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Fiction and Excerpts [9]

A Long Day in Lychford

Tue Oct 3, 2017 2:30pm
1 Favorite [+]
|| Book 3 in the Witches of Lychford series. It's a period of turmoil in Britain, with the country's politicians electing to remove the UK from the European Union--but what can three rural witches do to guard against the unknown?

Chalk

Mon Feb 27, 2017 9:00am
1 Favorite [+]
|| Andrew Waggoner has always hung around with his fellow losers at school, desperately hoping each day that the school bullies—led by Drake—will pass him by in search of other prey. But one day they force him into the woods, and the bullying escalates into something more; something unforgivable; something unthinkable.

A Long Day in Lychford

Tue Oct 3, 2017 2:30pm Post a comment 1 Favorite [+]

It’s a period of turmoil in Britain, with the country’s politicians electing to remove the UK from the European Union, despite ever-increasing evidence that the public no longer supports it. And the small town of Lychford is suffering.

But what can three rural witches do to guard against the unknown? And why are unwary hikers being led over the magical borders by their smartphones’ mapping software? And is the immigration question really important enough to kill for?

A Long Day in Lychford is the third book in Paul Cornell’s Witches of Lychford series, available October 10th from Tor.com Publishing.

[Read an Excerpt]

Chalk

Mon Feb 27, 2017 9:00am Post a comment 1 Favorite [+]

Andrew Waggoner has always hung around with his fellow losers at school, desperately hoping each day that the school bullies—led by Drake—will pass him by in search of other prey. But one day they force him into the woods, and the bullying escalates into something more; something unforgivable; something unthinkable.

Broken, both physically and emotionally, something dies in Waggoner, and something else is born in its place.

In the hills of the West Country a chalk horse stands vigil over a site of ancient power, and there Waggoner finds in himself a reflection of rage and vengeance, a power and persona to topple those who would bring him low.

Paul Cornell plumbs the depths of magic and despair in Chalk, a brutal exploration of bullying in Margaret Thatcher’s England—available March 21st from Tor.com Publishing. Read an excerpt below, along with a note from Cornell about the personal and intense nature of the story.

[Read more]

The Christmas Soundtrack to The Lost Child of Lychford

Thu Dec 1, 2016 11:00am 7 comments Favorite This

One of my three heroines in The Lost Child of Lychford is a put-upon vicar at Christmas time (I defy you to find me any other kind at that time of year). She expresses some of that frustration by naming some of her least favourite Christmas singles. These horrors include songs by Greg Lake, Chris De Burgh, and The Pogues (through sheer repetition, seriously, you should try being British at Christmas, it’s mostly hideous). Greg Lake fans should note, however, that he benefits from a bit of a twist ending.

So I thought, for an article to accompany my very dark Christmas novella, why not list some of my favourite Christmas singles? (That was a rhetorical question. Which will still probably get answers in the comments.) I’m not going to include traditional music here, or “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem,” which has probably influenced my work more than any other text, would take up half the piece. Also, Prokofiev’s “Troika” would get a paragraph or two for the way that I can’t get through it without recalling the TV trailers of my youth and bellowing “Christmas on BBC1!” No, instead I’m talking here about the sort of singles with a festive theme that get, or rather used to get, into the British charts. For this is a species on the verge of extinction. Talent show singles, charity crusades and tiresomely ironic responses to such have long since taken the place of current pop groups hopefully jingling sleigh bells.

[I like, in no particular order…]

The Lost Child of Lychford

Mon Oct 31, 2016 2:00pm Post a comment Favorite This

It’s December in the English village of Lychford—the first Christmas since an evil conglomerate tried to force open the borders between our world and… another.

Which means it’s Lizzie’s first Christmas as Reverend of St. Martin’s. Which means more stress, more expectation, more scrutiny by the congregation. Which means… well, business as usual, really. Until the apparition of a small boy finds its way to Lizzie in the church. Is he a ghost? A vision? Something else? Whatever the truth, our trio of witches (they don’t approve of “coven”) are about to face their toughest battle, yet!

Paul Cornell’s The Lost Child of Lychford, the sequel to Witches of Lychford, is available November 1st from Tor.com Publishing.

