Digging Up Donald »

Steven Pirie lives in the northwest of England with a wonderful wife, a marvellous son, and an incontinent cat, which is not nearly quite so marvellous and wonderful.

He is a playful forty-two year old, as the son and cat will often tell, and blames this outlook for the hefty humour he likes to paste upon his words. He follows football and is active in a number of internet writers' sites, though not at the same time.

It has been said he is to fiction writing what Al-Qaeda is to world peace - frankly, something of a nuisance - but not by reliable, sober sources. His short stories have appeared in a number of print and web-based magazines, none of which of which closed to business soon after. He clings to this as a positive sign.

Digging up Donald is his debut novel. A first, he hopes, of more still to come.

It's the end of the world in Mudcaster, and the mother is beset by family troubles - Maureen's unborn babies have been stolen by demons in the night, and Robert has taken to playing with dead Uncle Norman. The father is talking to his pot plants, again, which wouldn't be so bad had the mother not heard them answering back.

In dark times, the mother knows that only by drawing the family together, the living and the dead, may they overcome the trials of Ending. Together they are strong; divided they are weak.

Aunt Maude is easy to find, she was cremated just the year before. But others, like Cousin Hilderbrand, who had his brain confiscated by medical science, before he'd finished with it some said, prove more difficult. The real ancients are little more than rumours in their boxes. The family must deal with troublesome dead, demons, and worse still - the living - in order to save the day.

Digging up Donald is a gentle comedy - no demons were harmed in its writing.