A deep dive into Tethered

My latest novella, Tethered, is out now on 13 Days Publishing. What follows is the afterword from the novella, edited to remove spoilers.

Many of the so-called Internet rituals described in the story are real. That’s not to say that they actually work. But they are ‘real’ in the sense that they have been written about and discussed extensively online. I changed a few crucial details in my descriptions, especially that of the Elevator Game. I’m not saying I’m a believer, but I don’t want it on my conscience if one of my readers tries one of these things and ends up in an alternate dimension or something. Lots of people have tried the Elevator Game, with mixed results. They usually end up disappointed. However, as alluded to in this book, it might be worth noting that if it actually worked, they probably wouldn’t be in a position to tell anyone about it.

The death of Elisa Lam in 2013 is often linked to the Elevator Game because of the genuinely unsettling surveillance footage which emerged of her acting strangely in an elevator. Her demise is still shrouded in mystery and often cited as one of the most bizarre deaths in recent years. Was it an accident? Murder? Suicide? Or something altogether stranger?

Nobody knows, and ultimately, that’s what makes it so chilling. The other cases mentioned of people being found dead in water tanks are also real, and I am sure there are lots more that haven’t been so widely publicized. The Cecil Hotel (since rebranded as Stay on Main) in Los Angeles is a place with a very weird history, and Richmond House is also an actual building in Southampton, albeit with a slightly more mundane background. 

The summer of 2018 saw the arrival of a British reality TV show called The Circle, where a group of strangers were kept segregated and could only communicate with each other via a special social networking platform only they could access. One participant used his girlfriend’s pictures, and suckered everyone else into thinking he was someone he wasn’t. He won the first prize. I was fascinated by the way he manipulated the other players. It just goes to show that in an online world, you can be whoever you want to be. It also shows that even if there are red flags, the majority of people will ignore them and believe what they want to believe. I wanted to do something similar with the reader in Tethered. Anyone familiar with my work will know how much I love twist endings. I hoped to string you along for a while, feeding you just enough information so you think you know what will happen, and pull the rug out from under your feet. Then, just as you were getting your bearings, I wanted to do it again.

You may notice how integral the number 14 is to the plot. After setting sail from Southampton, a city integral to the plot of Tethered, the Titanic hit the iceberg on 14th April, the Cecil Hotel has 14 floors (Richmond House has only 13, I changed it for effect) my version of the Elevator Game has 14 steps, and both the serial killer Richard Ramirez and the ‘Man in Black’ from Tethered needed 14 victims. I thought this would be a bit more original than the usual 13. Regular readers of mine might also note that it fits in with one of my previous books,  Apartment 14F. That story is about an English teacher living in China and realising his apartment is haunted. The Chinese take numerology very seriously. Every number is symbolic. Mainly because of the phonetic similarity when pronounced in Mandarin, the numbers ‘one’ and ‘four’ have come to signify loneliness and death, two predominant themes in both that book and Tethered.

Tethered is out now on paperback and ebook.

 

The Incomplete Sneeze

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.

A Twist on Time is out now.

Retview #47 – The Grudge (2004)

Title: The Grudge

Year of Release: 2004

Director: Takashi Shimizu

Length: 91 mins

Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jason Behr, Bill Pullman, KaDee Strickland, Takako Fuji

First up, let’s address the big fuck off elephant in the room and put to bed any lingering speculation; this is the 2004 Hollywood remake of the 2002 J-Horror classic Ju-On: The Grudge, not the original (though both were written and directed by Takashi Shimizu). I was torn as to which version to write about for this series, this one winning on account of having Sarah Michelle Gellar in it who, when this first came out, was riding the crest of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-shaped wave. Yes, I’m that shallow. This project came at an interesting junction in her career as she was trying to capitalize on her Buffy fame but in serious danger of being typecast as a modern day scream queen after earlier roles in the teen classics I know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2 (both 1997).

