About two weeks ago I was asked to contribute to an up-coming charity anthology to raise money for cancer research charities. While flattered to be asked, I was also struck by the often cruel synchronisities life sometimes throws up. A few days earlier I'd learned that someone who played a minor yet important role in my life during my early twenties had just died of cancer.
That fucking disease. I hate it. I suppose at 41 I'm at the age now where people I know, or people I used to know, are dying: mostly friends' parents, sometimes even the friends themselves. The thought doesn't really carry any sense of consolation, but it's all just part of life. I know that, but I still can't get my head around it and it also forms a large part of the reason why I write horror: to put the lunacy and inevitability of death into some kind of personal fictional framework.
Anyway, I've been working all week on a story for this charity anthology. It might be the strangest - and bitterest - thing I've ever written. Titled All the Wounds of the World, it's a kind of horror genre reinterpretation of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape with a bit of Withnail & I thrown in for good measure.
See - I told you it was weird.
"Firmly in the front ranks of the new wave of British horror." - The Guardian
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