Hello

This is the website of Malcolm Devlin, who sometimes writes vaguely strange stories of one sort or another.
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Books

Unexpectedly, there are (or will be) four of these.

And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin

And Then I Woke Up

Available Now

Unexpected Places to Fall From, Unexpected Places to Land by Malcolm Devlin

Unexpected Places to Fall From, Unexpected Places to Land

Available Now

You Will Grow Into Them by Malcolm Devlin

You Will Grow Into Them

Available Now

Engines Beneath Us by Malcolm Devlin

Engines Beneath Us

Available Now

And Then I Woke Up

And Then I Woke Up

In a world reeling from an unusual plague, monsters lurk in the streets while terrified survivors arm themselves and roam the countryside in packs. Or perhaps something very different is happening. When a disease affects how reality is perceived, it’s hard to be certain of anything...

Spence is one of the “cured”. Haunted by guilt, he refuses to face the changed world until a new inmate challenges him to help her find her old crew. But if he can’t tell the truth from the lies, how will he know if he has earned the redemption he dreams of? How will he know he hasn’t just made things worse?

Order a copy now

(Also available as an ebook from your preferred supplier of electronic literature.)

“ Devlin does a superb job showing how his afflicted characters are compelled to accept outrageous beliefs that contradict the objective realities before them. The result is an unsettling cautionary tale for the age of alternative facts.”

— Publishers Weekly, starred review

“ A twenty-first century classic on par with Jack Finney's great 1955 Body Snatchers.”

— Elizabeth Hand, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

“ A scathing portrait of the world we live in and a running commentary on what’s story, what’s truth, and what’s not.”

— Stephen Graham Jones

“Devlin has written a horror story where the “zombies” are memes... I recommend [it] to the skies. ”

— New Scientist

“ Brutal and affecting.”

— Kaaron Warren

“ This unique take on classic horror stories will have wide appeal. ”

— Library Journal

“ Speculative fiction’s futuristic and fantastic worlds have always served as a mirror for present-day issues, and this is a fine example of the new wave of stories grappling with our current tumult. Understandably unsettling while offering a glimmer of redemptive hope.”

— Kirkus, starred review

“ Despite its brevity, Devlin’s post-truth parable is almost too clever to summarise... Already pitch dark, the book accrues awful weight in the wake of Covid denial and political lies.”

— The Guardian

“ This is a beautiful exploration of the seductive power of narrative, the need to be a part of something, and the toxic influence of propaganda. Highly recommended from every angle.”

— Mira Grant

“ The perfect story for the maddening times we find ourselves in. For every time we've said of a loved one who's gone astray, 'dear God, why can't they just wake up?'”

— Alma Katsu

“ Fans of Brian Keene, Adam Nevill, and Simon Strantzas will devour this apocalyptic pandemic tale, which will remind readers of a cross between Resident Evil and Fight Club. ”

— Booklist

“ A short, compassionate novel of post-plague reconstruction... Reading this felt like falling down a dark, deep hole. Spence’s storytelling voice is riveting in its honesty and helplessness, its matter-of-fact relation of terrible things; at the same time, it’s impossible not to feel on edge when reading a story about how literally dangerous stories are. There’s a constant sense of a lurking threat, a reminder to always consider the narrator. Intelligent, compassionate and unsettling, “And Then I Woke Up” is both an invitation to and a caution against allegory.”

— Amal El-Mohtar, New York Times

“ A sly snake of a narrative that, with wonderful pacing and elegant writing, continuously sheds its skin that revealing ever new realities that weave together and inform each other. ”

— Jeffrey Ford

“ And Then I Woke Up brilliantly calls into questions not only our ability to recognize truth, but also our ethics, politics, and most fundamental perceptions of each other, all within a gripping story.”

— Nancy Kress

“ And Then I Woke Up is a deft and moving novella about the ways in which with stories we make and unmake the world—and sometimes lose track of reality in the process.”

— Brian Evenson

Unexpected Places to Fall From, Unexpected Places to Land by Malcolm Devlin

Unexpected Places to Fall From, Unexpected Places to Land

In the exact same moment, all possible versions of Prentis O’Rourke will cease to exist. By accident, by malice, by conflict, by illness – Prentis will not simply die. He will go extinct. These are the stories of the journeys we take and the journeys we wish we’d taken.

Crossing multiple realities, countless versions of ourselves, and shifting backwards and forwards through time, these are stories of forking paths and unexpected destinations – of flying and falling and getting up to try again.

Order a copy now

(Also available as an ebook from your preferred supplier of electronic literature.)

