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.

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.

Bruce Blogs #5 – Born to Run @ 50.

I thought after my rant against Tracks II a while back, I should redress the balance by writing something to celebrate one of the greatest albums ever made hitting fifty. Yes, fifty. That’s fifty years. Bruce Springsteen’s seminal third album was released worldwide on 25 August 1975, and to celebrate the auspicious occasion I have been spinning it a lot this week. Or whatever the correct terminology is when applied to MP3 files. It’s not my favourite album by any means. It’s not even my favourite Bruce album (that honour will always go to Darkness on the Edge of Town). But Born to Run is undeniably brilliant. From start to finish it’s a journey, evoking cinematic landscapes signposted by teen angst, lost love, gang violence, and above all, that sense of frustration and crushing isolation that so often haunts people from small towns. At its core, it’s an album of hope and inspiration, which may help explain why it resonated so widely and with so many.

In hindsight, this album was Springsteen’s sliding doors moment. Having been signed by Columbia Records as a Bob Dylan clone in 1972, his first pair of albums (Greetings from Asbury Park, and The Wild, the Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle) didn’t exactly set the world alight. With the record company expecting a return on their investment, this third effort probably represented his last shot at stardom. And he knew it. Born to Run took 14 months to record, which was practically unheard of in the Seventies when most major label artists were putting out two albums a year. The title track alone reputedly took six months to perfect, with the Boss famously complaining that he heard sounds in his head that he couldn’t replicate in the studio. It was produced by Springsteen himself, aided by current manager Mike Appel and future manager Jon Landau, who tied themselves (and each other) in knots trying to capture something akin to Phil Spector’s legendary ‘Wall of Sound.’ The tensions led to a lot of soul searching, some very awkward conversations, and ultimately several departures with David Sancious and Ernest Carter being replaced in the E Street band by Roy Bittan and Mighty Max Weinberg on piano and drums respectively. Appel himself would soon be on the way out himself, which led to a lengthy legal battle which finally ended with Springsteen buying himself out of his own contract.

So what about the music? Well, you should already know all about that but if you don’t, here we go. Eight tracks totalling just shy of forty minutes kicking off with Thunder Road, one of the most recognisable songs in the Springsteen arsenal. With it’s haunting harmonica and piano, it’s a slightly understated introduction, before the balance is redressed with the punchy one-two combo of Tenth Avenue Freeze Out and Night. The ‘wall of sound’ production is already in evidence, but really comes into its own with the climax of the epic Backstreets which rounds out side one of the vinyl and cassette. I mention this because more than one critic has pointed out how vital the sequencing was, with its ‘four corners’ approach meaning each side of the recording starts on an uplifting, optimistic tone before sinking into lyrical drudgery and fraught pessimism, with lyrics touching on fear, betrayal, revenge, and violence. This concept is never more evident than when ‘side two’ kicks off with the immortal Born to Run, which perfectly encapsulates that sense of missing out that we all felt as teenagers, the unshakable belief that everything was happening somewhere else and all you had to do was get there. This is followed by She’s the One, a song about romantic obsession, and the album closes with Meeting Across the River and the immortal Jungleland, two similarly-themed tracks about the darker side of the American Dream with the latter weighing in at over nine minutes and featuring a timeless extended sax solo from Clarence Clemons.

Though not officially a concept album, it has been said many times that Born to Run has a very cinematic feel, with each track hitting like a mini opera, or a vignette attached to a broader work. Several critics have pointed out that the album is driven by actions, such as running, meeting, hiding and riving. These characters are in perpetual motion, if not literally then figuratively. It is indeed a journey for the listener from start to finish, the road possessing the ability to ‘take you anywhere’ and therefore offering a means of escape. There is a feeling that the highway offers a sense of hope or even belonging, and it becomes a metaphor for everything missing in the narrator’s life. Springsteen himself has said that it was all well and good packing all these characters in their cars and sending them off to chase their dreams, but then he had to figure out what happened to them all. Leaving was the beginning of the story, not the end. Interestingly, over the years another school of thought has emerged suggesting that the road described on Born to Run constitutes an antidote to the politically-charged climate it was released into typified by assassinations and the Vietnam War, which ultimately represented an escape from the American Dream rather than way to attain it.

