"The triumph of Everington’s first novel is that, while hinting at lofty literary precedents, it cumulatively takes on an unsettling voice all of its own." The Guardian
Just a quick note to say that my story, Bad Memories, is included in Dark Lane Anthology Volume 2 from Dark Lane books, which is out now.
The book also features tales by Rebecca Lloyd, Tim Major, and Kelda Crich plus many others, so it is well worth a read. The interior and exterior artwork are both great as well.
Bad Memories is a slightly unusual story for me, being set in the future. Or at least, a version of the future. The future of the world outside the Other Room, perhaps? It's a story about the relationship between a psychiatrist and a patient with an unusual malady...
Dark Lane Anthology Volume 2 is available now (UK | US)
In other news, the final two parts of The Quarantined City should be out this month from Spectral Press - it will be interesting to see what people make of the whole thing...
The Other Room, fed up that Falling Over has been getting all the attention recently, has got up off its arse and got itself a new review:
"The horror here deals less with gore and more with the way people respond horrifically to negative or unconventional situations... I recommend you take the time to get lost in this book"
Should any of you be so inclined, The Other Room is now available as a paperback on Amazon (UK |US) and Createspace.
Those nice people at Red Adept Reviews summed up the book better than I could:
"The horror angle in the stories is almost always a metaphor for other things – loneliness, fear, isolation, regret. The word “haunting” really does double duty here... Beautifully written, evocative, masterful...what shines through these stories is the author’s love of language."
I've been reading Retromania, Simon Reynolds' brilliant take on why pop music and pop culture is so addicted to its own past - seemingly gone are the days of new genres springing up, of innovative, 'modernist' bands determined to create something new. Instead, 'originality' in pop seems to consist of combining or using old styles in new way: sampling, mashups, irony and juxtaposition. (Don't worry, we'll get to how this relates to books in a minute...)
Part of Reynolds' argument is that, ironically, the futuristic technology of today allows us to wallow in the past to an unprecedented degree: any album, any single, any b-side, any Peel-session, any unreleased song can probably be found on Youtube, or on a blog, or as a download (legal or otherwise). His description of the psychology behind such behaviour struck a chord:
You're stockpiling so many albums, live bootlegs and DJ sets that you never have time to unzip the files and play them... Only now am I getting around to deleting some of the stuff I downloaded.... Most collectors know deep-down that quantity is the enemy of quality... the more you amass the less intense relationship you have with a specific piece of music...
I too have a ton of music I've never listened to on my hard drive; paradoxically the most satisfying moment, the most therapeutic, is deleting some of it - spring cleaning, leaving the stuff I actually want to listen to. The songs that will actually be part of my life - the "intense relationship" as Reynolds describes it.
History repeats: since getting my Kindle I've also downloaded far too many books onto it that I know I'll never read: free issues of obscure magazines; classics from Gutenberg by authors I've read before and hate (hello Dickens!); some self-published drivel where even the first line is bad enough to send me howling to the hills...
The majority of this has been stuff I've downloaded for free; stuff I pay for I am more picky about. But is it really free? It takes about an hour to listen to an album; but it takes far longer than that to read a novel or a short story collection. And I'm a strong believer that a good book should be reread, too - that it should be part of your mental and imaginative life in the same way as a good song. I have hundreds of paperbacks and hardbacks downstairs, some still unread; I have many great books just waiting on my Kindle - I've discovered more new, exciting authors in the last few years than for a long time before, from diving into the the self/indie published world - so why exactly do I sometimes feel the urge to download something that looks vaguely okay just because it's free? Without wishing to show off I can afford books; I can certainly afford an ebook for less than three quid, so why should free matter?
There are too many great books in the world; I don't have time to read just 'okay' ones.
I suspect I'm not alone in feeling something like mental-indigestion when I contemplate the glut of books (and music) I've downloaded that I'm not even sure if I want to read: I'm not even sure where I got some of the book from, or who the author is. My own experience with giving away books indiscriminatingly for free on Amazon is that it doesn't seem to any real long term increase in sales of my other books. I suspect many people have just acted like I did when I first got my Kindle: free! free! books for free! And then months later wondering just what the hell this First Time Buyers thing is that's clogging up their Kindle, and their mental space - wondering why they ever downloaded it when they don't even like short stories, or horror fiction, or...
