Five Things #3

Another round up of five things that have caught my eye recently...

1. Unmanageable Spirits: a Look at Nadia Bulkin’s ‘Wish You Were Here' by S.P. Miskowski
On The Conqueror Weird (a site new to me, but looks a goodie), author S.P. Miskowski writes about Nadia Bulkin's fine story, 'Wish You Were Here' (which you can read, uh, here).

2. 'The Average Man Is Not Hard To Mystify' by Chloe N. Clark
Another Chloe N. Clark story and another accomplished tale, one that rewards several rereads. Despite it's short length, this one is bottomless.

3. 'Quiet Horror, Unquiet Horror, Disquieting Horror' by Paul St. John Mackintosh
A wide-ranging piece on the Ginger Nuts of Horror site about what is, and isn't, 'quiet horror'. Takes in Robert Aickman, Joyce Carol Oates and many others. I may not agree with everything the author says here, but it's still well worth reading and engaging with.

4. Electric Lit Interview: Victor LaValle
Fascinating interview with Victor LaValle, author of one of the best neo-Lovecraftian books around, The Ballad Of Black Tom. Here he talks about Lovecraft, the mutability of genres, and "imaginative illiteracy" and a whole load more.

5. 'Good Bones' by Maggie Smith
A poem that has been on my mind a lot since the recent terrorist attacks in Manchester & London, and the surge in voter turnout among the young denying the Tories a majority. You could make this place beautiful.

Some Recent Things

Some recent things:

I was asked to contribute to Mark West's Brit Horror Mixtape, where he invited a number of writers to write liner notes about their favourite British horror story. There some fantastic selections, plus some I've not read but which I mean to check out. My own selection was Ramsey Campbell's The End Of A Summer's Day. You can listen to the Mixtape here.

I reviewed S.P. Miskowski's excellent new chapbook Stag In Flight for This Is Horror.

And finally, thanks to Kit Power and Jim McLeod for this interview over on The Ginger Nuts Of Horror site; I spoke to Kit about Falling Over and the stories inside. Hope you enjoy.

2013 - Looking Back...

Advanced warning: this is a very much me-me-me post, although I will be taking the time to thank a few people who've helped make this year what it was.

So, 2013.

Obviously, the main event in terms of my own writing was the publication of Falling Over - a move away from self-publishing, Falling Over was released by the stupendous Infinity Plus. The reasons I wanted to try and get this book published by someone else were as much psychological as practical or monetary: for a long period of my adult life, although I was writing I did very little in regards to trying to get published, and the reason was simply I was scared to. I was afraid to find out what reaction my stories would get. And I don't think it can be good for you, psychologically, to have not done something in your life that you want to because of fear. So in 2013 I did it. (Thanks to Iain Rowan who gave me a valuable shove when I was dithering.) And I'm exceptionally pleased with how it turned out: the artwork by Keith Brooke is great (lots of people have told me how much they like it) and the reviews from readers and sites such as Amazing Stories, Dark Musings, and Horrifically Horrifying Horror have been uniformly positive. And just being published by a publisher like Infinity Plus seems to have got me some attention and invites to write stories for people, which is all to the good. So I was stupid to be scared after all (mind you, that fear wasn't 100% misplaced: I'm very glad some of my earliest stories have never seen the light of day!)

Falling Over has got a bit of love in people's 2013 round ups as well, garnering an 'honourable mention' in the short story collection of the year category on Dark Musings, and being picked as one of Martin Cosby's favourite books of the year on Stranger Designs. And The Shelter has also got a mention in Mark West's Fifth Annual Westies Awards, at No. 11 in his fiction reads of the year. What a star.

I met a lot of great people in 2013, both online and out in the wild at Edge-Lit 2 and Andromeda One. I'm not naturally the most outgoing of chaps when I'm with people I don't know, so going to these things alone is always slightly daunting, and I'd like to thank each and every person who was so friendly. In particular it was a real laugh hanging around with Phil Ambler, Mark West and Steve Harris/Byrne at Andromeda One, and with the Fox Spirit gang plus assorted hangers on (i.e. me) at Edge-Lit. It's a sign of how quickly friendships can develop between people with the same, slightly warped, interests that I'm already looking forward to hopefully catching up with people again next year, and meeting some new faces.

