Tag Archives: marquis de sade



This includes:

Born to be Weird




Included are the short stories (also available separately):







Faces in the Dark


Faces in the Dark coversmaller


Also included are the short stories (also available separately):





Dead Streets – A sad and haunted tale.

Moral Zero


Moral Zero cover



The voyeur: Knowledge is lust.
The pervert: The fantasy is everything.
The sadist: The answer to all things lies in death.





Moral Zero extract #4

Moral Zero is a dystopian thriller with post-apocalyptic, sci-fi, existential and horror themes. Contains visceral and potentially disturbing sexuality and violence and is not for everyone, certainly not the faint of heart and stomach.

It is currently self-published as an ebook and can be found on Amazon for Kindle here.

Disclaimer: The lack of speech marks and other idiosyncrasies are deliberate.

Here is another extract from it.




Smoke and darkness. Little lights like glowing insects popped into existence and he saw that they were beetles, their carapaces embedded in the walls and their antennae feeling out to brush against him like the hairs of a carpet. They were alive. The feelers tickled his skin as if judging his merit.

It was a tunnel and he moved down it, moving like a phantom, something not really there, perhaps a hallucination or a memory. There was dark at the end of the tunnel and it was this that he was shifting towards. It was this where the smoke was coming from. It billowed like a plume, caught up in the dull beetle light and shining in patches, coming reflective in wisps – and then just a thick, lifeless fog. He could feel the hissing from the end of the tunnel and yet he could not hear it. The tunnel seemed without air and he was not breathing and the smoke as it rolled and writhed seemed at moments as though some creature winding out the netherworlds, and then other moments was a mirror to him, a mirror almost fully gaps and broken shards and the spider-thin fingers of smoke reflected his eyes and nothing more and at one instance a thousand eyes stared at him and then it was just smoke.

He reached the end. The vacuum trembled with the hissing and still all was silent and now he was in darkness.

There was a stretch of time alien and unknowable as he shifted and hovered and drifted as though smoke himself. He felt pulled back and forth as though on currents not his own. His legs remained useless and dangling and his body was pained by the pressures of larger forces upon it. He wanted to speak, to say that he was under his control and his alone, but that which controlled him would not permit this and his mouth stayed shut and sewn.

After the alien time and alien movement there was a flicker of light and he fell to the floor. His legs buckled and jarred and he had to recall the methods of their use. The flicker was growing and the first sound came, that of sizzling meat.

His eyes blinked and there was fire all around him and he was choking. But not from the smoke, which infested him as though part of his being. He choked at the sight of the lumps of meat in the fire, sizzling away, and then great sobs found their way through him and his body racked and heaved and he vomited and drooled and trembled impotently as the flesh bubbled and he traced the contours of the body parts with his fingers as if sketching in the air. The noises of the cooking and blistering meat were now accompanied by screams, even though there was nothing alive to make them and the screams were more like a chorus of echoes.

The stitching around his mouth was gone and he whimpered like a pup and was on all fours as he put his hands over his ears but the screams of the burning woman were still there, now louder and fierce as though the desperation to be saved had reached its point of crescendo and yet any hope of salvation was a lifetime ago and all that resounded within his head was a spirit, accusatory in his not being there and shrill in her anguish.

I couldn’t stop them, he said, all cracked and pathetic like a broken thing. The fires burned brighter and the smoke clogged and almost mercifully began to blind him from the detail.

She wailed as though a banshee and his tears fell so strong that they seemed that they could hold back the fires, and if they did it was only for him, or perhaps the fire just refused itself to touch him, but no amount of tears or buckets or oceans of water could quell its hold on her body.

He fell to the ground and curled up, twisted and unformed, more corpse than babe, some thing almost all dead inside, and even his raging hatred of mankind for its evil deed was at the moment stoppered and empty, ready to fill back up to overflowing whenever some idea of life returned to his body and mind, whatever its guise and whatever black road such an idea might lead him down.


Moral Zero cover

Moral Zero extract #3




Here is another extract from it.


Unidentifiable insects roamed the walls with sneering abandon. This place was theirs first and would be theirs still after the humans and semi-humans and all their creations were long dead. Even the moments when you couldn’t see them you could hear them, tickling the inside of the walls, and in the silent seconds each of their tiny legs resounded like clacking boots.

The last attempt to paint the place must have been in some previous age of humanity, when humans cavorted naked and whooping as nought but shaved apes. As if we had only regressed since then, evidenced in this maggot’s palace. The water ran, just about, and the plumbing worked on occasion, but any upkeep and maintenance more than that was the stuff of fancy. Was the place ever liveable? Perhaps in that previous age. Before whoever owned the place had turned their attention to things of greater import, such as dealing, gambling, prostitution and snuff rackets.

