Less Than Jake, Bouncing Souls – UK Winter Circus 2026 (review)

Less Than Jake are one of the ‘bucket list’ bands I promised myself I would go and see if I ever had the chance. It took long enough, but the stars finally aligned and I snagged tickets for the opening night of their 2026 UK trek at Bristol Prospect Building, one of the newest venues in a city awash with venues. It’s getting increasingly common, especially with US bands, to tour as part of stacked line-ups. In the age of spiralling costs, it’s probably the only sure-fire way to get some bums on seats. The UK Winter Circus is a perfect example, and beneath LTJ in the headline slot we have The Bouncing Souls, The Aquabats, and Bar Stool Preachers, four bands that despite representing different sub-genres complement each other perfectly.

Brighton punks-with-a-conscience Bar Stool Preachers kicked things off, and did so superbly albeit with a heavily truncated set (the downside of playing first on a 4-band bill with a strict curfew). Since 2016 they have steadily built up an impressive catalogue, and though in the modern age it’s difficult to gauge how popular they are their last album (Above the Static) made a small dent in the charts and the track Choose My Friends has surpassed 1.5 million streams. That must have earned them at least a quid. With all the infectious energy and enthusiasm of Massive Wagons or peak Wildhearts, and you can’t help but develop a soft spot for the Bar Stool Preachers. They do things the right way, seem like a solid bunch of guys, and have some good tunes in the bank with the biggest cheer of the night (to that point) reserved for their namesake anthem.

The Aquabats have always been an enigma to me. They’ve popped up on a few bills I have seen over the years, and though I appreciate their self-deprecating shtick I just don’t get the superhero alter ego thing. I will forever be mentally scarred by the image of a drunk mostly naked Aquadet squirming around on a toilet floor. Apparently, he hadn’t accounted for his superhero costume not having a zip in the front. He had to take the whole shebang off to go pee pee, and then fell over and couldn’t get up. I bet he was glad of the goggles. I’d love to tell you more about their set, but the truth is I swerved most of it in favour of the bar. But I will say they were much better than I previously gave them credit for, even accounting for the wholly unreasonable amount of inflatable sharks (they might have been dolphins).

I am a massive Bouncing Souls fan, and have been since I first heard Gone in around 2004. I have navigated a lot since then, and BS have been with me every step of the way so they are as big a draw for me as LTJ. They are one of those bands who I just connect with, and I can’t even explain why. As with most cult bands, you find that BS fans are real fans. There may not be many of them, but they sing every line in every song and I haven’t seen a pit go off like that since, well, ever. They played a mammoth 17-song set, unusual for a support band, heavily weighted toward their older material and kicking off with Manthem from 2001’s How I Spent my Summer Vacation album. The Gold Song, Kate is Great, Lean on Sheena, and That Something Special followed before Greg Attonito even paused for breath. The set was missing a few of my personal faves (Apartment 5F, Serenity, So Jersey, Ghosts on the Boardwalk, Coin Toss Girl) but you can’t have everything. Rumour has it a new album is imminent, their first new music since 2023, and it was (probably) represented here with a new song, the name of which eluded me. After hitting a peak with Hopeless Romantic and True Believers, two stone cold classics, the last song was Gone, of course it was. And then they were. BS, we love you. Headline tour, please. And we will sing along forever. Oi!

All this, three bands, three hours, and thirty-odd songs, was to prepare us for the ska skate pop punk royalty that is Less Than Jake. I must admit I swooned a little bit upon seeing Roger Lima in the flesh. What a ledge. The high-octane set kicked off with a couple of cuts from 1998’s Hello Rockview (Nervous in the Alley and History of a Boring Town) before being brought (mostly) up to date with High Cost of Low Living, a standout track from their most recent full album Silver Linings. The classics kept on coming; All my Friends are Metalheads, Johnny Quest Thinks we’re Sellouts, Walking Pipebomb, as the night moved toward a crescendo. The set mined so many old standards that they seemed almost apologetic when they played a new(er) song. The one they chose, though, Sunny Side Up from the Uncharted EP, is an absolute banger. Special mention should go to to Buddy Goldfinger. When he put his trombone down, which was often, he would just frolic and pogo about fulfilling a kind of Bez from the Happy Mondays role, minus the maracas. Wales got a shout out, which was unusual considering the gig was in England, but it made more sense when Chris DeMakes told the story of how, on their first visit to the UK, they strode out in Cardiff and said “Hello, England!”