The numbers leave little to the imagination. Released on 25 August 1975, BTR peaked at number 3 on the Billboard charts, back when it meant something, and by the end of the year had sold upwards of 700,000 copies. In 2022 it was certified seven-times platinum by the RIAA in the US and had sold 10 million copies worldwide. These days you can find it on ‘best album’ lists everywhere and Springsteen’s set lists are invariably studded with representatives, probably more-so than any of his other albums. Upon release, it received almost universal acclaim with Rolling Stone magazine commenting that, “Springsteen enhances romanticized American themes with his majestic sound, ideal style of rock and roll, evocative lyrics, and an impassioned delivery,” and the New York Times calling it a ‘masterpiece’ of punk poetry and one of the great records of recent years. Perhaps more pertinently in the grand scheme of things, it also marked the transition from Springsteen’s folk-inspired origins to global rock superstar, which now seems obvious but at the time didn’t please everybody, especially folkie types already scarred by Bob Dylan’s defection a decade earlier. But as anyone can see, rock n’ roll was always the Boss’s true calling and tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

Bruce Blogs #4: Why I won’t be buying Tracks II

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.

2024 in Review

January 2024 saw the publication of my short story The Cunning Linguist in the long-delayed anthology Welcome to the Splatterclub, vol III on Blood Bound Books. You can probably guess what that one’s about. I have a long associated with BBB, and they’ve always been great to work with. That was followed by short fiction in Flash in a Flash, the Black Beacon Book of Ghosts edited by Cameron Trost, and Big Smoke Pulp, Vol I, which by my count became my 97^th published short story (not including reprints). A second edition of Handmade Horror Stories, which includes my story Misshapes & Rejects, also came out.

On 27 March I released X6, my sixth volume of short fiction. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that X6 includes some of the darkest things I have ever written, including Holiday of a Lifetime, which I think has drawn the most reader complaints so far. My bad. Here’s the ToC. And here’s another look at the awesome cover by Greg Chapman.

I have been so involved in fiction over the past couple of years, I drifted out of journalism, apart from the day job. I enjoy writing about writing, and I have a lot of experience to mine, so I pitched a few articles to an American magazine called Writer’s Digest. WD is a bit of an institution, and definitely one to cross off the bucket list. I hadn’t been that excited since I wrote for Loaded. By the end of the year WD had published features about making the switch from writing for consumer magazines to the trade press, horror fiction markets, healthy habits for cultivating success, and finding your writing niche. There are also a few more in the pipeline.

Another writing magazine I have built up a good relationship with is Authors Publish. A couple of years ago they ran a piece I wrote about how I got my first book published, then late last year they contacted me out of the blue and asked if they could reprint the piece in a long-form book. Would I like to be paid twice for the same thing with no extra work on my part? Go on, then.

With the revised version of the second Ben Shivers mystery, The Butcher (working title), safely off to the publisher, at the beginning of the year I started shopping Silent Mine around, a horror western novella about a disillusioned cowboy on the trail of a missing husband. The last anyone heard, the husband went seeking his fortune at a place called Silent Mine, and he didn’t come back. Silent Mine is the first of a series featuring a character called Dylan Decker who does his level best to put the ‘wild’ in the West. A new publisher called Undertaker Books soon picked it up and did an amazing job with every aspect of it, from the editing to the promotion and cover art. They also asked for a first option on any more Dylan Decker books, which was music to my ears because I had another one under my belt. Meeting at Blood Lake (provisional title) will be out some time in 2025.

To bridge the gap, and to round out the year, I wrote a Christmas-themed short story, A Christmas Cannibal, again featuring Dylan Decker, which you can grab for free from THIS LINK. If you are a fan of horror fiction, you might want to sign up for the Undertaker Books newsletter.

