TTA Novellas Series

Here are some comments on Eyepennies: “A musician emotionally scarred by a near-death experience is haunted by his past, his present and his future in this chilling, slow burn of a ghost story. Read it!” Ellen Datlow “Mike O’Driscoll is without doubt one of our best writers. I often wish he wrote more, because when he does produce something new – such as the excellent Eyepennies – it’s truly an occasion for celebration” Tim Lebbon “A musician struggles to come to terms with his existence following a near-death experience, in a world where reality is something elusive and the darkness is always waiting. A beautifully written, evocative novella” Alison Littlewood “A beautiful story suffused with the entangled mysteries of pain and life, as radiant as it is dark: the best kind” Stephen Volk "O’Driscoll delivers these emotions with a subtlety that surprises. He lulls you in and leaves you drained, as all good horror writers should. But he does this without big dramatic scenes and with a skilful underplaying – even the most horrific of scenes, that with Mark in the farmyard with a gun, is done through Mark’s eyes, and Mark cannot appreciate the true nature of what he is doing. If the rest of the novellas in this series are half as good as this, I look forward to them eagerly." Suite 101 The inspiration for Eyepennies came from a song by American singer-songwriter Mark Linkous, on the album It’s a Wonderful Life: youtube.com/watch?v=h7cXtu3-u6c.

SPIN won the 2014 British Science Fiction Association Award. Nina Allan is acclaimed as a short fiction author and 'Spin' brings you an opportunity to try her longer fiction. 'Spin' is a novella which weaves Greek mythology, science fiction and alternate history into Layla Vargas'. journey across an alternate modern Greece. In the myth Arachne was the awesomely skilled weaver whose tapestries challenged the gods and eventually resulted in her being transformed into a spider. In Nina's novella Layla is our surrogate for Arachne and her fate and destiny, powers of prophecy and possibly those gods are implicit in her story and the stories of the people she meets. Here are some quotes from reviews: “Nina Allan’s re-imagining of the Arachne myth, with its receding overlays of the modern and the antique, creates a space all its own. The scene is clean and minimal, the light Mediterranean, the story seems musing and sad: but by the last two pages, Spin has you in a grip that persists long after you put it down” M. John Harrison “The writing is precise, the imagery vividly sensual; by re-imagining ancient myth in a stunningly realised alternate Greece, Nina Allan traps you in a web of story” Paul Kincaid “Spin blends contemporary, fantastical, futuristic, and contemporary elements in a way that Nina Allan is making her own” David Hebblethwaite “Allan expertly weaves SF, fantasy and mythology into a subtle, seamless, dreamlike whole. I loved it” Neil Williamson "Journeys mean something in a story like this one. They shouldn’t be rushed. They should be full of places, of encounters: With the young man afflicted with a curse. A fascinating epic poem on which Layla bases her newest work. The masterpieces of ancient sibyls, catching dust in the museum. Spiders weaving in the sunlight, busy at their work. The details so clear, so well-chosen to make a story." –RECOMMENDED" Lois Tilton www.locusmag.com/Reviews/#spin "Ultimately “Spin” succeeds for me because Allan is not trying to compete or improve upon the Arachne myth, nor is she wilfully offering up a new and jaunty twist. (Meowmorphosis... please.) No, instead what we get is a highly personal piece that was written for and is dedicated to her father. No RPG’s were needed in the arena after all, folks. The fight wasn’t there to begin with." In short, I’d heartily recommend “Spin” to fans of literary sci-fi and fantasy, and especially to those already familiar with Nina Allan’s work. If you tick any of those boxes then I doubt you’d be disappointed with this." Rating: 5/5" Lucian Poll lucianpoll.com/2013/04/01/review-spin-by-nina-allan/

