Shock Against Racism

This one's a bit political. (I know: me, political? Who would have thought...)

There is a real and rising tide of far-right and racist activity in the UK (and in Europe. And in the US. And, let's be frank, damn near everywhere we look.) This is a Bad Thing.

The UK genre community is, on the whole, a fine and welcoming place, one that opposes the politics of division, prejudice and hatred. Certain people have tried to portray it as being otherwise: at best they're mistaken, at worst, liars.

But actions, not words, are needed. Hence: Shock Against Racism.

SAR is a network of horror writers, artists and fans against racism and the far right. Our goal is to raise funding to combat the Right's lies and hatemongering, any way we can.

Two Shock Against Racism events are planned for this year: the first event will take place at Write Blend, 124 South Road, Liverpool L22 0ND at 7.30 pm on Friday 23rd November, and will feature readings by Ramsey Campbell, Priya Sharma, Cate Gardner and myself. Tickets £3.00 on the door, and all proceeds donated to Hope Not Hate.

The second event will take place at the Cowley Club, 12 London Road, Brighton BN1 4JA at 7.30 pm on Sunday 25th November, and will include readings by Tom Johnstone, Rosanne Rabinowitz and V.H. Leslie. Tickets £3.00 on the door, with all proceeds donated to Brighton Anti-Fascists.

As well as the need to take action against the far right and to show where our community really stand, there's another reason I decided to start SAR. The 25th November will mark the fifth anniversary of the death of Joel Lane, an exemplary author and friend to many of us in the community. Joel was avowedly political and a committed anti-fascist: I can think of no better way to honour his memory.

The Facebook page for the Liverpool event is here.

The Facebook page for the Brighton event is here.

The main Shock Against Racism Facebook page is here.

We hope you'll join us and help spread the word.

We Belong

Laura Mauro. Photograph by Michael Kelly.

So there goes another Fantasycon. Another brilliant event, another brilliant year.

Belonging is important. Finding a tribe, a group of people who share your values, the things you care about and love.

This is a time of year when absent friends come to mind. Today, the day after the con ended, Facebook reminded us all it's Graham Joyce's birthday. October was the birth month, too, of Joel Lane; November will be the fifth anniversary of his death.

Talking to the fantasy author James Bennett this weekend, he told me about his first Fantasycon. He was nervous, if not terrified - a young gay man, taking his first steps into a community he wasn't sure would welcome him or not. Joel saw that, took his hands and said, simply: "You belong here."

Yeah. That sounds like Joel.

That word came up again this morning, while I was reading different people's con reports on Facebook. The author Eliza Chan spoke about how the convention put to bed any fears that she didn't belong.

The British SFFH community gets a bad press in certain quarters, and it isn't deserved. I've always found it to be a friendly, welcoming and open community. No-one who loves the fiction we create and celebrate at Fantasycon should ever feel as though they have no place here. They do. I hope no-one has ever been made to feel otherwise.

The awards ceremony was, for me, a high point of the convention, when I got to see my dear friend, the lovely, talented and ridiculously modest Laura Mauro win the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story for the brilliant 'Looking For Laika'. I don't think I've ever seen someone more genuinely gobsmacked to win. (And I've seen a few.)

A couple of people who are normally mainstays of the convention (for me, anyway) couldn't make it this year - Lynda E. Rucker and Sarah Pinborough. The August Derleth Award went to Victor LaValle's The Changeling, but I was standing by as Sarah's stunt double in case it went to Behind Her Eyes. She sent me a short acceptance speech, and here's part of it:

"Fantasycon as ever evolves and changes and we may bicker on the internet and get riled about stupid things that mainly don't matter, but when push comes to shove, we are a family. Fantasycon has been there since the very start of my writing career, and it was through coming to Fantasycon every year that I made so many good friends, and gained so much inspiration to try harder and do better."

Yep. Exactly that.

So: if you love horror, SF or fantasy, Fantasycon is a place where you will be welcome. Doesn't matter what the colour of your skin is, your gender, your sexual orientation, whether you're cis or trans. Never doubt that you belong here. And never hesitate to let others know that they do too.

Joel Lane, Three Years On: Black Is The Mourning, White Is The Wand

Today is the third anniversary of Joel Lane's death at the ridiculously early age of fifty. He's still loved and greatly missed - now, perhaps, more than ever. I wish we had his intelligence and insight right now.

A couple of years ago, around the first anniversary of his death, I wrote a flash fiction piece called 'Black Is The Mourning, White Is The Wand.' I haven't been able to find a home for it, so I decided to use it as part of a tribute video. So, here it is.

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A Hazy Shade of Winter and 10 Books For Halloween

With Halloween next week, it's only natural to start casting about for suitable stuff to read and watch. You can't beat a good ghost story - although horror is more than just that, as the list below should prove.

But first, a quick plug:

My first collection, A Hazy Shade Of Winter, was published in a beautiful limited edition by Canada's Ash-Tree Press, was introduced by Joel Lane, and consisted of thirteen short stories and a 20,000 word novella.

And it's a book of ghost stories.

Matthew returns to the house where he spent an idyllic summer with a group of friends, and finds them waiting for him to join them... permanently.

