Rebecca and the King of All Snails

(Reposting. This was written some years ago as a birthday gift for my friend Rebecca Lowe.)

A man walks into a forest

A man walks into a forest.

Haunted Britain

A catalogue of hauntings from the landscapes of my life, 1987–2002.

The Magician's Wireless

I
Yesterday I went outside, and it was unseasonably cold. And the sky turned red, and purple, and finally black, and then it began to rain, huge icy bullets of filthy, dirt-streaked water, greenish and oily and iridescent on the back of my hand, a dirty black rainbow on my skin, the cold of it burning, the hairs prickling, the pores closing.

To crowdfund or not to crowdfund

So I decided to just go ahead and release this is not a picture. You can buy it here.

This is, if you've missed it, a collection of short supernatural fiction, and I didn't Kickstarter it this time. Why was that?

The Austringer (1969)

One of the only surviving stills from the 1969 BBC play The Austringer.

A ghost story, for Christmas. Not a folk horror, so much as about a folk horror. I read it to some friends on the darkest night of this year. 

I must acknowledge a debt of gratitude to my friend Jon Dear for the technical details in this story; every accuracy is his, every error mine, and so this story is dedicated to him. 

This story is included in the collection this is not a picture which is now available at Amazon.

The Truth About Sappho: Dartmoor

By dawn, we've packed up and started back. In the twilight, we pass a legion of Roman soldiers, camped out in plain sight. One man is sitting in front of his tent, tending a fire, using his helmet as a cooking pot, hung from a stick frame.

The Truth About Sappho: May in London

(This doesn't require you to have read the other posts in this series to make sense.)

Saint Peter Explains

(Note: I wrote this in about 2000, originally. Any resemblance between it and old friends is entirely coincidental. No Future Friday post today. Normal service will be resumed next week.)

The Truth About Sappho: First Examples

Ana is late. Everyone else has already started eating by the time she turns up, unapologetic. Ryan gets up, bustles around getting her a glass of wine, a plate of food. She nods to the others and tucks in without saying thanks. This is just her way.

The Truth About Sappho: A Manifesto

After delivering his son to nursery, Simon, carrying my notebook in the same bag as his lunch, finds himself approached not by Phil, who is his Line Manager, but by Morris, the Assistant Managing Director, who walks into his office when Phil is out and says to him,

– I understand you have some some experience in print design.

The Prince of Exiles, 35

Svaathe is singing a song in her own language, a lament, it sounds like, rising over the anguish of the stolen Sky-Chariot's engines.

An After-Hours Reading

(More horror fiction. I wrote this by request; it wasn't in the end used. Warning, as ever, for horror.)

The Prince of Exiles, 34

Something in me rises. It catches in my throat, settles behind my eyes, and then evaporates, as it always does.

The Truth About Sappho: Preface

(I wrote this some years ago. It never saw the light of day. It is the beginning of a thing.  Would you like to see more of it? Please let me know, and if you like my writing, please consider contributing to my Patreon.)
 
I wrote a rulebook for a game that you may already know how to play. It doesn't need a board, dice or cards. The only thing you have to have is a group of people to play the game with, and it's better if you trust them. You'll like this game. It has so much promise, so much potential. You can create whole lives with it, whole worlds.

The Prince of Exiles, 33

"What do we do now?" I have no idea, feel the grip beneath my diaphragm, a twisting, a constriction, at once strange and utterly familiar.

The Prince of Exiles, 32

In a stolen Sky-Chariot we take off from the oblique dock, rise above the factory ziggurat, watch as beneath us the soldiers breach the gates with a cannon shot, a beam of pinkish blue light that illuminates the massed ranks below, painting a thousand tiny faces with light in the fading night.

Stormboy, conclusion

The Prince of Exiles, 31

The smell of flowers, of furniture polish, of shelved books, the sun through a double-glazed windows, dappled through green sycamore.

"And then what? What do you do? Do you do what he asks?"

Stormboy, development

That night, Simon and I headed up to the Uplands Tavern.