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.
Novels about juvenile delinquents, short films about consumerism, and a weird classic I got round to far too late are among my cultural highlights from the past year.
I like these little bits of end-of-year housekeeping – looking back, sorting and filing, debating with past Ray the stupid ratings he gave months ago.
I often find that a book or film I wasn’t sure I’d liked has stayed with me and become a reference point, or an inspiration. Liking isn’t everything, it turns out.
Still, those ratings are useful because they help me remember how I felt in the moment, and make it possible to pull out highlights for a post like this.
I’d like to read more. My annual target of 50 books is do-able, just about, but slightly stresses me out. I certainly couldn’t read much more without it turning reading into another task at which I feel I’m failing.
My approach is to write a little capsule review of each book after I’ve finished and mark any book that I had a strong positive feeling about with an asterisk. A ‘strong positive feeling’ might be that it left me feeling cleverer, or moved me, as well as that it was simply enjoyable.
As for films, I don’t have a target, but I do try to watch films rather than TV or (ugh) YouTube. Of course I do watch YouTube, because it’s irresistible, but often feel dirty afterwards. In the hour I spent watching some bloke build a castle out of lolly sticks I could have got through most of a 1940s horror movie.
Films I review and rate on Letterboxd. That gives me quite a granular sense of the real standouts, especially as I’m quite stingy with any rating of four stars or more.
The best new-to-me books of 2025
The Furnished Room by Laura Del-Rivo, published in 1961, is a stone cold classic and anyone who likes both crime fiction and angry young man novels ought to read it. My copy, tatty and yellowing, came from the 50p bin in a charity shop, and its state of near disintegration seemed quite fitting. It’s about a young man who might be a psychopath, who has paedophilic and Nazi fantasies, and who thinks he’s better than everyone else despite being, essentially, a bum. It reminded me of Absolute Beginners (it’s a great West London novel), The Talented Mr Ripley, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Perhaps there’s even a little of Billy Liar there, if Billy was a killer.
Big Man by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) from 1959 is in a similar vein, but set in New York City rather than London. I was astonished by its brilliance and vigour and think it might be the best thing McBain wrote in a long, prolific career. The protagonist is a street punk who drifts into a life in organised crime because the mob identify him as someone who can be groomed, and trained to be an emotionless killer. It has several genuinely shocking twists and an utterly bleak ending.
I wrote more about both of the books above in a blog post about juvenile psychopaths earlier in the year, which also includes notes on The Dead Beat by Robert Bloch.
1992’s A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge is a big, high concept sci-fi novel which is bewildering at first but then, when you get used to it, has the pure thrills of a Lucasfilm adventure. My favourite characters were the Skroderiders, sentient plants who have symbiotic relationships with small carts on which they whizz around. There are also packs of intelligent dogs, each of which shares a consciousness and personality, and plenty of big spaceships.
I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai, from 2023, is a murder mystery set in an American private school that plays with, and criticises, the tropes of true crime and podcasting. It’s also about the Me Too movement, male privilege, and institutional wagon circling – conscious or otherwise. I found it both entertaining (“I couldn’t put it down” &c.) and thought provoking, which is always a pleasing combination.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, 1974, is a rather brilliant study of intergalactic war, spanning centuries, from the point of view of a single soldier. It’s Band of Brothers in space. The constant references to the increasing homosexual population reads as homophobic but I buy the argument that this is supposed to depict the alienation of veterans from the societies for which they fight. (Hey, guess what? It’s about Vietnam.)
Jordan Tannahill’s The Listeners, 2021, is a short, punchy novel that at times reads like weird fiction, and at others like a modern melodrama. A woman hears a mysterious hum. Her family can’t hear it and think she’s losing it. Then she finds that one of her students can hear it, too, and they form a bond that destroys her career and marriage. Slowly, she drifts into what might be a cult, depending on your point of view.
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson, 1951, is brilliant, compelling, and maddeningly oblique. I think the plot (if plot is the word) is that student Natalie is raped; disassociates; goes through a period of psychedelically intense psychosis; then emerges with new clarity, and new strength. But I spent most of the book feeling anxious and bewildered, in the best possible sense.
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, 2020, isn’t quite a novel. The plot unravels, the characters are cyphers. Part autobiography, part philosophical ramble, part political tract, it has interesting things to say about Bulgaria, nostalgia, conservatism, and the end of human history. The premise is the hook, though: in a world gone mad, a therapist creates domestic spaces where people can go back in time and ignore the present. But these comforting fantasies prove irresistible and, soon, begin to spread across wider society.
Fleischerei by Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin, 2025, was quite a challenge for me, Britain’s Most Uptight Man™, concerning as it does an intense cannibalistic affair between two outsiders in Berlin. It’s beautifully written, though, and there’s something thrilling about reading what feels like a forbidden text.
