Shadows & Tall Trees 8: 'The Sound Of The Sea, Too Close'

Shadows & Tall Trees 8, which features my story 'The Sound Of The Sea, Too Close', is officially released today. This is a story I'm especially proud of, and I'm pleased that its found a home with the utterly wonderful Undertow Press. As regular readers will know, I've often sung the praises of the work that editor Michael Kelly releases, and getting a story into S&TT is a genuine writing bucket-list moment for me. Especially seeing what other great authors are included, not least Alison Littlewood, Neil Williamson, Steve Rasnic Tem, V.H. Leslie, and... well, they're all brilliant.

Aside from where it's been published, I'm proud of 'The Sound Of The Sea, Too Close' because it achieved something I'd tried and failed at a few times: to write about climate change (and climate fear), in a way that was still speculative and 'weird'. (Maybe 'Heatstroke Harry' from Holding On By Our Fingertips was also a success in this regard.)

I've wrote before on this blog about climate change and fiction, but that piece was called Background Fears and that was largely how I'd tackled the theme in my stories up till now: as a background worry, a bit of atmosphere, a throwaway line. I wasn't sure how to present it as the main focus of a strange story without losing that very strangeness that interests me as a writer; I wasn't sure if it was possible to do so. 'The Sound Of The Sea....' didn't start out as an attempt to untangle that knot, it was originally gong to be a relatively simple and untroubled ghost story, set in an abandoned school. But what the school caretaker found in that abandoned school, in those ghostly classrooms, wasn't a ghost—without knowing I was going to, I wrote something very different and all the better for it. The climate fear—and the guilt—moved centre stage, but the ghostly air remained. Whether it's fully successful as a work of fiction, I'll leave others to judge. But as a way forward for my own work, it feels like an achievement to me.

You can purchase the gorgeous paperback and hardback editions of Shadows & Tall Trees 8 directly from Undertow, or get the ebook from Amazon (UK | US)

(Pathway to Paris brings together musicians, artists, activists, academics, mayors, and innovators to help raise consciousness surrounding the urgency of climate action and offers solutions to turning the Paris Agreement into action.)

Out Now: Holding On By Our Fingertips

The anthology Holding On By Our Fingertips, which features my story 'Heatstroke Harry', is out now from Kristell Ink/Grimbold Books, and mighty fine it looks too. It's a set of stories about the end of the world—so perfect cheery holiday reading—and features apocalypses from Ren Warrom, Phil Sloman, Terry Grimwood and Charlotte Bond, among others.

'Heatstroke Harry' is a story about climate change, cognitive dissonance, addiction, and prophecy. It's not strictly speaking horror, but it is a story about what scares me, about the unease I feel contemplating what's likely to come. Like the central character in this tale, I try not to think about the future too much.

The book launches at Waterstones Oxford and I'll be in attendance. Hope to see a few of you there.

Holding On By Our Fingertips (UK | US)

Background Fears #1

I've recently been rereading a whole bunch of my stories with a view to selecting those that will work best together as a third collection. Such an activity is interesting, because it reveals connections, motifs, and repeated/recycled imagery & ideas in my work that I've never noticed before.

And one thing I spotted is... I obviously can't stop worrying about climate change.

I mean, I kind of knew it was there in the background of my fiction, because it's in the background of every thought I have, so it seems. That little niggle, that little voice that doesn't let you forget where we're heading unless we do something. But I've only written about the subject directly once (in an as yet unpublished story) and I unthinkingly assumed I'd only mentioned obliquely in a few of the others that have seen the light of day.

As a horror writer, I should have known we can't bury our fears as deeply as that. Reading back, I'm constantly hinting at it. Trying to give voice to those moments of anxiety whenever something reminds me of climate change (which given it's in the background of everything, could be almost anything).

An incomplete list of the more obvious places it occurs in my work:

Pretty obviously, it's part of a whole set of background worries abut the future for the narrator in 'Falling Over'.

It's part of the world building in 'He'. Same with 'Mirages In The Badlands', too, with its "dreadful heat".