The people of a small village hunt a supernatural intruder - but who are the real monsters?

An innocent walk in unfamiliar surroundings becomes a journey into a nightmare; a stranded tourist faces a bizarre challenge; a harassed employee takes a desperate revenge on her employer; and a secondhand book of ghost stories becomes the instrument of a malevolent, restless spirit....

A Hazy Shade Of Winter is now available as an ebook on Amazon in the US and UK. So if you still can't pick a Halloween read after checking out the list below...

But I have a feeling you will. (Shit, I'm talking myself out of sales here...) So here, in no particular order, are ten books for Halloween. There are a couple of well-known titles here, but I've tried to pick a few that'll be less familiar as well.

1) The Matrix by Jonathan Aycliffe
The only novel on this list. Jonathan Aycliffe is a master at producing book-length ghost stories in the M.R. James vein, but this one, a tale of black magic, may be his best. Andrew Macleod, grieving after the sudden death of his wife, takes an academic job in Edinburgh, where he begins researching occult and esoteric groups there. His researches bring him into contact with Duncan Mylne, a wealthy lawyer and occultist, and into a world of black magic and evil. Finally he discovers the true reason for Mylne's interest in him - but it might be too late. A subtle and deeply creepy novel, the kind that has you looking over your shoulder at every creak of the floorboards if you read it alone at night. Just as good is Aycliffe's first novel, Naomi's Room.

2) Alone With The Horrors by Ramsey Campbell 
There was no way there couldn't be something by Ramsey Campbell on this list; the difficulty was which book. Alone With The Horrors is a great retrospective collection, sampling tales from throughout Campbell's career up to that point (1991), from the Lovecraftian chills of Cold Print through to tales like 'Again', which is still one of his most disturbing tales. It's a fine collection of 39 stories (in the Arkham House or Hodder Headline editions; 37 in the more recent re-release from Tor) to be dipped into at random till you find the tales that suit you best.

3) Craddock by Paul Finch
Paul Finch is now a best-selling crime novelist, but his roots are very much in horror and he has a huge backlist of collections to prove it. Just about any of them are worth grabbing (Stains, Walkers In The Dark, After Shocks and the three Medi-Evil mini-collections were all close contenders for this list) but Craddock (aka Major Craddock Investigates) is my Halloween recommendation. Set in 1860s Wigan, it comprises four novelette or novella-length stories - The Magic Lantern Show, The Coils Unseen, The Weeping In The Witch Hours and Shadows In The Rafters - featuring police detective Jim Craddock, whose investigations have a tendency to bring him up against the supernatural and is both superbly readable and hugely atmospheric.

4) From Hell To Eternity by Thana Niveau 
The debut collection from one of horror's rising stars is by turns lyrical, subtle, erotic and cruel. Stories like 'The Death of Dreams' are rooted in science fiction, while 'Antlers' starts out as a grimly believable account of human viciousness before giving way to a supernatural resolution. In 'Pigs', an illicit affair brings a young couple face to face with a herd of feral porkers, while the title story brings in the most notorious serial killer of them all.

5) The October Country by Ray Bradbury 
If there's a more apt collection for this time of year, I don't know what it is. Rich and lyrical, hugely imaginative, dark and scary, it's a timeless classic, including such tales as 'The Emissary,' 'The Next In Line', 'The Jar', 'Skeleton' and one of my all-time favourites, 'The Scythe.' If you've ever read Ray Bradbury, no further introduction should be necessary. If you haven't - well, here's the perfect place to start.

6) Warning Whispers by A.M. Burrage 
M.R. James may be the undisputed king of the English ghost story, but Alfred McClelland Burrage is one of its unsung heroes. Several of his best-known stories - such as 'The Sweeper' and 'Smee' - appeared under the byline 'Ex-Private X', the name under which Gollancz published Burrage's memoir War Is War, a memoir of his experience in the Artist's Rifles during World War I, which included fighting at Passchendaele. But if you have any of those big fat anthologies of ghost stories you often find in charity shops, there'll almost certainly be at least one Burrage story. This posthumous collection includes a host of inventive and chilling tales, not least the opening story, 'The Acquittal'.

7) Scattered Remains by Paul Pinn 

The late Paul Pinn was a superb writer who deserves to be far more widely remembered, and this, his first collection, is an extraordinary tribute to his skills. Ranging back and forth across the borders of crime, SF, fantasy and horror, his stories burrow into the psyche. 'Handicapped' shows a paranoiac's persecutory fantasties building up to explosion point; the title story depicts a post-apocalyptic world where NBC-suited soldiers battle an unstoppable army of horsemen wearing robes of human skin. The opposite of a pleasing terror.

8) The Moon Will Look Strange by Lynda E. Rucker
Lynda Rucker is brilliant at crafting beautifully-written and subtly unsettling tales, where the world we know... shifts, into something strange and off-kilter. By the time you know what's going on, it's probably too late. Her debut collection is one to savour over time, like a fine whisky. A new one, You'll Know When You Get There, is out now from Swan River Press. Fans of Robert Aickman and Shirley Jackson, take note.

