http://aspidistramagazine.co.uk/ One of London's most beautiful and creatively curated magazines, the Aspidistra, edited by Bella Szyzkowska, has just released its long anticipated issue X, wholly concerned with science fiction and monsters. I featured in the last edition of the magazine, in 2011, with some poetry from Red Museum about the Bocklin garden, and read at that launch in Peckham. This edition, like the last, is outstanding in its depth and quality, so many interesting artists and writers who I've not come across in other ventures.

My contribution this time is actually my first published Warhammer 40k universe story, and the only fiction I've had out in a long time. It is about a chaos space marine. Well worth a read. You can buy the magazine here http://aspidistramagazine.co.uk/The-Shop

an excerpt!: "He began by burning houses, lumoflares tossed onto the rooves of buildings all around him. He began lacing walls with bolter fire, sensing the panic rising from the ground like mist. He shot vehicles, animals, store houses, supplies. Grain and water spilled from hand sized holes in the walls. The nurglings that had gathered at his feet, bizarre horrors of inhuman design all the more surreal in the sweet countryside setting of the village, rushed the food stores and began gorging huge handfuls, turning corn into soil, water into tepid mudwash, and gulping down this foul jam by the fistfull. Then the people began to run, women screaming, desperately clutching their children. With great swathes of his chainsword he began to cut them down, limbs and heads and torsos falling and scattering the earth. He grabbed out at hair, at hands, and dragged those too slow to escape to face his deathly mask. Their skin blistered with spots and lesions, bile erupted from their bellies, they fell, unstruck, dying of some rapid contagion, if pure horror itself did not put paid to them, Surgenilus yanked with effortless might as they toppled, breaking fingers, scalping hair, and feeling the childish stab of bullets against his power armour, he disdainfully regarded the puny rifles with which the few men stood against him. His bolter, heavy as a man, tore through them with horrifying ease. One villager charged him with an axe, Surgenilus sliced his belly clean open with a chainsword, its teeth whirring through stomach muscle as though as though it were paper. Nurglings swarmed the spilling entrails, chewing and tearing, leaving behind them a wake of children’s bodies, those they had caught and smothered and bitten to death in the melee."