Category:Kenelm Averill

Kenelm Averill’s life has been marked by and defined by a love of narrative. His first ventures into reading books aimed at adults were paperback film novelisations, standouts being those by Alan Dean Foster and David Morrell. This was inspired by an early obsession with science fiction films; Kenelm’s first creative efforts were in fact illustrations of scenes and posters based on the films which inspired him – copies of movie adverts cut out from the Evening Standard newspaper, or from the photos in IPC comics, or Starlog magazine. Briefly, under the spell of US import comics, he dreamed of a career as a comic book artist or scripter or both. In his mid teens he caught the fiction reading bug through the supernatural novels of Stephen King, H P Lovecraft and many others; there followed an interest in the Beat writers, and a profound immersion in the Russian literature, and in his late teens he decided to become a writer. His twenties and thirties saw a broader range of reading in the realms of Southern Gothic, hard boiled noir such as Jim Thompson and James M Cain - also Zola and Maupassant, Dickens and Gissing. He has worked in education, in the civil service, and in numerous other jobs. The Years of Fading Magic is his first novel.