Where You Live

Tuesday 10th December is the official launch day for my new short story collection Where You Live in paperback and eBook.

The book consists of my favourite reprints from my out of print hardback collection It Knows Where You Live (only 100 copies were ever made, and they sold out before printing) along with two obscure reprints and five brand new, original stories. The paperback edition also contains three wonderful illustrations by Irish artist Niall Parkinson. The cover art is by Ben Baldwin.

I'm very proud of this book. I always thought we'd missed a trick by not making the original collection more widely available, and this book is more substantial because of the new material.

Here are links to order the book:

Crystal Lake Publishing

 

Amazon (universal link) 

 

 

He Belonged with the Lost

 (Photograph by Nicholas Royle)

 

“Dark times lead to powerful writing – just think of what the Depression and the war brought to American horror fiction. But the danger for modern weird fiction is that it struggles to break out of a tiny coterie of Internet-connected fans. The world needs intelligent horror fiction just as it needs socialism, and for the same reasons: the power of truth is the only thing that can give us a future.”

 - Joel Lane (via email, 20/04/2009)

On Monday 25^th November the writer, critic and anthologist Joel Lane died, apparently in his sleep. I heard the news the following day, via Facebook. I’d known Joel for less than ten years – not as long as some, longer than others – and the news hit me like a gut punch. It took a little while for the reality of his death to sink it, but when it did…well, that was the first time my son had ever seen his daddy cry.

I think I first met Joel in the flesh at FantasyCon, but I’d known him since the early 1990s through his fiction – he was the prime mover in the “Miserablist” subgenre, along with Nicholas Royle, Conrad Williams and several others. I’ve often said to people that I believe there are two writers of true genius working in the field of horror fiction, Ramsey Campbell and Joel Lane.  Now there is only one.

When I first read it, Joel’s work set off a detonation inside my brain and in my heart. I remember buying his first collection, The Earth Wire & Other Tales, and devouring the book when it arrived. Reading those bleak, beautiful, undoubtedly personal stories felt to me like I was entering an unknown country for the first time, but it was a place where I felt immediately at home. I’ve been inspired and directly influenced by Joel’s fiction ever since, and when I finally met him – nervy, edgy, intense, rubbing his head in that trademark way of his – I couldn’t help but be inspired by the man himself.

When I asked Joel to write the introduction to my first collection, he agreed and said he was honoured to be asked. When I read the introduction, I almost cried. He was such a supportive artist – a mentor, I suppose I’d call him. He was also a friend. His support and encouragement helped me become the writer I am today. I honestly mean that: without Joel’s support, I wouldn’t take the risks I do or tackle some of the themes I do. It delights me that he had the same impact on so many other people. He was generous, humane, a gentleman of the genre.

Joel was always ready to critique and compliment another writer’s work, yet he had this way of turning the conversation in another direction if you ever complimented him. He’d start talking about your writing instead, deflecting the praise. I don’t think he ever knew how brilliant he was, how vital his stories were. I told him countless times how much his fiction meant to me personally, but he’d just thank me, rub his head, laugh nervously, and begin to dissect and praise one of my tales. Joel was never comfortable with his own brilliance. But discomfort was part of his persona. Joel had always suffered with his health; his personal life often seemed dogged by tragedy and misfortune. He was in fact a very troubled man – I hope he’s found some peace at last, wherever he is.

I never saw Joel as much as I would have liked. We’d meet up every year at FantasyCon, we did several readings together over the years and he usually came out for a meal afterwards. I had the honour of editing him when he wrote a story for an anthology I put together – he even provided me with the title for the book. We kept in touch with irregular emails; he would occasionally send me stories along with the fascinating reasons behind why they’d been written. He’d also often write to me in detail about a story of mine he’d read. Over the past 12 months, our contact lessened. 2013 has been a terrible year for me personally, and I know Joel had a lot to deal with, too. It happens.