By contrast, the slow but steady increase in sales of The Shelter (in the UK at least) did seem to reach some kind of tipping point, leading into decent sales for the more expensive The Other Room too. In about the last four months The Shelter has sold about the same as First Time Buyers did for the few days it was free... but all the evidence is that a far, far higher proportion of those people read the book, and reviewed it, and told others about it, and bought my other books...
Reaching a large audience with a freebie can only go so far with books like mine, I think - the key thing is reaching the right readers, the ones who have similar tastes and passions as me. Certain authors are destined to only ever be cult favourites at best - and given that many of those authors are likely to be among my own influences, that probably should tell me something...
Anyway, enough self-absorbed and possibly incorrect rambling from me. Let's end with a song - a song about the future from back in the past:
(Just to prove Reynolds' point - this song is sixteen years old. Roughly the same span of time as from The (early) Beatles to The Sex Pistols. I'm sure playing I Wanna Hold Your Hand would have sounded anachronistic in 1976... but I heard The Universal on XFM the other day and it just merged into all the other songs around it.)
Almost exactly a year ago, I took my first bare-foot steps into the chilly waters of self-publishing, and released my collection The Other Room. Some of these stories had already been published in magazines, but most were new to the world. I honestly had no idea how the book would be received, either in terms of sales or reviews.
Fortunately, it's gone far, far better than I ever imagined. I mean, a book that cites Robert Aickman as an influence in its blurb is never going to be the next Twilight but by my own standards The Other Room has sold well, and the responses from readers from been both humbling and exciting. And at least one person let me know in an email that they bought it because of the Aickman reference.
And to celebrate, for the next week it is available for free from Smashwords, if you enter the following code at the checkout: QD54K. If you do pick up a copy, I'd love to know what you think of it.
And a year anniversary is an excellent time to start seriously thinking about what stories to include in a second collection, isn't it? You betcha.
Introducing a new weekly(ish) column... 'Strange Stories'.
When I released The Other Room I called it a collection of 'weird fiction' rather than horror stories. Weird fiction is a term that was first used with reference to fiction by the likes of Lovecraft and Machen, and has been used intermittently by writers ever since. It's a term which seems to have come into vogue again, especially with the publication of The Weird, a vast (and I do mean vast) new anthology which you do need to get. You do.
In a similar vein, Robert Aickman called his fiction 'strange stories' meaning much the same thing, I think - horror fiction that wasn't quite horror, ghost stories that didn't necessarily feature ghosts - weird, odd, strange, ghostly, uncanny fiction.
In this weekly feature I plan to talk about some of my favourite 'strange stories' (I also plan to open up the slot for some guest posts). Each post will be about a single story, whether short story, novella, or novel length (although a lot of the best of this kind of fiction has been done in the short story form).
But what distinguishes strange stories, or weird fiction, from normal tales of horror?
Well, for certain it's a sprawling and largely undefined tradition of writing, but one I feel very much a part of. I don't think it has rigid boundaries or borders; some authors write almost nothing but 'strange stories' and some more traditional horror or literary writers occasionally wander into its strange territory, and report back on what they find.
One of the key things that distinguishes this kind of writing, for me, is ambiguity (a topic I recently touched upon in a guest post on the Greyhart Press site). Maybe it's perverse to try and define 'ambiguity' to any great degree, but the kind of things I mean are:
Ambiguity of perception - how much of the story is real (in the context of the story) and how much is a product of the central character's distorted, confused perception?
Ambiguity of events - how certain can the reader be exactly what has happened?
Ambiguity of significance - how certain can the reader be of what the things that have happened mean? Both to the characters themselves, and symbolically?
Ambiguity of omission - do important details or emotional responses seem lacking from the story, stopping the reader make full sense of it?
Ambiguity of reality - does the story imply in some way that we can't trust our senses, and reality may be slightly or completely different to how we perceive it?
I'm sure there's more, and I'm sure I'll feature stories that don't seem to meet the above criteria, but the literary weirdness or strangeness I'm after is more a feeling than anything. I'll certainly aim to feature stories by writers such as Julio Cortazar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, T.E.D. Klein, and Algernon Blackwood. But first...
Next Week: Strange Stories #1. What Water Reveals by Adam Golaski
So it's been about a year since I became a published author.
