Wiretap is a monthly collection of the things I can’t stop thinking about. Crime, Thriller, and Horror fiction. TV and Cinema. True crime. Music. Quotes. Strange people. Bad decisions. Cultural debris recovered from dim corners of the internet and sodium-lit streets.
Each edition will contain updates on whatever I’ve been working on, reading, watching, listening to, or obsessing over during the month. Some of it brutal. Some of it intelligent. Occasionally both at once. Expect updates and insights into the writing and manuscript submission process, essays, underground music, and the sort of stories that leave fingerprints behind.
No productivity advice. No optimisation culture. No motivational sermons. Just signals intercepted from the shadows once a month.
PAYHIP STORE NOW LIVE
My Payhip store is now live.
This gives readers another place to buy my books directly, including signed copies, which are not available through Amazon. Pricing is also slightly lower than Amazon where possible. I may even throw some other book-merch up there in due course.
For anyone who wants a copy, prefers buying direct to support creators, or wants something signed, the store link is where to go.
Thank you to everyone who has already bought, read, shared, reviewed, or shown interest in my work. It helps more than you know.
QUOTE OF THE MONTH:
Terror operates best in the gaps between known facts. Using the threat of terror as a vehicle, psychological fiction, (whether it’s crime, drama, horror, thriller,) exploits the uncertainty of human motivation. This Lovecraft quote highlights how the anticipation of violence creates deeper dread than the act itself. A character isolated by geographic distance or social distrust experiences heightened vulnerability, turning otherwise ordinary environments hostile. Prose builds unease by withholding answers. Readers confront the same disorientation as the characters, navigating clues that offer multiple interpretations. This narrative technique transforms the setting into an active antagonist, where threats exist just beyond the field of view. Strong crime/thriller/horror narratives rely on this atmospheric pressure. The unknown forces characters to project their deepest anxieties onto their surroundings, driving them toward desperation.
GOD PUPPET
The transition from editing to action has begun, for GOD PUPPET.
The psychological pressure I spoke of in the section above mirrors the reality of the publishing industry. Sending a manuscript out into the world introduces a personal encounter with the unknown. During June, a couple of select literary agencies received submission packages for GOD PUPPET.
The subsequent silence creates its own narrative vacuum. The waiting period may stretch into months. The silence that follows submission forces an author to navigate a landscape devoid of feedback, where no news allows anxiety to distort expectations. A response might arrive, or the submission might disappear entirely into the industry void. This professional limbo generates a real-world tension that rivals the atmospheric dread constructed on the page.
But whilst the painstaking waiting period has begun… you’ll soon learn (below) the next wound is already open.
Here’s a video I put together to accompany and generate interest for GOD PUPPET.
THE NEXT CHAPTER
OK, I’ve kept everyone waiting long enough.
To my early subscribers, as a thank you for jumping on board and supporting my creative venture, you’re the first to hear about this. I have teased a little on social media, but other than that, nobody has received this information before you.
My extreme horror novella: TERMINAL GRACE, will be released on Monday 13th July.
They say you only get one debut, but I have to call bullshit. I had a coming-of-age crime debut, and now I get an extreme horror debut too.
This is hands-down the most grotesque piece of fiction I have written.
TERMINAL GRACE follows Edward Parkes, a man who’s spent his life accumulating power, wealth, and control. Luxury penthouses. Private jets. Money beyond consequence. Then a cancer diagnosis strips everything away and leaves him with only weeks to live.
When Edward receives an invitation to The Terminal Grace Foundation, an isolated retreat hidden in the tropical wilderness of Far North Queensland, he finds a promise too obscene to ignore.
There are alternatives to dying.
Inside the Foundation, Edward encounters a secret religious order built around conscious decay, surgical devotion, and the belief that decomposition is sacred. Their rituals don’t offer healing. They offer preservation through mutilation. Awareness without mercy. Survival without dignity. A body dismantled while the mind stays awake to witness every cut.
But something ancient sleeps beneath Terminal Grace.
Something older than religion.
Older than humanity.
And it has been waiting for the perfect vessel.
