Low Tides: A Halloween Story of Strange Shaldon
My short story, Low Tides, is online at the People’s Republic of South Devon, just in time for Halloween!
Read online, or download the PDF!
On hold
Just a note to let anyone who’s interested know that I’m putting TGWS on hiatus for a few months, as we’re just about to start building a house.
Film review: Phobia
An easy on the eyes and mind horror anthology from four Thai film-makers, Phobia never truly scares, but there are some fun jumps along the somewhat predictable way in these thinly-linked stories.
Thongkongtoon kicks off with the segment Happiness. A young girl is recovering from a broken leg in her flat, received when the taxi she was in collided with a pedestrian. Hiding from her landlady because her rent is in arrears her only form of communication with the outside world is her internet and mobile phone. When the internet packs up she begins to receive text messages from a complete stranger. Bored, she starts up a conversation, and after a series of stranger and stranger exchanges she wishes she listened to that revised and updated nugget of parental wisdom: never text strangers. Especially if they’re dead… This segment has no dialogue whatsoever, just the irritating buzz of the mobile as messages come in, off-set by the steady build-up of a claustrophobically threatening atmosphere as the ghost decides he wants to meet up in the flesh. Thongkongtoon just manages to keep the single interior setting this side of tedious, but the inevitable pay-off did send a little shiver down my spine.
Seems Only Right at Dead Lines Magazine
Back in 2008 I won the British Fantasy Society’s short story competition with my entry, Seems Only Right.
But it sort of got lost… it wasn’t announced at the Fantasycon Awards of that year, and maybe somebody read it in the BFS’ New Horizons journal in which it appeared, and although I read it at a couple of Horror Reanimated nights my gut feeling is that very few people know of its existence.
I’m happy to say that Dead Lines an American online horror fiction magazine has picked the story for its latest issue, together with the wonderful illustration that Robert Elrod crafted to accompany the piece. The magazine also has fiction from Graham Masterton, JF Gonzalez and John Everson, amongst others, so I’m in good company.
Check out Seems Only Right here.
Peter Crowther: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
The thirtieth and last entry in the weekly incarnation of the Bury Me series (thanks to all who have contributed so far) features an author, editor and publisher who’ll you all be familiar with: Peter Crowther, boss of PS Publishing, a wonderful short story writer and editor supreme; a man whose appropriately titled Narrow Houses anthologies chilled me in the early-nineties. If those titles aren’t books to be buried with, then I don’t know what are…
“You have to have belief in what a book says in order to make it special . . . believe in the possibilities it shows you. That’s my view.
I made the best two friends I’ve ever had when I was reading my burial book: two sides of the same coin—Will Halloway, growing in the sturdy and safe shadow of his father; and Jim Nightshade, a James Dean wannabe, filled to bursting with the possibilities life offers to those who are strong (or foolhardy) enough to grasp for the merry-go-round brass ring. Two boys of around the same age as I then was (and still am, pretty much, even now, way deep down inside, where it matters) who I have never seen or spoken with. Read more
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