Meanwhile, here on my faithful blog, judging by the site stats the most popular posts of 2024 were my eyewitness account of Bruce Springsteen’s Cardiff gig and, bizarrely, my review of Ryan Adam’s Nebraska cover album. My RetView series, which examines classic horror movies through a contemporary lens, is also still going strong. Recent entries include the ‘most controversial film ever made’ Cannibal Holocaust, the sublime Incredible Shrinking Man, and the simply superb King of Zombies. However, by far the most popular was The Mutations, another surprise.

If you want a summary of 2023, you can find that here. I have lots already planned for 2025, so watch this space and stay happy.

Remember, the harder you work, the more you achieve.

The Bookshelf 2023

I usually start this now annual tradition with a disclaimer that goes something like: “I only managed to read seven books this year, but THIS ONE was really, like, sooooo long!”

It’s taken me aeons to own up to the fact that I’m just a slow reader, but there it is. Shoot me. I read for 30-60 minutes every night, and sometimes that just isn’t reflected in the numbers I put up. Anyway, I made a conscious effort in 2023 to move away from horror fiction and read a more varied selection of books, something I’ve managed largely thanks to the book club at work.

It was a drag at times, but Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 is something I will probably never forget reading. Some of the wordplay, and the conversations that go around in circles, were genius. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera is also worth a mention, even though the plot itself seemed almost secondary to the philosophical ideals the writer was determined to convey. Seeing the stage version of Noviolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names after reading the book was an unforgettable experience, and reading Animal House by James Brown was surreal because I know some of the people he talks about. I owe a lot to Loaded magazine. Without it, I probably wouldn’t even be here writing this.

Stephen King’s Billy Summers was ace. Probably his best in years. I was also pleasantly surprised by Christopher Fowler’s Full Dark House. It’s very English. Very London, to be exact. Only another twenty-odd books in the series to go!

Here are all the books I read cover-to-cover in 2023 (DNFs don’t count)

Final Winter by Iain Rob Wright (2011)

Extreme Survivors: 60 Epic Stories of Human Endurance (2019)

South by Southwest Wales by David Owain Hughes (2018)

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman (2021)

Tougher then the Rest: The 100 Best Bruce Springsteen Songs by June Skinner Sawyers (2006)

Billy Summers by Stephen King (2021)

We Need New Names by Noviolet Bulawayo (2014)

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (2013)

Animal House by James Brown (2022)

The Wild West by Robin May (1975)

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller (1962)

The Horror Library, Vol 8 by Various Authors (2023)

Full Dark House (Bryant & May Mysteries, book one) by Christopher Fowler (2003)

Quitters Never Win: My Life in UFC by Michael Bisping (2019)

The Return by Rachel Harrison (2020)

That Old House: The Bathroom by Various Authors (2023)

Pet Sematary by Stephen King (1988)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (1984)

Themes for Great Cities: A New History of Simple Minds by Graeme Thomson (2022)

You can see last year’s list HERE.

Recapping the Wretched Bones Blog Tour

As any writer out there knows, writing a book is the easy part. Getting people to give a sh!t is much more difficult. That’s why in October 2023 I embarked on a blog tour in support of my latest release, The Wretched Bones: A Ben Shivers Mystery. It gave me a chance to reach potential new readers, reconnect with some old ones, and make some new friends. You can check out all the stops below where, alongside several interviews, you will find evidence of the symbiotic relationship between humour and horror, the unique connection between cats and writers, and a historical piece on that weirdest of historical entities, the sin eaters.

Thanks to everyone who hosted me, and/or took the time to engage. I really appreciate it.

Midnight Machinations/Grinning Skull Press: Cover reveal

Uncomfortably Dark Interview

Happy Goat Horror: Guest Post (The Top 10 Horror Comedy Movies EVER!)

