The seventh story in my new collection, Thin Places in Hard Concrete, was inspired by reading about Henry VIII’s colossal Nonsuch Palace.
I first learned about Nonsuch from the 1945 book British Architects and Craftsmen by Sacheverell Sitwell, which I read in a yellowing Pan paperback edition from 1960. A chapter about Tudor architecture includes a murky line illustration of Nonsuch (or Nonesuch) along with this attention-grabbing line:
Unfortunately the most conspicuous building of the age has been destroyed. This was the palace of Nonesuch in Surrey.
“Nonesuch Palace: a reconstruction by the late H.W. Brewer”.
I was astonished to discover that a palace bigger and more gorgeous than Hampton Court had once existed but was allowed to be demolished, with its constituent parts sold off as building materials to pay the gambling debts of Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine, in the 17th century.
And, yes, I knew about the XTC album Nonsuch but, honestly, I just thought it was a fairy tale, or something Andy Partridge had invented, along the lines of Neverland or Erewhon.
Nonsvch, XTC, 1992.
The dissolution of Nonsuch got me thinking about whether it’s the house that’s haunted or the site where the house stands. Would a ghost want to stay in place, perhaps cut off at the knees or floating in dead space? Or would they stick with the bricks, mortar, beams and panelling of the room they once knew?
This is another story that I rewrote completely. An earlier version was a response to a very specific call for submissions from a US magazine. It had a period setting and was pretty much a pastiche of M.R. James. It opened like this:
It was in the late summer of 1853 that a man in an expensive but gaudy waistcoat was shown into the private study of Linden House in Blackheath on the Kent side of London.
‘Do I have the honour of addressing Mr Thomas Nightingale, the noted historian?’ he asked, betraying his class by pronouncing the H in honour.
Nightingale, a man of about fifty with weeping white whiskers, allowed his nod to become a small bow.
‘Indeed you are, sir. And you are–’ Nightingale looked at the visiting card in his hand. It was printed on stiff board of distinct quality. ‘Mr Nathaniel Hanmer, master builder.’
Hanmer attempted to return Nightingale’s bow but the tightness of his waistcoat over his considerable belly prohibited such movement.
‘That I am, sir, and I come to you in particular, sir, as I believe you are the only man in England who will comprehend the value of certain items in my possession.’ He waved a hand from side to side. ‘Excepting, perhaps, Mr Hamilton in Birmingham.’
At the mention of this name, Nightingale’s lean face twitched, briefly.
The story wasn’t accepted and I found myself lumbered with a piece that, though fun to write, didn’t really fit with my other work. I pondered putting it on my blog, and also briefly considered putting together a whole collection of period pieces – which might still happen one day. In the end, though, I pulled up my writing trousers and started a fresh, blank document.
To fit in the collection that was brewing the story needed a contemporary setting, that being a rule I’d set myself. What immediately came to mind was the strange obsessions of tech billionaires (usually space travel, the obvious bastards) and their desire to be seen as contributing to the culture.
A few summers ago I found myself walking a public footpath across the country estate of James ‘Hoovers’ Dyson. It was staked out with signs warning against trespassing and I felt great frustration that one person was able to own such a swathe of beautiful English countryside. The grass is always greener, and it was really green, just over there, where I wasn’t allowed to go. In some vague way, this played into the character of Henry Hamblin – a man who owns so much but is, essentially, Billy-no-mates locked away in a bunker.
That second draft flowed quite naturally, being one of those cases writers sometimes describe where the characters dictate what happens with what feels like minimal need for intervention from the author. The ending took a few attempts, though, and I was ready to ditch the story altogether until, boom, the right structure popped into my head while I was in the bath, nowhere near a notebook.
As for the title, that’s something else I picked up from Sachaverell Sitwell’s book. The King’s Presence Chamber was a room outside the throne room where important guests were received. That it also happens to sound like a reference to supernatural occurrences is very convenient for me.
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.
The sixth 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.)
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.
The fifth story in my new collection Thin Places in Hard Concrete is about a woman who doesn’t understand why on the site of St John the Baptist on the high street there now stands a temple to the cult of a horseman.
Not only is the temple there but it seems to have been there for more than a hundred years, and everyone around her seems to take this strange cult for granted.
It’s an alternate reality story was inspired by my visits to museums in Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia where various artefacts from the ancient world depicted images of the Thracian horseman. There was a cult of the Thracian horseman in the Balkans for about 500 years from the third century BC. Then, in the Christian era, the imagery of the rider was applied to depictions of St George and St Demetrius.
I was already fascinated by this, and pondering on whether there might be some folk horror potential in it, when something I saw in a museum in Bosnia gave me the final inspiration I needed.
Up to this point, the Balkan countries I’d visited tended to talk about the Ottoman period as a dark time when very little of cultural importance happened. They were on hold, waiting to be liberated. But in Bosnia, that narrative was flipped, and the Ottoman Empire brought light where there had been ignorance. In that context, a display of medieval Christian artefacts came with interpretation that said something like:
“Christianity was one of many cults that emerged in the Roman Empire.”
Now, I’m not religious, but I did grow up in a country and a culture shaped by Christianity, so this description momentarily startled me. Even though, of course, this is exactly the point that is also made in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
What if a different cult had risen to the top? And what if that cult was totally unlike Christianity? Would there still be harvest festivals and church coffee mornings and dancercise meetings in the hall on Wednesday mornings?
