Recommendation: What They Find In The Woods by Gary Fry

Gary Fry's latest novella is released by Dark Minds Press today. Jammy sod that I am, I had the pleasure of reading What They Find In The Woods before its release. I've always liked Fry's work, so it wasn't hard to write some fulsome praise for a cover blurb; what I sent to Dark Minds after reading it was:

“Gary Fry’s What They Find In The Woods is a compelling, erudite and genuinely scary tale that combines deep-rooted folk horror with contemporary concerns. Subtle, clever, yet terrifying in its implications, it’s Fry at the top of his game. It might just be his best work yet.”

But here's a thing. Since writing those words, it's come to my attention that not everything in What They Find In The Woods is necessarily strictly fictional. Gary has posed a number of items on his Facebook page where the central character of the story, Donald Deere, is referenced in academic text books (Gary Fry is an academic himself) about working-class folklore and myths. He's also posted this video, about the story and some of the characters–should that be 'characters'?– in it. Make of it what you will.

It's all slightly unsettling, particularly coming after I'd read the story itself–it's like reality has retrofitted itself to Fry's creation, not the other way around. Odd. (I've had my own brush with fictional worlds and reality seeming to coexist, as those who've read the afterword to The Shelter and this post will know.)

Anyway, the novella is very good and you should buy it. Definitely. It's just... I'm not normally affected by these things, you know, but the stuff Gary has posted is very odd. Definitely buy it. But yeah... odd.

What They Find In The Woods (UK | US)

Bits & Bobs

A few bits and bobs of recent stuff:

American podcast Booked gave The Hyde Hotel a very positive review, as well as talking about hotel horror in general. You can listen to it here.

Forgot to mention this at the time, but over on Gingernuts Of Horror, the writer Kit Power picked The Shelter as one of his favourite reads of 2015, which I'm truly grateful for. "... a breathtaking piece of writing..." - cheers Kit.

Nina Allan was one of the participants on the panel I moderated at Fantasycon last year; she's expanded on her comments about diversity in the horror genre (which we only touched upon lightly on the day, unfortunately) in this essay on Strange Horizons. It's very stimulating well worth a read, not only for Allan's thoughts on the topic but also her recommendations of books and authors, some of whom are new to me.

Lastly, Des Lewis is conducting one of famed real-time reviews on my collection Falling Over as we speak, and I'm delighted at the things he's had to say about the stories he's read so far. If you've never read any of these utterly unique and idiosyncratic reviews, you might want to spend some time checking out the whole site.

The Shelter reviewed at Strange Tales...

"A wonderful exploration of powerful, quiet horror..."

Many thanks to Mark West for this review of The Shelter over on his Strange Tales site. Mark's a writer who, whenever he recommends a book I take note, so this review was especially pleasing...

England Made Me

So, the always-excellent Vivienne Tuffnell invited me to participate in another of these author-blog-questions-pass-it-on-thingys. And as it's Viv, who was lovely enough to publish my ramblings about Weird Fiction, I've taken part.

Q: where were your born and where do you live now?

I live in Nottingham, a few miles out from the city centre. I was born in a village called Cotgrave, which you can just see if you zoom in on the map. If you move your finger left from there, you're at the place where The Shelter is/was - unless it only exists in my head (see the Afterword in that book).

I also lived in Oxford for three years.

Q: Have you always lived and worked in Britain or are you based elsewhere?

Always in Britain. England made me, essentially, despite what I think about a lot of the people and politics and whatnot here. It might be lurching evermore right-wing, but the beer's still good.

Q: Have you highlighted or showcased any particular part of Britain in your books, a town, a city, a county, a monument, well-known place or event?

A lot of my stories take place in an unnamed and unspecified (although still obviously English) city. However there's a few where real places have formed the basis for them. Red Route is set on a very specific stretch of road in Lincolnshire - the red route signs showing the numbers of deaths are real. And Home Time is very much about the differences the character sees between living in a village in Nottinghamshire and living in the almost dream-like city of Oxford. 

Q: Tell us about one of your recent books...

