“With ‘The Old One and The Sea’, Lex H Jones has crafted a clever and beautiful coming-of-age story set within a miniature Lovecraftian snowglobe – in which adventure and intrigue exist alongside ancient monsters, and friends can be found in the unlikeliest of places.”
- Laura Mauro, British Fantasy Award winning author of ‘Looking for Laika’.
“Lex H Jones is a unique voice in horror and a writer to watch. The Old One and The Sea is an imaginative tale that will delight Lovecraftian readers of all ages.”
- Taylor Grant, Two-Time Bram Stoker Award Finalist.
The Sinister Horror Company are proud to reveal the cover of our forthcoming title The Old One and The Sea by Lex H. Jones which will be released on the 1st November 2019. The story centres around a fictional, secret childhood of influential horror author H. P. Lovecraft, and contains a foreword by Jim Mcleod of Ginger Nuts of Horror
The book is a new venture for the Sinister Horror Company as it is our first title aimed at a younger audience. The story is most likely aimed at the 7 – 12 year old market, although we’re sure a lot of adult Lovecraft fans will get a kick out of reading it too. As such we have created a new branding, Sinister Horror Company Kids, in order to show a difference between this and the regular adult books that Sinister are known for releasing. For this purpose we’ve tweaked our logo on the new book.
The gorgeous artwork for the cover and the twelve illustrations inside the book were created by Liam ‘Pais’ Hill.
Lex has this to say about the new release:
“I’ve always wanted to write a children’s book. The idea of giving somebody what might just be their first favourite book carries a lot of magic for me. Those books we remember from childhood, that we read again as adults and then go on to read to our own children, passing down the joy that they brought to us. To write something that carries with it the possibility of becoming such a book for somebody has always been a goal of mine. Naturally, in the absence of somebody coming over and telling you, it’s impossible to know if you’ve achieved that even long after the book is published, but the possibility that something might not work out exactly how you hoped is never a reason to not give it a go.
One of my first memories of ‘properly’ writing was actually writing for children. I was around nine years old myself at the time, and a teacher gave us the task of writing a story for much younger children than ourselves. He first read us a story, which as I recall was about anthropomorphised vegetables, and then asked us to write a story using the same characters and in the same style. Mine was about a game of hide and seek, and how one of the vegetables got stuck in some nettles because he wasn’t careful about choosing his hiding place. The reason all of this sticks in my mind is because the teacher took me to one side at the end of the class, and said to me that as I get older, I should seriously consider writing as something to pursue. That was the first notable time anybody had truly done that, and it would always stay with me.
At that age, I think I was a fan of Lovecraft before I even knew what Lovecraft was. The giant beast beneath the sea, tentacles where there shouldn’t be tentacles, whispering from the void, nameless, formless horror. I was always drawn to that. Episodes of my childhood cartoons like Ghostbusters, He-Man, and Thundercats would regularly draw upon Lovecraftian mythology, and whilst I was too young to recognise it, I lapped it up. That and my lifelong love of sea monsters meant I was always inevitably going to become a fan of Lovecraftian lore.
A little older now, when I started reading actual horror novels, Lovecraftian themes were strong in the titles that I enjoyed. It wasn’t just the monsters, it was the way in which they came to us. They were often discovered to have been here before we were, hidden away in the dark corners of the earth. That idea…that we might not actually be top of the food chain…that the world might not be quite as securely ‘ours’ as we like to think…is much more chilling to me than more traditional ‘good vs evil’ mythologies full of angels and demons. There’s a clear black and white there, goodies and baddies. Lovecraftian monsters are something different, there’s far more questions to be asked, and the answers are often deeply uncomfortable to those who find them.
All of this brings me to the decision to write a children’s book based on the works of Lovecraft. It started with a conversation I had with a fellow writer about whether you could actually make it work. I didn’t want to do one of those “Cthulhu Poops The World” type of children’s books, which is fine but essentially just silly. I wanted to do a serious, credible story with real emotion and a genuine plot. The more I thought about it, the more it started to fall into place. I’d set it in a run-down seaside town, which is another dark-but-somehow-still-magical thing I’ve always been interested in. I’d get my friend and comic-book creator Liam Hill to do the artwork for it.
I believed that I could actually do this as a serious project, and thankfully, other people believed it too. Without those people… like Kya Stillson for giving the book its first professional edit, Laura Mauro and Taylor Grant for reading it and being kind enough to provide both feedback and cover blurbs, Jim Mcleod for writing me a wonderful introduction, and of course Justin at Sinister Horror for believing in the book enough to publish it… then this book would have remained an unachieved pet project. Everybody sees writing as a solitary thing, but this book is living proof to me that this is very rarely the case. So many people whom I love and admire have had a hand in bringing this to life, and I know they’ll be as happy as I am to see it take its first steps.