I think my favourite might be The Horseman, in which a woman is surprised to see the local church has been replaced with a temple to a strange new faith… except it’s not new, it’s clearly an old building, which everyone else remembers having always been there. So far, so Arkham City, but what elevates it is that rather than playing out like a grand cosmic horror narrative, the replacement faith operates with the same faint crapness as modern British Christianity, all Henry hoovers in the holy places, awkward attendance at occasional ceremonies to placate older relatives, and an air of cringe around anyone too thoroughly into it.
And, yes, that’s exactly what I wanted to achieve.
Re: that Henry hoover, by the way…
One thing I noticed when compiling the collection is that its protagonists are, on the whole, slightly less working class than in Municipal Gothic and Intervals of Darkness.
In this case, I found myself thinking of the slightly more well-to-do people from my home town who, while not posh, and still with Somerset accents, drove newer cars, played golf, and took holidays to Turkey or Spain every year.
They had management jobs at the cellophane factory, became councillors, wore blazers on special occasions and, of course, had a church that they sometimes went to.
Their vague commitment to Christianity was part of what made them respectable.
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.
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
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…
Hard Landscape in Brick, Cecil C. Handisyde, Architectural Press, 1976
…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.
The fourth story in my new collection Thin Places in Hard Concrete is about a wannabe street photographer standing in a backstreet in Brussels with that itchy feeling something isn’t quite right.
I’m not sure where this story came from, exactly. It might have started with the title, with its misleading whiff of body horror, or it might have been inspired by watching too much photography YouTube.
YouTube, in case you didn’t know, is full of channels run by people faking it until they make it in their chosen creative field. They’re obliged to talk with great authority, making bold declarations and shocking statements, because the algorithm likes that.
But it’s usually painfully clear that they’re not that confident about what they’re saying – especially when they do a video one year on called something like “Why I was totally wrong about…”
I’m also amazed at how often they give all sorts of advice about how to take great photos and then cut to a gallery of their pictures, accompanied by chilled out lo-fi beats, and every single image is totally unremarkable. Or even straight up terrible, if not quite in Brooklyn Beckham’s league.
I know, I know… If you follow me on BlueSky, and have previously followed me on Twitter and/or Instagram, you’ll have seen plenty of my own unremarkable photos. But you’ll notice that I don’t have the nerve to make how-tos and video essays about them.
Another thing about the try-hard YouTube street photographer is that they’re often incredibly privileged. Several of them seem to lead lives where they drift from city to city, country to country, hanging out in luxurious rental apartments with their beautiful friends. And then spend the day taking pictures of homeless people or market stall operators because, you know, humbling and authentic and so on and so forth.
Back to that title, though: it’s refers to how the obvious presence of a photographer begins to change people’s behaviour, thus compromising the naturalness of a situation. It’s a phrase attributed to Joel Meyerowitz who took photos like the one below.
It’s a great example of the kind of picture Toby, my protagonist, would like to take and clearly the result of a practiced eye. Meyerowitz couldn’t have staged the two men dressed in yellow and red, echoing the colours of the traffic light next to them, but he sure as heck could wait until someone in yellow came along, and wait until the light turned red, and position himself to include the red phonebox and red-edged anti-littering poster at strategic points in the frame.
I am in awe of the bravery and confidence of the great street photographers – or, you might say, their arrogance and entitlement. But that’s a whole other debate. I’ve been challenged and shouted at when I wasn’t taking photos of people at all. Someone once pursued me over a mile because they were annoyed I’d taken a shot of an old sign on a factory building. I suppose what this story depicts is the ultimate fear that holds most of us back from taking photos of strangers: what if they really don’t like it and things turn nasty?
Why Brussels? Because it’s a city I’ve got to know fairly well over the years and, while I love it, it’s also somewhere I feel constantly on edge. It’s the only place, for example, where I’ve ever had a bona fide encounter with a pickpocket. It’s wild, chaotic and untidy. It can be beautifully photogenic, when it’s not terribly ugly. For all these reasons, it seemed like an interesting place to dump my anxious, unworldly protagonist.
You can order ‘Thin Places in Hard Concrete‘ now, with 10 brand new stories of everyday worlds weirdly out of whack: cults, ghosts, impossible infrastructure, haunted holiday apartments…
The third story in my new collection, Thin Places in Hard Concrete, is called ‘Unreleased’ and is about a haunted Mellotron tape bank.
It isn’t about The Beatles, exactly, but it is very clearly inspired by my reading of books and articles about them over the course of many years.
It’s funny that I sometimes think I’m not enough of a Beatles guy to consider myself A Beatles Guy. That’s despite the fact that my first (short) book was ABOUT THE BLOODY BEATLES.
In 2006, as a rather understimulated junior civil servant, I wrote 30,000 words about Revolver, based on extensive research. I published it online under a Creative Commons licence and it went somewhat viral after mentions at Boing Boing, in Rolling Stone and in The Sunday Times, among other places.
Then it got picked up by a publishing house that specialised in turning blogs into books. This was very exciting – I was going to be a published writer! The book got a cover design, got listed on Amazon, the publicity wheels started to turn… But the publisher got bought by a multinational and promptly dumped the project.
