Craig, a journalism graduate trying desperately to get a foothold in a fading industry, is going nowhere fast. While searching for a project to occupy himself, he stumbles across a blog written by a girl called Kami about internet rituals – challenges undertaken by those seeking to make contact with ghosts or other supernatural entities.
Craig becomes obsessed, and when Kami suddenly disappears he goes in search of her. From there he is powerless to prevent his life spiralling out of control as he is drawn deeper and deeper into a dark, dangerous world where nothing is quite what it seems, a world populated not just by urban myths and hearsay, but by real-life killers.
He thinks he is in control, but nothing can be further from the truth.
I was talking to a publisher about a different project when they said, “Aren’t you the guy who once write a book about Elisa Lam and the Cecil Hotel? What happened to that?”
They were referring to Tethered, a novella published a few years ago through a small press. And what happened to it was, the small press that published it went under, taking Tethered with it. Since then it was one of those things I kept meaning to go back to but never did. There was always something more important to do. As it had already been published I thought my only option would be to self-publish it, and that’s a giant pain in the ass. So it it sat gathering virtual dust on my hard drive until 13 Days Publishing came calling and asked if I wanted to re-publish it through them. Hell yeah, I did! And here we are. A slightly edited and updated version of Tethered, with stunning new cover art by Eric Ashmore.
This also marks my first release on Godless (an independent, horror-focused alternative publishing platform to KDP).
When Bruce Springsteen released the first Tracks in late 1998, it was just what fans had been waiting for. A four-disc boxed set consisting of 66 b-sides, outtakes, demos, and unreleased songs charting an alternative map of his career from 1972 up to 1995. If memory serves, I think it cost just under £40. According to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, this would be roughly £75 today. Since then, those archives have been further raided for various other projects, such as the bonus disc of rarities accompanying the Essential Bruce Springsteen in 2003 and The Promise double album in 2010. All this makes me believe that anything worthwhile would have been released by now.
Before I go any further, I should probably reiterate what a huge Springsteen fan I am, and have been for almost four decades. I have bought literally every official release, some unofficial releases, been to see him all over the world, most recently in Birmingham and Cardiff, and even made a pilgrimage to Asbury Park, New Jersey in 1999. His music has provided the soundtrack to my life. For me he peaked with Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, but for the most part his recorded output has been of a consistently high standard. He has made a few mis-steps, though. Springsteen himself has alluded to making several albums in the nineties that were so bad he could barely listen to them. The Human Touch and Lucky Town albums, two of the few officially released during that decade, are generally considered to be among his less adored, shall we say. Nothing that drew as much ire as the Great Ticketmaster Fiasco of 2022 when ‘dynamic pricing’ saw tickets being sold for thousands of dollars and loyal fans being ripped off left, right, and centre. Of course, The Boss denied all knowledge. It wasn’t as if he needed the money, having sold his entire catalogue to Sony the year before for a reported half a billion dollars.
Which brings me to my issue with Tracks II: The Lost Albums, released this week. And no, it’s nothing to do with his recent poliItical posturing, it’s the sheer cost of the thing. The 83 tracks come spread over either seven CDs for £229.99 or nine vinyl discs retailing at £279.99. That’s a decent chunk or change. It means each CD is being sold at £32.85, and each album at £31.11. Can you imagine the public outcry if Springsteen, or anyone else, tried charging those prices for standard commercial releases? According to Google’s handy AI overview, in 2023 the average cost of a CD in the UK was £10.21 and a vinyl album £26.01. And when dealing with boxed sets, this average price is often driven down because you aren’t just buying a single disc, but multiple units. What makes Bruce, or his record label (Columbia, now owned by Sony), think these songs, which haven’t been deemed good enough for release until now, are worth so much more? I’m sceptical. And I know he might not be personally responsible for the pricing, but I refuse to believe he has no say whatsoever.
I’m not buying it. Neither figuratively or literally. This whole thing stinks. I could stomach paying over the odds for concert tickets, and even being asked to shell out for album after album of patchy material. But this is a bridge too far. Yes, there is the option of buying a condensed single CD or double vinyl version (Lost and Found: Selections from the Lost Albums) for completistst and fans that don’t (or can’t) part with that amount of money, mirroring the 18 Tracks collection of 1999. But even that is overpriced, comparatively speaking (£12.99 for the CD and £37.99 for a double vinyl) and 18 Tracks came with three tracks not included on the boxed set. That in itself was construed by many as a cynical move as in the days before streaming and selective downloading, it was purely designed to make fans fork out for a whole album’s worth of material when all they really wanted were the three ‘new’ tracks. The thing I’m struggling most to reconcile here is the fact that the working class hero, man of the people image Springsteen has spent a career nurturing, is in danger of crumbling to dust. If it ever really existed. He has already announced plans for a Tracks III – something else I probably won’t be buying – and let’s not forget this release comes just prior to yet another presumably not insignificant payday with the biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere scheduled to hit screens this year. And he’s on the road again. Those bucks just keep rolling in.
