Category: books

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books ReadingThinkingDoing

Reading, thinking, doing autumn 2026: Like, zoinks – what a creepy old house!

Reading, thinking, doing.

This autumn I’ve been revelling in the coolth (that’s a real word) and writing spooky stuff in various formats.

A little context: this type of blog post is what I decided to do instead of starting a newsletter.

You can subscribe to this blog (enter an email address, get updates when I post) using a widget that, hopefully, you can see at the bottom of the screen.

Or, if you use an RSS reader like Feedly or Readwise Reader, you can add this blog there.

The format was inspired by someone on BlueSky saying:

“I don’t really want to read writing advice from authors… I just want to know what they are reading and thinking and doing.”

Paperback covers: a 1970s edition of A Guilty Thing Surprised, a 1970s film tie-in Penguin of Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Ronald Hutton's 2023 book Queens of the Wild: pagan goddesses in Christian Europe.

Reading… a bit less

I have a vague goal of reading 50 books a year. It motivates me to pick up a book when I might otherwise scroll The Doom on my phone for 15 minutes.

This year, though, I’m not doing so well and might not make my target. And the downside to targets is that they can make you feel as if you’ve failed miserably at a pastime that’s supposed to bring you joy.

I’ve had to remind myself that in a year when I’m trying to write a novel (more on that shortly) it’s OK not to read so many by other people.

Since my last update, the three books I have managed to read are:

  • A Guilty Thing Surprised by Ruth Rendell
  • Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
  • Queens of the Wild by Ronald Hutton

I’ve always admired Rendell’s writing and the way she evokes a version of England that’s so recognisable and real. Published in 1970, A Guilty Thing Surprised is very much a forerunner of the novels she would later write as Barbara Vine, dealing with sexual taboos and psychological trauma within families. It’s very much a book from 1970 – even as a woman, Rendell seems to have felt compelled to include, and describe in titillating detail, a Dutch sexpot au pair with big boobs, for example. But that of-its-timeness provides another layer of meaning over and above the artfully constructed plot.

The most notable thing about reading Picnic at Hanging Rock is how closely the famous and brilliant film adaptation follows the book. The book has, I think, fewer ambiguities, because we’re inside the heads of the characters at various points and understand their motives. In the book, for example, at no point did I think Michael might have murdered the missing girls, when that feels more possible in the film.

I read Queens of the Wild because a colleague spoke excitedly about Ronald Hutton and then, coincidentally, I saw this book on sale at the Arnos Vale cemetery gift shop a day or two later. It’s a bit of a ‘fix up’ with several related essays about female folk deities in Europe, such as the Fairy Queen. Those are bracketed with material about the general misconception that paganism survived as a shadow religion alongside Christianity and that every village festival or folk tradition is some ‘ancient survival’. Obviously, as a writer of weird fiction and horror, who sometimes dabbles in folk horror, I found lots of inspiration here. It also translated into a post for the beer blog I’ve been co-writing with my partner for almost 20 years, about pubs called The Green Man.

(One odd little thing: my copy of Queens of the Wild, purchased as new, bore evidence of someone else having read it, including folding down the corners of several pages. They’d been unfolded, and possibly even ironed flat, but I was still conscious of treading in someone else’s footsteps. Anyway, that’s another story idea filed away.)

Lots of movies and some junk TV

My mission for this year was to resist watching American films and broaden my knowledge of what used to be called ‘world cinema’. Helpfully, my local cult film festival, Forbidden Worlds, decided that the theme for their Halloween event would be ‘The European Slaycation’ so I bought an early bird full pass and saw:

  • Blood & Black Lace, Mario Bava, Italy, 1964
  • The Fourth Man, Paul Verhoeven, Netherlands, 1983
  • Who Can Kill a Child?, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, Spain, 1976
  • Stagefright, Michele Soavi, Italy, 1987
  • The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh, Sergio Martino, Italy, 1971
  • A bunch of recent short horror films

The Fourth Man was the standout and exactly the kind of film I’d never have got round to watching if someone else hadn’t advocated for it, and programmed it. It’s a film that, in many ways, could sit comfortably on Andrew Male’s ‘Aickmanesque’ watchlist: there are premonitions, religious visions, and an overwhelming sense of impending doom. Unlike Robert Aickman’s stories, however, The Fourth Man also drips with sexuality, like a Hitchcock movie with the subtext ripped out and laid on top. My reading of the film is that Gerard Reve (Jeroen Krabbé) thinks he’s an intended victim of black widow Christine (Renée Soutendijk) when, in fact, he’s just the murder weapon.

