My new novel:
Beyond the Dreams of Men
Perhaps check out my latest flash fiction anthology?
Flash Fiction Library
I’ve been building another project: FlashFictionLibrary.com.
The premise started off as very simple here: build a literary presence.
Interestingly, I am really enjoying the flash fiction genre and I think that it may have its own full place. Hence, I’ve begun publishing novella’s of ten to twenty of the Library’s stories on Amazon (see Volume I here) and, well, I guess we’ll see where all of this goes.
Anyway, please go check out FlashFictionLibrary.com and let me know what you think!
The Rains Outside
I reached, but you weren’t there;
I cried, but you didn’t hear me;
I tried, but I failed somewhere,
And the rains outside don’t care.
Woke up this morning to nothing,
And I decided to go nowhere;
There was nothing to do all day,
And the rains outside didn’t care.
We had a million conversations,
But they were all in my own head;
Afterwards, only silence was there,
And the rains outside never cared.
My Favourite Customer Review
Of the few that I have received, this is by far my favourite customer review:
“For a moment, imagine that the Gods are borne out of human and animal imagination, a need to reconcile the unforgiving natural world through storytelling, manifested quite solidly in the perceivable realm as beings of vast powers, desires, and hungers. Gods of knowledge and portent. Gods of sex and lust. Gods of blood and gold. This novella takes the reader into the minds, histories, and hearts of gods who have been ‘forgotten’ in name, though remembered and ‘fed’ in deed, and play out their continuing drama of agendas and violence against the backdrop of modern Johannesburg, South Africa. I urge anyone who enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s book AMERICAN GODS to take this journey, because while the former is a seminal work of mythic genius, it is ‘safe’, and the Forgotten Gods of Jozi is equally genius and most certainly not safe.”
– Amanda Close
It is regarding my book, “The Forgotten Gods of Jozi” :
Amanda is perhaps partly correct in her comparison of my book to Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods“. I read that book of Gaiman’s many years ago and it stuck with me as a favourite, but it was more the timing of that reading than the reading itself that influenced me. The timing of reading “American Gods” was just after I had discovered the intriguing writings and thoughts of Austin Osman Spare that resulted in the alternative occult school of thought, “Chaos Magic“.
A thought that always stuck with me was Spare’s inversion of cause and effect that formed the basis of traditional religion. What if, instead of us believing in gods that exist, the gods exist because we believe in them. What if belief itself had the power, not the gods.
After Spare’s writings stirred a philosophical tickle in me, Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” struck a narrative chord with me that I have often contemplated.
I suppose “The Forgotten Gods of Jozi” was a naturally extension (many years later) of these underlying thoughts and, even if I did not set out to replicate, duplicate or fabricate similarities, they do perhaps exist.
That said, beyond the logic of the oldest gods existing in the oldest known settlement of man (the Cradle of Humankind), the “Forgotten Gods of Jozi” is also partly a self-biography of me moving to Johannesburg (about seven or so years ago). It’s chosen settings are (and often chronologically) the places I stayed in over the early years, the places and things that left impressions on me and my local haunts in those days.
And, in this sense, the tale has nothing to do with Gaiman or Spare. Rather it is actually quite a personal tale with creative license on the city I’ve come to love.
All said and done, the above must be my favourite customer review of all time. It is quite an honour to be compared with Neil Gaiman, in any shape or form! Thanks Amanda.
I am two thirds of the way through my next book’s rough draft, “The Space Between Ages”, and here is a mock-up cover for it:

The Forgotten Gods of Jozi
Here is a link to my new book: The Forgotten Gods of Jozi.
And here is the blurb:
He lifts the cold, jagged rock. It is heavier than he expected. And then, with all his might, he smashes it down on the exposed skull of the man standing with his back to him. A loud, sick thump rings out. It mingles with his shout and the other man’s surprised, brief scream.
And then there is nothing but silence, broken only by his panting and the sound of blood rushing through his ears.
The world is silent.
The sky does not open up and the sun ignores him. The soft wind drifts by as the world carries on callously.
Everything is the same, but everything is different.
And a thousand, thousands years later the roar of Gorgion Tuesday erupts from a petrol station in upmarket Houghton – Johannesburg – his lover senselessly murdered in his arms. An old, cold evil stirs deep in the city under the African full moon, pushing back against the new nicotine-neon gods of modern man. Overlooking ancient battlefields now covered by complexes and shopping centres, a dark omen flies in through Old Man Mhlu’s window while Ragman Blue’s hypnotic song washes over a mortal crowd in a dingy bar in Fourways where dark things scuttle in the shadows.
Julia Green winks and takes a slow drag on her cigarette. Her scarlet lips softly blow out the smoke and her green eyes narrow in sudden thought, “Change, Tuesday, change… I can feel it coming. It may rain tonight.”
Everything is the same, but everything is different.
Holiday in Panoramas
My 2013/14 holiday took me along part of the Garden Route. It might just be the splendor of the places there, but I kept on having spectacular views that I started to capture in panoramas using my Samsung S3 phone.
So, here is my holiday in panoramas:
Not all the views, not all the places and not all good photographs…but some views, some places and certainly one or two panoramas I am quite proud of.
