Seeing no threat, he looked back to the young woman and said, “What did you say?” She was thin, though not frail, and though she was dressed in a manner by no means too outré for Olkney, the details of her costume said she had acquired it on some other world. Depending from a chain around her neck was a yellow stone carved roughly in the semblance of a human face. She swallowed and looked straight at him with wide-set, pale eyes. “I said I need your help.” She swallowed again and added, “Uncle Luff.”
Author
Born in Liverpool, his family moved to Canada when he was five years old. Married since late 1960s, he has three grown sons. He is currently relocated to Britain. He is a former director of the Federation of British Columbia Writers. A university drop-out from a working poor background, he worked in a factory that made school desks, drove a grocery delivery truck, was night janitor in a GM dealership, and did a short stint as an orderly in a private mental hospital. As a teenager, he served a year as a volunteer with the Company of Young Canadians. He has made his living as a writer all of his adult life, first as a journalist in newspapers, then as a staff speechwriter to the Canadian Ministers of Justice and Environment, and, since 1979, as a freelance corporate and political speechwriter in British Columbia. His short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Postscripts, Interzone, and a number of "Year’s Best" anthologies. Night Shade Books published his short story collection, The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, in 2005. He has won the Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada. His novels and stories regularly make the Locus Magazine annual recommended reading list.
