Tag: story by story

This is, I suppose, an example of working class, social realist body horror – a story about what tough work does to human flesh.

It started life as a passage in a novel I was working on which I used to describe, only half joking, as War & Peace on a council estate. Why should only aristocratic families get the dynastic epic treatment?

That book featured characters not based on members of my family, but certainly borrowing details of their biographies, and mannerisms, mixed up until they were no longer quite recognisable.

The specific incident that prompted this story, though, did involve my late father.

For a long stretch he worked nights as a lathe operator at a piston factory. He’d come home in the morning with curls of metal embedded in his fingers – like splinters, but worse. He or my mum would remove them before he could go to bed.

That also got me thinking about how my mum and aunties, and various women I worked with in factories, would eventually resign themselves to cropping their hair and trimming back their nails, to make factory work easier

‘Industrial Byproducts’ takes that process to its logical conclusion, perhaps also inspired by this amazing, or awful, advert from the 1980s which burned itself into my brain when I was a child:

I could tie myself in knots worrying about whether I’ve got all these details right, or whether they reveal some internalised snobbery, or whatever.

But if part of the point of writing is catharsis, and if we value honesty, I need to crush that urge to self censor. I need to let it, whatever it is, stream out.

The last lines of this story were painful to write. They’re even more painful to read back from the other side of the loss of my dad.

Catharsis. Honesty. Confronting the things that scare us most.

Intervals of Darkness, a collection of 14 weird stories, is out today as an eBook and paperback:

• UK eBook | UK paperback
• US eBook | US paperback

Funny story: I stole the title of this period horror story set in 19th century Milan from P.G. Wodehouse, who gave us ‘Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest’ in 1916.

For me, writing weird stories, or ghost stories, is often about an initial flare of inspiration, like the striking of a match.

When I saw the title of the Wodehouse story I thought: “Wow, that sounds like something from M.R. James or H.P. Lovecraft.”

I amused myself for a while by imagining how Jeeves might handle a haunting – “Perhaps you might invite one of your fellow members of the Drones Club, Mr Carnacki, to join us at Totleigh Towers, sir…”

Then, on holiday in Milan, the title popped up again and collided in my brain with a vague memory of The Aspern Papers by Henry James which I last read about 30 years ago, and the fantastic BBC film Schalcken the Painter, based on a story by Le Fanu.

Although most of my recent stories have had contemporary or post-war settings I’ve always enjoyed writing pastiche, and used to produce lots of faux-Edwardiana. So this was a slight departure, but not a major detour.

To get started, I found and devoured a slew of 19th century travel memoirs by British poets and writers, partly to train my brain on the prose style, and partly to, frankly, steal some of their descriptions of the historic city.

Having a narrator who is himself a stranger in town adds a degree of separation. If I get anything wrong, there’s his stupidity to blame.

Having ploughed through Byron at university, stanza after stanza, canto after canto, and Shelley as a teenager, I also enjoyed the challenge of writing some suitably bad poetry for my hero, James Lemuel Madin.

Again, it didn’t need to be good because he’s more Thomas Thorne from Ghosts than John Keats. Bumptious. Bigheaded. Convinced of his own brilliance.

Someone in my writing group read an early version of this story and said: “I don’t like him very much.” To which I’d say, correct. I don’t like him very much either.

That Madin’s best-known poem is an epic called Scholomance is (a) another point of connection between two of my stories and (b) adds another layer of Gothic spookiness, Scholomance being the mythical school of black magic mentioned in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Here’s the other story I’ve written that mentions Scholomance. There might be more to come.

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

I published this story here on the blog last December as part of my own emerging tradition of sharing a ghost story for Christmas.

It’s not really a ghost story, though, so much as a tale of horror, in a few ways.

First, it has more nasty physicality than I usually go for – more bone and blood.

And there’s actually a moment in the story that appalled me as I wrote it. Bloody hell, where did that come from?

The answer is, my subconscious, which I tried really hard to set free as I wrote all of these stories, but especially this one.

This story also came out of conversations with my friend Jamie Evans who is a fan of Rod Serling and often talks about the concept of ‘cosmic justice’.

His own excellent stories often follow this pattern: introduce us to someone truly awful, make clear that they deserve whatever they’re getting, then give the reader the satisfaction of watching them get it.

Then there’s the pleasure of subverting, or perverting, the idea Christmas. Many writers of weird fiction, and makers of horror movies, have explored this over the years, perhaps starting with Dickens.

Christmas is supposed to be a happy time of family gatherings, peace on earth, and goodwill to all men. When you lace it with alienation, violence, and monstrous creatures, the juxtaposition can be delightful.

Check out the early slasher movie Black Christmas or the 2010 film Rare Exports for more of that.

Another strain of real world horror is, of course, financial and social.

The narrator of this story knows more about their parents’ money problems than any child should, and is weary before their age. 

“It me”, as people used to say. I grew up poor and, as a child, was constantly aware of what we could and could not afford, and could tell when money was particularly tight.

So I used to do things like tearing up letters about school trips and throwing them away on the way home to avoid stressing my parents out.

I now realise, though, that I had one great privilege: parents who cared for and loved me, and upon whom I could rely. But there were plenty of children at school and on the estate who didn’t have that.

And there are plenty of kids in the city where I live who are dealing with neglectful, selfish or chaotic parents right now.

The lost illustration

One thing I’m a little sad not to have carried over to Intervals of Darkness is the illustration I drew to accompany this story when I first published it.

It’s quite cool, I think. I should probably get it framed and add it to my gallery of spooky art.

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

This is the shortest story in the collection and was inspired by a paragraph in The Valley, Elizabeth Clarke’s 1969 memoir of Welsh country life.

She describes the care with which the men of the village carry a coffin from a remote farmhouse to the chapel on the day of a funeral.

It’s poignant rather than horrifying but I read her book over a couple of bleak, misty days in an out-of-season coastal town where we’d gone to scatter some ashes.

On the train home, under heavy cloud, her brief account filtered through my subconscious and emerged as a first draft typed in some discomfort on a fold-down railway table.

As with other stories in this collection, its location shifted from the source to the West Country, and I had the landscape of the Mendip Hills in mind in particular.

The characters have names of people from school, from my estate, from war memorials, and from cemeteries.

I collect the names of the dead in a notebook for later use – a macabre habit in its own right. I also share them on BlueSky with the hashtag #CemeteryNames.

Like many of my nightmares (I’m a terrible one for nightmares) it’s about struggling to complete a task, or a journey, as the very ground beneath your feet slows you down, or trips you up.

It’s a very short story, so this is a very short blog post.

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

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

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

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

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

This is another story set largely on council estates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s often a burned out moped nearby.

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

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

Cake and eat it, me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many exorcisms do we need?

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the dream:

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

So I brought it closer to home, to Somerset.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somerset place names

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

In reality, Chidgey is Chedzoy and Muchney is Muchelney.

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

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

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