By the time you read this, I shall be dead.

By the time you read this, I shall be dead. Actually no, just on holiday - I'm writing this on Wednesday and my plane flies out on the Saturday coming... which to you will be last Saturday.

Anyway, I thought I'd schedule some posts whilst I'm off enjoying myself, so I've taken the opportunity to repost some guest blog pieces I've done on other people's blogs, for those of you who missed them first time round.

This piece on first appeared on Andre Jute's website;  I first met Andre on a Kindle discussion board where we derailed an entire thread by arguing vehemently about the truth or otherwise about man-made global warming. Despite that argument, there was  a healthy respect on both sides (which as you know is a rarity on the internet) so Andre invited me to join a group he set up on Goodreads, and later to write this guest post. 

It's about someone almost as contrary and infuriating as Andre himself: DH Lawrence. It was originally called DH Lawrence: The Mosquito.

The Mosquito, like so much DH Lawrence wrote, has an odd, contradictory feel to it. As always with Lawrence’s nature poetry he describes his subject perfectly, vividly – ‘queer, with your thin wings and streaming legs’. And the poem also captures that ticklish feeling of being in a room with an unseen mosquito – the dull whine of it on the edge of hearing, the thought that it might already be crawling over your skin… Lawrence’s blood is shook to ‘hatred’ of it.

And yet… there’s also a sense of admiration in the poem. As he kills it, a sense of identification. What is there to admire about a mosquito? Well I suspect that Lawrence wouldn’t have minded being thought a pest, by some people; wouldn’t have minded being the hateful noise in someone’s ear that stops them sleeping.

Like DH Lawrence I was brought up in a Nottinghamshire mining town, and like him I had to leave Nottingham to find out just who DH Lawrence really was. Despite his international fame and repute, it was never mentioned in school that such a writer had grown up not so far away. Walking around Nottingham city centre, you’d never know Lawrence walked here too – there’s no statue erected of him, no blue plaque, no Lawrence Road… I had to go study English in a different city before anyone told me anything much about DH Lawrence.

Why is Nottingham so dismissive of him?

Even now, when examining the motivations of the small-minded, one mustn’t rule out the twin British obsessions of sex and class. Maybe to some, Lawrence is still the son of a miner who wrote mucky books. And of course, Lawrence was dismissive of Nottingham itself (calling it ‘that dismal town’) and once he left he hardly returned, obviously not feeling the city any place for writers. But that doesn’t stop Dublin celebrating Joyce, another self-imposed exile. Nottingham could forgive Lawrence, and make a big thing out of him, but obstinately sticks to its other legends: a communist terrorist with a bow and arrow, and a football manager.

And yet… on the edge of hearing buzzes the mosquito, and if you head up a little side-street in the centre of Nottingham there’s an unremarkably ugly building into which office temps trudge every morning. I worked there, once. Outside is a sign, sepia text faded to illegibility by the sunlight. A face is just visible, and the eyes are blazing.

This building used to be JP Haywoods, and Lawrence worked there as a young man.

For the adventurous, a trip out to Eastwood takes you to the D H Lawrence Birthplace Museum, still struggling on despite small-minded attempts to close it to save money. Like it or not, they can’t seem to swat this mosquito, whose place in literary history seems assured. His critical stock fluctuates, but his books are always there, a part of our life and culture, and I for one am proud to say I come from the same city as the man. Despite his flaws, as a man and a writer, he wrote some of the great books of the last century, and fought a courageous fight against censorship all his life.

But it’s hard to remember, looking out on the new concrete and gleaming glass windows of Nottingham city centre. Robin Hood flags flicker from the Council House building where they’re no doubt preparing even more cuts, and the Brian Clough statue raises his hands in salute.

Maybe DH Lawrence was right, and this is no city for writers.

Maybe I should leave too.

Big thanks to Kayleigh Murphey from the Hail Horrors, Hail website for this rather splendid review of The Shelter.

