HELP A STARVING WRITER: PLEASE READ MY BOOKS!

If you enjoy this blog, you might also enjoy one of my books. I have been a professional journalist and film critic since 1983, and a novelist since 1993. My first book was published in 1989, and since then I have had more than half a dozen published in the traditional way, including two novels and several books on film. In 1993 I was included in W.H. Smith’s line-up of Fresh Talent, and in Granta’s list of Best Young British Novelists.

These days, like many other authors, I have been sidelined by the mainstream publishing industry. In order to make my writing available, I have been obliged to self-publish in ebook form. I am not and have never been a best-selling writer, and have never expected to become rich from my writing, but I am sad that my novels aren’t reaching the people who would enjoy them.

Would this be you? I don’t know. But for the price of a cup of coffee, you can download one of them from amazon or smashwords to find out. Click on the pictures to be taken to the amazon.co.uk website. They are also available from amazon.com and the company’s other websites.

Here’s what some people have said about my novels:

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SUCKERS

Anne Billson’s debut novel is part horror story, part satire and has been praised by (among others) Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Carroll and Christopher Fowler, who in Time Out called it “dark, sharp, chic and very funny”.CAT

It’s set at the end of the ‘greed is good’ decade, and features a gothic love triangle between a man, a woman and the 300-year-old vampire they chopped into easily disposable pieces a decade earlier. But now she’s back. and this time she’s building an empire…

‘…highly praised by Salman Rushdie and others as a sharp and witty satire on the greedy 1980s. And so it was, but that was only part of the story: it is also a gripping adventure yarn, a tale of the nemesis that may lie in store for us if we have ever committed a guilty act, and a delicious character study of an unconventional young woman whose weaknesses (envy, malice, jealousy) only make her all the more charming to the reader. It contains one of the most chilling moments in all vampire literature…’ (Kevin Jackson – Bite, A Vampire Handbook)

‘Billson honours the rules of the genre, then proceeds to have fun with them… Dark, sharp, chic and very funny’ (Christopher Fowler – Time Out)

‘very funny… what holds the book together, gives it its pace and energy, is the bright, unremitting nastiness of our narrator, one Dora Vale’ (Michael Wood – London Review of Books)

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‘a superb satirist’ (Salman Rushdie)

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‘merits a post position on everybody’s reading list, even those who don’t usually like vampire stories. It isn’t splatter fiction; it’s an honest piece of literature’ (Elliott Swanson – Booklist)

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‘a black and bloody celebration of wit, womanhood and slapstick, beautifully sustained to a thoroughly satisfying climax’ (Chris Gilmore – Interzone)

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‘a very camp and hugely entertaining vampire novel’ (Christie Hickman – Midweek)

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‘wicked and vulgar and unsettling… rollicking knockabout gore… nasty and brutishly funny’

(Patt Morrison – Los Angeles Times)

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‘a distinctive, original and refreshing debut, unselfconscious about its genre furniture, but arranging it to suit a very unusual piece of literary architecture’ (Kim Newman – Starburst)

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STIFF LIPS

SOME REASONS WHY THE WOMAN IN BLACK WASN'T SCARY

Clare, stuck on the wrong side of town, is desperate to live the good life among the writers and artists of trendy Notting Hill, like her friend Sophie. So she doesn’t think twice about moving into a house with a horrible history, even if some of its former occupants are still making their presence felt…

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But how far is Clare prepared to go for a W11 postcode? As far as sharing a flat with someone who is, as she puts it, “vitally challenged”?

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From the author of cult vampire novel Suckers comes a ‘sexy, sardonic and distinctly spooky’ tale of girls, ghosts and glitterati, set in a part of London that in less than a century has been transformed from a perilous slum called The Piggeries into one of the most fashionable addresses in town.

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‘A slick and remarkably controlled performance which more than equals her satisfying first novel Suckers. Ghost tales invariably leave me cold. I read this one in a single highly enjoyable sitting’ (Paul Rutman – Sunday Telegraph)
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‘With Stiff Lips, Billson overturns the clichés of the horror genre, establishing, in their stead, her own original voice’ (Lucy O’Brien – The Independent)
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‘Sexy, sardonic and distinctly spooky… a tale to make you shiver – if you don’t die laughing first’ (Cosmopolitan)
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‘Stiff Lips achieves an authentic and unsettling nastiness’ (Sunday Times)

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‘A vastly entertaining story… As well as being a successful ghost story, Stiff Lips is an amusing satire’ (Sophia Watson – The Spectator)

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THE EX

From the author of cult vampire novel Suckers and Notting Hill ghost story Stiff Lips comes another ghost story, narrated with self-lacerating humour by a private eye who has a lot to learn about himself and the world of the supernatural.

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Alice Marchmont is classy, beautiful and about to get married to the most eligible bachelor in town. But she needs John Croydon’s help. Because Alice has a stalker – it’s her fiance’s ex-wife, who is threatening to disrupt the wedding… or worse. Croydon has just one week to persuade this inconvenient ex to back down and leave the happy couple alone. Problem is, she’s going to take some persuading. Because she’s dead. Has been dead for quite some time. And she isn’t looking pretty.

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In the course of an investigation that will lead him from London to Norfolk and, ultimately, to Venice, John Croydon will be forced to dig into his own troubled past for answers. He will discover that looks can be deceptive, women are not to be trusted, one canal is much like another… and that some ghosts are worse than others. A lot worse.

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My next novel is THE COMING THING, which I am hoping to self-publish some time later this year. As you can see, I shall be sticking with the oral theme for the cover.

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MULTIGLOM

The Anne Billson blog