A Tale of Two covers

Posted on July 20, 2026 by Mark Hayes

This post may offend some people. To be fair I could write that at the beginning of almost everything I write so I’m not overly worried. However, this post will touch upon a subject which offends a lot of people, including me. The subject of AI art.

Now to be clear from the very beginning, I don’t like, encourage or proliferate AI art in any form. To give you a for instance I listen to a lot of music on instagram/facebook reels. I find a lot of new music and new artists there. Occasionally I will however come across some beautiful singing/music where the artist has used AI to create visuals to go with their music. I understand why as they might do this. Making a video can be expensive and if you have a particular visual vison using AI can be an attractive solution. But personally I would sooner have a still picture of the artist and the music than an AI generated video. It is the music I care about, and I am unlikely to listen long to anything with obvious AI visuals.

Now, that said, enhancing videos with software, and using software tools to do so I have no issue with. AI software tools used as tools, fine. Photoshop is a tool, some elements of photoshop use AI type algorithms, how do you think it determines what is and isn’t background when you ask it to remove the BG, or fill it back in. In these terms artists have been using AI tools for decades. The issue is not AI tools, it is Generative AI. There is a line in the sand, tools that assist the creative human is one side of the line, tools that steal from creative humans work to ‘create’ is on the other.

I have written seven novels, a novella, several of my own anthologies, and god only knows how many short stories over the years. But for those who are not aware, I am dyslexic, I could not write novels without a word processor, or at least I could be no one would be able to read them. Spell checkers, Grammar checkers, find and replace, and lately text to voice, are all software tools I make use of to write. All of them are tools that assist me creatively. All of them have some elements of algorithms baked in and are in effect AI tools that have been around for decades, but while they assist me to write, they do not do the writing.

They will never do the writing.

Quite rightly the creative communities of writers, artists, musicians etc are almost all AI-phobic, we don’t like it, we don’t want it, and we are repelled by it. Which is why I get annoyed when musicians use AI for ‘visualisations’. Or when writers use AI generated covers for books.

There is however an issue with AI-phobia. That been that just because something looks like generative AI doesn’t mean that it is. Generative AI steals the creative talents of artistes and regurgitates them. Occasionally this leads to the original art been incorrectly identified as AI… And AI-phobic’s occasionally assume something is AI just because it looks like it might be. And just to be very clear here. I am AI-phobic*. Proudly so…

*Yes I know it is weird to call yourself proudly ‘phobic’ anything. Particularly is you are adamantly not ‘phobic’ anything else, but to be phobic is to be afraid, and if you are not afraid of Ai you probably should be.

What inspired this post was a last minute panic with the latest Harvey Duckman Anthology where we changed the cover. The Harvey covers are done by a fabulously talented graphic designer called Nick Jenkinson who builds them with layers of ethically sourced graphic’s and has a very clear brief from Gillie (not that he needs it), ‘No generative AI’. Nick goes to great lengths to avoid any Generative AI elements in the covers, he checks everything studiously to avoid ‘contaminating’ the covers.

A note on cover design…. As you may know I do all my own covers. I always have, and I enjoy doing them. It is part of my process. I build them with layers of ethically sourced art, and in any average cover of mine there might be ten to fifteen elements/layers of graphics, even something as comparatively simple seeming as the new Lucifer cover I mentioned a few post ago have lots of layers to it, and a whole lot of editing of art to make it all fit together. Ten to fifteen layers….

Nick, for perspective, probably has forty to fifty layers in an average Harvey cover. Nick is an artist, I’m merely a vaguely competent amateur. Nick also checks every element to make sure it is not Generative AI. That is a whole lot of work because despite what the ‘finger counters’ may think, it is not in any way as obvious as they may think. Nick however is not an algorithm. People from Tadcaster seldom are. So in the latest Harvey cover he mistakenly included 1 piece of AI ‘art’ in the cover, because it wasn’t labelled correctly where he sourced it. Only when he went back to double check after we had already agreed on the cover did he find the error (an entirely forgivable error just to be completely clear on this. It was not his fault it was wrongly labelled.)

Having discovered the error, Nick remade the cover from scratch, for nothing, as he is aware of the Harvey budget constraints, despite already been paid for his original work. A days worth of work, because of an utterly forgivable error on his part. Nick is not just a great artist, but his is a gentleman of honour as well. I would add to this that he is also as much a part of the Harvey team as any of us. His covers are as important to the project as the words of our writers ever are. They help give us an identity that run through the series of that have now reached the landmark of ten books.

So Feral and Fae, our latest dark urban fantasy anthology (very dark in places, I am look at you Nimue…) had to have a new cover made just days before it was released.

The one of the left is the original ‘AI contaminated’ cover the one of the right is the new ‘clean’ one

Now I will admit I prefer the new one as it happens, though of the several covers I saw for this book one of the others options that was rejected was my personal favourite. Here however is the thing, while neither of these covers are generative AI, the contaminated one just having one element that was out of 50 , so 2% AI if you prefer, some perfectly nice people, who are AI-phobic might leap on the assumption they both are AI because they look similar to covers that are made with generative AI.

