The upheavals of adolescence silenced 'A Christmas Carol' for a few years. I became a firebrand atheist. Christmas - humbug! Too commercial! Then I became an agnostic. Christmas was a pro-forma affair, basically a chore. Buy mother a book, dad a new tie, my brother and sister small gifts. Pretend thanks for the fountain pens and shirts I received.

I'm not so sure that horror should be dismissed as something less than literature.

A real stunner. Want to get swept up on a journey you will never forget and never quite escape? Open THE RITUAL OF ILLUSION and let its magic leap out, grab you, take you places unlike you have ever known.

In them was not the savage blankness of the reptile species. Instead there was something far worse - burning, unquenchable rage mixed with the self-mocking irony of great intelligence.

God is wild; I am tame....Night falls and an age ends....We call and are answered through the thick foliage, by voices too strange to be our own.

Every time someone ends a prayer in the Western world they say Amen - that is the name of an Egyptian god associated with completion. So we're still praying to their gods.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.