My novel The Cellar Gang is available exclusively from this site, and if you buy it, I hope it makes you laugh.

As you will see when you visit the shop, this special edition is limited to five hundred copies. If you like it enough to buy all these then I will release the second book, Martin of Munich before Christmas next year (it’s a Christmas story). It’s my favourite book so far, but its comedy is even blacker than The Cellar Gang, so I thought I’d let you read  The Cellar Gang first as a more gentle introduction into my imagination.

To fill in that time-gap there are Walking With Billy (spoken word and music) and The Cathedral of Light (short stories).

Walking With Billy is a very personal project, and I did not originally intend it for release. But the positive reaction of friends has persuaded me to take this step.

Since I was a child I have been consistently moved by Yeats’s poetry. For me, he is the last great Poet, a poet from the Bardic tradition where poetry was written to move your soul, not just to amuse your intellect. Many times I have tried to deconstruct his poetry to find out how he does it, and each time I find at its base Yeats’s own original, gifted pulse that comes from the “deep heart’s core” of his genius.

I have tried to compliment and augment this Yeatsian thing with music and song. With the help of my son Raven’s beautiful violin playing (at the age of eighteen he has been playing and performing in public for sixteen years) and my daughter Oonagh’s angelic vocals and backing vocals, we have sometimes felt that pulse.

Be warned, this is not a professional studio recording. It is a homemade demo, an emotional expression and in many ways is, like my books, just another window into what goes on inside my head. With a small digital deck, a bunch of guitars and a synthesiser that insists on picking up Japanese, Russian and German radio programmes, I have crashed clumsily through the conventions of such things and hewn my tribute to Billy Yeats.

So, please come walking with Billy, and see whether you get there too.

The Cathedral of Light. For me, the medium of the short story has as much artistic potential as does the poem or the novel. Even the shortest and least condensed stories can leave a flavour that will stay all through one’s life. I suppose, in modern times where the short story does not feature much any more, this role has been taken over by the sophisticated TV advert that can tell a tale in thirty seconds with a series of edits none of which last for more than two seconds. I find those adverts fascinating, and some of them are truly brilliant in the way they tell their short story.

However, this collection has nothing to do with advertising but I hope that each little adventure will take you somewhere new, geographically and cerebrally.

With Martin of Munich I have the problem about not giving plots away. The book was generally inspired by the illustrations of Michael Sowa and Gerhard Gluck - for many years I lived with the poster of Koehler’s Pig and the pig in the soup. But it was specifically inspired by a lift a friend gave me in Munich. Half way to where we were going his car broke down, and he explained that a pine marten had chewed through one of the cables.

While we were waiting for the car to be fixed, he told me about the job he had every year - as a professional Saint Nicholas who visited families during the weeks before Christmas to make sure the children were behaving themselves.

I’m sorry if some of you will find this one too black, but the theme that runs through both The Cellar Gang and Martin of Munich is that you can laugh at anything, and if you can’t, then you have to learn.

I’m lucky enough to have a teaching job in Munich a few times a year so I know the city pretty well, particularly as it prepares for Christmas. I hope that some of my fondness for the place and its wonderful atmosphere at Christmas time comes across.

Keep well and I hope that you enjoy The Cellar Gang, and make sure none of your pets escape…

JOHN