9) Antique Dust by Robert Westall 
Westall wrote one of the great novels for children, The Machine-Gunners, set on Tyneside during the Second World War - not to mention some fine short story collections such as Break Of Dark. This collection, his first for adult readers, centres on antique dealer Geoff Ashden. "I have known more evil in a set of false teeth than in any so-called haunted house in England," he tells us, and he should know: after all, his trade brings him into contact with the past - and the dead - on a daily basis. The whole book is something of a love letter to M.R. James, but is a fantastic collection in its own right.

10) For Those Who Dream Monsters by Anna Taborska 
Anna Taborska doesn't write enough, but when she does it's fierce and uncompromising, with an unflinching eye for the kind of savagery humans can inflict on one another. Stories such as 'Little Pig' - one of the best in the book, a short, harrowing and heart-rending tale - have nothing of the spectral about them, needing only human evil and desperation as their cause, but Taborska is at ease with the supernatural too, as in 'The Creaking'. Other tales, such as 'Buy A Goat For Christmas', show a welcome streak of dark humour. Published by Mortbury Press, the book also boasts an introduction and beautiful illustrations by Reggie Oliver.

FCon Awaits...

Tomorrow, the dread trio that is Bestwick, Gardner and Priya Sharma will be setting off again, like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. (Except that there'll be three of us, and two of us are women, and we're in a car.) Off to Scarborough, for FANTASYCON!

Very much looking forward to seeing some old friends and meeting a few new ones.

The highlights, for me, will be the Snowbooks launch (featuring the relaunch of Cate's novella The Bureau Of Them), the awards (where Cate's on the shortlist for Best Novella alongside Nnedi Okorafor, Usman Tanveer Malik, Mark Morris and Paul Cornell, and where both Cate and Priya are shortlisted for Best Short Story with V.H. Leslie, Ralph Robert Moore, Adam Nevill and Frances Kay) - and the launch of Alchemy Press' tribute anthology to Joel Lane, Something Remains.

The inimitable Des Lewis has carried out one of his real-time reviews of Something Remains, available in three parts here, here and here.

Of my own contribution, 'And Ashes In Her Hair', Des says:


Ashes are fragments from many things all made the same thing by fire. This story, from whatever fragment it is made, is overtly the story of a call centre worker under strict employment rules, wringing out, from the results of a soul’s combustion, his own casual relationships with this book’s earlier waifs and strays – and wreaking sustenance from near-poisoned food, as well as eventually becoming complicit with acts of arson-into-ashes taking place in the vacant lot near the office where he works … with a swaddled outcome wrought into being as if for his embracing of a bereavement as well as of a potential birth. Heartbreaking.

I haven't seen Des since my first Fantasycon back in 1999. I believe he's going to be at this one though; it'll be good to meet him again.

For those others going this weekend - see you there!

Something Remains

I've talked about this elsewhere, but with the book coming out next month I felt it deserved a blog of its own.

When my friend, the author and poet Joel Lane, died in November 2013 at the ridiculously early age of fifty, he left a great deal undone. There'd been a planned monograph on 20th century horror fiction, which would have been up there with Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror In Literature as an overview of the field; he'd also spoken of writing a crime or horror novel.

And there were his notes for short stories - dozens of them. Some were a paragraph or two, others more detailed. And so Joel's old friend Pete Coleborn, proprietor of the Alchemy Press, approached a number of writers with a proposal: to take a set of Joel's notes and use them as the basis for a new story of their own, to be collected in a tribute anthology.

Edited by Pete and by Pauline E. Dungate, the result is Something Remains - a deeply Joelesque title. It includes, among many other (and probably better) tales, my story 'And Ashes In Her Hair.'

Something Remains will be released at Fantasycon By The Sea in Scarborough. The official launch will take place on Saturday 24th September 2016 between noon and 1.00 pm.

John Grant, Rosanne Rabinowitz and Lynda E. Rucker have also blogged about their involvement in the anthology.

Here's the full TOC:

• Foreword by Peter Coleborn
• Introduction by Pauline E. Dungate
• Joel by Chris Morgan (Verse)
• Not Dispossessed:  A Few Words on Joel Lane’s Early Published Works by David A. Sutton (Essay)
• Everybody Hates a Tourist by Tim Lebbon
• The Missing by John Llewellyn Probert
• Charmed Life by Simon Avery
• Antithesis by Alison Littlewood
• Dark Furnaces by Chris Morgan
• The Inner Ear by Marion Pitman (Verse)
• Broken Eye by Gary McMahon
• Stained Glass by John Grant
• Threadbare by Jan Edwards
• The Dark above the Fair by Terry Grimwood
• Grey Children by David A. Sutton
• The Twin by James Brogden
• Lost by Pauline Morgan (Verse)
• Through the Floor [1] by Gary Couzens
• Through the Floor [2] by Stephen Bacon
• Bad Faith by Thana Niveau
• Window Shopping by David Mathew
• Clan Festor by Liam Garriock
• Sweet Sixteen by Adam Millard
• Buried Stars by Simon Macculloch
• And Ashes in Her Hair by Simon Bestwick
• The Pleasure Garden by Rosanne Rabinowitz
• Joel Lane, Poet by Chris Morgan (Essay)
• The Reach of Children by Mike Chinn
• The Men Cast by Shadows by Mat Joiner
• The Winter Garden by Pauline E. Dungate
• Natural History by Allen Ashley
• The Second Death by Ian Hunter
• The Bright Exit by Sarah Doyle (Verse)
• Blanche by Andrew Hook
• The Body Static by Tom Johnstone
• You Give Me Fever by Paul Edwards
• The Other Side by Lynda E. Rucker
• Of Loss and of Life: Joel Lane’s Essays on the Fantastic by Mark Valentine (Essay)
• Shadows by Joe X Young
• I Need Somewhere to Hide by Steven Savile
• Coming to Life by John Howard
• The Enemy Within by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Afterword: The Whole of Joel by Ramsey Campbell (Essay) 

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Things of the Week: 15th July 2016

This week... has been a bit rough.