I'm not sure any of them qualify as recent any more, so I'll just mention again that my next book, Falling Over, will be out in the summer from Infinity Plus.

Q: What are you currently working on?

I'm doing the formatting for a print-version of The Other Room as well as writing the first draft of a short story about someone alone in a lock-keeper's cottage. That character is sums up all I dislike about a certain kind of British (well, English) petty, immigrant-bashing nationalism, actually. The story's not finished yet, but he'll get his comeuppance, I think...

Q: How do you spend your leisure time?
This is like that last question on a job application that I never know how to answer... Reading, obviously - lots of reading. Listening to music. Cooking curries. Not doing as much swimming and exercise as I should. 

Q: Do you write for a local audience or a global audience?

Neither, I don't think. I reckon it's more a global niche audience - that's the great thing about the internet, you can reach the people who have similar cult tastes to you no matter where they are. That said, I guess the stories do contain various British references, slang-words, spellings etc. so readers need to be at least open to that. But my readers are cool, so that's never been a problem.

On Ambiguous Endings

So, The Shelter. It’s generally got very positive reviews, but recently a couple of stinkers have trickled in. Which is just one of those things, obviously – don’t worry, this isn't going to be one of those posts where a minor author no one's ever heard of has a massive sweary breakdown just because they got a one-star review. But I do read all the reviews I get and I did think there was a certain common factor that both these two were complaining about:

“It didn't say much about [the] being in the shelter. I didn't think it was a horror story more a book about things playing with a boys mind.”

“You never find out what's down there or even get a description. !!”

I think these reviewers were expecting a more traditional horror story, with an ending where Alan Dean confronts the thingymabob in the shelter, finds out what it is, and defeats it, somehow. 

Well, The Shelter was never going to be that kind of story - as you’ll know if you've read the afterword, I conceived of it over fifteen years ago and whilst much has changed between then and the final draft, the ending has always been the same. So I'm relatively relaxed about those reviews as they relate to the story itself (although arguably my blurb needs to make it clearer what kind of book this actually is).

What it seems these reviewers are both complaining about, when you get down to it, is ambiguity. I've spoke a lot about ambiguity in the Strange Stories feature on this blog and generally praised it as something that distinguishes a good weird fiction story from an average one. I've mentioned different kinds of ambiguity, from not fully revealing the ‘monster’ (“You never find out what's down there!”) to ambiguity of perception (“more a book about things playing with a boys mind” – I love that angle on the The Shelter, actually).

But it’s an unfortunate fact that, whilst I believe such ambiguity is crucial to a certain type of horror fiction, it isn't very commercial. At all. From a commercial fiction point of view, the story of The Shelter might appear to be literally unfinished – what happens when Alan goes back? Does he find out what is down there? Does he defeat it? You're not telling me the whole story, godamnit! There’s nothing wrong with stories with that type of traditional structure, and I enjoy reading them if they’re well written, but as a writer my main interests are elsewhere. (This perceived need for narrative closure in commercial fiction probably goes a long way to explaining the commercial superiority of the novel over the short story and novella, but that’s another post.)

But, crucially, ambiguity doesn't mean arbitrary. I didn't stop the story of The Shelter at a random point just to be annoying or because my writer's cramp was flaring up. It stopped at the point where there was nothing more to say about Alan Dean’s flight from his past. He has finally decided to go back. I'm sure we've all been in situations where we've agonised over an important decision and then, once we've made it immediately felt better just because the decision has been made. The result of that decision almost doesn't matter that much. One way or another the die is cast, and we feel better for it.

That was the kind of closure I was going for with the story of Alan Dean. From that perspective, the ending isn't ambiguous at all. It ends at exactly that point where the central character's mental dilemma is resolved. In fact I'd go one further: continuing the story would have introduced more ambiguity, because whatever happened would have inevitably cast doubt on the rightness or otherwise of Alan's decision...

Maybe there are no truly unambiguous endings. Maybe, like life, all the author can do is trade off one set of ambiguities against another.

The Shelter (UK | US)

Big thanks to Kayleigh Murphey from the Hail Horrors, Hail website for this rather splendid review of The Shelter.

