Short Stories/Novellas
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Magpie’s Ladder | 2019 | Buy |
| The Lost Machine | 2021 | Buy |
Standalone Novels
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Necessary Monsters | 2017 | Buy |
| Tailor of Echoes | 2022 | Buy |
Richard A. Kirk was born in Kingston upon Hull, England, in 1962 and now lives in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Before writing his own fiction, he built a career as an illustrator, creating artwork for Clive Barker, China Mieville, Thomas Ligotti, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and others. His illustration clients have also included the rock band Korn. That visual sensibility carries directly into his writing, which tends toward richly described settings where the strange is treated as ordinary.
Kirk’s fiction falls squarely in the dark fantasy and weird fiction tradition. Necessary Monsters (2017), his first novel, is set in a world still recovering from a war that fused magic and technology, and follows two characters trying to uncover the secrets of Nightjar Island. Tailor of Echoes (2022) takes place in a shifting, labyrinthine city called the City of Steps, where a young architect runs afoul of a secret society. His shorter works, collected in Magpie’s Ladder and the novella The Lost Machine, explore similar territory on a smaller scale. Kirk writes and illustrates everything himself, giving his books a unified atmosphere that is hard to find elsewhere.