I also saw the 1958 Hammer adaptation of Dracula at the cinema – gorgeous, what a treat to see it on a big screen after all these decades, I still don’t think it’s a great movie – and then watched a bunch more Hammer films at home. Watch a few of them in close succession and you start to feel as if you’re watching one long film about the same bunch of characters, in the same settings, working out somebody’s obsessions. Which is very much the point of this short story of mine.

Again, because I’m writing so much, I’ve allowed myself some TV comfort watching and have been alternating episodes of The X-Files and NYPD Blue. The former seems as popular now as it’s ever been but I don’t think it’s fashionable to like the latter, not least because it’s definitely copaganda and has a whiff of right-wing weirdness about it. Watching later seasons that I never got to the first time round, I’m struck by the consistency of its look (everything is sickly green) and tone of voice, with characters speaking what you might call ‘poetic New Yorkese’, a strange dialect invented by writer David Milch. Despite being filmed primarily in Los Angeles, it uses second unit footage of New York City, cleverly dressed and redressed standing sets, and well-chosen LA locations, to create a powerful sense of place.

Scratching the creative itch

I’ve continued to practice ‘painting’ in Procreate on the iPad.

Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, a sketchy 'painting'.

It is absolutely miraculous to me that I managed to create a likeness of Harrison Ford without tracing a photo. In fact, I’ve tried tracing photos in the past and the likenesses have been less convincing.

I’ve learned, I think, that the essence of a person’s face is in the very smallest details. Zooming right in on my reference photos, I see that there’s a kink in the corner of the mouth, or asymmetrical slope to one eyelid. When I reflect those in my painting, boom, the resemblance intensifies.

It’s also fun to do silly doodles in Procreate, which can look quite finished with relatively little effort.

A sketch of a person in a bird costume, Mari Lwyd style. The costume's like a brown sack with a big beak and wings. The person's spindly legs are sticking out of the bottom. Beneath the beak there's a black hole with a pair of red-rimmed eyes peering out.

I’ve also been ‘stress collaging’. That’s what I call it when, feeling overwhelmed by life, I hunker down with a pair of scissors, a craft knife, a cutting mat, and a pile of tatty old magazines to make something. I was pleased with this set of cards made using only back copies of Sight & Sound.

A neat pack of cards bound with a red band; the card on the front reads WONDER (line break) FUL. Then the cards are laid out, with various strange images such as a person with a halo screaming on a subway train, and a pile of party balloons in front of the New York skyline.

And this vaguely hauntological, folk-horror-ish piece made from a British tourism propaganda magazine from 1967.

A collage of elements from a 1967 magazine. The background is the British countryside with cottages and a large hill or small mountain. It's lush and green. Snippets of text reading In Britain, See Britain, Seeing Britain by Road?, Britain Observed, Britain, are arranged in stacks and zig zags. A woodcut of a ram, looking sly and folk horror-ish, is in one corner.

My obsession with the slow motion mode on my phone camera continues, enabling me to make things like this while I’m in the middle of a walk…

I’ve been snapping the odd photograph here and there, too. Not as many as I’d like – I’m definitely struggling to see Bristol with fresh eyes at the moment – but there’s the odd one I’m quite pleased with, like this…

A rusting metal jug full of flowers and a scattering of red apples in the porch of a church.

Lots of writing

Despite feeling generally anxious and distracted, and constantly beating myself up about my lack of productivity, I have, in fact, done tons of writing.