Why is this? Because generative AI makes good book covers. We would never use them. We are committed to never using them. We find the entire idea of them abhorrent. But we can not deny they are good book covers. There is a reason for that, its simply that AI learned from humans what human want in book covers…

The reason we changed the cover was because one writer, new to the anthology, had asked in his writing group what they thought f the cover and several of them had responded “That’s AI.” Now I’m glad they did, because that is the reason Gillie asked Nick to double check. But they were not saying one small element was AI, they assumed, erroneously, the whole thing was AI generated. And again on this occasion I am glad they did, but assuming things are AI on no other bias that ‘it looks like it is AI’ is not good in general terms. And I speak as someone self professed an AI-phobic, as we all are at Harvey Duckman because we would no more use AI cover art than we would allow AI stories in our anthologies.

We have an absolute line in the sand, no generative AI, as if you don’t think we check every story you would be wrong. We have rejected AI submissions more than once and have a black list of writers who submitted AI stories. That line in the sand extends to everything we do.

This is why I am so pleased with the latest Harvey anthology cover, because I know its 100% human creativity. Just like all the rest.

Speaking of Feral and Foe.. am half way through reading the hardback. I had read many of the stories as a submission editor but not all as John and Gillie read them too and regular writers don’t need to be filtered through me so much. I had feared my own offering in this one ‘Of Copper and Bone’ (doors, murders, more doors) might be a tad too dark in comparison to the rest… Well, I was wrong there. All the stories are fabulous, but yea gods of oak and stone, some of them are dark. Not all, there is plenty of lighter pieces in there too, but the dark is very dark… New Harvey writer, Joachim Heijndermans ‘Feast of meat’ and my old favourite Nimue Brown’s ‘Thorny Hedgehogs Be Not Seen’ are deliciously dark tales for two very different reasons. Andrew Hodges ‘Malrubius’ is a vicious shade of black, Meanwhile Bruce Connelly is back in Fairy land with a different kind of dark humour…

I should not need to sell you a Harvey by now if you read this blog often, but this one is wonderfully feral… Even for us.

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Cosy dragons and haunted beds

Posted on July 9, 2026 by Mark Hayes

It is my, not especially profound, opinion that as a writer it is important to read a lot. It is also important to read different subgenres and wander off the well beaten track of Terry Pratchett, Stephen King, Joe Abercrombie, David Gemmell and the rest. Because yes I read books written by predominantly old middle class white men, some of whom are dead. Though to be fair I also spend an inaudiant amount of time reading books by long dead white middle class men such as Poe, Lovecraft, Wells, Verne. The point being its good to get out of your literary rut once in a while and read something different.

Now, to be fair, while I may read a lot of old dead white men, they are far from the only things I read. Some genre’s however I read less than others, not really for any major reason, I just don’t really seek them out. However on occasion a different subgenre crosses my path and for one reason or another I feel compelled to read them.

As is often the case these books are not written by old middle class white men and the authors are all alive as well, which makes a nice change.

Pay the Troll by Summer Oakes

I don’t generally read what you might term as ‘cozy’ fantasy. This is not a deliberate choice on my part, in so much as I avoid it. It is just not my genre. This is certainly in the ‘cosy’ fantasy bracket, which is to say its gentle, nice, no one gets hurt in a permanent kind of way, and no one spends any significant amount of time hungry…

Will Ryge is asked to recover a stollen gem that reputedly has some odd magical qualities. Will is a former agent and now private investigator, and has enough contacts to have an idea where to start. So takes the job and ends up trailing his suspect to a south Atlantic island that’s not on any map. A perfect island for thieves and smugglers to sell of stolen goods. But also an island with some odd inhabitants.

Along side the human population who live in a small port town at one end of the island there is a whole community of ‘magical’ residents of the island, Henri a friendly dragon, Vivaine the witch, Celeste a warrah, which is a highly intelligent fox like creature that can talk to humans. There are of course also dangers, trolls who own bridges and expect a toll, Queff’s which are poisonous goblin like creatures who hunt in packs and all manner of other dangers.

There are also cafe’s with extra large side entrances for dragons who do dragon size portions of rabbit stew.

This is all a gentle kind of delightful. It reminds me of a certain kind of fantasy novel I read a lot of as a child. Its a happy little ride in which nothing ostensibly terrible happens that can’t be fixed with a little rest and plenty of tea. It’s an adventure, with mild peril, that tells you it will all be fine in the end from the off. Thus not my usual fayre, but that is no bad thing.

Occasionally we all need a cosy little adventure with mild peril, tea and cake.

Summer Oakes lives on, what I assume is a small holding, in western Canada. She claims to be a witch, and I am old enough and wise enough never to question anyone who makes such a claim. She also occasionally likes things I put on BlueSky, which is how I know any of this. She is quite lovely and her occasional updates about life around the farm are charming.

Pay the troll is the first book in a trilogy, so I have more to read at some point

The Bed by Laura Perry

Romance fantasy, or Romantasy, isn’t really my stick, obscenely popular as it may be, I don’t generally read it. This novel is not strictly Romantasy, but has elements of romance to it. Strictly speaking I would call it a supernatural romance and if you like your fantasy to have elements of romance* it could well be a book for you.

*romance not spice, not that there is anything wrong with spice, just to be clear.

