Hibernia Altera: Muinbeo Chronicles #1

N.B. This book isn't self published—it was published by Little Island. I'm putting it here for the sake of completeness and because it starts off a series.

“Some of these stories really started decades, generations, ago, and now come to their close. New things begin to arise from the past, like phoenix feathers separating from the flame. The winding down of the old stories and the starting of the new arose from a death; a murder, if you will believe such wickedness. We warn you. We are the last—eh—people to pretend that Muinbeo is some kind of Island of the Blessed.”

Those enigmatic entities, the Storytellers of Muinbeo, know that History has something waiting in the wings. To set the scene for their audience, they relate a gripping tale about a death and its consequences.

When her mentor is bitten by a rogue werewolf and “joins our hairy brethren howling at the moon”, apprentice detective Salmon Farsade is assigned to Hal McCabe, Detective Chief-Inspector and vampire, just in time for a murder.

Fen Maguire has been stabbed, throwing the normally peaceful community of Ballinpooka into shock. The investigation into her death lifts the lid on more than just the name of her killer: political corruption, Outland conspiracy, academic deceit, and plain old-fashioned greed. A second murder follows: the clock is ticking, and as they seek a key to unlock the truth, the detectives are both helped and hindered by the various human and not-so-human beings that populate Muinbeo.

For readers of all ages.

Hibernia Altera: Flux Avellana #1

“So the actual reason I was calling you is because—get this—I am not going to Prague this summer at all. Surprise! Thanks, Villa. Just ruin my life for me.”

Villa Grace is in disgrace. Her expulsion from school has ruined the prospect of a family holiday in imperial Prague, where her mother is organising a conference. Two of her three siblings are barely speaking to her, as all four face into a ‘holiday’ sweltering on Cobwell Farm in the back of beyond of drought-stricken Hibernia.

But the power-hungry St. Maur Ker family has breached the border between mortal and sídhe for their own gain. Cobwell, on the threshold of myth, is about to become the centre of a battle between older, wilder forces and the technomantic ambitions of one of the empire’s great aristo–corporate clans.

Caught up in this conflict, the children are forced to face up to the dark underbelly of their parents’ corporate environment, and to confront their own conflicting ambitions and loyalties.

For readers of all ages.

"Gorgeous and hilarious and profound."" Siobhán Parkinson

Stranded in Quettopolis, the capital of Bakhtinstan, Cuffe spends her days surviving the destabilized city, distributing her writing through the ancient Forest, and recollecting her last job as a ‘corporate orator’. An archivist is on her way to steal Cuffe’s writing. A writer is hiding out, with the papers they stole from the archivist. A murderer is in pursuit. The disregarded Forest is reasserting itself.

The Mothman Institute’s mission is to protect endangered moths, but its experts are becoming bystanders, sidelined by the Institute’s ‘Players’ and their pursuit of corporate self-perpetuation. A senior Player, Caius, recruited Cuffe to create the rhetoric to underpin this new corporate vision. Cuffe, contemptuously confident, is disturbed by the oddnesses of the Institute—the punitive process with its absent defendant, the quarterly Hunt, the disregarded but omnipotent Registry.

Then comes news that a breeding pair of a moth thought to be extinct has been discovered in a country in the midst of a military coup. The Institute is riven by competing goals—the experts' to save the moths, the Players', to save the goose that lays the golden eggs. Meanwhile, no-one has been paying enough attention to what is happening in the basement…

Hollowmen uses disjunctive temporalities, narrative shifts, and intertextual polyphony in depicting a psychotic corporation and the irruption of the margins into the centre.

An encounter with an alien enemy. A strange epiphany in a fog-bound park. A collector of the names of the dead faces their own death. Rebel divinities respond to the prayers of despairing creation for deliverance. Bureaucrats find their grip on reality dissolving in odd ways.

In these ten finely crafted and unsettling stories, Maxwell's slipstream style interweaves strands of naturalism, science fantasy, and the experimental irreal, illuminated by sharp flashes of wit and language of lyrical precision. Many of the characters exist in a state of slippage, alienated from a world they thought they knew by an encounter with something that is indifferent to them, but to which they cannot remain indifferent.

More than twenty years separate the earliest and the most recent of the stories in this collection, but certain persistent preoccupations provide loose thematic links—environmental crime and retribution; the ways, both overt and insidious, in which institutions can corrupt or sacrifice those within them; the interpretations and recording of past events by unreliable narrators; and the pervasive, irreducible weirdness of existence.

My short stories are available for purchase individually as well as in collections in book form. Each new story I publish myself will be available as a standalone e-book; once sufficient stories have accumulated to warrant a book, a new collection will be issued in paperback and e-book formats. Collections may also include work published elsewhere, such as in magazines, once the rights have reverted to me.
Click on the link to view and buy available titles.

Hibernia Altera: Muinbeo Chronicles #2

"You did not tell the Abbess a single lie," Diamond said, "but you didn't tell her the truth."

As a good Sombrist, Hunter Sessaire is aware that not only lying, but curiosity, is very much frowned upon by his community. As an apprentice archivist, he cannot resist the temptation to puzzle out how a manuscript could have been stolen from the room within the Sombrists' Labyrinth. A room that opens only during a planetary alignment. An alignment that has not yet taken place.

But this is not the only enigma abroad in Muinbeo. Seemingly disparate occurrences remain opaque even to those normally in the know. Detective Chief Inspector Hal McCabe is scratching his head over the inexplicable vanishing of his apprentice, Salmon Farsade, and the dramatic and destructive theft of an ancient silver hand from the local school museum.

The boundaries of Muinbeo, carefully managed to keep the Outland and its machinations outside, where they belong, have become a bit more porous than McCabe would like. Not least when he begins to suspect that some of the uncanny events may have their roots in a controversial Outland archaeological dig in Aegypt… Once again we are led into a maze of mystery by those not entirely reliable narrators, the Storytellers, in this enthralling sequel to Good Red Herring.

For readers of all ages.