Nightscript Vol. 3 Out Now

Nightscript is an annual anthology of the strange and the creepy edited by C.M. Muller, and although it's only in its third year it has already found it's own special place in the literary horror ecosystem (I loved the first two volumes).

So I'm especially pleased that Volume 3 contains my story 'The Affair', as well as stories from twenty-two other writers, including Simon Strantzas, David Surface, Adam Golaski, M.K. Anderson, Daniel Braum, Rebecca J. Allred, M.R. Cosby and Malcolm Devlin.

In my humble (and now biased) opinion, the world needs more anthologies like Nightscript, so I do hope you'll check out all three volumes.

Ebook (UK | US)
Paperback (UK | US)

A Lovely Blog Hop... with added Dinosaurs

I've been challenged by my friend and all round good egg Mark West to join in the Lovely Blog Hop to talk about some of the things that have shaped my life and my writing. The blog was started by romance writer Sue Moorcroft, and I particularly like the fact that via Mark she’s forced a whole load of horror writers to participate in something ‘lovely’. We’ll never live this one down…

At the end of this post, you’ll find links to some blogs and writers I like. The writers have all agreed to participate in and continue this Lovely Blog Hop.

First Memory

I’m not sure I trust ‘first memories’ as objective statements of fact; I suspect that what your subconscious choses to remember as your ‘first memory’ may say quite a lot about your personality. So with that in mind…

I remember a recurring dream I had when I was very young which I’ve never really got to the bottom of. I was in a garden; to one side was a brick wall and to the other climbing plants on a frame. Everything was hyper-real, the plants vividly green, the bricks bright orange in the sun. I walked forward and the wall and the plants seemed to close in on me, forming a corridor. It got narrower and narrower, so that I could feel the rough brick scratch against my face and smell the sap of the plants… (can you really feel and smell in dreams, or is this something my subconscious has added later?)

As I pressed forward through the corridor of plant and brick and the view suddenly opened up in front of me, and I could see the ocean. There was something about the enormity of the ocean in front of me after the confined space of the garden that seemed terrifying.

It was here where I’d wake up.

Books

I can’t really remember not enjoying books and reading. Books about dinosaurs were an early passion (see below) and I also remember as a child reading Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and a science fiction series about a space warrior who had every bone in his body replaced with metal. I remember being slightly older and reading Agatha Christie books from my Grandma’s bookshelves–this obsession ended abruptly when I got to the end of Dead Man’s Folly and I realised the final pages, including the one which said who the murderer was, were missing. My wife bought me a copy twenty years later so I could finally find out.

I had a lot of time to read as a teenager because my group of mates at that point all lived in the next village along, and so to arrange to see them involved some planning and effort. So at weekends and during the holidays I had a lot of time on my own to read (and later to write–see below). Which sounds sad and lonely but it wasn’t for a kid like me. My Dad had bookshelves crammed full of paperbacks so I was never short of something to read, and it was during these days that I discovered writers like Mervyn Peak, Asimov, Stephen King, Stoker, Mary Shelly… anything I could get my hands on really. It’s an odd thought, but I sometimes wonder if that simple fact that my friends all lived in the next village along had as much impact on my becoming a writer as anything else.

Libraries

I was constantly in the local library as a kid, especially in the summer holidays. Like many children I had a period when I was obsessed with dinosaurs and I was just leaving this obsession behind when I found a dinosaur book in the library that somehow I’d never seen before. When I took it to the desk it turned out it was an actual scientific book on palaeontology that had had been misfiled in the children’s section. I was so crestfallen that they said if my parents approved they’d give me an adult library card so I could take it out.

So from the age of twelve I had an adult library card. I was so proud. And as I moved into my teens, I found this offered other pleasures than merely dinosaur books…

As a student I always liked university libraries too (both that of my own university and the Bodelian Library), and the sense that they contained books about everything: toxicology, Peruvian harp music, dead languages, map making, Narnia, recipes, dinosaurs (obviously), nuclear war, magic swords… Like Borges’ infinite library, hidden in plan sight if we just know how to navigate the dusty aisles of books.