“ I’ve been an admirer of Malcolm Devlin’s fiction for years. He writes with compassion, intelligence and precision, not just crossing but obliterating genre lines with joyful abandonment. His newest collection moved me deeply with its imagination, lyricism, and gorgeous prose—a terrific book to knock you off your jaded feet before landing you in all sorts of unexpected places.”

— Usman Malik, author of Midnight Doorways

“ Devlin writes intelligent, profound and perfect short stories. A brilliant collection.”

— Aliya Whiteley, author of Skyward Inn, Greensmith and The Beauty

“ The writing is beautiful and precise without ever trying too hard… Devlin proves a maestro at conveying the elusive dialectic of belonging and estrangement.”

— Litro Magazine

“ Malcolm Devlin dissects our everyday decisions, our individual tragedies, and summons the haunted feeling that our other selves are out there living alternate lives, and in doing so he offers the reader an unexpected and surreal consolation.”

Anne Charnock, Clarke Award-winning author of Dreams Before The Start of Time and Bridge 108

“ Acutely strange yet deeply humane, Devlin’s stories are slippery in all the best ways. This collection is a perfect demonstration of his range, wit and skill.”

— Matt Hill, author of The Breach and Zero Bomb

“ Conceptually, it feels like Devlin is inviting readers revisit the stories out of order someday, to glean deeper connections. To place our feet in the sand and see where the dog prints lead next time.”

— Andromeda Spaceways

“ Gorgeous writing and Devlin’s skill at weaving these plots is constantly on display and every story in the collection is well worth your time. Strongly recommended!”

— Runalong the Shelves

“ Themes of fate and free will, choice and contingency thread through these twelve luminous and lyrical stories. Frequently, as I was reading, I had to stop, my breath taken away at the sheer quality of the writing, the ease and craft with which the narratives unfolded, the compassion brought to each individual character, the strange beauty found in the everyday. Malcolm Devlin is one of our most gifted and perceptive writers. ”

— Una McCormack, New York Times bestselling author

“ Devlin is a master of the new new weird, bending the genre into wild new shapes. Pay attention or be left behind.”

— Gary Budden, author of London Incognita and Hollow Shores

“ Malcolm Devlin is an English marvel ensconced in Brisbane, Australia, who writes the literary strange in its most human form, one that imbues you into a meditative trance. ”

— Aurealis Magazine

You Will Grow Into Them by Malcolm Devlin

You Will Grow Into Them

This collection is published by Unsung Stories, and is available to order now via the link below or through your favourite bookshop.
It contains ten stories, each a strange sort of coming of age tale. There are ghost stories without any ghosts in them, werewolf stories without any werewolves in them, a city that turns into forest, a barren planet with a peculiar sort of harvest celebration and a suburban street suffering a very personal and rather embarrassing apocalypse. I hope you enjoy them.

While you're at it, you can also sign up to the Unsung Stories mailing list and you'll get new stories from smart and talented folk sent to you for free.

Order a copy now

(Also available as an ebook from your preferred supplier of electronic literature.)

You Will Grow Into Them has been shortlisted for the 2018 British Fantasy Awards and the 2018 Saboteur Awards in the category of 'Best Collection'.

“ Malcolm Devlin's You Will Grow Into Them is a collection of immaculately written tales that deftly mix darkness with a playful imagination. The result are stories that are as entertaining and humane as they are deeply unsettling. We need more stories in the world like these.”

— Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil's Rock

“ Almost every story in You Will Grow Into Them leaves behind a vivid central image. This may be grand and bizarre, like the transformed city-forest of Breadcrumbs; or something more low-key and menacing, as the enraptured clubgoers of Songs Like They Used to Play. In a few stories, these images can end up overshadowing the piece as a whole. Most of the time, however, Devlin gets the balance spot-on; then his stories shimmer with an otherworldly light.”

— David Hebblethwaite, Minor Literature[s]

“ Devlin’s stories are characterized by their absence of fear in the face of strange changes. They oppose the grim stupidity of the horrific sublime with the quiet ironies of consciousness and the inexplicable flights of fate. It is a mark of distinction that, here as in much of the weird, visions of the world are made unstable and porous, even as they reveal how dangerous life has always been. Cracks emerge. Inevitably, bodies start to pile up. Almost worse, bodies begin to go missing. Who knows what will appear in their place? Generosity is not softness; darkness may be more comforting than any light. You Will Grow Into Them promises much, namely, a fate of incorporation into forming uncertainty. It delivers gleefully, warmly, and well—with a distressingly strange and inexorable smile.”