Liz runs a small business selling art pieces she upcycles, and as business is good she buys herself an antique bedroom set, which unbeknown to her used to belong to a now deceased classics professor and occultist, who is ‘haunting’ the bed. This last is something of a simplification, he is actually been tormented on another plane of existence by the fallen angel Lucifer, because Lucifer is bored and wants something to play with. The arch angel Michael doesn’t entirely approve but as Lucifer is sticking to the letter of ‘the rules’ there is only so much he can do about this.

A haunted bed and supernatural entities are the least of Liz’s problems however as her mother is a bitchy lush who feels compelled to point out her mistakes constantly, her best friends brother has proposed to her, her best friend thinks she should accept, and she it trying to run a small business won too little sleep. She is also naturally attune to the occult, though she doesn’t realise this and quite by mistake manages to connect herself on a esoteric level with the beds previous owner Dr William Fletcher.

Things go downhill for Liz from there. What with the insistent not quite boyfriend wanting her answer to ‘the question’ he popped. Her best friend constantly pushing her to say yes. Her falling in love with the ghost who haunts her bed. Lucifer plotting against her and her family. And the IRS wanting to do an audit.

Yes, Lucifer the fallen arch angel uses the IRS to torture people… This should surprise no one.

The story moves between the real world, the the place between worlds where angels dwell and back again. The between the worlds sections are compelling in there strangeness. Lucifer is petty, Michael hide bound, Ariel easily led. All bound by rules that compel them no matter how much the lightbringer tries to subvert them. Meanwhile Liz has all the drama of human life to contend quite apart from the esoteric mess she had found herself embroiled in.

Importantly, this is all well written with an eye to details. It manages despite its central premise to be believable, at least within the context of a novel about a haunted bed. Liz is a believable protagonist, becoming embroiled in an esoteric world she is unprepared for. That she has some inherent talent in that area is doesn’t feel like a forced plot point, she is not a ‘chosen one’. She has just enough latent talent to irritate Lucifer, and to have the opportunity to thwart him in the end.

For all the supernatural esoteric elements this at heart remains a romance, for all one side of that romance is a deceased professor who’s soul is being torments by a fallen angel. It follows the patterns and beats of romance fiction. The same patterns and beats laid down by Jane Austin and reimagined by Hellen Feilding. The problematic family, the suitable yes unsuitable match, the interfering best friend, the handsome helpful sub plot guy and the love interest who is almost certainly wrong for her but so right at the same time… And waring angels on an ethereal plane.

You may have missed the last of those in Bridget Jones, and almost certainly in Austin but they were there I assure you, in the underlay subtext. What did you think all that polite conversation was about?

Somehow this all hangs together seamlessly, you are right there with Liz through all her struggles and hope she will come out the other end with her sanity intact even if her best friend needs a to keep her nose out… Its a joy to read and even for someone who does read romance as a rule it hits all the right notes you want in a supernatural romance.

Laura Perry is the temple mom of Ariadne’s Tribe, a worldwide inclusive modern interpretation of Minoan spiritual tradition. She lives somewhere in America and as yet has not been burnt at the stake for witchcraft by people who confuse the words paganism and satanism . On the whole I approve of not burning pagans. When not writing fiction she is just being wonderful at a whole host of things.

For a long time until I heard her speak I thought she was from the Cotswolds.

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Music to Write by ~ Female Rage Edition

Posted on July 2, 2026 by Mark Hayes

There has been a certain amount of words throw at the screen on an evening in the last few weeks. This is not overly unusual in the summer. Short nights and long evenings play merry hell with my body clock and writing is the result. As ever when I write on an evening much of it is to music, and my ever ecliptic taste tends to throw up strange play lists that often have some influence on what I write. Or what I am writing influence what I listen to.

I do have a lot of play lists, and a lot of old favourite that I cycle through. I do however always love to to find new music and new artists, for which of all places Facebook/Instagram reels are a surprisingly good resource, for both new artists on the fringes of the mainstream, and artists so obscure (yet wonderful) when you go to look them up on Amazon music or youtube because you want to listen to the whole song you find only a tiny number of people have ever heard of the artist or listened to the song (and I do mean tiny)

So in the spirit of sharing new music to write by, or just listen to (of which there may be a theme… ) From the almost mainstream down to an artist so obscure their you tube channel is only marginally better subscribed than my own

Firstly Paris Paloma and her song labour, you have probably heard this one, or at least the rage fuelled splendour of the chorus

Speaking of rage we come to Feed Us Your Girls by Lydia the Bard, which is equally wonderful but slightly less on the cusp of the main stream

Then we have Earth to Eve, and No Kings which is a truly splendid bit of rage

It isn’t all rage of course, there are some songs that are just delightfully bitter sweet Like this from The Lily Robinsons, which I doubt you have ever heard, but should give a listen

Now we come to this utterly wonderful song from new England indie artist Nocturnne who you have definitely not heard of. The Lily Robinsons are fairly obscure, but by comparison Nocturnne is hidden behind the vail. I have been listening to every track she has available on amazon ( all 9 of them, ) on a loop for the last couple of nights while I write.

