My latest collection, Thin Places in Hard Concrete, is now out, with 10 brand new weird stories.
You can buy the eBook and paperback from Amazon wherever you are. For starters, here’s where you’ll find it if you’re in the UK or US:
I’ve chosen not to apply digital rights management (DRM) to the eBook file so you can download it as an ePub file or PDF to read on whichever device you like, such as a Kobo.
(This also means you could email it to everyone in your address book, or upload it to piracy websites. But, uh, please don’t do that. I’m trying to be helpful here.)
In a couple of weeks’ time I’ll be advertising signed paperback copies for sale directly from me, but I need to find time and space for admin, packaging and posting. So bear with me.
The first reviews are in
“Ray Newman is an M.R. James for the 21st century. His haunting stories unfold in familiar, even banal settings – a rented flat, a holiday let, an inexplicable motorway interchange, the corner of a room. Things happen, or seem to happen, just out of sight, and beyond comprehension. Admirers of the cult TV series Inside No. 9 will love this collection.” – David Collard
“To be able to write well at all is hard enough. And to maintain a high standard across many stories is very rare. But across separate volumes? Now we’re in hen’s teeth territory… Ray Newman’s third deliciously jarring collection continues taking us down alleys we’d never noticed, and through doors we’d always thought locked. It’s our own lives on the other side, but somehow wrong, out of sync and more disturbing for being so familiar.” – David Peate, BlueSky review
“Thin Places In Hard Concrete shares with Ray’s first collection, Municipal Gothic, the masterstroke of a title that summarises the contents so well as to make any further attempt on a reviewer’s part redundant. Which is probably for the best, because otherwise I might be tempted to come up with some SEO monstrosity like ‘John Grindrod meets M.R. James’, and nobody needs that…” – Alex Sarll, Goodreads review
“Thin Places in Hard Concrete is a wonderful addition to Ray’s two previous books of short stories. If you enjoy that kind of format in general, or enjoyed his previous books, this is a must-buy.” – Andreas Krennmair, Amazon review
Some background to the collection
I’m writing individual notes on each story in the collection but also wanted to say something about it as a piece – because this collection didn’t come together by accident.
Municipal Gothic from 2022 is a compilation of stories I’d already written with one story dating back more than a decade. Many of them had things in common but, actually, the title implies a unity that is not there.
Intervals of Darkness from 2024 has mostly stories I wrote knowing they’d be collected together and was intentionally more varied, with period pieces and nods to folk horror as well as more of the social realist urban horror that people know me for. I think that disappointed or confused some readers. Why is the haunted British tower block guy writing something set in early 19th century Milan?
I wanted Thin Places in Hard Concrete to have a clear proposition, signalled by the title, and to feel more approachable, with 10 carefully chosen stories and fewer ‘album tracks’.
I also gave myself some rules:
- Nothing should be set primarily or only in the past.
- They should be set primarily in town.
- No folk horror.
This helped me stay on track and focus on writing, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, editing, editing, editing, polishing, polishing and polishing just the stories for this collection.
Half-finished stories got parked and I tried to banish them from my mind, for now. And some excellent stories that are finished but didn’t fit got put to one side. I’ve already trailed this in various places but some of those will find a home in my next collection, provisionally titled Oakhunger, in which I’m intending to fully embrace rural settings and folk legends.
Where did the title come from?
Titles are hard. I really sweated over Intervals of Darkness eventually finding that phrase in a story by M.R. James. But Thin Places in Hard Concrete came to me in a flash via my interest in modernist and post-war architecture. I have this book on my shelf…
…and hope to acquire its sibling volume, Hard Landscape in Concrete, some day.
Help me out
We write to be read. I don’t have grand ambitions to be a bestselling author, or to be rich and famous, but when I’ve sweated over a collection of stories as I’ve sweated over this one, I want to know my words have connected with the brains of at least a handful of my fellow human beings.
If you’re a reader then buy the book. I want people to read it. (If you can’t afford to buy the book, message me and we’ll sort something out.) And rate and/or review on Amazon and Goodreads if you can.
If you’re someone with any kind of audience anywhere, and you like what I do, tell people that the new book is out. I’m on BlueSky and LinkedIn but don’t use any other social media these days so I really appreciate any shout outs on Instagram, Facebook, or wherever.
If you’re a book reviewer and would like to review this one, let me know. The more articles and blog posts there are, the better.
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 