“I’ll make more of an effort next year,” I told myself. “When things get better…”

The last time I spoke to Joel he asked me if I’d like to contribute to an anthology he was editing. I said yes, of course.

“I must email Joel about that anthology,” I thought, just a couple of weeks ago…

You never know, do you? You always think there’ll be a next year, a next month, a next week. A tomorrow. But there never is.

Over the past couple of days my Facebook timeline has been filled with beautiful, heartfelt tributes to Joel. I don’t think he ever knew how much he was loved. There’s a certain tragedy in that, too.

There is now a gap in the horror community. It feels like a bomb has gone off and we’re all wandering about in the wreckage. Joel was our conscience; he was important – perhaps even essential – to the entire field. His work represented the best that horror fiction can be. Everything is different now that he’s gone. The night just got darker.

"None of it meant anything. He could remember all the things that mattered: the feelings, the sensations, the secret moments of truth. But he couldn't recall the names or the stories. He couldn't make any of it link together. The shadows of the trees were starting to blend, and he couldn't see the buildings any more. He was no longer real. He belonged with the lost."

- The Quiet Hours

Joel Lane (1963 - 2013)

 

(Photograph by Nicholas Royle)

New Book Release: Where You Live

Horror is everywhere…

It’s waiting behind a closed door, sitting in an ordinary chair, or following you on a country walk. Perhaps it’s washed up on a tranquil beach, hanging at a local skate park, recorded on an MP3 player hard drive, or even embedded somewhere deep within the design of something as simple and innocuous as a supermarket barcode.

Horror is everywhere, in the shadows and in the light.

It takes on every shape, comes in every conceivable size.

But most of all it’s right where you live.

 

Cover by: Ben Baldwin
Interior artwork by: Niall Parkinson
Edited by: Joe Mynhardt

Scheduled release: December 10th, Crystal Lake Publishing

Furniture Face

When I was younger, I thought I was invincible. Most of us do, don't we? I used to run 50 or 60 miles a week, went mountain biking, did a bit of kickboxing...and I never got injured. My body did whatever the hell I wanted it to, and it always recovered quickly.

This year - specifically the last three or four months - have been injury hell for me. I developed plantar fasciitis in my foot, damaged the tendons in my ankle, tore the tendons in my shoulder, and popped a finger out of its joint, damaging the soft tissue. I need physio, and a good podiatrist.

It takes longer to heal when we're older. Of course it does. Simple fact of life. Our bodies age but our minds still think we're in our twenties. But lately I'm starting to feel my age. I've never done that before. I always looked younger, felt younger than I was.

I'm only 44, but lately I feel it. I didn't until this past year. And that's frightening. I'm not invincible. I'm going to die, just like everyone else. The pathetic Peter Pan fantasy is well and truly dead in the water.

This week I found out that I need reading glasses. A small thing; nothing to get worked up about. But it's another sign, another nail in the coffin of delusion. And that, I think, is what this blog post is all about: the death of a delusion, the end of pretending that these things were never going to happen to me. We all age, each of us heads down that same path, moving slower and slower towards whatever waits for us at the end. I still have a long way to go - I'm lucky, I still get to amble along at my own pace, shiny new reading glasses perched on the end of my nose. Some of those up near the front have started to run. I can see them, and I want to call out to them, to drag them back to where I am now, but they can't hear me. All I can do is stand and wave.

Dexter - Remember the Monsters

I don't usually blog about television shows, but I've been a huge fan of Dexter right from the start, and now it's all over I feel compelled to say something about that controversial finale.

******************* SPOILER WARNING ***********************

This might be the only place you read a positive response to the final episode of Dexter. Most people I know seemed to hate it. I thought it was the show's finest hour.

The episode was not only a fitting ending to what has been a brilliant, subversive piece of television, but it was also a sad one. Strange, beautiful, melancholy, and ulimately moving in all kinds of ways, the episode capped off one of the greatest TV shows I've ever seen.

