Michael Marshall Smith - Author
About the Author
Michael Marshall Smith (who dropped the “Smith” to write The Straw Men) lives in north London with his wife Paula, and is currently working on screenplays and his next book, while providing two cats with somewhere warm and comfortable to sit.
Featured books by Michael Marshall Smith
Only Forward
Stark lives in Colour, a neighbourhood whose inhabitants like to be co-ordinated with their surroundings - a neighbourhood where spangly purple trousers are admired by the walls of buildings as you pass them. Close by is Sound, where you mustn't make any, apart from one designated hour a day when you can scream your lungs raw. Then there's Red - get off at Fuck Station Zero if you want to see a tactical nuclear battle recreated as a sales demonstration. Stark has friends in Red, which is just as well because Something is about to happen. And when a Something happens it's no good chanting 'Duck and cover' while cowering in a corner, because a Something is always from the past, Stark's past, and it won't go away until you face it full on.
Lonely Dead
Following on from the quite brilliant The Straw Men comes another high calibre, tense and chilling serial killer tale with those who survived still in the sights of the powerful strawmen. It’s the lonely and desperate against the unknown, something Michael Marshall is particularly good at. I cannot praise it enough. I don’t know if Science Fiction thrillers are to your taste but you might be interested to know that Michael Marshall is also Michael Marshall Smith, the author of four outstanding futuristic works of which I would particularly recommend Only Forward - and he is British.Comparison: Harlan Coben, Thomas Harris, Michael Connelly.Similar this month: Lee Child, Chris Ryan.
Other books by Michael Marshall Smith
The Mammoth Book of Folk Horror
Welcome to a landscape of ancient evil . . . with stories by masters of horror Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James , Ramsey Campbell, Storm Constantine, Christopher Fowler, Alison Littlewood, Kim Newman, Reggie Oliver , Michael Marshall Smith, Karl Edward Wagner, and more! The darkness that endures beneath the earth . . . the disquiet that lingers in the woodland surrounding a forgotten path . . . those ancient traditions and practices that still cling to standing stone circles, earthworks, and abandoned buildings; elaborate rituals that invoke elder gods or nature deities; the restless spirits and legendary creatures that remain connected to a place or object, or exist in deep wells and lonely pools of water, waiting to ensnare the unwary traveler . . . These concepts have been the archetypes of horror fiction for decades, but in recent years they have been given a name: Folk Horror. This type of storytelling has existed for more than a century. Authors Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft, and M. R. James all published fiction that had it roots in the notion of the supernatural being linked to objects or places left behind. All four writers are represented in this volume with powerful, and hopefully unfamiliar, examples of their work, along with newer exponents of the craft such as Ramsey Campbell, Storm Constantine, Christopher Fowler, Alison Littlewood, Kim Newman, Reggie Oliver, and many others. Illustrated with the atmospheric photography of Michael Marshall Smith, the stories in The Mammoth Book of Folk Horror tap into an aspect of folkloric tradition that has long been dormant, but never quite forgotten, while the depiction of these forces as being in some way natural in no way detracts from the sense of nameless dread and escalating horror that they inspire . . .
Hannah Green And Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence
There are a million stories in the world. Most are perfectly ordinary. This one isn't. Hannah Green actually thinks her story is more mundane than most. But she's about to discover that the shadows in her life have been hiding a world where nothing is as it seems: that there's an ancient and secret machine that converts evil deeds into energy, that some mushrooms can talk and that her grandfather has been friends with the Devil for over a hundred and fifty years, and now they need her help.
Intruders
Now a BBC America original television show by the writer and executive producer of The X-Files!For ex-cop Jack Whalen, it all begins with a visit from a childhood friend, a lawyer who needs Jacks help. The family of a noted scientist has been senselessly, brutally murdered, and the scientist is nowhere to be found.But Jack has more pressing concerns. The past that drove him from the L.A.P.D. continues to haunt him. And his wife has disappeared during a routine business trip to Seattle. She never checked into her hotel. She isnt answering her cell phone. She is gone.A third missing person, a little girl from Oregon, is found miles away. But it soon becomes obvious that she is not an innocent victim and far from defenseless.Something very strange is happeninga perplexing series of troubling events thats leading Jack Whalen into the shadows. And the secrets buried there are unlike anything he, or anyone, could possibly have imagined.
Mammoth Books presents Substitutions
Taken from The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22, edited by Stephen Jones.As Smith recalls: "e;This story came about in the simplest way, the way I always enjoy most - something happening in real life that makes you think 'What if?' "e;Our household gets a lot of its food via an online delivery service, and one day when I was unpacking what had just been dropped at our house I gradually realised there was something...not quite right about the contents of the bags."e;There's two things that are strange about that experience. The first is that - given that every household is likely to buy at least some things in common - you don't realise straight away that you've been given the wrong shopping. You don't immediately think 'This is wrong', more like . . . 'This is weird'. The second is how personal it is, gaining accidental access to this very tangible evocation of some other family's life. You can't help but wonder about the people the food was really destined for."e;In real life, I just called up the delivery guy and got it sorted out: but in fiction, you might tackle things slightly differently . . ."e;
What You Make It
The first ever collection of Michael Marshall Smith's award-winning short stories. The first piece of fiction Smith ever wrote - a short story called The Man Who Drew Cats - won the World Fantasy award. It's included here along with many others, some unpublished, which show the incredible versatility of one of the most exciting writers working in Britain today. The collection is stuffed with surreal, disturbing gems including: 'When God Lived in Kentish Town' Someone comes up to you when you're quietly eating your stir-fried rice in a great Chinese take away, and tells you: 'I've found God'. You try to ignore them, right? But what if they have, and what if He works in a drab old electrical store on Kentish Town Road and he's not getting many customers? 'Diet Hell' Some people will do anything to fit into their old jeans. 'Save As...' What if you could back up your life? Save it up to a certain point and return to it when things went horribly wrong? 'Everybody Goes' An idyllic childhood day from a long, hot summer. The kind you want to last for ever. All good things must come to an end, mustn't they?
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