Hiring Shimizu for this project was a masterstroke, as the movie largely keeps it’s Japanese flavour. Being filmed in Tokyo and featuring several notable Japanese stars also helped. Yuya Ozeki, Takako Fuji and Takashi Matsuyama all appeared in the two Japanese films upon which this was based, reprising their roles as the doomed Saeki family. The movie is also notable for an appearance by Ted raimi, younger brother of Sam, one of the film’s producers and creator of the legendary Evil Dead series. This version of The Grudge distributed by Columbia Pictures was itself followed by two sequels in Grudge 2 (2006) and Grudge 3 (2009), the latter going straight-to-video, but has very little to do with The Grudge (2020) which is known in the trade as a sidequel, a totally different movie (with the same name) taking place concurrently with events in the original series. Is that clear? Good. Let’s move on.

Somewhat unusually, the movie is told in a non-linear fashion and features several storylines that end up converging. The first thing we see is expat college professor Peter Kirk (Pullman) jump out of a window to his death, which instantly draws the viewer in and makes them ask WTF is going on. It soon transpires that a local housewife, Kayako (Fuji), had fallen hopelessly in love with him and been murdered by her jealous husband as a result, along with their young son, Toshio. From here on in, Gellar steals the show as Karen Davis, an American expat living in Tokyo with her boyfriend (Behr) charged with filling in for another worker, Yoko, who seems to have neglected her duties in looking after dementia-suffering patient Emma. At the house, Karen encounters the ghost of Toshio sealed up in a wardrobe and witnesses Kayako’s spirit descending from the ceiling to claim Emma. All very unsettling. When the police arrive they find the bodies of the Williams family who had unwittingly moved into the cursed house in the attic, along with Kayako’s jawbone, and the family of vengeful ghosts set out to tear it up some more. Watch out for the infamous shower scene which is probably second only to the original Psycho (1960) in the all-time list of infamous shower scenes. Now, if you found the above synopsis confusing at all, critic Roger Ebert simplifies things massively in his scathing 1-star review, “There is a haunted house, and everybody who enters it will have unspeakable things happen to them.” There you are, then.

Despite this, and a few other negative reviews, The Grudge was a huge initial success. On its opening weekend alone, it grossed $39 million, becoming the first horror film since House on Haunted Hill (1999) to top the Halloween box office and, until the 2009 Friday the 13^th remake, had the highest grossing opening weekend in history for a horror remake. On May 17, 2005, the unrated director’s cut was released on DVD. Notably, this version included several scenes that were cut (including one where Takeo drags Kayako’s body through the house whilst carrying a box cutter, implying this was the instrument he used to kill her) from the original in order to achieve a lower rating from the MPAA. Incidentally, this version of the film was used on the theatrical run in Japan, which only goes to show just how hardcore Japanese audiences are. If you are a fan of J-Horror you might appreciate this or this.

Trivia Corner:

Jason Behr and KaDee Strickland met on set and began dating due to their mutual interest in Japanese culture (which is why they accepted their roles in the film) eventually marrying two years later despite not sharing any scenes together in the film.

Faces on the Walls

I’m excited to announce my story Faces on the Walls has been included in the first anthology released by Ghost Orchid Press, entitled Home. It features one hundred stories and poems of exactly one hundred words each, all riffing on the theme of “Home.”

As the blurb says, “These tiny terrors run the full gamut of horror, from body horror and blood-curdling fear to atmospheric, lyrical Gothic tales. You’ll find haunted houses, burrowing parasites and suburban nightmares aplenty to delight, amuse and shock—all in an easy bitesize format.”

Faces on the Walls is based on a real-life paranormal incident I first read about when I was a kid. In 1971, strange stains began to appear on the kitchen floor and walls of a house in Belmez de la Moraleda, a small village in Spain. Soon, the stains began taking on the likeness of faces, sparking a decades-long interest in the ‘Belmez Faces.’ This story is a homage to one of the most terrifying things I have ever read about.

