“While cutting back the flat-leaf parsley today I discovered a South American rainforest tribe living in the vegetable patch.” Those who know me and who are familiar with my writing won’t be surprised to discover that Steve Jobs doesn’t appear in this new, previously unpublished short story. It doesn’t include his much-reported last words, either; so if you don’t know what they were, I recommend the search engine of your choice. The first ‘chapter’ follows, by way of a teaser. “Steve Jobs’ last words” is US$0.99 from the Amazon Kindle Store and if you join Amazon Prime you can borrow it for free.

An island rising from the sea, sand strewn with coconut husks frothing at its perimeters; the hills a mirage of purple looming from the rainforest… Set on an imaginary Caribbean island, ‘Dream Me An Island’ tells the story of local taxi driver Charles Wesley ‘Smiley’ Gumbs, who is coerced into using Obeah Magic to pressurise a multinational corporation to stop mining for gold.

Das Schicksal (‘Fate’, also known as the ‘Cruel Countess’) is a 1905 sculpture by German artist Hugo Lederer. It stands in the world’s biggest cemetery: the Ohlsdorfer Hauptfriedhof in Hamburg. It’s among the most distressing, unforgettable works of art I’ve seen and my short story germinated when, after stumbling across the statue, I imagined her coming to life. The story first appeared in the UK magazine The Third Alternative (now Black Static), then in Germany’s Heidelberg Review and subsequently in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s annual anthology, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (10th Edition), published by St Martin’s Griffin Press (USA). It’s now available as a Kindle e-book, with a cover designed by Elisa Bowman. Some history and a brief excerpt follow.

Cover photo: Uwe Barghaan © 2006

‘“Hey, Nigel!” Kev shouted. “We’re going on a boat-trip.” He was already at the gangplank.’

What happens when three drinkers take an impromptu boat trip? And why are the other day-trippers so relieved to get back to port? The title of this e-book comes from a reference in the introduction to Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, and a quotation from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. JP Donleavy’s A Fairy Tale of New York also gets a mention.

Get Port After Stormy Seas on your Kindle, PC or iPad for US$0.99 – less than you pay for the coffee you drink while you’re reading it. A link and short extract follow the jump.

The Vale of Health is a part of London’s Hampstead Heath, supposedly so named because it was spared by the Great Plague of 1665-1666. The Vale of Health is also my short story about a painting with a life of its own. It was inspired by the 1914 Henry Lamb portrait of the writer Lytton Strachey, a man who was ironically something of a stranger to good health; that is, considering he sat for Lamb in his Vale of Health studio at various times over a period of several years. Henry Lamb’s portrait of Lytton Strachey, one of the better-known members of the Bloomsbury Group, can be viewed online at the Tate Collection’s website. It’s an extraordinary painting, not least considering Strachey was supposedly in love with Lamb at the time. A brief excerpt of the story follows.

A Shelterless Man is my first e-book of poems, available exclusively from the Amazon Kindle Store for US$2.99. The title comes from a passage in Jack London’s book, The People of the Abyss, in which he describes his experiences among the poor in the East End of London: “On one bench I noticed a family, a man sitting upright with a sleeping babe in his arms, his wife asleep, her head on his shoulder, and in her lap the head of a sleeping youngster. The man’s eyes were wide open. He was staring out over the water and thinking, which is not a good thing for a shelterless man with a family to do. It would not be a pleasant thing to speculate upon his thoughts; but this I know, and all London knows, that the cases of out-of-works killing their wives and babies is not an uncommon happening.”

My short story Shem-el-Nessim was first published on the now defunct NZBC blog in instalments in 2006. It subsequently appeared in print in Zahir magazine (US); a Postscripts anthology called ‘This Is The Summer of Love’ (UK); and Steven Jones’s annual anthology The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 21, published by Constable & Robinson.

The story was inspired by an advertisement from The Illustrated London News for a real perfume by the London company J. Grossmith and Son. Last January I was emailed by a descendant of John Grossmith, Simon Brooke, who has re-launched the company and its perfumes. Shem-el-Nessim is now available as a Kindle e-book for US$0.99.

“The bullet point party’s electro-shock therapy hadn’t cured my ‘internet addiction’, which is what it claimed countless citizens were suffering from when its propaganda also said the net was killing print, the banks and big business, presaging bailouts and the more drastic measures we came to call the Almighty Crunch. I completed the treatment programme around the time they began prosecuting bloggers and citizen journalists for ‘media crimes’.” Ask the dissidents in Venezuela, the revolutionaries in Egypt, the rebels in Libya, or the protestors in Bahrain: the enemies of the internet are legion. Repressive governments, police states and fundamentalist regimes abhor a free internet. Iniquity is now available as an e-book on the Amazon.com (US$0.99) and Amazon UK Kindle Stores.

Optimised for Kindle, with active Table of Contents, illustrated cover and recommended listening, the e-book edition of Liquidambar is available for US$2.99, at the Amazon.com Kindle Store.

This new e-book only edition of The Bumper Book of Lies, optimised for Kindle, costs US$4.99. It includes 25 short stories by Chris Bell, 15 of them first published in magazines and anthologies; 9 previously unpublished stories; 1 story included in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror 10th Annual Edition; 1 story included in the PostScripts New ‘Writers’ anthology This Is The Summer of Love; 3 honourable mentions from The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror; 1 story included in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 21. Available exclusively from the Amazon Kindle Store.