Lois the Witch by Elizabeth Gaskell, 1859, was a real highlight of the year, republished as part of the Penguin Archive series as a small, plain paperback. It’s about a young woman in 17th century England who is despatched to America and finds herself a victim of witch madness in Salem. It is tragic and atmospheric, with some brilliant depictions of haunted landscapes:
Sights, inexplicable and mysterious, were dimly seen – Satan, in some shape, seeking whom he might devour. And at the beginning of the long winter season, such whispered tales, such old temptations and hauntings, and devilish terrors, were supposed to be peculiarly rife. Salem was, as it were, snowed up, and left to prey upon itself. The long, dark evenings, the dimly-lighted rooms, the creaking passages, where heterogeneous articles were piled away out of reach of the keen-piercing frost, and where occasionally, in the dead of night, a sound was heard, as of some heavy falling body, when, next morning, everything appeared to be in its right place – so accustomed are we to measure noises by comparison with themselves, and not with the absolute stillness of the night-season – the white mist, coming nearer and nearer to the windows every evening in strange shapes, like phantoms, – all these, and many other circumstances, such as the distant fall of mighty trees in the mysterious forests girdling them round, the faint whoop and cry of some Indian seeking his camp, and unwittingly nearer to the white men’s settlement than either he or they would have liked could they have chosen, the hungry yells of the wild beasts approaching the cattle-pens, – these were the things which made that winter life in Salem, in the memorable time of 1691-2, seem strange, and haunted, and terrific…
I was so impressed by the first two books in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy that I’d been saving Unconditional Surrender, from 1961. It’s incredibly readable and often very funny, almost ‘Bertie Wooster goes to war’. At the same time, it has profound things to say about the coming of the modern world, and the banal inhumanity of modern conflict, which is all paperwork and silent death.
Uncertain Sons by Thomas Ha, 2025, is the book I’ve been naming when asked for recommendations. It’s a collection of thematically linked stories about the apocalypse, mutation, denial, and family relationships. They’re all at very least good, and some are truly great. My favourite story was ‘Where the Old Neighbors Go’ which is about urban gentrification, flavoured with fairy folklore and Ghibliesque talking animals.
1958’s Spotted Hemlock by Gladys Mitchell, my favourite of the golden age mystery writers, was a treat towards the end of the year. A girl goes missing from an agricultural college for women, which is twinned with a similar school for men several miles away across country. The characters, the gothic atmosphere, and the observational humour carry a slightly less than brilliant plot. The sheer raging horniness of the girls in particular is very funny.
I came across The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa in the new Vintage Classics ‘Weird Girls’ series. It was originally published in English in 2008 and comprises three long short stories, or short novellas. They’re all rather sick. A girl who tortures a child, while lusting after a fellow inmate at her orphanage. A woman who casually, unconsciously poisons her pregnant sister. And, in the the third and best story, ‘Dormitory’, a sinisterly empty student accommodation block with only one resident and a predatory caretaker.
Finally, BUtterfield 8 by John O’Hara, 1935, is a brilliant evocation of the speakeasy era in New York City. It tells the story of the tragic downfall of glamorous Gloria Wandrous, a wild child with many lovers, who has never not been preyed upon by men.
The best new-to-me films of 2025
I’ve been strict here and limited myself to flagging films that I rated 4.5 stars or higher – plus a couple of entries that, on reflection, I should have rated more highly at the time.
Writer G.F. Newman’s Law & Order, broadcast in four feature-length parts in 1978, is an astonishing achievement. It explains how police corruption works in practice, and why it’s a problem, as we watch the ‘fitting up’ and imprisonment of a low-level criminal from multiple angles. Detective Fred Pyall is the bland, teddy-bearish villain of the piece, abusing his power and knowledge of the system to extract bribes and choose who does and not go to prison. Pyall is played by Derek Martin and his victim is played by Peter Dean, both better known for playing characters in Eastenders. Almost every other face is familiar from British TV soaps or comedies, or British films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Alan Ford is here, for example, and Ken Campbell gives a surprisingly restrained performance as a corrupt solicitor.
Picnic at Hanging Rock, directed by Peter Weir and released in 1975, took a long time to get to the top of my watchlist. Somewhere along the line, I’d got the idea that it might be an endurance test, perhaps because people keep describing it as ‘dreamlike’ and ‘ambiguous’, which can often mean vague and tedious. But, no, it’s utterly brilliant. From the opening scene, I was mesmerised by the mix of beautiful, hazy visuals and hypnotic, exotic music. Years before The Blair Witch Project or Fargo pulled the same trick, it sells itself as being based on a true story, which is enough to blur the audience’s sense of what is real and what is not. As in reality, as in true stories of crime and disappearance, things don’t make sense in neat and tidy ways. This film is the essence of ‘weird fiction’: ambiguous; unsettling; not only about haunting but actually somehow haunted itself.
The Lonely Shore, Ken Russell, 1962, is an astonishing short film unearthed and shared on the excellent BBC Archive YouTube channel. It feels like one of the apocalyptic short stories written by Michael Moorcock or J.G. Ballard for New Worlds – surreal, weird, disturbing, and deadpan funny. It is packed with breathtaking images conjured up from the contents of a junk shop arranged on a desolate beach. The radiophonic ambient horror score is the icing on the cake.