— Leif Schenstead-Harris, Weird Fiction Review

“ Devlin’s prose is polished to a bright colloquial sheen that rarely dulls; his characters speak as if they have just thought what to say. It is confident stuff that puts the reader immediately at ease: it is reassuring to sense one is in the hands of a writer who knows exactly where they are going and how to get there... Prepare yourself for the genuinely unheimlich. ”

Jack Messenger

“ Whilst reading this collection I was blown away by the quality of the writing and by how much each story got under my skin. They are subtle, empathetic, yet eerily strange; disquieting in places with the accuracy of the human condition portrayed through a darkly playful lens.
I recommend you read this book. It has the power to move, and to challenge the way each reader perceives the everyday.”

— Jackie Law, NeverImmitate

“ Malcolm Devlin’s work feels as if it sprung directly from the compost of ’70s folk horror, finding inspiration — and a renewed vigor — in the tropes and assumptions of authors such as Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Holdstock, and Joan Aiken. His debut collection, You Will Grow Into Them, thus perfectly embodies the shifting emphases and new grounding imageries of folk horror in the 21st century.”

LA Review of Books

“ Devlin’s collection, like Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney before it, is set to become one of the decade’s landmarks of English weird.”

— Nina Allan, author of The Race

“ This intriguing, alamring book, positively hums with a sense of the uncanny.” ****

— Will Salmon, SFX

“ You Will Grow Into Them is filled with stories that are deceptively simple and perilously elegant. They look like fairy tales, but aren’t really – in fact, they are best described as a precise alchemy of language. Perfectly-pitched, thoroughly disquieting, You Will Grow Into Them is like a light in the darkness, that might lead you home or lure you from the path. Malcolm Devlin is one of our finest voices.”

— Angela Slatter, World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings

“ Over the course of ten stories, Devlin shows just how varied Horror and Weird fiction can be, effortlessly fusing elements from folklore, science fiction, regency comedy of manners and urban fantasy into a cohesive and compelling whole... His writing is fascinated with transitory states and the liminal, the space that exists between the rigidly defined strictures of the world around us. In this his work echoes the philosophical approach of Philip K. Dick and Thomas Ligotti, reminding us of the power of genre fiction to ask profound questions about our relationship to reality. ”

— Jonathan Thornton, Ginger Nuts of Horror

“ Everything is written with a smooth professionalism of the first order. He really gets into the heads of his diverse and interesting characters and delivers the action in fluent prose that many writers will envy. ”

— Eamonn Murphy, SFCrowsnest

“ Devlin’s writing is surgical in its precision, with here and there a sly flicker of wit. These are stories that unsettle rather than horrify, full of irony and anxiety, from an author who exemplifies the very best of the genre. ”

— James Lovegrove, The Financial Times

“ This debut collection of stories by Malcolm Devlin is one of the best I've read in years. Subtle, by turns tender and brutal, and full of the sort of beauty one only finds in the heart's darkest corner, You Will Grow Into Them made me both jealous and grateful. Stories like this are exactly why I love to read.”

— Nathan Ballingrud, author of North American Lake Monsters and The Visible Filth

“ Devlin’s characters are believable and sympathetic, his prose walks that genius knife-edge of being sparse and scalpel-sharp while also having depth, texture and lyricism, and the structure and balance of each of his stories – all of which conceal an intriguing sting-in-the-tail – are reminiscent of the best of Angela Carter or Roald Dahl in their ability to build entirely believable universes but skewer everything down into small, intimate human moments.” 10/10

— Ian White, Starburst Magazine

“ Honestly, the span of worlds and subgenres is so wide it’s hard to pin You Will Grow Into Them down into one genre... Devlin has covered a wide enough range of topics to make me very happy to nominate his collection for a Saboteur Award: we’re dedicated to reviewing that which defies easy categorisation. Plus, it’s deliciously dark.”

— Richard T. Watson, Sabotage Reviews

“ There are many factors that make the short stories in this extraordinary collection so compelling. One is that you aren’t quite sure what genre you’re reading, which makes the outcomes unpredictable. That you’re still not sure by the end is no failing of the author; rather it’s that he mixes a uniquely beguiling cocktail of fantasy, science fiction, horror and something I can only describe as Other Stuff. Stories like these tend to get labelled New Weird, but I don’t think that label does them justice. It’s too alienating, and another source of readability is how incredibly moving the stories are.”

Andrew Wallace

“ You Will Grow Into Them is a compendium of strange tales that reveal much about our own world through a form of osmosis, stories in which psychological and spiritual states are made physically manifest. It marks the arrival of a potentially major new talent.”

