Ghost Beyond Earth was the first horror novel I had published, but it was in fact the second horror book I'd written (and the fourth manuscript overall). My first horror story ended up being Voices of Evil, published third (confused yet?). The reason being I wrote Voices of Evil and presented Pan with the idea for Ghost Beyond Earth as well to prove I wasn't a one-book wonder. Pan liked the synopsis for Ghost more and asked that I write it, so they could publish it first. The concept for Ghost Beyond Earth came from always being annoyed at ghost stories and the fact that people being "haunted" didn't just leave! I mean, what about the infamous Amytiville Horror house? Why in hell didn't the occupants of that place pack up and bolt at the first signs of the walls bleeding? Okay, it's the stuff of classic supernatural tales, but I wanted to add some credibility.
So when I saw some footage of the space shuttle in orbit I thought, "Now there's a place you can't leave in a hurry". Some subsequent thought showed that the shuttle was too restricted, so I used instead Space Station Freedom, which was the forerunner of the present International Space Station in orbit now. Freedom was never built, but much of the design and theory is used in the ISS
Next, how to give it a ghost? I figured that the extremes of temperature in space allowed for a perfect environment to maintain cryogenics. That idea gave me a bunch of dead bodies in the space station- a secret cryogenic facility run by NASA providing much-needed funds for the space program.
Ghost Beyond Earth is often called a science fiction book, but it's a ghost story. The astronauts are in the present-day, weightless and eating from tubes. There's nothing futuristic at all. Just a unique setting for a ghost story.

A Place to Fear, like Ghost Beyond Earth, was preferred to my first horror manuscript and published instead. Things go wrong in the publishing industry just like everywhere else and this book suffered a bit of bad luck. The original cover shown on the left depicts a walking corpse- your standard horror story "Undead" - trapped behind an army barricade with a typical sugarcane fire in the background (the story is based in Queensland). Unfortunately a lot of bookshop browsers picked it as a story about a concentration camp- it was a dying soldier behind barbed wire with a battlescene in the background.
The publishers didn't promote it too hard, expecting it to ride on the success of Ghost Beyond Earth- a fair enough assumption. So initial sales weren't good and that's always difficult to fix. The few reviews it got were very encouraging, but the damage was done. All my books start with simple ideas and this was no exception. I considered one day that we, as humans, have tried all types of elaborate rituals and experiments to raise the Dead and (supposedly) failed. But for an advanced civilisation, like aliens in UFO's, it would be a snap. A Place to Fear is all about UFO's, walking corpses, ghosts and being trapped in a small town whether you like it or not. Again, it ain't science fiction- honest.

Voices of Evil... hurray! It finally gets published, since it was the first horror manuscript I wrote. It's about a man who is haunted by ghosts from Gallipoli (a famous World War 1 battlefield that was the "birth" of Australia). Funny thing was, when we got serious about publishing it, someone decided that Gallipoli was "too old", etc, and I ended up completely rewriting the book using ghosts from the Vietnam War instead. Then somebody realised it would be the 80th anniversay of Anzac Day and maybe the first version was best after all- but I rewrote it all again, just to be sure. Pan tried to fix the issues caused by A Place To Fear's cover and the problems it caused, so they released Voices of Evil in conjunction with re-releases of my first two books using new covers. A good idea, but bookstores still didn't stock any of these books in any numbers, because history in the form of computerised stock inventories warned that A Place to Fear hadn't sold. It's a vicious cycle that can't be broken easily. The problem wasn't going to go away. Voices of Evil was the opposite idea to my earlier books. This time I wanted to have someone being haunted in broad daylight, in restaurants and other public places where you'd normally feel safe. Rather than be trapped, my victim was free to run as far as he wanted. That he was suffering an Egyptian curse, brought back to Australia by Gallipoli veterans, gave me a subplot of a war story. The beginnings of And In The Morning, which I'd write six years later.

The Devil's Numbers was Pan's last book for me. The release apparently still couldn't shake off the poor selling reputation of the earlier books, despite more good reviews, and it's a shame that what I thought was a clever story (I'd learned a lot in the writing of the previous novels) with a great cover didn't get the sales it probably deserved. I'm not saying I was unfairly "robbed" or anything- just circumstances conspired against us still and there always comes a point when a company like Pan has to make a hard, business decision. These things are rarely done without some unhappy feelings and harsh words, unfortunately.
It's probably the most "commercial" book I wrote, very in tune with current horror styles and written in a  way that showed my craft was improving. Like any trade, the more you practise the better you get. The Devil's Numbers again came from a simple idea. That a supercomputer could process the numbers of pi so fast that a doorway to another, evil dimension might be opened. I was back into the "don't let them escape" thing, so I put everyone on an ocean cruise liner controlled by the forementioned, rogue computer- where else but in the middle of the ocean?

Missing Pieces was published by Random House in Australia, then some years later released by Dorchester Publishing in the US too. It did okay, but didn't break any records. It’s a hard business with a lot of fierce competition fighting for every bookshelf and every website page. It's also been published in German by a German publisher called Weltbild and it's doing really well with over 80,000 copies sold so far. Feel free to figure that one out! Who got it wrong, and who got it right?
The idea came when I was having lunch with some of the editorial staff one day and I suggested I might write something different. They encouraged me to have a go- lots of red wine and sushi can do that. Later, when I was riding in a lift back up to my hotel room, I wondered what would happen if I (or anyone) discovered a severed finger on the floor... and next time it was a hand, then an arm- until it was a whole dead body. It was my first attempt at a crime novel and readers absolutely loved it. Some hardened crime fans picked the culprit a bit too soon for my liking and- fair enough -in hindsight I could have salted the story with a few more red herring characters. Are you good enough to figure it out? But it was intriguing to write in a new genre and basically make it work successfully.

I reckon And In The Morning is the book I was always destined to write. I have a passion about  military history, Australia's in particular, and to write something like this had been a dream right from the start. Earlier, it was doubtful there was a market for this type of book- and, in fact, I didn't think it would ever be published. There wasn't even a plan to show it to Selwa, my agent. I was just doing something I always wanted to do for the fun of it.
When I did show the first drafts to Selwa everything changed and the manuscript was bought by Simon and Schuster, making them my third publisher and representing quite an achievement on Selwa's part. Jody Lee also gets a big mention for her belief in the book and effort to get it on the shelves.
It's amazing what you can do, when you're writing from the heart and for the love of it again. I'll admit some of my later horror novels had a certain mercenary approach, writing with a market and readership in mind. And In The Morning I wrote because I wanted to. If they'd let me, it would have been twice as long. It's by far the best thing I've ever done. It was later licensed by Reader's Digest in Australia then again by RD in the Netherlands. I've never had the heart to read these condensed versions and see what they did to my manuscript, but since both releases represent about 100,000 copies each the exposure is awesome.