Hi, folks! Dane here, and today I wanted to share a quick update to let you know that it’s launch day for the Local Haunts Anthology, which was compiled and edited by fellow YouTuber Regina Saint Claire

It’s a super cool project with a simple premise: it brings together BookTubers and AuthorTubers (i.e. people who make videos about books and writing). The submission period took place earlier this year and the prompt was to tell a horror story based in your part of the world.

For me, I retold the local ghost story of a barmaid called Suki who worked at the George and Dragon here in High Wycombe. She was tricked into going to the Hellfire Caves by some local boys. When she found out that they’d tricked her, she threw stones at them, so they threw stones back and accidentally killed her. They say her ghost still haunts the area to this day.

Nineteen twisted tales from a vibrant, online community of horror enthusiasts!

What’s HorrorTube? A creepy, new carnival ride combining a water slide park with a haunted funhouse? Not quite, although that sounds like a blast.

A subset of BookTube, HorrorTube is an online community of horror enthusiasts who regularly post YouTube videos about horror-related topics, including books, films, and fiction writing.

Some of the writers included in this anthology cover horror exclusively. You’ll find them posting creepy photos on Instagram or waxing poetic about the seventies drive-in flick that kept them up all night. Some read widely, only delving into the horror genre occasionally. All are passionate about books and writing.

Joined together by this vibrant, online community of readers and writers, these nineteen authors bring you scary stories from all parts of the globe, proving that fear is universal.

Local Haunts has taken the horror BookTube community’s global influence and shrunk it down into one village of horror and mayhem you’ll not soon forget. Inside these pages are frightening stories from around the globe, telling tales of haunts, monsters, and other terrible things local to each author’s place of residence. Within these pages you’ll find terrifying tales from North America, my own included, joined by terrible happenings in the Australian bushlands, ghosts haunting an old Greek mansion, an abandoned Vietnamese hospital, and a creepy museum, among many other eldritch encounters. From the foreword by Jason White

A Stone’s Throw by Dane Cobain
The Gentleman by Ryan Stroud
The Salt Hag by CJ Wright
Crowthorne by Andrew Lyall
Mount Gilead by R. Saint Claire
Screen Eight by Michael Taylor
Drive Like Hell by Ken Poirier
The Mount of Death by Kevin David Anderson
The Drifter by James Flynn
The Blocked Cellar by Mihalis Georgostathis
The Night Watchman by Marie McWilliams
Alone Among the Gum Trees by Cam Wolfe
Highway to Hell by Nicholas Gray
The Room Within by D.L. Tillery
Fading Applause in Quintland by Lydia Peever
A Full Moon Over Black Star Canyon by Matt Wall
Long Buried by E.D. Lewis
Darkness Descends by Jason White
At the End of the Rope by Cameron Chaney

Cover art by Cameron Roubique

You can find out more about Local Haunts and order your copy by clicking here to check it out on Amazon.

As always, thanks so much for your support, and be sure to follow me on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter for more. You can also find out more about my books by clicking here. I’ll see you soon!

Hi, folks! Dane here, and today I have some super exciting news for you, which you can probably guess from the title. It’s cover reveal day!

Meat is a novel that I’ve been actively working on since 2015, and the idea stretches a little further back than that. It’s also the reason why I’m vegan. After all of the research that I did to write the book, being vegetarian just didn’t seem like enough to me.

I guess I’ll just let the cover and blurb speak for themselves:

Veterinarian Tom Copeland takes a job at a factory farm called Sunnyvale after a scandal at his suburban practice. His job is to keep the animals alive for long enough to get them to slaughter.

But there are rumours of a strange creature living beneath the complex, accidents waiting to happen on brutal production lines and the threat of zoonotic disease from the pigs, sheep, cows, chickens and fish that the complex houses.

Suddenly, disaster rocks Sunnyvale and cleaners, butchers, security guards and clerical staff alike must come together under the ruthless leadership of CEO John MacDonald. Together, they’ll learn what happens when there’s a sudden change to the food chain.

Bon appétit.