Home is available now in paperback and e-book.

Tethered: A History

Tethered, my novella about internet rituals, is finally out on Terror Tract Publishing LLC. Yay!

Here’s a helpful blurb.

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.

And a look at the awesome cover by Becky Narron

Tethered ended up taking on a bit of a weird structure, and is quite experimental in parts. It starts with a conversation between two flatmates, and the first half alternates between conventional storytelling and a mixture of mocked-up blog entries and news articles, while the second half returns to a more tried-and-tested format. I couldn’t help but get bogged down in the details, and the whole process took a lot longer than I wanted. The first draft resembled a pile of puzzle parts that I somehow had to piece together. I think they came together pretty well in the end. But I’m biased, obviously.

The title has a loaded meaning. In the traditional sense, ‘tethered’ means being being fixed or attached to something else (like reality), but a more modern usage it can be applied to using your smartphone to connect to the internet. Or something. This dual meaning made it the perfect choice, not just the respective definitions (both of which are relevant to the plot) but also because the title itself functions on multiple levels, which I hope the book also does.

After getting burned a few times over the years by rogue publishers, I’ve self-published my last few books, not just my X series which basically consists of fiction I’ve had published elsewhere, but longer original works, too, like Human Waste, Sker House and Dead of Night. There are many reasons why I do this, rather than go the traditional route. The process is much faster and I get to retain control over every aspect of the process from setting the price to the content and cover art.

The thing is, self-published authors get very little respect in the industry because there’s this attitude that anyone can do it, and you HAD to self-publish because your book wasn’t good enough to get published traditionally. There might even be some truth in that assumption, given the questionable quality of some self-published work out there. But without sounding too smug about it, I don’t think it strictly applies to me because my first half a dozen books were traditionally published. However, after a while out of the trad game, something approaching self-doubt crept in and I began to miss the competition.

Am I really good enough?

Is this book really good enough?

With the help of Terror Tract, I hope to answer some of those questions, and ask a few more.

Tethered is out now on paperback and ebook through Terror Tract Publishing LLC.

Tethered is out now!

My new novella, Tethered, is out now on Terror Tract Publishing.

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.

Tethered is available now on paperback and ebook from Terror Tract Publishing.

X4 – ToC

X4, my latest collection of short fiction, is out now.

Grin.

Check out the cover art by the awesome Greg Chapman.

As promised, here is the complete ToC along with the original publishing credits:

Band of Souls has previously appeared in the anthologies Return of the Raven (2009) and Fearful Fathoms, Volume 1 (2017)

As the Crow Flies was first published in QuickFic Anthology 2 (2016)

Jessica was first published in Liquid Imagination (2016)

Jumping at Shadows was first published in Matt Hickman’s Sinister Scribblings (2017)

Other Me was first published in Feverish Fiction (2017)

Vicar on the Underground was first published in Monsters Among Us (2016)

The Past Entombed was first published in Echoes & Bones (2017)

My Tormentor was first published by The Horror Tree (2018)

Lakeside Park was first published in Terrors Unimagined (2017)

Harberry Close was first published in Dead Harvest (2014)

Afterword

X4 is on Amazon now.

US LINK

UK LINK

100 Word Horrors 2

Back last year I contributed to an anthology of drabbles called 100 Word Horrors. I’d never written a drabble until then, but found it a lot of fun as well as a good exercise. When you only have 100 words, you have to be concise and make every word count. The format is one I enjoy, and I’ve dabbled (drabbled?) in it quite a lot since.

Here’s another one.

Fast forward a few months and editor Kevin Kennedy is at it again.

Introducing… 100 Word Horrors 2.

How’s this for an awesome cover?

My contribution this time around, Hitori Kakurenbo, is a spin-off from my recently completed (and as yet unpublished) novella Tethered. It isn’t set in the same universe, nor does it feature any of the same characters, but the two stories are linked because they both concern creepy internet rituals. Translated from Japanese, Hitori Kakurenbo means ‘One person hide and seek.’ Or something along those lines. I’ll be giving the game away if I divulge too much here, but let’s just say it involves a stuffed doll, a knife and some blood. Wahoo! What more do you need for a fun night in by yourself?