On a final, and more personal note, this is the first story I’ve written which my own niece and nephew will actually be able to read, and that thought excites me immensely. There’s even a little dedication to them inside the book. As much as I hope the wider audience enjoys it, I’m most excited to hear what they think.”
One of my first memories of ‘properly’ writing was actually writing for children. I was around nine years old myself at the time, and a teacher gave us the task of writing a story for much younger children than ourselves. He first read us a story, which as I recall was about anthropomorphised vegetables, and then asked us to write a story using the same characters and in the same style. Mine was about a game of hide and seek, and how one of the vegetables got stuck in some nettles because he wasn’t careful about choosing his hiding place. The reason all of this sticks in my mind is because the teacher took me to one side at the end of the class, and said to me that as I get older, I should seriously consider writing as something to pursue. That was the first notable time anybody had truly done that, and it would always stay with me.
At that age, I think I was a fan of Lovecraft before I even knew what Lovecraft was. The giant beast beneath the sea, tentacles where there shouldn’t be tentacles, whispering from the void, nameless, formless horror. I was always drawn to that. Episodes of my childhood cartoons like Ghostbusters, He-Man, and Thundercats would regularly draw upon Lovecraftian mythology, and whilst I was too young to recognise it, I lapped it up. That and my lifelong love of sea monsters meant I was always inevitably going to become a fan of Lovecraftian lore.
A little older now, when I started reading actual horror novels, Lovecraftian themes were strong in the titles that I enjoyed. It wasn’t just the monsters, it was the way in which they came to us. They were often discovered to have been here before we were, hidden away in the dark corners of the earth. That idea…that we might not actually be top of the food chain…that the world might not be quite as securely ‘ours’ as we like to think…is much more chilling to me than more traditional ‘good vs evil’ mythologies full of angels and demons. There’s a clear black and white there, goodies and baddies. Lovecraftian monsters are something different, there’s far more questions to be asked, and the answers are often deeply uncomfortable to those who find them.
All of this brings me to the decision to write a children’s book based on the works of Lovecraft. It started with a conversation I had with a fellow writer about whether you could actually make it work. I didn’t want to do one of those “Cthulhu Poops The World” type of children’s books, which is fine but essentially just silly. I wanted to do a serious, credible story with real emotion and a genuine plot. The more I thought about it, the more it started to fall into place. I’d set it in a run-down seaside town, which is another dark-but-somehow-still-magical thing I’ve always been interested in. I’d get my friend and comic-book creator Liam Hill to do the artwork for it.
I believed that I could actually do this as a serious project, and thankfully, other people believed it too. Without those people… like Kya Stillson for giving the book its first professional edit, Laura Mauro and Taylor Grant for reading it and being kind enough to provide both feedback and cover blurbs, Jim Mcleod for writing me a wonderful introduction, and of course Justin at Sinister Horror for believing in the book enough to publish it… then this book would have remained an unachieved pet project. Everybody sees writing as a solitary thing, but this book is living proof to me that this is very rarely the case. So many people whom I love and admire have had a hand in bringing this to life, and I know they’ll be as happy as I am to see it take its first steps.
On a final, and more personal note, this is the first story I’ve written which my own niece and nephew will actually be able to read, and that thought excites me immensely. There’s even a little dedication to them inside the book. As much as I hope the wider audience enjoys it, I’m most excited to hear what they think.”
THE OLD ONE AND THE SEA BLURB:
Howard is a lonely, isolated boy who lives in the run-down seaside town of Innsmouth. Most of the town’s men left to fight the Great War and didn’t come back, and those that did, like Howard’s neighbour Mr Derleth, brought their own scars and strange stories with them. None quite so strange as what is about to happen to Howard, however.
An undersea earthquake brings a strange black reef to the surface just off the coast of Innsmouth, and with it something else. Something old, and forgotten, and every bit as lonely as the young boy who discovers it. What follows is a unique and secret friendship that will change the life of both Howard and his bizarre new friend forever.
The Old One and The Sea will be available on Kindle, Paperback and Hardback from Amazon and the Sinister Horror Company website from the 1st November 2019.
Pre-orders to go live on Amazon and the Sinister website in due course.
For any enquiries or further information visit:
SinisterHorrorCompany.com