"...the book manages to balance that precarious line between real and supernatural horror. The story is, for the most part, grounded in the real, but there is that ever present "what if"  that you simply can't ignore."

What Do You* Fear?

* i.e. me

I've been interviewed over at the blog of author G.R. Yeates as part of his What Do You Fear? interview series.

Find out my views on UK versus US English, an embarrassing gap in my dark fiction reading to date, and in what ways I am not like Indiana Jones.

Strange Stories #14. Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

Strange Story #14: Dark Matter: A Ghost Story
Author: Michelle Paver

All day I've been trying to get it straight in my mind. What did I see? Should I tell the others?

Ambiguity is a term of I've used many times in the course of this series, and I've been looking for a story that illustrates a certain specific kind of ambiguity. Namely the 'is it real or is it all in their minds?' kind. A Turn Of The Screw is the classic example, but surely done to death (no pun intended). I wanted something a bit less obvious.

This kind of ambiguity is in some ways more simplistic than that found in other strange stories: it's basically a binary ambiguity, with either everything the main character tells us being real (in which case reality = A) or it's all a delusion (in which case reality = B). So I tend to think of these kind of stories as being less 'pure' types of weird fiction as some of the really ambiguous stuff we've been talking about - a story like Tell Me I'll See You Again doesn't just offer you a straight A/B choice of meaning, but a whole damn alphabet.

That's not to say that these kind of stories are any weaker or less interesting than other types of weird fiction - indeed I think they have several strengths, one of which is the ability to stretch out the ambiguity for a longer period of time without annoying the reader. It's no coincidence I think that Dark Matter is the first novel I've featured in this series.

And what a novel. Set in the Thirties, it tells of a group of researchers travelling to Spitsbergen in the Arctic Circle. One of them, Jack Miller, is already somewhat isolated from the others dues to reasons of class, and due to a combination of bad luck and Jack's own character flaws, he ends up alone at the camp as the six month Arctic night begins...

Paver uses the Arctic setting masterfully - the early stages of the voyage are set at the time of year where daylight lasts twenty-four hours, but Jack (and the reader) are constantly aware that the darkness is coming:

The birds are leaving and the nights are getting longer.

This light/dark pathetic fallacy seems to mirror the A/B ambiguity at the story's core, and it's only the Arctic setting that allows Paver to get away with it, for there day and night are contrasted in a starker way than anywhere else in the world (except the Antarctic, obviously). The white/black colour scheme of the setting seems to have the same kind of thematic effect.

I don't want to give too much away, for that's not what this series is about, but I'm sure it will surprise no one to learn that Jack's solitary sojourn doesn't go well. And the novel's subtitle gives away that a ghost is involved... but is the ghost real or imaginary?

Maybe this question is at the heart of all ghost stories, but rarely is it so starkly exposed as here. Cabin fever is a reality to the Norwegian trappers and sailors who accompany Jack's expedition in the early stages - not a psychological theory but something very real that can happen to those trying to get through "the dark time" alone. Tales of it are used as forewarnings so the reader is fully primed to not take everything Jack says on trust. And soon he is telling us about the strange, dripping, lopsided figure he sees around camp...

It can't hurt you. All it can do is frighten Jack tells himself. But since the reader is equally afraid that Jack is losing his mind as that the haunting is real, this isn't exactly comforting.Paradoxically the hints that the ghostly figure isn't real are the more scary - because then all we are left with is the idea of an isolated figure, going slowly mad against the perpetual backdrop of white snow and dark, dark night.

Next Time: Strange Stories #15. whatever the best strange story I encounter in my copious holiday reading is..!

...click; click; click...

I've been reading Retromania, Simon Reynolds' brilliant take on why pop music and pop culture is so addicted to its own past - seemingly gone are the days of new genres springing up, of innovative, 'modernist' bands determined to create something new. Instead, 'originality' in pop seems to consist of combining or using old styles in new way: sampling, mashups, irony and juxtaposition. (Don't worry, we'll get to how this relates to books in a minute...)

