Andy Cox of TTA Press has just shown me the artwork that Ben Baldwin has created to illustrate my new story ‘The Nightingale’, which will feature in Black Static #34. I can’t resist sharing this, because it’s superb. Ben has provided stunning illustrations for a fair number of my stories now (including the cover art for Spin, Stardust and Microcosmos) and this piece might just be his best yet. I absolutely love it.
‘The Nightingale’ is another of my South East London stories, and features several of the characters from ‘Wilkolak’, a story originally published in Crimewave #11 about eighteen months ago and recently reprinted in Maxim Jakubowski’s The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime #10. My story ‘The Tiger’ in the upcoming anthology from Gray Friar, Terror Tales of London, also revisits some of those same characters from SE12. ‘The Nightingale’, ‘Wilkolak’ and ‘The Tiger’ are all standalone stories, but I do sometimes like to find out more about the characters I write about and writing these kind of overlapping stories allows me to do exactly that. These three share a certain similarity in tone, I think – they’re all quite dark stories, about troubled, private people. I’m rather fond of them.
Black Static #34 is due out at the beginning of May. Andy confirms that my novella Spin should ship at around the same time.