Well, I guess this was my "Lockdown Project."
I don't really know why I did this (I mean, other than something to keep me occupied), but I wrote a novella during the initial lockdown, called Where The Strangers Come From. For various boring and tedious reasons, I had to sit on it and let it languish in the archives for a while, but I've finally decided to just...put it out into the world and let anyone who wants to get a copy and read it.
Where The Strangers Come From is an all but forgotten relic of the last century: an obscure text adventure game from the 1980’s, only ever sold by its creator in the classified pages of computer magazines from the UK. But in the intervening years, it’s taken on a whole new life as a piece of internet folklore, giving rise to strange tales around the bizarre programming language it’s written in, the supposedly traumatising effects it has on players who dare push further into the narrative and even people who simply disappear after managing to complete it.
When New York journalist Annie Caplan begins to investigate the game and its odd history, she becomes entangled in a web of truth and fiction, but, the deeper she digs, the more the lines between them blur. And at the centre of it all, someone claiming to be the games mysterious creator is determined that she play it herself…
Where The Strangers Come From is available from my Ko-Fi shop as a PDF, and in a variety of formats for your various e-readers from Amazon and Smashwords, priced £5.99:
And, again, huge thanks to m'colleague Bryan Coyle for providing that lovely cover.