TERMINAL GRACE is extreme literary horror for readers drawn to intelligent brutality, cosmic dread, religious corruption, parasitic transformation, and uncompromising body horror. I’ve opted for short-form storytelling because the material demands pressure, not comfort. Even writing it felt physically hostile at times.
This world isn’t for everyone. It’s for readers who want fast-paced horror with razor-sharp teeth, rot, fever, and no clean exits.
As mentioned, TERMINAL GRACE arrives Monday 13th July. You’ll be able to grab a copy on Amazon or through the Payhip store.
Alongside the release of TERMINAL GRACE, work has also begun on the next full-length novel which currently remains untitled. The structure is in place, with a complete chapter-by-chapter plan and core narrative architecture established at >110,000 words (this is where most of my drafts end up before I take to them with a chainsaw.)
The early direction is psychological-horror-leaning-rural-thriller, with internal dread, atmospheric instability, and the slow collapse of certainty at its core. Plot, character, and setting details will stay buried for now. More updates will follow as the draft takes shape.
CASE FILES:
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING
This month I read Guess Again by Charlie Donlea. The novel moves with the sort of mechanical precision thriller writers spend entire careers trying to perfect. Short chapters. Constant forward motion. Information delivered in controlled bursts designed to keep momentum high enough that stopping feels inconvenient. Donlea understands pacing exceptionally well and the book benefits from that discipline from beginning to end.
What worked best for me was the consistency. There are no major lulls, no wasted stretches where the narrative begins treading water. Every chapter arrives with purpose and leaves behind enough friction to keep you turning pages. Structurally, it feels engineered for compulsive reading, something I always appreciate when a thriller understands exactly what kind of machine it wants to be.
There was also an unexpected personal thread for me. One of the main characters has Bell’s palsy, which I’ve been slowly recovering from myself after an event in late February. I wasn’t expecting that detail to land as hard as it did, but a lot of the character’s symptoms and experiences felt uncomfortably familiar. The facial weakness, the physical strangeness, the way your own body starts to feel unreliable. It gave those sections a different kind of weight for me, one I suspect I would’ve read past in a completely different way six months ago.
Where I found myself slightly disconnected was the ending. Without wandering into spoiler territory, I found myself wishing the book had stopped one beat earlier. There’s a particular moment where the story feels like it reaches its sharpest point, hanging perfectly in uncertainty. Instead, Donlea chooses resolution. Personally, I would’ve preferred the final note landing on a question rather than an answer. The ambiguity felt stronger than the explanation.
Still, a thoroughly enjoyable read and one I moved through quickly, which is usually the clearest indicator of success.
I also read John Dies at the End by Jason Pargin under the pseudonym David Wong. The narrative is wild, mimicking an extended acid trip that leaves you hallucinating from start to finish. The plot follows two dropouts navigating cosmic horror, drug induced realities, and bizarre interdimensional threats. It blends absurd comedy with genuine dread, refusing to adhere to standard genre boundaries. It’s honestly one of the strangest things I’ve read.
I also read A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck, and oh boy… This is a strange, bleak little book. It starts with an almost absurd premise, then keeps widening until the absurdity becomes existential horror. It’s not frightening in the usual sense. There are no cheap shocks, no gore, no monster waiting in the dark. The horror is scale. Time. Repetition. The slow understanding of what forever might really mean.
The only thing I have to say about it, the only thing with any chance of carrying the weight it deserves, is this: it ruined me.
Not all the way through. Not page after page. Only at the end.
The weight of infinity.
The horror of endlessness.
I thought I might need a moment to gather myself before opening the next book. Alas, the universe had other plans. I have now started Blindsighted by Karin Slaughter, which is already a hard pivot. Where Peck’s book feels vast and metaphysical, Slaughter’s is immediate, brutal, and grounded in human damage. It has that grim small-town crime feeling, where every person seems to be carrying something unsaid, and every quiet moment has teeth.
More on that next month.
SURVEILLANCE:
WHAT I’VE BEEN WATCHING
I recently rewatched Inside, the Australian prison drama starring Guy Pearce, and found myself appreciating different parts of it the second time around. On first viewing, the obvious tension sits front and centre. A brutal meditation on violence, guilt, and the strange intimacy prison forces between men who would otherwise never occupy the same world. Watching again, what struck me most was how restrained the film is underneath all that weight.