Getting straight to the point, a lot of people seem to have wanted one of two things to happen: Dexter escaping to get his Happy Ending, or Dexter being caught or killed. I think either of those would have been a big mistake. They would have been crowd-pleasing and empty, and out of character with the entire show, betraying its subversive ethos. A lot viewers wanted resolution, a clear-cut ending. What they got instead was anticlimax and ambiguity.

Deb's death also seems to have caused some consternation. But it's been coming for a while. I actually thought the writers were going to kill her off a couple of seasons ago, but instead they made her the focus of the show (she'd always been it's heartbeat). It was another brave move from a show that never did quite what the viewers expected, or wanted.

Those final bedside moments between Dexter and Deb were profoundly sad, almost unbearable to watch. That sadness permeates the entire episode. What Dexter did made perfect sense in terms of the show's internal logic. It might not have been nice or palatable, but it was true. Deb was a free spirt, a  force of nature. She could not be allowed to exist as a vegetable. She'd done too much, seen too much to live with it all. Dexter himself was in the process of changing again, reverting back to, even becoming, what he had always been: a monster. The episode title is no accident: remember, no matter how much we empathised or sympathised with him over the years, Dexter was always a monster, but a monster pretending to be a man.

Dexter spent eight seasons trying to convince himself that he was human, and ultimately he was forced to accept that he wasn't. So he erased all evidence of that former struggle: he deleted his sister, the only thing that had made him even approach the illusion of humanity, and he let his son go (off with another seial killer, one possibly even more monstrous than himself). When he sailed off into that storm, the Dexter who had struggled with his identity was killed. The thing that emerged - shambling, bearded, shark-eyed - was the Dark Passenger. It is said that serial killers spend a long time trying to become. Dexter became one last time; he was willingly absorbed by the thing he'd always carried inside him.

That final shot is incredible. The thing that had once been Dexter, sitting at a small table in an isolated shack, staring dead-eyed into the camera. I have never been so haunted by a scene in a television show. That image will stay with me, open to interpretation, for a very long time.

I'll miss that monster. I'll miss Dexter so very much.

Updates

It's no secret that I've been struggling to write for several months now. I'm done in, run down, worn out. The demands of real life have broken something and it's taking some time to repair. But in the meantime, while I'm waiting (and hoping) for my passion to return, there are new books being released, momentum to keep up. Here are some details:

First off, The Bones of You is available to preorder from Earthling Publications. This has already received favourable early reviews, including one from Publishers Weekly.

Crystal Lake Publishing will put out my short story collection Where You Live in December. This feaures the thirteen strongest tales from my hard-to-find, out-of-print collection It Knows Where You Live plus two obscure reprints and four brand new stories.

Early next year will finally see the publication of my short apocalyptic novel The End, from Ian Whates'  Newcon Press. More details on this one when I have them, but we're planning a proper launch in London.

Having Written

I see it a lot. Writers stating that they write because it's fun, because it's entertaining. This is something I probably spend way too much time thinking about. Because I don't find anything about writing fun. For me, writing is hard. It's really fucking hard, and it gets harder the older I become.

I don't find one single aspect of the writing process enjoyable, on any level. When I write, I'm poking at recent wounds, opening up old scar tissue, raking around in the wet meat to find the core of the story. It's emotionally, physically and spiritually draining. I honestly can't see what could ever be fun about it.

But I envy those writers who say they have fun when they write. I wish I could be that way. I'd probably write more; I'd certainly feel more love for the process. I might even be less of a miserable bastard. Maybe.

The only thing about writing that gives me any ounce of pleasure is having written. When I finish something - be it a short story, a novella or a novel - I feel good, about myself and about the world. That good feeling is fleeting; it lasts only as long as it takes for the realisation to hit me that I have to start all over again on another story. But at least I have it, and it's mine. All mine.

I think that's the main reason I put myself through the emotional shitstorm of writing: to have written. Because having written is so much better than not having written.