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Intervals of Darkness

Story-by-story: Night of the Fox

A medieval alleyway curving away into darkness.

The inspiration for this story should be pretty obvious: British films with titles that begin ‘Night of the…’

That is, Night of the Demon from 1957 and Night of the Eagle from 1962.

The hero of the story is pretty obviously based on Dana Andrews, Brian Donlevy, Macdonald Carey, and other American actors who washed up in Britain when their careers began to founder.

Lots of low-budget British B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s have American stars looking bleary-eyed and rumpled round the edges, taking whatever work they could get.

A minimalist 1960s film poster with a vicious looking eagle and a screaming woman.
A poster for 1962’s Night of the Eagle.

The story was also prompted by conversations with my pals Jamie Evans, Rory ffoulkes and Stephen Graves, at various points, about the extent to which folk horror is ‘played out’.

I wanted to have a go at writing a folk horror story which hit all the prescribed beats while also presenting some new images and ideas.

What are those prescribed beats? I don’t want to spoil the story but let’s just say that I think The Wicker Man is prime folk horror and Witchfinder General isn’t, really, despite its place in the canon.

Also in the mix were my memories of visits to Tewkesbury and Lübeck, which both have intriguing networks of alleys and courts – survivors of mediaeval street patterns. Tewkesbury also has its old Mythe Road – what a street name!

This story shares the name of its setting, Newhamstead, with another story in the collection, ‘British Chemicals’. As I said in the post about that piece, I’m not sure if they’re the same town or not. But I would be surprised if I don’t use the name again, when it feels right.

The idea of a village being absorbed into a post-war new town appealed to me because I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about new towns.

In 2017, I co-wrote a book about pubs under the name ‘Ray Bailey’ and spent time visiting places like Harlow and Stevenage. And I’ve written here about the uncanny potential of new towns.

Finally, I should also admit that a significant inspiration – almost the spark for the story – was an American on Twitter sharing their astonishment the first time they heard a British person say, completely in earnest while offering to pour tea: “Shall I be mother?”

What a weird country this is.

A quote from Thom Willis: "“You don’t know what you're getting next – Cronenberg in a dingy terrace, Tim Powers jumping at shadows, M.R. James in a piss-soaked alley. The canvas feels bigger than Municipal Gothic.” Next to it is the cover of the book with someone being stalked through a dark space by an unseen figure.

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

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Story-by-story: Second Homes

A seagull in flight over the sea.

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.

(See also: Bait, dir. Mark Jenkin, 2019.)

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.

I like it because it adds a bit of regional texture without doing the impenetrable Jarge Balsh thing.

In another story, however, I have ‘gramps’. One reason for that is that, as a kid in Somerset, I heard it used quite frequently – but never ‘granfer’.

The other quite weird reason for ‘gramps’ over ‘granfer’ I’ll reveal in a later post in this series.

A quote from Verity Holloway: "Impressively eerie and packed with shocks... moments of powerful poignancy and startling strangeness. You'll want to linger over these stories." Next to it is the cover of Intervals of Darkness with a black background and red details. The illustration is of a person casting a long shadow. Nearby is another shadow suggesting a lurking but hidden figure.

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

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books Intervals of Darkness

Story-by-story: Men Who Live in Caravans

A caravan parked in the corner of a field surrounded by trees and undergrowth.

The second story in Intervals of Darkness is unusual in that it’s not overtly supernatural – but it could have been, with a couple of tweaks, and is certainly, I think, weird.

It’s also one of the most personal, close-to-the-bone things I’ve ever written. In the sense that I sort of hoped my family wouldn’t read it.

It’s about a man who lives in a caravan on farmland, scraping a living with shift work.

This could describe more than one of my own late relatives, and several people my parents have known over the years, and several people I’ve encountered in pubs up and down the West Country.

The specific trigger – the thing that put it on my to-write list – was a particular caravan in a particular field. It was overgrown, tangled among branches, and green with moss. And yet there were signs that someone was living in it.

