Monday 31 October 2011

Coffin Hop #2 - Ghosts for Halloween

Ghosts are my favourite of all the 'standard' horror monsters, for reasons to be explained in a future blog post.  For a final post for the Coffin Hop and for Halloween, I've collected some of my favourite quotes about ghosts. They're not all from horror authors, indeed they're not all from authors that I actually like; but they are all interesting...

If any of you have any other great ghost quotes, let me know in the comments, and I'll toss a free ebook your way.

"Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." ARTHUR C. CLARKE, 2001: A Space Odyssey

"Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea..." HENRIK IBSEN, Ghosts

"The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts." ITALO CALVINO, The Literature Machine

"The lawn
Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return
Gently at twilight"
T.S. ELIOT, To Walter de la Mare

"Of all ghosts, the ghosts of our old loves are the worst." SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

"Houses are not haunted. We are haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves, our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts." DEAN KOONTZ, Velocity

Friday 28 October 2011

Other Internet Pages Are Available

Some dark corners of the internet I've stumbled upon recently:

Firstly I'm loving the flash-fiction found on Maps Of The Lost - no idea who it is writing; there's no clues on the site at all. But whoever this mysterious stranger is - more please!

Speaking of flash-fiction, Anne Michaud is hosting a competition to write a scary story in 100 words or less on her blog as part of the Coffin Hop tour. My own entry, Haunted, is exactly 100 words long - you can find it here along with the other entries (I particularly like Ren Warom's story Glue).

Thanks to Colin Barnes and Alan Ryker for recent kind reviews of The Shelter on their blogs.

And speaking of Alan Ryker, as we were, he had a new site dedicated to horror movies called Streaming Horror. Check it out if you like horror films and/or cute but sarcastic dogs called Chewie.

Sunday 23 October 2011

Coffin Hop - Tales From Around The Camp Fire



Halloween is almost upon us, and that can only mean one thing - annoying teenagers who aren't even in costumes wanting money and sweets from me all week.

Oh no, two things: annoying teenagers and horror stories.

This post is about horror stories, and is my contribution to the Coffin Hop blog tour - if you check out their site you'll see all the authors involved, and the best thing is they're all giving prizes away. As am I... read on to find out more.

But anyway, horror stories; ones told around a camp fire by a group of kids, each trying to outdo each other, each swearing their story is true. Stories called things like The White Lady; The Killer In The Backseat... and The Hook.

And despite all the literary sophistication that we horror authors try to bring to their tales, I like to think at heart we're all just kids around that camp fire, each trying to make people believe that no, really, this actually did happen.

But sometimes the stories we tell say more about ourselves than we realise:.

Some Stories For Escapists #4: The Hook

 - “OK, I’ve got one, I’ve got one. There’s this boy and girl right, and they’re going somewhere in this car to get off with each other, like The Drop right? And…” 
- “That’s where my brother goes with his girlfriend, when Mum wouldn’t let him in the home with her after…” 
- “Your brother aint got no girlfriend, he just goes up The Drop with a Razzle!” 
 [Laughter]
- “Right, so they’re up there and snogging and it’s all dark and he’s got his hands on her tits and the radio’s on and in between songs this guy says, the news guy, there’s been a break out from the local mental home, which is right near where they are. Some psycho's escaped, and instead of a hand right, he’s got this hook, real sharp, which he uses to kill his victims, rippin’ up their guts. That’s what the radio says, and they’re still snogging each other, but she’s scared now, typical girl, thinking the killer might be around. ‘Let’s go home,’ she says, ‘Get off me, I want to go home.’ He doesn’t want to but she keeps sayin’ it, ‘Get off, I’m scared, let’s go, get off me!’ So he eventually lets her go and speeds off, real fast cos he’s pissed off right. And when they get back they find, in the driver door handle, this ripped off hook…” 
 [They all stare into the camp fire]
- “Your brother really get her pregnant?” 
- “Yeah. My parents gonna kill him!" 
- “Didn't he use a johnny?” 
- “Dunno.” 
- “He shoulda done it to her when she had her period. You can’t get pregnant then.” 
- “No, aint it after she’s had it?” 
- “How would you know, you aint even kissed a girl!”
[They all pause and stare into the fire] 
- “You don’t even know what a period is.” 
- “I do, my sister told me!”
- “What is it then?” 
 [Pause] 
- “I aint telling you lot!” 
[Pause] 
- “Do they really bleed? The first time you… Do they really bleed?”
[Pause] 
- “My mum’s gonna kill him.” 

Anyway, competition time. As regular readers will know, I've had some great guest bloggers on here to celebrate the art of the short story. And I think horror is one genre particularly well suited to short stories; I love reading  good anthology of horror stories by a host of different and varied writers.

So the competition is to make up your ultimate Horror Story Anthology. For every one that contains some stories I love, or that are new to me but that I rush out and buy, I'll give that person a free download of my horror novella The Shelter. And for the one I judge the absolute best, I'll also give a free download of my collection The Other Room. (All entrants are also very welcome to a copy of First Time Buyers  but as that's currently free anyway that's not much of a prize!)

The rules:
1. Leave a comment containing a list of the 5-10 stories that make up your anthology - you're favourite horror stories of all time
2. Any horror or horror-ish story welcome, as long as you didn't write it yourself
3. Anything from 100 to 15k words I'll consider a short story for the purposes of this competition

Good luck. And don't forget to check out the other authors on the Coffin Hop blog tour...!