The Children of Dynmouth, Peter Hammond, 1987, is a TV movie made for the BBC’s Screen One strand. It’s a strange, perverse take on Billy Liar, based on a novel by William Trevor. Timothy Gedge (Simon Fox) is a disturbed teenager with a voyeurism habit. He sticks his nose into the business of the respectable people of Dynmouth and casually blackmails many of them, either to get their help with his talent show act, or just for the sake of entertainment. Sometimes, his accusations are accurate; on other occasions, they’re pure self-dramatising fantasy – but no less dangerous for that. This was Fox’s only acting credit and his drama coach gets a special credit at the end. His non-professional performance only adds to the weirdness, as if an actual oddball has wandered onto the set and is bothering everyone. The character is supposed to have a poor understanding of boundaries, and to be intensely irritating, but I’m not sure the viewer is supposed to find him almost unwatchably annoying, too. I’m glad I persevered, though, because the final act of the film has overtones of Patricia Highsmith, the oblique school of weird fiction, and perhaps even Royston Vasey. This film startled and mesmerised me. It tapped into a bunch of my obsessions – small towns, West Country life, the darkness beneath the surface of suburbia. And, because it’s so obscure, it felt delightfully fresh.
Dinner in America, Adam Rehmeier, 2020, is a delightfully uplifting film from an alien world of Christian family dinners, bullying jocks, and raging punk arsonists. All the performances are excellent but it would be nothing without Emily Skeggs as Patty, a girl who is not secretly a genius, and doesn’t suddenly become a raging beauty when she removes her glasses and shakes out her hair. No, that only happens when a smile or a giggle breaks over her face as she feels real happiness for the first time, and it’s as if a searchlight has been flipped to full beam. The pivotal moment in the film, for me, is when she gets the opportunity to sing a song with Simon (Kyle Gallner), AKA her favourite punk musician John Q. As the intro plays out and she readies herself to sing there’s suspense in the moment. If she can’t sing, and her lyrics are bad, then she’s just the subject of yet another cruel joke. Spoiler: there’s a good reason her song causes a tear to roll down Simon’s bruised cheek.
The Family Way, Roy Boulting, 1966, has a reputation as a bit of a flop. I’m not sure why. For me, it’s the perfect midpoint between the angry young man Northern kitchen sink drama and the swinging sixties sex movie. It’s best known these days as an artefact of Beatles history: the soundtrack is (sort of) by Paul McCartney and hints at the bandstand brass to come on Sgt. Pepper, and some shots of terraced houses and gasworks look like Eleanor Rigby sounds. In itself, however, it’s a sweet little film about a young couple, played by the equally adorable Hayley Mills (Jenny) and Hywel Bennett (Arthur), learning how to be married under the prying noses of family and neighbours. The most surprising theme, however, is queerness. Ezra (John MIlls), Arthur’s gruff working class dad, begins to fear his son is gay. After all, he listens to classical music, reads books and, crucially, hasn’t yet consummated his marriage. When challenged by his wife, however, he becomes gentle: of course he wouldn’t shame his son for it, if it were true; of course he’d be there for him. But there’s more: she points out that Ezra brought his best and closest friend Billy on their honeymoon; that he and Billy were inseparable; that they started each day of the honeymoon with a walk on the beach together, leaving her in the hotel. He becomes dewy eyed when he talks about Billy and misses arm wrestling with him. And Arthur is, it turns out, probably Billy’s son – and reminds Ezra so much of his lost friend that it makes him weep. I mean, blimey.
Strange Days, Kathryn Bigelow, 1995, is a film I could have seen at the cinema when it came out, or on VHS, or on DVD. I finally got round to it 30 years after it came out, and more than a quarter of a century after it is set, on New Year’s Eve 1999. This vision of the then near future is all about organic virtual reality and not, as actually transpired, Netscape Navigator and the Nokia 3210. The details might be wrong but the point holds true: the retreat into nostalgia, the dependence on technology, and the place pornography always has at the cutting edge. It’s beautifully realised with hardly a clunky detail, and shot like a film from ten years later. The lack of obvious CGI must help in this regard. The scenes of violence towards women are hard to stomach, and are supposed to be – here, put this on, don’t look away, you need to watch to understand.
As for new films, I watched and enjoyed both The Brutalist and Nosferatu, but I’m not sure anyone needs more words on either of those right now.
I also want to mention an extremely bad film that is among the maddest things I saw this year. Cipayos, Jorge Coscia, 1989, is a dystopian film from Argentina which has Buenos Aires occupied by British troops – and the tango has been banned! But the underground resistance keeps the dance alive, in back alleys and speakeasies, as they get ready to see off the arrogant invaders once and for all. Key scenes involve British dignitaries at a garden party getting the shits and the Irish soldiers joining in a musical number in which they gaily sing ‘Brits out!’ before switching sides. I want to find more of this kind of thing in 2026.
I’ve been reading about New York during prohibition, thinking about Stanley Kubrick, and writing in the Edwardian mode.
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This particular post is the third in an ongoing series inspired by someone 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.”
If you follow me on Bluesky, you already have a pretty good idea of what I’m reading, thinking and doing at all times. These are some edited highlights.
Adrian Bailey’s cover illustration for the Penguin edition of BUtterfield 8.
Reading John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8
The entire premise of this post is a fib, by the way, because what I’ve really been thinking is “Ugh, I’m so ill”, and what I’ve been doing is sleeping, coughing, and generally feeling run down.
