A Strange Little Story...

I have a "Strange Little Story" coming soon in the substack of the same name from excellent writer and good egg David Surface. Make sure you're subscribed, if for some crazed reason you're not already: Strange Little Stories.

'The Call' in BLOOD IN THE BRICKS

 Really pleased to announce that my story, 'The Call' is part of the lineup for the forthcoming anthology Blood In The Bricks from NewCon Press, and edited by Neil Williamson. It's a book of urban folk horror, and being launched at World Fantasycon in Brighton in October. The blurb, preorder links, and the stellar lineup are below:

Tales of the city redolent with ritual and drenched in dread.

Folk Horror is primarily associated with isolated settings and weird beliefs. Traditionally the isolated setting is rural, but our cities have been around for a long time too, their histories constructed layer upon layer, their secrets long kept and buried deep. And there are other types of isolation than geographical remoteness: housing schemes and suburbs, gilded business districts and gated communities, industrial wastelands and crumbling tower blocks...

Who knows what our old bricks were made of or what lies beneath our brightly lit pavements? Who knows what superstitions have been passed down the generations and who knows what goes on behind the locked doors of the community centre?

Down Street – James Bennett
Danse Macabre – Kim Lakin
Hagstone – Tracy Fahey
Gerädert Fühlen – Steve Toase
The Inverse Nurse – Ian Whates
Open Studios – E Saxey
Escape Notice – Tim Major
Larking – Phil Sloman
When the Blood Runs Dry – Lyndsey Croal
A Tiding – Timothy J Jarvis
Our Sister of Blackthorn – Dan Coxon
One of The Rotten Ones – Matthew Hopkins
The Rope Swing – Penny Jones
A Pinch of Salt – Joanna Corrance
A Body’s Got to Have Hope – Angela Slatter
The Call – James Everington
Fulfilment – Harvey Welles & Phil Raines
Extraction – Don Redwood
Flip – Ray Cluley

Blood in the Bricks is available as a paperback, an ebook, and as a signed limited edition hardback signed by all the contributing authors.

Repost: The Book That Made Me

An online conversation with the ace Ben Unsworth about Ramsey Campbell's new novel An Echo Of Children made me remember this old piece that I wrote for The Ginger Nuts Of Horror in 2014. GNOH site has moved sites since then and despite searching it and the archive I couldn't find this piece, so I thought I'd repost it here. I've not made any changes to what the 2014-me wrote so if you spot any typos or inelegances blame him not me.

The Book That Made Me: James Everington on Ramsey Campbell's 'Dark Feasts'

When I was kid, at least once a year my parents used to take me and my brother to a seaside resort on the Lincolnshire coast, where it invariably rained. When I was young I preferred to go to Mablethorpe because it had a life-sized Dalek ride you could sit in for 10p. By the time I was fifteen, my preference had changed to Cleethorpes—because it had a good second-hand bookshop.

By this age I'd already discovered Stephen King on my dad's bookshelves, so I thought I knew what horror was. I'd already read some crappy genre stuff as well, so I probably wasn't expecting anything much above the level of being pleasantly grossed out when I bought a book with a picture of a women eating pickled onions from a jar with an eyeball floating in it...

Dark Feasts by Ramsey Campbell. A bargain at 50p (or five Dalek rides, if you prefer). And the book that taught me that horror fiction was far richer and exciting than I'd previously believed.

Visiting the second-hand bookshop was always the last thing we did for the day, because it was near the car park. We legged it through the inevitable August rain to the car, and a few minutes after purchasing Dark Feast I was reading the first stories in the back seat as we drove home.

Dark Feasts is a chronological 'best of' Campbell's short story work; as I remember I was only partially impressed by the first story, The Room in the Castle, which is from Campbell's earliest years when he was trying to write in self-consciously 'Lovecraftian' manner. Even as ill-read as I was back then, I found it a bit derivative.

But the second story... now that was a different matter entirely.

Cold Print is still heavily influenced by Lovecraft in terms of its plot, but its setting is contemporary Liverpool and now the voice of the story is all Campbell's own. And what a voice it is: one of the most distinctive in modern horror, a prose-style so supple that it seems to sing even as it hints at horrors only briefly seen. Up until reading Campbell I'd been under the impression that genre books focussed on story, and that 'fancy writing' was reserved for the kind of books we did at school (look I was fifteen, okay?) What Dark Feasts taught me was how misguided that view was; Campbell's horror works because of his prose, his extraordinary ability to conjure up a disturbing image in just a couple of sentences. His characters merely glimpse the phantoms and bogeymen in these stories, rather than seeing them straight on, leaving them (and us) unsure of exactly what's happening and how real it was.