"...the book manages to balance that precarious line between real and supernatural horror. The story is, for the most part, grounded in the real, but there is that ever present "what if"  that you simply can't ignore."

...click; click; click...

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.)

One Year(ish) On...

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...

Other Internet Pages Are Available

Some dark corners of the internet I've stumbled upon recently:

Firstly I'm loving the flash-fiction found on Maps Of The Lost - no idea who it is writing; there's no clues on the site at all. But whoever this mysterious stranger is - more please!

Speaking of flash-fiction, Anne Michaud is hosting a competition to write a scary story in 100 words or less on her blog as part of the Coffin Hop tour. My own entry, Haunted, is exactly 100 words long - you can find it here along with the other entries (I particularly like Ren Warom's story Glue).

Thanks to Colin Barnes and Alan Ryker for recent kind reviews of The Shelter on their blogs.

And speaking of Alan Ryker, as we were, he had a new site dedicated to horror movies called Streaming Horror. Check it out if you like horror films and/or cute but sarcastic dogs called Chewie.

It should be here!

This will only make much sense if you've read The Shelter, and more specifically the author's afterword.

But... it should be here! I swear. I remember it!

Horror Stories: What's In The Box?

Iain Rowan has posted a good review of The Shelter over at his blog - when I say a 'good review' I don't mean he liked it (although he did, thank goodness) but that it was an informative and perceptive piece, saying many interesting things about horror fiction. I was particularly struck by this:

Horror fiction often disappoints me, as the suspense and dread rises, but then you see the monster, and...is that it? 


This immediately made me think of Stephen King's wonderful non-fiction book Dance Macabre where he makes a similar point about horror - you throw open the door to reveal the monster and the reader thinks 'A ten foot ant! Yikes quite scary! But I can cope with that... Now a 100ft ant, that would be scary...' But of course, if what was behind the door was a 100ft ant, the reader would be thinking: Scary! But I can cope with that...


The image I have in my own head is of a jack-in-the-box - as a horror author, you better have something good springing out of that box. (And that thought always makes me hum this song, but anyway). 

All of which has got me thinking, what are the different ways horror authors solve this problem? Seems to me it's these:

1. Pretend There Isn't A Problem
Maybe, if you're a really skilled author, and having a really good day, you can still get away with writing a story where the big reveal is basically "Boo! It's a vampire!" Maybe.

2. Monster With A Twist
This one is quite common - vampires that turn into a snake not a bat, zombies that run etc. It can be done well   - vampires have been reinvented scores of times, the most recent high-profile case being Let The Right One In. When it's done well it works - the twist creates a frisson of shock, and allows creatures grown dusty with familiarity to be scary once more. But it's damn hard to do, and one suspects there's more failures than successes. Do it badly, and it's apt to seem to the reader like a cheap gimmick rather than anything they should react to, let alone be scared by.

3. Invent A New Monster
If ghosts, werewolves, vampires, aliens and zombies (and alien zombies) are all seeming too stale, then the best thing to do is invent a new monster, no? The reader can't have a jaded reaction to something they've never encountered before can they?

Well no. But there's little new under the sun. Dance Macabre time again (and if you read or write horror and haven't a well-thumbed copy of this on your bookshelf then you really need to examine your life choices up to this point) - King talks about the books Psycho and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as werewolf novels. Werewolf novels? 

Yes, because the really scary thing about werewolves isn't the teeth or fur, but the fact that those guys walk around most of the time looking just like you and me. As does Norman Bates when he's not in his dead mother's dress; as does the respectable looking Mister Hyde. The scary thing is they look normal but can change.

So if you want to create a new monster for your story, be careful. In reality, this method is likely to be identical to Number 2.

4. Only Partially Reveal Your Monster
Now we're talking. I do this one quite a lot - letting the reader glimpse the thing out of the corner of their eye, throwing in some choice description but leaving most to the imagination. The idea being, if the unknown is what's scary, keep it a bit unknown. Lovecraft was a master at this - how many of us could really say exactly what Cthulhu looks like?

Be wary though - if done clumsily this approach can seem to the reader to be a cheap trick.

