Hunker in the Bunker: 2020 in review.

2020 has been, I think we can all agree, a bloody weird year.

I'm not even going to try to summarise all the weird shit - the political shit, the pandemical shit, the insane screeching on social media shit, the stupid conspiracist shit - that went on. Or to list the number of people - writers, actors, artists, musicians, not to mention, in many cases, friends - that we lost this year.

It's been a fucker. But at least Trump's finished. That's one thing.

This really was the year of 'Hunker in the Bunker' for me. Anxiety and depression kept me off work and confined to the house for most of the year, so the first lockdown didn't really come as much of a change. Plus which, after the General Election last December, my attitude was basically 'we're fucked and there's not much point trying to change anything for the better because the UK, at least, is locked into an insane death spiral largely of its own making, so I'm just going to stay home, read, watch Netflix and snuggle with my beloved.'

Well - that, and write.

Which seems absurd, I know. But at least it kept me sane. Well, sort of.

This quote from Natalie Goldberg's wonderful book Writing Down The Bones kind of summarises it for me: "Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the centre of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write."

So yeah. That.

1000 words a day. 

There's a great video where someone's talking to Idris Elba, and he has two pieces of advice: don't be afraid to fail, and keep your head down. The second one, in particular, strikes a chord with me at this time of the year, when I try to look back and take stock. Elba talks about when he's swimming, trying to do 25 laps a day - there's always the temptation to look up and see how you're doing, to be constantly checking your progress. And if you do that, you're never as far along as you'd have hoped, and the work lasts longer and feels harder. But if you keep your head down and focus on just doing what you need to do, moment to moment, getting into the rhythm of your work, before you know it you're almost there.

I did my best, this year, just to do that. Hunker in the bunker, and keep my head down, and work.

So what do I have to show for it?

Well:

Novels

I was past the 100,000 word mark on The Teardrop Girl at the end of 2019. I finished the first draft - 170,000 words all told - at the end of February this year. And then started a new book.

Following The Teardrop Girl I've completed not one, but two new novels in first draft this year, and am (touch wood) 36,000 words into another. The Teardrop Girl has been redrafted and sent out to agents, and I'm at work on the others.

Stories

I've written sixteen pieces of short fiction this year (seventeen if you count my previous blog post!) Some of them very short. Finding homes for most of them proved harder: a lot of them are over on my Patreon. But some saw the light in other places.

Published This Year:

And Cannot Come Again was rereleased, in a gorgeous new edition from Horrific Tales, courtesy of the excellent Graeme Reynolds. It contained two previously unpublished stories. 

Also reprinted was my story 'Below', from Paul Finch's Terror Tales of North West England, in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year #12.

Stories

Not counting stuff that appeared for the first time on Patreon, four stories were published for the first time this year:

'In The Shelter', in new edition of And Cannot Come Again

'Black Is The Mourning, White Is The Wand' in new edition of And Cannot Come Again

'Kanaida' (on the Unsung Stories website, ed. Dan Coxon)

'We All Come Home' in After Sundown, ed. Mark Morris

Novella

Roth-Steyr, Black Shuck Books. 

Patreon

The following stories were published for the first time on my Patreon this year. Those marked with an asterisk were written this year 

 A Story Of Two And A Bit Halves *

A Treat for your Last Day *

Hell Is Children *

I Am The Man The Very Fat Man *

In The Service Of The Queen *

The Book Of Shadows *

The Book Of Spiders *

The Garden *

Truth And Consequences 

Winter Fruit 

Childermass Grove 

Slatcher’s Little Mates 

The Forest You Once Called Home

The Cabinet of Dr Jarvis

Hooded.

On top of all that, I stayed alive, stayed married and managed to get back to work at my day job.

So that was 2020. I didn't take the world by storm, but I'm still here and I'm still writing.

That's good enough for me.

Have the best New Year's you can under the circumstances. Be safe, and take care. Next year looks as though it may be another tough one; let's hold together, keep our heads down, and get through it. 

Things of the Week 5th April 2017: Interview by Louisa Rhodes, New The Feast Of All Souls review, The Adventure of the Orkney Shark

Photo by Vicky Morris.

A few things to announce this week...

First up, there's this really cool interview done last month, after my half of the Hive Writer's Day Workshop with the brilliant K.T. Davies. Louisa Rhodes, one of Hive's young writers, fed me questions about horror, writing and spaghetti, typed up my rambling responses and made them look reasonably intelligent. So here's the result. Louisa did a fantastic job, and was a pleasure to talk to.

The Feast Of All Souls has a new review, over at RisingShadow, in which Seregil of Rhiminee describes it as "one of the best horror novels I've read in recent years... entertaining, thrilling... ambitious and well-written. Excellent British horror fiction!"