My main focus is a novel, title undecided, of which I’ve now written 29,000 words. I wish that was a round number but 29,000 words is when act one reached its natural conclusion. I’ve been aiming to write 1,000 words per day which feels achievable, even when the day job leaves me wrung out. Some days I’ve managed 2,000, or even more. I want to be done with a first draft by Christmas which means staying focused and not getting distracted by other creative projects. No, Ray, you don’t need to make a zine that nobody has asked for, or record an album nobody will ever hear. Write the book. Sit down and write the fucking book.

I did allow myself a brief break from novel-writing to produce a one-off story for Halloween. It’s called ‘Piloti’ and is about a bored, lonely office worker falling in love with a brutalist building which is also a haunted forest. This also marks the first time I’ve used Procreate to create a useful, usable illustration for one of my own stories. Self-facilitating media node, &c.

The only ‘fun’ blog post I’ve had time to write was about the most perfect 2 seconds in pop history, when ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ by The Beatles segues from one take into another, creating the equivalent of an aural dolly zoom shot.

The latest edition of the General Witchfinders zine includes a small contribution from me. Editor Ross liked my longer-than-usual review of Ghostwatch on Letterboxd and asked if he could reprint it. I expanded it a little, and added some references and quotes, and that was that.

With my work hat on, I’ve continued to stick to my plan of writing a LinkedIn article every Friday, covering topics like the burden of dealing with other people’s AI outputs, and how a content designer’s brain works.

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books

Book review: Hookland Fragments Volume One by David Southwell

The cover of Hookland Fragments Volume One with a linocut of a bear swatting bones around.

The Hookland project has existed primarily on social media for more than a decade but now, finally, has manifested in physical form.

In Hookland Fragments Volume One, David Southwell, the creator of Hookland, an imaginary and particularly haunted English county, tells the story of its genesis. In 2012 he explained the concept to a friend, and his intention to post fragments on Twitter. The friend replied, “Dude, just write a fucking book.”

And it is a puzzle to many people that there hasn’t been a Hookland book before 2026 or, indeed, several.

This wisp of a publication, with just over 60 pages, feels like a testing of the water by someone who seems torn between two impulses. On the one hand, justifiable bigheadedness about the depth of his knowledge, the richness of his life experience, and the fact that his creation is beloved by so many. And, on the other, there’s a certain self-deprecating diffidence: What? This old thing? In a book?

If we buy this, read it, and appreciate it, there might be more, as promised by the presence of ‘Volume One’ in the full title. But, for now, these ‘fragments’ offer plenty of nutritional value for minds stimulated by folklore, hauntology, psychogeography, pastiche and mischief.

The meat of the book is a script for a talk given to the London Fortean Society above a pub in London earlier this year. There’s a certain breathlessness in it, capturing the sense of someone with a lot to say and not much time to say it. It’s dense with ideas and stories that will send you to Google or Wikipedia: Cunning Murell; the Southern Television Broadcast Interruption;the disappearing Dolphins of Westcliff-on-Sea; the six naked amnesiacs who turned up wandering in and around Romford between 1920 and 1923…

A key point is that Hookland owes much to the reality of growing up in Essex. In Southwell’s memory it is every bit as infested with the uncanny as the version of the county presented in the podcast Broken Veil.

Another chapter, or article, or essay – I’m not quite sure how to describe them – is a chunk from the A to Z of Hookland with entries on things like ichthyosaurs, Picnic at Hanging Rock and the Soviet cosmonaut Vyachaslav Zudov.

From a certain angle, this might read like yet another entry in the Haunted Generation, Scarred for Life, “‘oo remembers Noseybonk?” school of nostalgic hauntology. Apart from the fact that Southwell’s connection to many of these media artefacts is unusually personal and idiosyncratic, he also goes out of his way in one short article-chapter-essay to explain his lack of enthusiasm for 1970s public information films (PIFs):

I am regularly asked what part such films played in inspiring Hookland. Surprisingly, people don’t like the honest answer: “Less than Jack All.”

As someone from a working class background who experienced poverty as a child, and periods in foster care, Southwell’s perspective is refreshingly free of tweeness or cosiness. His rejection of PIFs as a source of inspiration is partly on the basis that the dangers they warn against might have seemed scary to middle class bureaucrats but were just facts of life to a poor kid growing up on the margins in 1970s Britain.

