Monday 30 April 2012

Stephen King Nails It...

Stephen King has written an article about American politics and tax (keep reading!) for The Daily Beast... and he does a better job cutting through the bullshit than most political commentators or journalists. It's called:

Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!

Now I'm not American (I've never even been there) but it seems many of the attitudes King describes are becoming common over here too; the recent cutting of the top-tax rate by Cameron and Osborne is proof of that ("we're all in this together" surprisingly proved to be utter horse piss) as well as the opening of the NHS up for profit; the fawning over the Murdoch empire even as it topples; the lack of regulation or censure on the bankers who caused this bloody mess in the first place...

Etcetera, etcetera.

So anyway, this piece struck a chord with me; and it's nice to know an author who's had much of my money over the years isn't a total prick, but in fact seems grounded and self-aware enough to realise luck and society as well as his own (formidable) talent got him where he is today.

Some choice King quotes from the article:

"I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share."

"That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fucking-American is what it is."

But really, read the whole thing.

Thursday 26 April 2012

... becalmed ...

I'm not writing very much at the moment. I'm about halfway through a new draft of an old story, Sick Leave (which is about the plague, and scary kids, and things we don't face up to in the darkness) but I've only managed a few hundred words on it this week.

I don't believe in writer's block as such. If you encounter it, I think the best thing to do is just sit and force yourself to write something, anything. Get something down, and then look at what you've written the next day and if it's shit... well, you can rewrite shit. Or bin it. But this way of writing - of working damnit - takes effort, takes a lot more energy than those times when the words come effortlessly and writing seems so easy; fun even. These things come in cycles, but unfortunately sometimes the periods when you really need to roll up your sleeves and put some elbow grease into your writing sometimes coincide with the times when real life is tough too. Not dramatic, not scary - I'm alright. But tough and tiring and draining. Now is one of those times, and so Sick Leave is progressing in fits and starts.

Logically of course such a time would be a good one to get caught up on some reading, on some blog posts, on some submissions of stories. But they all use the same part of my brain, the same enthusiasm, as the writing itself. I feel the same weariness attempting any of them. TV and Playstation it is then.

I feel somewhat listless, but restless too, like sailors on a becalmed ship.

It will pass, as all such things do; the sails will fill with air and the words will come again, and looking back on this becalmed period it will seem as unrealistic and implausible as the idea that I'll ever write something quickly and with ease does to me now. But for now, I am drifting.



On another, more positive note, I can announce that my story Snow is to appear in the Pulp Ink 2 anthology which will be published by Snubnose Press. It's edited by Chris Rhatigan and Nigel Bird and you can find the announcement and full line up of authors here.

Regular readers (hello!) may recall I've posted about Snow before, and the curse that seemed to be attached to the story, causing inevitable misfortune to any publication or anthology that I submitted it to. I speculated then that maybe the only way for the curse to be lifted was for the story to be accepted by someone.

So I'm pleased to say it looks like the nightmare is finally over.


Or is it...?

Friday 20 April 2012

Two New Stories





Awhile ago I was looking through some websites when I came across Sirens Call Publications. The second issue of their e-zine was accepting submissions for short stories based on the theme of 'horror from the point of view of the observer'.

The observer - that's interesting, I thought, but I haven't got any stories that fit right now, and the deadline is in a few days so I haven't time to come up with anything... Ah well.


Around this time I'd also been turning over a vague idea in my head about a story about a soldier in a modern day war, who did little but stare at computer screens all day like any other office worker. And about what he might see on those screens that wasn't strictly speaking there. Now you'd think my conscious mind would have been smart enough to think: computer screens? from the point of view of the observer? there's a connection there..! but no. But my subconscious, which is obviously the brains of the outfit, must have made the connection overnight, for the next morning I awoke with a story called 'Drones' in my head.

Not just the idea for 'Drones' mind you, but the whole shebang: the plot, the lead character's voice, the first lines, the last lines... This has happened to me only occasionally; when it does the story seems very fragile, like a soap bubble, and I know I have to get it written down as quickly as I can before it bursts. So I went straight downstairs, boiled the kettle, and wrote the first complete draft of 'Drones' in a couple of hours.