I had a fair few stories published in 2013; the two I'm most proud of probably being The Second Wish which featured in Supernatural Tales #23 (a magazine I've always really admired) and Calligraphy in the recently released anthology Little Visible Delight, where I'm alongside such cracking writers as Lynda E. Rucker and SP Miskowski. I also wrote a number of stories that have been accepted for publication that are due out next year; they're some of my best work, I think, and I can't wait to be allowed to tell you all about them...

As to 2014, well I'm currently pausing between drafts of a novella called Other People's Ghosts - this one is proving a sod to get the structure right for, but I'm sure I'll get there in the end. Between drafts on that I'm working on a story called Retro Night. It's about going out when you're young and invincible and think you can live forever... and going out when you're older and wiser and know that you won't.

And, tentatively, I'm starting to think about a third collection of short stories as well - working out which ones I have available would fit together thematically and trying out some hypothetical running orders... 

But enough navel-gazing - I hope everyone who reads this has a great festive period and a brilliant 2014. Have a drink on me. 

Cheers!

Reviews: A Horror Novella Special

Because I’m writing a horror novella at the moment, I've deliberately been reading a lot of horror fiction at that length recently (and, uh, Crime And Punishment). I've read far too many to review, so I was going to do a blog post on my five favourites. But then SP Miskowski had the nerve to release another brilliant book, so it's now my favourite six. 

I've not applied any strict criteria on what word length is a novella, I've just loosely applied it to anything in that grey-area between a short story and a novel. As I've already given away the name of one of the authors, I may as well start with:

Astoria - SP Miskowski
Astoria is a book in SP Miskowski's Skillute Cycle, which started with the impressive novel Knock Knock (Astoria works as a standalone tale though.) It takes as its starting point one of the incidents of Knock Knock, when Ethel Sanders flees her home town after her daughter's funeral, and is never mentioned again in that book - Astoria tells what happened to Ethel afterwards, and it might just be Miskowski's best work to date. It's a hauntingly ambiguous story of doubles and dream-like imagery - dreams as in what we wish for, as well as what wakes us at night. The ending immediately made me want to reread it all over again. I can't recommend this one highly enough, folks.

The Kill Crew – Joseph D’Lacey

Books about survivors of a zombe-esque apocalypse have, I know, been done to death. This, though, was really well crafted and went off in a different direction than you might expect. To give an example of how it stands out from its crowded sub-genre, the ‘zombies’ in this book are described like this: They stare at you and their eyes plead. They can't speak but they can wail. They can sob.... If you let them touch you they'll drag you away... and you'll come back mute save for your tears. There's a similar originality throughout this impressive novella, not just of plot but of tone.  I've not read any Joseph D’Lacey before, but on this showing I’ll be reading some more.

Sea Change – Iain Rowan

Genre-chameleon Iain Rowan turns his hand to a YA horror novella here, and in doing so produces yet another book that puts the rest of us to shame. A young boy arrives in a village on the Yorkshire coast, fleeing from a tragedy  at his school… and encounters something darker in the misty streets and caves there. The location and characters are beautifully detailed in Rowan’s readable yet evocative prose, and despite being ostensibly a YA book there’s a real sense of mounting tension, another Rowan trademark. Superb.

The Respectable Face Of Tyranny – Gary Fry

By coincidence, the title story of this collection of three novellas takes place on the same coastline as the Iain Rowan book above. It concerns a man ruined by the global recession, living in a caravan park on the Yorkshire coast with his teenage daughter, who starts to see strange things out the corner of his eye... There’s a distinctly Ramsey Campbell flavour here (no bad thing) and an ambitious attempt to juggle themes of economic and biological collapse. The other two novellas in this collection are equally impressive.

Children Of No One – Nicole Cushing

‘Dark fiction’ – it’s a term that’s casually chucked around nowadays, but this novella from Dark Fuse really deserves the term. Both literally – it concerns children living in a maze which is completely dark – and thematically. It’s an original concept too, with an original bad guy (part James Bond villain, part Samuel Beckett’s even stranger brother). There’s nothing supernatural here, and the story seemed to me to be about the crazy justifications people make for doing something evil. (Not sure about the phonetic English accent of one character though!) 

Let’s Drink To The Dead – Simon Bestwick

Three stories linked to Bestwick’s wonderful novel The Faceless, which regular readers will know was one of my favourites of last year. If you haven’t read The Faceless, start there. If you have, then this is a wonderful opportunity to revisit Bestwick’s grim, twisted world of haunted military hospitals, ‘spindly-men’, and real-world evil. Utterly compelling. I tried to pick a favourite of the three, and failed; damn you, Bestwick.