5. Ambiguity #1: Call Into Question Just What The Real Monster Is
Just because you've revealed what everyone thinks the monster is, it doesn't mean they're right. Maybe it's just an aspect of the real Big Bad. Think Ghost Story by Peter Straub which gets all sorts of ghosts and monsters and scary kids roaming around, but they're all just reflections of the real monster... and of ourselves. You can keep the tension tight if the reader is never sure which reveal is the big one.

6. Ambiguity #2: Call Into Question If The Monster Is Even Real 
Another one I really like. What if it's all in the protagonist's head? Isn't that more scary than a monster, in some ways - especially if you're not sure? The obvious example here is The Turn Of The Screw (ghosts are the perfect monster for this type of horror) but it doesn't have to be as overt as that; a lot of horror can be read in this way.

7. Make The Monster Relevant To The Characters
There's tons of good examples of this one, but to pick a familiar one: in The Exorcist the priest has to determine whether the girl is really possessed by a demon, or just faking or suffering some psychological trauma. But here's the turn of this screw: the priest is losing his faith in God. But if the demon is real, if Evil with a capital E is real, then surely Good with a capital G is too? The priest almost wants the demon to be real... (which dovetails nicely with technique 6. above).

8. Don't Have A Monster
Guess what? Horror doesn't need a monster. Horror needs dread, unease, fear; horror needs... well horror. And a good author can generate this without a bogeyman. To end with an example of my own, A Writer's Words in my collection The Other Room has no psycho-killers, no mutants or mummies. What it does have, hopefully, is a creepy sense of unease as an almost existential situation overtakes the main character. And somehow, with this kind of horror story, where there's no monster as such, the reveal can be seamless.

So, fellow horror authors, what do you think? Have I missed any out? In reality of course authors mix and match these approaches to the issue of opening the box, or the door, to reveal what's been lurking.

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In other news, I'm taking part in a 'blog hop' running from 24th to 31st October, where I'll be giving away some books and maybe other stuff if I can work something out. (If you aren't sure quite what a 'blog hop' is, like I wasn't, check out this post from Belinda Frisch, which explains it better than I could.)

If you're a fellow horror author (and let's face it, if you've read all of blog post so far there's a good chance you probably are) and want to take part, check out the Coffin Hop webpage.

The Shelter Is Real...

Exciting news - my new novella, The Shelter, is now available - Amazon UK | Amazon US | Amazon DE | Smashwords. To prove it, here's the cover art yet again (bored of it yet?) and blurb:

It’s a long, drowsy summer at the end of the 1980s, and Alan Dean and three of his friends cross the fields behind their village to look for a rumoured WW2 air raid shelter. Only half believing that it even exists beyond schoolboy gossip, the four boys nevertheless feel an odd tension and unease. And when they do find the shelter, and go down inside it, the strange and horrifying events that follow will test their adolescent friendships to breaking point, and affect the rest of their lives...

A horror novella of 15.5k words, plus an author’s afterword.

The phrase the shelter is real that I've used as the title for this post is one I use repeatedly in the afterword to the book, which describes the inspiration behind the story, and the slightly unusual circumstances behind its composition. 

If you do read The Shelter I'd love to know what you think of it - after having spent the last few weeks editing, proof-reading, and formatting it I'm now in that slightly weird zone where I can't even imagine what it would be like for someone to read it for the first time. This time the feeling is compounded by the somewhat odd nature of how this story came to be written, and the fact that it is a more straightforward and commercial story than I normally write. I'd hope it will still appeal to all of you who've said kind things about The Other Room though.

And regardless it's out now - an achievement I can be proud of. I've had the phrase bouncing around in my head for years, but now it's true in another sense - The Shelter is real.

Spot The Difference?

Well, The Shelter is almost ready to be released into the wild. Feedback on the trial cover I posted was pretty positive - everyone loved the image, although there were a few people who thought the text could do with more punch. All I've done for now is make it a bit bolder, but kept the font the same. It's the only real continuity with The Other Room cover - I figure if I'm going to change the text I'll do it for both, when I have some proper time to do so. (I originally wanted to make this cover very similar my previous one, by using the same limited palette and 'weird' filter effect. But in this case it just ruined the image.)

