Mark Cantrell's Blog, page 53
January 10, 2013
REVIEW: Greaveburn By Craig Hallam
An inspired debut for steampunk's Hallam Resonant with the hiss and clank of steampunk chic, Hallam’s Greaveburn is a richly-textured and suitably macabre gothic fantasy fit for this cynical age, writes Mark Cantrell on Cheshire Today
Reviewing books can be an ethical quandary these days, given all the sock-puppetry shenanigans that’s rippled through the publishing world recently, so before we begin this appraisal of Doncaster-author Craig Hallam’s debut novel, Greaveburn, it’s...
January 2, 2013
BLOG: Turn Up And Tune Into 2013
SO, welcome to the New Year; here’s to another 12 months of reading, writing, and publishing, and – touch wood – there’s some significant milestones in my literary life coming up this year.
The main event is the forthcoming publication by Inspired Quill (IQ) of my novel Silas Morlock. Right now, the novel is pounding its way through the pre-publication process. Expect it to be hitting the shelves later this year.
Before th...
December 30, 2012
BLOG: A Deadlier Shade Of Grey
Early next year, I'm planning on publishing a select number of short stories from my anthology ISOLATION SPACE as individual digital shorts. So allow me to introduce the draft cover for the first of these titles, a little vampire tale called Deadly Night Shade...
"She was the one who was afraid of the dark, that's why the other vamps in her gang laughingly called her Shade, but now the joke's on them, and she's the one still breathing. When a night on the town turns dea...
December 27, 2012
PROSE: Warning, This Post Is Psycho-Toxic
The Pestilent Script By Mark Cantrell
CREATIVE writing is the expression of a parasitic organism call Inspiracoccus Scriptorius Infectis. It multiplies within the brain, invading nerve cells, and then uses the neural weave to nurture the larval creature into fully-fledged maturity.
Some writers have guessed at the nature of this affliction; Orwell for instance referred to writing a novel as like some bout of a vile and debilitating disease. To date there is no cure. There is no inoculatio...
December 24, 2012
INTERVIEW: TV's George Clarke On The Housing Crisis
AT HOME WITH... George Clarke
Television was the last thing on architect George Clarke’s mind when he was starting out, but he took to it with gusto and his clear passion for good design and quality homes has made a winning champion for empty homes, but as he tells Mark Cantrell solving the housing crisis will take nothing less than a radical overhaul of the entire system
From an early age, George Clarke aspired to become an architect but by his own admission he kind of fell into televi...
December 22, 2012
FEATURE: Violent Disorder Needs A New Kind Of Cure
By treating violence as a public health issue, Scotland’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) broke ranks from the conventional law and order model to create a proactive multi-agency approach that has clear lessons for those tackling the more ‘mundane’ issues of anti-social behavior. Mark Cantrell wrote about the organisation in the September 2012 edition of Housing...
“The sin is ignorance,” said Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan;...
December 16, 2012
FEATURE: Housing Crisis Is A Work Of Art
From the September 2012 edition of Housing magazine: Despite the grim economic tidings and the ongoing horror story that is the housing crisis, there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful – no, really. Mark Cantrell reports
Britain’s housing crisis is a thing of macabre beauty, it must be said. The sheer misery of its dysfunction is an artful depiction of a dystopian social aesthetic; seriously, it should be on display in the Tate Modern if on...
December 8, 2012
BOOKS: The Banned Underground
Laugh? I nearly cried... Bad puns abound in this novel by Will Macmillan Jones, and while I can sometimes enjoy a bit of that, I have to say that overall I find myself somewhat disappointed by The Banned Underground, writes Mark Cantrell
The Banned Underground is meant to be a bit of frivolous time-killing fun (and nothing wrong with that) as the author himself told me. I encountered Jones doing a signing in my local Waterstones and got chatting.
It was good to shoot the breeze wi...
December 7, 2012
INTERVIEW: Julia Unwin On A Mission To End Poverty
AT HOME WITH... Julia Unwin It’s said that the poor shall always be with us but that isn’t good enough for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). As Julia Unwin, chief executive, explained to Mark Cantrell in the August edition of Housing magazine, the organisation is dedicated to understanding the causes of poverty – so that it might one day be eliminated
Some might be tempted to think of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) as a well-meaning theoretical body, a thinktank re...
November 24, 2012
INTERVIEW: Terry Waite Has Some Advice For Writers
When Terry Waite was taken hostage in the 1980s so began an ordeal that would last almost five long years; how he learned to cope with the solitude and uncertainty of captivity is a lesson for life - certainly, it has something to teach writers facing the more sedate hardships of their craft, writes Mark Cantrell
SOME months ago, I found myself speaking to Terry Waite MBE about his work with the homelessness charity Emmaus; I wasn't expecting...
