Saturday, September 10, 2011

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.

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