I'm using the word 'published' in about the most minimal sense it can be used here - my short story Feed The Enemy was published as an ebook by Books To Go Now about a year ago, and another called Home Time was accepted by Morpheus Tales... and I was pleased obviously, but also wondering where I was going with this writing malarkey, given that I was cruising towards my 34th birthday.
And now I'm cruising towards my 35th. So forgive me, I'm in a retrospective mood...
In the last year I've concentrated on self-publishing at the expense of trying to break the more traditional markets, which I don't regret for a second. (I may also have concentrated on it at the expense of the actual writing too, which I do regret.) Like many writers I suffer from quite a lack of confidence in my own talent, and the fact that self-publishing The Other Room and The Shelter has allowed me to get my stories read by so many people so quickly, and that they actually seem to like it is probably the best thing that could happen to me at this stage in my writing 'career'. And whilst it's true I can't stand the MBS practised by some members of the self-publishing community, it's also true that I've met some very talented authors, many of whom have been generous with their time, advice, and just basic friendship. (You know who you are.) That's been great too.
I do hope to get another collection of short stories self-published next year - I have enough. But I also want to return to trying to get some stories published in magazines and the like. Aaron Polson recently wrote a post with a line that summed it up for me:"Rejection is your friend, folks. Really." And it is. I'm glad I had a few years of sending stories out and getting rejections to sharpen and hone me as a writer before self-publishing became a viable option. I don't want to get complacent - just because anything I can write will probably sell a few copies on Amazon doesn't meant that it should. There's a lot of crap being self-published and I don't want to add to that.
I've already had a couple of acceptances for stories for more traditional markets, although the lag between acceptance and actual publication can be slow. Which is why there will be another self-published collection next year - I don't want to lose any momentum I might have gained. But I don't want all my irons in the same fire either...
I'm resorting to cliche so I'd better shut up now. If you've actually read this far, then thanks. Here's to the next year...
Halloween is almost upon us, and that can only mean one thing - annoying teenagers who aren't even in costumes wanting money and sweets from me all week.
Oh no, two things: annoying teenagers and horror stories.
This post is about horror stories, and is my contribution to the Coffin Hop blog tour - if you check out their site you'll see all the authors involved, and the best thing is they're all giving prizes away. As am I... read on to find out more.
But anyway, horror stories; ones told around a camp fire by a group of kids, each trying to outdo each other, each swearing their story is true. Stories called things like The White Lady; The Killer In The Backseat... and The Hook.
And despite all the literary sophistication that we horror authors try to bring to their tales, I like to think at heart we're all just kids around that camp fire, each trying to make people believe that no, really, this actually did happen.
But sometimes the stories we tell say more about ourselves than we realise:.
Some Stories For Escapists #4: The Hook
- “OK, I’ve got one, I’ve got one. There’s this boy and girl right, and they’re going somewhere in this car to get off with each other, like The Drop right? And…”
- “That’s where my brother goes with his girlfriend, when Mum wouldn’t let him in the home with her after…”
- “Your brother aint got no girlfriend, he just goes up The Drop with a Razzle!”
[Laughter]
- “Right, so they’re up there and snogging and it’s all dark and he’s got his hands on her tits and the radio’s on and in between songs this guy says, the news guy, there’s been a break out from the local mental home, which is right near where they are. Some psycho's escaped, and instead of a hand right, he’s got this hook, real sharp, which he uses to kill his victims, rippin’ up their guts. That’s what the radio says, and they’re still snogging each other, but she’s scared now, typical girl, thinking the killer might be around. ‘Let’s go home,’ she says, ‘Get off me, I want to go home.’ He doesn’t want to but she keeps sayin’ it, ‘Get off, I’m scared, let’s go, get off me!’ So he eventually lets her go and speeds off, real fast cos he’s pissed off right. And when they get back they find, in the driver door handle, this ripped off hook…”
[They all stare into the camp fire]
- “Your brother really get her pregnant?”
- “Yeah. My parents gonna kill him!"
- “Didn't he use a johnny?”
- “Dunno.”
- “He shoulda done it to her when she had her period. You can’t get pregnant then.”
- “No, aint it after she’s had it?”
- “How would you know, you aint even kissed a girl!”
