Tag: story by story

Posts about the stories in my collection Intervals of Darkness

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

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date May 7, 2026
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The ninth story in my new collection Thin Places in Hard Concrete is about what happens when you read aloud the names on old headstones in your local cemetery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mechanics of the afterlife

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

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

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

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

A similar example from TV would be The Good Place.

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

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

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

A note on the title

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

You can buy Thin Places in Hard Concrete as an eBook or paperback from Amazon wherever you are. For starters, here’s where you’ll find it if you’re in the UK or US:

I’ve chosen not to apply digital rights management (DRM) to the eBook file so you can download it as an ePub file or PDF to read on whichever device you like, such as a Kobo.

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

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date May 1, 2026
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The fifth story in my new collection Thin Places in Hard Concrete is about a woman who doesn’t understand why on the site of St John the Baptist on the high street there now stands a temple to the cult of a horseman.

Not only is the temple there but it seems to have been there for more than a hundred years, and everyone around her seems to take this strange cult for granted.

It’s an alternate reality story was inspired by my visits to museums in Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia where various artefacts from the ancient world depicted images of the Thracian horseman. There was a cult of the Thracian horseman in the Balkans for about 500 years from the third century BC. Then, in the Christian era, the imagery of the rider was applied to depictions of St George and St Demetrius.

I was already fascinated by this, and pondering on whether there might be some folk horror potential in it, when something I saw in a museum in Bosnia gave me the final inspiration I needed.

Up to this point, the Balkan countries I’d visited tended to talk about the Ottoman period as a dark time when very little of cultural importance happened. They were on hold, waiting to be liberated. But in Bosnia, that narrative was flipped, and the Ottoman Empire brought light where there had been ignorance. In that context, a display of medieval Christian artefacts came with interpretation that said something like:

“Christianity was one of many cults that emerged in the Roman Empire.”

Now, I’m not religious, but I did grow up in a country and a culture shaped by Christianity, so this description momentarily startled me. Even though, of course, this is exactly the point that is also made in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

What if a different cult had risen to the top? And what if that cult was totally unlike Christianity? Would there still be harvest festivals and church coffee mornings and dancercise meetings in the hall on Wednesday mornings?

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

I think my favourite might be The Horseman, in which a woman is surprised to see the local church has been replaced with a temple to a strange new faith… except it’s not new, it’s clearly an old building, which everyone else remembers having always been there. So far, so Arkham City, but what elevates it is that rather than playing out like a grand cosmic horror narrative, the replacement faith operates with the same faint crapness as modern British Christianity, all Henry hoovers in the holy places, awkward attendance at occasional ceremonies to placate older relatives, and an air of cringe around anyone too thoroughly into it.

And, yes, that’s exactly what I wanted to achieve.

Re: that Henry hoover, by the way…

One thing I noticed when compiling the collection is that its protagonists are, on the whole, slightly less working class than in Municipal Gothic and Intervals of Darkness.

In this case, I found myself thinking of the slightly more well-to-do people from my home town who, while not posh, and still with Somerset accents, drove newer cars, played golf, and took holidays to Turkey or Spain every year.

They had management jobs at the cellophane factory, became councillors, wore blazers on special occasions and, of course, had a church that they sometimes went to.

Their vague commitment to Christianity was part of what made them respectable.

You can buy Thin Places in Hard Concrete as an eBook or paperback from Amazon wherever you are. For starters, here’s where you’ll find it if you’re in the UK or US:

I’ve chosen not to apply digital rights management (DRM) to the eBook file so you can download it as an ePub file or PDF to read on whichever device you like, such as a Kobo.

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4: Bruising the Scene – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date April 28, 2026
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The fourth story in my new collection Thin Places in Hard Concrete is about a wannabe street photographer standing in a backstreet in Brussels with that itchy feeling something isn’t quite right.

I’m not sure where this story came from, exactly. It might have started with the title, with its misleading whiff of body horror, or it might have been inspired by watching too much photography YouTube.

YouTube, in case you didn’t know, is full of channels run by people faking it until they make it in their chosen creative field. They’re obliged to talk with great authority, making bold declarations and shocking statements, because the algorithm likes that.

But it’s usually painfully clear that they’re not that confident about what they’re saying – especially when they do a video one year on called something like “Why I was totally wrong about…”

I’m also amazed at how often they give all sorts of advice about how to take great photos and then cut to a gallery of their pictures, accompanied by chilled out lo-fi beats, and every single image is totally unremarkable. Or even straight up terrible, if not quite in Brooklyn Beckham’s league.

I know, I know… If you follow me on BlueSky, and have previously followed me on Twitter and/or Instagram, you’ll have seen plenty of my own unremarkable photos. But you’ll notice that I don’t have the nerve to make how-tos and video essays about them.