She remind me of when I first discovered All About Eve , more years ago than I chose to remember

Do yourself a favour and give her a listen

Anyway back to writing , happy listening

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Dear Edgar 61 ~ The Domain of Arnheim

Posted on July 1, 2026 by Mark Hayes

Way back in this project, specifically the 37th story, I wrote about ‘The Landscape Garden‘ a short ‘sketch’ story which was first published in the September 1842 issue of Snowden’s Ladies Companion. It was far from the most interesting piece Poe ever wrote, and it would not be unreasonable to suspect it was written purely for the pay check. It was a bland at best, but five years later 1847 in Columbian Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, a new expanded version of the story was published under a new title. The Domain of Arnheim.

The expanded version is around fifteen hundred words longer and I would love to say that these extra words fix all the issues with the original ‘story’. This would be something of an ask as one of the main problems with the original story was that it wasn’t a story to begin with. It was in essence just a descriptive piece about a landscape garden. As 19th century descriptive pieces about landscape gardens that are not part of a wider narrative go, it is right up there as one of the best I have ever read, but that isn’t saying a great deal as it is the only one I have ever read that isn’t part of a wider narrative, and I have not read many that are.

Purely descriptive pieces that have no narrative structure are not stories, Stories require a beginning, a middle and an end. Now the beginning does not have to be at the beginning so to speak. nor indeed does the end necessary need to be at the end. I have read, and indeed written stories where the end is quite firmly at the beginning. To be a story there does however need to be a narrative structure, and perhaps more importantly, a narrative.

The landscape garden is not therefore, in my opinion, a story. You can disagree by all means. You can defend our Dear Edgar by pointing out his stories come to us across going on two centuries, so who am I to say what is or is not a story. In my defence I am a man who writes stories… But importantly the question before us is not if the landscape Garden is a story, but if The Domain of Arnheim takes that original non-narrative piece and turn it into a story…?

No it doesn’t.

That is not entirely fair. The extra fifteen hundred words does add a thread of narrative to the story, involving a journey by canoe, but its a thin thread and easily snapped under the strain. There is nothing really here that’s worth the reading. Its the same non-narrative descriptive piece, with a hair beath of narrative connecting it to a second non-narrative descriptive piece. In the end it is just a bit dull and I see little to improve my original verdict beyond, well there is more of it. Which in this case is not really a good thing.

The Raven nevermore…

SHOULD YOU READ IT: No, perhaps if your are a keen gardener…. but no not even then.

BLUFFERS FACT: In the world of the Warhammer RPG and TTB games, Arnheim was a High Elf colony and port city built on the eastern Black Coast of the continent of Naggaroth. Located at the fringe of the Dark Elf domains. This led to it capture and recapture between the warring factions for centuries before it was finally destroyed by the witch king Malekith. It would be nice to say at this point that a garden has grown up among the ruins. It seems unlikely however.

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Interesting Folk…

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Mark Hayes

As a rule I seldom directly reblog, because I would end up filling this blog with other blogs on a daily basis and at some point that becomes a spiral of insanity, besides you can go find them yourself. But as I dabble in folk horror on occasion and to an extent it slips over into my unspecialised subject. I thought I would repost this intrigue look at the genre by Rowen Lee.

You should read it, probably before my own notes on the subject below…

Some Thoughts on Genre

So what is folk horror, Rowen starts with the definition below.

Folk horror is when a stranger stumbles into a “quaint” village and discovers horrors at a harvest festival! Folk horror is fundamentally British and pagan!

Its a good solid definition, and certainly that’s the definition at the roots of the genre. But stranger wanders into a ‘quaint’ remote village and discovers something horrifying is a definition that can be applied to a great many stories. I would argue the vibe behind it is the important bit. The ordinary everyday village folk proving not to be quite so ordinary, be it because of strange beliefs or the tampering of things beyond our ken.

Take ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and others stories Lovecraft set in his beloved version of New England. Lovecraft Country as it is sometimes called has many isolated communities and strange things in the woods. ‘The Picture in the House’ I would say is very much folk horror though it holds none of the usual tropes of the genre. Indeed it doesn’t fit in with Rowen’s definition at all… But the tales of Lovecraft country are ‘Folk Horror’ in much the same way as southern gothic is in essence folk horror.
Isolated communities, strange beliefs, dark undercurrents.

Innsmouth, an isolated community populated by half bred ‘fishy’ all of whom are members of a strange cult, that meets to enact rituals summoning their non-human masters, is the quintessence of folk horror in many ways. Aside the the fundamentally British and pagan part.

The inspectors tale (part 1 of The Call of Cthulhu) can also slip into that broader definition. A strange cult of otherness meeting in a swamp. Though I admit I am stretching here and it is more the New England tales that fit the genre.

Perhaps it is New England Horror in general that does this. Stephen King almost exclusively sets everything he writes in New England, specifically Maine (aside the dark tower novels, though they go there too) and certainly some of kings stories have elements of folk horror behind them.

I have also read a lot of folk horror style stories from America that have bene submitted to the Harvey Duckman Anthologies I work with. One of our most prolific writers form across the pond has written a series of short stories that all loosely hang together with are a wonderfuil example of folk horror in the short form.

The writer in question is Bruce Connelly, who aside been a writer and actor, is also a puppeteer who from 1993 to the present day has been Barkley, the dog on Sesame Street. Yes Barkley the dog writes New England folk horror…

In any regard Rowen’s thoughts of the subject are far more interesting than my own. Though as far as I am aware she doesn’t work with any writers who also happen to be muppets, so there is that.