It badly needs an update, rewrite and edit – I’ve learned a lot about writing since 2006 – but it’s still worth a read if you want to grab the PDF.
The point is, though, like lots of people, I love The Beatles and think about them a lot, and for some time one strand of that thinking has been about how dark they could be at times. One little joke of mine from a few years ago was to choose alternate titles for Beatles songs that would make them sound much more miserable, using only actual lyrics from the songs in question.
The cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band includes occultist Aleister Crowley, horror writer Edgar Allan Poe, and Aubrey Beardsley who illustrated Poe among other macabre subjects. Stuart Sutcliffe, a former Beatle who died in 1962, also features, like a ghost haunting his old band. (In my story, serial killer Ed Gein is on the cover of an unnamed 1967 album, just to underline that this is not quite about The Beatles.)
Then there’s the whole conspiracy theory about Paul McCartney having died and been replaced by a double. Of course this didn’t originate with The Beatles but, as Ian McDonald points out in Revolution in the Head, they also couldn’t resist teasing people who inferred secret messages from their lyrics.
I’m fascinated, too, by the emphasis on mind-expanding near-death experiences in accounts of LSD use. John Lennon’s song ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is very much an attempt to evoke the sensation of an acid trip and contains multiple references to death and dying – the surrender to the void.
Which brings us to ‘The Beyond’, the unreleased song at the centre of my story.
The Beyond
Back in 2021 I was seized by the sudden need to realise an idea and, in a flurry of activity one evening after work, created a short ghost story in the form of a pastiche of Revolution in the Head.
You can read that here on the blog as a sort of teaser for ‘Unreleased’. It’s more explicitly about The Beatles than ‘Unreleased’ and was as much an exercise in capturing Ian McDonald’s voice (snarky, a little too sure of his own correctness) and the design of the book (fonts, layout) as it was a piece of storytelling.
The overlap between ghost story people and Beatles people is quite small, I think, so this didn’t exactly set the world alight. A couple of people did say, “Ho ho, very clever!” and Robin Allender talked about it on his podcast Your Own Personal Beatles.
The song it describes, ‘The Beyond’, is in my mind somewhere adjacent to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Carnival of Light’, ‘You Know My Name, Look Up The Number’ and ‘Revolution 9’. The title is, of course, borrowed from the 1981 Lucio Fulci film which seems to have lodged in my brain not as Italian exploitation gore but as a rare example of genuine nightmare logic weirdness on film. If anyone wants to have a go at recording a version, by the way, I’d love to hear it.
For the past five years, I’ve been trying to work out how to turn that snippet into a full story. There were several failed attempts including one that was told entirely in the form of found text. Some of that made it into the final version but not, for example, this:
Flyer for the New Church of the Power Station of God, 1966
Are you dissatisfied?
Life is a miracle, but being alive is a drag.
We spend energy every waking moment.
Soul vampires take energy from us.
However much we eat of the flesh, and of the bounty of the earth, we can never keep up: we are machines for producing shit, and ennui is the result.
But what if there were an infinite power source to which a chosen few might connect?
God has left us, for now, abandoning us to our atom bombs and holocausts – but the source of his power remains!
If only we have the courage to crowbar the door, cross the threshold, and seize control.
We need a coup. We need leaders. We need soldiers.
Telephone Chelsea 4831 to arrange a personal confessional with a counsellor and find your way to endless spiritual power!
There was also a version told mostly through posts and threads from early internet Beatles forums. This was great fun to write but, ultimately, probably wouldn’t have been much fun to read.
Releasing the unreleased
When you take five years to write a story, you have plenty of time to draw in new ideas. By the time I reached something like a final draft of ‘The Unreleased’ earlier this year I’d also been thinking, for example, about how the team managing The Beatles’ legacy has used artificial intelligence to clean up old film footage and create new mixes of old songs.
This all began with ‘Free as a Bird’ back in the 1990s which used a fluttering, degraded tape of Lennon singing to create a new Beatles single. I like the record partly because it sounds uncanny and ghostly, rather than sweetly nostalgic as I think was the aim.
This only compounded a feeling I’ve had for years that recorded music has an inherent uncanny quality. You’re telling me that we’ve captured the performances of long-dead people in such fidelity that we can hear them clearing their throats, blowing their noses and asking for cups of tea from the studio canteen? When a review of a remastered album says, “It’s like being there in the room,” I shudder slightly and wonder if they ever sensed our presence.
One final contribution to the story was reading about obsessive vinyl collectors, and observing them in the real world in record shops and charity shops around Bristol. A challenge I set myself for Thin Places in Hard Concrete was not to rely purely on nostalgia and period settings. That meant I needed to find contemporary characters and give them a reason to encounter the haunted tape bank. Obsessive collectors, and the people who are obliged to live with them, gave me the necessary angle.
You can order ‘Thin Places in Hard Concrete‘ now, with 10 brand new stories of everyday worlds weirdly out of whack: cults, ghosts, impossible infrastructure, haunted holiday apartments…
The second story in my new collection, Thin Places in Hard Concrete, is called ‘Wolf in Exile’ and is about the son of a deposed dictator trying to live a quiet life but (literally) haunted by his past.
