Greetings from the wet coast of Sussex; I come bearing news. Over a month into 2026, and I’ve been circling a few writing projects, tricky as it’s been to focus on books. I can announce, at last, that I’ve settled on my next release being the long-awaited THE WORST SURVIVE – a novel that I’ve been sitting on since before I even started publishing.

The eagle-eyed amongst you might’ve heard me banging on about this for a while; The Worst Survive is the first novel in the Faergrowe dystopian action thriller series, set in a world torn apart by war and diminishing resources. It’s a love-letter to the post-apocalyptic and dystopian influences of my youth, such as Judge Dredd, Mad Max and the Fallout series, with a little Bladerunner and Ghost in the Shell thrown in for good measure.

It’s also an absolutely riotous ride with a simple message: the problem is greed, the answer is violence.

I don’t know why, but it seemed a good time to finally put it out there.

I’m giving it a last edit (it’s been through many in the past) and will open it up to beta readers to get some feedback before pushing the book out on the world within the next couple of months.

If you’d like to read it before anyone else, you can sign up for an early copy here!

What is the Faergrowe Series?

Starting in an alternate 2042, from a timeline that diverged from our own somewhere around the late ’90s, the world of Faergrowe is devastated by war and caught in a technological ditch of retro-futurism. Vintage meets cyberpunk, with chugging diesel war engines and chunky plastics alongside cybernetic enhancements and fiendish hackers.

What remains of the inhabitable world has descended into an anarchy of gangs, mercenaries and ultra-powerful corporations. Within that chaos rises Laine Faergrowe, a champion of new technology, a scientist ready to rebuild society.

But behind that man is another, tasked with protecting him: this is the story of Scully, a vulgar, alcoholic killer of questionable morals, and his part in changing the world.

This series has been with me for a while: the first drafts of The Worst Survive were written around 2011, alongside a movie script for The Faergrowe Principle, intended as Book #4 in the series (which received a few accolades in some screenwriting contests, FYI!). The framing here is that the first three books are concerned with the creation of a brave new world, whilst the fourth and fifth deals with the world that’s been created.

The Worst Survive

The Worst Survive is a frenetic, self-contained action thriller in which Scully is unwittingly thrust into a conspiracy of militant corporations hunting down a man with the potential to save the world.

Scully is mostly just interested in getting paid, so he can buy more booze – but when he sets his mind to something like getting paid, he’ll let no one stop him.

Along with his band of eclectic mercenary friends, Scully embarks on a madcap roadtrip from New Oak City’s slums out to the decaying wasteland and back, piecing together a puzzle that could spell hope or doom for the American Remnant. With a lot of violence along the way.

Origins of the Series

This book was born of my long love for all things post-apocalyptic and dystopian; when I was young, I was enraptured by the grittier, retro-futures of Fallout and Mad Max. I’ve been delighted to see Fallout having a revival in recent years, and with Judge Dredd becoming increasingly relevant in modern society I’ve been delving into that lengthy series in the extreme. It’s been interesting to me revisiting the worlds of 2000AD, which I never read extensively before, as I realise the influence even just my peripheral awareness of it had.

And a fun fact that recently came back to me: I actually worked on a Judge Dredd mod for Half-life, back in 2002 or so, which apparently is still available online! I created maps for it – a long-forgotten skill/hobby that I’ve been getting back into.

When it came to first writing this series, I was in something of a writing slump, having produced quite a few screenplays but no novels for a while, so these influences were like a comfort zone for me. I wanted to write something familiar, and relatively simple. An unapologetic action story with clear roots in broader dystopian media.

I wrote the original The Worst Survive in about 3 weeks for NaNoWriMo to get me back in the swing of things, partly based on a dream, and partly riffing on vibes from the anime Black Lagoon (yeah, a lot of different sources have fed this beast…). That was a different book to the one I have now, after extensive redrafts followed the writing of The Faergrowe Principle. My idea there was something between Dredd and Blade Runner, but in the guise of a Jason Statham film.

The series came with a full arc in mind, though each book would stand on its own. That arc held me back, because I didn’t want to release one book without the other four ready. So I put it off, and only ever got around to releasing a bonkers side-story, A Most Apocalyptic Christmas, to drum up a little support, which for the longest time has been the main view into this much broader world.

In the meantime, I variously submitted The Worst Survive to agents and publishers, and half-heartedly attempted serialising it here and there, all in a hope of guaranteeing support for the full series and never gaining quite enough interest to make it my focus. No more!

What’s Changed?

A bunch of reasons have made me feel it’s time to get on and put the book out there, not least because it seems as relevant now as ever. At the same time, it’s a welcome distraction. The Faergrowe books are, above all, action stories, delivering an enjoyable journey, despite the gritty setting and wider issues.

While I am working on The Blood Scouts Book #4 (coming along nicely by the way!), I also wanted to take some time to review some of the projects books I’ve never quite found time to polish off. The crux here was accepting that however long it might take me to eventually write the full five-book Faergrowe arc, the first book is well worth a read on its own, and it’s frankly collected enough dust already.

So, here it comes. With one last major edit and feedback from beta readers, we’ll get this book out in the next few months. Probably with a new cover, and all – the one I did above was a mock-up which I’ve never been entirely happy with.

I’d welcome any feedback from interested readers along the way, so if you’d like to dive into this series before anyone else (particularly if you enjoyed A Most Apocalyptic Christmas!) then let me know with this form here.