Guy Pearce is exceptional throughout, carrying the kind of quiet instability that makes every interaction feel uncertain. There's something deeply unsettling about how the film refuses easy morality. Nobody'sclean. Nobody's innocent in the ways we usually expect movies to package innocence. It feels less interested in redemption than in exposing the damage people drag behind them long after the worst thing they’ve done. My favourite brand of narrative.
I've also (finally) started watching Scrublands, adapted from Chris Hammer’s novel, which feels distinctly Australian in a completely different register. Where Inside is claustrophobic and intimate, Scrublands thrives on open spaces that somehow feel even more suffocating. Small town silence, buried resentment, landscapes carrying secrets heavier than the people standing inside them.
What I've always appreciated about Hammer’s writing, and what the series captures well so far, is his understanding of rural Australia as both a place and a pressure cooker. These communities operate on long memory. Old grievances calcify. Everyone knows something and nobody says enough. The mystery itself works, but what keeps me watching is the atmosphere. There’s a patience to the storytelling I find refreshing.
Both remind me how strong Australian storytelling becomes when creators stop chasing imitation and lean fully into our own contradictions. Violence sitting beside beauty. Isolation breeding intimacy. Landscapes shaping psychology as much as plot. Stories which feel inseparable from the country they emerge from.
STATIC:
WHAT I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO
I caught the Sanguisugabogg gig, supported by Peeling Flesh and Gutless. All three bands delivered incredible, crushing sets. The extreme energy from this show directly influenced my focus on filth, driving me to prioritise and finish editing the horror novella.
Naturally, the rotation this month consisted of thrashing those three bands alongside regular spins of Vredehammer and Meshuggah. Vredehammer provides blacked death metal driven by clinical, driving rhythms. The tracks carry a cold, aggressive momentum that pushes everything forward without hesitation. Meshuggah occupies a category entirely of their own. The mechanical precision and erratic, polyrhythmic grooves create a heavy, calculated wall of sound. Listening to them feels like watching an industrial engine dismantle itself and rebuild in real time.
The combination of chaotic death metal and structured, rhythmic weight provided the perfect soundtrack to close out a bleak month of heavy writing.
Why does this matter?
What a writer watches, reads, and listens to forms an essential part of the work itself. Every element of consumption influences the output. This creative intake doesn’t necessarily dictate the specific content produced, but it directly governs the volume and consistency of the production. Heavy, aggressive sounds fuel the momentum required to show up and execute the work daily.
WORDS FROM THE EXIT WOUND:
ON WRITING
The release of a debut novel is a strange milestone, particularly when the manuscript spent eighteen years sitting idle on a USB drive. I wrote 90% of DOGWATCH between 2005 and 2008. The book remained largely untouched until 2025, when a sudden, sharp sense of mortality forced me to return to it. Watching my dog deteriorate with old age brought my mind back to the story. I named the manuscript DOGWATCH decades ago for vastly different reasons, but the timing of its revival felt necessary.
I’d say that no matter what life threw at me, DOGWATCH was always going to be the first novel I released.
Traditional publishing houses didn’t pick it up, but I knew I couldn’t progress to other projects until this specific story entered the wild. In doing so, I realised that returning to work written nearly two decades earlier is an exercise in humility. It’s like reading your old Facebook statuses from circa 2008.
My immediate observation was that I had a real tendency to over-write everything. I didn’t trust the reader enough back then. So, when I picked it up again, I spent time closing structural gaps and polishing sections that, (quite frankly with the benefit of hindsight and experience,) made me cringe. However, the novel uses a first-person point of view, told through the perspective of a teenage boy aged 15-17 throughout the course of the story. Needless to say, anyone who’s interacted with a teenage boy knows a certain amount of cringe comes with the territory, and within my writing, much of that is intentionally left intact. Even so, looking at the work now, I’d handle several elements with far more decorum and poise today, just 12 months on from completion.
Yet, these are the exact lessons I needed. Writers don’t learn how to push their craft further by keeping early work buried.