Many thanks to RisingShadow, and to Seregil!

And finally... Simon Clark's anthology Sherlock Holmes's School For Detection is out now.

It's 1890. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson return to Baker Street after a night pursuing a vicious criminal. Inspector Lestrade is waiting for Holmes with a proposition of national importance.
Lestrade tells Holmes that a school of detection has been formed to train a new breed of modern investigators that will serve in Great Britain and the Empire. Most students will become police officers. Some, however, will become bodyguards and spies. Holmes begins instructing his decidedly curious assortment of students from home and abroad. He does so with his customary gusto and inventiveness.
Scotland Yard, in the main, allocates crimes to solve and Holmes mentors his students. Occasionally, he shadows them in disguise in order to assess or even directly test their abilities with creative scenarios he devises. Certain crimes investigated by the students might appear trivial, such as the re-positioning of an ornament atop a garden wall, yet it will transpire an assassin has moved the ornament to create good sightlines in order to commit murder with a sniper's rifle.
Other mysteries are considered outside the domain of the police. For example, the inexplicable disappearance of a stone gargoyle, which is linked to an ancient family curse. Or a man suffering from amnesia who discovers that not only has he acquired a secret life but also gained an implacable enemy, too. Holmes, with the ever- trustworthy Doctor Watson in his wake, is kept busy with his students' cases, ranging from minor to serious, sometimes rectifying their mistakes and saving them from a variety of disasters.
These eleven wonderful new adventures and intrigues include tales such as 'The Gargoyles of Killfellen House', 'Sherlock Holmes and the Four Kings of Sweden' and 'The Case of the Cannibal Club'.

The anthology also features my story The Adventure Of The Orkney Shark. Other contributors include Cate Garder, Paul Finch, Alison Littlewood, Carole Johnstone... and many, many more.

The Adventure of the Orkney Shark is set in 1927. Lieutenant-Commander Noel Atherstone, recalled from retirement in Australia for the Imperial Airship Scheme, is given a top-secret mission: to assist Sherlock Holmes in investigating the mysterious disappearance of ships in the North Sea. Fishermen blame the gigantic and voracious Orkney Shark - but as Atherstone, Holmes and Holmes' reluctantly-acquired pupil Mr Blacksmith search the seas in airship R.36, they discover a threat far deadlier than any sea monster...

“There,” said Blacksmith, pointing from an open starboard window.

“Where?” Holmes and I ran to his side, peering out – but we had already passed over the spot.

“Reduce speed,” I told Church. “Mr Potter, bring us around. Mr Hunt, maintain altitude.”

Slowly the airship turned. It wasn’t a quick process; R.36 was six hundred and seventy-five feet long from nose to tail, and almost eighty wide. But in the end, she cruised back the way she had come, at a more sedate pace.

“What did you see, and where?” demanded Holmes. Blacksmith pointed to an area of swirling water between two flat, tabular skerries.

“There,” he said. “It does not move.”

“I see nothing,” said Holmes.

“Nor I,” I said. “Just rock, weed, barnacles…”

“Barnacles, yes. There are none elsewhere on these shoals.”

He was right, now I considered: for whatever reason, the tiny shellfish didn’t appear on any visible part of the rocks and skerries. They lay only in this one area, in a long wide cluster. As we drew closer, I saw its outline was distorted by the water’s churning, but there was something about the shape – a regularity, a symmetry.

The barnacles had not grown here; they had grown somewhere – or on something – else. Something that had spent a great deal of time in other parts of the sea, more conducive to their survival.

Blacksmith was right: I saw it now. A great mass, encrusted in barnacles and weed, in the shape of a huge fish – a long teardrop body, but with fins, almost like wings, jutting out from its sides, and another, a thin sharp triangle, rising from its back. But it was larger than any fish – four hundred feet, if it was an inch...

You can buy the anthology here.

Things of the Week, 19th December 2016: Pseudpod Podcast Part II, This Is Horror Review The Feast of All Souls

Further nice things have happened. Following on from 'Dermot' getting a truly chilling reading from Alasdair Stuart on the Pseudopod podcast, you can now listen to Lewis Davies' rendition of 'The Moraine' too.

Originally published in Paul Finch's Gray Friar Press anthology Terror Tales of the Lake District, 'The Moraine' follows Steve and Diane, a couple with a troubled marriage, who get lost when an unexpected fog catches them on a Lake District hillside. Trying to find shelter, they instead find themselves on a slope of loose rubble, left behind by the Ice Age glaicers: a moraine.

And they aren't alone there. Something lives under the rocks - and it's hunting them.

'The Moraine' was, along with 'Dermot' reprinted in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year #4.

