No Comfort Breaks Required - 100 Words of Terror as a businessman finds a ghastly way to solve his staffing problems...employing the deceased!

No Comfort Breaks Required

I should have thought of this years ago. For too long I suffered the burden of a demanding workforce. Never satisfied. Forever bleating about their “rights”. Damned socialist nonsense.

Mama DuChance changed all that, came to me with an idea. Employ the dead to work my call centre. Their needs, as far as I can tell, are few. Being dead, they enjoy no protection under discrimination laws. I can pinch the women’s bottoms with impunity.

What’s that damn noise coming from the trading floor? Some kind of chanting. One word: flesh.

Chairs scrape as they rise. They’re heading this way.

Out of Town - 100 Word Horror Tale of Retail Atrocity, that'll make you GA(s)P in terror!

Out of Town

I pull into the retail outlet. My wife’s birthday tomorrow and I haven’t got her anything.

They all look the same: the stores, the cars, the people. Same clothes, same vacant eyes; dead black holes, lifeless but for the embers of greed. They want things. I think I’m supposed to want them too.

They sense my lack of belonging. Manicured hands grab me, carry me into a department store. My clothes are replaced with designer garments, a needle jabbed into my neck, freezing my muscles.

I’m lifted to the window and positioned with the other mannequins.

You’ll probably see me.

In the darkest reaches of the Hebrides, buried in the frozen peat it lay. My novel stirs, takes shape and prepares to rise.

It's been far too long since I posted anything on my blog, this is partly due to the excesses of the festive period, my own engagement to my now fiancée, and extensive research and planning of my first novel.

I've written many short stories; both flash fiction horror and longer stories, but the business of writing a novel really is something else. It's both incredibly daunting and intimidating, but also tremendously exciting. It has given me a sense of freedom I've never experienced creating short works of fiction; the possibilities are literally infinite. Where do I take these characters, what drives them? How deep into the world of the occult and supernatural do I want this novel to go? Am I writing a horror novel or a fantasy novel, and does it matter? These are all questions I'm currently asking myself, and at the moment, changing my answers on a daily basis. Slowly but surely though, I'm whittling down the possibilities, like a sculptor watching a piece of rock gradually take place.

All I can really reveal at this stage is that it will be a gothic horror tale set in the Highlands of Scotland, set partly in the modern day and partly at the time of the tragic 19th century Highland clearances.

I hope people will like it. I do anyway, so that's something.

100 Word Horror: Gunpowder, treason and seditious literature; a Guy must burn!

Remember, Remember

Every year they burn a Guy in our village. We all gather round, young and old in the dark autumn night. Tall shadows. Smiling faces in the blazing amber glow. Hot dogs and mugs of steaming tea, enjoying the crackle and pop of the burning wood.

And the screams of the Guy. The sizzle of his scorched flesh. Roasting meat.

There’s always someone to be made an example of. A dissident, a traitor to be sent screaming to hell.

This year it’s going to be my son. I feel no sadness, he was caught reading banned literature and must die.

New story up on Popcorn Horror & the inspiration behind it

Popcorn Horror have kindly put another one of my stories up on their site:

http://popcornhorror.com/matter-destiny/

It's a gruesome tale set in two very different pubs in two contrasting parts of London. The inspiration for this story came on a recent visit to London's famous Theatreland. We called into an old Victorian pub on Drury Lane before going to our show, and while knocking back a pint or two of London Pride, I looked around me at all the theatre memorabilia dating back maybe a century or so, and wondered what kind of characters must have sat in my very seat drinking just as I was.

The idea fascinated me. Actors, musicians, writers, politicians? Almost certainly. Gangsters, thieves, murderers, fraudsters? Quite possibly. Thinking of what those four walls have seen in all the years the pub has been running sparked my interest. But it was the collection of rather ghastly looking clown masks behind the bar made me want to develop my interest into a story. I felt uneasy as I looked up at them and wondered what it would be like to be alone in the bar in the dead of night and see one move it's eyes, even talk to you...

And so 'A Matter of Destiny' was born. Please do check it out and feel free to let me know your thoughts. And maybe next time you're in an old pub, or indeed any old building, have a little think who and what those four walls have seen. What might even still be there. Watching. Listening. Waiting.

Tears in Joyland - My thoughts on Stephen King and his recent novel 'Joyland'

So, ten minutes or so ago, I finished Stephen King's 'Joyland', and I am so moved by its tragic and bittersweet majesty, that I just have to write about it. If I don't, I could sit here weeping like a baby. You will find no spoilers here, but that book moved me more than any other for a very, very long time.

First things first: wow.

I've been a Stephen King ever since I read 'Salem's Lot' as a petrified 13 year old, quaking in my bed, dreading having to get up and put out the light. Terrifying as that first experience was, I've been hooked on horror ever since. As years went by, I worked my way through all of King's classic work, with perhaps 'The Shining' being the highlight for me, closely followed by 'The Stand'. Thrill after thrill, terror after terror followed, and for many years, he could do no wrong.

But then, somewhere in the mid 90s it all started to go horribly wrong. His novels failed to grip me, often seeming like horror-by-numbers, perhaps even that King essentially didn't really care. Anything with his name on it was going to sell, so what the hell? By the time the millennium dawned, many of his novels had gone from steady mediocrity into the murky depths of the almost unreadable; 'Cell', 'The Duma Key', and the atrocious ending to the already deteriorating 'Dark Tower' series, led me to adandon King, so I thought, for good.

I only picked up 'Joyland' because it's part of the 'Hard Case Crime' series I've been enjoying lately, featuring hard-boiled crime fiction from old masters like Donald Westlake and Mickey Spillane, as well as badass modern noir from the likes of the delectable Christa Faust. Well, how glad I am that I did give my old hero another chance. 'Joyland' is a beautiful, funny, tragic and at times devastating ride; full of incredibly well-drawn characters, and a  magical setting. A park 'selling fun' at the end of an era as the corporations grew ever more powerful and squeezed out the independents, a time when the magic of a carnival was real, not carefully planned and scripted. A time that is now long gone, but, thanks to the imagination of Stephen King, is relived in all it's glory.

Looks like I'm getting back on that ride I stepped on as a scared kid all those years ago.

The King is Dead: An abominabal Royal Succession. Stately terror in 100 wicked words!

The King is Dead

The old man had been in bed for weeks. Too sick to move his brittle, creaking carcass. Rotting from the inside, his decomposition already begun. His courtiers, practised in sycophancy, masked their distaste at the cloying stench.

Only his eyes seemed alive. Bright, sharp. They darted around the royal chamber, following every movement of the chosen few allowed to witness his demise.

His latest demise. Not his final demise, that wouldn’t come for centuries, perhaps not at all.

His Grandson and his wife were, as carefully co-ordinated, expecting a baby.

Here one goes again, what?