Shortlisted for Best Collection in the British Fantasy Awards 2023

Candescent Blooms is a collection of twelve short stories which form fictionalised biographies of mostly Golden Era Hollywood actors who suffered untimely deaths. From Olive Thomas in 1920 through to Grace Kelly in 1982, these pieces utilise facts, fiction, gossip, movies and unreliable memories to examine the life of each individual character set against a Hollywood background of hope and corruption, opportunity and reality.

"

★★★★★ Andrew Hook’s book is a gothic treat. I only wish he’d investigated and imagined the fast exit of Mike Todd, one of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands, whose private plane blew up over New Mexico; or the drowning – homicide or otherwise – of Natalie Wood; or the fate of Gig Young, who shot his wife and then himself in Manhattan. Perhaps there will be a sequel, or a continuation. In particular, I much admired the heightened poetic style, which wholly fits the subject-matter. We are told about “Benny Goodman’s treacle-swing”; there are Chandleresque phrases such as someone or other emitting “a soft bubble of hostility”; and Hook is capable of epigrams worthy of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, eg, “Guilt would be bearable, but innocence corrupts the soul.” Marvellous.