If a Hookland book, movie, TV show or prestige podcast had emerged a decade ago, would it have worked? Hookland’s power is that it is never complete and presents itself to us only in snippets of obscure, unattainable texts. A glossy mass market Product would probably have sapped the project of its energy and sense of infinite possibility.

Fragments presented in a series of monographs (or zines, I suppose, in 2026 terms) might, in fact, be the perfect format for exploring Hookland.

Perhaps, ideally, with more illustrations and photography, or even examples of the faux-ephemera that Southwell says he always intended to create to help Hookland materialise more fully.

Disclosure: we’ve never met but David did write the foreword to my 2022 collection Municipal Gothic and has been kind enough to recommend my writing to the residents of Hookland from time to time.

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Thin Places in Hard Concrete

How to buy Thin Places in Hard Concrete direct from me

A pile of copies of Thin Places in Hard Concrete with their spines forming a rippling staircase.

If you want to buy the paperback of Thin Places in Hard Concrete directly from me now’s your chance because I’ve got a limited number of copies and I’m all geared up to do the admin.

One copy costs £13 including what for some reason we always refer to as “postage and packing” (P&P).

If you’re interested message me to let me know:

  1. Where you want me to post the book.
  2. If you want it signed.
  3. If you want it dedicated to you or someone else.

And I’ll let you know how to pay me for it.

I also have copies of my earlier collections, Municipal Gothic and Intervals of Darkness. They’re also £13 each including postage and packing.

I’ll apply a discount if you buy two or more books:

  • 1 book = £13 inc. UK postage
  • 2 books = £25 inc. P&P
  • 3 books = £36 inc. P&P

Other ways to buy and read my books

I really, really don’t mind if you buy from Amazon. Unless you need them signed, it’s probably easier for you, and definitely easier for me.

If you’ve got Kindle Unlimited, you can read the eBook for free – or, at least, as part of your subscription. I get paid according to the number of pages you read. This is all totally cool as far as I’m concerned.

Various online booksellers like Hatchard’s also carry the paperback. I get a smaller cut this way but, again, I really don’t mind that at all.

If you really want to read one of my books but you’re too skint to buy a copy, message me and we’ll sort something out.

Or you could ask your local library to get them in, which would also be great for me.

Categories
books Film & TV

Lists, curation and the power of brevity

A selection of film guides including The Psychotronic Encyclopaedia of Film.

Lists and guides can be a great way to find new books to read, films to watch and music to listen to. They’re also difficult to put together and seem to make people furious.

As I write, the most recent list to have riled people was The Guardian’s top 100 novels of all time. The criticisms of the list are along these lines:

  • “My favourite book isn’t on it.”
  • “A book I hated is on it.”
  • “Nobody really likes these boring books, they’re just being pretentious.”
  • “The very idea of a list offends me, why must everything be counted and categorised?”

Because this particular list is interactive and helps readers tot up how many of the books they’ve read, there’s also some anxiety around not having read enough of them or having read fewer of them than other people. And anyone who has read quite a few of them is, of course, lording it and showing off.

Honestly, I think the list is fine. As critic and writer Andy Miller has pointed out, however you cut it, these are 100 worthy, interesting, notable books. I didn’t personally get much out of Ulysses but I don’t dispute its right to be on the list because I am not the most special boy and the world does not revolve around my tastes.

The controversial Sight & Sound top 100 films list from a couple of years ago prompted similar debate – which is, of course, exactly why publications go to the immense trouble of running polls and compiling lists. Not cynically, as ‘clickbait’, but because they know that, whatever they might claim to the contrary, people are, in fact, extremely interested in lists and are likely to engage with them as a result.

What I saw on BlueSky yesterday, dismissed as ‘discourse’ by the weary eye-rolling classes, was lots of people having passionate, involved discussions about books. And reacting against the list is just another totally valid way of engaging with it.

For me, that conversation spilled over into a very enjoyable discussion with my partner in the pub, and a flurry of interesting messages with a couple of writer pals.

