Author: Ray Newman

Lots of my weird stories are also supposed to be at least a little bit funny. The self-regarding literary psychogeographer who narrates ‘The Horns in the Earth’ gave me lots of opportunities for humour.

For example, I had great fun coming up with titles for his books – Avenues and Alleyways: an exploration of the back passages of Britain is a particularly puerile example.

But this character is also a reflection of me. His constant stream-of-consciousness search for ways to jam disparate ideas together into a coherent story is a bit like how I write fiction:

I found shards of crockery, chunks of blue glass and an ink bottle, and several pieces of terracotta with fractured text: ‘Ginger beer’. A century’s-worth of crap that had tumbled down the slope from the houses on the ridge above… Hold on, I thought – is this a metaphor for something? These post-war dormitory estates as human landfill. Dumping grounds on the edge for people towns and cities don’t want. A nation divided. Yes, this was good, definitely worth tugging at.

This is another story set largely on council estates.

I had in mind, as I often do, Southmead and Lockleaze in Bristol; the Sydenham estate in Bridgwater where I grew up; and the Treneere estate in Penzance, where I spent hours wandering when I lived in Cornwall.

I took an alleyway from one, a recreation ground from another, an arcade of shops from a third, the wind-swept square of a fourth…

I’m so familiar with the textures and feel of places like this that writing it comes naturally. In fact, my dreams are often set on council estates – usually a distorted version of Sydenham – as if that’s the default game map for my subconscious.

Another important influence on this story is an ancient religious site near where I live, near the CO-OP, round the back of an industrial estate.

In St. Anne’s Woods there’s a wooded valley with a holy well.

It’s surrounded by iron railings and the tree above it is covered with tattered rags – the remains of face masks hung there as a sort of offering during the pandemic.

There’s often a burned out moped nearby.

The well was associated with the Chapel of St. Anne which stood about 350 metres away. It was destroyed by Henry VIII. In 1486, his father Henry VII made a pilgrimage to the chapel and the well.

So, I’m gently mocking psychogeographers, while also indulging in a little psychogeography myself.

Cake and eat it, me.

‘The Horns in the Earth’ is also the closest I’ve got to indulging in a trope I dislike: the scary youth in a hoodie.

Without wanting to self censor, I challenged myself when I noticed the story drifting that way, and I hope I’ve done something slightly more interesting than simply say: aren’t working class kids terrifying?

That the narrator finds them so perhaps tell us something important about him.

Intervals of Darkness will be published on 7 September. You can pre-order the eBook now.

What if the bearded hippy vicar who used to guest star at my school assemblies had to deal with the events of The Exorcist? That simple question was the seed for this story.

The vicar who came to my school wasn’t called Paul but he did have a beard and an acoustic guitar. He was a Cambridge graduate and softly well spoken.

And his church on the estate was a post-war modernist building, with concrete columns and parquet floors, at which I attended harvest festivals, christenings and weddings.

But I can’t say that my character of Father Paul is ‘based’ on this real vicar because when I knew him, I was a child – and not one who regularly went to church.

In other words, Father Paul is a creation inspired by memories of vague impressions.

The main thing I took from the real vicar is the title ‘Father Paul’. Because our vicar was always called ‘Father…’ even though he was Church of England.

When I shared drafts of this story with various critical friends, a couple picked me up on this detail, thinking they’d found a mistake. But (a) that’s how it was and (b) it turns out lots of CoFE vicars get called ‘Father’ informally; some dislike it, most don’t.

Also in the mix was (and I might almost say ‘as ever’) the Enfield poltergeist, the classic working class English haunting. Chris Coates has written a pleasingly snarky debunking of the Enfield case.

Personally, I don’t believe for one moment that anything supernatural happened in that particular house.

For this story, I asked myself, how would an unequivocally real poltergeist case look and feel? What would need to happen for somebody level-headed to really believe in what they were seeing?

And how might a cunning demon or devil go about denying an exorcist documentary evidence of the facts as part of its mischief?

Finally, as I’m sure many people will notice, there’s a touch of a famous British folk horror film here, too, which I won’t name because it would probably constitute a spoiler to do so.

When you’ve read the story, let me know if you’ve worked out which film I mean.

More generally, the landscape of Bristol, and of my hometown, both of which were urbanised rapidly after World War II, continues to inspire me.

Concrete laid over old orchards. Council houses on hills and in valleys with who knows what beneath the mud.

Place names borrowed by local government officials from those of farms, fields, lost manor houses, and other landmarks otherwise wiped from the map.

How many exorcisms do we need?

I’m very conscious that poltergeists and exorcisms might be played out, or at least hard to find new approaches towards.

In this case, I hope that the setting (an English council estate), the quirk of a non-Catholic exorcist, and the streak of folk horror, might make it feel fresh.

Having said that, for more in a similar vein, I recommend The Borderlands, a somewhat successful 2013 film about Catholic priests sent to exorcise a church in Devon.

Intervals of Darkness will be published on 7 September. You can pre-order the eBook now.

This lost episode of a 1970s children’s television series came to me in a dream. Usually dream stories are nonsense but this one, to my astonishment, worked.

Here’s the dream:

You’ll note that, in the dream, it was Tales from the Fens, but I don’t know East Anglia well enough (yet) to write that.

So I brought it closer to home, to Somerset.

The dream gave me a premise and some details but, of course, I had to do a lot to turn it into a coherent piece of fiction.

I also found myself thinking about Jeremy Deller’s nationwide art installation to mark the centenary of the start of World War I, ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’, from 2014.

There is also, of course, that story from Sapphire & Steel with the ghost of a soldier from World War I haunting a railway station. (Which I think Jeremy Deller must also have had in mind.)

Having dreamt of a TV show, I had to make it a TV show, which also happens to tie into my interest in grainy old BBC ghost stories for Christmas, and Tales of the Unexpected, and similar.

Let’s be honest, this is pure nostalgic, hauntological fan service.

The final component was the idea that Bernard Miles might be the narrator of the story. Miles is perhaps best known for his performance as Joe Gargery in David Lean’s 1946 film of Great Expectations. He was also famous for his stage and screen performances in rural dialects.

Though he specialised in the accents of counties surrounding London, I reckon he could easily have stretched to a Somerset accent with a little time to prep. And I think he’s exactly the kind of person an ITV subsidiary might have approached for a job like this in 1970.

I dithered a little about how much storytelling business to include. In the end, I went heavy on it at the start, and at the end, but let it fade out in the middle. Because I suspect that, as with attempts to write in regional accents, it would get pretty annoying after a while.

Somerset place names

People who know Somerset will notice that I’ve rendered a couple of place names as they’re spoken rather than as they’re spelled.

In reality, Chidgey is Chedzoy and Muchney is Muchelney.

My thinking was, though, that surely Mr Miles would be given them as spoken in his script, right?

But also, I just take a certain homesick pleasure in these little details.

Intervals of Darkness will be published on 7 September. You can pre-order the eBook now.