But I couldn’t lead with that because other people’s illnesses are utterly tedious.
When the flu was at its height, I couldn’t even read. I spent two days mostly lying in bed with my eyes closed, only half listening to podcasts and audio dramas. In a low key way, this made me somewhat anxious, because I knew I had a yearly reading target to achieve.
That target is a very manageable 50 books. It’s just challenging enough to make me take a book from the shelf and read it rather than looking at my phone, but not so tough that it becomes a chore. As the end of November came around, I’d read 47 books, and needed to stay on track.
When the flu began to lift, I grabbed almost the first thing I saw with an interesting cover, and that was John O’Hara’s 1935 novel BUtterfield 8.
It’s a startlingly frank, sexy novel, with an undercurrent of sexual sickness. Gloria Wandrous is a flapper (although that term had gone out of fashion by the time the book is set, in around 1931) with many boyfriends, and dark memories of being abused by a family friend when she was eleven.
Her latest boyfriend, Weston Liggett, is a married man unhappy with his wife and overcome with lust for the 18-year-old Gloria. When he unwisely takes her to the family apartment after a day of drinking, she steals his wife’s mink coat, which careless act brings everything crashing down around them.
I didn’t realise until after I’d finished it that it was based loosely on a true story, that of a woman with the equally unlikely name Starr Faithfull, born Marian Wyman in 1906. The truth is even more grim and sad than O’Hara’s reinvention.
What O’Hara does brilliantly is to capture the whirl of conflicting feelings and emotions in the mind of a young person who has not been well cared for. She’s sexually uninhibited, she’s socially conservative; she wants a platonic friendship, she is offended that her one platonic friend doesn’t want to have sex with her; she feels dirty, she knows she is the most beautiful woman in New York City. The most important thing is never to stand still, or be alone, or think even for a moment.
For the beer blog I’ve been writing with my partner since 2007 I wrote a post highlighting O’Hara’s depiction of the New York speakeasy – an incidental but not unimportant aspect of the book.
It’s just a podcast, not a documentary or an academic text, but within those bounds it was a great primer on the films I haven’t seen, and a reminder of what’s interesting about those I have.
It made me think I need to prioritise seeing Lolita, which I’ve put off until now because, well, I’m basically a prude, and even the basic premise of the book/film made me feel uneasy.
It also made me want to watch Eyes Wide Shut again, having not seen it since it was released in cinemas in 1999. Back then, I was bewildered and bored by it. Now, with a bit more life behind me and more patience, I suspect I’d get more out of it.
I should say that Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This seeded this idea. That’s less of a podcast and more like a documentary and in a series from a couple of years ago, Erotic Nineties, Longworth made a strong case for Eyes Wide Shut over the course of two long episodes.
As you might know, one of my particular obsessions is the way cities are recreated on studio backlots, like London in Los Angeles. One of the features accompanying the new Criterion Collection release of Eyes Wide Shut is a documentary about how Kubrick went about recreating New York in London, commissioning Lisa Leone, a friend of his daughter’s, to photograph the real New York in intense detail to inform the design of the set.
This feels like a fascinating creative project in its own right and there’s something fascinating about seeing photos of rubbish bins (sorry, trash cans) and shop fascias presented like evidence in a trial, or as if intended to communicate the concept of America to an alien from another world.
It’s also given me an idea for a project of my own. Watch this space.
Writing like an Edwardian
One of the principles behind my next collection of weird stories is to try to avoid nostalgia and retro pastiche. At the same time, I’ve written quite a bit of that over the years, and might put out a separate collection of only Victorian-Edwardian-style stories at some point.
As I have done for a few years in a row, now, I want to share a ghost story for Christmas on this blog. This time, I weakened, and decided to write something vaguely in the style of M.R. James or one of his contemporaries. It’s a long way from Municipal Gothic but what the hell, it’ll be free. The important thing, really, is that I enjoy writing it.
With that in mind, I’ve spent three evenings after work to get to a finished draft of about 2,800 words. What’s particularly enjoyable about writing in this mode is learning little historical details on the way. For example, you know those all-in-one underwear suits with a little flap on the bum? Those were known as ‘union suits’ in the US and as ‘combinations’, ‘woolly combinations’ or ‘woolly comms’ in the UK.
The story needs an edit and will be out in time for Christmas. Hopefully it’ll offer at least a little of the thrill of the real thing.
Broadcasts
I’m recording a podcast tonight, another episode of CinéClub with Joe Tindall, talking about the BBC ghost stories for Christmas and similar. That’ll be out before Christmas too, I hope.
A few weeks ago, with my professional hat on, I was the guest on another podcast talking about content design in healthcare. You can listen to that now.
Hotels are fundamentally weird places and the sense of unease they prompt is powerful fuel for weird stories.
Even before we consider aspects of the uncanny, and the hotel in weird fiction, the very concept of the hotel is troubling.
You’re telling me I’m going to a strange town to sleep in a strange room, in a strange house, where someone I don’t know has a master key to my room?
It’s no wonder I barely get a wink of sleep whenever I’m away from home.
