that, moving forward, you’re gonna know when something’s mine. I think I’ve achieved that, and so, it’s time to emerge from this cocoon, hopefully with more grace than Derek Smalls climbing out of his. 

So, here’s all the news that’s fit to print:

Blood’s Back

Blood on the Motorway is the first book to come back on sale. Not only does my first novel have a swanky new cover, it is now permanently free in ebook, which will be the case for all my books moving forward. If you want a paperback version (and who wouldn’t, with them looking this sexy?), these should be around in the next week or so. I’ll let you know as soon as they are, or you can visit the new page for the Blood books right bloody here on my new website:

CHECK OUT BLOOD ON THE MOTORWAY FOR FREE

Did you say website?

I did! You may have noticed that things look a bit different around here, and that’s all part of the branding, baby. Have a look around, and make sure you sign up for the newsletter. I’m no longer offering a free download to go with your subscription because all my books are going to be free anyway, but you’ll see new sections for the Blood and Sunset Chronicles series, as well as the podcasts. 

Podcasts, you say?

Again, yes. Glad you’re paying attention. Bleakwood, my horror anthology podcast, came back a few months back and has had new episodes written by Dan Howarth, Kev Harrison, Sam Tindale, and me! Check it out if you like a short spooky tale every month.

All Creatives Now is the podcast I run with the aforementioned Kev Harrison, horror author extraordinaire, in which we talk to creatives of all different stripes about their creative journeys. Since we came back we’ve had chats with Zomblogalypse co-creator Miles Watts, and horror authors T.C. Parker and Alan Baxter. Come check it out!

Some general housekeeping

You may have noticed that this blog post, and the newsletter that likely brought you to it, are no longer on Substack. I feel like most of the last year has been a bit like the end of The Lost Boys when Grandpa wearily exclaims: “One thing about living in Santa Carla I never could stomach: all the damn vampires.” Just substitute Santa Carla for the internet, and vampires for Nazis, and you have a pretty neat summation of 2023. 

As much as I liked the promise of what Substack could be, I couldn’t continue to use a service that not only turns a blind eye to far-right extremism, but amplifies it, monetises it, and hides behind spurious free-speech debates that wouldn’t hold water in my son’s debate classes. The same goes for Twitter, which is why you’ll no longer find me at either. For the moment the Substack will act as an archive for all my old blog posts going right the way back to my Livejournal days, but I’ll likely find somewhere else to hide that. As for social media, you’ll find me now at Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram, as well as round the back of my local Dixon’s, chuffing away on twenty menthols. No, probably not that last one, actually.

In conclusion

I’m back! Over the next few weeks the rest of the Blood Trilogy will be back on sale, and then it’ll be the Sunset Chronicles, as well as an upcoming brand new book for you all to enjoy in the coming months. I’ll be back in the next few days with my customary run down of the year just gone (with some fun playlists) and a look ahead to the year of ALL THE ELECTIONS. Won’t that be fun?

If you want to drop me a line leave a comment below, and if you’ve never read Blood on the Motorway before, now’s the time to get in on the action. And remember, if you like what you read, tell EVERYONE.

Test Post

This is a call to all my past resignations

Back on broken ground

I’m back! I’ve had a fair chunk of time off recently, so if you’ve been waiting for a long time for the latest episodes of The Sunset Chronicles, Bleakwood, or All Creatives Now, I can only apologise. There’ll be some news about all of them a little bit further down this very article. (Insert *skip […]

Hiatus

I'm taking a break, and apparently that takes 1500 words to explain.

New Release: Genesis

Grab the tenth episode of the Sunset Chronicles today.

Happy birthday, internet me

It's funny what you get nostalgic for, isn't it?