Thursday 27 March 2014

A nice double-bill review of both The Shelter and The Other Room on the Amazing Stories website today. Lots of nice things said, with especial praise for a few stories including A Writer's Words ("a very strong, terrifying piece of conceptual horror") and The Other Room itself ("an effective and unsettling nightmare").

Amazing Stories review.


Tuesday 25 March 2014

Recommendation: Ghostwriting by Eric Brown

Ghostwriting is a collection of stories by Eric Brown, who is normally a science-fiction writer. As the title suggests, this collection brings together Brown's occasional forays into the world of supernatural horror and the ghost story.
Ghostwriting
In his introduction, Brown wonders why an avowed rationalist like himself is occasionally drawn to such subject-matter (it's something I've written about in the context of my own stories in the post A Drunken Conversation About Ghost Stories). You can read his thoughts for yourself, but what struck me as interesting was how many of his characters in these stories echoed the same thoughts as they found themselves wrapped up in the irrational and supernatural; for example in the first story (the fabulous The Man Who Never Read Novels) the central character has this to say to the decidedly non-rationalist titular character he meets on a train:

“I'm a rationalist,” Russell said, “a believer in science. I'm also a novelist.”

And of course, the point where Russell says this is exactly at the point where the reader is beginning to doubt the rationality of this particular novelistic world; and at the point, too, where maybe Russell is beginning to doubt it himself... It's a sentence echoed by many of the other characters in these stories. And is it really that odd? Surely the irrational is more frightening for a believer in science, messing as it does with the very fulcrum of his or her beliefs? (Much as The Exorcist is presumably more frightening for a Christian reader.)

Regardless, Ghostwriting is a fine collection of stories, nearly all of which can be read in different ways - as explorations of characters haunted either by the supernatural or purely by their own mental demons. Particular favourites of mine were the aforementioned The Man Who Never Read Novels; Li Ketsuwan, a tale of compulsion and comeuppance set in Thailand; and the superb The Disciples Of Apollo, a story of someone who goes to a remote island facility after being diagnosed with a fatal disease, and which plays it's cards very close to its chest until its explosive last line... 

A strong and thought-provoking book, I wolfed this down during a single-train journey, and I am still thinking about many of the stories afterwards. Let's here it for the rationalist horror writers.


Ghostwriting is out now from Infinity Plus - sales links here.


Thursday 20 March 2014

Horror Fields and Amazing Stories

I'm pleased to say that my story, Across The Water, is out now in the Morpheus Tales Rural Horror Special - The Horror Fields. Mine is a jolly little tale about prejudice, strange insects, and lock-keeping.

There's some great authors featured, including Richard Farren Barber and Rosalie Parker, so I'm really looking forward to reading this one myself. The cover art is really cool too.

The Horror Fields is available now in paperback from Lulu and ebook from Smashwords, with Amazon coming soon.


Also, I've been interviewed by Gary Dalkin on the Amazing Stories website - one of the most enjoyable interviews I've done to date. You can read it here.

Monday 10 March 2014

My Writing Process


So, I've been tagged by MR Cosby (author of the forthcoming Dying Embers from Satalyte Publishing) in this Writing Process chain thingy. The idea is that I answer the following four questions on the same day as Martin's other chosen writer (
Mark Fuller Dillon) and then tag some other writers to continue the chain. So without further ado, the questions...

1) What am I working on?
A new collection of nightmare stories.I'm on the second draft of a new novella called Other People's Ghosts, which is about poltergeists and guilt and all sorts of dark and fun things like that... Structurally it's one of the most ambitious things I've written, because the timeline is deliberately non-chronological, and there's a lot of work and trial and error going into getting that right at the moment.

I'm also working on a short story called Premonition which is a bit of a Dorian Gray style-thing.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
God, that's a hard one to answer without sounding like a smug idiot. I'm not one to sing my own praises... I don't deliberately set out to write something 'different' or genre-bending, I think it's just a case of reading and thinking about as many books as I can (not limited to horror) and then just trying to write true to that and to my own experiences and beliefs. Weird fiction is a very personal type of writing, I think, because you rely on subconscious and non-logical judgements sometimes, so I think it's inevitable writer's personalities and sensibilities come through when they're writing. So in the sense that we're all individuals, originality comes for free. Of course this kind of 'originality' doesn't mean that it's necessarily any good...