(That’s it above.)

I stared at it for a long time, took a photograph or two. Then I thought about an uncle who died in a caravan in the corner of a field, and was discovered by my dad when he went round with his regular care package one weekend.

With a few wrong turns, that could have been Dad, too. Or me.

But, fretting about class, I tied myself in knots over this for a while.

Did I have the right to tell this story?

Was it inherently snobbish or sneering?

Eventually, I had a word with myself. Who else was going to write it if not me? And if I wrote it plainly, sincerely, honestly, I’d be using my small amount of privilege in a useful way.

Still, at first, I wanted to do what I usually do and hide behind the safety of a spooky story. An early draft ended, predictably, with more overtly supernatural events.

But, as with a story not in this collection, ‘The Architects’, I pulled back and let weirdness be a seasoning, rather than the sauce.

Writing it was an emotional experience. I had to stop several times, overcome with feeling, and even pushed to tears.

The feedback I’ve had since it was published at Minor Literatures suggests that people took the story as intended.

A drainage channel alongside a narrow country lane. There are reeds at its banks and algae on its surface. The landscape is flat.
The Mark Yeo at Rooksbridge in Somerset.

On ‘reens’

The word ‘reens’ crops up quite often in my stories. That’s because I grew up in Somerset which is sliced all across with reens, or rhynes.

They’re drainage ditches – a human intervention in the landscape.

One near my parents’ house, the Mark Yeo, was created in the 13th century.

I find them romantic and mysterious in a very specific, unromantic, un-mysterious way.

Sometimes, they look like shimmering, infinite mirrors running towards distant hills.

And at other times, they’re full of beer cans and algae.

A quote from John Grindrod: "Existing somewhere between Robert Aickman and J.G. Ballard, these blackly funny tales are sure to chill you, no matter how high you turn the central heating." Next to it is the cover of Intervals of Darkness with a black background and red details. The illustration is of a person casting a long shadow. Nearby is another shadow suggesting a lurking but hidden figure.

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

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books Intervals of Darkness

Story-by-story: Poor Ned’s Head

A skull on display in a museum, on a plastic stand. The image has been treated to look like an old photographic plate.

The story that opens Intervals of Darkness is an example of magically frictionless fiction.

I saw a call for submissions on the theme of ‘water’ and then, only a little while later, visited the wreck of the Mary Rose in Portsmouth.

Being me, I was drawn to the cabinets filled with skulls found aboard the wreck. What must it feel like to be killed in action, lie in the mud for several hundred years, and then be put on display?

The facial reconstructions added another layer of weirdness. In curatorial terms, this is good interpretation. It helps civilians like me understand the past more clearly, in human terms. But all those disclaimers, and the careful choice of language… Those reconstructions are just informed guesswork, really. And they always look a bit… wrong. Talk about the uncanny valley.

My other half says that she likes being with me when an idea for a story strikes me. She recalls it happening very obviously on this museum visit – “Must find notebook… Must write down… Haunted skull… Eye to eye with… Must find notebook…”

Then I did something at which I’m worryingly good: quickly absorbed a bunch of writing about ships, sailing, and archaeology, and synthesised it into some plausible bullshit. It wouldn’t fool anyone who knows a lot about those subjects (I suspect Steve Toase might fling the book into a fire) but it’s enough to sell the story to most readers, I think.

Having successfully begged for an extended submission deadline I hammered out a first draft of the story in a couple of hours. And not much changed in the rewrite.

Maybe that impassioned drafting gave it a boost. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Verity Holloway, editor of Cloister Fox magazine, snapped it up – and she’s told me again since what a great story she believes it to be.

This was also the story that signalled a slight change of direction from Municipal Gothic. Not every story I write has to be set in those working class environments where I feel most at home.

It’s also the first time I’ve written a story intended to evoke Nigel Kneale. I was thinking about his particular niche – that intersection of technology and the spirit world, as in The Stone Tape – and wondered if and how a computer-generated model might become possessed.

