The Day the Moon Wept Blood
an excerpt

It all began the day I met my dead friend.
You can see from that very first line that this is going to be a difficult novel for me to write. In previous volumes in this series you have seen me face danger after danger with only the merest hint of cowardice. In this one things will be different, because I had to face this adventure without my most important ability – my poetry! And I had to face my greatest fear – death!
But we’ll get to that.
Let’s go back to Christmas, 2006. Howard Phillips and the Saturation Point were playing our first gig: the Silver Age Books Christmas party. The publisher, Stephen Theaker, had reserved a chunk of Down Under, the Australasian bar on Broad Street, and we had been doing our best to distract the SAB employees from the sports showing on the televisions splashed everywhere.
There were four of us in the band now, as anyone who has read the previous books in this series will know. I performed vocals, and engaged with whichever instruments took my fancy.
On drums we had the aptly named Mountain Drummer, who I had met in the course of my adventure upon The Ghastly Mountain. He was human, but a giant. He was the last of a tribe that had lived upon Mount Ban-Mossow, a mountain upon which I had nearly died so many times. I had found him banging out his grief upon a hundred animal skins stretched over a crevasse, creating a thunder that rolled across the entire country of Banet, casting every living that heard it into the depths of despair. We had no crevasse upon the stage, but his drumming still had much the same effect upon the audience.
On guitar was Prince Vann of Envia, who had joined us after I discovered that His Nerves Extruded. In the course of freeing him (and his entire world) from the clutches of his father, the dread Zuvanos, I had wrapped his extruded steel- and nylon-coated nerves around a block of wood, to create a fearsome weapon. When he decided to return with me to Earth, I realised that his nerves could be tethered to a more shapely piece of wood. Now he didn’t just play guitar – he was the guitar!
Finally (for now), on bass was J,J,T,L.M, a crystalline entity from the far future. I had introduced him to the joy of making music using instruments during a lull in The Doom That Came to Sea Base Delta. When I returned to our time, I had been surprised to find him waiting with the other members of the band, jamming away. To his people, music was speech – their names were notes, their bodies instruments! To all of them I had been a curiosity, and a subject of admiration, as they watched me gamely plugging away at something they found so simple. Imagine meeting a fish whose hobby was breathing out of the water!