The place was a front, that was clear. But Mr White kept his head down and his eyes blinkered and he made sure he knew nothing. They walked to their room on the ground floor, and any of the rotting wooden doors left open slammed shut as others heard their approach. Red narrowed his brow as they passed one, and evidently he heard something salacious for he smirked and shook his head. Mr White was not listening. He just wanted to sleep.

They entered the room and were surprised to find it no worse than the hotel in District Five. Sure, the curtains were rags that had at no point ever been actual curtains except when defined by their use. Sure, the bed was grubby as muck and painted in a thousand stains, not just the sheets but soaked through into the broken-springed mattress, all those essences of soul and sickness that leaked down into the barrel of the world. But it was a place to sleep, and it was dirt cheap, and that had suited Red, at least, fine.

Mr White looked around the small room, as if expecting something tucked away, as if the room could hold big secrets in its corners. He put his hands on his hips. There’s only one bed. I thought there’d be two.

Shotgun the bed.


You can take the floor. Here man, take the second pillow and the extra sheet.

How thoughtful.

No worries. I’m goin sleep now. You alright?

Yes. Okay.

Guess what we’re doin tomorrow?




As soon as they entered the bar Mr White knew something was different. The lighting was the same, and yet the room appeared darker, shrouded and close. It seemed as though the space within was trying to escape the walls, push away from claustrophobia or some dark energy, as though something within was a force without reckoning, something foreboding and fearful that all other matter and empty space shifted imperceptibly away from. The walls showed strain, buckling towards another dimension.

The whole area was a bubble and it swallowed them up. Inside even the air felt sharper, daggered and skeletal. Air colourless as always and yet inexplicably blacker, swaying with dust and decay and creaking soundlessly. It made its place there not as a giver of life but as though it were a saw upon the human soul. The soft lights, still and yet aching under invisible duress, cast shadows upon the wall so dark as to be empty forms in the universe, empty souls and holes in the world. Looking and losing oneself in those small oblivions turned the inconsequential animate and malicious, lengthening such casts to gangling monsters and cage bars.

The bar smelled of whiskey and smoke and death. This was not intangible, a phantasm of the world under the scope of the mind. This was something real to them and they breathed it in as one might breathe in anything that was there.

They found themselves moving towards the epicentre, and that which pushed all around it pulled them in as though they were at the end of a rope.

Rum and mixer. Red was leaning over the bar. Yeah, anythin. No, that orange one. With the pirate. Yeah. No ice. Cool.

Mr White stood by him and shivered though it was not cold. He turned to the man next to him.

Johnny Black’s face was not as conventionally handsome as Red’s, and certainly possessing none of that effeminate prettiness, none of the cleanness or smoothness, the jovial cheek. His face was hard and weathered, as if dashed by sandstorms. His nose was lean and pointed like a weapon. His jaw was tough and grizzled and leant his features a grim mood, as though the grit of it ground his teeth from a life of too much death. His hair and eyebrows were black as the night and his eyes were pits of surging darkness. His was a face of authority and command, of beckoning attraction and obsession. From the feel of it all, from how weak and silly you felt in comparison.

He was sitting at the bar smoking and he turned to look at his witness and Mr White shared a gaze that locked his limbs. It went right to his gut and his heart and the soul of his groin tore like paper.

Um. My name’s Mr White, Mr White said. He was stiff and self-conscious of trying to act normal. Self-conscious of sweating. He curled his toes tight.

You got a first name? The man’s voice was hewn and leathered and edged in Death’s whisper.

Mr White hesitated. We . . . don’t need first names.

Fuck that. The man held out his hand, hot and rough. The name’s Johnny Black.

Kidd Red pushed in front of them, holding his drink sloshing the sides of the glass, and the man whipped his hand back, sheathing the thumb into his belt.

I heard of you.

Well. Ain’t that something.

You murdered three people out in Seven. We were there and I was talkin to some folks and your name kept comin up. They said the cops were raidin places lookin for you.

Wowee, Johnny Black said blankly, his voice low and guttering. Wasn’t me. I distinctly remember not being there. I was out in Nine, killing six. He smiled, and his eyes burned, and he put that fat black cigar of his back twixt his white lion teeth.

You’re joking, right? Mr White said.

Now why would you ask a question like that? His deep southern accent was almost well-spoken beneath the cracks, as though he could belong both at a dinner party and on a ranch. He spoke like a hard-living man well-read.

Johnny Black puffed on his cigar, and crackling desert smoke broiled out in front of them, making Mr White cough. Johnny twisted on his barstool and beckoned the bar girl over.

Three whiskeys. The one with the holocaust on the bottle.

She swamped and fired the little glasses so the liquid was hot on top like bubbling blood. She banged them down in front of the three of them and each one sounded like a gunshot.

He laid out a note on the bar top without looking, wrapped around a knife. His eyes were intent on the floorboards.