I wrote the first draft of this story in a single day in a fairly gloomy apartment in Bucharest, Romania, which perhaps gives you a clue to the specific inspiration.
My partner and I were in the middle of one of those ‘trips of a lifetime’ built around a three-month career break I was lucky enough to be allowed to take.
She’s a natural traveller, someone afflicted with Wanderlust. I’m not. About three and a half weeks into the trip I was exhausted, homesick, and badly wanted to spend a day sitting at my desk, alone, typing. When my partner decided she wanted to go to the thermal baths, also not my thing, I had my chance.
The urge to type was a result of inspiration having struck at an earlier stop on the journey, Timișoara, the city where the 1989 revolution which led to the end of the communist regime began.
The Museum of the Revolution in Timișoara is small but does its one job very well: it tells the story of how the Romanian people rose up, step by step, against Nicolae Ceaușescu and his family.
In one room there was a wall covered with official portraits of Ceaușescu, like a grim version of a Warhol print. In another, there were wobbly mannequins wearing the moth-eaten uniforms of various soldiers, police officers and riot squad men. I stared at those for quite a time.
Another stop on the tour was Sibiu, a beautiful city in Transylvania, which was the home of Ceaușescu’s alcoholic son and heir, Nicu. Something about the idea of this loser, destined for power, fascinated me. After his parents were executed, Nicu was arrested and imprisoned for two years. He was released in 1992 and lived the rest of his life in Vienna where he died at the age of 45.
In Bucharest, I found myself thinking about Nicu living the life of a playboy prince in a country where the population was oppressed and often starving, and then getting to spend his final years in relative comfort.
So, when I got to sit down at my keyboard in that very city, out came most of ‘Wolf in Exile’ in an uninterrupted stream.
Other seasonings
The story is not about Nicu Ceaușescu and Nicu Ceaușescu was not the only influence on the story.
Another, for example, was this specific DVD cover image from about 20 years ago which lodged in my brain.
A Koch Media DVD of the 1974 film ‘What Have They Done to Your Daughters?’ from 2004.
I wrote (and rewrote, and rewrote) an entire crime novel which had this image as its seed, about the murder of a senior civil servant by a right wing lone wolf disguised as a motorcycle police officer. It’s the facelessness, I think, and the stance.
Here’s the poster I created for this story with my own sketched illustration.
The setting of ‘Wolf in Exile’ also reflects the many holidays I’ve taken in Germany over the past three decades, with places in Munich, Cologne, Nuremberg and elsewhere muddling in my subconscious to create a non-specific nightmare version of a rather complacent, well-to-do city.
There’s also a minor story by H.P. Lovecraft from 1926 called ‘He’ which I’ve always rather liked. It’s about a man who has moved to New York City and hates it but finds some comfort in finding and wandering the oldest streets in the city late at night:
The man came upon me at about two one cloudy August morning, as I was threading a series of detached courtyards; now accessible only through the unlighted hallways of intervening buildings, but once forming parts of a continuous network of picturesque alleys. I had heard of them by vague rumor, and realized that they could not be upon any map of today; but the fact that they were forgotten only endeared them to me, so that I had sought them with twice my usual eagerness. Now that I had found them, my eagerness was again redoubled; for something in their arrangement dimly hinted that they might be only a few of many such, with dark, dumb counterparts wedged obscurely betwixt high blank walls and deserted rear tenements, or lurking lamplessly behind archways unbetrayed by hordes of the foreign-speaking or guarded by furtive and uncommunicative artists whose practises do not invite publicity or the light of day.
It’s the idea of impossible geography, of streets that don’t make sense, that obliquely inspired certain aspects of ‘Wolf in Exile’.
Finally, I must mention the stories of my friend Jamie Evans. He and I are members of an small, informal writers’ group and I’ve been lucky enough to listen to him explain the concept of ‘cosmic justice’ as a narrative driver. Basically, it’s fun to read about a shithead getting what he deserves through supernatural means. This is more Jamie’s turf than mine but ‘Wolf in Exile’ definitely fits into this category.
“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.”
The first story in my new collection, Thin Places in Hard Concrete, is called ‘The Interchange’ and is about a road that should not be there.
This story is already out there in audio form thanks to a collaboration with Giles Booth, creator of the podcast Listen With Other. It’s read by me and Giles has mixed it with my own field recordings and synthesiser drones.
‘The Interchange’ was on my to-write list for years and its origins can be traced back to a single image shared on Twitter (RIP) by the brilliant LCC Municipal account which has since migrated to BlueSky.
Here’s the image which Ian, creator of LCC Municipal, kindly shared with me in a higher resolution scan back in July 2020:
SOURCE: LCC Municipal
I mean, look at it. Just look at it. It tells a story without me needing to write one, really. The lone vehicle, so small and lost; the confusing geometry of the roads; the uncannily blue sky.
I was so fascinated by it I acquired a set of original architectural plans for the Almdonsbury interchange from eBay, which I incorporated into the poster below. Don’t they look strangely organic to you? Almost Gigeresque.
I’m generally pretty fascinated with motorways, though, and have written about them before, including this piece about the M32 originally published in The Modernist, and a story in my first collection, Municipal Gothic, called ‘Rainbow Pit’.
I blame this obsession on growing up on the Sydenham estate in Bridgwater. It’s a place where, even when it’s completely silent, it isn’t, because you can always hear the white noise of the M5.