For the past few weeks I haven't been feeling good at all - a growing sense of hopelessness, of everything feeling like too much effort, constant nagging anxiety.

Earlier in the week, some old social media bullshit flared up again. That was the final straw; by the time Cate got home that evening, I was practically a wreck. I just about managed to cook dinner for us. At which point I decided Facebook and I needed a break from one another.

I thought it might just be stuff on the news - Brexit and so forth, and all the worries that go with it - and they probably helped tip me over the edge, but ultimately this is just the return of an old enemy. The black dog: depression. It's a bloody horrible thing that I hoped I wouldn't see again - but it's back, worse than before.

After a lot of prevaricating - too bloody much of it - I'm going to see my GP on Monday. Hopefully get something sorted.

I think I've said this before, but it bears repeating: do not suffer in silence with this. Men, especially, seem to, believing you're supposed to 'man up' and soldier on. And all too often that makes it worse - and more likely to kill you. I could have saved myself a lot of pain by ringing the surgery on Monday. There's no shame in antidepressants, if they're what you need. You wouldn't think twice about taking painkillers if an injury was causing serious pain; they help you function as normally as possible while you heal. This is no different.

My friend Ren Warom, in addition to being a smashing writer, has blogged and vlogged candidly about mental health issues and recovery. I heartily recommend her blog posts on the subject. And indeed the rest of her blog.


Cheers to Ren, Sarah Pinborough, and a few other people for kind words and cyber-hugs this week. And to Cate, without whom I really don't know how I would have coped. Love you, hun.

*clears throat following embarrassing schmaltzy bit*

Otherwise, what things have there been this week?

Steady progress on Devil's Highway; hopefully the beast will be finished soon. It's taking shape, and I think I'm going to be pleased with how it turns out. Hopefully the publisher will too.

Tomorrow we're off to Edge-Lit in Derby with Priya Sharma - some good company and laughter will, I hope, do me a lot of good.

Saving the best till last, though: I am very, very proud to announce my inclusion in an anthology that will be released at Fantasycon By The Sea this September.

When Joel Lane passed away in 2013 - Jesus, nearly three years ago now - he left behind him a wealth of notes for stories he'd never found time to write. Last year his old friend Pete Coleborn of the Alchemy Press invited me to contribute to an anthology he was editing with Pauline E. Dungate, another of Joel's friends: a number of writers, each working with a different set of notes, would set out to complete the stories.

I've blogged previously about the tale I wrote, 'And Ashes In Her Hair.' This week, Alchemy published the table of contents for the tribute anthology, Something Remains. All proceeds from the anthology will be donated to Diabetes UK (Joel suffered from Type 1 Diabetes since his teens.)

Here's that TOC in full:

• Foreword by Peter Coleborn
• Introduction by Pauline E. Dungate
• Joel by Chris Morgan (Verse)
• Not Dispossessed:  A Few Words on Joel Lane’s Early Published Works by David A. Sutton (Essay)
• Everybody Hates a Tourist by Tim Lebbon
• The Missing by John Llewellyn Probert
• Charmed Life by Simon Avery
• Antithesis by Alison Littlewood
• Dark Furnaces by Chris Morgan
• The Inner Ear by Marion Pitman (Verse)
• Broken Eye by Gary McMahon
• Stained Glass by John Grant
• Threadbare by Jan Edwards
• The Dark above the Fair by Terry Grimwood
• Grey Children by David A. Sutton
• The Twin by James Brogden
• Lost by Pauline Morgan (Verse)
• Through the Floor [1] by Gary Couzens
• Through the Floor [2] by Stephen Bacon
• Bad Faith by Thana Niveau
• Window Shopping by David Mathew
• Clan Festor by Liam Garriock
• Sweet Sixteen by Adam Millard
• Buried Stars by Simon Macculloch
• And Ashes in Her Hair by Simon Bestwick
• The Pleasure Garden by Rosanne Rabinowitz
• Joel Lane, Poet by Chris Morgan (Essay)
• The Reach of Children by Mike Chinn
• The Men Cast by Shadows by Mat Joiner
• The Winter Garden by Pauline E. Dungate
• Natural History by Allen Ashley
• The Second Death by Ian Hunter
• The Bright Exit by Sarah Doyle (Verse)
• Blanche by Andrew Hook
• The Body Static by Tom Johnstone
• You Give Me Fever by Paul Edwards
• The Other Side by Lynda E. Rucker
• Of Loss and of Life: Joel Lane’s Essays on the Fantastic by Mark Valentine (Essay)
• Shadows by Joe X Young
• I Need Somewhere to Hide by Steven Savile
• Coming to Life by John Howard
• The Enemy Within by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Afterword: The Whole of Joel by Ramsey Campbell (Essay)

I'm very proud to be in this one. Hope you'll all buy a copy.