The first review, from Rowan Lee, mentioned Nigel Kneale, though not in connection with this story, so that thread obviously runs throughout the collection.

Blooper reel

  • In the original draft of the story I had my ship, Faerie, sailing from Falmouth to Portsmouth, but sinking in Mount’s Bay. Revising it for Intervals of Darkness I thought, hold on, that doesn’t make sense… So now, she was bound for Kinsale instead.
  • The first draft of the story had the eyes as being in the ‘stern’ of the skull but it got fixed in the edit. Look, I told you I was blagging this.
A quote from Verity Holloway: "Impressively eerie and packed with shocks... moments of powerful poignancy and startling strangeness. You'll want to linger over these stories." Next to it is the cover of Intervals of Darkness with a black background and red details. The illustration is of a person casting a long shadow. Nearby is another shadow suggesting a lurking but hidden figure.

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

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Intervals of Darkness therapy

The self-loathing of the working class writer

A black and white image of a wall topped with barbed wire. There is a street sign for St Saviours Avenue.

I’d have been shy about calling myself a ‘working class writer’ a decade or so ago. Which is ridiculous, with hindsight – because what else am I?

The stories in my last collection, Municipal Gothic, and in my upcoming book, Intervals of Darkness, are mostly attempts to process my experiences as a working class kid.

But if that working class kid could hear me, a university graduate and professional, referring to myself in these terms, he’d be furious.

“How can you call yourself working class?” he’d ask, “with all your privileges and relative comfort in life?”

Back then, I thought being working class was a binary state.

I read and admired books by people like Alan Sillitoe but also hated them for moving to London, or France, and becoming part of the literary establishment.

How could they write about working class life when they weren’t living it?

I was an idiot, of course.

How would Sillitoe have found the time and energy to write if he also had to do night shifts on a production line, you know, to keep his hand in?

And how long did I think it took to become middle class? It’s not an overnight process.

What I came to realise is that you don’t ever really shed working classness. It’s baked in. It shapes your attitudes to life and your perspective on the world. In the negative sense, the scars are permanent.

For the first twenty years of my life, I was steeped in my working classness, even through four years at a not-very-working-class university.

Sure, I got a desk job, wore a suit, and stopped worrying quite so much about money – but working classness continued to affect my ability to connect with people, to get promoted, and to experience basic human happiness.

If I experience the slightest financial shock – an unexpected bill, for example – I completely flip out, and revert to being an anxious child. Even if, once I’ve taken a breath and counted to ten, I can easily afford to deal with it.

My dreams were, and often still are, set on council estates and in council houses. My stories always drifted back to those same settings – pubs, terraced houses, small towns, factories… Even if I wanted to write middle class fiction, I’m not sure I could.

The characters in my stories are often aspects of my late dad, his brothers, or my mum and her family, or of people I knew growing up.

And sometimes they’re versions of me. A clue to that is if the character in question is uptight, bewildered, and slightly detached from their surroundings.

What makes a working class writer? In my opinion, they’re someone with personal, first-hand experience of working class life. (Not someone whose grandfather was a miner.) And whose writing, consciously or otherwise, attempts to make sense of that experience.

Often, perhaps too often, that can feel limiting. What if you don’t want to write grim social realism? What if you don’t want to constantly confront your own experiences of poverty? Or, on the flipside, to feel obliged to write inspiring stories about the power of working class community.

Personally, I don’t want to be a Working Class Writer. I want to be a writer. I want to write what I want to write.

And I don’t want to agonise constantly about whether I’m presenting my working class characters with sufficient nobility, or making the right political arguments.

So, sometimes, I might get it ‘wrong’. But it’s not out of stupidity or ignorance, it’s because I’m battling my own subconscious, or attempting to exorcise a ghost of my own.

Intervals of Darkness will be published as an eBook and paperback on 7 September 2024. You can pre-order the eBook now.