My 2019 photo-zine project Bristol Without Cars also ties in, now I think of it. Depending on your point of view that was built around a series of images of empty roads that are either utopian or apocalyptic, depending on your point of view, and which are certainly somewhat eerie either way.
Empty roads in central Birmingham in early July 2019.
In recent years, I’ve also read quite a bit of J.G. Ballard who wrote in 1971:
If I were asked to condense the whole of the present century into one mental picture I would pick a familiar everyday sight: a man in a motor car, driving along a concrete highway to some unknown destination.
As it happens, that line is referenced by filmmaker and writer Chris Petit in the latest edition of the BFI magazine Sight & Sound which reminds me that I also saw his weird 1979 British road movie Radio On for the first time in 2022.
Radio On is full of images of roads, motorways, roundabouts and off-ramps – including rare footage of the ‘temporary’ flyover at Bristol Temple Meads which was actually in place for 30 years.
I can’t say I exactly enjoyed Crash, from 1973, but it certainly lodged in my brain. Concrete Island from 1974 did rather chime with me, though, feeling closer to weird fiction. It’s about a commuter whose car crashes through a barrier stranding him on a patch of wasteland between flyovers in West London. However he tries, he cannot escape – or is it that he doesn’t really want to? If we’re talking influential images, look at this cover design by Paul Bacon for the US first edition.
I must also mention Broken Veil, a faux-documentary fiction podcast by Joel Morris and Will Maclean that I very much admired. Among its many uncanny ideas there is a “roundabout to nowhere” in the Essex countryside which confuses the protagonist-hosts attempts to find the location where the strange events of the story take place.
Finally, I must mention The Appointment, a 1981/82 film that has slowly emerged from obscurity thanks to a recent BFI Blu-ray release. It opens with a voiceover reading an official report which helps sell the reality of the strange events that follow…
“Extract from police report number 727a, strictly confidential, unpublished and unavailable. Subject: Sandy Freemont. The last positive sighting was on her way home from a school orchestra rehearsal. This was on Tuesday May 14th at approximately 6:30 in the evening. At about this time her friend Janey Carr places her positively as entering the footpath through the area known as Cromley Woods, a then popular shortcut for several of the children living in Millard Heights…”
Hopefully this, and the similar posts to follow for each story in the collection, will answer that recurring question “Where do you get your ideas?” The short answer is: by reading, looking, walking, and by giving my subconscious time (years) to digest the resulting soup.
Thin Places in Hard Concrete is out on 30 April 2026. You can pre-order the eBook now and the paperback will be available to order from 23 April. I’ll also have paperback copies to sell directly – details to follow.
In the first quarter of 2026 I’ve been reading about witchcraft and folk horror, watching a lot of J-Horror, and trying to make more music, faster.
First, a quick reminder of the point of these posts: I very nearly set up a newsletter, then decided against it, because the world doesn’t need more Substacks. (And, in fact, my partner and I have now shuttered the Substack we used as the newsletter for our long-running beer blog.)
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I think blogs are fundamentally a good thing and I will keep blogging until they shut down the internet for good. I think more people should blog and those with blogs should (time and circumstances permitting) blog more often, even if nobody reads a word of it.
What I’ve been reading
I’ve been struggling with reading in the past couple of months. I got promoted at work and am also on a tricky project which takes up a lot of bandwidth in my brain including, unfortunately, at 2 am when I should be sleeping. Still, having that soft annual target of 50 books has pushed me to pick up the odd paperback even when I felt weary.
If there’s been a theme it’s witchcraft. I read and enjoyed Malcolm Gaskill’s Witchfinders from 2005, appreciating his skill at turning hard research into a compelling narrative. I especially enjoyed collecting the names given by various people when forced to confess to keeping ‘imps’:
Littleman
Prettyman
Dainty
Rug
Jack
Prickears
Frog
Touch
Pluck
Take
Jacob
Hangman
Meribell
Kit
Beelzebub (a log)
Trullibub (a stick)
At a certain point, though, I did start to find the accounts of specific witchcraft panics repetitive and wondered whether he wasn’t being a little too generous to the archive material that, fair play, he’d spent years finding and burrowing through.
The most important lesson I learned from the book was that the belief in witches was generally sincere, rather than cynical, and that England in the 17th century was full of tensions and anxiety about what God might want and whether he might be mad at us. The execution of witches almost feels like a form of human sacrifice in that context.
Without planning it, I bounced straight from that into another book about witchcraft, Marjorie Bowen’s 1909 novel Black Magic, recently republished as part of the Vintage Classics ‘Weird Girls’ series. Being Edwardian, it’s no surprise that it is occasionally long-winded and a little too leisurely, with the same passionate conversations repeating themselves every few chapters. What feels way ahead of its time, however, is that complex portrayal of gender and sexuality, and the sheer raging blasphemousness of the story. Our hero, Dirk, is a practising black magician who falls in love with another would-be witch, Theirry, as they form a sort of coven. That feels quite daring and I can’t tell if it increases the frisson, or provides a moral get out clause, that it is blindingly obvious to modern readers that Dirk is actually a woman in disguise. The other surprise, for me at least, is that religious magic is real in this world, leading to a positively apocalyptic ending in a Rome lashed by God’s fury.