I have stayed in some objectively odd hotels over the years. The converted U-Boat factory in Gdańsk, for example, which aimed for industrial minimalism but whose concrete walls throbbed with memories of Nazism.
In Lithuania, one hotel had a display of KGB bugging and recording equipment that had been removed from the walls during its renovation.
Back home in the UK, my mind turns to a genteel bed and breakfast in Gloucestershire that hadn’t been decorated in about forty years. There were faded paintings of Spitfires, Hurricanes and the Queen on every flat vertical surface. In the corner of my room was a small door which I opened to find a cupboard filled with box after box of children’s drawings and schoolbooks from, I’d guess, the nineteen-seventies.
In the Scottish Highlands, there was a would-be boutique hotel whose lobby came with a chaise longue strewn with sinister porcelain dolls, and whose owner had a way of making tourist tips sound like threats: “I’m only trying to help you…”
Chain hotels are no better. In one, my partner and I only discovered there was a connecting door to the next room when its occupant burst in looking for the bathroom. He was almost as terrified as us.
In another we were kept awake all night by local youths roaming the corridors banging on doors and smoking pungent weed.
Bad things do happen in hotel rooms, too – those private spaces for hire where, even if you can no longer sign in as ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’, you are at least free from surveillance or supervision.
I was prompted to think about the hotel in connection with weird fiction by reading Daisy Johnson’s The Hotel. It’s a collection of stories originally written for BBC Radio Four all of which are set in and around the same fenland hotel.
It feels to me as if Johnson was trying to exorcise every single anxiety she’s ever felt while visiting hotels, whether caused directly by the strangeness of the buildings themselves (what’s behind that door?) or the social situations that bring us to them. There’s a particularly effective pair of stories about a hen party in which an actual monster is less scary than the cruelty of old friends.
Critics have rightly noted a connection between Johnson’s creation and The Overlook Hotel from Stephen King’s The Shining, via Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of that novel.
The Overlook is a brilliant creation, and of the best haunted houses in fiction, alongside Shirley Jackson’s Hill House. Here’s my favourite line from the book:
It was empty and silent, the only sound that curious subaural echo that seems to linger in all large rooms, from the largest cathedral to the smallest home-town bingo parlour.
Hotels are bigger than our houses, and often as big as palaces. There might be hundreds of other guests, or none. We can easily find ourselves alone on seemingly endless corridors, lined with endless doors. King, and Kubrick, mine these in-between spaces for all they’re worth.
A handcrafted photo manipulation duplicating a hotel corridor into infinity.
Neither the Overlook nor Daisy Johnson’s hotel are especially old buildings but both have managed to accumulate many ghosts in their short lives. A private house might have, say, twenty occupants in a hundred years, whereas even a small hotel could have that many people pass through in a single weekend. Many lives are overlaid there.
In Joanna Hogg’s film 2022 film The Eternal Daughter Tilda Swinton plays a woman staying at a country hotel out of season, surrounded by dense fog. She is accompanied by her elderly mother, also played by Swinton. It’s an unsettling, confusing film, which plays with ideas of time and memory – and what are ghosts if they’re not memories? We might visit the same hotel every year, or years apart, and feel that we’re picking up where we left off, stepping into another life, or other timestream.
Another feature of The Overlook as presented in the film of The Shining is that, like Hill House, it does not make sense as a coherent space. There are many analyses of the layout of The Overlook online, some treating these problems as ‘goofs’ or continuity errors, others acknowledging that they might contribute to our unease.
This gives us a link to the traditional English ghost story which was often quite capable of high weirdness.
In his tale ‘Number 13’ M.R. James gives us a hotel room that shrinks and expands as an impossible room next door appears and disappears during the night:
He started to go down to breakfast. Rather late, but Number 13 was later: here were his boots still outside his door—a gentleman’s boots. So then Number 13 was a man, not a woman. Just then he caught sight of the number on the door. It was 14. He thought he must have passed Number 13 without noticing it. Three stupid mistakes in twelve hours were too much for a methodical, accurate-minded man, so he turned back to make sure. The next number to 14 was number 12, his own room. There was no Number 13 at all.
A welcome you’ll never forget
We’re supposed to feel welcome in hotels; the industry is called ‘hospitality’. But in horror or weird fiction, they can be either cold, or positively hostile.
The Bates Motel from Robert Bloch’s Psycho, filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1960, is a famous example of a hotel that lures in guests, then devours them. There are peep holes, so no privacy, and the doors do not keep predators out of the rooms. The chambers of the Bates Motel are very unsafe spaces.
Robert Aickman’s 1975 story ‘The Hospice’ is about a travelling salesman who gets lost on country roads and checks into a country hotel. The events that occur during the course of his stay follow nightmare logic – and are, in fact, very much like some of my own recurring nightmares. He wants to leave, but can’t, with various obstacles placed in his way.
Are the guests there against their wills? Are some of them ghosts? Has there been a murder?
Aickman’s technique here, as usual, is to leave us asking questions, and to withhold answers.
His story also makes me wonder about the overlap between hotels and other bed-and-board institutions – hospitals, care homes, mental health care facilities, halfway houses, and prisons.