Check out 100 Word Horrors 2 to read Hitori kakurenbo in its 100-word entirety, along with stories by lots of other, more talented writers including Amy Cross, Andrew Lennon, David Moody, Michael Bray, Shaun Hutson, Terry West and my spirit uncle Craig, to name but a few.

I’m just there for the shits and giggles.

And the stuffed dolls.

100 Word Horrors is available now on ebook and paperback.

RetView #5 – The Night Stalker

Title: The Night Stalker

Year of Release: 1972

Director: John Llewellyn Moxey

Length: 74 mins

Starring: Darren McGavin, Simon Oakland, Carol Lynley

Note: This article concerns the original 1972 TV movie, not the unrelated 2016 release of the same name, or the 2002 movie Nightstalker, both of which focus on the activities of serial killer Richard Ramirez.

It’s probably fair to say that despite coming out before I was born, this made-for-TV movie, and the popular series that followed it, had more of an effect on me personally and professionally than anything else committed to celluloid. I didn’t even realise how much until relatively recently. How? Because the film married my twin obsessions with writing and the paranormal, ensuring that to my young and impressionable mind, that the two things would forever be entwined.

Shortly after I first saw it as a kid, I remember telling my parents I wanted be a journalist when I grew up. They facilitated this childhood ambition by going out and buying me a ‘reporters kit’ comprising of a notebook and pen and a magnifying glass. Obviously, I immediately went out looking for monsters, ghosts, and other supernatural entities, hoping to look at them in fine detail through the magnifying glass and write about them in the notebook, because I wanted to be just like Carl Kolchak.

Damn it, I still do.

For the uninitiated, Carl Kolchak (brilliantly portrayed by the sadly departed Darren McGavin) is a jaded Las Vegas newspaper hack under unrelenting pressure from his shouty editor Vincenzo (Oakland) to turn over a constant stream of newsworthy articles. Luckily for him, though less-so for the victims, he uncovers a spate of gruesome murders and a wide-ranging cover-up. The general feeling is that Kolchak is particularly anxious to solve this particular case out of concern for his dancer girlfriend Gail (Lynley). An investigation reveals that the murders go back centuries, and the victims invariably suffer extreme blood loss. There is a suspect by the name of Janos Skorzeny who Kolchak believes is an ageless vampire, but can he convince the authorities and his difficult editor?

Ultimately, he doesn’t need to convince anyone because during a late-night showdown Kolchak manages to destroy the suspected vampire, thereby saving the city. But his actions come at a terrible cost. He is told to leave Las Vegas immediately or face a trumped-up murder charge, and is given the devastating news that Gail has already left. The lovelorn reporter then blows his savings placing ads in the personal sections of newspapers up and down the country in an attempt to find her. He never does, and the movie ends as it begins, with Kolchak lying on a bed in a sleazy hotel room listening to a playback of his account of the crimes which he has narrated into a Dictaphone. I guess matters of the heart were a lot harder to resolve before Facebook and What’s App.

The story ark was continued in a sequel, The Night Strangler (1973), where Kolchak finds himself in Seattle and is hired once again by Vincenzo to report on another series of bizarre murders. The second movie immediately preceded the 20-episode TV series, which became a fore-runner for such shows as the X Files, Supernatural, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There was also a short-lived, and frankly pretty terrible remake which lasted for ten episodes in 2005.

When it first aired on ABC over 45 years ago, The Night Stalker set the viewing record for TV movies, winning a 33.2 rating (the percentage of all TV homes). I might be wrong, but I don’t think that figure has ever been surpassed, and in the age of Netflix and streaming, it’s unlikely to ever happen. The screenplay for The Night Stalker was written by sci-fi legend Richard Matheson (the man behind I am Legend, the Incredible Shrinking Man, A Stir of Echoes and many more), and adapted from an as-then unpublished novel called the Kolchak Papers by Jeff Rice. Matheson and Rice collaborated on the sequel The Night Strangler but Rice, who often felt marginalized, then faded into obscurity, dying in 2015 at the age of 71.

