Out of the Darkness, Writing the Uncanny, Best British Short stories

It’s been a long time since I posted an update on here for various reasons, and I’m happy to say since the last post I’ve had stories and essays in three different publications.

I have an essay in Writing the Uncanny: Essays on Crafting Strange Fiction, ed. Dan Coxon & Richard V. Hirst (Dead Ink) titled ‘Half-Concealed Places, or a Particularly Humdrum Uncanny’. The essay is about weird and uncanny fiction’s interaction with edgeland and psychogeographic writing, and how it can work powerfully in seemingly ‘humdrum’ spaces.

I was honoured to be invited to contribute to an anthology featuring writers such as Jeremy Dyson, Alison Moore, Lucie McKnight Hardy, Jenn Ashworth and many more.

You can buy it here.

I have a new story in the charity anthology Out of the Darkness, ed. Dan Coxon (Unsung Stories) called ‘The Residential’. Themed around mental-health, all proceeds from sales of the book go to the charity Together for Mental Wellbeing.

‘The Residential’ is a new London Incognita story, about the everyday stresses and rage induced by life in a city like London – specifically when all the systems that keep the city fail. It’s also about the eeriness and uncanny nature of suburban streets.

Once again, it’s a pleasure to be in an athology with so many brilliant writers of the weird – Laura Mauro, Malcolm Devlin, Aliya Whiteley, Gareth E. Rees and many more.

You can buy it here.

My story ‘What Never Was’, first published in Confingo magazine and part of last year’s collection London Incognita was selected for Best British Short Stories 2021, ed. Nicholas Royle (Salt). It feels like a real stamp of approval to have one of my stories included in this collection, and I’m very grateful to be in such good company.

You can buy it here.

LONDON INCOGNITA

I am delighted to announce that my second book of fiction, LONDON INCOGNITA, will be published by Dead Ink in October 2020. You can currently pre-order it by becoming a Dead Ink subscriber here.

Includes the Shirley Jackson Award shortlisted Judderman.

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ABOUT THE BOOK

London Incognita chronicles a city caught in the cycle of perpetual decline and continuous renewal: the English capital, groaning under the weight of two-thousand years of history, as seen through the eyes of its desperate and troubled inhabitants.

A malicious presence from the 1970s resurfaces in the fevered alleyways of the city; an amnesiac goddess offers brittle comfort to the spirits of murdered shop-girls; and an obscure and forgotten London writer holds the key to a thing known as the emperor worm. As bombs detonate and buildings burn down, the city’s selfish inhabitants hunt the ghosts of friends, family and lovers to the urban limits of the metropolis, uncovering the dark secrets of London.

FICTIONAL NOVELS IN THE WORK OF D.A. NORTHWOOD

The Dead Ink reissue of Northwood's Judderman

The Dead Ink reissue of Northwood's Judderman

I have been working with the independent press Dead Ink (publisher of my own collection, Hollow Shores) recently, editing the work of 'lost' London writer D.A. Northwood – namely the novella Judderman produced for the 1972 run of the Eden Book Society. It has been a very rewarding experience, and I have found of immense interest the fictional novels Northwood makes reference to in his works. As a writer myself interested in the blurring of fictional realities and so-called true ones, I find Northwood's simple but powerfully effective tactic irresistible.

Interspersed with his references to 'real' (for what is real anyway?) writers such as Alexander Baron, Algernon Blackwood, C.L. Nolan, Mary Butts, Arthur Machen, and the poet Adrian Mitchell, we find a number of references to writers I can find no record of despite my exhaustive online searches.

We find a reference to a poet operating in either the weird or the decadent tradition (as always Northwood only makes the briefest of allusions) named Hecate Shrike. Whether contemporary to the nineteen seventies or not, it is never made clear.

There is much discussion of the clearly fictional Malachite Press (how I wish it existed!), with the following works cited to a writer named Michael Ashman, creator of a series of post-WW2 occult detective novels, following the exploits of a man named Vincent Harrier. A grim, anti-heroic figure perhaps familiar to the contemporary reader from American hard-boiled fiction, but operating in the Blitz rubble of a city rebuilding itself both physically and psychologically.

The Ashman books referenced in Northwood's work are:

  • The Salvage Song of the Larks, and Other Stories (one story in the collection is named: ‘A Life Constricted, or, These Serpentine Coils Will Crush Us Both’)
  • Saxifraga Urbium (a story of London Pride)
  • What I Found in the Drowned Land
  • The Epitaph To All Our Yesterdays
  • Your Architect is Degenerate

There is also reference to another London novel, chronicling the mudlarks who sift for the treasure of the Thames. It is a book that we must also assume to be fictional. The title of that novel is Through This Mud We Find Ourselves, and has no author attributed to it.

I live in the hope that one day, in an Oxfam or Mind charity bookshop in my new home of Enfield Town, I will stumble on one of these mythical novels of a hidden London. I know it is an impossibility, and therein lies the thrill.