Changing (indie)tact

Just a short post announcing I will be ditching my usual stance of not reviewing books on M&M and will be - on occasion - publishing reviews on small press titles and self-published e-books from here on.  Over the next few weeks I’ll be reviewing Gareth L. Powell’s debut novel, Silversands, Paul Meloy’s collection, Islington Crocodiles, and Neil George Ayre’s e-book, The New Goodbye, right here on Muskets and Monsters, with more to come.

Why? 

Well, as readers, more and more of us are looking for alternatives to what's on offer in the local Blackstones or Waterwells. Over the past 12 months or so my reading habits have altered, leaning more and more towards small press publications, books that are deemed not commercial enough to find a home in mainstream publishing and your local WH Smiths.  Some of these independently produced books leave many mainstream offerings choking dust in terms of originality, ambition and writing prowess, and it’s a crying shame they don’t find a greater audience, such as GL Powell’s anthology The Last Reef (which might be out of print, but you can now get it on the Kindle – and I do advise you to get it, I really do – it’s bloody good stuff).

So it’s all about spreading the word – bad stuff as well as the good – to help mine that narrow, elusive seam of story-telling-gold amongst the dross, a seam that you can find hidden beneath commercialism in that often marginalised world of the independent small presses. 

Keep digging and it’s worth the effort, I can tell you…