The Shelter Is Real...

Exciting news - my new novella, The Shelter, is now available - Amazon UK | Amazon US | Amazon DE | Smashwords. To prove it, here's the cover art yet again (bored of it yet?) and blurb:

It’s a long, drowsy summer at the end of the 1980s, and Alan Dean and three of his friends cross the fields behind their village to look for a rumoured WW2 air raid shelter. Only half believing that it even exists beyond schoolboy gossip, the four boys nevertheless feel an odd tension and unease. And when they do find the shelter, and go down inside it, the strange and horrifying events that follow will test their adolescent friendships to breaking point, and affect the rest of their lives...

A horror novella of 15.5k words, plus an author’s afterword.

The phrase the shelter is real that I've used as the title for this post is one I use repeatedly in the afterword to the book, which describes the inspiration behind the story, and the slightly unusual circumstances behind its composition. 

If you do read The Shelter I'd love to know what you think of it - after having spent the last few weeks editing, proof-reading, and formatting it I'm now in that slightly weird zone where I can't even imagine what it would be like for someone to read it for the first time. This time the feeling is compounded by the somewhat odd nature of how this story came to be written, and the fact that it is a more straightforward and commercial story than I normally write. I'd hope it will still appeal to all of you who've said kind things about The Other Room though.

And regardless it's out now - an achievement I can be proud of. I've had the phrase bouncing around in my head for years, but now it's true in another sense - The Shelter is real.