Welcome to a library of books I've written about angels, unicorns. goddesses, leprechauns and whatever else you see below. Click on the covers for more, or HERE if you'd like to email any comments.

First comes a wonderfully satisfying venture that was published in March 2011 and gave a chance to pick up from the book on angels I wrote about ten years before, along with other strands of interest. Many thanks to Cindy Richards of Cico Books in London who offered the chance to write it, and Sarah Perkins for the atmospheric illustrations.

It is a pack of beautifully illustrated oracle cards calling on fallen angels who are on the side of neither God nor the Devil in the current ideological wars. They are interested, disembodied and often demonized spirits who sympathise with all sides of the biblical religions and are shared by all their Books. The angels' co-operation in creating the cards was really quite extraordinary. Try them and see for yourself.

Next comes a book I waited about thirty years for the chance to write. It 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.

I did hope to have the John Duncan (1866-1945) tapestry at the top of this page for the cover, but getting permission proved too complicated. And as it happens the actual cover captures the feel of the book very well in a quite different way. I only came across Duncan's art while working on Faeries. He was one of the most influential Scottish painters of the late 19th century Celtic Revival movement.

The book was published in the autumn of 2007 and at 224 pages is a fair bit longer than most I've had published, 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.
For an interview about the book click HERE.

By way of contrast, the follow-up for autumn 2008 was the book on vampires you see on the left. It wasn't quite as long in gestation as Faeries but I wrote it on and off for a dozen years and it is wonderful to see it in print at last, with Bruce Pennington's original black and white drawings. In person Pennington 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.

For online reviews click HERE.
For an interview about the book click HERE (scroll down the page).

In 2012 the book was published in Polish by Bellona Books of Warsaw. It's also available in the UK through Amazon. As with the original edition the illustrations are by Bruce Pennington.

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 beautifully presented with a hardback and dust cover. The idea of the format is to present the facts in juicy little bites, so to speak. The Vampires volume is a kind of taster for the much larger book above and there is inevitably some overlap, but I tried 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.

These three books are now available as Kindle eBooks fom Amazon. Click HERE and scroll down the page.

As a bonus I got to do another book about unicorns, which links in a nice circular way with the first book in the next section below.