Why I Sub-titled The Other Room a collection of “Weird Fiction”

Morning.

I should be doing some writing instead of being on the internet, but whilst the coffee is kicking in just a quick note to say that I am guesting on the lovely Vivienne Tuffnell's site today with a post called Why I Sub-titled The Other Room a collection of “Weird Fiction”.


Do check it out if you have time, as well as the rest of Viv's blog.

Now: writing.

Strange Stories #10. Dress Of White Silk by Richard Matheson

Strange Story #10:  Dress Of White Silk
Author: Richard Matheson

Collected In: Nightmare At 20,000 Feet: Horror Stories

Grandma locked me in my room and wont let me out. Because its happened she says. I guess I was bad.

This is my favourite Richard Matheson story. It is told from the point of view of a six year old locked up by her Grandma because she has been "bad." Over the course of the story we find out exactly how bad she has been...

Well, not exactly. That is we know by the end of the story something pretty terrible has happened to the narrator's best friend, Mary-Jane, but we aren't sure precisely what. More importantly, we are not quite sure who is to blame.

I've spoken a lot about ambiguity in this series, and here Matheson creates a whole ton of ambiguity simply by his choice of narrator - the little girl telling the story might know what has happened, but she can't fully express it, and certainly doesn't understand the full import of what has happened (in her eyes she has merely been bad). If the grandma had narrated this story it would be very different, because Grandma we feel would be able to tell us what "it" is that had happened, and what happened to the girl's mother, and whether the mother really was beautiful (as the narrator contends) or slightly... odd looking (as Mary Jane says). There's a similar argument between the two girls concerning the titular white dress itself:

And anyway its not a white dress its dirty and ugly she [Mary Jane] said 

If you Google this story you'll find plenty of anguished English Literature students saying things like "What does this story mean???" Is it a ghost story? A vampire story? Is it, in fact, a naturalistic account of a girl who idolises her dead mother and pretends she is somehow still under her influence when she turns violent against her friend? (It's perfectly possible to read this story as having no supernatural element at all - the grandma's cries of god help us its happened its happened simply meaning the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree...) Is it a witch story? A child demonic possession story?

All of these possible interpretations point to one thing: it's a strange story.

Next Week: Strange Stories #11. Not sure yet!

Crime and Puni.... More Crime

Regular readers of this blog will know the name Iain Rowan, and also that I rate him as one of the best new authors I've discovered in recent years. Excitingly his début novel One Of Us has just been released by Infinity Plus - it was Shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Début Dagger award. 

It's available now in paperback (US | UK edition coming in early April) and as an ebook (Amazon US | UK). I recommend you all go out and buy ten copies. 

Anna is one of the invisible people. She fled her own country when the police murdered her brother and her father, and now she serves your food, cleans your table, changes your bed, and keeps the secrets of her past well hidden.

When she used her medical school experience to treat a man with a gunshot wound, Anna thought it would be a way to a better life. Instead, it leads to a world of people trafficking, prostitution, murder and the biggest decision of Anna's life: how much is she prepared to give up to be one of us?  

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In other news, the Abominable Gentlemen are readying the latest issue of Penny Dreadnought for its entry into the world; it is to be called Uncommitted Crimes, after this quote from Theodor Adorno: Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

Strange Stories #9. Tell Me I'll See You Again by Dennis Etchison

Strange Story #9:  Tell Me I'll See You Again
Author: Dennis Etchison

Anthologised In: A Book Of Horrors

"This isn't a game."
"Sure it is. We used to play it last summer. Remember?"

I haven't read many stories by Dennis Etchison, but each one I have read has been good enough to make me question why that is. This particular story appeared in A Book Of Horrors, an excellent anthology of stories from which it would be tough to pick a favourite. Etchison's Tell Me I'll See You Again would be in the running though.

Despite the anthology's title, and the grinning skull on the cover I'm not sure this is a horror story though. I don't think 'strange stories' have to be (and the editor Stephen Jones obviously doesn't either). Tell Me I'll See You Again's main mood is one of elegiac melancholy, not horror.