After that, I needed something light and turned to the stack of Penguin editions of P.G. Wodehouse novels I picked up in a charity shop in Ealing the other week. I hadn’t read Jeeves in the Offing before and was excited at the prospect of a new-to-me Bertie Wooster book. Being from 1960, however, it is an example of a lesser later Wodehouse. The prose in peak Wodehouse makes me laugh out loud every two or three lines. Here it was more like every three pages. The sparkle simply wasn’t there. It was nonetheless pleasant to spend time in a world where, apparently, the war never happened, nothing really matters, and people are constantly falling into ponds.
I’ve also been reading ‘zines’ in that 21st century sense of remarkably professional indie publications. The second edition of Ritual from the people at Weird Walk was themed around hauntological TV and featured, for example, a good piece on The Mind Beyond by Adam Scovell.
And I’m really savouring the first issue of Crossroads, a new publication about American folk horror edited by Candice Bailey AKA ‘Rowan Lee’ and Gavin Lees. At its core are three essays about Deliverance, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Race With the Devil introduced by Bailey’s own essay arguing that these could be said to constitute the ‘holy trinity’ of American folk horror. It’s available in the UK as a print on demand book or a bargain-priced eBook.
My aim for this year is to watch only films from countries other than the USA. I’ve been doing pretty well on that except that my partner loved Andy Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary and made a very rare request to watch the film adaptation at the cinema. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I certainly enjoyed how much she enjoyed it, given that she’s someone who can generally take or leave movies.
Last year I acquired the Arrow Films Blu-ray box set J-Horror Rising and working through the lesser-known films in that collection prompted me to revisit the classics. In the first months of this year I rewatched Ring, Dark Water and Ju-On: The Grudge, along with several others I never got to first time round. This led to a blog post about how J-Horror revived the traditional ghost story for the 21st century.
I know it’s weird that I’m always giving myself these little jobs to do but once I’d decided to write that post it helped me prioritise watching movies over, say, watching TV, or binging YouTube.
My mission to watch more non-American films has also been aided by the excellent BFI Player streaming service which is a bargain at about £7 a month. It’s got a smaller selection of films than some other services but what’s there is so interesting, and so well chosen, that I never struggle to find something that piques my interest. Holy Cow (Louise Courvoisier, 2024) is something I’d never have ordered on disc but which I found fascinating, funny and moving. It’s about a teenage tearaway in France’s Jura region who suddenly decides he needs to become an expert cheese maker when his father dies. (That sounds like a spoof of a French film from The Simpsons, I know.)
I’ve also been buying discs from Radiance Films, a relatively new UK Blu-ray label which specialises in world cinema from the junction of genre and art film. From Japanese ghost stories to French crime thrillers, their catalogue is full of utter obscurities, each of which makes you think, “Wait, why isn’t this film better known?” Particular highlights have been the German heist movie The Cat (Dominik Graf, 1988) and Alain Corneau’s Série noire from 1979, about a weaselly little fantasist who mistakenly believes he can commit the perfect murder.
The cover design for Thin Places in Hard Concrete as of March 2026. There might be further tweaks.
What I’ve been doing
My main focus has been getting my next collection of short stories, Thin Places in Hard Concrete, to the finish line. The stories were all written months ago but they’ve needed rewriting, editing, polishing and proofreading – none of which are as much fun as writing. I’ve also had to do a bunch of admin around the self-publishing process, such as setting up the text for paperback and formatting the eBook.
I sometimes have my doubts about self-publishing – the thought lingers that it’s what you do when, actually, you cannot write, and cannot get published ‘properly’. Then I look at some books that have been traditionally published, with their knocked-up-in-Canva covers and complete lack of marketing, and feel reassured I’m doing the right thing. It helps that the feedback so far from those who’ve read it has been extremely positive. For example, here’s the blurb that David Collard has very kindly supplied:
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.
As a spin-off from that, I also collaborated with Giles Booth on an adaptation of ‘The Interchange’, one of the stories from Thin Places in Hard Concrete, for his podcast Listen With Other. This was great fun to do, even if I did end up recording the audio about 16 times.
This also motivated me to make some music for Giles to use in the production which I did with a mix of field recordings, hardware synthesisers, a dodgy old tape recorder, and Reason, my preferred digital music tool. It was such fun that I then recorded a bunch more ambient, droney background music which I’ve told Giles he is free to use however he likes in other episodes of Listen With Other.
I used Reason for this second batch, though, realising that it really is much easier and faster than using hardware, even if it’s less tactile and ‘pure’. I also found myself questioning the ease with which a piece of music can be created using tools like Reason’s chord player, and its various arpeggiators. Is this so different to just generating a piece of music with AI? Well, yes, but it still feels very close to cheating.
With my lesser-worn graphic design and illustration hat on, I designed a cover for my friend Rory ffoulkes’s collection of weird stories, The Seen and the Unseen, which you can buy now.
Final thought: zoom in
In the next quarter, I’m going to be inspired by this excellent article by Adam Page about Christopher Lee’s performance in The Wicker Man which reminded me of the power of picking one detail or aspect of an artefact and really focusing on it. Not everything needs to be longread or an all-encompassing deep dive.
A run of Japanese films released around the millennium, and bracketed together as ‘J-Horror’, gave new life to the ghost story. In 2026, they’re still exciting.
