People prize what they don’t understand at least as much as what they do.

Read page 3 for a mad Puritan worldview you probably thought died out 200 years ago, and page 4 for the nuts.

We’re going to be getting a lot more 2012 apocalypse meanderings in the weeks and months to come…

Here’s the cover for the Pyr edition of The Silver Skull, by Chris McGrath, published in the US this October.

From the blurb:

A devilish plot to assassinate the Queen, a Cold War enemy hell-bent on destroying the nation, incredible gadgets, a race against time around the world to stop the ultimate doomsday device…and Elizabethan England’s greatest spy!

Meet Will Swyfte – adventurer, swordsman, rake, swashbuckler, wit, scholar and the greatest of Walsingham’s new band of spies.

But Swyfte’s public image is a carefully-crafted façade to give the people of England something to believe in, and to allow them to sleep peacefully at night. It deflects attention from his real work – and the true reason why Walsingham’s spy network was established.

A Cold War seethes, and England remains under a state of threat. The forces of Faerie have been preying on humanity for millennia. Responsible for our myths and legends, of gods and fairies, dragons, griffins, devils, imps and every other supernatural menace that has haunted our dreams, this power in the darkness has seen humans as playthings to be tormented, hunted or eradicated.

But now England is fighting back!

Here’s the cover for the mass-market paperback publication of The Burning Man, Book Two of Kingdom of the Serpent, which is out in June.

You can see it’s quite different from the hardback and trade paperback editions – the figure is less stylised, the fire not so harsh. Personally, I prefer the old image…

… but the powers that be at Gollancz think this one is more effective. Opinions?

You can buy the new paperback version here or order it from any good bookstore.

The first three chapters of World’s End, Age of Misrule Book One, are now up at the Pyr Sample Chapters blog.

A couple of nice reviews are in on the US publication of World’s End:

Chadbourn takes the reader on a wild ride through lands where modern Britain connects with the ancient past.

Chadbourn writes a tale that twists the tropes of fantasy into something unrecognizable.

Also nice as they come from bloggers who I read and respect. I won’t be doing a Joe Abercrombie (Hi, Joe!) and obsessively detailing every mention of my name across the internet, but I wanted to put these two up to mark the moment, as it were, of World’s End appearing in the US.

For all you sword and sorcery fans, here’s some rare footage of fantasy great Michael Moorcock joining space cadets Hawkwind to intone his Elric poem/lyrics on stage.

Moorcock was a part of Hawkwind for several years, and the band’s Chronicle of the Black Sword album was heavily influenced by his work. Cherry Red records recently secured the rights to release all of Hawkwind’s material, which had been unavailable for many years. More details at the Cherry Red site.

I come from a long, long line of coal miners (certainly on one side of my family – there’s some strange blood on the other, to be sure). Coal dust is in my veins, as it is in the area where I grew up in the English Midlands. The houses round here used to be black with the coal embedded in the brick from centuries of the stuff being transported from the mines. The landscape was apocalyptic – slag heaps rising to the sky, and palls of smoke from where the seams underground had caught alight.

Against the grim outside world, there was a powerful sense of community. The miners existed alongside death and disability on a daily basis, and lived life to the full whenever they came back into the light. I remember pubs packed with thick-armed, tattooed men, downing pints of bitter and singing raucously, the wives joining their husbands on Saturday nights for singalongs and dancing at the working men’s club, the tall tales, the ghost stories and underground mythologies, and most of all the laughter that bound everyone together.

It’s all gone now. In the early 1980s, the Conservative Government decided to break the back of the troublesome miners’ union and close the pits, including my local ones. The ensuing strike was furious and hard-fought. It tore apart families, villages, friends. Eventually the union lost and the mines were closed. No one round here has forgotten it. Children are told tales of the wicked witch Margaret Thatcher who threw all the men on to the poverty line, brought depression and suicide, left families hungry and killed off the villages. Killed the communities dead.

On the one hand, it’s better round here now. The slag heaps are gone, replaced by green parks and forests. The houses are clean. Work has gradually crept back, but only after years of pain. But that sense of community was gone. The pubs all seem strangely empty to me. Not enough laughter, not enough joy in living. I miss that old world.

A friend of mine, David Bell, has written a book about the strike – The Dirty Thirty – Heroes of the Miners’ Strike (Five Leaves). It celebrates the struggle of the thirty Leicestershire miners who showed great courage in standing up for their beliefs and coming out on strike when many around them argued against it.

Dave interviews the surviving members of The Dirty Thirty, and also talks to the womens’ support group. On the blurb, Tony Benn says this book “is of the greatest importance”. You can order it directly from Dave and get it signed or pick it up from Amazon, Borders and Waterstones.

Book collectors in the US are racing to snap up Pyr’s first edition of World’s End, Book One of the Age of Misrule, I’m told. A printer’s error resulted in the Pyr logo being left off the spine. It will be corrected for the forthcoming second edition, making those first Pyr-less copies unique and – apparently – collectable.

Cover artist John Picacio has written about it here and here.

If you do want a first edition, you’ll need to hurry. Only a few remain in the warehouse – and that’s a whole month before the official publication date. You can get it here.

A publication date has now been finalised for Hellboy: The Ice Wolves from Dark Horse Books: October 15 2009.

You can pre-order it in the UK here and in the US here.

And just to remind you of Duncan Fegredo’s great cover:

Hellboy cover

Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said yesterday in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years.

They had the Loch Ness Monster and a crashed alien spaceship too.