Come and See Us at FantasyCon this Weekend

Our Other Selves

Optical Elusion

Soon it will happen again.

You are wide awake in the night, listening in silent, rigid terror to the sloughing of the wind in the few trees scattered within the forest of concrete high-rises outside. Ancient boughs groan and creak, threatening to break and fall to earth. You can almost hear the sound of concrete stressing and fracturing beneath the weight of the elements.

You wait for the scream that hasn't arrived. Not yet.

The heat in your bedroom is unbearable, even though it is the dead of winter's night. The window is cranked open an inch, letting in an icy wind that somehow makes you sweat.

A sense of apprehension is carried in with it, as if the world waits with you.

The signs, the omens, are all there.

Soon it will happen.

Again.

Rising from sweat-soaked sheets, rubbing neck, throat, face with hot and clammy fingers, you walk to the mirror on the front of the dresser at the foot of the bed. Breathe mists before your face as you approach the glass, partially obscuring what you can hardly bear to look at.

You stand naked before the mirror, as you have done so many times before. And stare. And wait.

You cannot see your reflection in the glass, only that of the darkened room: bed, chair, cupboards and chest of drawers; pictures, ornaments and bric-a-brac.

Then, in the mirror, the wardrobe door nudges slowly open, darkness spilling out around your absent reflection as the image emerges from its hiding place. 

You watch in numb, helpless fascination as your truant reflection steps daintily out of the nest of hanging clothes and into the room; you are rooted to the spot when it pads across the carpet, making no sound as it leaves by the door without even glancing in your direction. 

A chill pierces your heart, cooling you, as at last you hear that imagined/remembered/predicted scream winding towards you through the litter-lined corridors of night.

Crumpling beneath the weight of your own helpless horror, you sink to your knees. Weep dryly into hands that are deadened from the memory of so many reflected atrocities, wet with so much reflected blood.

Then, unable to do anything more, you go back to bed. To wait for the return of your absentee image, your prowling reflected self.

Soon.
         It will happen.
                                 Again.

--------------------------------------------------

I wrote that when I was nineteen or twenty years old. I just came across the story in an old file, and thought it was kind of neat. The roots of my current fiction are there, plain as day, as are my lifelong preoccupations. It's interesting looking back on stuff that was written by a self you no longer recognise.

Like the main character's prowling reflection, I can sense the person I was then  hanging around me now, lurking at the boundaries of my life. He knows where I live, but he chooses not to make himself known

I wonder what he thinks of the man I've become.

Dead Bad Things Review

Starburst Magazine has given Dead Bad Things a cracking review. You can see it by clicking this link:

Dead Bad Good Review

"If you like your horror dark, disturbing, intense and oppressive then this will be right up your street. Just be warned. This is not your usual horror story."

Hummer

"Brendan turned his head to follow the bird’s progress, and watched as it flew past Simon and Jane – both of them stepping back to allow it out of the room – and into the rest of the house. The movement of its wings was a small-scale miracle: so much fury and motion suggesting such calm and silence. The sight triggered a chain of detonations, submerged memories exploding at random inside Brendan’s head, but they went up in smoke before he could grab them."

 

 - Silent Voices

(c) Gary McMahon 2011

FantasyCon Schedule

So next weekend - 30th Sept to 2nd Oct - is FantasyCon 2011 down in Brighton. I'm attending the event, and here's my official schedule (the rest of the time I'll either be browsing in the dealer's room, attending other panels and readings, or just hanging around and chatting at the bar):

Friday 30th September:

4pm - Has Crossover Overtaken Genre? (Panel, moderated by Sarah Pinbrough)

8pm - Mass Book Signing Event.

9pm - PS Book Launch (I have a story in the Weird Western anthology Gutshot, edited by Conrad Williams).

10:30pm - Reading, Spectral Press (myself and Simon Kurt Unsworth, introduced by Simon Marshall Jones. I'll be readng from my Spectral Press chapbook What They Hear in the Dark).

Saturday 1st October:

2pm - Solaris Party (I'll be there to meet-and-greet and sign copies of The Concrete Grove).