[They all pause and stare into the fire]
- “You don’t even know what a period is.”
- “I do, my sister told me!”
- “What is it then?”
[Pause]
- “I aint telling you lot!”
[Pause]
- “Do they really bleed? The first time you… Do they really bleed?”
[Pause]
- “My mum’s gonna kill him.”
Anyway, competition time. As regular readers will know, I've had some great guest bloggers on here to celebrate the art of the short story. And I think horror is one genre particularly well suited to short stories; I love reading good anthology of horror stories by a host of different and varied writers.
So the competition is to make up your ultimate Horror Story Anthology. For every one that contains some stories I love, or that are new to me but that I rush out and buy, I'll give that person a free download of my horror novella The Shelter. And for the one I judge the absolute best, I'll also give a free download of my collection The Other Room. (All entrants are also very welcome to a copy of First Time Buyers but as that's currently free anyway that's not much of a prize!)
The rules:
1. Leave a comment containing a list of the 5-10 stories that make up your anthology - you're favourite horror stories of all time
2. Any horror or horror-ish story welcome, as long as you didn't write it yourself
3. Anything from 100 to 15k words I'll consider a short story for the purposes of this competition
Good luck. And don't forget to check out the other authors on the Coffin Hop blog tour...!
I've made one of the tales from The Other Room available as a standalone story; it will available on Amazon as soon as possible. But as the idea is to put it out there for free (which on Amazon can be a s-l-o-w process) I'll just give you the Smashwords link for now, where it is already free:
If you check it out, I hope you enjoy it. Cover art and blurb below...
Kat and Alex move into a new house... but they're about to discover even new houses can be haunted. Outwardly confident and united, secretly they both harbour doubts about the economic situation, and each other. When Kat sees a pale figure in the mist fleeing from her behind their house, those doubts and fears are brought to light in a way both macabre and surreal.
Pleased to say that my story Red Route will be appearing in the forthcoming Dark Moon Digest Ghosts special edition. Not sure when it is out yet, but I think before Halloween sometime...
Do any of us stop to think as we get in the car that it's most likely the riskiest thing we'll do all day?
It's a slightly differently edited version to the one that appears in The Other Room, but probably not so you'd notice. It's like the different between this and this.
Starter: before we get going, you might want to check out this recent post on Alain Gomez's Book Brouhaha blog. It's a link to other blogs about short stories, so well worth checking out prior to reading this week's In Defence of Short Stories defence below.... One of the links is back to here so there's no excuse not to come back for the main course.
Main Course: today's guest, uh, chef is Michael A. Kozlowski, a horror writer, whose short stories are collected in the admirably titled Some Days Suck, Some Days Suck Worse
(Amazon UK | US, B&N, Smashwords). He also has some free stories for you to sample on this page of his site.
He's the first person to mention Jersey Shore while attempting to defend short stories, to the best of my knowledge.
Take it away Mike...
When I first saw
this whole “Defence of the Short Story” thing, I thought to myself (mainly
because I have not yet figured out how to instill my thoughts into other
people’s brains) that I needed to write one of these. So I asked James if I
could contribute and then I spent a few weeks starting and stopping and typing
and deleting and coming to the realization that I wasn’t sure just where the
hell I was going with this.
I’ve always
loved short stories; more than novels I would venture. I like the quick pace,
the bare bones, the grab you by the scruff off the neck, shake you around a bit
and discard you in a shaking, panting heap sort of thrill of the short story. I
like to read them and I like to write them.
As, primarily, a
horror writer, I am already assaulted with the idea that my genre is often
maligned and regularly dismissed as the sub-standard, red-headed stepchild of
the “literary” world. The fact that a lot of my work is in short story form which,
apparently, makes me the equivalent of a loud, stinky fart on a crowded bus; a
few people find me amusing but most…eh, not so much.
I will say that
I’m surprised the short story needs defending at all. In a society that has the
collective attention span of a fruit fly, you’d think short works would be all
the rage. That said, if you look at the way we’re drawn to disasters,
self-destructive celebrities and shows like Jersey Shore, you’d figure horror
would be a stellar market to be in. But let’s not blame the reader just yet.
For that, you can go back and look at the previous posts on this subject and
get all kinds of intelligent arguments and information from a number of clever
authors.