More info

Meat will be self-published to begin with, although I may submit it to some small publishers further down the line. I don’t think it quite fits with Dragon Moon or Encircle, the publishers of No Rest for the Wicked and the Leipfold series respectively, but that’s just fine by me.

I’m currently shooting for a mid-October release date, just in time for Hallowe’en. It’ll also mean it’s out in time for Christmas, although you might not want to give it to your granny unless she’s got a strong stomach.

In the meantime, you can of course find out more about my existing books by checking out my author pages on Amazon and Goodreads, and you can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for more. I’ll see you soon!

Hi, folks! Dane here, and today I want to talk to you about music. I don’t promote my music stuff too much because my focus has always been and will always be on my writing, but every now and then there’s something worth shouting about.

In this case, it’s that my fourth album, Echoes, is out now on Spotify, with other platforms including iTunes coming soon. If that’s not enough and you want it in a different format, you can also check out the album and some accompanying lyric videos over on my YouTube channel.

Here’s the track list:

1 – Jar of Hearts

2 – You and Me

3 – It’s Not Easy Being Free

4 – Nobody Cares

5 – Cole Porter

6 – Waiting

7 – Chasing Dust

8 – Watch the Planet Die

9 – Inside Her Head

10 – Lean Down On Me

11 – Since I Fell For You

12- Hello Lover

13 – Hibernating

14 – Up in the Country

15 – Cigarettes and Dollar Signs

16 – Gone, Gone, Gone

17 – Be Yourself

That’s about all I’ve got for you at the moment and so I’ll keep things short and sweet, but if you want to keep up-to-date with my adventures then you can always give me a follow on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SoundCloud, YouTube and wherever else takes your fancy. I’ll see you soon!

Hello! Dane here, and today I wanted to share a quick bit of news, which is probably self-evident from the title. I’m talking, of course, about The Arts Show.

Airing between 7-8 PM on Tuesdays on 106.6 FM and live online at WycombeSound.org, The Arts Show is my new local radio show and it’s dedicated to local music, events and the arts scene.

Of course, plans have been forced to change because of coronavirus, and so instead of broadcasting live from the studio with a guest, we’re currently stuck broadcasting from home. We’re still getting a guest on each week, but they’ll be joining us by telephone.

In the first show, I was joined by local musician Jordanna Blake, and we played some of her music as well as tracks by Faiblesse Parfaite, Colin Upfield, Maz Manzini, France Ellul and, of course, The Ilk.

The Ilk is the band that I’m in with Twanglin’ Jack Ford, who’s going to be joining me on the next show. I’ve also got a bunch of further guests planned including a horror film-maker called Matt Sears, who I used to work with back when I worked for fst.

I’m also looking for more local musicians who’d like to share their music with me, as well as for people putting on live streams and doing other artsy stuff in the local area. If you’ve got something for me, be sure to reach out to me on dane.cobain@wycombesound.org.

In the meantime, you can follow The Arts Show on Facebook for further updates and you can join us every Tuesday at 7 PM UK time live on 106.6 FM and online at WycombeSound.org. Hope you get a chance to catch a show sometime soon!

Hi folks! Dane here. You might notice that things are looking a little different around here. I’d love to say that I felt like it was time for my website to have a refresh, but the honest truth is that I migrated to a new web host which runs eco-friendly servers and I made a bit of a cock-up when I was importing the database.

Still, it’s a good excuse for a fresh start, and I’d been thinking about it for a while anyway because I hadn’t been posting any updates. Back in the day, I had a reminder on my to-do list to write a new article each week, which pretty much forced me to ramble about nothing just to meet a publication schedule. Then I ended up just not posting anything at all.

Now, I plan to post updates only as and when I have something to update people about. The good news is that it’s been a productive couple of years, even if my public output has been kind of slow, and there are plenty of new books in the works along with a new album of music and a few other products on the go.

So to cut a long story short, DaneCobain.com is back and better than ever. I’ll be posting some more updates in the coming weeks and months, but in the meantime, feel free to have a little look around at my books, my music and my videos.

And of course, if that’s not enough, you can also follow me on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, as well as checking out both my book blog and my freelance site. I look forward to catching up with you guys again sometime soon!