What does ‘best’ mean anyway?

One problem with lists and guides is that there are a hundred different ways to approach the question of what is ‘best’.

If you’re choosing a hundred novels to represent the best of human intellectual endeavour, and the full breadth of global culture over centuries, your list will look one way. If it’s about which novels you’d take to a desert island, it might be quite different.

You might also think about novels that have meant the most to you over the course of your life, or novels that are socially important, or novels that will have the widest popular appeal, or novels you’d recommend to friends, or…

These are all interesting questions with which to grapple and, remember, lists aren’t rationed. We can have as many as we like, and anyone can write one for the group to get mad about, as long as they’ve got a blog or social media account on which to share it.

Short lists beat long ones

A hundred novels sounds like a lot but it’s not. Of course good and important books are going to get left out.

Even so, if I asked a friend for recommendations and they gave me a list of a hundred books, films or albums, I’d think it was too much, and not particularly helpful.

A list of ten items is more useful. When I create Letterboxd lists they often include only ten or twelve films. That seems digestible and achievable to me. It’s enough to make an argument and to avoid marginal cases and fuzzy edges.

A list of three recommendations might be better again, though, and perfect for social media. To paraphrase, “If I had more time, I’d have made a shorter list.” If someone asks, for example, “I liked The Big Combo, what should I watch next?” you can suggest:

  • something safe and similar (The Big Heat)
  • something a little more obscure (Kansas City Confidential)
  • something tangentially connected (Leave Her To Heaven)

Interesting doesn’t always mean good

One of my favourite podcasts, Pure Cinema, has recently been focused on two important books by Michael J. Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film from 1983 and The Psychotronic Video Guide from 1996.

These are great breeze blocks of books and intimidatingly comprehensive. But, of course, you’re not really supposed to read them from cover to cover so much as dip into them for reference, or at random.

I also watched a short documentary about the BBC’s Moviedrome strand that popped up on BFIPlayer the other day. Moviedrome ran from 1988 to 2000, originally with filmmaker Alex Cox as the host, and later critic and documentarian Mark Cousins.

The format was simple: before a showing of one of the many films in the BBC’s library of licensed titles, Cox/Cousins would speak for two or three minutes, setting the context and giving the viewer some ideas to bear in mind.

It was hugely influential in establishing a British angle on the canon of cult films. I often ended up watching it and taping the films for my personal collection. Ask any British film enthusiast of a certain age when they first saw a particular cult film and there’s a good chance it will have been via a Moviedrome screening.

What both Weldon and Cox do well is to explain with energy and enthusiasm why a film is noteworthy and valuable, even if it might not make it onto that rather highbrow Sight & Sound list anytime soon – even if, frankly, it stinks, and they don’t personally like the movie at all.

I’m drowning, help

What properly curated guides and lists do is reduce the cognitive load of navigating an overwhelming media landscape.

They make the millions of books, films and records we’ll never get to feel a little more manageable.

They help us decide how to spend our time, energy and money. And they give us permission to focus on certain things while ignoring others.

The only problem is knowing which guides or lists to look at. We probably need a top 100, as voted for by experts.

My list of 10 great novels

In case you’re interested, here’s the list I’d have submitted if, for some reason, The Guardian had asked my opinion:

  • The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
  • Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  • War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  • The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
  • The Rising of the Moon by Gladys Mitchell
  • The Yellow Dog by Georges Simenon 
  • The Inheritors by William Golding
  • Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
  • The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
  • Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith
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books Thin Places in Hard Concrete

10: The Lost Seconds – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story

A man in a blue jacket disappearing into a tube station entrance with filthy steps and diagonal lines in various colours on the wall.

The tenth and final story in my new collection Thin Places in Hard Concrete is about what might happen if time froze around you for just a few seconds, leaving you out of sync with the world.