They’re particularly effective because they bring the ghost story up to date with post-war urban settings and a focus on modern technology.
They also play with our expectations of the ghost story, often seeming to present us with a cliche or familiar pattern only to yank away the guardrails in the final act.
In this blog post, I’ll be sharing some of my observations about what makes J-Horror tick based on a recent binge watch of most of the key films, plus some marginal candidates that helped me triangulate.
A working definition of J-Horror
For the purposes of this blog post, I want to talk specifically about Japanese supernatural horror films from between around 1997 and 2005.
Some people use the term to refer to Japanese horror cinema in general, stretching back to the 1960s. Others even apply it to nineteenth century literature, modern novels, and comics.
Others include films from the same period I’m covering but which do not have a supernatural element. When I asked on the social media platform BlueSky which films might be said to form the core of J-Horror, or its ‘holy trinity’, many people suggested Takashi Miike’s Audition from 1999 – a psychological horror with graphic scenes of torture. But I struggle to seat that alongside Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998) and Ju-On: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2002) both of which are very much about ghosts, curses and haunted houses.
That conversation was helpful in finding the epicentre of J-Horror, even if its boundaries remain vague. Almost everyone named Ring and Ju-On: The Grudge as centrally important. The next most commonly suggested supernatural horror films were Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002), Pulse, AKA Kairo (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001), One Missed Call (Takashi Miike, 2003) and Noroi: the Curse (Koji Shiraishi, 2005).
These are the films I’ll be focusing on, with mentions of several others.
You are, of course, welcome to disagree with my definition of J-Horror, with the films I’ve chosen to consider part of it and, indeed, the very concept of the label. If so, I’d suggest writing your own blog post which anyone can do and everyone should be doing, because blogging is great.
I’ll also acknowledge that there are plenty of people who know Japanese cinema better than me and who have made a special study of J-Horror. If you want a definitive history of J-Horror, or a broader survey of media that might belong within the category, do check out their work, some of which I’ll flag throughout this post and in a reading list at the end.
Noroi: the Curse.
Urban legends and viral storytelling
The viral nature of stories, and of the curses they convey, is a key theme of J-Horror films.
There’s a strong culture of urban legends in Japan. For example, in the July 2025 edition of Fortean Times Laura Mauro wrote about one particular strand of Japanese legend: the toilet ghost. Mauro recounts that the legend of Toire no Hanako-san (Hanako of the Toilet), who pulls people through the toilet bowl and down to hell, can be traced to a specific elementary school in Tokyo as far back as 1948. Spooky school stories are, she suggests, an entire literary sub-genre, with tales spread from child to child, school to school, and documented by writers like Toru Tsunemetsu.
A young office worker named Norio Tsuruta, employee at a video production company in Tokyo, had noticed that television shows about supposedly true ghost sightings and hauntings were extremely popular… Tsuruta’s highly popular 1991 Scary True Stories (Honto ni Atta Kowai Hanashi) provided through low budget production on video, the look, mood, and style of what we now know as J-Horror… They begin with candid snap-shots of normal Japanese folks who have had their eyes black-barred for anonymity. We start with the full photo on screen and then we cut into a close up of the ghost or spirit that has been caught in the background of the picture. These are regular folks who are being haunted.
In J-Horror films, schools, schoolchildren, and schoolgirls in particular are antennae for urban legends and ghost lore. In Ring we see schoolgirls being interviewed, speaking directly to camera. In narrative terms this acts as both a convincer and a distancing mechanism. They’re either expert witnesses who perceive and believe things that adults miss, or just silly, gullible kids.
In One Missed Call the first clear articulation of the mechanics of the curse comes from a group of kids in blazers and knee socks overheard by the protagonist Yumi (Ko Shibasaki) in the street. Where have they learned this? Oh, you know, just around.
Noroi: the Curse connects the urban legend aspect of J-Horror with another contemporary trend: found footage horror. Its protagonist is a producer of straight-to-video supernatural investigation documentaries. Following rumours and local myths he stumbles into a grim case that crosses over into folk horror. Like the urban legend framing, watching the action through handheld camera footage and clips from convincingly typical Japanese television shows helps to sell the reality of a fantastical situation.
No happy endings
Almost every J-Horror film in the core group sets up an expectation, or a hope, that the problem can be solved as it might be in a formal Victorian tale of the supernatural. That is, if you can solve the mystery, or find the buried corpse, you will lay the ghost or lift the curse.
Empathy and the quest for justice is, however, rarely rewarded.
J-Horror’s unhappy endings are the necessary pay off for the overwhelming sense of dread that they conjure up through eerie soundscapes, slow-building situations, and uncanny imagery.
As we near the end of Ring everything seems on track to wrap up neatly, with virtue, kindness and determination rewarded. But, no, the vengeful spirit doesn’t want to be found, understood or loved – it wants more victims, and it wants to make more monsters.
Ju-On: The Grudge gives us a taste of the logical conclusion of that idea in its brief but utterly chilling final shot of a city covered with posters seeking missing people, and seemingly abandoned.
But it is Pulse that really goes there, giving over its final act to an apocalyptic vision of a world invaded by ghosts. The vehicle for their crossing over is particularly interesting in the context of another recurring theme in J-Horror.
