Chopped Meat

I've just written a new book in eight days!

Chopped Meat: British Horror of the 1970s is the title. I commenced from scratch on the morning of Friday May 29th and completed it in full yesterday evening. I'm awaiting a proof copy and will then put it on general sale.

It's a pocket guide to 70s British horror movies and TV - 126 brief pages, A5 size (if Billy is still out there somewhere, he'd be appalled that this booklet-sized item isn't anywhere close to the dimensions of my 60s and 80s books on BHFs!).

So, why did I write it? Several reasons. Something to do during lockdown, for one (though I'm right in the middle of editing three other books currently, so it's not as if I needed anything to do!). Plus, I've been awaiting FAB Press' expanded version of Ten Years of Terror, which has been in the pipeline for many years, and so when thinking about subject matter for this self-imposed challenge, figured that "if FAB won't get around to doing it, I'll nip ahead and beat them to it". And the main reason is that I'm editing Eric McNaughton's book 'Spotlight on Horror' at present, and the contributors' deadline of February 29th ended up being laughable - more than three months later, writers are still sending material in!! And that fact has caused me lots of extra unforseen work! So, to show the 'Spotlight' guys how it ought to be done, I decided to see whether I could write a book in ten days, the intention being to self-publish it before midnight on Sunday June 7th. Well, I amazed myself by completing it within eight days - text done in six, plus two days for formatting, editing, and online publishing.

Content-wise, it features mini-reviews of every British horror feature film of the seventies, year by year - including a few titles that I don't think have ever been included in a book about British horror before. I've also done sections on short films, amateur films (again with some material that hasn't been covered elsewhere), foreign films in Britain, 'monster matinee' films (Ray Harryhausen, John Dark/Kevin Connor, etc) - and a whopping annotated list of British horror telly, which won't be absolutely 'complete', but which I've tried to pack with as much info and content as possible within the limited space.

Hopefully it will be on sale within a week or two.