Some titles here will already be familiar to many having previously been released in some form or other; Follow that Dream, County Fair, Johnny Bye Bye, My Hometown, Shut out the Light, Secret Garden. Plus, there are a few more with titles so bland and generic you feel tired of them even before you’ve heard them. How excited can we get about a collection of outtakes of outtakes of outtakes? Most of us are still recovering from his cover of Do I love You (Indeed I do). This feels exploitative. Like a barely disguised cash grab. If in doubt, just look at that cover art. What art, I hear you say. No effort has been made whatsoever. That’s exactly my point.
I fear Bruce, as much as I love the guy, might have gone to the well too many times and perhaps these ‘lost’ albums should have stayed lost.
I am pleased to announce that my sci-fi short story The Incomplete Sneeze is included in A Twist on Time, the new time travel-themed anthology on Smoking Pen Press. I have worked with SPP before, when they included Down the Road in Vampires, Zombies, & Ghosts, another entry in their Read on the Run series.
From the cover:
You won’t find anything reminiscent of H.G. Wells, or of the Doctor Who series. Rather, you’ll find some unintended jumps in time, without any machines or devices. You’ll find some questionable means of travel. And – in contrast to the ‘standard’ rule that you cannot/should not change the past, you will find people from the future who come back with the goal of changing the future, and you’ll find efforts at do-overs, both successful, and not so successful.
What’s the Incomplete Sneeze about? Well, in the mornings I sometimes have sneezing fits. Some kind of allergy, I suppose. An old girlfriend once described sneezing as like having an orgasm in your head, which is a pretty unique description and not far off the mark. Anyway, I began to wonder what might happen if I fell through a wrinkle in the universe and teleported every time I sneezed. In my mind, this somehow got tied up with the mystery of the Somerton Man, when a ‘well-dressed’ gentleman was found dead on a beach in Australia and nobody could work out who he was, and a story was born.
Any writer will tell you that research is a crucial aspect of the craft. But it’s importance is elevated in historical writing, which often stands or falls in the small details. Your work has to be factually accurate, or things quickly fall apart and it loses all credibility. At the very least you’d be called lazy, and probably a lot worse. Readers can only suspend belief so much, and if inaccuracies find their way into the text it jars and the whole house of cards is at risk of falling down. For example, it’s no good writing a story set in California in the year 1879, taking time to carefully construct the scene and introduce the characters, then have one of them use a Lee Enfield rifle, which didn’t come into widespread use until 1895 and even then was mostly issued to British soldiers with very few finding their way over the pond until much later. Not every reader would know this, but I’m willing to bet a good many would. Weaponry plays a vital role in my new novella, Silent Mine, the first in a series of stories starring the same protagonist Dylan Decker, as it does in most Westerns, so it was absolutely vital to get it right. Other minor details I had to address for the sake of authenticity were what the average general store might sell, the price of a shot of whisky, and the measure it came in.
Part of the inspiration for Silent Mine was the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, an open world adventure role play set in the Wild West. The game is impressive in many ways, not least the level of detail it contains. It’s also impeccably researched, with several elements finding their way into the book. One example is the practise of carving an X into bullets to create an early form of expansion ammunition, which was just too good not to use. Once armed with a scrap of information as a leaping off point, it was off to the internet to find out more.
When carrying out research, I think it’s important to forget everything you think you know and try to approach the topic with fresh eyes. There are a lot of common misconceptions out there, especially about the so-called Wild West, that aren’t strictly true. For example, if you watch any Western movie you’d be forgiven for thinking that people were getting killed left, right, and centre. But the fact is that the murder rate was lower back then than it is in most modern cities in the same location, even taking into account the higher population. From what I can make out, the dramatic gunfights and face-offs that were the bread and butter of the genre are a Hollywood invention, exceptionally rare IRL. Who on earth would risk death when it would be safer and easier to bide your time and shoot someone in the back when they weren’t expecting it?
In addition, relations between settlers and Native Americans weren’t nearly as fraught as Hollywood would have us believe. Sure, there were flashpoints, and some pretty ugly historical events, but generally speaking the two groups just wanted to make the best lives for themselves, with each using the other to their best advantage. There was also a lot more diversity than is generally portrayed in the movies. Cowboys immigrated to the US from all over the world and spoke every language under the sun. At least the famed Spaghetti Westerns of the sixties and seventies were on point in that respect. I did take a few liberties. I call it artistic license. Dylan is a comparatively recent name, popularized by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in the mid-20th Century so it’s unlikely there were many cowboys using it. And though a ‘sour toe cocktail’ is a real thing (I promise!) again, it wasn’t around in 1879 though probably should have been.
There’s no denying that the whole art of research is much easier in the internet age. Twenty years ago I wrote a book about a Welsh football (soccer) club, and my research entailed travelling to a major library every morning and manually scanning countless reels of microfilm. When I found something of interest I scribbled it down in a notebook. These days, we literally carry the sum of mankind’s knowledge around on a device we keep in our pockets (and use it to look at pictures of cats, as the meme goes). But you still have to know what you’re looking for, and there’s a lot of misinformation out there to sift through. Sometimes it can be like looking for a nugget of gold in a sea of sludge. And with internet sources being notoriously unreliable, you always have to check that what you’ve found is the real deal and not a chunk of fool’s gold.
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