Simon Avery's Blog

My new novel PoppyHarp is available to preorder from Black Shuck Books.

Noah and Imogen are both children when they first meet in 1973. Noah is in a children’s home after the death of his mother, and Imogen is accompanying her father, the brilliant but eccentric Oliver Frayling, to promote their BBC TV show The Adventures of Imogen and Florian.

Following a turbulent relationship in their twenties, Noah and Imogen part ways and lose sight of each other. Almost thirty years later, they meet again. Noah is now a successful writer and a newly single father. He and his daughter visit the recently widowed Imogen in Lethebury, a sleepy little town in the Malverns where Oliver created The Adventures of Imogen and Florian.

Oliver has been missing for years, but aspects of his failed TV show seem to live on in Lethebury. One night Florian, his fictional old rabbit, comes to life and seems to want to lead Noah and his daughter through a door that used to lead Elsewhere. But where does it lead now?

The answer lies somewhere in the story of Oliver’s deeply conflicted life, his private relationship with the BBC producer Malcolm Church, an abandoned Cold War bunker, and PoppyHarp.

But just who or what is PoppyHarp?

From the World Fantasy Award-nominated author of The Teardrop Method, PoppyHarp is a story about England in the 70s and 80s, the AIDS epidemic, the faded lights of celebrity, and building your own little plot of Eden when it feels the world has forgotten about you.

Overjoyed to announce that my new novella, Sorrowmouth is available to order from Black Shuck Books and Amazon.
A huge thank you to the brilliant Priya Sharma for her kind words about the book, and to Steve J Shaw for publishing it!
Here’s the blurb…
“For a long time Sorrowmouth existed as three or four separate ideas in different notebooks until one day, in a flash of divine inspiration, I recognised the common ground they shared with each other. A man trekking from one roadside memorial to another, in pursuit of grief; Beachy Head and its long dark history of suicide; William Blake and his angelic visions on Peckham Rye; Blake again with The Ghost of a Flea; a monstrous companion, bound by life’s cruelty…

As I wrote I discovered these disparate elements were really about me getting to some deeper truth about myself, and about all the people I’ve known in my life, about the struggles we all have that no one save for loved ones see – alcoholism, dependence, self doubt, grief, mental illness. Sorrowmouth is about the mystery hiding at the heart of all things, making connections in the depths of sorrow, and what you have to sacrifice for a moment of vertigo.”
Simon Avery
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“Simon Avery summons the spirit of William Blake in this visionary exploration of the manifestations of our grief and pain.”
Priya Sharma

This is a huge event for me. In September TTA Press will publish The Teardrop Method as part of their novella series. The wraparound cover art by Richard Wagner is just gorgeous.

You can order it now: The Teardrop Method from TTA Press
It's just £8. I’d really appreciate your support!

I’ve also been lucky enough to get some wonderful advance praise from a trio of writers whom I admire greatly. Thanks to Gary McMahon, Ted E. Grau and Nicholas Royle for their kind words.

Krisztina heard the song and she followed it across the city….

Winter in Budapest. In the midst of a terrible personal tragedy, singer/songwriter Krisztina Ligetti discovers she can hear songs of mortality. She spends her days following these songs until they lead her to people at the precipice of death. From the fading bars of their final breath, Krisztina takes the story of their lives and turns them into music.

When Krisztina is reunited with her father, a reclusive 60s pop star, she believes that she has finally found a way out of the darkness, but then she begins to receive news clippings detailing each of the deaths she has been witness to. A man in a porcelain mask who seems to be everywhere she looks and a faded writer who shares Krisztina’s gift seem to know her, know that the past has a hold on them all, and that it won’t stop until someone has paid the price.


‘The Teardrop Method is a story about stories; a beautiful novella about love and loss and the connections people make and then sometimes break. It’s quiet, haunting, and ultimately moving.’ Gary McMahon



‘Nightmare plotting infused with an aching mitteleuropäische sadness, Simon Avery’s tale of music and mortality could be the novelisation of a lost Argento movie.’ Nicholas Royle


‘Without any prep or background, I started reading the novella The Teardrop Method by British author Simon Avery, and was immediately engaged by the moodiness, the bleakness, the desperation and creaky, world-weariness of the setting and characters. These appealing elements perfectly coalesced into a tragic and fervent eulogy to the creative process – to Art with a capital A – as a means of salvation and transcendence and doom, and to love itself in all its complex iterations, exploring the concept of loving, dying, and even killing, in order to achieve the proper reception code from the eternal Muse while the roaring Danube drowns out the rest of the world. This is a very European story, in all its faded baroque finery and cafe claustrophobia. The snow is heavier here, the dawn ever more surprising. The supernatural and the natural are not so far removed in places like this. The old and the new forever caught in a twirling waltz.

The Teardop Method is also a brilliant showreel for Simon Avery, a relatively new author that I had not previously read. His balanced prose and mature grasp of doomed love (both romantic and familial), the transience of corporeal existence, and the grim hidden realities of even the most outwardly charmed lives mark him as an author of dark fiction florets already fully in bloom, growing big and tall and dangerously beautiful in a corroded hothouse hidden away in a backstreet of a crumbling cobblestone city five hundred years past its prime.

I highly recommend this novella, and cannot wait to see what melody Mr. Avery pens next. I’ll be listening.’ T.E. Grau

Buy The Teardrop Method from TTA Press