So just what am
I getting at? Well, for a guy who claims to write short stories, you’d think
that, whatever it is, I might be finding my way there by now. And I am…I think.
It’s not easy to
write a short story. It’s worth saying that it’s not easy to write a novel
either, at least one that’s worth reading, but we’re not talking about those
right now. You’ll often hear writers talking about “killing their darlings”
which is to say, cutting out all the bullshit. And you’ll hear them lament that
process as painful but necessary to produce a quality work. In a novel (Oh,
look! I guess we are talking about those a bit) that might mean cutting out
superfluous information or overly descriptive text or random, wandering
sub-plots that don’t really lend to the overall work. Maybe that 100,000 word
piece needs to be sliced down to 80,000 or 70,000. That can be quite a task.
Now imagine
taking that same story or plot idea (and I don’t mean to imply that every novel
could just as easily be a short story; this is for illustration purposes only)
and cutting it down to about 5000 words, which is about where you need to be
for most short story markets. There’s no room for anything extra in there. Yet,
when a short story works (and, as with any piece of art, they don’t always)
it’s so beautifully compact that nearly every word and moment sticks with you.
A short story
author has to be succinct. He or she has to grab your attention and give you a
great pay off all in a short little span of time. A short story might only be
as long as a typical novel’s space allotted for a singular character
development. Short stories are, in short, hard to write well. There are a
number of authors out there, many of whom have posted here before me, who
continue to accomplish it, but there are a great many that, I suspect, aren’t
very good at managing it. Rather than hone that skill, they revert back to
novel length work and use the demise of the short story as an excuse;
ironically contributing to that demise.
If the short
story is dying as an art form, it’s at least partially because there aren’t
many good artists out there.
They say that if you create a good piece of
literature, it will find a home. We could have another discussion about why
that may or may not be true but, regardless, it begins with the creation.
Pudding:nice little review of The Other Room over atNovel Opinion - despite the name, they obviously have good taste in short stories too...
I was talking to some of my non-reader friends in the pub the other night (non-readers are people too, apparently) and the somewhat boozy conversation got round to hobbies, and while I don't view it as a 'hobby' I told them about the stories I'd written. It was the first time I'd mentioned the subject to them, and they naturally asked what my stories were about. So I gave them a rough synopsis of the plot of my forthcoming novella The Shelter and a few stories from The Other Room...
"What? You write ghost stories?"
I was a bit taken aback by that shocked "you". Why shouldn't I write ghost stories? I asked what they meant by that comment, and amid the general beer-confusion I got the answer out of them: they wouldn't expect someone like me to believe in ghosts.
Well no. I wouldn't expect that of someone like me either. I can be pretty scathing toward people who believe in mumbo-jumbo, good-luck, or attributing significance to coincidental oddities. I can't stand people who argue by constructing straw-men or from conflicting premises (hello, internet discussion groups!). As well as fiction, my bookshelf comprises of non-fiction works of popular science, philosophy and logic...
So for the record: no, I don't believe that ghosts, or any of the other supernatural gubbins in my stories, actually exist.
I guess this a statement that only horror stories would routinely have to make. For realistic fiction, the question doesn't generally apply. For the other kinds of speculative fiction, fantasy and sci fi, the tendency is for the author to build a whole world - internally consistent but not mimetic. Horror is the only genre which generally strives to create a realistic view of the world, but then introduces a single unrealistic element into that world.
Neither of my drunken companions continued the conversation beyond this point, but if they'd been sober I suspect the natural next question would have been, "Okay, so why do you write ghost stories then, if you don't believe in such things?"
Good question.
There's a somewhat trite assumption that the creations and monsters of horror are just analogies for our real world fears - vampires = fear of sex; zombies = fear of plague; and so on. But I don't believe that equations apply to literature, or that the complexity of a great story can be reduced to a mere binary relationship with a small part of the real world. But removing the over-simplification, there's some truth to the idea that horror fiction plays on what we find disturbing, on things that we find creepy or just, somehow... wrong.
If I look back at the science and philosophy books I proudly displayed as evidence of my rationalism above, I find I'm fascinated by all sorts of oddities, paradoxes where logic seems a flimsy construction. Schordinger's Cat and Hempel's Ravens. Fascinated, and maybe just a little... scared.
