The DemiMonde and Beyond
Novels
• • •
The Gaps Between the Stories
The Gaps Between the Stories is a fractured novel about memory, war, and the failure of narrative to hold the world together. A storyteller attempts to reconstruct his grandfather’s wartime experiences, but the account splinters into unreliable voices, surreal missions, and recurring figures who drift between history and hallucination. As personal trauma, political myth, and post-truth absurdity bleed into one another, stories no longer explain events—they obscure them. What remains are fragments: violence without meaning, memory without certainty, and a desperate human urge to keep telling stories even as they collapse.
An Untamed Garden Game (work in progress)
An Untamed Garden Game is a destabilising novel in which agency, intention, and control are quietly dismantled. Set within a shifting conceptual landscape known as the Garden, the story follows human actors who believe they are making choices, forming plans, and exerting power—while unseen systems patiently reroute every outcome. The Garden speaks in its own logic, indifferent to human meaning, bending perception and causality without malice or purpose. What unfolds is not a contest to be won but a demonstration: that the game was never designed for mastery, only participation, misunderstanding, and slow, inevitable undoing.
In Abeyance of a Small God (work in progress)
In Abeyance of a Small God is an intimate, destabilised novel of grief, faith, and suspended action. Moving between confession, memory, and hallucinated theology, it follows a narrator living alongside a diminished, possibly imaginary god—present, powerless, and waiting. The narrative resists plot in favour of accretion: fragments of illness, love, addiction, prayer, and guilt gathering without resolution. Belief here is not redemption but exposure, stripping away agency and certainty. What remains is abeyance itself—a life paused between responsibility and escape, devotion and doubt, where even the divine is unable to intervene.
Don’t wait in abeyance for the Small God – take a sneak peak
Retrouvez Le Guiche (work in progress)
Retrouvez Le Guiche is a drifting search narrative set in the long hangover of espionage, myth-making, and self-deception. An ageing operative wanders through old haunts in Southeast Asia, half-pretending to look for a vanished comrade, Guy “Le Guiche” Guicharde, while avoiding a reckoning at home. Missions blur with drunken nights, memories rot, and truth dissolves into anecdote and joke. At its core, the novel is a bleak meditation on post-truth cognition: how stories, once untethered from reality, metastasise into something autonomous—rewriting motive, agency, and finally the possibility of return.
Short Fiction
Stockhomely – A Lizard Cycle (serialised fiction, Roe River Review)
A tale of Big Dave, Very Very Big Dave, the human, and Huw, the gecko, involving sieges, shootouts, insanity and the Stockholm Syndrome.
Ground Zero – An Ice Cream Saga (serialised fiction, Roe River Review)
The Ice Cream Guy encounters ordinary everyday mayhem whilst shifting product.
Another Day at the Bureau (Neon Origami)
Something is wrong with Maurice. It could be a case of late stage Mehrkanoonism, or perhaps he is simply turning into a filing cabinet. Pour yourself a Black Scallywag, and find out.
Samhain Dogs (Argyle Literary Magazine)
When the Wild Hunt gets wild, the Samhain Dogs howl.
A New Look at the World’s Oldest Profession (Modern Flash Fiction)
When Capuchin Monkeys invent prostitution there’s only one way things can end up…
A Problematic Submission to our “Voices of Clark County” Literary Competition (forthcoming – Roe River Review)
R. Ishmael Cavendish receives a disturbing entry to the County Fair Literary Competition. it purports to consist of survivor testimonies. From some kind of Apocalypse. Involving Zombies. Oh… and masturbation.
Into the Blue (Eastern Iowa Review)
An assassin hiding inside a waterbed. What could possibly go wrong?