Meanwhile, Jake Marley at This Is Horror has reviewed The Feast Of All Souls:

Simon Bestwick has taken what appears on the surface to be a traditional haunted house ghost story, and twisted it into something altogether stranger and unique. Bestwick’s use of language and character, as well as the concrete foundation of his setting... helps to solidify Ramsey Campbell’s statement that Simon Bestwick is “among the most important writers of contemporary British horror.”

You can read the full review here.

Please share far and wide!

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.

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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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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The Condemned

My new collection, The Condemned, will be released by Gray Friar Press around the end of March this year as part of their 'Gray Matters' series of novellas. 

The Condemned contains six novellas and novelettes, including the BFA-nominated The Narrows, which was reprinted in Best Horror of the Year #1, and The School House, originally published in Houses On The Borderland.

The other tales, Dark Earth, A Kiss Of Old Thorns, The Model and Sleep Now In The Fire, are all previously unpublished. The collection will be released in paperback and a hardback limited edition; the hardback will contain an additional short story, 'Made Of Clay.'

As if this wasn't enough to put a smile on my face, some truly excellent writers have provided blurbs for the collection. From Alison Littlewood (author of A Cold Season and Path Of Needles):

'Simon Bestwick writes the kind of fiction that gets under your skin and stays there . . . thoughtful, tense and genuinely scary, his short stories lead you into dark places and then blow out the candle. His next collection is set to be a must-read of the genre.'

Further blurbs come from the mighty Paul Finch:

‘Simon Bestwick has penned some of the downright eeriest fiction I've ever read. But there is nearly always a hard, urban edge to it, and a deep political awareness. This is an author who bleeds onto the page when he's writing. He really believes in what he's doing. It's his passion and his mission, and as such his meaningful brand of horror is raw, shocking and right in-yer-face. Potent stuff, on so many levels.’

And another from Joseph D'Lacey:

'Grim, beautifully crafted and thought-provoking, Bestwick’s fiction satisfies on every level.'

And to crown it all, the great Ramsey Campbell has this to say:

'Simon Bestwick is among the most important writers of contemporary British horror. His work is rooted in unflinching social observation, and his supernatural tales have a real moral resonance. He's living proof that horror fiction can talk about the way we live today and shine an uncanny light on life, which throws its darkness into sharper relief.'

Many thanks to Ramsey, Joseph, Paul and Alison, and to Gary Fry at Gray Friar; as you can imagine, I am a happy chappie. :)

A Bombardment Of Nice Things

Two posts in as many days, after such a long silence!  I know, it's shocking.

Black Static #32 arrived today.  In it, as well as stories, there are reviews.  Many reviews.  A number of them about me.  Or my writing, anyway...

Good things were said by Peter Tennant both about my collaboration with Gary McMahon, 'Thin Men With Yellow Faces', and 'Shuck', my contribution to Paul Finch's excellent Terror Tales of East Anglia anthology.  But the biggest love was reserved for The Faceless:

'The supernatural elements of the book are handled with great aplomb... Another pleasure is the way in which Bestwick handles characterisation and relationships, adding yet further strands and complications to his narrative... a book of true moral dimensions... This is Simon Bestwick's finest work to date, the one in which he harnesses the sense of anger at social injustice that permeates so much of his work and uses it to a greater end, and it is among the very best of what the horror genre in the UK had to offer in 2012.'

And indeed Peter's blog lists The Faceless as one of his top books of 2012.

Dark Musings rated The Faceless as the top horror novel of the year, and it's also made the shortlist for the 2012 This Is Horror Awards.

All of which makes me very happy.  So now you know.

You can now get back to doing whatever you were doing. :)

The Next Big Thing (With Apologies To Paul Finch And Carole Johnstone)

First of all, sorry I’ve not been around much lately.  There’s been some not-too-wonderful stuff going on in what we laughingly call ‘real life’ that’s occupied a lot of my time lately.  Nothing to do with the ever-reigning Ms G; that’s been one aspect of my life that’s been consistently great, in fact.  No, this involves the world of work, and it’s still ongoing, so can’t be discussed here as yet.  Hopefully that’ll be resolved in the next month or so, and I can be a little less mysterious about it.

Secondly, a more specific apology goes out to Paul Finch and Carole Johnstone, both of whom asked if they could tag me in this meme a while back and didn’t even receive the courtesy of a reply as my head was firmly up my arse.  As penance, I’m tagging them here.  (Also, there’s practically no-one I know left to tag, so that’s its own punishment.)

Anyways, that most excellent Aussie, Mr Antony Mann, tagged me in this meme to write about my WIP.  So here goes…

1) What is the working title of your current/next book?
Riders On The Storm.

