The fifth weird story in my new collection Thin Places in Hard Concrete is told in the form of a series of reviews of a holiday apartment, and responses from the host.
It’s another of my experiments with form along the lines of ‘Modern Buildings in Wessex’ and ‘An Oral History of the Greater London Exorcism Authority’ from Municipal Gothic. I always enjoy writing pieces like this because I get to adopt a range of different voices and play around with the language of bureaucracy and commerce.
In this case, I’m quite smugly pleased with myself having included the line “Views of the iconic river and harbourside area” in the description of the property by the owner – inspired by something I saw in a real estate agent’s listing and jotted in my notebook.
I enjoyed writing it. Laying it out for the finished book was another matter. Which idiot decided to include all these headings and subheadings? What am I supposed to do with all these star ratings? Fortunately, typesetter and designer Ray doesn’t get a say in the actual writing. Otherwise, everything would be much plainer.
When it came to writing the various reviews, I tapped into another of my favourite things: choosing a restaurant or pub on Google Maps; checking out the reviews; sorting the reviews to show the worst reviews first.
My absolute favourite pne star review is not of a hospitality venue, however, but of a church between Bristol and Bath. It’s a perfect small horror story in its own right:
I first aired the idea for this story back in August 2024 and wrote several versions until it really fell into place. Once again, that big trip around the Balkans last year provided lots of fuel for my imagination, as we stayed in one apartment after another. Who lived there before it was turned over to the tourist trade? What horrors might those flats in Sarajevo and Mostar have overlooked? (More on Mostar to follow in a later blog post.)
I’ve got a bit of a thing about holiday lets, apparently, having previously written a ghost story for Christmas 2024 about a couple whose weekend away takes a grim turn. And last year’s ghost story for Christmas, ‘The Stray Dog’, was set in a hotel which are places I often find a bit creepy.
Holiday lets and hotels are all homes that are not homes. They have beds that have been slept in by hundreds of other people – people who have left behind stains and hairs and crumpled love letters. Little hauntings, in a sense.
And that’s before we even dig into all those hotels and apartment blocks converted from other uses: tenement blocks, mills, factories, prisons, orphanages… Sleep well!
You can buy Thin Places in Hard Concrete as an eBook or 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.
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 