Ghosts

For me, the rest of 2012 is all about the ghosts.

I'm just about to start work on my next novel, The Quiet Room. I expect to have a good working draft finished by September, so that my agent can start sending it out to various publishers. The novel is an expansion of my award-winning story What They Hear in the Dark, and I'm very excited about it. A modern, character-driven ghost story, I'm hoping this might be the one to take me to the next level.

After that I'll be writing my second ghost story of the year.

This Tuesday I was appoached to write a novel by a US publisher I've wanted to work with for several years. Within twenty-four hours, we had the contract signed and the synopsis agreed, and I had my first advance payment in the bank. That's the quickest piece of business I've ever done.

The novel will be called The Bones of You, and I'm afraid I can't say much more about it than that right now, other than it will be released in a beautiful limited edition hardback.

This means the rest of my writing year is spoken for. I'll be taking on very few other projects until I get these novels done.

Updates

Apologies for being so slow in updating this blog, but, well, I've been busy. Very busy, in fact, working on the third Concrete Grove novel - Beyond Here Lies Nothing - so that I can get it to my publisher in time. I'm sure the three of you who read this blog will understand how that goes.

My first update concerns a new book. Visions Fading Fast, which I edited for Pendragon Press, is avaiable in paperback now. The nice hardback edition will follow shortly - I'm told it's at the printers now. The book contains brilliant long stories by Joel Lane, Nathan Ballingrud, Kaaron Warren, Paul Meloy and Reggie Oliver.

Click the link to purchase a copy:

Visions Fading Fast

In other news, my latest collection Tales of the Weak and the Wounded is still avaialable. To order direct from the publisher (with very reasonable shipping rates), click this link:

Tales of the Weak and the Wounded

The collection has been received very well indeed. Here's a nice review, just to whet your appetite:

Famous Monsters Review

Writing as Self-abuse

Whenever I write a novel, I just keep writing until the first draft is complete, relying on the momentum I build to carry me through to the end. I don't edit as I go along; I just keep writing the story, getting it down on the page. Utilising this method means that I rapidly begin to doubt that what I've written is any good, culminating in a complete panic attack near the end of the draft, at whic...h point I've usually convinced myself that it's terrible and I can't write for toffee.

Then I start the editing process, and realise that what I've produced isn't that bad at all - in fact, it might be pretty good, if I can manage to get the edits right. That's where I'm at now with the current novel: thinking, "wow, this isn't too bad at all".

It's a painful and unhealthy way to work, and means that I produce a lot of drafts of each book, but I do it every damn time.

I think I might be a masochist.

Meme Horror

This week I've been suffering from a chest infection and a sinus infection, so I've been stuck at home trying to recouperate. I've watched a lot of DVDs, read some books, and spent way too much time on Facebook. It was during a spell on the latter that a US writer friend - Nickolas Cook - put me onto something called creepypasta.

Creepypasta is kind of a gerneric web term for short horror stories purporting to be urban legends, usually posted anonymously. It's all very knowing and self-referential - a kind of unofficial internet metafictional project - and it's fascinating. This, in turn, led me to check out things like smiledog.jpg, the Slender Man and The Marble Hornets Project.

This last one - Marble Hornets - is the thing I want to talk about here.

The series consists of 57 (to date) individual Youtube uploads which are meant to be footage shot by a small group of people who were making a film school project called "Marble Hornets". The footage documents the director's descent into apparent paranoia and his eventual disappearance, the clips spliced together by a friend of his who begins to discover events on film that he has no recollection of happening.

Before long, we begin to get glimpses of a tall, thin suited figure known elsewhere on the internet as the Slender Man, and the protagonist is watched, stalked, and finally attacked, by white-masked figures.

The whole thing is both epic and intimate, absurd and insightful, messy and often completeley fucking terrifying. I think it's the first masterpiece of internet-based meme fiction. The project seems to represent a new wave of horror storytelling; something I'm calling Meme Horror. These films take their inherent flaws - lack of budget, amatuerish production values, non-actors, guerilla filmmaking - and turn them into strenghts. Equally inspired by the Mumblecore movement and The Blair Witch Project, it's like we're seeing a backlash against CGI-driven, gore-filled Hollywood horror, and these weird little films manage to generate a palpable sense of dread.

Yes, after around the "Entry 30" mark things start to get repetitive and some of the initial unpredictability is lost, but there's still something fundamentally chilling and utterly compelling about the shaky little hand-held film clips. Even a brief clip of a children's party takes on an ominous note of dread in the context of the whole gestalt.

This is good stuff; it's elemental terror, hitting deep nerves in our modern psyche: white middle-class ennui represented in the form of horror Cinéma vérité .

I have seen the future of horror, and it's a meme...

Check out Marble Hornets for yourself:

Marble Hornets