Also folk horror in the more narrow view is indeed British and pagan, so nothing I have suggested really fits that definition, beyond the general vibe of the genre. But they all give me the same itch that good British folk horror does.

Finally, if you want what I think of as real deep at the roots British folk horror I recommend you go read the Thistlebone graphic novels some time, but be warned they are dark and snarly.

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Lucifer Redux

Posted on June 16, 2026 by Mark Hayes

For the reasons I went it to last week Lucifer mandrake & The Esoteric Cricket Ball has a new cover. It has also had a few minor issues fix in a short edit and because I could the kindle edition has a bonus mandrake short story Auguries, from my Auguries of Euryale collection.

I am very please with the new cover, which has so much pop.

And the paperback has a full wrap to the back cover is pretty awesome too even if I am the one saying that.

It that has wetted your appetite, you can get a copy in paperback or on kindle (and soon in hardback) here mybook.to/A3ON

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Cover Stories

Posted on June 11, 2026 by Mark Hayes

‘Don’t judge a book by the cover’ as the old wisdom goes, unfortunately, however, in the real world everyone does. There is going to be some harsh unforgiving honesty with myself in this post, but sometimes that is required.

A week ago I took out my phone and showed a group of friends three cover designs for a book I am in the process of vaguely writing. This is to say it is not the book I should be writing but the book I am writing while I need a break from the book I should be writing. The reason for this was a couple of evenings before while while avoiding writing the book I was writing to avoid writing the book I should be writing, I faffed on with cover ideas and came up with three different ones*.

*You should note here that none of these are final designs, they are scribbles on the page… no more than that. They are far from finished.

Well actually two as I had a cover design already from a pervious procrastination. I was not entirely sold on the first one though it used a technique I had used before with Maybe, in that the character on the front was facing into the book with her back to the reader. There is phycology at work here, but also practicality

The practicality is once you use an image for a character you are stuck with them to an extent. You are going to need more than one picture in case you go back to that character. Show them looking into the book and you avoid that and allow the reader to project whatever image they want onto the character.

The phycology is it invited mystery, who is the shadowy figure she is looking at? Who is she? There is an implied sinisterness to this situation as well, something bad is going to happen.

The other covers I made are based on both main characters in the novel, which could be described as a Victorian version of the men in black ( The Men in Dark Tweed), but also shades of the avengers (the 60’s the British TV show not the American comic book superhero team) Mr Chapman is very much and allegory of John Steed and Miss Bradshaw is equally an allegory of Emma Peel. It is all set within a Victorian secret government department dealing with occult threats and other weirdness, while keeping the general populous unaware that strange things are going on. It is my distraction novel because its is just plain fun to write and does not take itself seriously.

Of the small select group of friends I asked, the opinions I got back was almost entirely universal. Everyone was intrigued and interested by the first cover. Liked the mystery and invitation to discover more it held. And none of them cared much for the other two, which felt forced and uninspired. So that was an evenings procrastination avoiding writing the book I was writing to avoid writing what I should have bene writing wasted…. But at least I got opinions. Opinions are good.

Also, it struck me afterwards that the single most successful novel I have written, the sequel to which is the book I should be writing, in case your wondering. Maybe, has a very similar cover in that the female main character is facing into the book. The cover of Maybe captures peoples imagination, possibly because of the title as well, but certainly the cover works in a way some others don’t.

To offer another example I have a couple of small anthologies the most recent of which is Auguries of Euryale. The most successful however is The Strange and the Wonderful which preceded it and was the reason I did Auguries in the first place as The Strange and the Wonderful sells well for an anthology and also does well at events. The cover just works and draws people to it. It is often the book people pick up first.

Yet it has a simple cover, a cloud scape with a pagan, witchy, skull thing I just liked when I stumbled across it and bought the art. Auguries by contrast has a cover design I really like, but it has not sold as well as I could have reasonably expected, which as its an anthology was not a great deal to start with as anthologies are really books people buy if they have bought your novels and want more, which has happened. What hasn’t happened it Auguries hasn’t found a audience beyond that in the way The Strange and the Wonderful does, nor does Auguries draw attention at events the way the other book does. As much as I love the cover, it isn’t doing what I as an author need the cover to do.

It doesn’t matter how good the stories are, or even the blurb, if no one gives the book a second look due to the cover. Covers are a dark art in that respect.

This brings me to the cover another novel, and one both written and published, one for which I also adore the cover design…. Lucifer mandrake: The Esoteric cricket Ball.

The Lucifer, Luci cover tells you a lot about the book without telling you about the book. Its a very pretty cover, I am very fond of it. But here in lays the rub… The novel, which those who have read it are fairly universal in praising, just has not sold. It just hasn’t managed to grab peoples attention and that unfortunately may have a lot to do with the cover.

I had a conversation about the cover, and covers in general, a few months back while working an event with fellow authors, and asked for candid opinions. Candid opinions are exactly what I got. The summery of which is the cover at first glance suggests the book look like something other than it is a fantasy/supernatural romance. That was not my intention, its not what I write in general and certainly isn’t the case with this novel. So readers who are attracted by the cover are not ones that would be inclined to read the novel once they read the blurb. The pitch is wrong. The cover is therefore by extension wrong.

