About the author

CHRIS BELL was born in North Wales in 1960. He studied going-slowly-all-the-way-around-the-outside in the playground of Old Park Primary School, Holyhead, which was later demolished to make room for an Unemployment Benefit Office. One of his secondary school reports read: “This boy shows no interest in music.” He has since worked as a musician, record company runner and a song lyricist, and since 1997 has been living and working in Auckland, New Zealand. His hobbies include baby-wrangling; tinkering with a bass guitar plugged into a Korg ToneWorks Pandora PX4D; drinking single malt whisky; and irregular blogging. He gave up ironing but nobody noticed.

The Bumper Book of Lies is his only collection of short stories and this is a very old photograph.

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Publishing credits for stories in The Bumper Book of Lies

The following stories were first accepted for publication: ‘On Formosa Street’ in Takahe (New Zealand), Medusa’s Hairdo (USA) and Story Cellar (England); ‘The Madagascar’ in Zygote (Canada); ‘In The Last Light of the Triple Sun’ in The Zone (England); ‘Bob’s Date’, ‘Nude Disintegrating Parachutist Woman’ and ‘Desert Ballet’ in Sivullinen (Finland); ‘A Glum Bureaucracy’ in Axiom (Wales); ‘The Leg Man’ in Grotesque (Ireland); “Skins Out!” in Sierra Heaven, Threads (England) and as ‘The Dream Virus’ in TransVersions (Canada); ‘Multi Bob’ in Zygote (Canada); ‘Flake’ in Chronicles of Disorder (England); ‘The Cruel Countess’ in The Third Alternative (England), The Heidelberg Review (Germany) and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror—10th Annual Edition (USA); ‘Detox Mansion’ in Auslander (England) and in the Farseer e-zine; ‘What’s In A Name’ in Auslander (England); ‘The Boom on Mizar-5’ in Not One of Us (USA); ‘The Locum, Yellow Rose’ in The Edge (England) and an edited version in Not One of Us (USA); ‘This Shining World’ in The Sunday Samoan (Samoa).

The following stories have yet to appear in print: ‘Dream Me An Island’; ‘Wide Awake and Half Asleep’; and ‘Postcards from Nashville, Tennessee’.