Moral Zero cover

Moral Zero extract #2


It is currently self-published as an ebook and can be found on Amazon for Kindle here: http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Zero-Set-Sytes-ebook/dp/B00LDWTQC2/ 


Here is another extract from it.


The streets slid on all sides as if they were on rails. Theatre backdrops turned on some hidden winch, a scenery on repeat, re-using buildings, trash, people.

They passed little cracked bulbs nestled in grating coming out brick walls with the bricks crumbling and broken. Some buildings looked as if they had suffered some air raid or street bombing and if anything they passed looked repaired it was work without effort or hope, as if the builders could not summon any care for anything in these streets. Everything was covered in graffiti. Most of it was people just making their mark, leaving a name and a guess at a date for who knew what day was what in Rule. Much of the graffiti was obscene and sordid and some of it was anti-authority and some of it was dark and cruel.

They passed steel bins left empty while rubbish and refuse of every kind was scattered everywhere, as if the bins themselves signalled some command to order that the people shunned. They passed the homeless or what seemed to be the homeless, though in this city they could be anybody. They sat or lay forlorn in clothes or bundled rags or naked and grimy. Some shivered and some sweated and many writhed on drugs or swayed on drink as if conducting some voodoo incantation to rid the street of its evils. Some of those sat were junkies and one or two were well-clothed and clean-shaven and this did not seem to matter. Some begged and were ignored, some didn’t beg and were ignored. By all except pushers and pimps, thieves and worse. Mr White saw them sidle up and sit down as if friends, to young women and men, to kids, to those well-dressed and those naked, to any and all, for even the ugly and old could be exploited, and perhaps in their desperation they were perfect for it. Mr White awkwardly gave a man with his hands out a few coins, and received a strange look from Red. The man looked at the coins in his hand as if they were foreign to him. He bit into one with what was left of his teeth and a tooth broke and his mouth bled over the coins. Another man came out of the shadows and they saw the glint of a blade and they left quickly while he kneeled down and close to the broke-tooth man.

Mr White followed Red close as he half-strut his stride and both their faces glowed in the light of the neon signs that hung crackling from anywhere they could be seen. Their faces were ultramarine in the hazy light of a peepshow theatre, and scarlet and bloody in the outside embrace of a porn shop. Their features flicked green with envy and yellow with sickness and every colour of the rainbow in a dozen different tints and bleeds. They passed drug dens and brothels and gun-shops and run-down emporiums selling things behind fortified counters to any customer with the money and neither would ask questions nor demand answers. They passed a bright pink lit window and above it was a pink sign of a pizza with red neon meatballs. They entered and bought pizza for that was all the food there was and it came cold and crusty and the meat on it was nothing they could recognise. Red bought them both some kind of liqueur which he glugged and Mr White sipped slowly. Red told Mr White not to make any eye contact with any of the other patrons of the takeaway, to not even look at them, and Mr White replied that he would not even consider it.

They left and continued on to the border between District Seven and Ten. Only once did they pass a cop and it did not harass them nor harass anybody else. They could not see its face hidden as it was behind its helmet but its manner of walking and how it stayed in the light and how its head moved from side to side but too quick to examine anything gave the impression of nervousness, as if it knew its continued solitary existence in these streets had even more tentative a future than those prostitutes and homeless addicts. They did see a number of drones, and heard even more, to the point that the buzzing cat-purrs that crept up on them and then past or were hidden behind walls or flying above them along rooftops or down in the sewers beneath their feet became no more an event than their own breathing.

Nearly there hombre, said Red, as they passed though the darkness under a small dilapidated bridge that leaked some dark fluid from its bones. Mr White thought a few drops hit his shoes but he did not stop to check. The lights were less now and as he flicked his eyes quickly at the people in the street they seemed full of cruelty. He did not dare look at their faces and this gave them an absence of humanity, if there was even any there. He saw Red look at some of the bodies of the girls but he was looking less and less and whether this was due to a dropping quality or apprehension or weariness on Red’s part was unknown. Mr White saw a woman in leather straps and netting and something that looked like barbed wire around her crotch lean out of a doorway at their approach. She had a huge exposed cleavage and her lips were bulbous and sticky red, pumped so fat that they seemed to command her whole face. He looked at Red and Red must have seen her first because without turning his head he shook his head emphatically and they walked on.

Mr White shivered and he finished the last of his liqueur which tasted of rotten fruit but all synthetic and shook full of sugar. He wondered aloud where the next bin was for he had not seen one in some time. Red told him to drop it on the street and after a hesitation Mr White placed it down as near the side of the street as he dared go and then hurried back. They passed a middle-aged woman in furs being sick onto the side of a grey-brick building without windows or doors. Her face was pale and blue and Mr White looked for the light but it was not blue but white.