“I saw him Mr Munroe.” A sly look lit up Jimmy’s blinking eyes. “He’s always chasing you.” Raym’s hand froze in front of his chest, creeping back up towards his throat again. “What?” “In a funny square van.” The kid blinked, blinked, blinked. He wooshed his hands either side of his body like he was starting a drag race, and Raym flinched again. “It’s got black tails – really, really looong ones, like party streamers!” All Raym wants to do is give up smoking. So why is his entire life falling apart? Why are new mistakes and old terrors conspiring against him? Why is he being plagued by the very worst spectre from his childhood? And why does giving up suddenly – horrifyingly – feel much, much more like giving in? This 38,500-word novella has already picked up rave reviews: “Carole has written out of her skin for this novella. How can reading something so dark and insidiously uneasy offer the reader so much pleasure? Cold Turkey is a hammer and Carole Johnstone will cave your skull in with it. Brilliant” —Johnny Mains “Carole Johnstone has the canny knack of making the real seem strange and the weird commonplace. In Cold Turkey, addiction and compulsion spirals downwards into imagined and real nightmares. Top Hat, a creation to rival King’s Pennywise, rides through the urban Scottish landscape that Johnstone has created with an absolute sense of place. Her laugh out loud humour balances her harshness and puts you off-guard before delivering the final blow; if you get in bed with the devil, he’s going to fuck you over at some point” —Priya Sharma “Cold Turkey is rich with nightmarish invention. Johnstone has created a very distinctive villain with the sinister top-hatted tally-van man, yet knows when to hold him back to let other horrors take centre stage. There’s an addictive quality to the well-paced prose that makes reading Johnstone’s stories a habit you’ll never want to kick, and this one’s so good it’s probably bad for you” —Ray Cluley At the British Fantasy Convention, held in York in September 2014, Carole's 2013 short story 'Signs of the Times' won the British Fantasy Award for best short story. This story has now been added to the Cold Turkey ebook free of charge.

The Teardrop Method by Simon Avery is the fourth in TTA Press's Novella series (previous titles are Eyepennies by Mike O'Driscoll, the award-winning Spin by Nina Allan, and Cold Turkey by Carole Johnstone, all available on this site). It contains a bonus linked short story, 'Going Back to the World'. Krisztina heard the song and she followed it across the city... Winter in Budapest. In the midst of a terrible personal tragedy, singer/songwriter Krisztina Ligetti discovers she can hear songs of mortality. She spends her days following these songs until they lead her to people at the precipice of death. From the fading bars of their final breath, Krisztina takes the story of their lives and turns them into music. When Krisztina is reunited with her father, a reclusive 60s pop star, she believes that she has finally found a way out of the darkness, but then she begins to receive news clippings detailing each of the deaths she has been witness to. A man in a porcelain mask who seems to be everywhere she looks and a faded writer who shares Krisztina's gift seem to know her, know that the past has a hold on them all, and that it won't stop until someone has paid the price. "The Teardrop Method is a story about stories; a beautiful novella about love and loss and the connections people make and then sometimes break. It's quiet, haunting, and ultimately moving" Gary McMahon "Nightmare plotting infused with an aching mitteleuropäische sadness, Simon Avery’s tale of music and mortality could be the novelisation of a lost Argento movie" Nicholas Royle "Without any prep or background, I started reading the novella The Teardrop Method by British author Simon Avery, and was immediately engaged by the moodiness, the bleakness, the desperation and creaky, world-weariness of the setting and characters. These appealing elements perfectly coalesced into a tragic and fervent eulogy to the creative process -- to Art with a capital A -- as a means of salvation and transcendence and doom, and to love itself in all its complex iterations, exploring the concept of loving, dying, and even killing, in order to achieve the proper reception code from the eternal Muse while the roaring Danube drowns out the rest of the world. This is a very European story, in all its faded baroque finery and cafe claustrophobia. The snow is heavier here, the dawn ever more surprising. The supernatural and the natural are not so far removed in places like this. The old and the new forever caught in a twirling waltz. I highly recommend this novella, and cannot wait to see what melody Mr Avery pens next. I'll be listening" T.E. Grau "A monumentally haunting novella" Des Lewis “Simon Avery’s descriptions of Krysztina’s music makes me want to hear it. It’s a subtle and beautifully told tale with echoes of European film-makers like Haneke and Kieslowski, as well as their predecessors like Franju and Polanski. It conjures a powerful sense of foreboding that reminds me of Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, and shares with that film a sense of being haunted. It has moments of profound sadness and yet still managed to surprise me with its uplifting ending. One of the novellas of the year” Mike O'Driscoll “A dark and tense thriller, set against a cold Hungarian backdrop. The reconnection between father and daughter gives The Teardrop Method melancholy in light of the father’s declining health, and the handling of the supernatural element is done so latently it feels authentic and genuinely spooky. The prose is compulsively readable and even the stranger members of the cast pop off the page” Nick Cato, The Horror Fiction Review “A quintessential TTA novella: horror with a vein of oddness that runs through it; a strange story where the protagonist hears the song that precedes a person’s death. With vivid descriptions of Budapest, it all helps to create a wholly believable narrative. Recommended, especially if you’re a fan of Dario Arge