I’ve been writing a few stories featuring circuses and my imaginary Fenland village of Great Witcherly (or Great Marshway in one version – I forgot what I’d called it).

One of these – The Death of a Clown – will appear in Midnight Menagerie when that publishes on April 22.

A second – Dog Days, Wolf Nights – has just become available in Circus of the Dead and a third, The Goldfish, should soon appear in Hellbound Books Creature Feature.

Those were written in response to seeing calls for submissions, but it has inspired me to start a novel with the teenage protagonist having been brought up in a circus but coming to live with her uncle in a house where each level still exists in the period it was built in – going back to a cave from the Ice Age.

The short stories all have a degree of inspiration from Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way comes, and one of my (imaginary) London Institute of ‘Pataphysics stories – included in Triple Obscura 2 –  crams in references to the Bradbury book and lots of other strange circuses as well as a number of avant garde classics.

The other story of mine which has just come out is The Usher of Fall House in the Gothic Gazette. I wanted to see if I could take the atmosphere of Gothic Fiction and translate it to the present day without the usual props of the genre. The observant will notice my trick of not specifying the gender of the protagonist.