Another thing about the try-hard YouTube street photographer is that they’re often incredibly privileged. Several of them seem to lead lives where they drift from city to city, country to country, hanging out in luxurious rental apartments with their beautiful friends. And then spend the day taking pictures of homeless people or market stall operators because, you know, humbling and authentic and so on and so forth.

Back to that title, though: it’s refers to how the obvious presence of a photographer begins to change people’s behaviour, thus compromising the naturalness of a situation. It’s a phrase attributed to Joel Meyerowitz who took photos like the one below.

SOURCE: joelmeyerowitz.com/street-photography

It’s a great example of the kind of picture Toby, my protagonist, would like to take and clearly the result of a practiced eye. Meyerowitz couldn’t have staged the two men dressed in yellow and red, echoing the colours of the traffic light next to them, but he sure as heck could wait until someone in yellow came along, and wait until the light turned red, and position himself to include the red phonebox and red-edged anti-littering poster at strategic points in the frame.

I am in awe of the bravery and confidence of the great street photographers – or, you might say, their arrogance and entitlement. But that’s a whole other debate. I’ve been challenged and shouted at when I wasn’t taking photos of people at all. Someone once pursued me over a mile because they were annoyed I’d taken a shot of an old sign on a factory building. I suppose what this story depicts is the ultimate fear that holds most of us back from taking photos of strangers: what if they really don’t like it and things turn nasty?

Why Brussels? Because it’s a city I’ve got to know fairly well over the years and, while I love it, it’s also somewhere I feel constantly on edge. It’s the only place, for example, where I’ve ever had a bona fide encounter with a pickpocket. It’s wild, chaotic and untidy. It can be beautifully photogenic, when it’s not terribly ugly. For all these reasons, it seemed like an interesting place to dump my anxious, unworldly protagonist.

You can order ‘Thin Places in Hard Concrete‘ now, with 10 brand new stories of everyday worlds weirdly out of whack: cults, ghosts, impossible infrastructure, haunted holiday apartments…

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3: Unreleased – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date April 26, 2026
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The third story in my new collection, Thin Places in Hard Concrete, is called ‘Unreleased’ and is about a haunted Mellotron tape bank.

It isn’t about The Beatles, exactly, but it is very clearly inspired by my reading of books and articles about them over the course of many years.

It’s funny that I sometimes think I’m not enough of a Beatles guy to consider myself A Beatles Guy. That’s despite the fact that my first (short) book was ABOUT THE BLOODY BEATLES.

In 2006, as a rather understimulated junior civil servant, I wrote 30,000 words about Revolver, based on extensive research. I published it online under a Creative Commons licence and it went somewhat viral after mentions at Boing Boing, in Rolling Stone and in The Sunday Times, among other places.

Then it got picked up by a publishing house that specialised in turning blogs into books. This was very exciting – I was going to be a published writer! The book got a cover design, got listed on Amazon, the publicity wheels started to turn… But the publisher got bought by a multinational and promptly dumped the project.

It badly needs an update, rewrite and edit – I’ve learned a lot about writing since 2006 – but it’s still worth a read if you want to grab the PDF.

The point is, though, like lots of people, I love The Beatles and think about them a lot, and for some time one strand of that thinking has been about how dark they could be at times. One little joke of mine from a few years ago was to choose alternate titles for Beatles songs that would make them sound much more miserable, using only actual lyrics from the songs in question.

The cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band includes occultist Aleister Crowley, horror writer Edgar Allan Poe, and Aubrey Beardsley who illustrated Poe among other macabre subjects. Stuart Sutcliffe, a former Beatle who died in 1962, also features, like a ghost haunting his old band. (In my story, serial killer Ed Gein is on the cover of an unnamed 1967 album, just to underline that this is not quite about The Beatles.)

Then there’s the whole conspiracy theory about Paul McCartney having died and been replaced by a double. Of course this didn’t originate with The Beatles but, as Ian McDonald points out in Revolution in the Head, they also couldn’t resist teasing people who inferred secret messages from their lyrics.

I’m fascinated, too, by the emphasis on mind-expanding near-death experiences in accounts of LSD use. John Lennon’s song ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is very much an attempt to evoke the sensation of an acid trip and contains multiple references to death and dying – the surrender to the void.

Which brings us to ‘The Beyond’, the unreleased song at the centre of my story.

The Beyond

Back in 2021 I was seized by the sudden need to realise an idea and, in a flurry of activity one evening after work, created a short ghost story in the form of a pastiche of Revolution in the Head.