When I say the book has not sold, that is exactly what I mean. While it has done reasonably well at events, where I can tell people about it, online it has sold less than a quarter of what I could have reasonably expected based on how other books did in the first 16 months of their release. A book I have been told be several readers is the best I have ever written*, is utterly failing to find readers, even among people who have read other books of mine. It just isn’t finding its market.

*They are wrong, the best novel I have ever written is Passing Place, but Lucifer is up there with my best in my opinion.

Cover designs are a discussion that comes up a lot with the Harvey Duckman Anthologies, as recently as yesterday I was in a discussion between several of us, and the chief, about the cover of the forthcoming Dark Urban Fantasy anthology Feral and Fae which is due towards the end of the month. The discussion was long and complicated and I shall not bore you with the opinions. The main font for Fae is being changed and some other minor things, But these were the choices of cover presented to us by Harvey resident cover designer, the lovely Nick Jenkinson (Klaus) who Gillie keeps locked up in her cellar and feeds on scraps of bacon, allegedly…

My own favourite of the three, the middle one, is not the one being used, indeed it the one no one else seemed to like. But as you may have realised by now, what I like does not always make for a good cover…

A good cover being the cover that finds readers.

Which brings me back to Lucifer, the novel that no one reads, with the cover that does not work. Having decided this is the case I have started putting together a few possible replacements, the first of which is a minimalist design, meant to stand out, and attract attention in the way the Strange and the Wonderful cover does. I will be making more before I fix on anything final. It is designed for impact, it is designed for people to say, what is that? A couple of versions of this first idea are below.

I am not yet convinced I have this cover right, and I will make some more designed before I make any changes. But I do like the simplicity of this one. It has impact and intrigue to it, which is sometimes the secret, to finding the answer to the question ‘what cover will work best’.

Lucifer Mandrake: The Esoteric Cricket Ball is good novel. It deserves to be read. Covers matter and the current one just isn’t working. Which is a shame, but the point of a cover is not to please the writer but to find a book readers.

Sometimes you have to kill your darlings, and sometimes reinvent them.

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Dear Edgar 60 ~ The Cask of Amontillado

Posted on May 26, 2026 by Mark Hayes

When I was fairly young, certainly no older than ten or twelve, my maternal grandmother used to slip me a very small glass of sherry now and again. Edna Herrington had lived through a war, rationing and my grandfather dying young on her and leaving her left to raise two teenage girls on a Burtons clothing factory wage, in a back to back council house in east Leeds, with communal outside toilets. By the time she was slipping me tiny glasses of sherry she was living in a council tower block that had replaced the back to backs, with internal plumbing.

Edna lived through a lot, smoked 20 Embassy Number One’s a day and sipped her way through a bottle of sherry a month. Slightly more if she had one of the grandkids staying over night… Some time after this, once all the grand kids were adults and had left their respective homes, Edna’s mind started slipping, and she moved in with my mum and dad for a few moths but the night my mum woke tup to find her mother stood over her husband holding a knife and saying she had to kill him before he killed them, my parents decided with heavy hearts that there may be some wisdom in finding her a care home.

Grandma Edna loved my father, he was her favourite son in law. Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease with no logic to it at times.

But as I say, long before the disease took my grandma from me and replaced her with a slightly mad old woman living in the past, she used to slip me tiny glasses of sherry when ever I stayed the night in her flat. To the child I was, this was a rich strange tasting forbidden fruit… Almost certainly given so I would actually go to sleep…

I have never drunk sherry since, as such I would not know a fine Amontillado from any other sherry. Something in which I am not alone…

In this grim tale of revenge by our Dear Edgar, the promise of sampling a cask of Amontillado is used by the protagonist Montresor to lure his intended victim Fortunato to his grotesque doom. Fortunato considers himself to be a connoisseur of fine wine, though just how true this may be is debateable. At several points in the story he betrays a degree of ignorance, not least when admonishes another noble man as unable to tell the difference between Amontillado and Sherry. Unless Poe himself was unaware they were one in the same, which seems unlikely, it portrays Fortunato as been a social upstart and a drunkard. This is however, the least of his sins in the eyes of Montresor.

At some point in the past Fortunato had wronged Montresor, at least in the eyes of Montresor. What exactly has had done to deserve his fate is never entirely explained. Fortunato, blissfully unaware of this long held vendetta, considers Montresor to be a old friend and trusted ally. Trusted enough that Fortunato openly admits to Montresor he is a Freemason, and seems surprised that Montresor isn’t, at least he has no knowledge of freemasonry, masonry on the other hand…

This is far from the first time Poe has told a story from a murders perspective. Most notably he does so in The Tell Tale Heart and The Black Cat, but also to an extent the early stories like Berenice do much the same. But in those cases the madness of the perpetrator is fully on display. They are to an extent windows into insane minds. In this case however if Montresor is insane it is the cold calculated insanity of a psychopath, rather than the fractured minds encountered in other Poe stories. Montresor at no point comes across as insane at least in regards to the way Poe normally writes insanity. Instead he seems merely coldly and callously driven to enact his revenge.