[Read more]

In These Green Hills

Tue Sep 8, 2015 9:00am 7 comments Favorite This

The Cotswolds are a range of hills, in the middle of Britain, which define a region. They rise from the Thames to an escarpment called the Cotswold Edge, above the Severn valley. As with many things in Britain, they’re characterised by their ill-defined boundaries. Several places on their fringes, or honestly nowhere near, claim, for the purposes of tourism, to be part and parcel. The Cotswolds are the home of crafts, dry stone walling, rolling hills, small market towns, country inns with good restaurants, hideaways for the rich. They’re laid back and gorgeous, like an aging slab of good cheese.

This is the region in which reside myself and my wife. She’s the vicar of a glorious parish church in a glorious Cotswolds market town. The only problem is, we have to solve so many surreal and whimsical murders. (Whenever I say that to Americans, they look anxious for a moment, as if it might be true.) My upcoming novella for Tor.com, Witches of Lychford, uses a very similar Cotswolds town as its setting. It’s an attempt on my part to connect with our new home and the people here, and to communicate some of the flavour of the place to those who’ve never been here. It’s about three women with experience of the other-worldly coming together to fight supernatural evil, said evil being, obviously, in the form of a chain of supermarkets.

[Read more]

The Magic Number: Why Witches Come in Threes

Thu Aug 20, 2015 9:00am 10 comments 2 Favorites [+]

Why is it so often three witches? That’s the number who band together to fight the forces of supernatural evil (in the form of a supermarket chain arriving in their small Cotswolds town) in Witches of Lychford, my forthcoming novella for Tor.com. That grouping is part of a long tradition.

The three witches of Macbeth are the obvious starting point. Shakespeare may have based those fate-deciding ‘weird sisters’ on the Fates—the Moirai of Greek myth or Parcae in the Roman version—of whom there were also three. (The historical chronicles he takes as his source material make this identification directly, making it clear that the term ‘weird sisters’ is another name for the Fates. It also offers the possibility they might have been fairies, but doesn’t actually call them witches.) The idea of the Fates may have influenced Norse belief in the Norns, also a trio of divine female arbiters of destiny.

[The three witches also have had a long career in literature and the media.]

Witches of Lychford

Wed Jul 29, 2015 11:00am 2 comments 2 Favorites [+]

The villagers in the sleepy hamlet of Lychford are divided. A supermarket wants to build a major branch on their border. Some welcome the employment opportunities, while some object to the modernization of the local environment.

Judith Mawson (local crank) knows the truth—that Lychford lies on the boundary between two worlds, and that the destruction of the border will open wide the gateways to malevolent beings beyond imagination. But if she is to have her voice heard, she’s going to need the assistance of some unlikely allies…

We’re pleased to present an excerpt from Paul Cornell’s Witches of Lychford, publishing in paperback and ebook September 8th from Tor.com!

[Read an excerpt]

Five Brilliant Things About Doctor Who “Time Heist”

Mon Sep 22, 2014 1:30pm 26 comments Favorite This

It has taken us a whole week to get out from behind the sofa following last week’s terrifying Doctor Who Episode “Listen” and so we welcomed this fun and enjoyable episode of Doctor Who, “Time Heist.” This time the action revolved around a robbery of the greatest bank in the galaxy, a riff on the classic Heist movies with echoes of Ocean’s Eleven and Mission Impossible.

It was great to see an episode where the Doctor takes centre stage at last (as both hero and villain), but for us it was his two extra companions Saibra and Psi who really stole the show. But what did Tor UK’s resident Whovian Paul Cornell think?

[Read More]

Series: Doctor Who on Tor.com

The Severed Streets (Excerpt)

Fri Apr 18, 2014 4:00pm 1 comment Favorite This

Detective Inspector James Quill is back in Paul Cornell’s The Severed Streets—a police procedural tinged with fantasy—available May 20th from Tor Books!

Desperate to find a case to justify the team’s existence, with budget cuts and a police strike on the horizon, Quill thinks he’s struck gold when a cabinet minister is murdered by an assailant who wasn’t seen getting in or out of his limo. A second murder, that of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, presents a crime scene with a message identical to that left by the original Jack the Ripper.

The new Ripper seems to have changed the MO of the old completely: he’s only killing rich white men. The inquiry into just what this supernatural menace is takes Quill and his team into the corridors of power at Whitehall, to meetings with MI5, or ‘the funny people’ as the Met call them, and into the London occult underworld. They go undercover to a pub with a regular evening that caters to that clientele, and to an auction of objects of power at the Tate Modern.

[Read an excerpt]

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