In 2025, of course, they also perform the role of refugee asylum facilities. They weren’t designed for this, and their guests are not on holiday. But that doesn’t stop mobs assailing them from outside, turning the hotel into a trap.
Hotels in my stories
I could easily write a hundred stories about hotels. As set out above, I often find discomfiting – even the most benign examples.
Why do Premier Inns have those weird purple-tinted Lovecraftian landscape prints on their walls? Who left that handwritten love letter in the drawer? What do the Gideons know that I don’t?
In practice, I restrain myself, and it’s only ‘Alice Li is Snowed Under’ in my collection Municipal Gothic that really explores this setting. It was inspired by the many years I spent doing too much travelling for work.
As I was, Alice is an earnest twentysomething trying to make a career in the Civil Service and, like me, she is an introvert who welcomes the loneliness of hotels – up to a point.
When the hotel becomes snowed in, she is forced to stop working, and to be alone with her own thoughts, and with a visitation that makes her confront an unresolved question. The blank, bland offers nowhere to hide.
There is also, however, a strange old country hotel in my retro folk horror story ‘The Night of the Fox’ and a truly horrible one-star dosshouse in ‘The Horns in the Earth’. Both are in my other collection Intervals of Darkness.
There’s also another story I’m working on inspired by a stay at a chain hotel in central London the night before an early train. There, I was kept awake by the sound of drilling during the night, which the manager insisted was not happening.
When all you want is to sleep, a malevolent hotel that insists on preventing that from happening is pretty close to the ultimate horror.
What happens when angry young men are more than angry? These three roughly contemporary books give us portraits of youths struggling with their own murderous instincts.
I came to The Furnished Room, Big Man and The Dead Beat one at a time after finding tatty old paperbacks in charity shops or roadside book swap boxes.
All three were written during a period of anxiety about juvenile delinquency and a simultaneous growth in popular discussion of psychopathy.
The term ‘psychopath’ was popularised in the 1940s and a slew of novels and movies from that point on portrayed a particularly chilling type of killer. Being outwardly in control, and even charming, they were able to walk and live among us.
Joseph Cotten’s Uncle Charlie in Alfred Hitchcock’s brilliant 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt is one example. Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley introduced us to the chameleonic Tom Ripley in 1955.
At the same time, young people were beginning to seem dangerously out of control, with motorbikes, switchblades, and a lack of respect for authority.
That’s the context in which the following three pulp paperbacks emerged.
Little boys to broken men
Big Man is the earliest, published in 1959. Its author was prolific novelist Evan Hunter, born Salvatore Lombino, and best known for a series of police procedural novels written under the name Ed McBain. He wrote this book as Richard Marsten and it reflects something of that sense of fractured personae.
It’s written from the point of view of Frankie, a young man living in poverty with an alcoholic mother, and drawn into petty crime by sheer boredom. Petty crime leads to organised crime where, after resisting, he embraces his true murderous self.
The 87th Precinct novels are set in an anonymised fantasy of New York where Manhattan is Isola, Queens is Bethtown, the river is the Harb, and so on. Big Man is set in New York proper, where Hunter grew up and which he knew at street level.
This authenticity shines through in his portrayal of the everyday lives of idle young men with no coin in their pockets and every reason to feel detached from the world. That Frankie’s best friend Jobbo has appalling body odour sets the tone: this is a world where sweat stinks.
These early chapters are similar in mood to The Incident, a 1967 film based on a 1963 TV play, about two young men who terrorise a New York City subway car. In both cases, the thesis is that the road to murder begins at robbery, and robbery comes as much from a need for something to do as from the urge to acquire.
For Frankie, the lure of organised crime isn’t so much money but also a sense of family, respect, and affection. The mob boss is a father figure – someone who tells Frankie he is a good boy and has value.
Even through Frankie’s unreliable narration we see, of course, that he is being preyed upon and manipulated. Through favours owed, debts incurred, steps taken from which there is no walking back, he is drawn away from society and becomes ever more tangled in a shadow world with its own values.
What really sets the book apart is Frankie’s relationship with his two lovers. Frankie is torn between two women – a sexually insatiable gangster’s moll who has been with the whole crew, and the nice neighbourhood girl who wants to start a family.
It is shocking when he shoots the former on the indirect order of his boss. It is absolutely devastating when he puts a bullet in the head of the second because she has become a hindrance to his career.
Hunter plays with our prejudices: promiscuous girls who get involved with criminals put themselves in the firing line, but nice girls who just want their boys to go straight? They deserve a happy ending.
By the end of the novel, Frankie has become a killing machine, like a soldier trained for combat. He follows orders and shoots when he’s told to shoot.
He is also cursed with the knowledge that if he can bring death to the others so swiftly and easily, then death can come to him the same way.
Robert Bloch’s The Dead Beat was published in 1960 and tells the story of another blank, murderous young man.
Larry Fox is a dead beat jazz pianist who finds a way to break out of the world of crime, prostitution and drugs and into the nice suburban home of a nice suburban family.
His great skill is being able to present as a good boy when it suits him – or maybe these are actually glimpses of the real Larry, or another Larry, battling Bad Larry for supremacy?