8pm - Alt-Dead book launch (not 100% certain Ill make this one).

Sunday 2nd October:

10am - How to Market Your Novel (I'll be moderating this panel)

Shucking off the Fear

This week I remembered exacty why it is that I write. I've been working on a relatively simple chapter - a man going to dinner at the house of some old friends, with all the mixed emotions something like that involves - and the magic happened. Something clicked.

The current novel has been something of a struggle. I've wrestled to shape my ideas into coherent sentences, ill health has dogged my attempts to finish, and at times it's felt as if I was simply grinding out the words to get from one scene to the next... But this week, out of the blue, I remembered that I write for me, I write to satisfy my creative urges. I don't write for money; I don't write for some idealised audience. I do what I do because I have to, to keep me from doing something even more stupid.

The key to all this was that I stopped what I was doing, sat down on the sofa, and re-read what I'd written, and all the stuff I'd been anxious about faded away. I was actually pleased with what I'd produced - I thought it was good and gripping and readable. That rarely happens when I read my own work.

Then I realised that for months I'd been working under the weight of a pointless fear: I was scared that the themes might bog down the story, and that there wasn't enough "horrory" stuff in there. This week, after my read-through, I thought: so what? This might not be the novel that people are expecting, but it's the novel I needed to write. It's about childhood hopes gone sour, the bitter taste of regret, and incorrect assumptions about what it takes to be a man.

After 70,000 words this novel has finally revealed it's purpose and shown me what it's all about.  And instead of worrying whether or not I'll crash and burn I've simply started to enjoy the ride.

Dead Bad Things

"He was sitting by the hole in the ground he’d just filled with soil, wondering how long it would take for the remains to begin to rot. Down there, beneath the packed earth, lay a small boy he’d taken from a street in Birmingham three days ago. A small, underfed boy with not much to say for himself; he was maybe three or four years old."

So today I received my author copies of Dead Bad Things - a  big box of lovely books from those wonderful people at Angry Robot. And it really is lovely, the physical book: an absolute joy to behold.

This is the second novel in a series featuring my protagonist Thomas Usher (I won't use the word hero, because he's far from that). It's a direct sequel to Pretty Little Dead Things, and the two books together form what I now think of as Usher's origin story. Further books will focus on the relationships outlined in these first two stories, and we'll get to know Usher and the people that inhabit his world a lot better.

The Usher novels slot neatly, I suppose, into the supernatural detective sub-genre. Usher can commune with ghosts, after a fashion...but his ability has its limitations. He can see the ghosts, but he cannot understand them or hear what it is they say. So he fumbles around in a literal darkness, trying to absolve his own sins (either real or imagined) by trying to help. Often he simply makes things worse.

I'm very excited about this book. I think it's a huge step forward from the first one in terms of plotting and characterisation, and I'm praying to whatever dark entities might be listening that it's enough of a success to justify more books in the series. I already have a third one planned. It's called The Night I Died.

Writing the Blues

"These stories are my Blues; they are the songs I sing when I’m all alone, staring at the screen and feeling the words flow through me and out of me."

The above is an extract from my forthcoming short story collection It Knows Where You Live. It nails down how I feel about the act of writing weird fiction - the fact that, to me, good horror fiction is like the Blues in the way it can tell us a lot about ourselves, riffing on certain established techniques and metaphors to cut through to some kind of inner truth about the human condition. Like an old man sitting on a wooden porch swing and plucking at his guitar, the best horror writers are creating their own form of the Blues.

The stories in It Knows Where You Live are all what could be termed as "Quiet Horror". There are no monsters here, very little blood is spilled, and the damage wrought in these tales is more emotional than physical. Theese tales are all about human connections and failures, broken relationships and chances not taken. The breakdown of what it is that defines us as people.

I believe there are less than 10 copies now remaining of this limited hardback, so if you'd like to sample my Blues get yourself along to Gray Friar Press and pre-order one now, before it's too late.