— Pete Tennant, Interzone #270

Engines Beneath Us by Malcolm Devlin

Engines Beneath Us

This is the fifth in the TTA Press Novella Series.

Rob is a Crescent kid. Born and raised in the sheltered circle of grey semis, built to house the employees of The City Works and their families. Under the eye of the reclusive Mr Olhouser, the residents of The Crescent go about their work, their lessons and their law, accompanied by the never-ending sound of The Works machinery deep under the ground.
When Lee Wrexler moves into The Crescent, he brings with him something dangerous from the outside. Not just a reputation for trouble, but an outside perspective that will ultimately show Rob that the home he always thought he had a measure of is a stranger and far more unsettling place than he could have imagined.

“ After reading Devlin’s well-written chiller, you may never look at cities in exactly the same way, but reading Engines Beneath Us is something you definitely should do.”

— Paula Guran, Locus

“ Demonstrating how understated prose can itself thrum as if concealing hidden workings, this authentically eerie novella gets its tone just right.”

— Mat Coward, Morning Star

“ Malcolm Devlin is one of those writers who inspires great trust from readers, and rightly so. He is a quietly brilliant craftsman who never puts a foot wrong. His writing here has an authority and economy that gradually induces paranoia in the reader. We become conscious of the engines beneath us, and afraid. Highly recommended. ”

— Georgina Bruce

“ A beautifully told and deeply troubling story that confirms Devlin’s place at the forefront of Weird fiction.”

— Jonathan Thornton, Ginger Nuts of Horror

Here are some stories I've written

Passion Play (Black Static #38, TTA Press, Jan/Feb 2014)
Must Supply Own Work Boots
(Interzone #255, TTA Press, Nov/Dec 2014; Starship Sofa 452, September 2016)
Two Brothers (Aickman's Heirs, Simon Strantzas, ed. Undertow Publications, 2015)
Her First Harvest (Interzone #258, TTA Press, May/Jun 2015)
The Knowledge (Gods, Memes and Monsters, Heather Jones, ed. Stone Skin Press, 2015)
Five Conversations With My Daughter (Who Travels in Time)
(Interzone #261, TTA Press, Nov/Dec 2015)
Breadcrumbs (Interzone #264, TTA Press, May/Jun 2016)
The End of Hope Street
(Interzone #266, TTA Press, Sep/Oct 2016; The Year's Best Weird Fiction 4, Undertow Publications, October 2017; Shortlisted for the BSFA Award Best Shorter Fiction 2017)
Dogsbody (Black Static #54, TTA Press, Sep/Oct 2016)
White Elephants (Nightscript Volume 2, C.M. Muller, ed. Oct 2016)
We Can Walk It Off Come The Morning (Shadows and Tall Trees 7, Undertow Publications, May 2017)
The New Man (Interzone #270, TTA Press, May/Jun 2017)
Songs Like They Used To Play, We All Need Somewhere To Hide, The Last Meal He Ate Before She Killed Him, The Bridge
(all published for the first time in the collection You Will Grow Into Them, Unsung Stories, June 2017)
March, April, May, 2084 (Unsung Stories, July 2017)
What Little Boys Are Made Of (Nightscript Volume 3, C.M. Muller, ed. Oct 2017)
Moths, (The Shadow Booth, Dan Coxon, ed. Dec 2017)
We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, (LossLit, Issue 7, Mar 2018)
The Purpose of the Dodo is to be Extinct (Interzone #275, TTA Press, May/Jun 2018)
Finisterre (BFS Horizons #7, May 2018)
Nautilus (Far Horizons August 2018)
A Dreamer Arrives in the Occupied City (Interzone #281, TTA Press, May-June 2019)
My Uncle Eff (An Invite to Eternity Gary Budden, Marian Womack eds., Calque Press, November 2019)
Engines Beneath Us (TTA Press, March 2020)
Flotsam and Jetsam (Out of the Darkness Dan Coxon, ed. Unsung Stories, September 2021)
The Chariot (Great British Horror 7: Major Arcana Steve Shaw, ed. Black Shuck Books, October 2022)
Forty-Three Brief Observations Regarding Geoff the Spoon (CloisterFox - Issue 2 Verity Holloway, ed., October 2022)

Contact me

If you'd like to get in touch, you can email me at malcolmvdevlin@gmail.com. Alternatively if you'd prefer, you can hunt me down on Twitter, where I intermittently post things that are a little bit trivial and occasionally resort to mild sarcasm.