The Platinum Raven and other novellas is now perkily available—a paperback comprising a collection of four novellas called The Platinum Raven, The Host in the Attic, Apricot Eyes and Hallucination in Hong Kong. For some great reviews and interviews about it, see Reviews and interviews for the four novellas.

Retail links for The Platinum Raven and other novellas paperback are here. And each of the four novellas is also available by itself as a separate e-book: retail links for these four individual novella e-books are at The Platinum Raven, The Host in the Attic, Apricot Eyes and Hallucination in Hong Kong.

The Platinum Raven is a triple convulsion whereby our heroine Raven escalates herself into the Chocolate Raven and then the Platinum Raven, from London to Dubai to the tower in the hills in the desert—then back down again, forever changed. A lot of its action happens in my favourite building, the fabulously flashy Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest skyscraper.

The Host in the Attic is a hologram of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, digitised and reframed in cinematic style, set in London’s Docklands in a few years’ time. It’s pretty spooky, and I believe it’s a slant on Wilde’s masterpiece that we haven’t seen before. One playful aspect of my homage to him centres on the fact that one of its characters is posited as having written my novel The Imagination Thief, which helps to drive the story of The Host in the Attic forward (as an equivalent of Wilde’s character Sibyl’s acting). But this is just part of the fracturing of characterisation I’m playing with across the five tales, whose casts of characters all overlap; and you certainly don’t have to have read The Imagination Thief before you read this novella or any of the other novellas here.

In Apricot Eyes, a cat-and-mouse pursuit through the New York City night involves a preacher, a psychic and a dominatrix, broadcast live on air—until a horror is unearthed, bringing two of them together and the third to a sticky end. It’s a sassy little street-queen of a romp, embracing a few underbelly-of-New-York elements, in addition to a dose of the more bizarre stuff that I always like to throw into the mix too.

In Hallucination in Hong Kong, sliding from joy to nightmare and back, a plane-flight frames a journey into Jaymi’s and Angel’s polarised identities and perceptions, where past and present merge in an obsessive fantasy of love, death, horror and apocalyptic beauty. To me it feels like a dark and twisted firework display of some kind, or some kind of shout into the void, but it was written from a place of compassion and probably a wish that the many kinds of stunning beauty in the world didn’t have to share that world with such catastrophic chasms of suffering as some individuals fall into.

I had the pleasure of a couple of fun and intelligent interviews that recently appeared, concerning these four tales: with JJ Marsh at Words with Jam magazine; and with Jane Davis at her blog.