What’s Your Passion?

Books. My family. Books. My friends. Books. A fine curry. Books. Indian Pale Ales. Books. The Headington Shark. Books. The music of Bob Dylan. Books. Twin Peaks. Books. 

I secretly still like dinosaurs very much too.

Learning

I’ve always enjoyed learning–not necessarily learning stuff by rote, but learning new concepts and ideas. I studied Literature and Economics at university, and since then I’ve gone through phases of reading books about linguistics, game theory, cosmology, chess, the environment… 

And writing, of course, is a kind of learning. Which leads nicely into:

Writing

The first thing I can remember writing seriously was a piece of creative writing when I was in the final year of my GCSEs; I wrote a horror story after having recently discovered Stephen King. I can’t remember the plot of that first story, but I remember it had a sex scene in (and at sixteen I wasn’t following the ‘write what you know’ rule here…) because King’s books did. But I didn’t dare show it to my English teacher with that scene, so I wrote another story. This one I remember a bit more, although I wish I didn’t: a man had a transplant operation of some kind, which somehow caused the personality of whoever the organ had come from to inhabit his body. Don’t laugh, we all have to start somewhere. 

After GCSEs were over it was the summer holidays. As I said above, I had a lot of time to myself during school holidays. So somewhat bored one day I looked again at the first story I’d written and spotted a way to ‘improve’ it by rewriting it. So I did. 

And I’ve never really stopped since then, although there have been pauses. I studied Literature at university and I wrote a lot of different things as a student–some horror, but also realistic and experimental stories, some god-awful poetry, a kind of wannabe Martin Amis novel in the form of a self-help book. It took me awhile–by which I mean years–to understand that, whatever small talent I have for writing is more narrowly focussed than my reading tastes. But that’s fine. It was all useful, I think–all the failures, the dead-ends, the botch jobs–in learning how to be a writer. I recently recycled one line from that horrendously bad novel–one single line from 70k words that has always stuck with me–when I found its proper home seventeen years later in The Quarantined City, a serial that I’m writing for Spectral Press. The two pieces couldn’t be more different both in terms of genre and, hopefully, quality but as that sentence proves, they’re both me

Mark’s original post can be found here.

The writers I have nominated, for their sins, to continue this blog hop are:

Jasper Bark

Martin Cosby

Tracy Fahey

Dark Lane Anthology

Pleased to say that my story The Man Dogs Hated has been republished in the Dark Lane Anthology Volume 1 (it originally appeared in Falling Over). The anthology includes some fantastic authors, including M.R. Cosby, whose name regular readers of this blog will recognise...

It also includes some great interior illustrations, including one for my own story, which I'm particularly pleased about.

Dark Lane Anthology Volume 1 (UK | US)

Strange Story #21: Mortmain (Guest Post by MR Cosby)

Strange Story #21: Mortmain

Author: John 'Jack' Metcalfe

Collected In: Nightmare Jack & Other Tales

JE: Some time ago I was thinking about resurrecting the Strange Stories column with a series of guest posts. Unfortunately only one person ever actually completed a piece for me & so I forgot about the idea. Having just remembered that I never posted this piece by Martin Cosby I've posted it now... If anyone reading this has a strange story they'd like to write about on here, do get in touch. 

Martin's début collection, Dying Embers, is out now. So without further ado....

John Metcalfe, often known as 'Jack', lived a life as strange and enigmatic as many of his tales. Married to the manic-depressive novelist Evelyn Scott, they led an unlikely, globe-trotting and nomadic existence, until poverty and bad health intervened. Both their literary reputations declined over their years together; and after Evelyn's death, Metcalfe was left penniless and reliant upon the charity of friends until a fall led to his demise.