Things Of The Week: 10th June 2016

Bits and pieces of stuff this week. Work on Devil's Highway grinds steadily on, gathering momentum. Fingers crossed, I might just pull this one off.

In other news, the shortlist for the British Fantasy Awards was announced on Monday. Some of you may remember that I posted a few recommendations for the shortlist back in February - and a very gratifying number of them have made the shortlists! Either I'm a major trendsetter, have developed powers of mind control without realising. Or, more likely, I just felt the same way as a majority of voters. The most boring explanations are usually the likeliest.

I'm on one of the juries - for Best Collection, alongside Carole Johnstone and Emma Cosh. The nominations in that category are:

Ghost Summer: Stories, Tananarive Due (Prime Books)
Monsters, Paul Kane (The Alchemy Press)
Probably Monsters, Ray Cluley (ChiZine Publications)
Scar City, Joel Lane (Eibonvale Press)
Skein and Bone, V.H. Leslie (Undertow Publications)
The Stars Seem So Far Away, Margrét Helgadóttir (Fox Spirit Books)

We're going to have our work cut out, to say the least. I've read some of the collections, but not others - but there's no doubt it's going to be a close-run thing.

I didn't make the shortlist this year - I hadn't expected to, given the quality of work out there - unless you count The Second Spectral Book Of Horror Stories, which has nominated for Best Anthology and which includes my story 'Horn Of The Hunter.' Despite my (and others') well-documented issues with Spectral Press and issues raised in respect of its TOC, I think it's an excellent anthology and a fine achievement by Mark Morris.


However, someone else did make the shortlist, and this for me was the best news of the whole thing.

Among my recommendations back in February were a short story and a novella, 'When The Moon Man Knocks' and The Bureau Of Them, which in my admittedly biased view were two of the best things published last year. Both of them have been shortlisted, alongside (among others) Nnedi Okorafor, Mark Morris, Priya Sharma, V.H. Leslie, Adam Nevill and Usman Tanveer Malik.

Both pieces are, of course, by Cate Gardner, now also known as Mrs Bestwick. (It's still great to write that!) 'When The Moon Man Knocks,' in particular, is one of the best things Cate's ever written, a heartbreaking and unsettling meditation on grief and loss. It's also packed with oddness and invention, in a world that's half the one we know and half a surreal fairyland - somewhere between Lewis Carroll and early Tim Burton. Cate wrote it shortly after her mum passed away; today would have been Pauline's 71st birthday.

Anyway, I'm hugely proud of and happy for Cate today. Fingers crossed for the awards in September!

Things of the Last Two Weeks (Part Two)

www.alexcf.com

The last few days have seen me trying to get back into the groove of writing. It's been a bit weird, not least since the laptop I've had for the better part of ten years - my trusty E-System, a Christmas present from my parents in 2007! - finally appears to be dying. As laptops go, it's had a pretty good run, so I can't complain, but I'm trying to work on the purple Acer laptop I bought last year.

See, the E-System's one flaw - or its biggest advantage, from my point of view - is that it's rubbish at connecting to the internet, meaning that I can work on it pretty easily without being distracted by Facebook. The Acer is great at connecting to the internet. That wasn't so bad in Barmouth, where there was no wifi in our flat, but now we're home again.

And yes, I've installed Freedom. Thing is that, unlike the version I've used in the past where you just downloaded a programme onto the machine, Freedom is now some weird cloud-based thing. And even when I've switched it on, the damn thing still connects to the internet. So once again, the wacky world of IT has delivered an updated, upgraded, 'improved' version of something that's about as useful as a pork pie at a bar mitzvah.

Even so, my short story mojo continues unabated. I wrote another story the day after my wedding, and two more on the honeymoon with another underway. That's a total of eight short stories so far this year, most of them in the past month.

That said, I need to get back on the Devil's Highway; there's still a lot of work to do before the deadline at the end of June. It's been nice, though, to work on some again.

Writers can be divided up any number of ways - and probably shouldn't be divided up at all, but that's another story - but one of the most interesting is the old question of whether you're a Planner or a Pantser. That is, do you plan out what you write before getting started, or wing it and make it up as you go? It's more of a spectrum than an either/or thing - much like sexual orientation, which gives me something of a segue to this blog post by Janine Ashbless, also known as Keris McDonald. One of the UK's foremost erotica writers, Janine is a confirmed Pantser. (And when she gets the time, she writes some superb ghost/horror fiction under her Keris McDonald byline - highly recommended if you can track some down! You can find out more in her Lowdown.)

Until recently, I'd have described myself as a dyed-in-the-wool Planner. That's certainly how my novels have been written - with more and more detailed planning, in fact, before I set pen to paper. A few years ago, I extended the practice to short stories, as I was finding hardly any time to do them. For the past couple of years, in fact, I've hardly written any stories that weren't to commission.