The next day I attempted to decipher my cramped and frantic handwriting, and wrote out a second draft; the day after that it was typed up and sent off. It's been years since I've written anything so quickly, and although the story is only about 2.5k words, it's still a good feeling.

Anyway, given that the story wouldn't even have existed without the nudge from the Sirens Call submissions page there was no messing around on Duotrope with this one - the story went straight across to SR, a few days before the deadline closed. And I'm very pleased to say they accepted it.

I really like it, as a story, but then I would say that because the writing of the story was so quick and easy - writers tend to like best the stories they liked writing best I find, rather than the ones where they've had to slog through redraft after redraft. But whether inspiration and writer's cramp or hard graft and heartache produces the best stories for readers to read I'm not so sure.

Anyway, you can read 'Drones' in Issue Two of The Siren's Call e-zine, available to purchase here. I'm off to check it out, and see what kind of company I'm keeping...



In addition, the Abominable Gentlemen have been busy in the lab again, and after much boiling of test-tubes and loss of eyebrows, I am pleased to say that fourth volumes of Penny Dreadnought is available now.

This issue's honorary Gentlemen is Theodor W. Adorno, whose quote “Behind every work of art lies an uncommitted crime” was the inspiration for the title. That was my idea; I'm the Abominable Gentlemen who brings unnecessary pretentiousness to the group.

The issue contains four tales of murder, malfeasance and malarky:

Occupational Hazard by Iain Rowan
The Aerialist by Alan Ryker
Packob's Reward by James Everington
Poe's Blender by Aaron Polson

Commit your own crime by downloading it from Amazon (UK | US), Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords.


Monday 16 April 2012

Strange Stories #12: The Long Sheet by William Sansom


"The Long Sheet" by William Sansom

Strange Story #12: The Long Sheet
Author: William Sansom
Collected In: not sure, sorry. It doesn't appear to be in the Faber reissued Stories
Anthologised In: The Weird

Such, then, was the task of the captives...

There's a little sub-genre of the weird tale (or sub-sub-genre - like Inception I'm not quite sure how many layers down I am any more) where the story seems like a allegory or parable. I say seems, for the key point is that unlike a straight-forward allegory such as Animal Farm, exactly what the allegory or fable means or represents isn't quite clear. Instead, the reader is left with an undefinable sense that there must be more significance to the tale being told, over and above the literal interpretation of what has happened, but quite what that significance is just beyond reach.

Kafka is the obvious example; in fact so obvious that this blog post was going to be about In The Penal Colony, which is a classic example of what I am thinking of here. But it seemed a bit too obvious so I've been putting off writing about it... and then I read the story The Long Sheet by William Sansom in the anthology The Weird.


Have you ever wrung dry a wet cloth? Wrung it bone white dry - with only the grip of your fingers and the muscles of your arms?


Those are the opening lines, and I was immediately intrigued. The story tells of the clear and unusual punishment facing groups of prisoners, who have to wring dry - bone dry- a vast, long sheet in damp, dreadful conditions. They are promised freedom if they ever succeed. The prisoners are divided into teams and put into separate rooms of the jail to complete their task, and the story largely tells of the different approaches and attitudes each group of people has to the Herculean task...

For anyone who's read any Kafka, the style will seem familiar - the attention to mundane detail and routine, the lack of any real characterisation or world-building beyond the bare minimum, the odd, ritualistic details that are never quite explained... and perhaps most chillingly the idea that everyone has long since forgot why the strange punishment is being enacted, but still it is.

However, Sansom wrote this story before the English translations of Kafka, making it all the more remarkable. Sadly I didn't find the other Sansom story in The Weird as interesting or as good as this one - it seemed more a poor-man's version of The Swords by Robert Aickman, although again it was written before that. However The Long Sheet definitely interested me enough to make me want to read more of this author, who I'd not come across before.

It finishes on a suitable ambiguous note - it seems at first glance like the 'moral' of a traditional allegory, but is it? Is there any universal meaning here, or is it just the guards having a good joke? Or are the guards themselves just part of the vast system of the long sheet, where people's creativity, and faith, and work-ethic,  lead to such manifestly pointless results?

The story is told in the form of a fable, but is that form just a hollowed-out shell, containing no deeper meaning, for all our efforts at interpretation? Is reading it an empty ritual, much like the twisting, and twisting of the wet sheet? But all those little, precise details - it must all mean something, surely?