And I find this same sense of rationality being more flimsy than we'd like to think in the best horror stories: in Call Of Cthulhu and the elder gods lurking out there somewhere; in The Turn of The Screw and the ambiguity of not knowing whether the ghost is real or not (by which I mean real in the context of the story); in stories as different as The Stand and The Summer People where society and its conventions are shown to be paper-thin; in stories by Ramsey Campbell where even descriptions of the mundane seem to convey a hazy sense of menace...
Capturing that feeling - that's why I write ghost stories. (And thinking up blog posts like this is why I drink beer with my non-reader friends in pubs.)
Am I alone in this - other horror authors, do you believe that the things you write about could actually exist? Or are your views like mine, or somewhere else entirely?
I'm delighted to announce that one of my stories from The Other Room, Red Route, is also now available in the second anthology from BestsellerBound. The anthology collects together ten short stories from ten authors, across all styles and genres. Best of all, it's available for free from Smashwords and hopefully soon from Amazon (UK | US) when they match the price.
And if that cover doesn't scream scary, literate horror, I don't know what does.
The BestsellerBound website itself is a message-board for readers and writers alike, and one that's very 'pro-writer' (to use a dreadful phrase). Some of the writers I've mentioned here before, such as Neil Schiller and Maria Savva, are regulars there. Any writers out there might want to check it out...
The always great Maria Savva has interviewed me about The Other Room over on her Goodreads blog.
And what's more, two lucky people who either leave a Comment or Like the interview will receive a free copy of The Other Room. If you lose on the lottery tonight (hopefully not in the Shirley Jackson sense) then you might find the odds somewhat less than a million to one for this give-away,
Check out the interview here, and don't forget to comment.
p.s. if anyone out there wants to check out my Goodreads profile and send me a friend request, feel free...
I'm sure it's very uncool to talk about Stephen King nowadays - the guys been too popular for too long now. There was a brief period when it seemed semi-fashionable in literary circles to praise him as being a 'natural storyteller' or some other patronising drivel, and to mention how he didn't just write horror, oh no. Which he doesn't, obviously; he's written children's books, crime novellas, coming of age stories, and whatever the hell we're supposed to call The Dark Tower series (meta-textual cowboy alternative-reality fantasy?) But liking King only for his non-horror work is a bit like being one of those people who only like Nirvana's acoustic album. Basically, you're missing the point.
But I get too excited about things I like to ever be considered cool, and I've reached an age now when I can cease worrying about that. I doubt my Dad ever seriously worried about it either.
But, if you like books; scratch that, if you love books, you might well find my Dad cool, in his own way. And you'd certain find what was called "the spare room" in my parent's house cool. Because it was full of books. It still is, ever month he seems to find a way to stuff more in. I suspect my Mum likes the fact he's now bought a Kindle purely because it might stop them having to take out a second mortgage just to store all his books. (And I've still got 100+ stored there too, besides the 500+ in my current house. Sorry Mum - one day I will take them away, I promise. And this time, I mean it.)
As a kid and young teenager I wanted to raid my Dad's book collection; rather than stopping me read his 'adult' books, he carefully recommend ones to me. At quite a young age I was reading a lot of his classic sci-fi: Asimov, Clarke and the like. I mean, a lot of it was over my head, but there was no real sex or violence in those books for my dad to worry about. Nothing scary.
But I exhausted those, and kept pestering him for other books, and one day when I was about fifteen he handed me this:
I'm sure not the only person who remember this cover; it certainly made an impression at the time - a stark image with only one small splash of colour, no writing at all, with an embossed face as black as the background it rises up from. What you can't tell from this picture is how the cover changed if you turned it in the light - at one angle the girl's face looked happy, at another blank. Depending on the light, she could look alive or dead. The image above really doesn't do it justice, but I think it's one of the greatest covers I've ever seen.
It is of course Salem's Lot by Stephen King.
I read it in about a day. And then I read Thinner I think (what a one to pick next!) and then Night Shift and then...