Here’s a bit from the opening which takes place in the gents toilets beneath London’s Paddington Station:

The cleaner’s mop ceased to splash and slap. Cisterns and taps no longer dripped – the background percussion I hadn’t even noticed was there disappeared. I’m now aware of the constant, multi-layered hum of electricity, fans and mechanical devices but at that moment, for the first time, I really knew what silence was… You know how when you pause a film, it looks different? Even if the shot is of nothing – a blank wall, paint drying, still life – when the video is playing at twenty-four or thirty or sixty frames a second, it feels alive. But paused, it loses definition. The grain or pixels become fixed in place, revealing the surface texture and two-dimensionality of the image. During the freeze, when time stopped for me, the real world looked something like that. Dust hung in the air, no longer swirling but like a previously unnoticed field of stars, and fruit flies, fixed in space, became solid black punctuation marks.

I suppose what I’ve written is more speculative fiction than weird fiction – but what could be weirder than time freezing for no apparent reason? And what I really wanted to explore wasn’t the mechanics or science of a disruption in time but how it might feel.

Like quite a few of the stories in Thin Places in Hard Concrete it’s really about someone whose sense of how the world works has been yanked out from beneath them, leaving them alienated and disconnected from society.

As I type that I think, huh, that’s weird, because I sometimes feel alienated and disconnected from society. There’s a good description of this phenomenon in a recent post by Eoghan Walsh:

For readers among you who have never experienced this feeling, it may seem paradoxical to both feel lonely and simultaneously fail to grasp with the fervour of a thirsty man in the desert any and all opportunities the world presents to engage with it. I am sure there are people reading this now, furrowing their brows at the memory of their own efforts to arrange drinks that went nowhere, contact scorned, or the prolonged periods where it appears I just disappear for weeks on end.

It’s interesting that we sometimes refer to breaking off contact like this as ‘ghosting’, isn’t it? Some other behaviours Eoghan describes – being physically present but refusing to engage, holding yourself at arms’ length, making yourself invisible – are also arguably those of a living ghost.

In an interview with Bob Fischer in Fortean Times recently film director Mark Jenkin said:

I realised at some point during the making of this film that all time travel films are effectively about ghosts, and all ghost stories are effectively about time travel.

In ‘The Lost Seconds’ the protagonist becomes a sort of ghost from 8 seconds in the future – or perhaps he’s haunted by the world from 8 seconds ago?

The ability to freeze time is a common fantasy. I think what it often expresses is a desire to stop all the noise and action, reduce the cognitive load of a world in motion, and take control. When it all begins to feel too much, the ability to hit pause might help.

A poster for the story with an abstract image of someone with their hands raised, blurred, ghostly.

London stories

I lived in London for a decade after university; my partner is from London; and we visit often. Being an obsessive walker and casual photographer I’ve probably explored more of London’s streets than many people born and bred there, sometimes with Nairn’s London or some other guidebook in hand.

So, I feel confident in depicting London and entitled to set the odd story there, if it feels right. But when does it feel right? All I can say in this case is that the moment from which the entire story sprang, the opening quoted above, popped into my head while I was in London, using the very facility described.

For a moment, I was the only person there and thought, “If the whole world disappeared above ground, I’d have no idea.” Somehow, that led to the follow-up question: “What if nobody ever walks down those steps because they’re all frozen in place somewhere else?”

The final story-by-story post

I’ve enjoyed writing these, forcing myself to recall where stories came from, and interrogating myself about their influences.

I want them to work like trailers for people who have not read Thin Places in Hard Concrete (“You had me at ‘gents toilets beneath Paddington’!”) and as a bonus feature for people who have read the book and want to know more.

Maybe it’s not a good idea to reveal so much about how my stories come into being. If the essence of weird fiction is leaving things unexplained, the zero ending, deliberate obscurity, then this over-explaining must be the antithesis.

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.

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books Thin Places in Hard Concrete

9: Damnatio Memoriae – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story

A cemetery with headstones sticking out from tall yellow grass. There are yellow flowers in the foreground.

The ninth story in my new collection Thin Places in Hard Concrete is about what happens when you read aloud the names on old headstones in your local cemetery.

If you follow me on BlueSky, and previously followed me on Twitter, you might know that I collect names from headstones and sometimes share them with the hashtag #CemeteryNames.

I do this because I find them beautiful and fascinating, especially when the name is one I’ve never come across before.