Should we help her? Mr White whispered as they drew level.

I think you know the answer to that one man, said Red, and Mr White already did.

On both sides of his vision were alleyways and small side streets shrouded in the thickest blackness, both full and empty, like beckoning voids, each one seeming a shortcut to oblivion. As though if he ventured down any he would never be seen again. He heard a gunshot from one and then silence and from another a scream and then silence. Both seemed to come from some other world hidden from his eyes, as though the blackness did not contain such dangers but was merely the gateway, and once you passed through you ceased to be part of this world and would be forever lost. His mind seemed to draw him closer to these shadows, shifting his perspective from side to side, but his body stayed on track out of fear and automation and so it seemed like his mind was struggling to escape its bonds while the body stayed firm and the mind lurched out on its own like some drunken phantasm of the night. It splayed out left and right and tried to fly to the voids and the tether caught and it was pulled back, secretly glad, springing back to safety and full of the rush of terror avoided.

We’re here, announced Red abruptly.


Moral Zero cover

Moral Zero extract #1




Here is an extract from it.


On the lowest flight was a grand artistic rendition of some seemingly apocalyptic scene, but it was smeared and sooted from some past fire, and whether the work was of a great battle, a religious revival or a ferocious orgy was unknown. Mr White peered at it as he dropped step to step, and he could just make out in the very centre of the piece some black shape, a human figure perhaps, but it could as well be a curious blot, a burned scar forming nothing but the centre of everything.

Mr White came out of the fire escape into the sun and met Red with his back to the wall, one foot up. Red was wearing shades and pendants on chains and was staring down the sun.


How long have you been out here?

Red shrugged. He had a cigarette in his fingers dropping ash and his other hand thumbed his belt. You ready.

Mr White looked up at the sun, still blinking as his eyes adjusted to the light. It wasn’t joyous and rich, it was thin, artificial, as though the sun was an imposter. Perhaps nought but a bright moon shone on them that day, as every day. Cutting through the skim of the city’s milk. As though it were a bubble, and nothing could pass through and keep its lustre, its original power and integrity. Mr White waved a hand through the air and he could feel it. The cloy of the city, the milk, the soul. Sour and pungent.

You ready?

I’m ready. Mr White took a deep breath and the air was neither fresh nor clean.

Red looked at Mr White and grinned. Old habits die hard, don’t they.

Mr White smiled and stretched a little. Yeah.

They moved off, Red leading, Mr White just a step behind. Red walked with his customary jaunt as if he thought he was a rockstar or a drug dealer or a pirate. He could have been all three and it wouldn’t have mattered.

Mr White felt a dull, snapping breeze on his neck as though someone was clicking fingers on his skin. He reached up and found a button undone on his shirt, and he hastily rebuttoned and held his coat tighter to him.

Red glanced at him. It ain’t cold.

I don’t like it.

Red chuckled and kept on.

They walked through trash and bottles span and splintered as Red’s boots kicked them away.  Beside them cruel looking taxis vibrated back and forth along the road. They looked like they were battered out from sheet iron. The windows were frosted to obscure both driver and passengers, but the appearance was more of glass punched and cracked over and over, utterly smashed and held together with invisible tape. Like some crude icing rink after years of use without repair. The wheels were crags that crunched refuse and dead things under their merciless tread.

On their left buildings and shop windows were passed without comment or notice, all the same, all hopeless and blank. White lights shone into the day, advertising, always advertising, but without vigour, as if even the perpetrators of such had fallen to resignation, a disbelief in their products. Once in a while a tree was passed, but they looked plastic and they stood like statues, the leaves as still as iron claws. Beside every one were two benches, one on either side, blue paintwork scabbing away to show a brown leprous heart. On some sat people, and they all stared forward, even those in halting conversation. Talking as if ghosts in a foreign land.

You oughtn’t have done that. An old man stared ahead and he blinked so slow and heavy that it was a wonder if he knew whether he was awake or asleep, or alive or dead.

I know it. His companion was emaciated, looking like something just dug up. You know how it is.

No I don’t.

The man from the grave sighed, and the world seemed to fall off his bones. Every man wants to be seen as dangerous some point or another. Capable of such things. No man can go a whole life otherwise. Every man wants to know he’s a danger. To be thought of such a way. For one moment or two.

You oughtn’t have done it.

I know it. It is how it is.

Red and White walked on out of earshot and at length they came to a checkpoint cutting off the street. It clustered with police, in their black uniforms and black mirrored helmets.

You done this before?

Mr White shook his head.

It’s easy. They got nothin.

They were looked at like robots handling objects but they gave their names in the booth and they were let through without further consideration. There were no niceties. They were ushered in and out and they walked away from the faceless stares, those expressionless things that seemed so alien and hostile, void of feeling. They walked away with their necks prickling into District Seven.

Moral Zero cover