What impressed me at the time was how serious the writing seemed. Even writing about something like vampires, he treated them - and more importantly the people of Salem's Lot - seriously. (Not that Asimov & Co. weren't serious writers, I just wasn't at an age to appreciate it then.) It wasn't a dramatic epiphany or anything, just a gradual realisation that books were actually better, and deeper, and more important than even a book obsessed child like me had realised. I'm wary of people describing events as 'life-changing', but that moment when my Dad handed me Salem's Lot certainly seems like one to me. It seems to be the moment something started. To me, it seems like there's a chain of cause and effect from that moment, to the publication of The Other Room - and teasing you, I know my next book, The Shelter, certainly wouldn't have been written unless I'd discovered Stephen King at an early age...
So that's why Stephen King will always be a bit cool to me. But more importantly, so will my Dad.
Just a quickie posting today, before the main event tomorrow.
Firstly, I'm proud to say that The Other Room has been favourably review at Red Adept Reviews - I posted recently about MBS in the self-publishing scene, and Red Adept is one of the antidotes to that: objective, independent reviewers, who aren't afraid to put the boot in and forensically list all of a books faults if they think it's bad. Fortunately they gave The Other Room four stars, and it's a really perceptive and comprehensive review. It even made me think afresh about my book. You can check it out here.
Secondly, some other bloggage for you to check out:
Really interesting post and discussion on 'Bringing Horror Back' over at Alan Ryker's place. My post tomorrow will be expanding on some comments I posted over there.
And Iain Rowan has started some interesting 'Writers Talk About Writing' interviews over on his site, the most recent being with horror supremo Gary McMahon.
I have to admit (although I didn't at the time) I was apprehensive about releasing The Other Room earlier this month, far more so than when Feed The Enemy came out. With FTE I had a lot of internal excuses I could say to myself if it didn't sell well:
"Well it's just a standalone short story, and not many people buy those"
"It's not like the normal stuff I write, so it doesn't matter if it doesn't get good reviews"
"To be honest, I never liked the cover art..."
etcetera
None of these applied to The Other Room. It's my first full collection of fiction, and with the cheap initial price, the great cover photo by Neil Schiller I used for the art work, and the lessons I learnt promoting FTE, there were no excuses any more. Not that I'm expecting instant mega sales, I know enough to think that my fiction has cult appeal at best. Which is fine, some of the writers I like best are cults [insert your own pun here, if you're that way inclined]. But even cults have to start somewhere...
Fortunately, my nerves appear to have been misplaced (I spend half my life worrying about things that never happen). The Other Room has sold pretty well, on my terms, easily doubling Feed The Enemy's monthly best already. And the first reviews have been positive, including this one on Barry Skelhorn's blog. Obviously I have a lot of work to keep doing to promote it, but now I can stop worrying about it being a total disaster, and move on to worrying about something else...
Nevertheless, Feed The Enemy continues to live a life of its own out there on the internet, and I was recently interviewed about it as part of Dan Holloway's 'How Long is a Piece of Rope?' series on his blog. The concept is, Dan asks the same, somewhat unconventional, questions to all authors taking part. Take a look, and while you're over there do check out the rest of Dan's site because a) he's a great writer, and b) it's a great site, full of interviews, bits about Oxford, recipes & puzzles relating to his book.
Finally, a shout out to some good books by other indie authors I've been reading (links are to Amazon UK):
The Haiku Diary - Neil Schiller - It's that man again. I was sure I'd mentioned this on here before, but apparently I've only mentioned Oblivious. This is Neil's diary, in Haiku form. Insightful stuff huh?
The Little Girl In My Room - Clare Farrell - uneven collection of horror short stories. Some I really liked, others really needed something a bit extra. Worth the price for the good ones though.
When Cthulhu Met Atlach Nacha - Alan Ryker - what to say? A one-act play, which is a romantic comedy set around Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos... This was always going to be awful or great. Fortunately, it's the latter. Kudos!
I love music - songs are almost as good as stories, and if I had an atom of musical ability in my body I might even have gone further... but I haven't. If you think my writing is ham-fisted, you should have seen my teenage attempts to learn the guitar.
Songs, and the ideas and words from them, have always informed my writing - not in a conscious way necessarily, but just in the way that certain songs have sunk down deep into me, and will obviously bubble up now and again.
These are some of the obvious connections to songs in my writing, but I'm sure there's many buried in there. Click the links for youtubes...