As revenges go, this is unquestionably brutal. Lured, while drunk, by the opportunity to sample a fine cask of Amontillado and plied with other wines along the way, Fortunato, who is far from fortunate, is led through the bowls of the Montresor family home, through wine cellars and catacombs. Into a dark alcove deep in the furthest cellar, where he is chained to the wall in a drunken stupor and starts to come round as his host proceeds to wall him in alive. All the while listening to Fortunato’s pleading to be released as he finally realises this is not all some wildly elaborate practical joke.

This is a cold end to a chilling tale. Unlike Poe’s other tales of murders, Montresor faces neither justice nor indeed his own guilt. There is only the tinniest of suggestions of him experiencing any guilt at all right at the end, which he then dismisses as a reaction to the dampness of the catacombs. Oddly, or perhaps not, because Montresor faces no crisis of guilt, and remains uncaught, this feels a more chilling tale than Poe’s other stories. Montresor is a murderer who you could pass in the street with no inclination of his psychotic nature. It is grotesque in ways Dear Edgars other tales are not. Rather than obvious signs of insanity he is a companionable murderer, with a refined taste and sensibilities plying his victim with drink and massaging his ego, before committing his cold callous crime. Montresor is in a way a precursor of Hannibal Lector, only without the cannibalism.

A refined killer who acts without pity, who seems sane even which committing insanities.

A TRUE MURDER OF RAVENS

Should you read it: Yes, it is dark and chilling and tangibly horrific, and Poe at his best

Blaggers fact: Reputedly Poe’s inspiration for this story came from a barrack-house legend he heard while stationed at Fort Independence in his army days. After a dual over a card game that left a much admired officer dead, the men of the fort took revenge on his killer by getting the other officer drunk, then chaining him in the depths of the fort and walling him in. However, while Edgar may well have heard the tale in the barracks, it was entirely a fabrication. While the dual did take place, the surviving office was acquitted of murder and was still alive some thirty years later, when Poe put pen to paper to write this tale.

He did die that year however…

Now I think I am going to buy a bottle of Sherry, and have a small tipple to the memory of Edna, as fine a Grandma as a boy could ever wish for. In the meantime, support Alzheimer’s research, or just find out more at https://www.alzheimers.org.uk

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Dear Edgar 59 ~ The Sphinx

Posted on May 14, 2026 by Mark Hayes

The Sphinx is, as I am almost sure you will be aware, a mythical being with the body of a lion and the head of a beautiful woman. There is a rather large nose-less monument to the Sphinx on the Giza plateau, that sits alongside the great, the not quite as great, and the in comparison somewhat lesser, pyramids of ancient Egypt. This story however is not about that Sphinx.

Nor is this story about the Greek myth of the Sphinx. This pitches the monster as one of the titans. A creature that is an asker of riddles. The old “Answer my riddle and I will grant you a boon , fail and your dinner…” kind of riddle asker, but one who for some reasons always seemed to ask the same riddle…

What has four legs in the morning,

two legs throughout the day,

and three legs come evening?

The answer to which if you ever find yourself in need is ‘a man’.

Why the ancient and wise sphinx who knows all things always asks the same question no one knows? Except perhaps the ancient and wise Sphinx, but I would suggest this is not a question you should ask of a violent tempered ridder…

However, as I said, this is not The Sphinx in the title of this story from our Dear Edgar.

Nor is it related to the character ‘The Sphinx’ in the movie Gone in 60 seconds, played by former football hard man Vinnie Jones. Though in fairness that would have been some what unlikely and remarkable prescient of Poe if that was the case.

The Sphinx in question is instead the ‘death head sphinx moth’ a comparatively large and admittedly chilling member of the Lepidoptera order of insects. That is to say, its a big moth…

In Poe’s tale the narrator and his friend have escaped a Cholera outbreak in New York and have gone to wait it out in the hills around the Hudson valley. As the days go by news of deaths in the city continue to rise and thus despite the pleasant surroundings the mood of the companions is on the low side. The narrator in particular suffers from a morbidity of temperament, and has to push away depression lest it overwhelm him. So he spends his days reading, sketching and going for the odd ramble through the woods.

The narrator though remains in the grip of morbid thoughts and when one day he dozes while reading a book he wakes to find himself staring at a monster, which he then describes in no short detail, before fainting to the floor.

Some days later he recounts this event with no little embarrassment to his friend and describes the monster he saw, at which point the story very much becomes an inverse case of ‘that joke’ from Father Ted. The Giant moth monster is not giant, its just not far away. He had in essence awoke to fine a death head sphinx moth hovering close to his eyes and lost all sense of perspective, both figuratively and actually.

Now, all this is down to subtext, or lack there of. The narrator is terrified of the Collar epidemic burning through the population of New York. That plus his heightened sense of isolation and morbid depression led him to believe he had seen a portent of death in the form of the death-head on the moths carapace. The moth that just happened to be inches form his eyes and seemed to him enormous. The problem is that this is pretty much all there is to it. Its a short story with some horrific imagery described, and a meh twist at the end.

One can’t help but feel a Poe story about ‘The Sphinx’ in Egypt would be more engaging than this.

TWO RAVENS CONSIDDERING A LIGHT MOTH LIKE SNACK TO BE SMALL FARE

Should you read it: Well its short, and a master piece in description when it comes to the moth but that doesn’t exactly make it worth your time.