Night Musings

It's after midnight again, and I'm sitting in my study surfing the Internet and watching the blackness outside my window. I'm not tired; I can't sleep. There's no use trying, not yet, because I know I'll just lie there next to my wife, staring into the darkness of the bedroom and listening to her breathing. I make a few purchases from Amazon - things I can do without but seem to offer me something that I think I might need at some point. I read a Rilke poem on a writer friend's website and feel a clenching sensation in my chest. I wonder how long a person can survive on five hours' sleep a night, and then I remember how I basically wrote myself into hospital last month. Nothing makes sense to me right now but these words, this process of writing down my thoughts.

Somewhere outside, a car engine growls. Lights go off in the house across the way. The black shape of a cat slinks along the top of a stone wall. My eyes hurt. I wish I could go to sleep.

It's after midnight. Again.

New Limited Edition Short Story Collection

It Knows Where you Live

 by Gary McMahon

The modern world is a place ripe with fears. The city, the suburbs, and even the fringes of the countryside: all present opportunities for unease. The way people act when they are together, or when they are alone; the beats, the pauses, and the words we use to communicate reveal a primal darkness at the heart of the modern human experience.

And whatever this darkness is, it knows where you live . . .

In these fifteen tales, acclaimed horror author Gary McMahon casts a light into the shadowy corners of contemporary life, and brings those fears to the page.

Click this link to preorder now from Gray Friar Press:

It Knows Where You Live

-----------------------------------

The origin of this book was an email conversation I had with Gary Fry, the man behind Gray Friar Press. We were having a bit of banter and I suddenly pitched him a short collection (around 50,000 words in total) of stories based around the theme of "modern unease". I didn't think he'd go for it but and he said yes. That was pretty cool; the quickest acceptance I've ever had. The man's a lunatic - but in a  good way.
 
There are fifteen stories here, thirteen of which have never been published before. The majority of the tales were written specifically for this volume.
 
It Knows Where You Live will only ever be published in this format: it's a one-off project. No POD paperback, no ebook edition...just 100 affordable hardback copies, numbered, flat-signed, and each with an ominous little slogan hand-written in the front by me. There's an author's foreword, story notes in the back, and the cover was designed by Gary and myself - this involved lengthy emails, images sent back and forth, and even the occassional argument over which direction to take the design.
 
I think it worked out just fine.
 
The books are already selling fast. So if you'd like one, hit the above link and reserve a copy...before it's too late. Before it forgets where you live.

"When the man was finished he stood up and moved away from the bed. Katie’s body looked like a mistake, a messy little error. Her eyes bulged from her slackened features; her skin was the colour of moonlight."

IT KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE

'Gutshot' and 'Nowhere to Go'

Up for pre-order on the PS Publishing site is Gutshot, the splendid editorial debut of Conrad Williams. This is something special: an anthology of weird western stories.

There are some terrific authors in thsis one, and alongside their tales is my offering "El Camino de Rojo".

Artwork by Caniglia.

Full ToC listed below:

Paul Meloy Carrion Cowboy

Alan Ryan Passage

James Lovegrove The Black Rider

Zander Shaw Blue Norther

Joel Lane Those Who Remember

Mark Morris Waiting for the Bullet

Gary McMahon El Camino de Rojo

Joe R. Lansdale The Bones that Walk

Peter Crowther & Rio Youers Splinters

Christopher Fowler The Boy Thug

Amanda Hemingway Ghosts

Simon Bestwick Kiss the Wolf

Stephen Volk White Butterflies

Gemma Files Some Kind of Light Shines from Your Face

Cat Sparks The Alabaster Child

Michael Moorcock The Ghost Warriors

Sarah Langan Beasts of Burden

Peter Atkins All Our Hearts are Ghosts

Thomas Tessier In the Sand Hills

Adam Nevill What God Hath Wrought?

 
 

Also, my friend Iain Rowan has dropped the price of the Kindle edition of his collection of crime stories Nowhere to Go; throughout September it'll cost you only 99c (or equivalent). A bargain. If you haven't read Iain, read him now: his work is heartfelt, compelling, and beautifully written.

Links:

Amazon UK

Amazon US