Will Wiles – författare

A bold and brilliant debut from a darkly funny new voice.Oskar is a minimalist composer best known for his piece ‘Variations on Tram Timetables’. He lives with his wife and two cats in an unnamed Eastern European city. But this book isn’t really about Oskar. Oskar is in Los Angeles, having his marriage dismantled by lawyers. Meanwhile, he has entrusted an old friend to take care of his perfect, beautiful apartment.Despite Oskar leaving extensive notes on how to keep his flat in pristine condition, a tiny oversight initiates a chain of farcical, and even fatal, disasters. ‘Care of Wooden Floors’ is about loneliness, friendship and the quest for, and struggle against, perfection. And it is, a little, about how to take care of wooden floors.

‘Wiles is basically Kafka, if Kafka had spent more time in British hotels and pubs’ David BaddielWill Wiles both re-invents and murders the London novel, in a spectacular act of evil, surgical intensity’ Warren Ellis‘It’s outstanding’ Mail on Sunday, Event Magazine The dark, doomy humour of Care of Wooden Floors mixed with the fantastical, anarchic sense of possibility of The Way Inn, brought together in a fast moving story set in contemporary London. Jack Bick is an interview journalist at a glossy lifestyle magazine. From his office window he can see a black column of smoke in the sky, the result of an industrial accident on the edge of the city. When Bick goes from being a high-functioning alcoholic to being a non-functioning alcoholic, his life goes into freefall, the smoke a harbinger of truth, an omen of personal apocalypse. An unpromising interview with Oliver Pierce, a reclusive cult novelist, unexpectedly yields a huge story, one that could save his job. But the novelist knows something about Bick, and the two men are drawn into a bizarre, violent partnership that is both an act of defiance against the changing city, and a surrender to its spreading darkness.With its rich emotional palette, Plume explores the relationship between truth and memory: personal truth, journalistic truth, novelistic truth. It is a surreal and mysterious exploration of the precariousness of life in modern London.

‘Funny, chilling, intriguing: each tale offers something different from the last, and the overall result is like listening to a perfectly made album.’ —Mark WatsonAn anechoic chamber is a soundproofed room with no echo. The profound silence it produces is disturbing enough. But listen carefully and you’ll hear something worse … In this new collection of uncanny short stories, award-winning author Will Wiles finds sinister creatures and subtle nightmares in mundane modern environments and bureaucracy. A cursed NHS file brings doom to whoever handles it. A memory-foam mattress breaks down the walls of sleep. A marketing executive for a property developer turns to the occult. And horror seeps from the most unexpected places: eBay purchases, boxes of holiday photographs, and the hidden corners of the smart TV menu. While mostly modern in setting, this is a collection steeped in the tradition of the weird tale and the ghost story, and includes homages to the greats of the previous century: a doomed Edwardian antiquarian is drawn into a murderous plot involving a Roman mosaic, and river boatmen uncover eldritch terror in a deserted mining town. You’ll never look at some things the same way again.