Taking The Old Tip Road to the Horror Library

Remember those public information films where you were forced to watch kids drown, get run over, or be abducted by presumed perverts in a bid to ‘keep us safe?’

In the UK there was one warning us against climbing into discarded fridge freezers, because there’s no handle on the inside and you’d get stuck in there. I don’t recall kids climbing inside discarded fridge freezers being much of a problem, even where I grew up in Wales, but we had a public information film about it anyway. Looking back now, maybe we didn’t. Maybe I dreamt the whole thing. Regardless, the images of a kid trapped inside a fridge freezer at a rubbish tip until he either suffocated or starved to death stuck with me, and years later, a lot of years later, actually, I wrote a story about it.

In an email, the esteemed editor at Dark Moon Books Eric J. Guignard said after he read it, the story stayed with him, which I take as a compliment. It’s very much how I felt about the original concept. It burrowed into my mind and festered there, demanding to be written, though it took a very long time for me to do anything about it.

You can find it in the new anthology The Horror Library Volume 8 on Dark Moon Books, where it sits proudly alongside stories by Bentley Little, Ai Jiang, Steve Rasnic Tem, Eric Nash and more.