Nonetheless, in the midst of such a turbulent life he managed to write a number of novels which, despite critical acclaim and commercial success, have since disappeared without trace; and several collections of short stories, which almost managed the same fate. Luckily, Ash-Tree Press produced Nightmare Jack and other Stories in the late-1990s, thereby bringing his little-known short fiction back to print.

His best-known tale must be Nightmare Jack, famously judged by Robert Aickman to be "one of the finest supernatural tales in English literature", and included in his second Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1966). Of similar stature are the much-anthologised Brenner's Boy, The Double Admiral, and The Bad Lands. All are masterpieces of creeping dread, creating both disturbing imagery and a cumulative sense of unease.

Mortmain (first published in his collection Judas in 1931) is typical of his best work and is surely influential; it's not just the subject matter that recalls Elizabeth Jane Howard's Three Miles Up from two decades later.

It starts as it means to go on. "In the cabin the rescued girl Salome, now his wife, was washing up the plates from supper." This juxtaposition of the intriguing alongside the everyday sums up the story. John Temple is on a boating holiday with his new wife, the recently widowed Salome; and despite both their best intentions, shadows of her previous marriage loom ever larger as the trip progresses. To begin with, the spectre of Salome's late husband Humphrey Child is embodied by the house they shared. 

"It must have stood within his view a quarter of an hour before he noticed it. From Penny Mile they had come dropping through the windless evening with the falling tide, and it had crept upon him unawares."

They leave the house behind, and make their way along the river. On the face of it, nothing could be more relaxing and familiar than the peaceful, easy rhythm of nature on the Hampshire coast, so familiar to them both. In contrast with this, however, is the rising sense of unease created by repeated sightings of what may or may not be the ghost of Humphrey Child's boat; a 'prestidigitating, pestilential hulk'. At first Temple tries to ignore the apparition, half-seen on distant moorings, hoping that his wife has not noticed its brooding presence. However, he soon realises that despite it being impossible, it cannot be ignored; and that Salome has been seeing it too, in fact more frequently than he.

By this time Salome's health seems to be deteriorating and Temple's state of mind is worsening. Nonetheless, she insists upon them persevering with their trip, and during the second week the sightings of Child's boat increase in frequency, getting relentlessly closer. Then, the encounters with the moths begin; and there can be no denying they are venturing recklessly into the land of the dead. Indeed, Temple's realisation that Salome's cannot resist the lure of Child's attraction from beyond the grave comes far too late. Is it too late for Temple too? 

I won't spoil the ending, but suffice to say the climax of this story is a triumph of the ambiguous story form, and must also be a pretty early example of such. As with most of Metcalfe's work, Mortmain is graced with economical yet beautiful descriptions of the featured landscape, under which lurks a more forbidding and at times frightening side to the natural world. The power comes from when and how this nether world bubbles to the surface.

Dying Embers

Today's the release day for Dying Embers by M.R. Cosby, a collection of short stories which I've had the pleasure of reading pre-release, and the privilege of writing an introduction for.

And, picky bugger that I am, I certainly wouldn't write an introduction for just anyone. 

Fortunately this is a fine collection of weird, Aickmanesque weird fiction, which no doubt explains why it was snapped up by Satalyte Publising. Here's a brief extract from my intro:

Within these stories you’ll find people drawn into strange situations that they, and we, only partly understand. In nearly all cases the characters themselves are not to blame for what occurs; they are merely unfortunates who have slipped through the gaps in a ‘real world’ that is more porous and uncertain than they imagined. The same goes for the lucky reader, and it is important in this regard that Cosby seems only marginally interested in the traditional trappings of the horror story: the monsters, the restless dead, the slimy deities from another world. The lack of such predictable tropes makes the experience of reading these stories the more unpredictable; previous horror stories you might have read are no guide here.

Sales links and more information on Martin's site.

Should you need any more encouragement, I'll end by saying one of the stories even has dinosaurs in.

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?

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.