Some of the stage banter was hilarious. Lima and DeMakes should start a comedy podcast together (“It’s good to see so many people here! In America we couldn’t sell out a phone booth”). The set was closed out with The Brightest Bulb has Burned Out, Look What Happened, and Gainsville Rock City. The band, collectively and as individuals were bang on point. What a fantastic gig this was.

The tour continues.

Cthulhu Cymraeg The Night Country: Lovecraftian Tales from Wales

A new anthology entitled Cthulhu Cymraeg The Night Country: Lovecraftian Tales from Wales, edited by Mark Howard Jones and featuring my story Strzyga, is out now on Crossroad Press.

Here’s a helpful blurb:

Before the American master of cosmic horror H.P. Lovecraft came the Welsh genius of the weird Arthur Machen, who filled his pages with tales of ancient evil. Now comes this collection of seven NEW stories from the ancient land of Machen, following in the footsteps of Lovecraft and his uncanny creations. Featuring original stories by: J. L. George, Mark Howard Jones, Paul Lewis, John Llewellyn Probert, C. M. Saunders & Charles Wilkinson

I wrote the first draft of Strzyga, named after a female Polish/Slavic demon similar to a vampire, a few years ago. It’s a pretty grisly story about a nightshift worker who finds something unnatural in his warehouse, the general concept focusing on what happens when the mundane collides with the extraordinary. At just under 10,000 words it wasn’t quite long enough to stand up on its own, but too long for most short story markets.

Until now.

Cthulhu Cymraeg The Night Country: Lovecraftian Tales from Wales, is available on eBook and paperback.

A Century of Short Stories (and not out!)

Is that a cricket reference? I think I just made my first cricket reference. Anyway, my 100^th short story, Midnight at Deadwood Station, was recently published in the anthology Horror on the Range (available via Undertaker Books).

I must admit, I never thought I would ever reach this landmark. Granted, it took me almost thirty years, but that’s still a solid 3.3 shorts published each year on average. My strike rate probably would have been a lot higher had I not drifted away from fiction for a few years in the middle there. I had given up my factory job which provided a steady but low income, and had to earn a living. Fiction just didn’t pay enough (still doesn’t), so I started writing features for magazines and did bar work on the side to pay my way through university. After that, I moved to China and started writing fiction again during the long, lonely Spring Festival of 2009, while snowed in my apartment in Tianjin.

By some weird twist of fate the first story I ever submitted also became the first story I ever had published. Monkeyman came out in a Welsh fiction magazine called Cambrensis in 1997. It was inspired by a quirky story I read in The Sun newspaper about an area of northern England being terrorised by a someone in a gorilla suit often spotted climbing up people’s drainpipes. He was probably either a peeping Tom or a burglar wearing a disguise, but might have been something worse, which is where my imagination went. Cambrensis was run single-handedly by a dear old chap called Arthur Smith. I think that early success had more to do with him feeling sorry for me than any real skill on my part, especially as I submitted the manuscript in BLOCK CAPITALS and the poor bloke had to re-type it all. Cambrensis was a labour of love for Arthur. I doubt he ever made any money out of it, especially because in lieu of monetary payment, the reward for publication was a lifetime subscription. As it turned out, the ‘lifetime’ in question was his. He died a few years later, and Cambrensis died with him.

This was the era of the small press. Genre magazines printed in small batches, which were kind of like fanzines for horror writers. Some were quite prestigious. Not many paid, but I was still cutting my teeth and just seeing my name in print was payment enough. Credits in Raw Nerve, The Asphalt Jungle, Roadworks, and others followed. But within a few years, the Internet would come marching in and give the industry a massive kick up the arse. The small press disappeared virtually overnight to be replaced by websites and the submitting process became cheaper and more efficient. Back in the day you had to type out a story on a typewriter, send it off to a magazine, (not forgetting to enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope so they could send it back) and wait several months for a reply. Sometimes the reply never came. Other times they wouldn’t send your story back, or they would but it would be all coffee-stained or crumpled and you’d have to type out another one. These days, you just end an email.

