I’m thrilled to announce that my new fantasy anthology, The Dark Forest Within, is out now. These six tales of magic and mystery, darkness and danger, adventure and romance, triumph and tragedy have been carefully curated by yours truly as a companion piece to my novel, Ravenseed.

Let me be clear upfront: You do not need to first read Ravenseed to read this collection. Nor does reading these stories first spoil Ravenseed in any way, shape, or form. Each of these half-dozen novellas and short stories is designed to stand alone.

Weighing in at over 100,000 words, this epic collection is excellent value, featuring some of the best fantasy tales I’ve written to date. Selecting what to include and exclude was a tricky process, as I wanted the stories to read as a collective experience whilst also being thematically and tonally in keeping with Ravenseed. Some of these stories were previously available to Substack or Medium subscribers, but 40,000 words worth of material is previously unpublished, unseen anywhere up until now.

As such, here’s a brief introduction to each story. Over the next few weeks, I’ll discuss them in more detail in separate articles.

Papercut – Gabriel, a lonely teenage boy living with his strict Jehovah’s Witness mother, is visited in dreams by a mysterious paper girl.

An In-Between Christmas – On a spiritual plane between life and death, Sophie, a struggling writer, tries to contact her comatose father.

Window of the Soul – Amid a world torn apart by civil war, an adolescent girl called Inessa faces soul-threatening danger when her stepfather wants to cut out her eyes.

Wulfric’s Quest – In many ways, the centrepiece of this collection, this previously unpublished 27,000-word novella involves a peasant farmer attempting to track down an elusive wizard following a vision of impending catastrophe in his village. Set in the Dark Ages, this could be interpreted as a sequel to Ravenseed or as an entirely unconnected story, one parallel universe away from it.

Winged – Another previously unpublished story, this features the knights in Ravenseed as supporting characters in the first act before the new protagonist, a mysterious woman named Amelia, undertakes a dangerous quest alone. A direct prequel to Ravenseed.

Bloodmire – Published here for the first time with my slightly revised (and preferred) finale, this is another Ravenseed prequel featuring a minor but pivotal supporting character from that novel in one key scene. It concerns a knight undertaking a quest to rescue his betrothed, who has been captured by a supernatural beast. But is this knight as pure-hearted and brave as he appears?

For the purists out there, the original, slightly different Bloodmire finale will remain on Medium for posterity. But for the record, I consider this tweaked version definitive.

As the title of this collection suggests, the deeper the protagonists go into the forests (and there are forests in every story of one kind or another), the deeper they go into themselves. Whether they concern dreams, different dimensions, or our own world long ago during the Dark Ages, I hope these tales resonate with you.

The Dark Forest Within is out now in ebook or paperback via Amazon here (in the UK) and here (in the US). For Draft2Digital and its various outlets, you can pick up ebooks and paperback copies here.