G. P. Taylor Loses a Wheel

The Rev. G. P. Taylor, author of Shadowmancer and other books, has gotten a bit of press (in the Christian market, at least) from telling the Daily Star tabloid that enemies sabotaged his car. (Thanks to Bookshelves of Doom for the first alert.) As passed on by the Spero News and the Assist News Service, Taylor reported that a wheel had come off his chauffeured car, but he and his driver escaped injury.

Taylor told the tabloid's eager reporter: "I'm the victim of an insidious hate campaign among some adults who don’t like my books. These people flood the web with messages inciting harm towards me and one recent posting read 'should we want to kill him.'" Yet despite the news that such messages have "flooded the web," the only example of that quoted phrase that Google could find for me was this very news article. Taylor's near-death experience on the highway is apparently too big to confine to his blog, or even to mention there.

A year ago, folks may recall, Taylor got "120 pupils aged 12 and 13" riled up by using words like "bum, bogey, fart and pee" in an author talk at a comprehensive school. Teachers stopped him halfway through, and someone--who could it have been?--called the papers. Of course, Taylor would have had no reason to expect that using such vocabulary in a school presentation would have caused a fuss, would he?

At that time Taylor told the Guardian that he was merely speaking up for such fine literature as, well, Shadowmancer. He agreed that he'd "said television was 'crap' compared with books," and that "Harry Potter was not 'the only gay in the village'," a catch-phrase from the Little Britain television show. (This was reported around the world as if Taylor had said Harry Potter is gay; English may be our universal language now, but that doesn't mean anyone understands the English.)

Why do I get the feeling that Taylor manufactures his own publicity? Consider this article that appears on Taylor's webpages and nowhere else:

New York Times best selling author GP Taylor has vowed that he will be giving up writing his Shadowmancer series of books as he has been branded as the new CS Lewis. . . .

Due to the popularity of the Shadowmancer series, it is believed that Taylor has been offered 'an incredible' deal to produce a sequel for the millions of fans worldwide by Faber and Faber. It is also believed Lawyers have also gagged Taylor from revealing the amount of the contract in public as it is said to be a 'never before done deal'.

What journalist ferreted out all that secret information about Taylor's book deals (and edited it so poorly)? None other than Bob Smietana, Taylor's collaborator on his autobiography. Yes, Taylor is one of those rare authors who need a ghost writer for their own memoirs.

And speaking of that autobiography, perhaps it will clear up how old Taylor is. This Spero News review of the book reports he was born in 1958. Yet in 2003 he told the Guardian that he was 43, and the recent Daily Star article apparently states that three years later Taylor is only 44.