SEA HUNTERS: SHONISAURUS. A creature feature novel from Severed Press.

John Seton, a grizzled British sailor, ex Royal Marine, is a sea monster hunter. He's after one in particular, a sea-serpent that killed his squad and crew 20 years previously and led to him leaving the Navy and going solo. He is so obsessed that other sailors scoff at his stories and call him 'Ahab'

He also has a reputation for getting the job done and he and his small international crew of misfits on their highly modified small patrol boat are 'hunters for hire' among those in the know, big corporations in the main, trying to cover up what they're doing while also getting rid of the beasties that are plaguing them.

When he takes on a job for an exclusive yacht club in South East Asia he expects it to be a simple one. It's only one beastie after all.

But all too soon John and his crew discover that they are in big trouble.

They've killed a pregnant Shonisaurus.

And daddy is very angry.

Big beasties fascinate me.

Some of that fascination stems from early film viewing. I remember being taken to the cinema to see The Blob. I couldn't have been more than seven or eight, and it scared the crap out of me. The original incarnation of Kong has been with me since around the same time. Also around then my local fleapit was showing a variety of things that stayed with me, from Mechakong to Godzilla, from the Valley of the Gwangi to One Million Years B.C., from Jason and the Argonauts to the Golden Voyage of Sinbad that have left me with a lifelong passion for dinosaurs, stop-motion monsters, and indeed, everything Harryhausen related.

Similarly, not long after that period, somewhere around the late 60's, early '70s. I remember the BBC showing re-runs of classic creature features late on Friday nights, and THEM! in particular left a mark on my psyche.

I've also got a Biological Sciences degree, and even while watching said movies, I'm usually trying to figure out how the creature would actually work in nature -- what would it eat? How would it procreate? What effect would it have on the environment around it?

On top of that, I have an interest in cryptozoology, of creatures that live just out of sight of humankind, and of the myriad possibilities that nature, and man's dabbling with it, can throw up.

All of this means I can't avoid writing about the beasties, from the whole S-SQUAD series, the BELOW trilogy, Giant Crabs in CRUSTACEANS, to Yeti in BERSERKER and ABOMINABLE, man-eating seaweed in THE CREEPING KELP, another big blob in THE PLASM, killer shrooms in FUNGOID and Giant Ants in GENERATIONS.

And there's now this, my latest foray in the genre. Mostly it's for the love of big beasties. Mostly.