You can read that here on the blog as a sort of teaser for ‘Unreleased’. It’s more explicitly about The Beatles than ‘Unreleased’ and was as much an exercise in capturing Ian McDonald’s voice (snarky, a little too sure of his own correctness) and the design of the book (fonts, layout) as it was a piece of storytelling.

The overlap between ghost story people and Beatles people is quite small, I think, so this didn’t exactly set the world alight. A couple of people did say, “Ho ho, very clever!” and Robin Allender talked about it on his podcast Your Own Personal Beatles.

The song it describes, ‘The Beyond’, is in my mind somewhere adjacent to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Carnival of Light’, ‘You Know My Name, Look Up The Number’ and ‘Revolution 9’. The title is, of course, borrowed from the 1981 Lucio Fulci film which seems to have lodged in my brain not as Italian exploitation gore but as a rare example of genuine nightmare logic weirdness on film. If anyone wants to have a go at recording a version, by the way, I’d love to hear it.

For the past five years, I’ve been trying to work out how to turn that snippet into a full story. There were several failed attempts including one that was told entirely in the form of found text. Some of that made it into the final version but not, for example, this:

Flyer for the New Church of the Power Station of God, 1966

Are you dissatisfied?

Life is a miracle, but being alive is a drag.

We spend energy every waking moment.

Soul vampires take energy from us.

However much we eat of the flesh, and of the bounty of the earth, we can never keep up: we are machines for producing shit, and ennui is the result.

But what if there were an infinite power source to which a chosen few might connect?

God has left us, for now, abandoning us to our atom bombs and holocausts – but the source of his power remains!

If only we have the courage to crowbar the door, cross the threshold, and seize control.

We need a coup. We need leaders. We need soldiers.

Telephone Chelsea 4831 to arrange a personal confessional with a counsellor and find your way to endless spiritual power!

There was also a version told mostly through posts and threads from early internet Beatles forums. This was great fun to write but, ultimately, probably wouldn’t have been much fun to read.

Releasing the unreleased

When you take five years to write a story, you have plenty of time to draw in new ideas. By the time I reached something like a final draft of ‘The Unreleased’ earlier this year I’d also been thinking, for example, about how the team managing The Beatles’ legacy has used artificial intelligence to clean up old film footage and create new mixes of old songs.

This all began with ‘Free as a Bird’ back in the 1990s which used a fluttering, degraded tape of Lennon singing to create a new Beatles single. I like the record partly because it sounds uncanny and ghostly, rather than sweetly nostalgic as I think was the aim.

Unofficially, there are also people using AI to make John Lennon sing songs he never sang, which I found profoundly disrespectful but, at the same time, weirdly fascinating.

This only compounded a feeling I’ve had for years that recorded music has an inherent uncanny quality. You’re telling me that we’ve captured the performances of long-dead people in such fidelity that we can hear them clearing their throats, blowing their noses and asking for cups of tea from the studio canteen? When a review of a remastered album says, “It’s like being there in the room,” I shudder slightly and wonder if they ever sensed our presence.

One final contribution to the story was reading about obsessive vinyl collectors, and observing them in the real world in record shops and charity shops around Bristol. A challenge I set myself for Thin Places in Hard Concrete was not to rely purely on nostalgia and period settings. That meant I needed to find contemporary characters and give them a reason to encounter the haunted tape bank. Obsessive collectors, and the people who are obliged to live with them, gave me the necessary angle.

You can order ‘Thin Places in Hard Concrete‘ now, with 10 brand new stories of everyday worlds weirdly out of whack: cults, ghosts, impossible infrastructure, haunted holiday apartments…

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2: Wolf in Exile – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date April 16, 2026
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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.

You can pre-order the eBook of Thin Places in Hard Concrete now and the paperback will be available to order from 23 April.

“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.”

David Collard

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Thin Places in Hard Concrete

1: The Interchange – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date April 15, 2026
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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.

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Intervals of Darkness

Story-by-story: Industrial Byproducts

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date September 7, 2024
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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.

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

UK eBook | UK paperback
US eBook | US paperback

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Intervals of Darkness

Story-by-story: The Unbidden Guest

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date September 6, 2024
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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.

A quote from Rowan Lee: "Newman returns to haunted Britain with fourteen more wonderful stories... Fans of folk horror and weird fiction will find a lot to love."

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

Tags Intervals of Darkness, story by story

Intervals of Darkness

Story-by-story: Winter Wonderland

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date September 6, 2024
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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.

My original illustration for ‘Winter Wonderland’.

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.

Tags Intervals of Darkness, story by story

Intervals of Darkness

Story-by-story: The Pallbearers

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date September 5, 2024
No Comments on Story-by-story: The Pallbearers

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.

Tags Intervals of Darkness, story by story