Hello from Hollow Stone Towers

A very quick one from me today, since my to-do list is longer the Bayeux Tapestry, and there's no sold out tickets to go and see that, I can tell you.

I come bearing three pieces of news, and one reminder.

News the first

Solstice, the complete fourth season of The Sunset Chronicles, is out now in ebook and paperback.

Collecting together all five episodes of the fourth season of The Chronicles, my epic sci-fi horror serial that's about to head into its penultimate season. If you want to get caught up before that starts, now's the time!

The Minos is coming home, and the whole world is waiting to see what it brings back with it. Humanity's salvation, or its doom?

On the long journey back from Europa, Wyn and the last of her crew are carrying the answer in their hold when a ship comes hunting through the dark. Whoever is aboard wants their cargo. In the black between planets, there is nowhere to run.

Jules wakes after eighteen months in a bed she doesn't recognise, in a body worn down to the bone. While she slept, the resistance made her a symbol, her image stencilled on every wall. But the boy she loved has come back a stranger, and the movement that saved her has its own use for her, the girl who wouldn't stay dead.

In the drowned ruins of Hong Kong, Yan has spent two years running from the men who killed her father. A simple retrieval job drags her straight back into their orbit, and as the world convulses around her, she finds herself circling the one name she swore she would never utter again: Christopher Sun.

In the frozen north, Roman and Jimmy have kept Mercy hidden and safe, far from anyone who would make a weapon of her. Then footprints in the snow lead into the trees, and the little girl is gone. To get her back, they will have to bargain with the devil himself.

As the assassins close in and the towers of London burn, four desperate fronts race toward a single reckoning, and the horror that followed them back from the ice is only just waking up.

You'll also spot, if you visit that link, that Eventide, the complete fifth season, is available to preorder now, in ebook and paperback through Amazon, and will be out in two short weeks. Huzzah! Oh, and if you're desperately waiting on news of Season Six, well the first episode, Omen of the Deep, will land on Thursday 15th October, with a new episode landing every two weeks.

News the second

You may notice, if you click on the eBook link for Solstice, that it's not in Kindle Unlimited. As I mentioned before, I will be slowly removing my books from KU over the coming months, so if you're a KU reader, I am really sorry but that means you won't be able to pick up the final two seasons as part of your subscription. In order to offset this, I'm going to price each episode at a discounted rate for the first week of release only, before they go up to the (still very cheap) normal price of £1.99/$2.99 an episode.

But, in good news for anyone who prefers to get their books from Apple, Kobo, B&N, Google Books, etc, that means that the full Hollow Stone Press catalogue will be available in those stores, as well as direct from my website, very soon. As things stand everything will be out of KU by October 21st, so hopefully it'll all be in time for spooky season!

News the third

Okay, not so much news, really, as much as a note to say that over on the The Hollow Stone Blog I've recently finished a rather absurdly long set of essays that gather my thoughts on the future of the Internet, and the ways in which we can recapture the promise of the early web from the dark overlords who've since conquered it. Now, that may not sound massively relevant to the newsletter of a horror writer, but writing Sunset Chronicles has, over the last decade, made me think a lot about the intersections and dark paths in which technology is leading us. If that sounds like something you'd be into, check out all three posts below:

And, finally, a reminder...

Don't forget that as a subscriber to this newsletter, you get a free eBook copy of Tales From Bleakwood. Just enter your email address and I'll send a copy right to ya.

There's a town called Bleakwood. It isn't on any map, and the people who find it tend to wish they hadn't.

Bleakwood looks like any other small English town. A pub, a couple of churches, a high street going quietly to seed. You could drive through it in a minute and forget it by the next. But the woods press close on every side, something very old sleeps beneath the streets, and the people here have a habit of making bargains they come to regret.

Tales from Bleakwood is a free collection of horror stories first heard on the podcast Bleakwood, plus a new story that never aired. It's yours, free, when you join my newsletter.

And that's all the news that's fit to print!

Happy reading,

Paul