When I returned to the fiction fold after my exile, I had to adjust to the new landscape. But adjust we do. The world would be a very boring place if everything stayed the same. Looking back at my body of work, it’s possible to pick out trends and little threads tying them together which, with the benefit of hindsight, I can relate to where I was in my life when I wrote them. Some of my early stories, like A Thin Disguise, Another False Dawn, and A Hell of my Own Creation, are essentially about a young person struggling to find their place in the world, something I was doing a lot of at the time. A lot of my older stories are written from the POV of a lone male protagonist. That’s not me being misogynist. It’s just a reflection of a life lived mostly as a lone male protagonist. There is often sense of displacement, and not fitting in. Another observation I can make given some distance is that much (probably too much) of my short fiction is set in pubs or clubs. Painted Nails, Club Culture, The Cunning Linguist, and others fall into that category.

Naturally, geography has also had a massive impact on my work. I tend to write about my where I am living at the time. You can’t help but be influenced by your environment. Most of my earlier stories had a ‘small town’ setting, which I later gave the name ‘Wood Forge’. The Old Tip Road, What Happened to Huw Silverthorne, What Happened Next, Never Go Back, Hero of the Day, Where a Town Once Stood, and the Widow of Wood Forge, were all set there, along with many others. When I lived in China, that became my preferred setting. God knows the place is so weird it provided a lot of inspiration and led to stories like The Others, Roach, Surzhai, Little Dead Girl, The Wailing, Siki’s Story, and If You’ve Ever eaten Toad. Then there was the four years I spent in London, which comes with it’s own special kind of terror. Vicar on the Underground, Scary Mary, #Subject 270374, Gush, Sleepless, Holiday of a Lifetime, and Harberry Close were written, directly or indirectly, about my time there.

Finally, there are personal circumstances. Life is hard, and we all go through some shit. Some might disagree, but I have grown a lot in the past 30 years. Different places, relationships, jobs, experiences. Writing helps me deal, and a lot of the associated frustrations are filtered through my fiction. I doubt I’ll manage a hundred more short stories. There comes a time when we all have to stop what we are doing and do something else instead. But like I said I never thought I’d be able to write the first hundred, so we’ll see.

If you’re interested, you can find a full list of my published work HERE.

I periodically collect short stories into compilations called the X books. You can find the latest edition HERE.

2025 in Review

Greetings! And Happy New Year. Dang, 2025 was gone in the blink of an eye. It’s so weird how the older I get, the quicker the time seems to go. With that in mind, let’s get down to business with a quick recap. In the name of promotion, in the past I’ve tried to limit any magazine or blog interviews I do to around release dates. I have since come to realise that this probably isn’t the best strategy. Best case scenario, your name is everywhere, all the time, for a couple of weeks or so, and then it’s nowhere for a year. Or until you release another book. Your audience either gets tired of you or they forget all about you. So my new strategy is to try to toe the line by doing a couple of interviews a year when the opportunities arise, and spreading them out. Here’s one I did with Andrew Cooper about my novella Silent Mine.

2025 was a good year for short stories. Cutter was included in Big Smoke Pulp (Volume 1), the sci-fi chiller The Incomplete Sneeze was included in a time travel-themed collection on Smoking pen Press, and the drabble Girl’s Night appeared in Flash Phantoms. Later in the year, Horrific Scribblings published The Screaming Man, describing it as ‘quiet horror sci-fi’, a very fitting description, and Collection in Person was included in Clubhouse 3 on Crystal Cook’s 13 Days publishing.

Also, my stab (sorry) at erotic horror, The Cunning Linguist was reprinted in the Blood Lust anthology on Black Hare Press, and I sold Revenge of the Toothfish as a reprint to an antho called Murderfish, the title being a massive clue as to the theme. I probably take more satisfaction in selling reprints than original stories, because it means getting paid for the same thing twice.

You might remember a fella called Dylan Decker, star of the aforementioned Silent Mine. DL Winchester, head honcho at Undertaker Books, let slip that they were putting together a Western horror anthology and asked if Dylan Decker would like to be involved. Of course he would. Decker doesn’t turn down many assignments. The result was Midnight at Deadwood Station, and it is probably the Decker story I am most proud of to date. All writers know that feeling when you don’t have to dig around for the words, they just appear in your head and you write them down. That’s when we do our best work. The story came out about 8,000 words, which is pretty long for a short story, but it works, and Horror on the Range is out now. Fittingly, it was also my hundredth published short story, not including reprints. There will be a blog post about that particular landmark coming shortly.