Part of Reynolds' argument is that, ironically, the futuristic technology of today allows us to wallow in the past to an unprecedented degree: any album, any single, any b-side, any Peel-session, any unreleased song can probably be found on Youtube, or on a blog, or as a download (legal or otherwise). His description of the psychology behind such behaviour struck a chord:

You're stockpiling so many albums, live bootlegs and DJ sets that you never have time to unzip the files and play them... Only now am I getting around to deleting some of the stuff I downloaded.... Most collectors know deep-down that quantity is the enemy of quality... the more you amass the less intense relationship you have with a specific piece of music...

I too have a ton of music I've never listened to on my hard drive; paradoxically the most satisfying moment, the most therapeutic, is deleting some of it - spring cleaning, leaving the stuff I actually want to listen to. The songs that will actually be part of my life - the "intense relationship" as Reynolds describes it.

History repeats: since getting my Kindle I've also downloaded far too many books onto it that I know I'll never read: free issues of obscure magazines; classics from Gutenberg by authors I've read before and hate (hello Dickens!); some self-published drivel where even the first line is bad enough to send me howling to the hills...

The majority of this has been stuff I've downloaded for free; stuff I pay for I am more picky about. But is it really free? It takes about an hour to listen to an album; but it takes far longer than that to read a novel or a short story collection. And I'm a strong believer that a good book should be reread, too - that it should be part of your mental and imaginative life in the same way as a good song. I have hundreds of paperbacks and hardbacks downstairs, some still unread; I have many great books just waiting on my Kindle - I've discovered more new, exciting authors in the last few years than for a long time before, from diving into the the self/indie published world - so why exactly do I sometimes feel the urge to download something that looks vaguely okay just because it's free? Without wishing to show off I can afford books; I can certainly afford an ebook for less than three quid, so why should free matter?

There are too many great books in the world; I don't have time to read just 'okay' ones.

I suspect I'm not alone in feeling something like mental-indigestion when I contemplate the glut of books (and music) I've downloaded that I'm not even sure if I want to read: I'm not even sure where I got some of the book from, or who the author is. My own experience with giving away books indiscriminatingly for free on Amazon is that it doesn't seem to any real long term increase in sales of my other books. I suspect many people have just acted like I did when I first got my Kindle: free! free! books for free! And then months later wondering just what the hell this First Time Buyers thing is that's clogging up their Kindle, and their mental space - wondering why they ever downloaded it when they don't even like short stories, or horror fiction, or...

By contrast, the slow but steady increase in sales of The Shelter (in the UK at least) did seem to reach some kind of tipping point, leading into decent sales for the more expensive The Other Room too. In about the last four months The Shelter has sold about the same as First Time Buyers did for the few days it was free... but all the evidence is that a far, far higher proportion of those people read the book, and reviewed it, and told others about it, and bought my other books...

Reaching a large audience with a freebie can only go so far with books like mine, I think - the key thing is reaching the right readers, the ones who have similar tastes and passions as me. Certain authors are destined to only ever be cult favourites at best - and given that many of those authors are likely to be among my own influences, that probably should tell me something...

Anyway, enough self-absorbed and possibly incorrect rambling from me. Let's end with a song - a song about the future from back in the past:

(Just to prove Reynolds' point - this song is sixteen years old. Roughly the same span of time as from The (early) Beatles to The Sex Pistols. I'm sure playing I Wanna Hold Your Hand would have sounded anachronistic in 1976... but I heard The Universal on XFM the other day and it just merged into all the other songs around it.)

Strange Stories #13: Smoke Ghost by Fritz Leiber

Strange Story #13: Smoke Ghost
Author: Fritz Leiber
Collected In: Selected Stories
Anthologised In: The Weird; The Dark Descent 

And he had said 'I don't mean that kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today...'

So, Smoke Ghost.