The rest of the book is even better: Dark Feasts really does contain some of the best horror stories ever written: The End Of A Summer's Day, The Man In The Underpass, The Companion... These stories and others made me aware something else as well: that the best horror is often in the form of the short story.

Trying to recall the experience of reading Ramsey Campbell for the first time is tricky, as I've read his work so often since then. For years, because I could only afford to buy books for my university course, Dark Feasts was the only book I had by him and I read the stories it contained over and over again. In reality there was probably no sudden epiphany; it's more likely that what I learnt from Dark Feasts gradually revealed itself to me, and started to influence the stories I was writing. 

And that first story? I even learnt something from that, now that I look back. I learnt that when you're starting out as a writer it's okay to explore your influences consciously, to deliberatively examine how someone else writes in order to begin the process of working out how you do. And in my case, I wasn't learning from Lovecraft.

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Top 10 Horror Reads 2024

It's been awhile since I did any book recommendations on here, so I thought I'd see if I could come up with my favourite horror reads of 2024. After some deliberation, and in no particular order, here's the result:

Last Night Of Freedom, Dan Howarth (Northern Republic)

A story of a stag-do gone horribly wrong (and not in the strippers and vodka shots kind of way) this was like an English version of Deliverance and it kept me absolutely gripped all the way through. Bloody violent and bloody good.

The End, Kayleigh Dobbs (Black Shuck Books)

A mini-collection in the Black Shuck Shadows range, featuring six tales about the end of, well, everything. Who can end the world six different ways and still keep you guessing until the last page? Kayleigh Dobbs can. 

Stone Gods, Adam Golaski (NO Press)

Adam Golaski might be the most underrated author working in horror/weird fiction at the moment? Maybe it's because he's surreal as much as scary, or maybe it's because he's not exactly prolific—I think this is his second collection of such fiction. And like his first, Worse Than Myself, Stone Gods contains many tales that demonstrate what a travesty that like of recognition is.

Subject 11, Jeffrey Thomas 

An author new to me, and one I immediately vibed with, if that's the right word. This is a novella-length work about ten people undergoing some weird kind of experiment where they're living together in an abandoned factory. Identify-warping weirdness ensues. Loved it.

The Weird Tales Boys, Stephen Jones (PS Publishing)

A book about horror rather than a horror book, this tells the story of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard, and also the broader story of Weird Tales magazine and pulp publishing at the time. Odd praise for a nonfiction book, but I found it a real page-turner. I knew a bit about HPL's life but not really the others, so some of the tragedy they faced was an actual shock to me.

Dirt Upon My Skin, Steve Toase (Black Shuck Books)

A mini-collection in the Black Shuck Shadows range (hey wow, deja-vu...), each of the stories here is a weird and twisted take on the theme of archeology. Original, well-written, creeps you out - what more could you ask for?

Uncertainties 7, ed. Carly Holmes (Swan River Press)

It's kind of hard to praise an un-themed horror anthology in a couple of sentences without just going 'all the stories are amazing!' but guess what: here, all the stories really are amazing. The Uncertainties series continues to set the bar for original, literate horror fiction in the short story form.

Ivy Grimes Grime Time, Ivy Grimes (Tales From Between)

I'd never heard of Ivy Grimes at the start of 2024, but she's firmly on my radar at the start of this year, based on this mini collection and a smattering of other stories I read in various places online. I hate the word quirky, normally, but it seems to fit these well-written, messed-up and psychological messy tales.

Charlie Says, Neil Williamson (Black Shuck Books)

The minute I read the description of this—basically, urban folk-horror based around the fears and implied rituals of those fuck-creepy 70s public information films—I pre-ordered it. (The fact it's by the always great Neil Williamson was a selling point, too.) And it very very much rewarded me for doing so.

The Return, Rachel Harrison (Holder & Stoughton)

An utterly brilliant horror debut, mixing a creepy hotel, a changed person who's returned after they vanished, and a subtle, funny, and realistic depiction of female friendships, this is really creepy and compulsively readable.