In the longer form, Dylan Decker saddled up for another adventure, this time at Blood Lake where, right after an encounter with an angry grizzly, he gets yanked into a duel with a flying cryptid. There was quite a complex back-story surrounding Blood Lake, which I wrote about in depth here. Decker’s near-legendary encounter with the group of murderous Germans, A Christmas Cannibal, was also re-released as a stand-alone, and you might be happy to know that book three (or four, if you count A Christmas Cannibal) is already in the publisher’s hands.

2025 also saw the re-issue of a revamped and remixed version of Tethered, my novella inspired by internet rituals, the Cecil Hotel, and the death of Elisa Lam, by 13 days Publishing. I did a deep dive into the history behind it here.

On the non-fiction front, I wrote about creating multiple revenue streams, making the switch to full-time writing, celebrating the little wins, pantsing, how to write about unfamiliar topics, and when to grant copy approval and when not to for Writer’s Digest, and cuckoos for Fortean Times. FYI, all my WD articles are archived here. Weirdly, the most popular post on this here blog with 1019 views perhaps indicates that I may not be the only person haunted by the number 27.

Lots planned for 2026, so onwards and upwards.

You can check out last year’s review here.

The Bookshelf 2025

A couple of years ago, I made a conscious effort to broaden my reading. Until then I had read almost exclusively about zombies, ghosts, and serial killers and it was all getting a bit samey. There are only so many ways you can rip someone’s head off. That said, I loved the Drift by CJ Tudor. Perfect winter reading. And one of the most memorable experiences of the year was hiring a mini-cinema with my book club to watch the movie adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin after we’d read the novel. We did a similar thing before with Silence of the Lambs, and it adds a completely new dimension.

The experiment to read more widely is ongoing, and has provided mixed results so far. I still can’t stomach romance or erotica, read into that what you will, but I enjoy books by writers who aren’t from the US or UK. In a lot of cases, it offers an alternative perspective, or at least a slightly skewed one. Life is all about growth. Probably the best book I read in 2025 was the Shadow of the Wind by Spanish writer Carlos Ruis Zafon about a young boy, a hidden library, and the secrets of his favourite writer. A modern classic. As always, my TBR list is growing quicker than my R list, but that’s nothing new.

Anyway, without further a-do, this is a list of every book I read cover-to-cover in 2025. For 2024’s list, go HERE.

The Drift by C.J. Tudor (2023)

Winter Horrorland by Various Authors (2024)

Welsh History: Strange but True by Geoff Brookes (2017)

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)

Last Night of Freedom by Dan Howarth (2024)

A Palace Near the Wind by Ai Jiang (2025)

The Club House by Various Authors (2025)

Devil’s Fork by DL Winchester (2025)

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruis Zafon (2001, English translation 2004)

Night Birds by Christopher Golden (2025)

The Haunted Forest Tour by James A Moore & Jeff Strand (2007)

A Twist on Time by Various Authors (2025)

Holly by Stephen King (2023)

Mountain of the Dead by Jeremy Bates (2018)

The Hundred Year Old Man who Climbed out of a Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson (2009, English translation 2012)

Headhunter by Tom Curran (2013)

Odd Jobs by Various Authors (2024)

Dylan Decker at Deadwood Station

When Dylan Decker is robbed and thrown off a moving train, he thinks his night can’t get any worse. Or weirder. But then he finds himself at an outpost called Deadwood Station, a place where the dead don’t stay dead, and the weirdness level goes through the roof.

Midnight at Deadwood Station, my hundredth published short story (not including reprints) is set in the same universe as the novellas Silent Mine, Blood Lake, and A Christmas Cannibal, and included in Horror on the Range, a new Western-themed anthology on Undertaker Books.

Horror on the Range is out now

The Revenge of the Revenge of the Toothfish!

No, that’s not a typo. A few years ago I wrote a surreal, gory little story about a group of fishermen out trying to catch Patagonian toothfish (more commonly known by the more palatable name of Chilean sea bass) when they reel in something altogether more bizarre.

