As you know, I've another novel due for release this year, this time from Solaris: The Feast Of All Souls (formerly known as Redman's Hill.)
As you can see, it also boasts an awesome cover by Ben Baldwin.
The suburb of Crawbeck, on a hill outside Manchester, overlooks the
woodlands of Browton Vale. Alice Collier was happy here, once; following
her daughter’s death and the breakdown of her marriage, she’s come
back, to pick up the threads of her life. 378 Collarmill Road looks like an ordinary semi-detached house. But
sometimes, the world outside the windows isn’t the one you expect to
see. And sometimes you’ll turn around and find you’re not alone. John
Revell, an old flame of Alice’s, reluctantly comes to her aid. The hill
is a place of legends – of Old Harry, the Beast of Crawbeck, of the
Virgin of the Height and of the mysterious Red Man – and home to the
secrets of the shadowy Arodias Thorne. Alice’s house stands at a gateway between worlds. On the other side
of it, something has woken. And she and John, alone, stand in its way...
You can read Solaris' official press release here, featuring Jon Oliver saying nice things about me.
The Feast Of All Souls will be published in December 2016.
Coming up briefly for air here; I meant to do an end-of-year vlog for New Year's Eve, but I'm working on a novel redraft that needs doing by Monday, and by the evening I hadn't got round to it. Yesterday passed in much the same way.
So, a few quick words on 2015.
It was a tough start to the year. Cate's mum passed away just before last Christmas, which was a huge blow. Pauline was a kind, funny lady who had deserved better from life than she ever got, but never let it get her down. I'd liked her a great deal and wish there'd been time to know her much better, and she and Cate were very close. Seeing the person you love in that kind of pain and being helpless to make it go away is awful.
Plus, we were still living in the neighbourhood where Cate and her mum had lived for decades, in The House Of Damp And Mould (and perenially malfunctioning boiler.) I hadn't published a novel in three years, unless you counted the serial Black Mountain, and still didn't have an agent. (Although I was working on a new novel for Solaris, so it wasn't completely bleak.)
A lot has changed since then.
Cate's lovely and moving piece here says more than I could about coming to terms with loss. We moved in June from Tuebrook to the Wirral, to a little house we both love. There are plenty of green spaces close to hand, we're fifteen minutes from the beach by bus and our landlord's great. It's a new start, and it's done us both good. And we've set the date for our wedding next year - this year, I mean.
Hell's Ditch, which I'd started to fear would never see daylight, found a home with Snowbooks and came out last month. It's the first book in a story that's been steadily evolving since I was nineteen. I started writing it back in 2010, broke off for 2011 to write The Faceless and finished it in early 2012 before the long hard task of shopping it around began. Now it's out, and suddenly the rest of the Black Road needs to be travelled. In a few weeks I have to go back to the world of Helen and Gevaudan, Danny and Alannah, of Dr Mordake and Colonel Jarrett and Tereus Winterborn, and start writing about it and them after a three year absence (although I did pop back for a couple of brief visits without too much trouble.) It's exciting, and it's scary. All being well, The Devil's Highway will be out in October. (The paperback of Hell's Ditch will be released this March.)
I finished the novel for Solaris, The Feast Of All Souls (the original title, Redman's Hill, was felt to sound too like a Western for American readers!) and that'll be available in December 2016. Watch this space for a reveal of Ben Baldwin's brilliant cover art.
In between the first and second drafts of Feast, I wrote another book - a crime novel, belted out hard and fast, at white heat. It was great fun, and it got me an agent.
Four short stories came out, including 'The Face Of The Deep' in GAME OVER, which was singled out for praise by the Financial Times, and 'Horn Of The Hunter' in THE SECOND SPECTRAL BOOK OF HORROR STORIES - one of fourteen stories picked out of over 800 submissions! The others were 'The Climb' in Black Static #49 and 'No Room For The Weak', published on Mark Allan Gunnells' blog as part of the Hell's Ditch blog tour.
So 2015 ended a hell of a lot better than it started. It wasn't an unbroken uphill climb, of course: there were setbacks and downturns along the way. Especially in the wider world. There was the election result back in May: Britain, already a darker, meaner and more frightening place, is becoming more so. And then there were the horrible massacres in Paris, Baghdad and Beirut, and the vicious racism and hatred that's arisen in response to them. And the Christmas period has brought a succession of horrendous storms with torrential rain and flooding across many parts of the country. There will, very likely, be more to come. But there's still good in the world; there's compassion and kindness and love. Sometimes I think there's actually enough of it. But I always was an optimist.
However good things are going, something can always happen to pull the rug out from under. But just
because it can doesn't mean it will. So I'm starting 2016 with guarded optimism: there's a lot of hard work ahead, and not everything will be easy. But I have my health (touch wood), I'm with the woman I love and I've reached a couple of professional milestones.
2016 will see two novels published - The Devil's Highway and The Feast Of All Souls. And in a couple of weeks, my novella Angels Of The Silences will be reissued by Omnium Gatherum (and here's the new cover art - ain't it beautiful?) It's going to be a busy year in every way: hopefully it will be followed by more.
Happy New Year to all of you. I hope it brings you everything you want, need and hope for.
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.