3) Why do I write what I do?
I don't particularly feel like I have a choice, to be honest. The ideas for stories come to me - sometimes fully formed, more often a nebulous image or intriguing first line - and those are the stories I write. Of course there's conscious decision making after that, and I spend a lot of time thinking how horror fiction works and try and apply that to my work, but the initial moment of conception is pretty much spontaneous. Every time I've tried to force myself to write in a particular mode or genre, it's been a failure.

That's not to say that the initial moment of inspirations is completely beyond my control; for example I've been mulling over writing something novella-length for awhile and deliberately reading other people's work at that length before the ideas for Other People's Ghosts fell into place. So you you can try and 'hack' your subconscious. Invites and submission calls for themed anthologies work in the same kind of way.

4) How does my writing process work?
I think "process" is a rather grander word than whatever I do deserves. But usual it's a little something like this:

I mainly write all my first drafts by hand, because I prefer the speed and spontaneity, plus psychologically the words feel less fixed scribbled onto paper than neat on a screen, and so it helps me be ruthless when rewriting and editing. It forces a certain discipline because it means that every sentence gets rewritten and re-thought out. I might do a second handwritten draft to sort out the more structural problems, and then the third draft is where I type it up and fix all the sentence level stuff.

That said, neither of the two things I'm working on at the moment have followed that process at all! The above is probably my ideal process, each story deviates from it by varying amounts. 
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I'm supposed to pick three writers to keep this blog chain going, but as of yet I haven't and because I'm full of cold I don't think I'll manage to do so in time. So if you're a writer reading this and I like you (and if you read my blog then I do like you, automatically and without reservation) then feel free to take up the baton.

Saturday 8 March 2014

Recommendation: The Language of Dying by Sarah Pinborough


I’d heard a lot of good things about this book before I read it – so much so, in fact, that I wondered if it could possibly be as good as people said it was. Perversely, each glowing review I read moved this one further down my to-read pile, until last weekend when I finally decided to give it a go. After reading the first few pages, I realised something:

I’m a twat. It's brilliant.


So let me say first off that if you’re like me and have the same kind of grudging, disbelieving response to overwhelmingly positive reviews – don’t be a twat too. 
Especially as you’re about to read another review that sings this book's praises to high heaven and back round the yard again. 

The Language Of Dying is a novella with a simple plot: five siblings gather at the house of their dying father, and the bonds between them weaken as their father’s body slowly fails in the room upstairs. Meanwhile, the unnamed narrator of the tale is waiting anxiously for the reappearance of the a fabulous beast she has seen outside of the window on other occasions of stress and trial... It's a powerful, at times difficult read, that doesn't flinch from the realities of a slow, drawn-out death that, let's face it, we're far more likely to end up facing than the gruesome deaths of most horror or crime fiction.

The beauty of the story (and it is beautiful) lies in its telling; it’s one of those books where you read an amazingly crafted, punchy sentence and think that you must remember it, only to read an even better sentence a few lines down that makes you forget the first one, and then you forget that one as you read yet another beautiful sentence on the next page... and so on. As befits the title, this is a book about words as much as about death. About how our words die, too.

In the end, this is a book that pulls off that magic trick that only fiction can do: reminding us of the universal by telling us of the specific. Quite simply, one of the most best books I've ever read. 

Wednesday 5 March 2014

Thingamabobs

Thingamabob #1: I've been interviewed by the good chaps over at This Is Horror as part of their Meet The Writer feature. Ever wanted to know who I admire in the horror world or if I prefer gore or psychological chills? Probably not, but you can find out here anyway.

Thingamabob #2: Not to be outdone, over in The Horrifically Horrifying Horror site, there's an ace new review of the anthology Little Visible Delight which has some kind words about my story Calligraphy. 

Thingamabob #3: As I write this, I realise all over again how Belle And Sebastian were so very, very good back in the day, thanks to Shuffle. And it never hurts to be reminded of that fact:



Saturday 1 March 2014

"I found these stories horrifying, though they are not all strictly horror... I can’t promise these tales will scare you. But they sure as hell will disturb you. (Five stars out of five)"

Pleased as punch by this new review for Falling Over on Rabbit Hole Reviews.