Revenge of the Toothfish was originally published in the anthology Trigger Warning: Body Horror, and now it’s back! Reprinted in the brand spanking new book Murderfish: An Aquatic Anthology on Wonderbird Press. Murderfish is part of the Unhelpful Encyclopedia series, where each volume focuses on a specific category of animal. Of course, the stories about these creatures go in fantastical directions, take place on other worlds, and often indicate that your fish really are trying to kill you.

“If you want your nature documentary to feel like a PG13 action-adventure romp, you’ve come to the right place.”

Murderfish: An Aquatic Anthology is out now.

RetView #86 – X The Unknown (1956)

Title: X The Unknown (1956)

Year of Release: 1956

Director: Leslie Norman, Joseph Losey

Length: 81 mins

Starring: Dean Jagger, Edward Chapman, Leo McKern, William Lucas, Peter Hammond, Kenneth Cope

X The Unknown is one of the few non-anthology movies in existence to boast more than one director. The official line is that original director, Joseph Losey, who had moved from the US to the UK after being placed on the Hollywood Blacklist (an actual post-WWII list of individuals in the entertainment industry with alleged communist links), ‘fell ill’ and had to be replaced by Leslie (father of Barry) Norman who had been a Major in the British Army. That wasn’t the only early controversy to befall this Hammer production, which had been intended to serve as a sequel to The Quatermass Xperiment (1955). That plan fell through when writer Nigel Kneale refused permission to use the character of Prof Bernard Quatermass, which rendered a sequel to the seminal British sci-fi horror flick meaningless. To all intents and purposes, Dr Adam Royston (Jagger) became the ‘new’ Quatermass. At least for a little while. There was yet more controversy after the film’s release when a distribution deal between Hammer and RKO fell through due to the latter company’s demise, before it resurfaced as RKO Pictures Inc, forcing Hammer to strike an alternative deal with Warner Bros.

Given all this off-screen chaos, it’s a testament to the professionalism of those involved that they managed to come up with anything at all, let alone a film with such a tight, streamlined plot and focused narrative. There is very little superfluous material here. The film begins with a group of British soldiers using a Geiger counter on an exercise in a remote part of Scotland. One of them (Cope) finds an unexpected source of radiation, and then gets himself blown up. Oops. Even worse, for mankind, anyway, the explosion reveals a seemingly bottomless crack in the earth. After a series of strange deaths where the victims appeared to be melted, Dr Royston inexplicably (though mightily impressively) concludes that a form of life that existed in distant prehistory when the Earth’s surface was largely molten had been trapped by the crust of the Earth as it cooled, only to return to the surface periodically in order to seek food from radioactive sources. This ‘form of life,’ unseen on screen until the closing stages, turns out to be a dead ringer for the blob from The Blob (1958) which was actually released several years later. Whether or not it was inspired by X The Unknown, is unclear. In any case, can Dr. Royston and his band of merry men find a way to save the world from being melted by the blobby thing (alternatively dubbed ‘throbbing mud’ in some reviews)?

Despite the absurd storyline (which 1950s storyline isn’t absurd?) this is an entertaining film. The acting is superb, though the special effects let it down slightly. I suspect this was in part due to a shortfall created by half the $60,000 budget going towards paying Academy Award winner Jagger’s salary, who had just been given the gong for Best Supporting Actor in the war film Twelve O’Clock High (1949). There is also a notable lack of a female lead, or a female anything. But hey, this was the fifties. Communists were bad and women were in the kitchen. I love the ending which, though ostensibly ambiguous, is actually a stroke of genius, but what really stands out for me is the dialogue. Here’s a sample:

Q: What was that?
A: I don’t know, but it shouldn’t have happened.

A brilliant, concise, straight-to-the-point, no frills, typically British response.

