 I find myself trying to imagine the virus, imagine myself catching it, or imagine Grandad catching, imagine him dying from it. But it’s a kind of imagining that’s hard to sustain – it feels indulgent, like a fantasy, like a depressive’s daydream. ‘Underlying conditions’ – that’s the phrase which the news reports always mention when it comes to the deaths. We have no conditions in our household, unless you count Grandad’s dementia. And in any case the illness, as opposed to its social effects, remains unseen. When I watched the news this morning the reports were all of hospital exteriors, of dry soundbites from medical advisors conveyed via webcam. The figures in hospital beds, their faces obscured by ventilators, their limbs flapping weakly as they seize in panic – that is all left to the imagination. I have a new short story available to read.
'Grasshopper' was written in response to events in real time with me finishing it only a couple of weeks ago. It takes the form of a woman in a remote village writing a journal which documents the moments when coronavirus creeps first through the country, then into her community and finally into her family. Writing in this way - quickly, with ever-changing events informing the direction of the story - isn't usually my style but, like many other writers I know, I have found trying to think creatively with all of this swirling around me pretty much impossible. So it was cathartic to try to give voice to the anxieties I feel must have been fairly common over the past few months. Ordinarily, I would sit on a finished story like this for a while before putting it through the editorial process, trying to restructure the piece and smooth away the flaws. Clearly, in this instance the piece would lose some of its intended impact. My hope is that it feels authentic. This piece was commissioned by Greater Manchester Combined Authority for their Covid-19 archive of works documenting and responding to the times we've all found ourselves living through. You can read 'Grasshopper' here.
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‘My family were in this city before it was even a city. Pre-Industrial Revolution, you know? Manchester was just another backwater then – just a church, a couple of pubs and some houses by a river. My dad always says we can trace our family back to some bigshot from the 1500s, some important astrologer, used to talk to the angels and work out when all the lords and ladies should have their weddings. Then Queen Elizabeth died and talking to angels got him in trouble, so he got sent to Manchester as a kind of punishment.’  I have a new ghost story, titled ‘Lodestones’, coming out in This Dreaming Isle, a brand new collection of stories each of which takes a piece of British folklore and its location as its starting point.
At present, it often feels as though we’re all locked into a collective crisis of identity, with what it means to live in this country endlessly contested and squabbled over. What does it mean to be British? Does someone who happens on have been born here have more of a claim to the land they walk on than someone who happens to have been born elsewhere? Whose history is Britain’s history, whose values, whose culture? While the skirmish plays out – tilting further daily into ugliness and racism – the land itself remains, a repository for stories older than those who tell them, stories which survive via their telling, passed on from imagination to imagination, even while the lights begin to go out. ‘Lodestones’ pertains to Manchester, to its endless redevelopment and, dimly, to John Dee, the courtier, alchemist, scientist, theologian, alleged black magician and astrologer to the Queen, who moved to the city in 1596 and, by all accounts, had a bit of a shit time here. It also takes its title and some of its inspiration from ‘Loadstones’, a 2013 song by The Fall which I was listening to a lot while writing it. I was also learning to drive, and as such the story features quite a few descriptions of cars, roads and the correct use of gears. I am nothing if not a complex, mysterious writer. This Dreaming Isle features 'Lodestones' along with fourteen other stories by Alison Moore, Andrew Michael Hurley and the great Ramsey Campbell among others, all of which draw on history and landscape, touch on myth and legend, and look to the past, but also question who we are and what constitutes this ‘we’. The stories for the book are all written and the cover art is ready, but your help is still required. The authors, the artists, editors and the printers all deserve a fair wage. You can get yourself a copy of This Dreaming Isle while also doing your bit to support an independent publisher, Unsung Stories, via its Kickstarter. Here you will find various rewards, including the chance to pick up some of their 2018 titles, including Aliya Whiteley's new novella, The Loosening Skin, at a special price.
Something I missed earlier this year was the release of an episode of The Wandering Bard, a podcast on the topic of writing, travel, place and identity, in which myself and Jenn, my occasional collaborator with whom I wrote last year’s The Night Visitors, talk about the north, going on holiday, horror and the role of the artist post-Brexit.
You can listen to the whole thing here.
This is how he pisses now. Slumped back against the cistern, letting it drain from him. It is four in the morning.  Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, of hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind and moss'd cottage-trees bent with apples. But also the season of witches and ghosts, of clowns in sewers and the fabled sharknado. For the next couple of weeks, my ghost story ‘The Upstairs Room’ is available for you to read on Minor Literatures. ‘The Upstairs Room’, which I wrote about not so long ago here, will be included in the first edition of The Shadow Booth, a brand new journal of weird and eerie fiction, edited by the award-winning Dan Coxon. Drawing its inspiration from the likes of HP Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, and also Thomas Ligotti and (one of my favourites) Robert Aickman, The Shadow Booth explores the dark, murky territory between horror and literary fiction. But none of this can happen without you. The stories are already all written, the cover is designed, the baying readership awaits. All that is needed is for you to support the project by placing your order to get your copy in time for Christmas. You can read ‘The Upstairs Room’ here. And, more importantly, you can pledge your support and order a copy of The Shadow Booth here.  EDIT. The bad news: this story has now been taken down from the Minor Literatures site. The good: The Shadow Booth blasted its Kickstarter target and is now in the process of being printed, replete with ‘The Upstairs Room’. If you didn’t get a chance to pledge but still want to buy a copy of the book, I’m sure once it’s all wrapped up I’ll be mercilessly banging on about it, so stay tuned.