I don't know.

Next Week: Strange Stories #12. Smoke Ghost by Fritz Leiber

Thursday 12 April 2012

Crazy what you could've had...

So, in the last month and a bit I have:

Had a couple of story acceptances, one of which I'm particularly excited about but can't share with you yet...

Had the nicest, most constructive rejection of a story to date (perversely this felt almost as good as the acceptances)

Had another brilliant month of sales in the UK, and an abysmal one in the US.

Finished writing a story called Drones which is about war, and collective responsibility, and why starring into a computer screen for too long might be a bad idea...

Started writing a story called Sick Leave which is about a teacher, The Black Death, and that spooky little "... we all fall down" song.

Discovered this video of R.E.M. performing 'Country Feedback' in 2001, where Michael Stipe starts seeing lines of Dylan's 'Like A Rolling Stone' over the outro. Godamnit they were good at this point.


You?

Monday 9 April 2012

Strange Stories #11: The Hortlak by Kelly Link


Strange Story #11: The Hortlak
Author: Kelly Link
Collected In: Magic For Beginners
Also Available to Read or Download on the Author's Website


The zombies came in, and he was polite to them, and failed to understand what they wanted...
For this week's story, I though it would be interesting (for me at least) to read and comment on a story by an author completely new to me. No prior knowledge, no research on Google - just read it and then write this piece. And if you don't like it you only have yourselves to blame, because this story was chosen by the readers of this blog when (for reasons that doubtless made sense at the time) we composed a contents list for a non-existent Scattershot Writing Horror Anthology. Kelly Link was one of the writers who was new to me who got a lot of votes, so I've been meaning to read her for awhile now. Also you can get this story, plus many others, for free on her website, which is great.
Anyway -  The Hortlak. (Okay, I lied. That thing about not doing any research? I did Google the meaning of the title. It is Turkish for 'ghost' or 'phantom').  It's immediately obvious from the style of this story that this isn't a straight horror story - the writing and range of references is too knowing, stylised, and arch for that. Like Douglas Coupland if he'd seen more George A. Romero films. And it seems to me Romero's zombies, and the notion that they are a metaphor for mindless consumerism are a touchstone here, albeit one completely transformed and transfigured by Link's prose. The zombies in The Hortlak come out of a chasm in the ground, behind a twenty-four hour convenience store. They don't go on a flesh eating rampage though. They seem to go... shopping. Sort of. Anti-shopping.

The zombies didn’t talk at all, or they said things that didn’t make sense. “Wooden hat,” one zombie said to Eric... They tried to pay Eric for things that the All-Night didn’t sell.
The story, despite its tone, seems preoccupied with death. As well as the zombies, there is Charley, who works at the vet putting down unwanted dogs, after giving them a final ride in her car. The dogs may or may not come back as ghosts, ghosts you can't see but can smell. The central character's mother appears to have left town to hunt and kill his father. The two central characters, Eric and Batu, spend a lot of time speculating about what life, so to speak, is like for the zombies down in the chasm:

“Yeah?” Batu said. “Zombie bars too? Where they serve zombies Zombies?”

It seems telling that they are unable to imagine the zombies as living a life that much different to their own - a life of consumerism. When all the evidence is that the zombies are not like this: they try and give things not buy them, they are attracted to objects because of their intrinsic value (they like shiny things) not their monetary worth.

The Hortlak seems to me in part a story about our inability to truly imagine death, despite it being all around us and inescapable. And about our inability to imagine an alternative to capitalism, perhaps, despite all its faults.

I may be doing the story a disservice here, because as I said I've only just read it, and I have a whole load of unanswered questions after that first reading. I hope some of you who are also new to Link are intrigued enough check it out (see the link above for free a downloads). And I haven't even mentioned the man with the bees, the pyjamas (what the hell is going on with the pyjamas?), the Startrek references, the Turkish translations, the Canadians, the...

If you have read the story before, have you any theories of your own? Have I missed the point or got anything wrong?

And if you were one of the people who recommended this story to me originally: thank you. This one looks like a keeper.

Next Week: Strange Stories #12. The Long Sheet by William Sansom. 