At the time of writing X the Unknown has a 6.1/10 rating on IMDb, based on 3 000 audience votes, and a 5.8/10 rating, at critic aggregate Rotten Tomatoes. AllMovie gives it 3/5 stars, and Craig Butler writes: “While it is not a classic of the genre, it’s a very well-made and quite entertaining little flick” A contemporary review on the website Mike’s Take on the Movies, says: “I liked this film the first time I saw it when it turned up on VHS tape thanks to the Hammer line released by Anchor Bay years ago and I still enjoy it after repeated viewings. It’s far from flashy but it’s direct and the thrills are solid for a mid fifties sci-fi flick with some startling F/X from Leaky. Then there’s Dean Jagger. A consummate pro on screen.” LINK

In a highly recommended in-depth review, the blog Scifist 2.0: A Scifi Movie History in Reviews says: “In comparison to the Quatermass films, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and their other legendary horror movies, X the Unknown remains a footnote in Hammer’s filmoghraphy. However, it is significant as the film in which some of the core personnel of Hammer’s horror franchise started to coalesce. Many key names are still missing, but X the Unknown for the first time brings together a large number of the artists who would go on to create the Hammer Horror cycle.”

Trivia Corner:

According to sources, Jimmy Sangster’s original script described the blobby throbby mystery monster thing as being “made up of millions of writhing worm-like segments” capable of slipping through small cracks and forming up again on the other side. This ability is briefly described in the film, but never shown on screen. Even if the movie had had a significantly larger budget, those effects would have been virtually impossible to achieve with the technology of the day.

Modern Publishing – The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

The Good

The rise of self publishing. There’s still an elitist mentality in some quarters, especially the established old brigade who think that self-publishing doesn’t really count, but what it has done is level the playing field. Writing and publishing books used to be the exclusive domain of the well-off and/or well-educated. Now, there are more publishers then ever before (and I’m not just talking about vanity publishers, though those parasites still exist) and if all else fails literally anyone can write a book and self publish it on platforms like Amazon and Smashwords. It’s very punk. You don’t even need much technical know-how. All you really need is motivation.

The Bad

Also the rise of self publishing. There are two sides to every coin, as they say. There may be more publishers around now than ever before, but most of them don’t have two pennies to rub together. There’s no big advance, and no marketing budget. Most are struggling just to stay afloat. And the self publishing route is even more fraught with danger. The main problem with self-publishing is that most releases sink like stones. Effective marketing is not only expensive, but a complete mystery to most of us.

Plus, there is very little, if any, quality control. There are millions of books published each year, and the number is climbing. Some are brilliant. Some are terrible. Most are somewhere in between. It’s not for me to say what makes a book terrible, suffice to say that just because you CAN write books, it doesn’t mean that you should. I apply the same logic to robbing banks.

The Ugly

Discrimination. For starters, can we all agree that racism, sexism, ageism, classism, elitism, nepotism, and most other isms, are bad? They are divisive, restrictive and create disharmony and hostility. Mankind should have evolved past all that by now. I believe the world should be an even playing field, and your gender, sexuality, age or skin colour shouldn’t affect how other people view you or your work.

Yet apparently in the publishing industry it’s still okay to judge people this way. How often do you see limited submission calls? Some are restricted to gender or sexual persuasion, some to particular countries or territories, others to various minority groups.

An increasing number of markets have things like this in their guidelines:

Seeking original submissions exclusively from people aged 22-24, from Prestatyn, who like the colour purple and currently identify as squirrels.

Okay, that’s an extreme example, but you get the point. Now before you stand up and scream BUT IT’S NOT THE SAME THING! How about you take a minute to ask yourself why? Why isn’t it the same thing? Discrimination is discrimination however you dress it up, and we all have ways of making it more palatable.

The real irony here is that most of these publications claim to advocate equality, yet in practise promote the exact opposite. Instead of erasing the lines that divide people, they are pouring cement on those walls and rubbing their hands with glee as they grow higher and higher. In my mind that is both hypocritical and counterproductive. When did two wrongs make a right?

It makes no difference to me whether the author of whatever I am reading is male, female, black, white, straight, gay, something in between, or whatever. I honestly couldn’t care less. I’m all about the writing. If someone asks me what the last book I read by a [insert label here] author was, I probably wouldn’t be able to answer because I don’t look. Should I? Sexual orientation or race don’t factor into my decision-making.

Can you imagine what would happen if a publisher put out a submission call along the lines of, “Seeking material from straight, white males ONLY.”

There would be a public outcry, and rightly so. That publisher would probably be branded a far-right Nazi and cancelled quicker than Firefly. And if you don’t get the reference, Google is your friend. So why are submission calls specifically requesting work exclusively from other demographics considered okay?

