Guest Blog by Ashley Lister - The Cursed Blog Tour: Day Three

Ashley Lister is a prolific author of fiction, having written more than fifty full length novels and over a hundred short stories. Aside from regularly blogging about poetry and writing in general, Ashley also teaches creative writing, language and literature in Lancashire, England.

(This is part of the blog tour to promote Ashley's latest release, Cursed. Now read on...) 

I’d like to begin by thanking Simon for letting me visit here today and share this. This is an extract from my latest novella, Cursed. Cursed is the third in an ongoing series of novellas, all loosely related by the location in which they’re set, Innsmouth, and it’s going to be released on March 1^st, 2021. This chapter occurs halfway through the story.

Innsmouth University's Explorers Club meet once a month to share stories of the supernatural. They meet in empty houses, abandoned buildings and derelict churches. They meet in the dead of night. They tell stories of the impossible, the unbelievable and the most terrible. And now, it appears, their meetings have been cursed.

There were shadows at the base of the clocktower. At this time on a winter’s evening, with the first of the ten o’clock chimes ringing out through Innsmouth’s empty town centre, shadows were not unexpected. But, for anyone paying close attention, anyone watching the dark shapes that came and went of their own volition, the shadows would have seemed darker around the base of the clocktower on this occasion.

Derek Brown, lost in his own thoughts as he took Horatio on his evening constitutional, had not noticed the shadows. It was a cold night and, not for the first time, the threat of rain made him wish to Christ his wife’s French Bulldog would hurry up and do its business so he could get back home. Horatio was not the brightest dog he’d ever encountered and this nightly walk was always made tiresomely protracted because Horatio needed to sniff every lamppost, piddle at least three hundred times, and take one shit that was slightly larger than the turds that Derek could produce. On top of that, with Horatio being a chunky little bastard, who waddled more than he walked, the nightly constitutional took forever.

“Is this what my life’s come to?” he wondered, glaring down at the dog.

Horatio had paused to take his last shit of the day and it was never a pleasant experience to watch. With his bulging eyes, which always seemed to bulge further when he was straining to squeeze one out, Horatio reminded Derek of his wife. The idea that a pet could look like its owner was never truer than when Horatio was standing on a street corner with his fat arse trembling, his eyes bulging like chapel hat pegs and an expression of stupid surprise on his tubby face as though he didn’t know what was happening. Derek had often thought it was like having his wife with him on the walk, except with less inane chatter and slightly more outdoor defecating. He repeatedly told himself he’d take a picture of this moment when it occurred so that he could post it on FaceBook, alongside a picture of her, and ask his friends to spot the difference.

And this evening, to his surprise, Horatio was providing him with the perfect moment. It was almost as though the fat, simple dog had decided to pose for the shot.

Derek snatched the mobile from his jacket pocket and opened the camera app. It was set on selfies when the screen opened and he found his own pudgy, gammon-coloured features being displayed on the screen. Recoiling only a little, he pressed the button to turn the camera around and found himself staring down at Horatio as the dog stared up at him.

With the eyes bulging, the tongue lolling out over a double-chin, and a facial expression that looked like it had found three consecutive answers on a word search puzzle and was bursting to boast about the achievement, the shitting Horatio could have been his wife’s twin. Admittedly, one of them had a little more facial hair than the other, but Derek thought that was such a small distinction it was close to being negligible.

He snapped three pictures in short succession, chuckling softly to himself as he anticipated the repercussions of sharing this picture with friends. Horatio, clearly unimpressed with being photographed in the middle of a relatively private act, shied away from Derek. It was an abrupt lurch that caught Derek by surprise. One moment he was taking pictures of a shitting dog whilst holding its leash and chuckling to himself. The next moment the leash had been pulled from his hand, Horatio was waddling toward the clocktower, and Derek watched his phone, fall from his fingers and land on the freshly laid turd that Horatio had deposited.

“Bloody hell,” Derek complained. “Horatio,” he called. “Come back here.”

He reached for his phone, picking it up gingerly between thumb and forefinger, and realised Horatio’s sticky turd had adhered to the screen. Derek sneered in disgust, sure the dog had done this deliberately and he scanned the empty street looking for his wife’s French Bulldog.

“Horatio,” he called. “Where are you?”

Innsmouth seemed surprisingly quiet this evening. On the positive side, that meant there had been no one around to witness him dropping his phone on top of a warm and steaming dog turd. On the negative side, the silence unsettled him and there was no one around to tell him where his wife’s stupid dog had gone. A mist of drizzle hung in the air. The night seemed chillier than it should have been and, for the first time, he noticed that quite a few streetlamps seemed to have stopped working. The night was darker than it had any right to be and the subsequent shiver that tickled down his spine had nothing to do with Innsmouth’s low temperature.

Ashley writes:

This story is built on my fascination with the way people share their personal ghost stories. To celebrate this fact, on Monday March 1^st, I’ll be hosting an online book launch/virtual event where I (and some friends and fellow writers) will be sharing our own personal ghost stories. If you fancy joining us, either to share a ghost story or simply to listen, please drop me an email at me@ashleylister.co.uk and I’ll happily send you an invite.

And, to find out what happens in the remainder of this novella, you can pre-order a copy of Cursed on Amazon.

You can also buy the previous novellas in the series, Unearthed and Fearless. 

