Hello from an unfathomably hot annex of Hollow Stone Towers.

I have not one, not two, but THREE bits of news for you today.

Firstly, Dark Horse, the second book in the Darkness Rises series, is officially out in the world as of today. Huzzah!

Lucy Barker is still in York, trying to put herself back together after everything that happened in Darkness Come Alive. She's done with all of it, even her feelings for Adam. And then a new vampire arrives in the city with a centuries-old score to settle and absolutely no interest in keeping things quiet. Every piece of herself Lucy has glued back together is suddenly very much at risk.

If the first book was about pulling back the curtain on what's under the cobbles of York, this one is about what happens when you've seen it and you can't make yourself look away. It's the nastiest, most propulsive thing I've written in years, and I'm super proud of it. Buying it today, on release day, genuinely helps it find its feet. So if that's something you'd like to do, well, then, you should do that.

I've managed to get my stuff together suitably to get the paperback launched alongside the eBook, so that's good. As per usual, it's available in all good book stores in paperback, and in eBook from Amazon (booooo) or Kindle Unlimited.

But wait, there's more!

You want a free book, just as a nice reward for being on my mailing list? Well, I made you something...

A few years ago I started a podcast. The plan, such as it was, went like this: every couple of weeks I'd write a horror story, sit in a tiny room I'd generously describe to people as "a studio", and read it aloud into a microphone for whoever happened to be listening. No grand scheme. No outline. Just me, the dark, and a town I'd invented called Bleakwood, which I was making up roughly as fast as I could record it.

This is, regular readers will note, more or less exactly how I do everything.

What came out of it was a set of stories I'm genuinely fond of. Bleakwood is a small English town that isn't on any map; a pub, a couple of churches, a high street going quietly to seed. It looks ordinary. It is not. People here make bargains they shouldn't, the woods take more than they give, and something very old is waiting at the centre of it all. The tales run from a curiosity shop with a truly terrible returns policy to the night the sky catches fire.

I've tidied them all up, dropped the episode numbers, and gathered them into a proper collection called Tales from Bleakwood. And I'd like you to have it. Free. No strings, no catch.

There's even a final story in there that never made it to the podcast at all, which means you'll be among the first people anywhere to read it.

But wait! There's more!

Some of you have been reading The Sunset Chronicles an episode at a time, which how I intended for the episodes to be consumed, like episodes of a TV series. But, it turns out, quite a few of you are binge-watchers. I've had a few requests to bundle them together into individual bundles, and I am nothing if not a man of the people

The Sunset Chronicles: Season One gathers the first five episodes into a single volume, the whole opening act in one place. The year is 2107, the Earth is dying, and Wyn, Lois and Judd are about to discover that a dying planet is the least of anyone's problems. It's the beginning of a story that now runs to half a million words across five seasons, with two more ready to birth, and this is where it all kicks off.

If you've been meaning to give Sunset a go, or you know someone who'd rather hold a season than chase episodes, this is the one to point them at. It'll be out in exactly two weeks, and the subsequent seasons will be coming out at a fair clip beyond that, leading right into the launch of Season Six, and you can grab the eBook preorder right now.

So, there you have it! You wait ages for a bit of news, then three come along at once.

I'll be back in a couple of weeks with that Sunset launch, but until then, happy reading.

Paul