BIOGRAPHY
Tom at Brombil Reservoir, 2022
Tom East’s latest, available on 21st September 2023, and briefly at a discount in the eBook version, is a new, third, edition of the first volume (of three) in the ELDRITCH COLLECTIONS. These are often referred to loosely as ‘dark stories.’ In this collection, some stories, like SOLDAT and the title story, are indeed unremittingly dark. In others, like WAXLOW AND LILAC and BEFORE THE KETTLE BOILS, light filters down strongly.
The volume has stories centred on such things as digital cameras and their forerunners, ashtrays, a decommissioned telephone box, Roman soldiers, a civil war in the UK, the two World Wars of the Twentieth Century, as well as the more expected tales of werewolves and visitors from that otherworld, like a succubus and incubus. One story, THE FIRST AND LAST LETTER, based on actual events in the Smalls Lighthouse, twenty miles off the coast of Pembrokeshire, was the lynch pin an opera recently performed in Illinois. Together with the composer of the opera, Francis Lynch, Tom was co-librettist. The events at the turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries gave direct rise to the Trinity House policy of ensuing lighthouses were manned by three and not two keepers. This policy lasted until our own century, when the last lighthouse was automated.
Prior to this was the Eldritch Novel, THE KA OF STEPHEN CHARLES, the third volume in the ELDRITCH COLLECTIONS. A total of thirteen books is still available in print or eBook Worldwide. They include the controversial novel THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO St JUDAS and the unsparing non-fiction of LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE, about recovery from two brain haemorrhages.
Earlier, Tom was the writer of many works of fiction, commercial features, essays, reviews, 'other prose' and poetry. He was the author of six (print) books.
He was born in London, although of a Welsh family and has lived in Wales for many years.
Still available as paperback and ebook:
THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT VERSE BRIGADE
