RICHARD E. ROCK

In the first extract from FRENZY ISLAND that I posted we met the cat-loving heavy metal fan from Arizona, Cynthia Dowley. In the second we met refugees Esperance and Godriva Watara. Now it’s time to meet the bad guy from my forthcoming sci-fi/horror novel: Texan billionaire businessman Byron Wurd. Byron made his fortune with a…

The story of FRENZY ISLAND kicks off when a small lifeboat full of shipwrecked refugees washes ashore on an unnamed island off the coast of east Africa… “The boat hit shore at 09:27 EAT. We can be exact on this because it was picked up by the perimeter cameras. It was an old open lifeboat,…

Cynthia Dowley is one of the main players in my forthcoming sci-fi/horror novel FRENZY ISLAND. She is absolutely, totally and completely my favourite character in the book; a prolifically tattooed twenty-something employee of SpaceWurd who digs heavy metal (favourite bands include Sumo Cyco, Butcher Babies, Stitched Up Heart and Megadeth), has a big ginger cat…

If you’re hungry for a creepy folk-horror tale that’s guaranteed to put you off your dinner, this is it. The Feast is a Welsh language film, subtitled, that centres around a dinner party thrown by a well-to-do family of generally unpleasant people. Glenda, the matriarch, is a prissy perfectionist stewing in her own materialism. Her…

For the uninitiated, Liv Kristine is a Norwegian singer who, as lead vocalist in Theatre of Tragedy and Leaves’ Eyes, helped to define the gothic heavy metal subgenre. She has also throughout her career contributed vocals to a number of other bands and released five solo albums plus numerous EPs. But what I’m reviewing here,…

Just as my first novel, Deep Level, began with a nightmare, so did this one. Actually, scratch that. The journey to Frenzy Island began with a series of them. There were four, and they came over successive nights. The first depicted a shipwrecked party of cruise liner tourists washing ashore on an island with a…

Whitechapel 1888 was no place for a lady. Not only were poverty, disease, crime and alcoholism rife, but there was a notorious killer on the loose whose savagery, it seemed, knew no limits. But Jack the Ripper wasn’t the only murderer preying on woman at that time. The Ladies of Whitechapel by Denise Bloom sits…

Early on in this novel, Stephen King identifies the ‘one last job’ trope in crime fiction as a sub genre in its own right. And, as he points out, that ‘one last job’ seldom goes smoothly. Enter Billy Summers, a hit man with literary aspirations who is acutely aware of the perils that come with…

Does Alan Moore, the impressively bearded sage of Northampton, even need an introduction? Regardless, he’s getting one anyway. He’s the enigmatic writer who revolutionised the comic book industry with such classics as the Batman graphic novel The Killing Joke, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and many, many more. He…

McCrae stalks the streets of his city in a creepy beaked mask and a hooded cloak, looking for all the damned world like a demonic crow. The downtrodden denizens call him ‘Doctor Death’, but instead of taking lives he is actually trying to save them, for he is a plague doctor. His lover Katrein is…