In his comments on the story's inspiration in the book, Etchison says it came from remembering how he and his friends used to stage mock accidents at the side of the road, to freak out passing motorists. The story begins with Sherron and Vincent finding their friend David apparently hit by a truck:

"Not bad." Vincent walked around the crash scene. "I'll give you a seven."


Sherron doesn't score her friend's death; she acts as if it were real. In fact, as if David were dead. She taps his head against the pavement, and his eyes open again.

"I knew he was faking," Vincent said.


But it's not entirely certain who is faking, or what they are faking. The mysterious Sherron also seems to bring back to life a possum, and a dead cricket she put in her shirt pocket. But couldn't the cricket have been alive all the time, and aren't possums well know for playing, well, possum?

The story makes this explicit: Sherron is doing a school project on 'thanatosis' - animals playing dead for defence. It also emerges that David's brother and mother died in a traffic accident, on a trip he was supposed to be on, and that he has been having 'fake deaths' since... or so he and Sherron seem to believe. Can we trust a kid's version of what is happening? And actually, just who is telling this story? (An ambiguity Etchison says in his afterword is deliberate). The first line of the story is:

Say it happened like this:

Hardly the most reassuring opening if we want to be sure that yes, it did happen like this. (It shows how precise Etchison's prose is that just that first word of the sentence subtly changes it's effect on us.)

And then, at a point towards the end of the story, where most authors would offer some kind of explanation, Etchison pulls off the most remarkable trick - after spending most of the story describing events of a few hours at most, he suddenly covers years in just a few paragraphs. It's the literary equivalent of that jump-cut in 2001 A Space Odyssey. You'll end up reading these paragraphs a few times, as the ambiguities of the story seem to grow exponentially. Did David really suffer from fake deaths and come back to life? Did Sherron bring him back or was that coincidence? Was there ever really even a girl called Sherron? Who is telling this story, and why, and who to?

There's no answers, but Echison rewards you a final line which is so perfect and haunting that you'll not care a jot. And then, if you're anything like me, you'll go right back to the start and read this stunning again.

Next Week: Strange Stories #10. Dress Of White Silk by Richard Matheson

Creak

"It's 4am and somewhere, something has opened..."

Creak is a very short (5 mins) horror movie from Sincerely, Psychopath. Like a good horror short story, there's no fat on this one. It's well worth watching, it taps into that unease we all have (admit it) when you hear a strange noise in the house late at night. The one you know is just the house settling, but....

With thanks to the Hail Horrors, Hail blog for the tip off.

A quick note to say I am guesting on Eva Dolan's Loitering With Intent site today, with a post in her Criminal Classics series - basically some great writers (and me!) writing about books which feature crimes but which aren't necessarily 'crime fiction'

I take on Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived In The Castle.

I didn't have room in my word count to quote the opening paragraph, but it is one of my all time favourites, so here it is in all its spender:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live withmy sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenent, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead. 

Strange Stories #8. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Strange Story #8: The Yellow Wallpaper
Author: Charlotte Perkins 
Collected In: The Yellow Wallpaper And Other Stories
Anthologised In: many anthologies, including The Dark Descent 


I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before

Like many people (especially in the US I think) I studied this at school. It was public domain even back then, so the teacher knocked up some special copies for us - bloody self-publishers. We were told it was a classic piece of feminist literature (true); an expert expression of repression and madness (true); an ironic reversal of The Doll's House (true). What we weren't told is that it was a horror story.

I would have attributed this to the fussy, genre-phobic syllabus of English GCSE circa the mid-Nineties, if it wasn't for one thing: in doing some reading up on this story in preparation to write this piece (I do do preparation, despite any appearances to the contrary) I've encountered the same attitude. This isn't a horror story - no sir. No mere horror story; how can it be when it is a classic feminist examination of repression and male attitudes to female emotion?

I'm not quite sure I understand the argument, the either/or attitude. I guess there's still a viewpoint that some people have that calling something a piece of horror literature cheapens it somehow; somehow makes it have less of a serious point? But regardless of what some people think it is a horror story, as well as (not instead of) what they think it is.