The Lockdown with... Ashley Lister

Ashley Lister is a prolific writer of fiction across a broad range of genres, having written more

than fifty full length titles and over a hundred short stories. He is the co-host of Blackpool's Pub Poets and a regular participant (and occasional winner) in their monthly Haiku Death Match.

Aside from regularly blogging about writing, Ashley also teaches creative writing in the North West of England. He has recently completed a PhD in creative writing where he looked at the relationship between plot and genre in short fiction.

1. Tell us three things about yourself.

1) I own the two cutest dogs in the world. This is Oswald and Dee. Dee is sticking out her tongue in this photo. Oswald is looking fed up with Dee’s flippant shenanigans.

2) I’ve got a PhD in creative writing. I wrote a thesis that looks at the relationship between plot and genre in short fiction.

3) I’ve written a book called Blackstone Towers, a horror novel, and I think it’s awesome.

2. Many writers have said the COVID-19 outbreak and the lockdown have made it harder for them to create. Have you found this? Has the outbreak affected you as a writer and if so, how?

Perhaps we should call it ‘Writer’s Blockdown’? I will admit it hit me hard.

Lockdown gave me a lot of free time. I was able to work from home in the day job, you can still deliver lectures online, but I had free time because I wasn’t traveling to work, or going to the gym, or walking the dogs very much, or doing any socialising.

But I didn’t have the enthusiasm to do any original writing.

Then I had the idea to self-publish some of my back catalogue. I hadn’t done much in the way of self-publishing previously. I’ve usually worked with established publishing houses, but rights had reverted to me on a handful of titles so I thought I would see what the experience was like. Once I’d finished revising and uploading the previously published titles, I wondered if I should try to release a novel that I hadn’t yet placed with a publisher.

I surveyed my Facebook friends to establish the most effective title for the book and that’s how I come to be here, today, talking about Blackstone Towers.

3. What was the first thing you had published?

When I was eight, I had a poem published in a school magazine. Not only was the poem dreadful (rhyming ‘boy’ and ‘toy’) but I seem to recall it was also plagiarised. After that, when I was in my early teens, I had a letter published in the British comic Bullet, and they managed to change my surname from LISTER to LISTEN. After that my first success as an adult writer came when I wrote an erotic story for the adult magazine Forum.

4. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?

I’m torn between two choices here. Part of me wants to say my PhD thesis, which can be found at this link. It embodies research from four and a half years of my life, includes a variety of original short stories in a range of genres, as well as my supported arguments for the difference between the semantic and syntactic aspects of genre.

However, another part of me wants to talk about my poetry. During lockdown I managed to put a lot of my poetry into a single collection (Old People Sex and other highly offensive poems), and I like that book because I know it makes readers laugh. My late father was a stand-up comedian and it’s always been an ambition of mine to entertain an audience in a similar way to him, so I think this book would have made him proud.

This is the opening stanza from the title poem of that collection:

Granny pulled on her surgical stockings
She put her false teeth in the glass
She took the Tena pad out of her panties
And said, “Grandpa, could you please f**k my ass?”

5. …and which makes you cringe?

There is a trilogy of erotic stories that I wrote a few years ago.

If I found a genie in a bottle, and I was granted three wishes, rather than doing something nice like removing illness and disease from the world or establishing a fairer balance of economic distribution, I’d ask the genie to remove each of those books.

6. What’s a normal writing day like?

When writer’s blockdown isn’t happening, I have a fairly rigid schedule. I get up at five and go to the gym for an hour. When I get back I breakfast, shower, shave and dress. A couple of days a week I go onto the campus and deliver lectures on creative writing and other English-related subjects. This completes my nine-to-five.

On the days when I’m not lecturing, I’ll spend a couple of hours writing from nine to eleven, walk the dogs, and then spend the afternoon either working on edits, researching, blogging or immersing myself in other tangentially related writing projects.

I’m very lucky in that I can spend so much of my time immersed in writing and stories.

7. What work of yours would you recommend for people on lockdown and in need of a

good book?

My horror novel Blackstone Towers is due out on August 22^nd. I’m very pleased with this one because it contains ghosts, zombies, daemons and lots of background supernatural elements. I think it was Toni Morrison who said, “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” Blackstone Towers is the book I wanted to read that I had to write.

This is the blurb from the back of the book.

The talismans of the magi control seven realms of the mortal world. One can grant the bearer immortality; another gives its owner unfathomable wealth; a third gives the holder unerring foresight. There is a talisman to control reality, success, the deliberate and the accidental, and a talisman that governs the balance between love and hate.

The planets are now aligning, and one worldly resident of Blackstone Towers knows the talismans urgently need collecting and destroying before they fall into the wrong hands.

The only problem is establishing whose hands are the wrong ones.

8. What are you working on now?

I’m about to embark on a blog tour to promote Blackstone Towers, with dates and locations below. [Ed: the blog tour's now complete, but why not check it out anyway? :) ]

My next project is going to be a series of horror novels, each one set around the same fictional university. There’ll be a Lovecraftian theme to all of the stories because I’ve recently been binging my way through the Herbert West – Reanimator stories and they have a definite allure that I think is always overshadowed by the Cthulhu mythos.

On top of that, I’m planning to spend a little downtime reading The Feast of All Souls because it looks like it’s going to be a delightful read. [Ed: Aw, shucks - thank you!]

Thank you for inviting me to visit your blog today. It’s been a genuine pleasure.