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.

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.

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

The Return of the Christmas Cannibal!

The Dylan Decker novelette, A Christmas Cannibal, has been released as a stand-alone by Undertaker Books as part of their Graveside Reads series, making the perfect gift for the ghoul in your life!

Or for yourself.

Christmas in the badlands is never much fun. But when someone steals his horse and leaves him for dead in a snowstorm, this one has the potential to be Dylan Decker’s worst ever. Or even his last.

But he isn’t ready to die just yet. He tracks the thief to a nearby town, where the festive season is in full swing, with revenge on his mind. Little does he know that his ordeal is only just beginning, and the ho ho horror is about to go to another level.

This time, Dylan may have bitten off more than he can chew…

A Christmas Cannibal is OUT NOW!

RetView #85 – The Orphanage (2007)

Title: The Orphanage (El Orfanato)

Year of Release: 2007

Director: JA Bayona

Length: 97 mins

Starring: Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Príncep, Mabel Rivera, Montserrat Carulla

This acclaimed co-production between Spain and Mexico is the long-form directorial debut of Barcelona-based director JA Bayona, who went on to direct Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) and Society of the Snow (2023), which told the story of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972. Short on both money and experience, for Orfanato, Bayona enlisted the help of Mexican horror legend Guillermo del Toro Gomez, perhaps best known Mimic (1997), The Shape of the Water (2017) and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019). It’s also the first screenplay by Sergio G Sanchez, who was heavily influenced by the classic literature Turn of the Screw by Henry James and Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, as well as horror movies like The Innocents (1961), The Omen (1976) and Poltergeist (1982). The work was nominated for Best Screenplay at the 2008 Goya Awards after being nominated for no fewer than 14.

The Orphanage opens with some kids playing a game, but you just know things won’t stay this innocent long, in more ways than one. One of these kids is Laura (Rueda) who is adopted only to return to the now-abandoned building thirty years later with her husband (Cayo) and son, Simon (Príncep), with the altruistic intention of turning it into a home for disabled children. Soon after they move in, Simon, who is both adopted and HIV-positive but doesn’t know either (which is certain to make for some pretty awkward family chats at some point) soon starts making friends, kind of unusual given that the place was deserted when they moved in, and starts saying off-kilter things like, “I’m not going to grow up. Like my new friends.” He now has six of these invisible playmates, by the way. He talks about a treasure hunt, presents a box of teeth as a ‘clue,’ and claims that if he finds the treasure he will be granted a wish. He has also taken to drawing creepy pictures of a child with a cloth sack over his head, another massive red flag. Don’t the kids in these films always do stuff like that? By now, it’s pretty clear the old orphanage is haunted and the spirits are exerting their influence on poor Simon. The question now becomes why? Because there is always a ‘why.’ Things are compounded by a visit from a social worker called Benigna (Carulla) who is later spotted acting suspiciously in the grounds. As things escalate, Laura becomes increasingly concerned, and then frantic with worry. All of which seems entirely justified when Simon disappears, driving a wedge between Laura and her husband. This leads to a series of strange discoveries, and as the secret of the orphanage is slowly revealed it turns out Simon is neither the first nor the only child to go missing.

The gothic mansion (the Partarriu Manor) where most of the action takes place is very impressive (pictured below), and some of the cinematography truly stunning. Despite being filmed on location in Llanes, northern Spain, there is a lot of torrential rain (rain in Spain?) and it’s overcast most of the time, which all adds to the menacing mood. The location was chosen due to its diverse natural settings, which Bayona made full use of. It was made in 2007, but looks and feels a lot older. Maybe that was the intention. In 2007 New Line Cinema bought the rights for an English-language remake but that seems to have stalled, and there have been crickets ever since. On this, Bayona noted, “The Americans have all the money in the world but can’t do anything, while we can do whatever we want but don’t have the money,” whilst also pointing out that the American industry doesn’t take chances, and prefers to remake movies that were already hits.

The Orphanage reportedly received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, and when it was released in cinemas became the second highest grossing debut ever for a Spanish film. It was also a hit with international audiences. At the time of writing the film has an 87% approval rating on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes based on 181 reviews, with an average rating of 7.4/10. The critical consensus reads, “Deeply unnerving and surprisingly poignant, The Orphanage is an atmospheric, beautifully crafted haunted house horror film that earns scares with a minimum of blood.” Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Roger Ebert said the film is “deliberately aimed at viewers with developed attention spans. It lingers to create atmosphere, a sense of place, a sympathy with the characters, instead of rushing into cheap thrills.” A more contemporary review in The Film Magazine says: “The Orphanage might be one the most moving ghost stories ever put to film, and throughout its deliberate, slow-burn telling of a pitch-black gothic mystery it never loses touch with its beating heart. It’s about lost, forgotten, mistreated children and how pain can be passed on decades down the line, but ultimately also that love, care and kindness saves lives and prevents the next generation being both metaphorically and literally haunted.”

On the negative side, the film drew criticism for its ending and several reviewers picked up on the fact that at its core the film is about grief and the mental toll it takes, with some suggesting it is a depiction of a bereaved parent’s slow descent into madness drawing comparisons with The Babadook (2014). Tellingly, this is never definitively addressed.

Trivia Corner:

Though uncredited, Guillermo del Toro Gomez plays the doctor at the Emergency Ward who treats Laura after she injures her leg looking for Simon.

Girl’s Night

Happy to report that my drabble, Girl’s Night, has been included in the latest edition of Flash Phantoms ezine.

I do love a good drabble, and there’s a lot going on in this one. I was determined to stick to my usual modus operandi of lulling the reader into a false sense of security before hitting them with a gut punch at the end, but it’s a lot more difficult to achieve when you only have 100 words to play with.

Still, mission accomplished. I think.

Girl’s Night is free to read HERE.