Feed The Enemy - a great song by the under-valued Magazine (post-punk Manchester band, like a more sarcastic and witty Joy Division). Like all the best music, it sounds profound, but I've no idea what it's actually about. "No room to move, no room to doubt" - well quite. Source of the title for my stand-alone short story Feed The Enemy.
When The Walls Bend - a line from The Gloaming, by Radiohead. Amazing, but you already knew that. What you may not have known is that it's also the title for a story in my collection The Other Room available from all good booksellers. Well, Amazon.
Wilder - achingly beautiful song from The Boo Radleys. "Beautiful" is an over-used word when writing about music, but go and listen to this and tell me what else I could have said? I used a line from this ("maybe it's brighter down there, maybe it's wilder") as a heading for my as yet unpublished story 'Long Distance Relationships'.
Trying To Be So Quiet - "Aint it just like the night, to play tricks when we're trying to be so quiet..." C'mon, you know which song opens like that don't you? Surely you don't have to click the link to find out...? Title of yet unpublished ghost story; didn't make the grade for The Other Room.
I'm not one to use exclamation marks in post titles excessively (and multiple exclamation marks are a real no-no) but I feel justified here. (!) Because 'The Other Room' is out - a collection of twelve short stories for your e-reading pleasure. Here's the same cover image I've been posting a lot, along with some links:
The Other Room is a collection of weird horror fiction, containing twelve stories of the uncanny and the surreal. A naive student finds that his crumbling bedsit can be as haunted as any Gothic mansion. A man stumbles across another world which is the mirror image of his own. A young woman who everyone thinks is beautiful wonders why, given what she sees in the mirror each morning. Influenced by writers such as Ramsey Campbell, Shirley Jackson, and Robert Aickman these tales, like all good horror stories, are as much about the psychology of the protagonist as the fate that awaits them. The Other Room contains both new and previously published stories that will challenge your conceptions of horror and literary fiction.
This is an odd one. I wrote this at
university - one winter I got sick with some kind of flu, and barely left my
room for days. I took the kind of flu medicine that knocks you out for a bit
rather than cures you, and then when awake drank either coffee or whisky
depending on whether it looked light or dark outside my window.
Obviously whatever assignment or other
writing I had on at that point was halted, but when I recovered this was scrawled on my notepad. I
vaguely remember writing it. but those memories are tinted by the fever-like
quality of my illness.
All I've ever done to alter it is give
it a title; the whole story is mysterious to me and reading it back I get no
sense of having written it myself. Despite that, I've always found it the one
story of mine I can't form any objective opinion on. I'd be genuinely
interested in hearing what readers think of it.
I suppose a Freudian reading through
this would have a field day - I'd like to point out that my relationships with
my parents and brother are completely normal...
A Writer's Words
Yes, yes, I know the title is bad -
awful, pretentious, and trite. But I've never been able to think of a better
one. (I often struggle with titles - I can get all the way to the end of a
third draft of a story and still have
no idea what the damn thing should be called.)
Like The Other Room the inspiration for this one came from another minor
incident which I then took to its extreme. Like the main character I was on a
train when I became concerned it was the wrong one, and there was a note with
back-to-front writing stuck to the window. From that brief spasm of anxiety
(and it's always slightly nerve-wracking, using public transport for long
journeys) came this story.
Red Route
These Lincolnshire roads, with signs showing
the number of fatalities, are real. I guess this complements the previous
story, but this time it's about personal not public transport. Do any of us
stop to think as we get in the car that it's most likely the riskiest thing
we'll do all day?
When The Walls Bend
I've a tendency to over-think when I'm
writing, to believe that a story needs some kind of intellectual underpinning
before I can begin it. To compensate, I often force myself to write something
based on a simple, archetypal idea. Here I just wanted to write a haunted house
story.
I had to have some way in though, and
the idea for this story came when I wondered why so many haunted houses in
fiction were big, sprawling mansions owned by screwy upper-class people. Do the
rich really have a monopoly on the afterlife as well? I wanted my haunted house
to be small, cramped, and squalid. I also love ghosts stories which are as much
about the person being haunted as the ghost.
This was another story for which I
struggled finding a title; I was playing Radiohead's Hail To The Thief album constantly at the time, and eventually I
'borrowed' the title from a lyric from a track called The Gloaming.
I've always liked the last line of this
story, and it seemed an appropriate way to end the collection as a whole.