Willow Croft: Guest Post (Ben Shivers and Mr Trimble)

That Spooky Beach Interview

That Spooky Beach: Guest Post (The Plight of the Sin Eaters)

Robin’s Review Interview

The Horror Tree: Spooky Six

Writer v Writer with Neda Aria

Introducing the Wretched Bones

The Wretched Bones: A Ben Shivers Mystery is OUT NOW on paperback and ebook via Midnight Machinations, an imprint of Grinning Skull Press.

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2023 in Review

2023 was another decent year for me on the writing front. I think I largely maintained the momentum I generated last year. One of my more ‘out there’ stories MyDarkside(dot)com was included in issue 22 (Spring 2023) of Phantasmagoria magazine and Finders Keepers, my collab with Michael McCarty, reprinted in his collection Biters: Tales of Zombies & Vampires. Concidentally, shortly afterwards my own biting story appeared in The Book of Drabbles on Shacklebound Books and later that summer my story The Old Tip Road was included in the Horror Library 8 where it sat uneasily alongside contributions by Bentley Little, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Ai Jiang, who is quickly becoming one of my favourite writers.

Of all the fiction I have ever written, String probably got the biggest reaction. Several readers actually contacted me to tell me how grossed out they were, which was very satisfying. If you want to see what all the fuss is about you can find it in the anthology That Old House: The Bathroom, compiled and edited by Angel Herrin for Voices from the Mausoleum. Towards the end of the year I also had short pieces published in Tiny Frights magazine and the Christmas anthology Macabre Minima Ho Ho Ho. Incidentally, that was my 91st published short story. When I first started writing back in the last century, I never thought for one minute I would get this far. I am living proof of how far being a stubbourn bastard can take you in life.

My big news in 2023 was the publication of my latest novel, The Wretched Bones, the first book in the Ben Shivers series of mysteries on Midnight Machinations, an imprint of Grinning Skull Press. Look at the awesome cover:

If you didn’t already know, the book is about paranormal investigator (PI) Ben Shivers who lives in a camper van with his rescue cat, Mr Trimble. When he is called in to probe a series of tragedies at an exclusive resort in the English countryside, he isn’t prepared for what he is about to uncover and soon realizes it isn’t always a good thing when dreams come true. As anyone who has written a book will tell you, that’s the easy part. Getting people to give a shit is far more difficult. Therefore, I spent most of the winter doing interviews and guest posts for various outlets as part of the Wretched Bones Blog Tour. At the same time I worked on a revised draft of the second book in the series, which is now called The Butcher and will be released by the same publisher later in the year. I call it a series, but each book is a standalone featuring the same main character(s).

Elsewhere, I somehow managed to write a new novella, mainly in my lunch hours at work (don’t tell the boss), untitled as yet, which serves as a loose sequel to my No Man’s Land: Horror in the Trenches. Of all the things I have written, that universe is the one most people encourage me to explore further. This one isn’t set in the Great War, though, I have moved the action on a couple of decades to World War II. Same problem, different war.

Here on da blawg, 2023 also saw us go through numbers 66 to 76 of the #RetView series of contemporary reviews of classic horror films, featuring such forgotten gems as From Dusk till Dawn, Cat People, Hellraiser and The Birds. My most popular blog post of the year overall with a whopping 703 views was my review of the Bruce Springsteen gig at Villa Park, Birmingham, though my review of Ryan (not Bryan) Adams’ take on Nebraska wasn’t far behind which I found surprising. I still find it strange how some posts just take off, while others that you have high hopes for sink withouta trace.

I hope you achieved your personal goals in 2023. If you didn’t, make sure you hit those targets in 2024 because if you die a hopeless failure you’ll only have yourself to blame. You’re steering your ship, nobody else, and it goes where you tell it to go.