The public reaction to the announcement of DOGWATCH brought unexpected challenges too. Most people met the news with genuine surprise, and a lot of kindness. A few reactions, though, caught me off guard. Some people questioned whether I had used AI to write it - hot tip: I didn't, and there’s a whole other newsletter on that topic. Some people have never once spoken a single word to me about my writing. Others wanted to know why I had never mentioned the project before, as though years of private work had somehow become an omission.
As though silence meant secrecy.
As though my creative life required a special group chat briefing.
Let me be perfectly clear:
I’ve never hidden my love of writing which precedes the existence of AI. I’ve kept blogs for nearly twenty years. I’ve written essays, fragments, outlines, abandoned starts, false starts, reviews, diatribes and manifestos, and stories in every stage between idea and manuscript.
Writing has always been there.
What I haven’t done is report every private ambition to people who weren’t present for the work, the doubt, the hours, or the long quiet middle.
That matters.
Friendship doesn’t entitle anyone to a personal announcement. Support matters more than proximity. If you rarely check in, rarely engage with content, rarely encourage, and rarely show up for the small things, then no, you don’t get to act wounded when you weren’t given advance notice of the big thing.
Creative work is private before it becomes public. Nobody owes the world a fucking progress report. Nobody owes casual observers access to an unfinished dream.
Anyway, I’m not the first and certainly won’t be the last creator to experience the peculiarities of people.
The experience also gave me a new respect for self-publishers. Managing the entire process takes a brutal amount of effort. Writing the book is only the first step. Everything after that; editing, design, formatting, publishing, promotion, admin, expectation, noise, is where the vocation starts to show its teeth.
DOGWATCH is now widely available, and as I said, the response has been mostly positive. I’m grateful for everyone who has read it, shared it, reviewed it, bought it, or even sent a quiet message of support. Those things matter more than people realise. At the time of this newsletter going to print, DOGWATCH has a healthy 5.00 stars on Amazon and 4.83 stars on Goodreads, and some of the reviews have left me breathless at times. I need only read back over them if the fire ever looks like burning out. If you’ve read it and have been thinking of leaving a review, please do. They all matter.
My focus has now shifted forward. I have several incomplete manuscripts in various stages of completion, so consider this fair warning: there is more coming. And no, I will not be apologising for keeping the work private until I’m ready to share it.
My current priority is pushing my second full-length manuscript: GOD PUPPET, out to literary agents.
Beside that sits the self-published novella: TERMINAL GRACE, my extreme horror debut and the first released work to push directly into the uglier territory I want to explore further, (but not exclusively.)
If DOGWATCH opened the door, then TERMINAL GRACE kicks the door off its hinges, drags it into the basement, and leaves it there to rot.
From a writing and marketing perspective, TERMINAL GRACE also gives me a world with teeth. The Terminal Grace Foundation, its theology of decomposition, rituals, hidden history, and the thing sleeping beneath it all, definitely leave room for expansion. I don’t want to force a sequel for the sake of one, but this world has enough rot in the walls to support further novellas, connected stories, or a wider mythology built around the Foundation, its objectives, and its influence.
I’m starting to see the shape of the work ahead more clearly. While it will appeal to a different audience, TERMINAL GRACE is a more concentrated, violent expression of the same creative direction as DOGWATCH and GOD PUPPET; narratives built around power, psychological fracture, bodily failure, faith, dread, and the systems people build to survive what should destroy them.
As mentioned earlier, I’m also breathing new life into an older manuscript that takes a different path again. This project leans into the psychological horror of the Australian landscape, but the people are no less compromised. The tone sits somewhere in the vein of Jane Harper, stripped down and blended with the grime of someone like Ania Ahlborn.
DOGWATCH remains an open chapter too. I may rework it for traditional publishing in the future or expand the story outward. For now, it serves as the foundation of my publishing history, the project that taught me not only how to handle the realities of publication and support, but also serves as the catalyst for the cleaner, sharper, more disturbing stories following it.
Thank you so much for your support!
About this newsletter:
You are receiving this email because you subscribed to my monthly newsletter. On the last day of each month, I share information about what’s been happening in my world, particularly in the creative space. Occasionally, I’ll send out longer content fiction, and you’ll also see the odd giveaway with no catch and no hidden agenda.
You quite literally just have to read it.