Gutter Boys

On 20th October, Waterstones released the cover of my second novel, Gutter Boys, which, like A Million Tiny Missiles All At Once, is published with Chicken House Books.

I thought I’d just provide some background on it and how it all came about.

In the Summer of 2025 my family and I visited Nova Scotia where I’m originally from. My parents live in a fairly isolated place with a lot of wilderness around them which is not uncommon for most people who live in Nova Scotia. The Summer before that, this area of Nova Scotia had experienced really devastating wildfires which were terrifying and new. My parents and grandmother were evacuated and by some miracle no one in the province died, although a lot of people lost their homes.

It was a really hot summer and every day we’d go hiking in the woods and along a lake that is nearby. We’d get eaten alive by bugs and it was sweltering hot but it was a lot of fun. I was reminded of a time when I was around ten years old when a friend of mine and I got lost in the woods. We were only gone for two or three hours but I can still feel the panic that settled in when we first realised we were lost. Because getting lost in the woods in Canada can sometimes mean death.

I was thinking about this and about someone I knew from my teen years who passed away very tragically and every night we’d go to bed and hear the coyotes howl and I had this idea for a story. I drove my family up the wall with it because I’d get up, still half jet-lagged, at about 4 or 5 in the morning and I’d watch the mist roll off the lake and the pine trees and I’d write for several hours. I’d never written anything in this way, before, and I am unsure I will again.

When we got back to the UK the summer was nearly over and had almost finished the novel. I just felt I needed something to make the characters a little more unique to each other. One night, it was pouring rain and I was walking our dog Biscuit and I spotted a book left out on the sidewalk. It was ruined in the rain but the cover was still intact and I just leaned over and picked it up. It was called Eyes of the Alien and just looking at the cover gave me an idea: As a kid I was alien and conspiracy theory obsessed (back when you could read about conspiracy theories without aligning yourself with facists). So I decided to have one character that was also alien obssessed and I thought it would be cool if he carried around a book about aliens and would read sections of it to his friends. It was a lot of fun to write.

Eyes of the Alien

The story is about three friends who are dreading going back to school in September. Someone in their school had been murdered and it’s the talk of their small town. These three friends weren’t close with the kid who was murdered, but they have a morbid curiosity that takes over when they overhear the possible location of the murder: a hunting cabin deep in the woods.

Determined to do something before the end of the summer, they set off into the woods to find the cabin. Things go really wrong for them.

I loved writing it, it is a novel I am really proud of and I hope you enjoy it when it comes out in April! You can pre-order it here!