Blaggers fact: The Death Head Sphinx moth is commonly referred to as one of the Death’s-head hawkmoths, (there are three of these one of which is the Sphinx). The hawkmoths are perhaps most famous these days as being the moth covering Jodie Fosters lips in the movie posters for Silence of the Lambs… Which always struck me as slightly chilling.

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The Creation of Strange Worlds

Posted on May 12, 2026 by Mark Hayes

Back in early December 2024 I received a message on my Facebook author page ‘Passing Place’ quite out of the blue.

I will admit my first thought, not entirely unreasonably, was ‘Scam’. Not unreasonably because I get a lot of scammers messaging to my author page. However this time it wasn’t, as I determined after some careful enquiries. This was a genuine approach, with the offer of a genuine contract to write a book. A book on the strange worlds, creatures and gods that sprang from the imagination of old tentacle hugger himself HP Lovecraft.

I had some reservations about this all the same. I am primarily a writer of fiction after all. My one foray into non-fiction had been The Lexinomicon. A bluffers guide to HP Lovecraft’s stories, which came about after I wrote a long series of blogs over the course of four years. While writing and researching those blogs I read every story Lovecraft had written several times and when I put the book together I read several of them again, as what works in a blog post does not always translate to a book and in some cases it had been a while since I read the stories in question. In all I spent half a decade researching and reading Lovecraft, about whom I have definite opinions…

Did I really want to delve back into the mind of Howard Philips Lovecraft?

There was also the question of writing to a contract, something I’d never previously done. One of the joys of self-publishing is you set your own dead lines, then you can ignore them when something shiny appears. It was also not like I did not have other things in the works. Most notably but not solely the second draft of The Esoteric Cricket Ball was almost complete, and I had a self-imposed publishing deadline of the 15th of March* in order to have a new book ready for a bunch of events I was signed up for in the spring of 2025.

*yes my deadline was the id’s of March**, an auspicious date I tend to chose for deadlines as it appeals to me have a deadline on the date Julius Caesar was murdered, that and it happens to be my birthday. By coincidence it is also the date on which Howard Philips Lovecraft died.

**Yes that is pretentious as hell, what of it?

Having explained this to the publisher, I asked for more details and was told by Arcturus their deadline was the 1st of August 2025, and that they wanted 35000 words by then, could I put together a structure and plan for them first? And they were offering a flat fee no royalty deal…

Now, 35000 words is not as many as you might think. My novels range between 65 -100k, My previous book on Lovecraft’s stories was around 80k. But it was December, August was only nine months away and I had a novel to finish. I had no clue how to structure the book and a flat fee no royalty deal was a new one for me. So I went and asked for advice from a couple of fellow authors, one of which had written a number of non-fiction books in the past.

As ever this meeting took place in the pub, whence I was told in no uncertain terms to just do it. The flat fee was large enough to make the lack of royalties a none issue (for context, it was more than all my novels combined had made over the last three years, not that this is saying much) . The fact they were offering a 50% advance as well more or less sealed the deal as it showed they were serious.

So I put together a structure, and exchanged a few more emails while we ironed it out, then got to writing, once the novel was complete in March…

What the book became was in part a biography of Lovecraft, as well as a deep dive into the mythos, dreamlands, creatures and strangeness crated by Providence’s favourite son ( well favourite author at least). It ended up been enormous fun to write, not least because I had to do lots of research and I love research. I will not pretend the biography is as in-depth as some of those out there, my now well thumbed copy of Joshi’s ‘short’ biography is 108 pages long and the longer I Am Providence is a tomb of nearer 600 , but an in-depth biography was never the brief. I cover his life and works to the extent a more casual reader might find engaging, then move on to the worlds, deities and creatures he created as well as principal characters both human and not so human from his works.

I like to think I completed the brief and that the book I wrote is indeed as it is described on its amazon listed A….

‘fascinating reference guide, you will discover the secrets and mysteries of H. P. Lovecraft’s iconic worlds. From the Great Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos to the shifting places of the Dreamlands, the settings of Lovecraft’s stories are replete with terrifying monsters, bizarre creations and cosmic mysteries.

Fully illustrated, the world of Cthulhu is brought to life as never before in this volume and you will soon become an expert in the characters and locations of Lovecraft’s tales. As well as descriptions and explanations of the key people, events and places, this book includes an exploration of Lovecraft’s legacy and examines how his writing has continued to enthral and influence people for nearly a century.’

I have barely mentioned this book previously. Not least because until it had a publishing date etc it did not seem entirely real. I have not mentioned it on social media at all, and eluded to it at most here. I deferred the advance for complex reasons, so it wasn’t until I had submitted the first manuscript, gone through the editing phases, and seen the full proofs, that I really believed the book would finally come about. I was far from sure I would see a penny for it until I did and even still it all seemed a little surreal, stemming as it did from a message on Facebook. Admittedly the Facebook page is a perfectly reasonable point of first contact. It just seemed odd.

Yet here it is, with a few glimpses of the inside…

It comes out in September this year and is available, well just about everywhere for per-order. It remains a bit of a strange thing to have been asked to write, but I look forward to holding a final copy in my hand at some point in the near future. It is an enormously pretty illustrated hardback, for a given quantity of pretty that involved tentacles, extra eyes and unimaginable horrors from beyond the realm of human experience

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