When I was the guest at one of David Collard’s online literary meetups the other day someone mentioned the fact that many surnames died out during World War I and perhaps this brings an added layer of melancholy and bittersweetness.

Here are some recent examples from cemeteries in Bristol and South Gloucestershire:

  • Bundey
  • Dascombe
  • Dolling
  • Duffin
  • Filor
  • Greasley
  • Gubbins
  • Hordo
  • Krywen
  • Lasper
  • Loney
  • Rodbard
  • Skyrme
  • Tossell
  • Weetch

The best, though – my absolute favourite – is Frederick T. Mittens, which would be a great name for a cat.

These names sometimes end up in my stories, too, bringing their own strange flavour. Another place I look for character names is on war memorials. (And on the shelf right above my desk, where I keep books about London, the West Country, and folk traditions.)

I have wondered if my spotting, writing down or saying aloud these names triggers some kind of notification to their bearers in the afterlife: “Ping! Emma Weetch you have… One… new mention.”

As you’ll know if you’ve already read it (thank you) this thought was the origin of the story ‘Damnatio Memoriae’.

Avonview Cemetery in Bristol really is my nearest cemetery and, like the unnamed protagonist of ‘Damnatio Memoriae’, I often walk there. My family on both sides has tended to prefer cremation so there are very few places I can go to pay my respects. Visiting the graves of other people’s relatives is a good substitute, though, prompting me to think about my dad, my grandparents, my uncle Norman, and various other people I’ve lost over the years.

It also helps put my everyday worries in perspective. Sure, I might be a bit stressed at work, but at least I’m alive beneath a big blue sky, hearing the wind shaking the trees, rather than buried under a stone which records the charabanc accident that killed me.

A poster for the story Damnatio Memoriae with a sculpture of a hooded figure and a bunch of plastic flowers.

The mechanics of the afterlife

‘Damnatio Memoriae’ is also a contribution to one of my favourite sub-genres: stories about how the afterlife works, and especially its processes and bureaucracy.

I’ve got a Letterboxd watchlist of films that fit, including Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life and After Life directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda.

The former depicts a blandly pleasant reception resort for the recently dead where they’re given the chance to explain why they deserve to move onto heaven.

The latter depicts the grey-suited civil servants who process the departed, helping them understand the meaning of their lives before they’re allowed to progress.

A similar example from TV would be The Good Place.

In each case, there’s an attempt to grapple with the practicalities of how the afterlife might work, and an assumption that it will resemble the systems of waiting rooms, appointments, petty rules and paperwork we know from our lives on earth.

My story doesn’t quite go there but it does assume that there’s a line of communication between earth and the afterlife, and that the system has its own rules, faults and quirks.

Cemeteries lend themselves to stories like this because they resemble human filing cabinets; they’re places where death is visibly present in our communities; and where we go to transact with our own mortality.

A note on the title

The title for this story came from one of the many museums I visited in the Balkans last year. They’re stuffed with Roman artefacts and one exhibit explained that when a prominent Roman was deposed, and fell out of favour, their name and face would be scrubbed from the record – their memory would be condemned or damned.

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.

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8: The Dead Spot – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story

Ruined concrete buildings in Mostar, Bosnia.

The eighth story in my new collection, Thin Places in Hard Concrete, is just as long as it needs to be. Which is another way of saying it’s very short – just shy of a thousand words.

I’ve mentioned before how inspiring I found ‘24 Rules for Writing Short Stories’ by Owen Booth. There’s plenty of good advice doused in snark, such as this:

9. All short stories should be 3,000 words long.

When I read that it flipped a switch in my brain and I suddenly understood that if I wanted to write a 10,000 word story, that was fine, and if I wanted to write 350 words, that was also OK. Sure, it’s useful to have guidelines, but they shouldn’t interfere with the simple act of storytelling.

‘The Dead Spot’, it turned out, wanted to be about a thousand words long. Sure, I could have stretched it, but I like to keep my prose lean, and I hate reading stories that I can tell have been padded, or pulled too thin.