The Solution

Personally, I think publishers would be better served having an ‘open door’ policy, where the story is king (or queen), and people are judged solely on the strength of their work, rather than any number of other variables. That would be refreshing, and altogether more progressive, wouldn’t it?

How about we go one step further and advocate a universal ‘blind’ submission policy where all identifying information is removed from manuscripts and not even the editors know whose work they are reading. That way, there can be no discrimination either way, and only the very best work is selected for publication, thereby giving the reader the best quality product. That should be the primary goal anyway, rather than virtue signalling or furthering whatever political agenda an individual might have.

After all, any self-respecting writer would prefer to have their work published on merit rather than just to tick a box somewhere.

Ask them.

Why I Write Horror

There are a lot of ways to approach this question. The obvious answer would be ‘Because I want to.’ But that would be overly simplistic. Looking at it, it also comes across as belligerent as hell and gives the reader nothing. An alternative would be ‘Because it’s what I read.’ But that’s only slightly less belligerent, and again gives the reader nothing. So I opted to tackle the question from a different angle.

The more I thought about it, the more complex the answer, and the question, became. I realised that at some point in my life there had to be a defining moment. Some event that set me off on this dark path, rather than an alternative path lined with glitter, rainbows, dancing bunnies and jolly unicorns.

Maybe it was the time I sneaked into my older sister’s room to look for her diary, which I planned to use for extortion purposes, and found instead her collection of battered horror paperbacks. I was too young to appreciate the literary merits of said collection, and instead pored over the covers, one of which memorably portrayed a man with an axe buried in his head.

Or was it watching An American Werewolf in London for the first time? On repeated viewings, I began to appreciate the humour more. But back then, it was just horror. Pure, primal, pulse-quickening horror. Two scenes in particular stuck with me, and still do; the Nazi demon home invasion sequence and the chase through the London Underground. Coincidentally, when I moved to London to work for a magazine years later, that very underground station (Tottenham Court Road) was on my daily commute, and it was a very disconcerting experience interchanging there late at night. The place hasn’t changed much.

Another trigger for my love of horror might have been listening to my ex-coal miner grandfather’s stories of the ghostly bwca he and his mates swore they heard deep in the bowels of the earth. Years later, I found that these stories were not unique to Welsh mines. Stephen King wrote about the same phenomena in The Tommyknockers. In fact, people hear the same phantom tapping and knocking noises underground all over the world and always have, yet nobody knows what causes them. I explored this concept further in my recent novella Silent Mine.

Then again, perhaps growing up in a house which may or may not have had a resident poltergeist sparked my interest in horror and the paranormal. I’ve made my peace with that, and haven’t completely ruled out the theory that any perceived activity was a manifestation of my own pubescent telekinetic energy, as per one of the main theories behind the poltergeist phenomenon.

On the other hand, my obsession with horror, the paranormal, and all aspects of the unexplained might be down to a strange encounter involving a huge wooden wardrobe in the back bedroom. That certainly happened before any of those other things, and may well have influenced my thought process for evermore. Maybe if the Wardrobe Incident had never happened, none of those other things would have happened.

So what happened, exactly?

To this day, I don’t even know.

But I know something did.

(Not the actual wardrobe)

One of my earliest memories is having some kind of bad experience with that damned wardrobe and being too young to run away. I remember sitting on the floor, the wardrobe towering over me, overcome with a mixture of helplessness and profound terror. The next thing I know I am at the top of the stairs, too little to tackle them by myself, yelling for my mother. When she finally came, I was too traumatised to even articulate what had happened. All I could do was point.

It might have been something innocuous; a sudden breeze opening the door, gravity making something fall inside and make a noise. Heck, I might just have caught a fleeting glimpse of a rogue dormouse or something.

Or it could have been something so utterly terrifying that I refused to enter that room again, suffered from insomnia for years, and checked myself in to a kind of mental emergency room where my fractured mind still seeks to paper over the cracks. That part of my memory is now hidden from view, obscured. Maybe it will come back one day, maybe it won’t. 

Maybe I don’t want it to.

And maybe that’s why I write horror.

An alternative version of this post first appeared on the website Kendal Reviews