Authorpreneur Dashboard – Neil McGowan
The Surgeon
Literature & Fiction
Ten years after witnessing a horrific murder, Joe Mackay is getting on with life as a student. Little does he realise that his world is about to be turned upside down. After being subject to a brutal assault, Joe unwittingly sets in motion a chain of terrifying events that unleash a bloodthirsty demon. He must confront his deepest fears in order to survive, because It is coming for him. And it will not stop until it claims him...
Book Bubbles from The Surgeon
First Encounters
This section was the germ of the whole story. A recurring image of a woman being tortured by a creature that was not of this world kept intruding on my thoughts, until I finally sat down and roughed it out on paper. The original draft was handwritten, with lots of notes that I used to start to develop the plot from. The finished version was somewhat different to the original idea (it's better, I think); for one thing it's far more gruesome. It also allowed me to build a believable back story as to how she ended up in this predicament. The whole book developed quite quickly from this, although the original draft took a while to write; I tried plotting it out only to find characters doing what they wanted as opposed to what the plot demanded. I went with the flow and as a result, I think the book is much better.
Don't Drink the Water
Science Fiction & Fantasy
A dive trip to the Seychelles turns into a Lovecraftian nightmare…A lone farmhouse witnesses a descent into madness…Something wants to take Sara to the Christmas party… Don’t Drink the Water is a collection of seven tales of horror from Neil McGowan, author of the 5-star reviewed The Surgeon. From the Lovecraft-inspired horrors of the title story to the sci-fi horror of the final tale, stopping along the way to observe madness, mayhem, murder and what happens when love endures beyond the grave, be prepared for a roller coaster ride through the realms of terror. Each story is prefaced by the author, giving a unique insight into the creation of nightmares and chills.
Book Bubbles from Don't Drink the Water
Holidays and Lovecraft
This story was originally written longhand (I still have the manuscript, complete with coffee stains!) over a period of about five weeks in my lunch break. I'd not long returned from a couple of weeks vacation in Tenerife, and some of the locations stuck in my mind. That, coupled with my interest in diving and added to my interest in Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, all combined to produce this story. It got a little longer than I originally envisaged, but I liked the way it started off quite normally, before slowly ratcheting up the tension to a shocking finale. A final note: most of the locations in the story actually exist (or at least, they did).
Nanobite
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Port Seton. A quiet town on the east coast of Scotland, not far from Edinburgh But something is very wrong. A cyclist has gone missing. A woman is followed home from work. A house fire claims three lives. Two teenagers are found dead, their bodies mysteriously drained of blood. Liam Baxter and Karen Nicholls start to unravel a complex web of horror with a genetics and bioweapons research facility at the centre of it. An experiment involving genetically engineered nano-technology has gone drastically wrong, turning all those who come into contact with it into modern day vampires. They need to stop them before it's too late. But for some, it may already be too late...
Book Bubbles from Nanobite
A different approach to vampires
I'd wanted to write a vampire novel for a while, but I also wanted to find a new direction to explore the concept of vampires from. I liked the thought of vampires as cold and calculating machines, with the propensity for vast amounts of violence. This book was the end result of all that thinking.