As Good Larry, he’s bashful, well-spoken and polite. He’s musically talented and has hopes to study composition at university. This is catnip for the middle class saviours who take him in and nurse him when they find him unconscious in the back of their car. Especially the women.
But Bad Larry plans to get revenge on his former accomplices in a robbery and will fuck, rob, drug and manipulate anyone who gets in his way, or can help him achieve his goal.
Bloch doesn’t expect the reader to read between the lines. He has his characters debate matters of juvenile delinquency and ‘the beatnik problem’ which gives him an excuse to insert chunks of his thesis into the text:
It all began with World War One, I suppose. Up until then, the traditional role of the young man in this country was that of an apprentice. In rural communities he started as a hired hand or helped his father on the farm. In the cities he entered business as a clerk or a messenger or an office boy. Youth accepted a subordinate position unquestioningly, even when the industrial era developed… War is the great glorifier of youth… Our economic leaders, through the media of advertising, assure us that it is the duty of everyone to appear young; to buy products which enhance the illusion of immaturity. Our books, magazines, motion pictures and television programs inform us, not too subtly, that romance and adventure are the exclusive property of young people between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. Nobody over that age ever falls in love or experiences anything of lasting significance, except for a few oddball characters thrown in for comedy relief.
Bloch was primarily a writer of horror stories and the scary idea in this story is that adults cannot tell good boys from bad ones. That nice young man your daughter is dating might be a hophead, a junkie, a pervert or a killer – better not let him in. Especially not if he reminds your wife of when she was young.
The kitchen sink killer
Crossing the Atlantic, Laura Del-Rivo’s The Furnished Room was published in 1961 and filmed as West 11 in 1963.
In many ways it sits alongside British social realist novels like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or, closer in tone and setting, Absolute Beginners. The difference is that Del-Rivo introduces a gun into the mix turning it into something like a crime novel, or one of Georges Simenon’s romans durs.
Joe Beckett is another semi-intellectual, but a reader rather than a musician. Like Larry Fox, he is capable of making himself presentable, as long as nobody gets close enough to notice the grubbiness of his shirt or smell his unwashed socks. To some people he reads as clever, almost an intellectual, although his drug-fuelled lectures don’t stand up to the scrutiny of really intelligent people.
As with the protagonists of many other British novels of the period, he is too full of fury to be constrained by the drudgery of a nine to five job, or by love and marriage. Unlike Arthur Seaton, however, he decides that committing a murder might fix the emptiness inside him.
Haunting the cafes and bedsits of West London, Joe meets a classic British type: the faux-military conman with a range of regimental ties to suit whichever story he is telling on any given day. Keen to inherit from an aged aunt, he draws Joe into a scheme apparently inspired by Strangers on a Train.
That standard crime plot isn’t where the excitement lies in this story, though. That’s in Joe’s battle with his own worst instincts. He has constant intrusive psychopathic, paedophilic and fascistic fantasies. Reading about Nazi concentration camps thrills him:
Beckett’s immediate reaction had been a burst of sadistic joy. He knew that if, at that precise moment, he had seen a woman prisoner with her arms yearning for a lost child, he would have kicked her in the face. The shooting of the new detachment had pleased his sense of order. They were damn nuisances, screaming and panicking like that. Shooting them was the only orderly thing to do. He loathed the prisoners for their ugliness, their suffering, and their lack of pride. The photographs of these degraded sufferers, squatting behind their barbed wire, had revolted him so much that he had thought it a pity that the whole lot hadn’t been gassed. He had preferred the photographs of the Nazi guards, who had at least looked clean and self-respecting.
This book in particular feels like a commentary on present day alt-right, manosphere and incel cultures.
All three books force us to inhabit the minds of boys who don’t know how to love, even if they sometimes get close.
Those are the moments when we want them to break through the barriers, to untangle the complex feelings that threaten to break through their anger, resentment and hatred.
But they can’t do it. So they reach for guns and point them at innocent people.
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla is a fascinating story. If nothing else it was published in 1872, long before Dracula, and was clearly a huge influence on Bram Stoker.
When the team at the Vampire Videos podcast invited me to join them as their guest on an episode my first challenge was to think of a vampire movie they hadn’t already covered.
Fortunately, I’ve developed a taste for the kinds of films you can only find in the depths of YouTube, which is where I found a 1989 episode of the US anthology series Nightmare Classics based on Carmilla.
It stars Jennifer Tilly as Carmilla and relocates the action from Styria in Eastern Europe to the American Deep South.
Here, though, I wanted to say a few words about Le Fanu’s original story which I suspect many readers of vampire fiction have overlooked for various reasons.
I first read Carmilla as a teenager during the vampire craze of the early 1990s, when kids at my comprehensive school in Somerset – even those who wouldn’t normally be seen dead with a book – were carrying around film tie-in editions of Dracula and Interview With a Vampire.
I read both, and saw both films, and wanted more, so when I was given the chance to choose a book for a school prize, I selected The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories edited by Alan Ryan.
What a treasure trove that book was, and is. I still have the same copy, its pages yellowing, wrapped in ‘protective film’ that is slowly eating it, with a slip on the flyleaf which tells me I won the Phillips Award for Academic Achievement in 1994.