'Across The Water' alludes to it, although of course the central character of that story probably doesn't believe in climate change. (He doesn't believe in a lot of things, but if horror teaches us anything it's that disbelief can't save us.)

Looking back, I see that 'The Place Where It Always Rains' is totally a metaphor for climate change - how could I not realise that? - and similar 'strange weather', for want of a better term, drives the action of both 'Snow' and the 'Into The Rain' section of The Quarantined City.

It's a constant, now I look for it. It's hiding in both the haunted house tale I'm currently writing and the first story I ever had published, 'Feed The Enemy'. It's quite obviously something which haunts me but which I cannot exorcise, not even through fiction.

It's in the background, of everything. But like all monsters in the background, it's not going to stay there forever.

It's coming for us.

Recommendation: Lost Girl by Adam Nevill

Horror is perhaps the most subjective literary genre to judge, because in the end it comes down to how the book emotionally affected you. Did it scare me? Did it creep me out; did its shadow linger after I closed the pages? I think most readers of the horrific, the weird, and the strange would admit that those books & stories which most scared them did so in part due to qualities outside the book. Because the books that really stay with us are those that play on our existing phobias, bugbears, and neuroses.

So it was with me and Adam Nevill's Lost Girl.

Lost Girl takes place in a near-future England, slowly collapsing as climate-change wreaks havoc across the globe and millions of displaced people move northward. Within this grim setting, Nevill tells the story of a character known only as 'the father' on a quest to find his missing daughter, who was snatched two years earlier. In the future depicted here, a single missing child is small-beans to the overworked authorities, and the father must employ his own methods to track down those who abducted his child: methods which increase in violence even as his quest appears more and more hopeless.

Part of the reason this novel had such a powerful effect on me is surely because I'm a relatively new father myself; the parts of the book describing the daughter's abduction, the father's descent into grief, pain and despair, triggered no end of 'what if' scenarios in my head. (And given how vivid & starkly the father's plight is described, I'm sure this was the case for the author too.) Indeed, this is a subject matter that, even before was a father, could induce a sickly panic in me as a reader; I remember similarly feelings of panic reading Ian McEwan's The Child In Time.

But more than that, I've always been fascinated and appalled by climate change. I remember studying it at university, twenty years ago now, and while it was a horrifying concept then it seemed far away enough that we would do something about it. Obviously. Why wouldn't we? But now it's decades later, we've done comparatively little, and it really is the last chance saloon. The idea of runaway global warming has a different emotion intensity now, and not just because it's that much closer. It's because it no longer feels like something the previous generation has done to me, but something I've colluded in doing to my daughter's generation. Nevill's central plot, about a father trying and failing to protect his child, is of course the perfect metaphor for his wider theme.

The book's depiction of the England of tomorrow is frightening in its plausibility. It's a society still clinging to its old ways, its old shape; the police, politicians, inner cities, countryside, class division, motorways and other familiar features of British life all still present. But it's an England far hotter, overrun by criminal gangs, struggling with mass immigration, infectious diseases and the fear of imminent collapse. It's a place being reshaped not by a single apocalyptic event but by the slow accumulation of entropy and disaster. (The fate of other countries, the book suggests, has not been so kind.) It's a grimly realistic view of what life in the face of slow-motion environmental collapse will actually be like. And of course, like all depictions of the future, it's also a depiction of how we live now. Although it was released over a year ago, it's hard not to see in the world of Lost Girl a distorted and magnified version of our current Brexit small-minded idiocy.

The obvious book to compare Lost Girl to is Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece The Road; it's a testament to Nevill's skill as a novelist that Lost Girl comes out well from that comparison. Taut, brutal, violent, scary (but with only the merest hint of the supernatural), thought-provoking, emotionally-wrenching and possibly prophetic, it's a remarkable piece of work. It's a novel that, even after a single reading, I know will stay with me, haunting me with the fear that my daughter will grow up into the world it depicts. With the fear that if she does, it will be because I (and all of us) failed her and allowed her to become lost.

Lost Girl (UK | US)