Welcome to a collection of books I've written about angels, unicorns. goddesses, leprechauns and whatever else you find below. Click on the covers for more. First, because it is closest to my heart and I waited about thirty years for the chance to write it, comes a book which traces the origins of the Celtic beliefs about faeries back to the misty days of their first arrival in Ireland, apparently descending from the sky in flying ships and landing on the mountain tops amid a great cloud that shrouded the land for three days. According to legend they then ruled the country as gods for an age before being forced to retreat into a parallel world, or sail away westwards across the ocean like Tolkien's elves.

The book was published in the autumn of 2007 and at 224 pages is a fair bit longer than most I have written so far, in proportion to my interest in the topic, though without anywhere near exhausting it . . . The aim of the book is to give a kind of overview of the subject for those who are curious and even quite well informed about Celtic mythology, but daunted by its abundance and seeming chaos. Also to examine how the basically pagan ideas in the faerie faith nevertheless managed to survive and prosper alongside Christianity right up to about a century ago when other forces undermined the solid belief in faeries in the Celtic countryside. Click on the cover for some sample pages.

For an online review click HERE

By way of contrast, the follow-up for autumn 2008 is the book on vampires you see on the left. It hasn't been quite as long in the making as Faeries but I wrote it on and off for a dozen years and it will be great to see it in print at last, with Bruce Pennington's original black and white drawings. In person Bruce is the most mild and optimistic person, but he just happens to have a wonderfully gothic imagination and is at his best when depicting demons and disasters. To see a selection of his work, including illustrations from this book, visit his website HERE. To view some sample pages from the book, click on the cover.

The idea for doing this book first came from being asked to write an introduction for a reprint of Sabine Baring-Gould's classic 1865 Book of Werewolves, because I was taken by his curiously healthy angle on an equally morbid topic. There was something so refreshingly wholesome about it that I wondered if something similar could be done with vampires. So that is what I set about doing. Curiously, many of the sources I delved into were the same as those I used elsewhere for a book about Angels.

Then below we have a little halloween trilogy that came out in 2006. Each book is 96 pages long and about the size of a standard paperback but with a hardback and dust cover. Click on the covers for some sample spreads. The vampire volume is a kind of taster for the much larger book above and there is inevitably some overlap, but I tried hard to avoid repetition so this should not spoil your appetite for the larger book and it contains many additional titbits. It was fun to have a look at werewolves and witches as well.