As well as John Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ and Stoker’s own ‘Dracula’s Guest’ it contains the complete text of Carmilla, a novella at 70 or so pages.
I sometimes describe myself as Britain’s Most Uptight Man and I was even worse as a teenager. Carmilla, at that time more than 120 years’ old, still had the power to thrill and shock (me, at least). I was astonished by how modern it seemed with an intense sexuality and, specifically, what seemed to me in 1994 to be a clear and unambiguous portrayal of a lesbian relationship:
In silence, slowly we walked down to the drawbridge, where the beautiful landscape opened before us.
“And so you were thinking of the night I came here?” she almost whispered.
“Are you glad I came?”
“Delighted, dear Carmilla,” I answered.
“And you asked for the picture you think like me, to hang in your room,” she murmured with a sigh, as she drew her arm closer about my waist, and let her pretty head sink upon my shoulder. “How romantic you are, Carmilla,” I said. “Whenever you tell me your story, it will be made up chiefly of some one great romance.”
She kissed me silently.
“I am sure, Carmilla, you have been in love; that there is, at this moment, an affair of the heart going on.”
“I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless it should be with you.”
I’d like to pretend I had a sensitive, sophisticated response to this at the age of 16 but what I probably thought was “I’m confused, help!” and/or “Cor, girls kissing!”
Carmilla, I later learned, was the source for all of Hammer’s “Cor! Girls with their tops off!” vampire movies of the 1970s, their use of the name ‘Karnstein’ being the most obvious giveaway.
The Vampire Lovers from 1972, with Ingrid Pitt as Carmilla, is a fairly close adaptation of Le Fanu’s novella with all the flaws and compromises you might expect for a film of the time.
I don’t want to spoil the podcast but it’s fair to say the 1989 adaptation, though less exploitative, also has its flaws.
It would be great to see an adaptation of this story as lavish and careful as Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Robert Eggers’s recent version of Nosferatu.
There are themes in Carmilla that still resonate in 2025, not least the negative power of loneliness.
Laura is utterly isolation in a castle in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by stuffy old men and servants.
It is her desperation for a friend, for any kind of companionship, that makes her so vulnerable to Carmilla’s serial predation. Or, to put it another way, that makes her so ready to be liberated. Which is it?
I see in this uncomfortable tension some interesting echoes of online exploitation and catfishing.
That such contemporary parallels can be drawn is perhaps a sign that Carmilla has depth and value beyond it’s part in the genesis of Dracula, and beyond its undoubted erotic charge.
You can listen to the podcast at vampirevideos.co.uk or wherever you usually get podcasts. The full text of Carmilla is available online at Project Gutenberg and in The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories which you can buy used for buttons.
I’ve got a limited supply of paperback copies of both Municipal Gothic and Intervals of Darkness ready to ship to anyone in the UK who wants to buy one.
They’re £13 each including delivery in the UK, or you can get both for £25.
They’ve each got a selection of weird stories and ghost stories, with Intervals of Darkness being the more recent of the two collections.
“Impressively eerie and packed with shocks, Intervals of Darkness ushers the reader through 1970s grime and Gothic opulence, with moments of powerful poignancy and startling strangeness. You’ll want to linger over these stories.” – Verity Holloway
“Housing estates, factories, tower blocks and caravans, nowhere is safe from Ray Newman’s dark imagination. Existing somewhere between Robert Aickman and JG Ballard, these blackly funny tales are sure to chill you, no matter how high you turn the central heating. It’s every bit the equal of Municipal Gothic, and if anything it’s darker and stranger.” – John Grindrod
Contact me to sort out payment and delivery, and to let me know if you want the books signed or dedicated.
If we’re already connected, you probably know how to reach me, but otherwise…
I lived in Penzance in Cornwall for six years, including several stormy, boarded-up off-seasons. This story is about how that felt – and about the distinctly haunted landscape.
I used to observe the coming and going of people throughout the year, and the rhythms of the tourist industry. Repainting and repointing in the run up to Easter. And the general air of exhaustion in early autumn.
I was especially struck by how silent Mousehole seemed in the gaps between holidays, when the second homes and rental properties were empty.
On Scilly, in Marazion, and in various other places, I’d pick up interesting details about how things worked – like the chip shop owners who shut for the winter and disappeared to Florida.
Another influence, though not directly referenced, was the Solomon Browne disaster of 1981. When the Penlee lifeboat went out in a storm to save crew and passengers aboard the MV Union Star. Sixteen people died including eight lifeboatmen from Mousehole.
This tragedy suffused the village and the area. The old lifeboat house was a permanent memorial on the coast path and The Ship Inn has a plaque and photographs of the lifeboat crew. Children and relatives of crew members still live in the area.
This sadness offers a strange contrast to the Instagram-friendly lifestyles of people from ‘up country’ who only come down when there’s a reasonable chance the sun will be out.
I can’t claim to have totally sussed Cornwall in six years. I doubt you could do that in four centuries. But I learned enough to tell this small story.
A note on ‘granfer’
A couple of stories in this collection use the West Country word ‘granfer’ – that is, grandfather.
I’ve heard it used naturally and without affectation in both Cornwall and Bristol, hundreds of miles apart.
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 