The Second Explorers
The jungle has its own life: dark and steamy, wet and clammy. It clings to me like those haunting images that I will remember for years to come in the warm, dry and safe comfort of my home.
Back home.
If I survive.
Every now and then a blinding burst sunshine cuts through the canopy above me, but then just as suddenly the wet darkness is back. All over me. Strange sounds hiss and scamper through the undergrowth as I move forward. Countless insects buzz around me as a chorus of strange howls start far away floating around me like some primordial choir.
Other howls suddenly strike up on all sides of me.
And then disappear as quickly and mysteriously as they came.
My hands are wet—perhaps from the dank humid air, perhaps from my nerves. The steel blade in my hand seems almost too hot to hold. Too heavy to carry. Too important to drop.
And my arm goes up.
And my arm goes down.
The vines and twisted vegetation falls—inch by inch—under the blade in my hand allowing my slow advance, almost a proxy for civilisation moving deeper in the wild untamed jungle. I briefly wonder if the first explorers had gone this way? Had ancient man faced this jungle with the same mixture of disgust and fear as wells up in me now? How had he kept on moving forward in the face of this?
And my right foot moves forward.
Then my left foot.
Foot by foot.
Inch by inch.
And so I move forward.
Something slithers over my foot and disappears into the jungle’s cover. An explosion of colour flutters over me as a strange beast shrieks somewhere in the distance.
My breath is sticky and I lick my lips tasting faintly of salt. I take a last small sip of the last of my clean water. This land is still spoilt this far south. Its ground water still tainted by the fallout so many centuries ago, so I cannot drink of its waters nor eat of its fruits. At least I have been able to save my rations this far on from the sacrifices of my companions along the way.
My arms goes up, steel flashes in sudden sunlight and my arm goes down. The vines fall temporarily away and I push forward.
Step by step.
All my technology has failed me. Transport crashed and broken, power sources are all gone, med-packs used up and masked blocked and cast aside. I savour a grim smile, as the first explorers had no more to use than what I carry now.
If they could get here, then so can I.
The rain comes at night. It always does. Not a trickle, but a flood of beating angry water attacking the land and the miserable life that survives here. I take shelter under a large strange leaf of some unidentified plant and try to find warmth in thoughts of home.
Home?
Home seems so far away as to be nothing more than a dream. A dry, warm and safe dream.
At least the jungle’s beasts also seem to take shelter from the rain. The strange howls and hisses around me have disappeared. Or drowned out by the roar of the rain on endless miles of jungle foliage?
I try to ignore the last thought, but it is no use. I cannot sleep.
Eventually the rain stops and then there is just darkness. A deathly darkness before the dawn’s moist red eye rears its head through the jungle heights. A welcome light in a fatal wild land still steeped in man’s past folly.
Step by step.
Foot by foot.
Arm up, arm down and inch by inch, I keep moving.
Suddenly—
Suddenly, I am no longer in the jungle. I have burst out into a clearing of sorts…
The mud behind me has given way to the strange fading grey rock that ancient man used to build his pathways from. Faint white lines still mark out portion of it, perhaps indicating lanes for those travelling on it? It is cracked where it lies, but leads my eyes to the structures dotted along it.
The old dwellings lie here. Forgotten. Abandoned by mankind, but still unclaimed by all but few jungle vines and errant foliage. It is empty and dark, but I can almost imagine ancient man moving up and down these roads in their ancient land machines running on hydrocarbons and primitive power sources—some of the same primitive power sources that ended that age of man. The land machines filled with ordinary men off to whatever work filled that age’s day, children running laughing along these streets as woman bustled the markets…
Like in a dream I wander down that cracked forgotten road quietly as if they would speak to me of the images they once saw.
I pass by rusted signs and poles written in ancient, square tongue. Some of the land machine’s rusting carcasses lie scattered along the way. I pass a strange domed building on my left where I believe ancient man worshiped his primitive god, represented by a cross with a stretched bottom vertical.
And then I am in the centre of the skeleton of that city: a tall frame of rusting iron spirals upwards. Ancient man ruled from here. He ruled from these great architectures of control as his world connected across ancient machine-based networks.
So I climb it.
Endless crumbling stairs later I am standing on the top of the architectural skeleton and gazing down at the remains of the city below me. My breath is taken away and, finally, the steel blade in my hand clatters to the ground.
But I barely notice it.
The sight before me is so amazing, so unique, so vast… I do not really have any words for it. The crumbling remains of the city spread out beyond my very field of vision. It so huge. So vast. So endless that even the jungle seems to fear its size…
I do not think we realize how large ancient mankind really was. None of the old tales have truly captured quite how vast his control and dominance of this world was. The size of the remains of just this single city implies how thousands, no, millions of ancients must have lived here…
And suddenly it dawns on me exactly how devastating the nuclear bombs must truly have been to wipe out New York.
Personal Apocalypse (New Painting)
Balcony of My Life
From the balcony of my life,
That birds fly away so, so slow,
The activity some distant strife,
When life happens far below.
And all men have a landlord—
Some devil in a cheap disguise,
Selling them wars with a sword,
Rinsed through the same old lies.
I wonder how much longer,
This machine can wander on;
When nothing makes you stronger,
And all the lies are long gone.