And I was feeling dissatisfied.

The short fiction I did write was feeling stale, repetitive, done before. There was a time when what I'd written had come both easily and from somewhere deep in me. I believed in it and felt proud of it, and many people had liked it a lot. All without planning. I wanted to get back there.

The last few short stories have all had that quality, or some of it. I think I'm some way to go before I'm getting the same thrill from what I do as before, but I'm on the way. It'll have to be fitted in around the novels, but that's not necessarily a bad thing - and among many other things, short stories can be great playgrounds and testbeds for ideas and settings and characters you may want to do more with.

So all of that's been nice.

www.alexcf.com

Less happy was yesterday's news that the YA science fiction author Nicholas Fisk had passed away, albeit at the good age of 92. I grew up reading his science fiction - along with Dr Who novelisations, books like Time Trap, Antigrav, Space Hostages, Trillions and the classic Grinny (an odd sort of alien invasion novel that's also damned creepy) were some of the first SF I read as a boy. His story collection Sweets From A Stranger was superb too. He wrote intelligent, thought-provoking and entertaining stories and novels for young readers that still hold up today (and are worth a read by adults too.)

In other news, Laura Mauro, a very fine writer, wrote this excellent piece on magical thinking and OCD. I suspect a lot of writers have MH issues of one kind or another, if only in the form of depression caused by banging one's head repeatedly against the brick wall known as reality.

There was also this fascinating article on bodies of strange creatures allegedly found in a London basement. In fact, they're the work of writer, illustrator and sculptor Alex CF, which is going to be of great appeal to anyone who enjoys the outre, the macabre or the just plain weird. I've included two images from his collection here; go to Alex's website and see the rest.



Two final items. First, my old friend Rob Kemp, who readers of the 1990s small press may remember as r.j. krijnen-kemp, author of a small but perfectly-formed body of weird stories, wrote this article on a bit of Shropshire folklore. Which reminded me of something else.

The late Joel Lane's first novel, From Blue To Black, told the story of a fictional '90s rock band; the book included the titles and even some lyrics of the band's songs. I got very into folk music in the late 2000s, and one of the titles, 'Still And Moving Water', caught my imagination, as did a line from the fictive song. I asked Joel if I could turn it into a song of my own; he agreed, as long as he got a co-credit, and my friend Iain Mackness recorded a very rough demo of it. Working on the recent tribute anthology to Joel ended up inspiring me to make a YouTube video for the song, and I was reminded of it again by Rachel Verkade's touching and perceptive review of Joel's posthumous story collection, Scar City, over at The Future Fire. So here it is.

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Have a good weekend, everybody!

Things of the Last Two Weeks (Part One): 19th May 2016

Well, I'm back. Sorry the blog's been a tad quiet, and for the absence of The Lowdown. It returns tomorrow, all being well.

Still, there's a pretty good excuse for the long hush: Cate and I finally got married on Saturday 7th May this year. The following Monday we were off on our honeymoon to Barmouth, which we got back from a couple of days ago.

Cate mentioned a friend of hers saying 'I needed a holiday to get over the holiday!' and in the best possible way, I think I know what they meant. Returning to normality is a slow process after a week or so like that.

We were told to enjoy every moment of our wedding day, as it all went by so fast. And it did. And at the same time, it seemed to last forever - again, in the nicest possible way. My face hurt from all the smiling. Family and friends were there, and a lot of writers. God knows how many horror stories we've inspired. One day I'll have to write about it myself - make sure it's all immortalised in prose.

We took a moment, too, to remember Cate's Mum Pauline, and Joel Lane, who would have been our

best man: special thanks to Bernard, who did that job on the day, and to the one and only John Llewellyn Probert for reading a short extract from one of Joel's works. I could go on and on about all the different people who made the day so special, like our bridesmaids Amy and Becky, or... but I'm going to stop there now, because I'll end up leaving someone off! But thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who came. It was a special day.

The honeymoon was lovely too - on past trips to Barmouth we've been cursed with some grotty weather, but that week was glorious. I'm tanned several shades darker than I was before - or at least my face and forearms are! So we walked along the beach, spent a lot of times in the beautiful cafes on the Quay, like Davy Jones' Locker and The Anchor, spent even more time in various gift shops (Cate) and second hand bookshops (both of us), and spent most evenings in the restaurants - The Captain's Table and (again) The Anchor being two particular standouts. If you're ever in Barmouth, those are both great places to eat.

They're even naming drinks after my stuff now....

We made a couple of day trips, to Porthmadog and Bala, and on the second actually found a bottle of liqueur called Black Mountain, aka Mynydd Du!

The day before we left, we went to St Mary's Church at Llanaber, where my gran is buried, to pay our respects and put some flowers on the grave. Daft, I know, but I find myself talking to her, even though she isn't there. She worried, I think, in her last years, that I was never going to get married or settle down with anyone. I wish she and Cate could have met - they'd have loved one another to bits.

We walked back from Llanaber, over the railway tracks and down the full length of the prom, which, be assured, is a bloody long way, especially in hot weather. Luckily, the Quay also boasts an ice-cream parlour called Knickerbocker's, which was a pretty good motivator. On the way there, we actually bumped into the registrar who'd married us, who was spending the weekend on the coast...!