Yumi Nakamura (Kô Shibasaki) with what I think is a Panasonic clamshell phone in One Missed Call.
Technology as the vehicle of the curse
At the time of their release J-Horror films, as I recall it, were sometimes ridiculed for shoehorning contemporary technology into their plots. What next, a haunted MiniDisc? A cursed Nintendo DS?
Ring is where the important J-Horror motif of the cursed technological artefact seems to begin. Its lethal chain-message videotape was remarkably effective, too. VHS brought grit, noise and artefacting – again, distancing and concealing – so that what we did see felt all the more unsettling. The choice to show us the eerie, unsettling tape in its entirety, like a short art film, was also brilliant. As others have pointed out, most people saw Ring on VHS and so, for one very weird minute, found themselves exactly replicating the actions of the doomed protagonists.
Subsequent J-Horror films continued along this road and gave us cursed voicemail messages, spooky clamshell mobile phone ringtones, mysterious eCards, haunted video games, and so on. In this world, ghosts often manifest on glitching TV broadcasts, CCTV screens and webcam footage.
In Pulse it was the nascent internet itself that became a portal through which hostile ghosts were able to cross over from the other side.
This reliance on technology often gave these films a sharp contemporary edge at the time of their release but ensured that by, say, 2009, they felt almost hilariously dated.
Now, more than a quarter of a century on, they’ve begun to feel like the next generation of hauntological artefacts, taking over from Victorian dolls and music boxes, and from the 8mm film and reel-to-reel tape of the 1970s. And they bring their own digital dirt, and built-in sense of melancholy nostalgia.
A blandscape from Ring.Suburbia in One Missed Call.
Blandscapes and backrooms
Another recurring feature of J-Horror films is the grey and beige mundanity of their settings. They are very decidedly anti-Gothic.
The action often takes place in and around post-war apartment blocks, in car parks, in playgrounds, or on suburban back streets.
There are brightly lit, quietly buzzing welfare offices with queues and waiting rooms, and blandly bureaucratic schools and hospitals.
The haunted houses are small, lived in and modern – more IKEA than Borley Rectory.
This tells us we’re in the real world, where real people really live and really work, so that when things start to drift towards the uncanny it feels all the more disquieting.
There’s also a foretaste of ‘The Backrooms’ trend of the 2010s in the between places the protagonists of J-Horror films find themselves exploring. In Dark Water it’s the functional rooftop infrastructure of an apartment block’s water system – rusty, damp, perfectly ordinary, except when it isn’t.
In Dark Water, Ju-On: The Grudge and One Missed Call the uncanny potential of lifts (elevators) is explored. They’re traps where vengeful spirits have their prey cornered, or from which the enclosed protagonists get brief glimpses of the creatures that stalk them.
Sadako (Rie Inō) in Ring.
What if a girl had long hair?
Finally, I have to acknowledge a recurring visual trope in J-Horror: the vengeful female spirit with long dark hair.
For starters, there’s Sadako, the antagonist of Ring, whose long dark hair is also (shudder) wet.
In Dark Water, by the same director, Mitsuko is another dreadfully damp monster whose hair even makes its way into the water system of the building, through the taps, and out into glasses of already murky-looking drinking water.
In Tomie (Ataru Oikawa, 1998) the face of the non-human entity at the heart of the film is concealed from us by long hair which she compels her bewitched male servant to brush for her.
Kayako, the furiously angry ghost of Ju-On: The Grudge and its sequels, hides behind her long, untidy hair, and even uses it as a weapon.
It’s easy to think of this as a superficial effect, or a cheap way of triggering feelings of unease. (See also: masks or crazily fixed smiles.) But academic Colette Balmain wrote about the meaning of unruly hair in Japanese horror films in a 2008 paper:
Theories of hair and its relationship to socio-political structures in South East Asia suggest that long hair is symbolic of freedom, while short or bound hair is subject to social control… [and] unbound hair connotates sexuality…
By contrast, the young women who are so often the protagonists of J-Horror films generally have short, glossy, beautifully styled hair. Their characters are star students, social workers, television reporters, or devoted mothers, and the actresses who play them are usually some combination of pop star and model.
But who remembers the names of those characters? It was never them who inspired endless sequels and spinoffs.
J-Horror is worth revisiting in 2026
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed both revisiting J-Horror films that I watched first time round and discovering films I skipped at the time.
It’s often easier to make sense of trends and sub-genres after some time has passed, and when there’s less noise from marketing people repackaging any old tat to cash-in.
What got me started was the excellent Arrow Films Blu-ray box set J-Horror Rising which contains six relatively obscure films including Noroi: the Curse. They don’t all match my personal definition of J-Horror but where they deviate, and how they differ, helped me understand its fuzzy edges.
This also sent me back to rewatch Ring, Ju-On: The Grudge, and others. Suggestions from BlueSky led me to Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997) which, while it lacks the supernatural aspect I crave, was certainly a welcome discovery.
Most of all what I got from this was a sense of immersion in another culture along with a barrage of new ideas for how to think about ghost stories.
While I won’t be introducing any lank-haired well-dwelling revenants to my own fiction just yet, I’ll certainly be aiming to capture some of the bone-deep sense of wrongness that J-Horror conveys so well, in such clever ways.
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 