Saturday 7 April 2012

Review: One Of Us by Iain Rowan


Iain Rowan has played a blinder with his latest book (and first full length novel) One Of Us. It's a crime novel from Infinity Plus, and like pretty much everything else I've read by Rowan it transcends the genre it's written in to become something else: an Iain Rowan book. And who cares about all this genre nonsense anyway, aside from marketing people - a good book is a good book. And even by his own previous high standards the author has excelled here.
One Of Us is told from the point of view of Anna, a medical student who has come to the UK illegally (the reasons why she has left home only become clear gradually). She is living in a hostel and working in a burger bar, when one day comes the chance to gain some identification papers - at the price of using her surgical skills for some local mobsters...
The story is told in the first person, and Rowan's depiction of Anna's point of view and character is accomplished and spot on. The characterisation of the others in the book, and the depiction of their changing relationships to Anna, is also extremely well done. The book takes a particularly adult and realistic look at how friendship (as opposed to romantic attachment) comes about and falls apart. Despite, or perhaps because of, the first-person narrative, the prose of the novel fizzes with great turns of phrase, acute observations, and sarcastic dialogue.

What really sets this book apart is its viewpoint - there's a palpable sense of anger at the way people like Anna are treated: the ignorance, the casual racism, the refusal to see. It's this that underpins the plot's twists and turns, and makes for a book both exciting and moving.

As I said, a blinder. You can get hold of it both as an ebook (Amazon UK | US) or a paperback (UK | US) and frankly you have no excuse not to.

Wednesday 4 April 2012

Supernatural Tales 21 - Review


Thought I'd give a quick shout out to an issue of a magazine that's really impressed me recently -  issue #21 of Supernatural Tales is stuffed to the rafters with excellent stories. Often when I read short story magazines there's a few I think good, a few average, and a few I can't stand. If I'm lucky they'll be one up there in the very good category. ST21's worst story was a good one, and some of these tales were really very good indeed.


I've mentioned both Iain Rowan and Adam Golaski on this blog before (Golaski as the first author in my 'strange stories' series and Iain Rowan so many times he could probably claim squatter's rights) so I was expecting to very much like their contributions, and neither disappointed. Rowan's The Edge Of The Map was a short and very effective story which, in it's final sentence manages to pull off a volte-face in terms of mood and meaning - something about it really got to me. Golaski's Translation by contrast is a longer and more ambiguous tale, and dense and hard to fully grasp on first reading

But what was also nice was to find other equally good stories by authors new to me. As I said, all of them were at least good:

Supernatural Tales 21Steve Rasnic Tem's story These Days When All Is Silver And Bright is as good as it's title, which about says it all.

Virpus is a more tongue in cheek tale, funny in that way that horror can be (and which seems to be missed by so many people). It still plays successfully on a very modern fear, thought. (This one was by Bill Reid.)

S.P. Miskowski's A.G.A. was told almost entirely in dialogue and all the more effective for it. I really liked this one.

Steve Duffy's The Purple Tinted Window was disturbing rather than frighting, in that the supernatural element was provides relief  from the horror of the protagonist's mundane life, rather than the other way round.

The Last Fight by Sam Dawson is about the sacrifice and responsibility of those who went to fight the Spanish Civil War, and perhaps our own lack of such virtues.

And Stephen J. Clark ends the mag with The Vigil - an almost Lovecraftian horror tale this, filtered through The Twilight Zone perhaps. A good one to end on.

You can buy the magazine from Lulu or take out a subscription from the Supernatural Tales site itself. And when I say "you can" I mean "you should", obviously.

Monday 2 April 2012

The Mill by Mark West - Review

Been meaning to post a review of this for awhile - this is the second Mark West story I've read, the first being his story in the anthology Ill At Ease. That one impressed me enough to buy The Mill, a novella from Greyhart Press.

Ostensibly this is a horror story, but it is as much about the dislocation caused by the death of a loved one as it is about the supernatural. Although the supernatural element is there - the story is genuinely creepy in places.

West convincingly writes about his character's feelings of grief and isolation - at times this was a heart-wrenching read. It is well paced, with no extra fat on the meat of the story, making its bleak atmosphere feel even more dark and unremitting. The ending really works, bringing both the realistic and supernatural elements together into a climax that is pitch-perfect, and haunting in more than one sense.