So, a lovely day and a lovely honeymoon. And I'm a very happy man. Hopefully Cate's an equally happy lady. I love her very much and hope for many happy, healthy and prosperous years with her.

Here's some music, because for some bizarre reason this seems to be the song that sums up the whole thing for me. (Cate will probably think otherwise, but even the happiest marriage has the odd disagreement.) ;)

 Peace and love to all,

Simon x

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Things Of The Week: 1st April 2016

Gardner, Bestwick & Sharma.

So, this week...

Last Sunday Cate and I went to Eastercon on a day membership with our friend Priya Sharma. Obviously it's more SF/Fantasy than horror, but it was well worth going to, and we got to catch up (briefly) with Ramsey and Jenny Campbell, and Sarah Pinborough.

Priya rocks the Gothic.

I also ran (all too briefly) into Mike Cobley and Martyn Taylor, long-time fellow ranters at the monumental bastardry of the Conservative Party, and to see the Q&A between Kari Sperring and Aliette de Bodard, who'd just won two BSFA awards for her work. (I managed to snag a copy of her first novel, House Of Shattered Wings, while I was there...) Later I bumped into the lovely Lydia Gittins, (former PR for Solaris, now PR for Titan Books) too, and got to chat with her for a good half-hour (but sadly, didn't get a chance to steal her pink coat. Pity.)

Me and a slightly blurred Nina Allan.

It was our first Eastercon, and Priya's first time ever on a panel (Sumptuously Gothic). She was a bit nervous, but did a great job. Hopefully she'll be doing many more in the future.

After the panel, we made off with Rosanne Rabinowitz in search of food, and accidentally kidnapped Nina Allan on the way (while Christopher Priest strolled back to the convention hotel without having noticed his other half had been shanghaied) for tapas at a Greek restaurant.

One of my resolutions this year has been to write more short fiction  - and, more to the point, to try

Rosanne Rabinowitz and Cate.

and write more short fiction that I'm really proud of. A lot of the stories I've written over the past couple of years has been to commission, and much of the rest has been... well, proficient enough in technical terms, but without the heart and soul that the stories I'm proudest of have had.

Too much of it has either been action driven, with characters who feel a little too 'stock', or go over old, safe ground. It felt, in the words of Austin Powers as though...

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Earlier this week I wrote a story called 'And Ashes In Her Hair,' based on some story notes left behind by the late Joel Lane. When Joel passed away, he had the notes for a number of stories left over, and a number of writers are working with these notes to create stories for a tribute anthology. Writing 'And Ashes In Her Hair' felt like a step in the right direction, a move towards writing something real once more. I'm proud of it.

I've got (some of) my mojo back.

Logan Masterson.

On a less happy note, news broke a couple of days ago on the passing of US author Logan Masterson.

I'm afraid I didn't know Logan at all - we were Facebook friends but had never really interacted - but it was still shocking and sad to hear of his death. Especially when it emerged that culprit was an enemy that has claimed the lives of far too many men: depression.

As I said, I didn't know him - and there's little more contemptible than people who try to gain attention and sympathy by falsely claiming intimacy with somebody who's died - but from what I saw of his Facebook posts he was a decent man, someone with whom I think I would have enjoyed talking to had the chance arisen. Having suffered from (thankfully fairly mild) depression in the past, I know how horrible and debilitating it can be; it's not something I'd wish on anyone, and it's always deeply sad to hear about someone losing their battle with it. So here's a link to a piece by someone who did know Logan. There is also a memorial fund, to which you can donate here.

To anyone suffering from depression, I would just say: please, talk to someone. There is help out there. Try to find it. ESPECIALLY if you're a man. You are not lesser, or weaker, if you admit you are in pain.


Have a good weekend, all. Be well, and take care.

Remembering Joel Lane

Photo by Emily McMahon

Today would have been my late friend Joel Lane's 52nd birthday, and I was reminded all over again (chiefly by Facebook) how much I miss him. A few months ago I posted a memory of Joel on Facebook - a brief anecdote that did much to sum up his wit and sly sense of humour - and it occurred to me that it would be nice to give it a more permanent home.

On the heels of that, it occurred that many others would have stories to tell about him. Funny ones, sad ones, inspiring ones - mostly funny ones, though. Although his stories were bleak and his life often unhappy, Joel could often be funny beyond words.

Anyway: if you have such an anecdote about Joel, one you'd like to share, drop me a line here. I'll post them on the blog on an as and when basis, so there's a permanent resource in his memory.

The Dark Season

This week marked the official beginning of autumn in the UK. I love all the different seasons of the year, although if I had to do without one of them, it would probably be winter. But then, I wouldn’t love the spring as much, as there’s something even more wonderful about warmth and colour and light returning to the world after those long cold months of darkness.

And I love the summer too. But if I had to pick one favourite, out of all the seasons of the year, it would be autumn. It’s the beauty of the leaves turning and falling, even lovelier for its transience; it’s the slow cooling of the year, that hearty feeling of walking in air that isn’t freezing, but holds some slight hint of chill, that necessitates a thick jumper or a coat. It’s those rich autumn evenings where the night comes slow but deep. It’s those mists you sometimes get; there’s something quintessentially English about autumn here, something that brings back memories of my childhood in the ‘70s and ‘80s and something, above all, about ghosts.