RetView #73 – Indestructible Man (1956)

Title: Indestructible Man

Year of Release: 1956

Director: Jack Pollexfen

Length: 72 mins

Starring: Lon Chaney Jr, Max Showalter, Marian Carr, Ross Elliott, Robert Shayne

The summary of this one reads like a mash up of Curse of Frankenstein and Shocker. Charles ‘Butcher’ Benton (played by Chaney Jr, by consensus one of the greatest horror movie actors ever) is a convicted murderer and robber betrayed by some acquaintances (and his attorney) who wanted to get their hands on his share of some loot. As a result, he is sent to the gas chamber and his body unlawfully sold to a mad scientist (Shayne). Benton’s lifeless corpse is then zapped with high-voltage electricity and subjected to various experimental chemical injections. His heart is re-stimulated and he is essentially brought back to life. Except now he has been rendered mute because of the electrical damage to his vocal chords, so all he can do is stare menacingly at people. By way of compensation, he is immensely strong and impervious to scalpels, bullets and even, as we find out later, bazooka shells. Hence, the Indestructible Man. Got it so far? Nice.

So, moving on, when Benton ‘comes around’ he is understandably a bit miffed at how things have turned out and swears revenge on all those who have wronged him. And by now, its a pretty extensive list. So first he kills the mad scientist and his assistant, then goes on a murderous rampage to even up the score(s). At one point, one of his would-be victims seeks the help of a friendly barman, busting into his joint saying, “I need help! I just found out Benton has hired a killer to get me.” This was before anyone had twigged it was Benton doing the killing, of course. The ‘friendly’ barman turns out to be anything but sympathetic and says, “Then drink up and get out. I don’t want any trouble in my place.”

The entire movie takes place in Los Angeles over a 72-hour period and is told in the kind of narrative style popularised by TV cop show Dragnet, which keeps the viewer up to speed and is just as well given the fact that the main star has been struck mute. Weirdly enough, that year Chaney Jr starred in another movie in which his character doesn’t speak (The Black Sleep). A very accurate IMDB review (where it currently holds a review score of 4.3/10) says, “Dragnet meets Frankenstein’s monster is the best way I can describe the flavor of this film, which is not nearly as bad as its current low rating would have you believe. In fact, if you like 50’s and 60’s Allied Artist horror on the cheap, I think you’ll like this one. Remember Allied Artists was a poverty row outfit, and they could usually afford just one star. In this case it is Lon Chaney Jr.”

In their contemporary review, the website Basement Rejects gives us the other side of the coin. “For the most part the special effects are pretty awful and the movie appears very cheap. I say for the most part because I think the burn make-up at the end of the film is pretty good. He is supposed to be a character that cannot die but his character can still be maimed. The result is a pretty effective face-melt burn. Indestructible Man isn’t so invincible. It is a rather lame story that seems more like a plot of an episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits than a feature film (maybe that is why it is only 70 minutes long). The movie isn’t very good and it isn’t very fun…there is a reason it is often a bargain B-Movie.”

The Spinning Image was even more scathing, but no less accurate: “This endearingly rubbish science fiction thriller was scripted by Vy Russell and Sue Bradford. It’s basically a low budget gangster movie with the novelty of featuring an indestructible man as its main villain. There are many moments of lunacy: the map to the stolen money has no landmarks or writing on it, save for a big X, the professor’s assistant apparently drives Chaney’s freshly-executed corpse home in the back of his car; Chaney’s stripper girlfriend eagerly agrees to go out with the lieutenant tracking him down when the detective reveals his first name is “Dick”.

Indestructible Man came as something of a surprise to me. Or a bolt out of the blue, if you’ll excuse the pun. It’s refreshing to come across a fifties B-movie that isn’t about either aliens or radiation. It was distributed on a double-bill with World Without End (1956) and in some areas with Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) both of which ARE about aliens. Sort of. Overall, I liked it. Sure, the special effects are questionable. Okay, everything about it is questionable, but it was made in1954 (and held back for two years). That’s a long time ago. So long ago, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube for free.

Do it.

Trivia Corner:

Lon Chaney Jr. reportedly asked director Jack Pollexfen not to make any dialogue changes or additions after the lunch break, because he was a big drinker and would usually be blotto by then.