GO HERE for more RetView entries.

Trivia Corner:

Producer Chris Carter is such a fan of Kolchak that he cast Darren McGavin in the X Files. The original plan was to have him play Kolchak thirty years on, but McGavin elected not to and the role was re-written to make him Arthur Dale, ‘Father of the X Files.’

Five Thoughts

I recently did a fun piece with the Deviant Dolls where each of us had to lay out five random thoughts. Here are mine…

1: I Have no Faith in Politicians

And neither should you. No matter what party they represent, or what country they come from, all politicians have one thing in common. They are all lying, scheming, manipulative, self-serving assholes. You think any of them really want what’s best for you? Nope. They want what’s best for them. They want the power, the prestige, and the expense accounts. Whoever they claim to represent, the first sign of trouble they’re going to bail and leave you drowning in the sea of excrement they leave behind while they launch a new career doing after-dinner speeches for £6,000 a time. And it will be your own fault for voting for the cunts.

2: Music is Getting Progressively Worse

As I get older, I find myself experiencing some weird kind of musical regression. Another sign that modern life is rubbish. I just can’t stomach any chart music these days, apart from a bit of Taylor Swift. My music taste stalled in around 1995, and in recent years I’ve transcended even that embarrassment by discovering a penchant for 70’s and 80’s rock. Deep Purple, Bob Seger, Night Ranger, Cheap Trick, Survivor, you’ll find them all in prominent positions on my playlist. Did you know Survivor had an entire alternate career untainted by Rocky films? Me neither! Less happily, I also discovered that Jimi Jamison, the lead singer who featured on Burning Heart (Rocky IV), the Moment of Truth (Karate Kid) and, most famously, the Baywatch theme, died in 2014 as a result of methamphetamine intoxication.

3: And While we’re on the Subject…

The recording industry has never shied away from ripping people off, ever since the sixties when labels would release albums by their most popular artists, then put out singles that weren’t on it so fans would have to buy both. But what’s with these ‘Deluxe Versions’ of albums? They have to be the ultimate rip-off. A band puts out a nice, solid 12-track album. It sells well, and the fans love it. In fact, it does so well that six months later, the record label tags on two bonus tracks, either leftovers from the recording sessions or different versions of tracks already on the album, and re-releases it. Except this one costs more money. They might even pull the same trick further down the line and call it a ‘Super Deluxe Version,’ or a ‘Tour Edition.’ These days, some artists license exclusive editions, with subtle changes to the track listing, to large retailers like Target or Walmart, knowing that their hardcore fans, the ones they should be looking after rather than exploiting, will be eager to get everything they put out. Some things change, but record company execs being money-grabbing cunts is one thing that always stays the same.

4: Technology is Scary

When I was a kid, the height of technological advancement was the Betamax VCR. And that, my friends, was a fucking revelation. You can watch horror movies, with the gory bits still in, whenever you want? Get the fuck outta here!

Now you can make your own movies. On your phone. And then share them with millions of people at the touch of a button. What the actual fuck? Of course, technology comes at a price, and like most people my age, I’m very glad the Internet didn’t exist when I was young and stupid, because there’s no way I’m living that shit down.

5: Aliens Exist

I believe in ’em. What’s up? When I admit this to people, they very often laugh in my face. But what’s so hard to believe? It’s incredibly arrogant and naïve to go around thinking that in all the infinite vastness of space, the only intelligent life exists right here on this one little floating speck of dust. We don’t even know what lives at the bottom of the ocean for fuck’s sake. Take the blinkers off. The truth is out there.

This post originally appeared  on the Deviant Dolls website.