Hello.

I have been working on a poem. No wait, don’t go! This isn’t like those other poems. This one is different. You know those long, sprawling, spooky poems, like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge? Or twisting, dastardly misadventures like The Shooting of Dangerous Dan McGrew by Robert Service? They’re good poems. They’re long and they rhyme good. It’s like that.

I have always admired poetry that tells a mysterious story. So I thought I’d do one of these rhyming sagas myself, imbued with a tint of modern gothic life. A long poem that rhymes good. The result is The Unenviable Insomnia of Halloran Kin. Here’s the blurb:

“Out to the churn, you will depart,
out to that London din.
And don’t return, without the heart,
of the man called Halloran Kin.”

Halloran Kin lives in Belfast as an idler, just one of a clan of 1001 cousins. But when he finds himself hounded and criminalised by Djinn, he is forced to make a stumbling escape that will take him all across the North Atlantic nations of Europe – from the frozen tundra of Iceland to the foggy wilds of Galicia. Told in seven parts, Halloran Kin is a long rhyming poem set in a dark world of monsters, animals and Ghasts. A macabre fugitive’s story that spans a decade of chronic remorse, sleeplessness, betrayal, friendship and faith.

There you have it. Most of the tale is related by Halloran himself, as he sits in a bar inhabited by strange creatures. At 1433 lines, the story is over twice as long as the Ancient Mariner. Sorry.

The Unenviable Insomnia of Halloran Kin is available for Kindle on Amazon for about £1.50 or on the Kobo ebooks Store for the same price. Or you can buy a file containing 6 different formats (.epub, .mobi, .awz3, .lit, .htmlz & .html) totally DRM-free from Gumroad. Even if you do not have a tablet, the .html file will still allow you to read the poem as one long scroll on your internet browser.

That’s all the salesmanship I can stomach for now. If you enjoy my writing and fancy a little adventure, pick it up!

Thank you.