The other thing I need to do is get the blurb... sorry 'product description' written. I hate writing blurbs. Any vague skill I have with words seems to go out the window when I write blurbs. So far what I've got is this:

It’s a long, drowsy summer in the 1980s, and Alan Dean and three of his friends cross the fields behind their village to look for a rumoured WW2 air-raid shelter. Only half believing that it even exists beyond schoolboy gossip, the four boys nevertheless feel an odd tension and unease.  And when they do find the shelter, and go down inside it, the strange and horrifying things they encounter will test their adolescent friendships to breaking point, and affect the rest of their lives...

A horror novella of 15.5k words, plus an author’s afterword.

Hmmm.

A Drunken Conversation about Ghost Stories...

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?

A Scattershot Posting #6

Like a swan floating on the river, there may not appear to have been much activity here at Scattershot Writing for the last week, but underneath it has been as frantic as anything.

I'm hoping to have The Shelter published in just over a fortnight... and I'm on holiday for half that time. But I'm still on schedule I think: feedback on the trial cover I posted below was pretty positive; some people didn't like the font/text-size but I can play around with that quite easily. I've also had some helpful proof-reading and editing suggestions from a couple of beta-readers, to whom I am inordinately grateful. So things seem to be on track...

In other news, I've answered some questions for Five Question Friday over at Aaron Polson's blog - check out all of Aaron's site if you haven't already. But be prepared to spend some cash when you see how interesting his books look...

Finally, my last post was called Bad Cover Version (rather inaccurately, to be fair). But as it's Friday we could do with some decent tunes - so here's my pick of five great cover versions. (Feel free to let me know your top-five covers in the comments...)

The Flaming Lips covering Can't Get You Out of My Head (Kylie Minogue): 


If you're going to cover Kylie, you might as well up the plaintive emotional content while simultaneously wearing furry animal costumes, no?

Laura Marling covering The Needle and The Damage Done (Neil Young):


Marling shows she really is the real deal by going toe-to-toe with Young, and coming out with at least a score-draw.

The Tindersticks covering Here (Pavement):


I can't find a proper link/video for this sorry; I think this might be a live version. Well worth checking out the original (it was a B-side). Proper Nottingham band, Tindersticks:

Radiohead covering Nobody Does It Better (Carly Simon):


Another live one, but unlike the Tindersticks one, this hasn't ever been done in the studio to the best of my knowledge. But it's awesome, obviously.

Taken By Trees covering Sweet Child O' Mine (Guns & Roses):


I love this because it takes a song everyone knows, and makes something completely different out of it.

Bad Cover Version?

It's like a later "Tom & Jerry" when the two of them could talk

Like the Stones since the Eighties, like the last days of Southfork. 

Like "Planet of the Apes" on TV, the second side of "'Til the Band Comes in"

Like an own-brand box of cornflakes: he's going to let you down my friend.

I've teased about this before, but this is the first official mention: in September I hope to have a new book out. It's called The Shelter and I didn't want to include this story in The Other Room because I didn't think it fitted - although still horror, I think it's a more commercial, traditional horror story than those in that collection. There's a reason for why it's different to my usual stuff, which I explain in the afterword.

Or it would be more commercial, if it wasn't for the length, because The Shelter is - gulp - a novella. (In fact at approximately 15k words some writers would call it a 'novelette' but come on people! We're supposed to be writers, and yet you use such a manifestly ugly, dispiriting word as 'novelette'? For shame!)

Anyway, because of the length of this story, I don't plan to sell it for much above the minimum ebook price point in the foreseeable future, so the cover art will again be all down to little old me. Below you can see the first stab I've made at it; I would be seriously grateful for any and all feedback:

And yes I know, the Pulp lyrics at the top of this post, and indeed it's title (which is the name of the song) don't really relate to the content much do they? Or at all, to be honest, beyond the use of the word "cover".

But they are cool as sin, and sometimes that's all that matters.

My Dad, Stephen King, and Me

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.