He has not put anything on the walls – no photographs, no artwork – and he lies there for a while staring at the bare white chimney-breast, and then into the dark space beside his head. He thinks about his life.  I’ve a new ghost story in Tales from the Shadow Booth, a brand new journal for weird, spooky and unclassifiable fiction which is currently crowdfunding its first issue on Kickstarter now.
From the Kickstarter page: Drawing its inspiration from the likes of Thomas Ligotti and Robert Aickman, as well as H. P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, The Shadow Booth explores that dark, murky territory between mainstream horror and literary fiction. From folk horror to alien gods, the journal aims to give voice to the strange and the unsettling in all its forms. This Kickstarter campaign is specifically aimed at launching the first issue of the journal, to be published later this year. The stories are already written and selected, the cover is designed. Now we simply need you, the readers, to show your interest by ordering a copy. My story is called ‘The Upstairs Room’ and is about a man in a house. I won’t say much more than that, not because I’m a secretive, reclusive oddball who clams up like Theon Greyjoy when required to talk about his work (although I am) but because there’s honestly not a whole lot more to the story than that. I know, I know, that premise sounds none too thrilling – a man in a house – but that’s pretty much the template for the golden age ghost story. MR James’s entire fiction output could be titled Various Men in Various Houses. Here’s the story behind this story. I’ve been working on ‘The Upstairs Room’, on and off, for about ten years. When I first started it I was living in Preston next door to an abandoned and gradually dilapidating house (you can read all about this woeful time in my life in a brief piece I’ve written for Gravy Mag - pre-order your copy now!) It often feels as though the buildings we surround ourselves with develop something approaching sentience and as though that sentience can outlast its inhabitants. Of course, this is a bit of silly and superstitious unscience, yet it endures because it has a resonance with that murky intersection where place, memory and the human imagination all converge. And that’s how I felt about the house next door, when I was awake late at night, that it was in some way cognisant, malignantly so. I couldn’t help myself from imagining what unspeakable aberration had befallen my absent neighbour, what celestial claw had emerged from the walls and swept him into oblivion. And so, to protect myself, I wrote a story. Over the years it’s picked up other themes and motifs: fractured masculinity, fatherhood, madness, toilets. It’s exciting to be having a story published in such a great new mag with such a formidably illustrious line-up. As well as the likes of me, there’s also contributions from people whose work I know and/or like: Gary Budden, Daniel Carpenter, David Hartley and many others. You can pre-order your copy here. There are various rewards available, including a bundle of books by the authors involved, among which you will find a signed copy of The Night Visitors. ‘So,’ Kim says, perching her sunglasses on her hat, removing the lens cap from her camera, ‘hang on a sec. You’re telling us these flowers are the same flowers which were here two hundred years ago? The same as when Shelley visited the island? The exact same flowers? Is that right?’  I’ve a new story on The Island Review. It’s called 'Kloya and Klik', and contains three of my favourite things to write about: holidays, bad dreams and ghosts.
A holiday is the setting. I love writing stories set on a holiday: LOVE it. Holidays immediately put your characters into an isolated and unfamiliar situation, pushing them to interact with other characters in more revealing, compelling and exposition-heavy ways than they realistically would in their day-to-day lives. And strange and awful things can happen to them without requiring too much in the way of explanation or structure. Basically, I’m quite a lazy short story writer and I love holiday settings because they do a lot of the work for me. Bad dreams are the source. I’ve always had bad dreams – or, rather, vivid dreams – although since becoming a father a couple of years ago I’ve found they’ve either tailed off or become less easy for me to recall in the mornings. As someone who likes to write stories with weird stuff going on in them you’d think I’d be keen to use these dreams, and I am but I find the opportunity to do so in a way which actually works pretty rare. If you’ve ever studied creative writing you’ve probably at some point been told to avoid writing dream scenes like the plague. Which is good advice: no matter how brief, dream sequences are almost always tedious. You’ll be no doubt relieved to hear dream sequences don’t actually feature in 'Kloya and Klik' but the story did have its origins in a dream I once had in which I was lost on a mountain and found a window embedded in the rock. And it’s a ghost story, or a ghost story of sorts. Although I tend to think of ghost stories as my home turf as a writer I often have trouble finding a place for them. They aren’t quite horror stories, but they’re also not quite not horror stories. So I’m thrilled to have ‘Kloya and Klik’ on The Island Review. As its name suggests, it publishes writing which is inspired by islands. Islands share something of an abstract kinship with ghosts, their anomalousness exerting a curious beaconlike power over the human imagination and, in the case of volcanic islands, reminding us that the past has the power to intrude on the present in the most violent way. Anyway. You can read the story here. |
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