Tuesday 18 October 2011

A Free Halloween Treat...


I've made one of the tales from The Other Room available as a standalone story; it will available on Amazon as soon as possible. But as the idea is to put it out there for free (which on Amazon can be a s-l-o-w process) I'll just give you the Smashwords link for now, where it is already free:

First Time Buyers

If you check it out, I hope you enjoy it. Cover art and blurb below...


Kat and Alex move into a new house... but they're about to discover even new houses can be haunted. Outwardly confident and united, secretly they both harbour doubts about the economic situation, and each other. When Kat sees a pale figure in the mist fleeing from her behind their house, those doubts and fears are brought to light in a way both macabre and surreal.

A horror short story of approximately 7.5k words, First Time Buyers first appeared in the author's début collection, The Other Room.


Friday 14 October 2011

Spooky



Pleased to say that my story Red Route will be appearing in the forthcoming Dark Moon Digest Ghosts special edition. Not sure when it is out yet, but I think before Halloween sometime...

Do any of us stop to think as we get in the car that it's most likely the riskiest thing we'll do all day?


It's a slightly differently edited version to the one that appears in The Other Room, but probably not so you'd notice. It's like the different between this and this.





Saturday 8 October 2011

It should be here!

This will only make much sense if you've read The Shelter, and more specifically the author's afterword.

But... it should be here! I swear. I remember it!



Monday 3 October 2011

In Defence Of Short Stories #16: Colin Barnes

A quick bit about me - I've been interviewed by the talentless, no hope, self-published hack horror writer James Everington over at Sea Minor, the website of the wonderful Nigel Bird. If you want to read such illuminating exchanges as:


              Shit
              Shit
Then check it out here... 



Okay, today's guest blogger is Colin Barnes, and it's his birthday so you have to be nice to him in the comments, okay? (At least, until tomorrow you do... ) Colin is an author of dark fiction of the gritty horror/thriller type - he recently released a a crime anthology titled 'Killing my Boss' that he co-authored with best selling author Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff. Now he's working on a anthology of horror stories in his 'City of Hell Chronicles' setting, which looks like it's got some very interesting and exciting writers contributing to it... 
Colin has chosen to write on one of the all time great short story writers, Ray Bradbury, who I'm sure needs no introduction to any of my erudite readers. 

Take it away Colin...


The Bradbury Approach

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. " (R.Bradbury)

I could end the post right there and it would sum up Bradbury's approach to writing in the tiniest of nutshells. This is a man that exudes vitality, wonderment and sheer joy in his writing; even some of his darker horror themed stories exude these qualities in abundance.

Ray Douglas Bradbury is one of our greatest ever writers, and one of the most prolific short story writers. If you are looking for a good primer in what a short story is, pick up any one of his many collections and therein you'll find the formula to short story perfection. His stories are witty, often with insightful social commentary; disturbing, with their look at humanity and the deep rooted existentialist questions that he poses, and profound in their look at what it means to be human.

Not just a science-fiction writer, Bradbury writes across a wide range of genres, but with one common theme: wonder. Everyone of his stories echoes that earlier quote: each one is dripping with literary drunkenness, an excess of expression and meaning. His stories are more than just a mirror to the world, they hit you right between the eyes and make you question yourself, your environment, the direction we as a species are taking, and myriad more consequences.

In a 54 minute speech in 2001, Ray regales the audience of the 'Sixth Annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea' with a speech on writing that is quite simply the finest 54 minutes anyone could spend if they want to learn what it is to be a writer. He drips passion and honest from every pore. I challenge you to watch this alone and not bring a tear to your eye through the sheer brilliance and love this man has for literature. In the video he challenges would-be writers: If you want to be a writer, don't start with a novel. Instead, write a short story every week for a year. At the end you'll have 52 stories, and some of them will be good. 





It's a great approach for new (and experienced) writers. There's something cathartic about turning a story around within a week. You get to develop an idea, write it and polish it. Every week you'll have a finished piece of work, and it's true, you WILL have some good ones, even ones that are publishable. And maybe even ones that will change someone's life like Bradbury's stories have done.

On the subject of ‘In Defense’ of short stories, personally, I don’t feel they need defending as such; they just need to be brought more into the consciousness of readers. Novels are the vogue at the moment, but it wasn’t always like that. Short stories in the form of comics, serialisations, and anthologies used to be the big sellers, but as publishers dwindled, so did those kinds of products. Now, all the bucks go into developing novels. However, this is where eBooks are giving short stories a return to former glory. You can pick up single shorts or even collection for around 99c(p) and sample a range of authors. This is how Bradbury got started.

He approached publishers with a whole collection of short stories that he wrote. Luckily for him they had a unifying theme, and the publisher wasn’t so short sighted to dismiss him out of hand for having the temerity to turn up at their offices with a handful of papers. Instead, they read the stories and decided to publish them in a kind of novel format, but they were still short stories. This collection was titled ‘Martian Chronicles’ and by approaching various situations from a range of directions over his collection of short stories, they formed a whole similar to that of a novel.


So, without short stories, Ray Bradbury probably wouldn’t have had his breakthrough title and been as big an influence on the world of literature that he is today. 

Take Ray’s spirit, and try it for yourself – for both the writer and reader, indulge in short stories, you won’t be sorry, in fact I guarantee you will be enthused and rekindle a love for this perfect literary form.

As I started this post with a Bradbury quote, I shall close it with one: 


“Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall. ” (R. Bradbury).