October, of course, is the heart of autumn; it’s the month that sums it all up. And of course it’s the

month of Halloween, as well, which has changed a lot since my childhood. When I was little, trick-or-treating was unknown; I’ve seen the American version of Halloween become more and more emulated over here. When I were a lad (said the grumpy old bore) Halloween would consist of bobbing for apples, or maybe a game of murder in the dark.

And, of course, you’d turn off the lights and watch a horror movie – on TV, or if you had such luxuries, a VCR. That’s still pretty much how we spend Halloween at Castle Bestwick, albeit now the VHS cassettes have given way to DVDs.

But the best thing of all, at Halloween, is to read, or listen to, a ghost story.

My late friend Joel Lane once said that horror is a very difficult genre to leave behind. I think his exact words were: “Horror has a habit of turning up on your doorstep, pregnant and crying, five months after you thought you’d finished with it for good.” A slight exaggeration, but there’s a grain of truth in it.

While I’m not repudiating Horror wholesale, my thoughts have turned increasingly over the last couple of years to writing outside the genre; Hell’s Ditch is SF/Fantasy, the novel I wrote on spec earlier this year is crime, and Redman’s Hill owes more to the – again, very English – brand of fantasy produced by the late Graham Joyce and Robert Holdstock, or by Alan Garner, than to M.R. James or Stephen King.

And yet I can’t deny the hold that Horror has on me, and on my work. There’s a decidedly Lovecraftian element woven into Hell’s Ditch and the other, forthcoming novels in The Black Road; my crime novel revolves around the activities of a cult that wouldn’t be out of place in any tale of supernatural terror. And there are ghosts in Redman’s Hill, writing about whom creeped me out. So hopefully they’ll do the same to you.

 

Maybe that’s because Horror exists at something of a crossroads: it overlaps into crime, into science fiction, in fantasy and into mainstream literature – because, again and again, Horror tells us how things fall apart.

Thomas Ligotti uses the metaphor of a car accident to explicate his concept of the field: one moment you’re travelling along in your vehicle, secure in the illusion that your life is basically safe and that you are in control. In fact, none of these things have been true: the whole time, there have been any number of things that could go horribly wrong, but it’s not until your car goes out of control and slews wildly across the lanes of oncoming traffic that the illusion is shattered and you become aware of all the terrifying possibilities that exist.

Those possibilities are infinite: there’s a wide gamut in crime fiction, for instance. Sometimes they exist in one’s own psyche and the flaws and weaknesses there, or in that of another human being, wounded or twisted by nature or nurture. Or the nature of the crime can be a conspiracy, criminal or otherwise, to profit from misery or hide an unwanted truth, or the kind of petty, meaningless, barely motivated violence behind which we see the fundamentally random and absurd nature of a Universe ruled by blind chance. Any number of ways to shatter the illusion and show us, in Montague Summers’ words, “the monstrous things that lie only just beneath the surface of our cracking civilisation.” It’s certainly no accident that a number of skilled writers of the macabre, such as Paul Finch, Graham Masterton and most recently Tim Lebbon, have found commercial success writing dark, unflinching, often brutal novels of crime.

Science fiction is another, because we do not know where the future will take us, be it technology (as in the fiction of – for instance – Pat Cadigan) or social trends (1984, or the strange dark literary dreams of J.G. Ballard.)

And in fantasy, we can encounter the very stuff of our nightmares: they may be our own very personal ghosts and demons – our moral failings, our psychological scars – given physical form (as was the case in much of Joel’s fiction) or they may be horrendous things that exist simply because they do. As for literary fiction (however we define that), Horror – if it’s at its best – tackles the same themes and concerns, but with other (perhaps even a wider range of?) tools.

The traditional ghost story, though, has a particular something to it. The ghost story is one very particular branch of Horror, but it’s one of the finest, most subtle – many have described as the most difficult kind of story to write well. It begins with the world we know, or think we know, and ends by showing us that world is much more than we think. Which can be a frightening prospect, but can also be far more. It’s been argued, for instance, that the ghost story is inherently optimistic, as it implies that death is not the end. Then again, some stories – I’m thinking, once more, of several of Joel Lane’s, among others – proffer posthumous existence to which oblivion would be entirely preferable.

I’ve only named a few authors, and I’m painfully aware that all but one of them is male, and all of them are white. But there are many more.

But to go back to the beginning of this: Autumn is coming upon us, and with that the appeal of the ghost story is stronger than ever. It’s a good time, as the nights draw in and the air is full of rustling from the trees with their falling leaves, for what M.R. James called ‘a pleasing terror.’ And it’s a rare year when I don’t write at least one tale of the spectral and supernatural over the course of the dark season. If I can do so, and if I can get the hang of the requisite technology, I might record a reading and post it on the blog as a treat to the loyal readers (both of you!) We shall see.

In the meantime, here’s one of my favourite actors reading one of my favourite stories: Tom Baker, with Saki’s ‘Sredni Vashtar’. Enjoy.

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