I've read this story a number of times, most recently in the anthology The Weird. That was the first time, to my knowledge, that I've read it in a chronological sequence and been able to compare it to other stories of its time...

God how modern it seems.

I mean, just flicking through The Weird I can see this was written two years before The Crowd by Ray Bradbury; nine years before The Summer People by Shirley Jackson; thirty-four years before The Hospice by Robert Aickman. Fine stories all, and in some of their period detail you could perhaps date those stories after Leiber's. But in tone, in sensibility, I'd argue Smoke Ghost seems the more modern story.

It's self-consciously modern too. The quotation which I started this piece with comes from right at the start of the story, as if to let the unsuspecting Forties reader know that things had changed. It continues like this:

... a ghost from the world today, with the soot of factories on its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would... slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost.'

You can almost see the light-bulb appearing above a young Ramsey Campbell's head when he read this paragraph thirty or so years later.

The setting of this story is predominately those deserted office buildings (because late at night), as well as crowded commuter trains, and doctor's offices, and creaking elevators.

And of course for a new kind of ghost story you need  a new kind of ghost. Properly speaking, the creature that haunts Catesby in the story isn't a ghost at all; it seems instead to be the malignant personification of modern living; a creature born of smog and pollution, of hate and war, machinery and alienation. It's face, Catesby speculates, is an amalgamation of:

...the hungry anxiety of the unemployed, the neurotic restless of a person without purpose, the jerky tension of the high-pressure metropolitan worker... the inhibited terror of the bomb victim...

And not just its face, we understand as we read this, but its emotions, such as they are, too. The smoke ghost is all our negative, alienated feelings come back to haunt us...

All this makes the story sound too knowing, too self-conscious to be truly scary, but somehow it pulls off the trick of being scary too. It's often said that it is the unknowable that is scary, both in life and in fiction, but like all truisms that doesn't always hold true. Catesby's terror is no less when he understands the nature of the smoke ghost, and neither is our uneasiness. Because like all the crap that we pump into the skies, it seems hard to imagine that all the stress and rage of modern life that we exude isn't floating around too, forming god knows what shapes in the sky.

Next Week: Strange Stories #14. Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

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Oh, and just to mention a nice review of The Other Room over at Trembles magazine can be found here, should you have the hankering to do so.

The Other Room - One Year On...

Almost exactly a year ago, I took my first bare-foot steps into the chilly waters of self-publishing, and released my collection The Other Room. Some of these stories had already been published in magazines, but most were new to the world. I honestly had no idea how the book would be received, either in terms of sales or reviews.

Fortunately, it's gone far, far better than I ever imagined. I mean, a book that cites Robert Aickman as an influence in its blurb is never going to be the next Twilight but by my own standards The Other Room has sold well, and the responses from readers from been both humbling and exciting. And at least one person let me know in an email that they bought it because of the Aickman reference.

The book also featured in the 2011 Red Adept Reviews Indie Awards short story category.

The Other Room is available on Amazon (UK | US | GE | FR | ES | IT) and Smashwords.


And to celebrate, for the next week it is available for free from Smashwords, if you enter the following code at the checkout: QD54K. If you do pick up a copy, I'd love to know what you think of it.

And a year anniversary is an excellent time to start seriously thinking about what stories to include in a second collection, isn't it? You betcha.

RIP MCA

MCA AKA Nathanial Hornblower AKA Adam Yauch has passed away.

One of my fondest memories is being at Nottingham's Rock City on a student night with @fidelsdrummer 'pogo-ing' (does anyone still say that?) to the song below, screaming the lyrics at each other until we were out of breath and falling over. This was at about 8.30pm because obviously when you're 17 you go to the club as soon as it opens to get the most out of the night. So we'd only had chance to have one pissy, warm, watered down lager (Rock City's speciality to this day) by this point, so we were drunk on nothing more than the certain knowledge that the music that you're into when you're 17 is the best music that  has ever, ever been made. 

Still one of the greatest music videos ever.

RIP, man.