Getting Naked

Vector Cartoon Character – Young Man in White Underpants

As anyone who knows me reasonably well will be aware, I write a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, and a lot of stuff in between. It varies, but until I started working on a trade magazine last year, around half my time (not including the time I spend researching, marketing, and submitting) was spent on articles for various magazines or websites on everything from Chinese media censoreship to chili pepper farming, or movie or book reviews or something, and the rest was spent writing short stories and novellas. Novels, not so much, because they take years and I don’t find the pay-off so satisfying, either emotionally or financially.

I’ve always found non-fiction both more profitable and easier to write. There’s a science to it. You get the green light from the commissioning editor, do the research, find an angle, familiarize yourself with the house style, and away you go. You become a small cog in a big machine, and all you have to do is your job. Your work appears under the masthead of whatever publication you are writing for, and most of the time readers don’t even know, or care, who actually wrote it. Your name is out there, and you are still eligible for criticism, but it’s not front and centre. It’s kinda like parading yourself around in front of a bunch of strangers wearing a uniform. This uniform is something people are familiar with, and used to. They have expectations of how someone wearing it should act, and how you should walk. If anyone has an issue with you, they’ll take it to your boss and you’ll probably never have to deal with it.

Fiction, though, is a whole different ball game. Unless you write under a pseudonym, you are right there, front and centre. It’s your choice, but really you HAVE no choice. Self-promotion is everything, and there is nowhere to hide. Even if your fiction is published in a magazine, anthology or journal, its usually the names of the contributors prospective readers look for and whatever the publication is called becomes secondary. There is nothing to hide your modesty. That uniform has been removed and there you are in all your pale, quivering glory, stark bollock naked and waiting for people to throw tomatoes at you.

Some people like being in this state; vulnerable, exposed, there for the world to not only see, but judge and critique. Which is fine. Each to their own and all that. Most of us, however, are not so comfortable with it and we wish there was another way. But there isn’t. Every time we put our work out there, we effectively strip off and lay ourselves open for criticism. Not only that, we even bend over and invite a multitude of total strangers to shaft us and then walk away giggling to themselves.

Now, some people might love that naked body on display. Whether it’s male, female, fat, thin, black, white, whatever. But there may be some elements you, as an audience, might find less attractive. Maybe you’d like slimmer thighs, or fatter thighs. Maybe you dig tattoos and body art, maybe you don’t. Who knows? One of the greatest aspects of being human is that we don’t all like the same things. Life would be pretty damn boring if we did. Most rational people acknowledge that nobody is perfect and accept each other, warts and all.

But a small minority will be put off by the paleness of our skin, our wobbly bits, that weird mole on our left thigh, or even just by the fact that you’re naked. It’s easy for these people to make their disapproval known. We even egg them on. “Whaddya think? Tell me! Write it down and post it in a public forum to ensure that as many people as possible know how hard you think I suck!”

By that, I mean there’s a good chance they might take one fleeting glance at our exposed flabby bits then run off to leave a bad review on Amazon or Goodreads, or they might pause and take a real long, detailed look, and THEN run off and leave a bad review on Amazon or Goodreads.

We can all accept criticism. Or at least, we should be able to. It comes with the territory, and it’s all part of being a creative. Not everyone is going to like everything we do. We take the rough with the smooth and don’t expect blanket praise.

Still, some empathy would be nice. Ask yourself how you would feel if you were out there, naked, being ruthlessly judged by faceless critics who fire their wounding shots then duck back down behind the parapet where it’s nice and safe? I often wonder about these people who hide behind fake names and leave a trail of one and two star reviews in their wake. Does tearing people down make them feel better about themselves? Does it fill some void in their lives? Do they think they are doing some kind of public service?

Be honest, by all means. Tell us what you think. What you really think. But next time you leave someone a bad review, or even worse, drop a one-star rating without even explaining why, spare a thought for the amount of work that has gone into the book you just shat on. The time, the energy, the hope the writer has invested. It might not be to your liking, their naked body might be so damn ugly it makes you throw up in your mouth a little, but at least they have the balls to risk everything and put themselves out there. That alone has to be worth more than one star.

If you really want to see me naked, you can do so HERE.