As an example, consider these lines from the opening, describing the house the couple are moving into:

There is something queer about it... Else why should it be let so cheaply?

This is shortly after using the word haunted in connection to the house as well. It's not just a horror story opening, it's a classic, almost cliched horror story opening. One feels Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson were reading closely.

Then there's the narrator's obsessive description of the titular wallpaper itself: repellent; flamboyant; unclean; strangely faded; stripped off in great patterns and of the pattern in the wallpaper design: slanting waves of optic horror.

Hardly a world away from Lovecraft, is it?

Regardless, when I say it's one of the best 'strange stories' I've read, I'm certainly not intending it as a criticism or intended to dilute its feminist 'message' (for want of a better word). In fact that's partly why it's such a great horror story.

(I found loads of great images based on the story when looking for one for this piece - too many to chose from. Here's some more).

from an 1989 installation, "The Yellow Wallpaper" by artist Marlene Angeja.

From here



  

By Kate Beaton

Next Week: Strange Stories #9. Tell Me I'll See You Again by Dennis Etchison

Excuses, Excuses

No Strange Story this week; I've been struggling to find the time to read The Yellow Wallpaper, which is the next story I've chosen. I like to read them afresh so I can write something good rather than just some rehashed crap based on how I remember a story I last read years ago.

So what have I been doing? Well, working on a couple of guest blog posts, and trying to figure out what the hell a new story called The Man Dogs Hated was actually about. (Turns out its about conformity and the sacrifices we make to belong somewhere. And dogs.)

So in the absence of anything for me to actually write about, here's some cool stuff written by other people on the subject of horror or fiction this week:

• The ever-excellent Cate Gardner talks about horror, gingerbread men, and The Wizard of Oz in a guest posting on This Is Horror.

• Neil Schiller starts a new music-related flash fiction project, 7'' Stories on his blog. Warning: his post contains a link back to my blog, so don't get trapped in an infinite loop clicking between the two...

• There's an interesting discussion about the difference between Western And Asian horror films on the Hail Horrors, Hail site.

• And finally, Gary McMahon is interviewed about his latest books on Starburst. I really like his final few lines: "It’s always there, in the darkness – the darkness that’s inside us all, the darkness that awaits us when this crazy ride is over."

N.B. This blog post was written whilst listening to songs by: Pavement, Emmy The Great, and Daisy Chainsaw, as well as the proper 8 minute plus version of Stay Together by Suede.

"Hi, how's it going?"

Hi, and thanks for asking.

February has been a good month, I think:

• I had three new stories out in one form or another, bizarrely all on the same day: New Boy on the Dark River Press site; Haunted in 100 Horrors; and He in Penny Dreadnought: The Lone And Level Sands.

• I've submitted quite a few stories to magazines and anthologies and had one acceptance so far.

• I've written two new stories, and am currently struggling with a third that might be called The Man The Dogs Hated. Despite its short length I'm having a lot of trouble with this one.

• I got £90 of book tokens from work and was like a kid in a candy-shop for a good few hours in the local Waterstones.

• Sales of both The Other Room  and The Shelter were really good; I presume this is still the after-effect of so many e-readers being sold at Christmas, but during the odd optimistic moment I like to think it's because I'm actually an okay writer.

• I won a copy of The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.

So yes, not a bad month, all told. As to what comes next, I'm not sure. I have enough stories that I think are good enough to self-publish another collection straight away, if I wanted to. And given that sales of my other self-published books seem to be on an upwards path an the moment, the temptation to do this quickly is quite strong. 

But then I also worry that I need to be thinking long term, and getting as many stories out to as many different markets as possible, in order to build an audience the old-fashioned, slower way. And maybe I should be thinking of trying to get a second collection out via an independent press anyway, rather than all under my own, somewhat limited, steam. I'm honestly not sure at the moment.

But to end on a less self-absorbed, boring note, here's a song from the new Tindersticks album: