Black Mountain #6: The House By The Cemetery

My apologies, first of all: the latest instalment of Black Mountain is a couple of weeks late. There was some sad news in our family, and the work train got a tad derailed. But here is the sixth episode, The House By The Cemetery and the seventh, The Master Of The House, is almost finished, and should be out on schedule at the end of June (fingers crossed.)

Yes, the title The House By The Cemetery is a nod to the great Lucio Fulci. No, the title The Master Of The House has nothing to do with Les Miserables. Although a recent one-star Amazon review of The Faceless complained that it was 'depressing and dreary', so perhaps adding musical numbers to my stuff to liven things up would be a good thing.

As ever, The House By The Cemetery boasts fantastic cover art by Neil Williams. Here's a taster of what you can expect...

The watcher by the lake...

It began with a dream; it ended in obsession, insanity and death.

The fire in the woods...

The old farmhouse stood on high ground near the mountain of Mynydd Du. Long-abandoned though it was, Ronald Ashington still saw potential in it.

The dancers in the pines...

The Ashingtons had a vision: a luxury hotel, a hidden gem tucked away in the wilds of the Welsh countryside, a home away from home for couples looking to get away from it all. Yes, this house was perfect, except for the name: Ty Mynwent.

The house by the cemetery.

What you’ve got to understand, doctor, is this. If I told you in detail everything that happened at the farm, everything I saw, you’d call me mad. You’d say it was a delusion, that I saw things that weren’t there, heard voices that didn’t exist. But it’s not like that...

I have experienced, I have witnessed, things, phenomena, so… removed from the normal run of human experience that they have brought about a fundamental change in my understanding of the nature of reality. In how I… interact with the world. And with others. This places me at odds with the majority of people, and even with society as a whole. But this is not because of illness. Not because of chemicals in my brain or any stupid shit like that. It’s because while I was up I saw and heard and understood things. And I can’t carry on as I did before, as if the old things matter. Because they don’t...

Money. Conformity. Family. Marriage. All the sacred cows. They’re meaningless. Compared to what’s up there.

Black Mountain #5: The Last Of Russell Ware

The Black Mountain saga is just shy of its halfway point with its latest instalment, courtesy of Spectral Press. As ever, it boasts a cover from Neil Williams, who continues to do truly stellar work on this project.

Author and journalist Russell Ware was the man who’d coined the term ‘The Bala Triangle’, chronicling the phenomena that surrounded the North Welsh mountain Mynydd Du with ever-increasing obsession.

On the 2nd January, 1981, his career and marriage in ruins, he set off for Bala for the last time.
The following morning, Ware’s body was found in Llyn Daioni, the lake at the heart of so many of Mynydd Du’s mysteries. An accident, or suicide; either way, his torment, and that of his loved ones, was at an end.

But in the shadow of Black Mountain, nothing is as it seems. Rob Markland, following in Ware’s footsteps, finds one man willing to break a silence of thirty years, and tell the true story of the last of Russell Ware.

'The light came from a fire. A big, bright bonfire in the middle of a clearing where there shouldn’t have been any clearing, flames shooting ten, twenty feet up into the air. And standing all around the fire were a bunch of people in pale-coloured robes. They were all hooded, so I couldn’t have told you what sort of faces they had. To be honest, I’m far from sorry about that.'

UPDATE: The Last of Russell Ware is now available to download here and here.

Black Mountain #4: The Beast Of Maes Carnedd

Not had time to get a new website organised yet - I'm still unpacking my crates of books - so this one will have to stay in service a little longer, in order to let you know that the latest instalment of the Black Mountain saga, The Beast Of Maes Carnedd, is now available on Amazon, with - as you can see - yet another awesome cover by Neil Williams.

Maes Carnedd lies in ruins now. It’s more than a hundred years since the Welsh mining village, in the shadow of Mynydd Du, was abandoned by its inhabitants.

In the summer of 1903, terror came to Maes Carnedd, and left a trail of corpses in its wake.

Something that killed with the strength and savagery of an animal, but the cruelty and sadism of a man. Something that brought death to its victims in the heart of the woods, in the tunnels of the mines, or behind the locked doors and windows of their own homes.

Only one man knows the truth of the events that doomed Maes Carnedd.

And now it’s time to tell.

'We could all hear Bert Williams' screams, fading away as it dragged him off. And we could have gone after him, but we didn’t. No point. We’d have been dead too. You didn’t see what it did to those men. 

They were torn to pieces. I mean literally. Limb from limb. Like you’d pull a roast chicken apart – rip off the drumsticks, gouge and tear off the breasts. Strip the carcass. We could recognise the faces, just – and by Christ, I wish I hadn’t – but as for the rest? You couldn’t tell which bits were Bill’s and which were Jack’s.
 
As for Bert Williams - no-one ever saw him again, living or dead.'


The first three episodes of Black Mountain, The Red Key, The Ghosts Of Hafan Deg and The Strange Death Of Britt Nordenstam, are all available for download too.

American readers can download the saga here.

And The Birds Fly South For Winter

This is my last morning in the house I've lived in for twelve years. I moved in at the end of 2001, halfway through writing a novella called Until My Darkness Goes, which appeared in my first story collection. I remember that because it's a ghost story, and on my first night alone in the house, as I was writing a suitably creepy scene, a floorboard creaked somewhere and terrified the bejazus out of me. The next night I put some music on, only to switch it off when other sounds intruded. After a moment I realised it was the couple next door. Making love. Very, very loudly. I managed not to bag on the wall and tell him to give her one from me.

I was twenty-seven when I moved in here. Last month I turned forty. I spent the last of my twenties and all of my thirties here. For most of that time I was single, and on occasions despaired of ever not being alone.

Not that I was. I've made good friends living here in Swinton; the guy over the road is one of my best mates. My next door neighbour, a former lodger, is someone I knew at college.

I learned to be happy on my own in this house. While I've lived here, I saw my first books published, and my stories appear in annual 'Best Of' collections. I wrote Tide Of Souls here, and The Faceless.

And I fell in love while I lived here. And that love has deepened, and now I'm moving to another city - Liverpool - to be with the woman I love. A new life begins, exhilarating and scary all at once.

I will miss this house. I'll miss Swinton. I'll miss the little Chinese takeaway up the road where I'm on first name terms with the owners. I'll miss the nature reserve ten minutes walk from my front door and the country park up the road, and all the bits of green belt and natural beauty I've come to know, living here.

But it's time to go.

This is a good little house. It's taken care of me, far better than I've taken care of it. I'm glad that the people buying it from me are friends. I'm glad it will be in good hands.

This might be the last post here on this blog, too. I'm hoping to set up a WordPress site. This blog has been good, but I think I need something different now.

Thanks to everyone who's been following me since I set it up six years ago. Take care, be well and be happy.

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The Strange Death Of Britt Nordenstam

The third instalment of Black Mountain, my serial for Spectral Press, is The Strange Death Of Britt Nordenstam, released at the end of this month.

Once again, the cover artwork is by the immensely talented Neil Williams, who's outdone himself with this stonking cover.

'I could hear him. Not one voice, but dozens. Hundreds. You know your Bible, Mr Ware? ‘Call him Legion, for we are many?’ Many voices, but all one. It was a call and it was beautiful but I could never quite hear it, and I had to. I wanted to follow it. Same as Britt. But it was worse for her, because it was her the devil wanted...

...I could hear it too, and it was calling me up into the pines. Because, you see, Mr Ware, that wood – Coed Capel – it isn’t always as small as it looks. There are places where the pines stretch out and out forever, and the paths through them coil around so you can never find your way back. And the devil’s waiting there for you in them.'

You can download the second episode, The Ghosts Of Hafan Deg, here, and read the first episode, The Red Key, for free here.

X7

X7 is a slim but punchy little anthology from a new small press called Knightwatch, and is edited by Alex Davis. Its theme? The Seven Deadly Sins...

'We are punished by our sins, not for them' - Elbert Hubbard. 

X7 takes you on a sinister, startling and scintillating journey through the deadliest of sins with seven superb horror tales. 

In these pages both hero and anti-hero will succumb to sin and reap the results of their behaviour. Be it the gastronomic society that uncovers a unusual delicacy, a brother seeking to become closer to his lost sister, the wrath of a serial killer – and his psychologist – being unleashed or the simple sin of lazing a while by the waterside, this anthology will shock and surprise and equal measure. 

Featuring new and exclusive stories from Alex Bell, Simon Bestwick, Simon Clark, Tom Fletcher, Amelia Mangan, Gaie Sebold and Nicholas Royle. 

As you can see, it's a bloody good line-up. My own contribution is on the them of Greed, and it's called 'Stormcats.' Here's a quick sample:

'At the bottom of the slope, where a shore of silt and loose stone was forming where the grass had been washed away, lay a tide-mark of straggly fur.

Aaron went down to the water’s edge. Rats, maybe? But he already knew they weren’t.

Cats. All along the shoreline – there had to be thirty or forty of them, washed up at his door. All dead, of course, long-drowned. None, that he could see, still had eyes. Movement in the water – he looked up to see more limp, furred bodies being washed in.

...

He looked down at the cats again, prodded the closest one with his foot.

It moved.

Aaron leapt back. Must be trapped gas, or something inside it, eating it from within. But no; the cat writhed there brokenly, then rolled and rose up on its paws, then looked around and, despite its absence of eyes, it saw him. And when it did, it hissed and arched its spine, the remainder of its bedraggled hair rising on end as it did.

The whole shoreline was moving now, the rest of the cats thrashing back into life and motion – getting to their feet and hissing, arching their backs –

And starting to advance.

Aaron backed away. The ones in the water were moving too. They floundered their way to shore, to join the other cats – the other dead cats – as they advanced on him.'

X7 is available both as a paperback or an ebook.

The Ghosts Of Hafan Deg are unleashed!

Black Mountain #2: The Ghosts Of Hafan Deg is now available to buy. You can download it to your Kindle for a mere £1.86 here (or in the US, for $3.07 here.)

The first instalment, The Red Key, will soon be available as a free download as well. In the meantime, you can read it - also free - here.