With ghost stories especially the plot often comes after the central image, incident or premise. The writer wants to tell an anecdote, or evoke a feeling, but is obliged to shape it into a more substantial narrative.

I love Algernon Blackwood – his stories genuinely creep me out – but they often seem to me to be about a third too long, with an excess of preamble and rounds of repetition. I suspect he was often writing to meet the word count requirements of magazine publishers.

When I’m putting together one of my own collections, I’m not bound by any such restrictions. And, in fact, I like to vary the stories by theme, intensity and length. I won’t go so far as to suggest that a collection of stories has a rhythm but a succession of 3,000 word stories probably does register with the reader as repetitive on some subconscious level.

A poster for The Dead Spot with a bullet hole in glass and a smoking cigarette.

English Civil War

‘The Dead Spot’ is set in the aftermath of some sort of conflict – I’ve kept it fairly oblique – as life is getting back to a new post-war normal. Everyone wants to move on and forget, but that’s easier said than done with ruins and memorials all around.

It was inspired by a visit to Mostar in Bosnia where we stayed in a clean, modern apartment-hotel that it turned out was previously a ruin on the frontline between Bosniak and Croat forces during the Bosnian War of the early 1990s.

Discovering this freaked me out. The flat was so ordinary – spatulas in the drawer, wi-fi router behind the telly, pot pourri on the coffee table – and yet 30 years ago it might well have been a sniper’s nest.

A couple of days ago I wrote about my story ‘One Star Review’ which touches on some of the same feelings which are, really, the fundamental energy source for ghost stories. What happened in this place and might it have left residue? It doesn’t matter if it’s a Gothic castle or a holiday flat, the feeling is the same.

There’s also something in the day-after-tomorrow faintly dystopian setting of ‘The Dead Spot’ that comes from the experience of living in 2026. Things feel unstable. Never-agains feel as if they might, in fact, be about to happen again. We’re already feeling the effects of climate change and the battle for resources has begun.

About 20 years ago, I started work on a novel provisionally titled English Civil War. I wrote about 20,000 words before, first, deciding that it was too ambitious for me to handle and, secondly, that reality was moving faster than my imagination.

A later completed but unpublished novel, Long Knives, borrowed some of the mood of that earlier piece, being set in the slow run up to civil war as the facade of British democracy begins to crumble.

‘The Dead Spot’ might be set in this same world.

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.

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7: The Presence Chamber – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story

A gallery at Hampton Court Palace with chequered floor and wood panelling.

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.

A murky line drawing of an enormous ornate Tudor palace with large gardens and an obelisk.
“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.

The cover of Nonsuch, or Nonsvch, with a gilded illustration of the palace on a red background.
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.

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6: One Star Review – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story

A gloomy looking holiday apartment.

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.

A poster for the story One Star Review showing a row of kitchen knives on a magnetic strip.

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.

A 1-star review: "scruffy and dark looked like there was mould on the support Beam the managers kids run all over the place in roller skates people bring smelly dogs this pub gose more down hill ever time a new manager comes in the bathroom is out dated and smells food is all microwaved and this is something iv seen it's either microwaved or deep fat fried everthing is frozzen food but the salerd..."

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:

A 1 star review of a church: "Nice priest, but music is dyer and the people very unfriendly. I was welcomed by Fr Fountaine, but after going for 5 weeks I felt that the people didn't welcome newcomers. A very dark and unfriendly feeling to the place, which is a shame as the Priest and building were lovely. It didn't feel like a community, as if there were evil forces at work."

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.

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books Thin Places in Hard Concrete

5: The Horseman – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story

A fairly crude stone carving of the head of a horse surrounded by what I think is ancient Greek. An interpretation card next to it says "Altar with dedication to the Thracian Horseman".

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?

My friend Alex kindly reviewed Thin Places in Hard Concrete on Goodreads before anyone else could get in first. He says:

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…

A social media post from me on BlueSky with a picture of a smiling red Henry vacuum cleaner and the text: "Just finished the first draft of a new weird story. It's now with my trusted readers for a first reaction. Spoiler: a Henry vacuum cleaner plays an important role."

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.