2) Where did the idea come from?
The R.101 airship, the biggest British aircraft ever built- 777 feet long and 132 feet high- which crashed in France on October 5th, 1930, killing 48 of the 54 men aboard.

R.101 over St. Paul's Cathedral

3) What genre does your book fall under?
God alone knows.  A sort of bizarre mix of science fiction, fantasy, horror, comedy, action-adventure and love story.  But despite the airships, I don’t think it counts as steampunk.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
That’s an interesting question as many of the characters are based on the real-life crew and passengers killed in the crash.  The main character, Sam Church, was a young crewman who nearly prevented the disaster, and survived the crash only to die of his injuries shortly before his father and fiancee reached his bedside.  The other crew members have largely been fictionalised, so that’s a bit easier: if I could borrow a time machine, I’d nip back to the ‘80s and collect the late great Bob Peck to play Lieutenant-Commander Joseph Stakowski Martindale (R.101’s First Officer) and a greying but still tough-looking John Thaw for Flight Sergeant Bill Rathbone (the ship’s Chief Coxswain.)  Plus a younger Liam Neeson, from around the time he did Darkman, to play the villain of the piece, Mr Quill.  For other characters, I’d go for Pauley Perrette as Sidgeley (a brilliant, geeky Goth chick from 2007), Naomie Harris as Captain Jane Rhymer (an 18th century pirate) and Hermione Norris as Dr Gail Anderman (an archaeologist from 1936.)

Rigger Samuel Church, 1904-1930

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
At the moment before it crashes, the R.101 airship and the men who were killed aboard her are pulled through space and time to a distant world to help save a community of people from throughout earth’s history from an inhuman, Lovecraftian menace that’s awakening after aeons of slumber, and the insane, decaying Mr Quill.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
My wonderful agent, Sharon Ring, will be representing it.


7) How long did it take you to write the first draft?
The first twenty or thirty thousand words took months of writing and rewriting, because there’s so much stuff happening- you’ve got to set up the historical event (the R101 disaster) and the background to that, plus the alien planet and everything going on there; also, you have to introduce the airship and get enough information across for readers to understand what’s going on. As well as that, you have to introduce a bunch of characters.  Oh, and on top of all that, there’s the actual story.  The hard work’s trying to combine all that in a way that flows naturally and doesn’t seem clunky.  Once that was finished, the rest- eighty or ninety thousand words- came very easily and the first draft was finished in a couple of months.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
I’m really not sure!  Michael Moorcock’s The Nomad Of Time is a bit like it, I suppose- it involves airships and time travel.  I did once jokingly describe it as Battlestar Galactica with airships, though I think- hope!- it’s developed beyond that.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Are you sitting comfortably?

In 2010, I went to the Fantastic Films Festival in Manchester, where Ramsey Campbell presided over the raffle.  The prizes were a mix of stuff you’d really want and stuff you wouldn’t accept as a free gift if there was a gun to your head.  One such example was a book on girl’s dolls, apparently written for adults.  Frankly I found that creepy enough, but Ramsey started doing the dolls’ voices… I still have nightmares about that bit. 

Anyway, he made it clear that no-one was going anywhere till somebody bid at least a pound on this book.  Which I did, just to make it go away.  Of course, no-one else was stupid enough to do that, so I ended up with the infernal thing.  I tried to surreptitiously abandon it in the hotel as I was fairly sure that I’d get put on some sort of register if I was caught with it in public, but some bugger found it and posted it to me.  No idea who.  In a way, that’s the most worrying thing about it.

But there was another book that was part of the same prize, called Survival of Death, all about the ‘evidence’ for the afterlife.  And one of the articles in it was about the R.101 airship disaster, and a medium who claimed to have made contact with the spirits of the dead crewmen.

I’d read bits about R.101 before, back in pre-internet days, and this article rekindled my interest.  People still argue today about the causes of the crash and whether she was simply a bad ship or a good one plagued by ill-luck.  I knew there was a story in it somewhere and read more widely about R.101 and the great rigid airships in general.  They cast a spell, which I think you either get or you don’t, and R.101 was certainly a beautiful ship.  Anyway, I originally intended to write two or three stories about R.101- each completely different versions of the story- to try and sell as a chapbook.  Somewhere along the line one of the story ideas- where the ship escaped destruction- expanded and pushed the other ideas out.  First it was going to be a novella… then a novel… now it’s planned as the first in a series of novels.  No idea how that happened.

R.101 over Elstow, Bedfordshire

10) What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?
There are also: Spitfires, pirates, monsters, battles and true love.

Thanks again to Antony for tagging me, and I hereby tag Jeannie Alderdice to carry the meme on by answering the same 10 questions and tagging others to carry it on on January 23rd!