You can find an extract from The Devil’s Looking Glass here. The book will be published by Bantam in the UK in April 2012.

Follow the links at the top of that page for a brief interview.

Artwork by John Picacio, for the final book in the nine-volume sequence. Should be in stores in May.

Music could have been an inspiration for the design of Stonehenge, according to an American researcher.

Steven Waller’s intriguing idea is that ancient Britons could have based the layout of the great monument, in part, on the way they perceived sound.

Archaeoacoustics is a growing field, with researchers reporting interesting results from many prehistoric structures.

“The only meteorites that we know about that have survived these long ages are the ones that were collected in Antarctica,” said researcher Colin Pillinger, adding that more recently, some ancient meteorites have been collected in the Sahara Desert. This rock came from neither the Sahara Desert nor Antarctica, but rather the Lake House in Wiltshire. “Britain was under an ice age for 20,000 years,” Pillinger said, explaining the climate would have protected the rock from weathering. At some point, the Druids likely picked up the meteorite when scouting for rocks to build burial chambers. “They were keen on building burial sites for [the dead] in much the same way the Egyptians built the pyramids.”

Sounds like a great exhibition.

A two-and-a-half hour webchat with the great Alan Moore, wherein he talks about magic, writing, creativity, Lovecraft and horror, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, philosophy, time, his new novel, Watchmen and more…

Alan Moore chats with Harvey Pekar statue contributors (FULL) from Chris Thompson on Vimeo.

A mysterious circular object the size of a jumbo jet has been discovered on the floor of the Baltic Sea. Professional shipwreck hunters identified the anomaly, and a smaller circular object, while searching with sonar.

Unbelievably, this was primetime TV in the US and UK back in the early nineties, seven minutes of a man standing in a room, yet still creepy and nightmarish. And now we have Downton Abbey. Sigh.

Posted because I love Lynch, and this year sees the twentieth anniversary of the movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, one of my favourite films.

Here’s the cover art for the Pyr edition of The Burning Man, Book 2 of Kingdom of the Serpent, out shortly. Art by John Picacio.

It’s got a Hieronymous Bosch feel, I think.

My Swords of Albion books get a pretty detailed analysis on Huffington Post, looking in particular at how an Elizabethan fantasy can have some relevance to the world we live in today.

Read it here, leave a comment.

Out now, from Bantam: ebooks of The Sword of Albion and The Scar-Crow Men.

Elizabethan spies, supernatural threat, and the forces of Faerie – just in time for Christmas (or the holiday of your choice).

Here’s artist John Picacio’s cover for the Pyr edition of Jack of Ravens, Book One of Kingdom of the Serpent. Out in March, with books two and three to follow in subsequent months.

For US readers, this is the final trilogy of the nine-book sequence that began with Age of Misrule. Jack Churchill returns, along with the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons, Fabulous Beasts, Celtic gods, Ragnarok, the Otherworld and the wrapping up of every single plot-thread wound over the series.

Can I suggest to all the readers who have been complaining about Gollancz’s failure to reprint the long-sold-out UK version to pick this up on import. It should be available on both Amazon and the Waterstone’s site.

Experts have identified the precise location in Wales of some of the megaliths used in the construction of Stonehenge.

It’s a pretty major achievement to discover the location of the millennia-old quarry down to a few metres, but this also throws up some new mysteries. The rhyolitic rocks differ from all others in South Wales. The presumption is that they were chosen for a specific reason. How were they identified and why? There has been some interesting work done elsewhere into the acoustic qualities of particular stones at prehistoric sites. Is this important?

And this discovery has also kicked a hole in theories of how the stones were transplanted to Salisbury Plain. A consensus was growing that they were floated on rafts along the coast, but the exact location’s inaccessibility to water makes this unlikely. The old geologic theory – that the stones were pushed by advancing glaciers from Wales to Wiltshire during the ice age – is pretty flimsy as there aren’t any other Welsh rocks scattered around the Plain.

Here’s the cover of the new German edition of World’s End. An interesting approach – that appears to be the long-buried bones of a dragon…

I’ve set up a Google+ page for my writing. Feel free to add me to your circles:

Mark Chadbourn on Google+

Here’s the cover to the third Swords of Albion book, The Devil’s Looking Glass, which is published in the UK April 2012.

Artist tbc.

This new look at an old discovery is raising questions about whether ancient aboriginal culture had a deep understanding of the movement of the stars.

“They have discovered that waist-high boulders at the tip of the egg-shaped point along the ring to the position on the horizon where the sun sets at the summer and winter solstice – the longest and shortest day of the year.”

It’s been very quiet around here in recent weeks, mainly because I’ve been pulling 12-hour days, seven days a week to finish up the final draft of The Devil’s Looking Glass, the third Swords of Albion book.

It’s now been delivered to my editors at Transworld in the UK and Pyr in the US.

Publication is scheduled for April 2012 in the UK. Not heard a date from Pyr yet. So tonight I will be having a beer or two to celebrate. And tomorrow…

Back to work on a new project.

As I was finishing up the last draft of The Devil’s Looking Glass, I received news of the publication of the French version of Lord of Silence (see below). It got me thinking about how, although we live in a globalised world/economy, fiction is one area where the separations of the past are still quite evident.

The massed ranks of the internet love to pretend only one yardstick is necessary for books. Press this button for good, and this one for bad. Except, as the music industry has found out, the 21st century is all about nuance and complexity and mini-tribes. The mainstream is dead.

Some books just don’t travel well. That doesn’t mean they’re bad books, just that they’re not necessarily universal. Some novels work best when they’re communicating with a very narrow readership. Subtle, deeply-themed, with a great deal of unspoken communication because so much knowledge is already shared.

This is a long tradition of British fiction, and one reason why many UK writers have struggled across the Atlantic, but you can also find it throughout Europe.

Americans are much better at universal communication (unless the fiction is religion or sport-based when it hardly ever breaks out of their shores). I don’t know why that is, although I have a few ideas. The nation and its history is based upon the principle of Big Mythologies, and myth is a universal communicator with its symbols and archetypes. And film as an American art-form (okay, arguable, I know, but it has been embraced by the people as such) has infused the culture with its universal communication techniques.

I love the big books with the ubiquitous themes, but I’d certainly miss those fusty, quirky little stories about forgotten parts of a country’s culture if they came under threat in the current publishing climate.