Currently I am typesetting a second short anthology of stories of the kind I oft refer top as Passing Place tales. That being stories of a certain kind, the kind that might appear between the pages of my 2016 novel Passing Place after which this blog is named. This has lead to me needing to redo the Also By pages. Normally this is black and white pictures of cover, with a small blurb or an edited down review. Or a simple list of books on one page.

In the kindle version thee would of course have links to the versions, but in print it just acts as a list.

I decide to do something different for Auguries of Euryale, my forthcoming anthology of my own work. I decided instead to write it in a more narrative style, telling a story of my novels and other works. I think it sort of works as a more interesting way to do the Also by pages…

The Auguries of the Also By

This book was not the first anthology of The Passing Place. Before this book came ‘The Strange and the Wonderful’, if you enjoyed these stories, you will enjoy those too.

Before ‘The Strange and the Wonderful’ came The Passing Place itself, a novel about Richard, a piano player, coming off the road trip to end all road trips as he was seeking answers to an impossible question. Why his wife took her own life…

The novel is centered around the telling of stories in a strange bar on the edge of reality. A Bar that is advertising for a piano player in a bus station window, when Richard pitches up with his last couple of dollars in a Midwest town in the middle of a thunderstorm. The card also says that any successful applicant must know one song in particular. ‘Endless Winter’, an obscure track for an equally obscure 70’s album. A song that also just happens to be Richards deceased wife’s favorite song.

It is then that the cat tells him to take the job.  

A third anthology of short stories by the same author is ‘Cheesecake, Avarice and Boots’ which contains a novella set in the Passing Place, when Hannibal Smyth falls into the bar, in a most literal sense, when he is thrown off the side of an airship. When not avoid a painful death by falling into an impossible bar rather than the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Hannibal Smyth, who’s real name is Harry Smith when he is not posing as a member of the officer class in the Royal Airship Force, is serving queen and country as a somewhat unwilling agent of The Ministry in an alternative steampunk modern era in which Queen Victoria is over two hundred and been kept alive by nefarious means to hold together a British Empire that never fell.

As well as the novella and several of the short stories in ‘Cheesecake, Averice and Boots’ Hannibal is also the protagonist and somewhat unreliable narrator of a trilogy of novels, ‘A Spider in the Eye’, ‘From Russia With Tassels’, and ‘A Squid on the Shoulder’. A rogue, a liar, murder, thief, traitor and unwilling agent of the crown, Hannibal tells the reader from the very beginning that they can not trust a word he says.

The novels, novella and the most pertinent short stories are available in a collected edition ‘The Complete Hannibal Smyth Misadventures’.  

While Hannibal Smyth is Steampunk in a twisted version of the modern era, the world of Hannible Smyth diverged form our own in the mid-Victorian period when HG Wells took it on himself to alter the natural course of events. It is in this earlier era that the novel ‘Maybe’ is set. In ‘Maybe’ Eliza Tu-Pa-Ka morns the death of her father the brilliant Samoan engineer   Ma-Ya-Bee and seeks to hold his murders to account with the aid of Benjamin West, of the Kensington West’s and his former manservant Gothe, who is formally alive. Intrigue abounds as shadowy villains put the fate of the empire at risk. A game of high stakes is being played. Higher Stakes than Eliza, mistakenly called Miss Maybe, could have imagined.

Staying with alterative Victorians we come to ‘Lucifer Mandrake and the Exoteric Cricket ball’. Mandrake began as a short story in a Harvey Duckman Anthology. A tale of the kind you oft come across in the Passing Place, one set in a Victorian world where the arcane is real and governed by Newtons Laws of Magic. A tale that grew from its telling as once Lucifer Mandrake was born in that short story it became obvious there was novel waiting to be written.

Lucifer is Arcanist to the Court of St James by appointment of the queen herself. Plots are afoot, someone is resurrecting dead peers of the realm and sending the back to the house of lords as zombies. Someone is bound to notice eventually.

There is a threat to Queen Victoria herself, as plotters seem to replace her with the King of Hanover. An old grimoire has been stollen, an face from Lucifer’s past returns to haunt him. He must face a haunted version of his own city in the fae realm, break foul enchantments that endanger the royal family and betrayal by those he trusts most.

But more than that he must face the other version of himself, the one within, hidden behind the eyes of Luci Drake.

Lucifer, Hannibal, Miss Maybe and others have all walked through the doors of The Passing Place. Miss Maybe was there right at the start, appearing briefly as a cameo in the original novel long before her own story was ever written or even fully conceived.

Others are there too, Susanna from my very first novel ‘Cider Lane’ shows up as a nightmare in a corridor. H.P. Lovecraft has sat at the bar, before he was asked to leave for preaching about abstinence and sent out into the garden to stare out into the darkness beyond at something red…

At some point the author of these Novels and short stories accidently wrote the ‘Lexinomicon’ a non-fiction guide to Lovecraft’s fiction, which lead to him being invited to write a second book on The Strange Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft.

This is also not the end, the doors of The Passing Place never close, new stories are waiting to be told. New novels waiting to be written.

Something Red dwells in the darkness waiting with Scarlet Sometimes. Lucifer Mandrake, Hannibal Smyth and Miss Maybe all have new tales to tell. Meanwhile Anna Kirkpatrick a teenage witch from Teesside is waiting round the corner with Mr Spleen and deMafesss practical Lawyers to the Fae Kings court on her tail. She has gotten hold of something precious to the Elf king, and at some point she might even work out what it is and tell the author…

May your darkness hold glimmers of light and your light hold shades of darkness.

With regards for happy readings  

Mark Hayes 2026

Auguries of Euryale will be out in the new year, if not before, but it is running late for a December release so January seems favorite right now. The name comes from a combination of two of the stories in the book. Auguries which is a new Lucifer Mandrake story set ten years after the novel, but written to avoid spoilers. And Euryale, who’s name you might recognize as she is one of the two immortal sisters of medusa. Euryale now works in a charity shop in Cheem, because immortality chafes if you don’t keep yourself busy. There are twelve stories in total some long some short, all the kinds of tales that would be told in the passing place.