ST Collection

The Original Afterwords

2009-09-04T09:13:00.000-07:00

Since I started my “Strange Tales”, back in 1987, I’ve written afterwords to all of my short stories and novels. The stories in the collection were no exception and I published “edited highlights” in the book.

I edited them for reasons of space, but I’m not bound by that here. So the following afterwords are the full versions and - as with a lot of this kind of material - can be safely ignored if the mechanics of story writing don’t interest you.

However, if you do read through, there might be some plot spoilers - you have been warned…

Infantophobia
This came to me from a story in “The Dream Zone #1” - it didn’t have any dead babies in it, bbut it did use the word gravid (which I’d never heard before). I suddenly had this image of a huge foetus, rather like the teacher puppet from “The Wall”, climbing out of a grave and chasing someone. I told Alison the idea (which, at that point, I thought was quite amusing) and though she thought it might be a little bit too sick, said that I should have a go. I wrote the Melanie part the following day and the main body the day after, having just received the acceptance for “Smile” from Sci-Fright.

As the story progressed, the imagery changed. Some editors and readers said that the realistic build-up was ruined by the appearance of the giant foetus and, although I was reluctant to change it, I could sort of see their point after a while. However, I couldn’t resist putting the image into the story so that is why Frank has the nightmare right at the end. The only problem this gave me is that where originally Frank paid the price for his unburdenings, now he gets away scot-free and I think it makes the story darker.

I can honestly say that this does not come from personal experience or belief - and I made the title up too. Originally, I was going to call it Gravidphobia but didn’t, since Frank’s problem is not with the woman, but the baby.

This was rejected by “The Dream Zone” (too grisly), “Nasty Piece Of Work” (“it’s like a Shaun Hutson novel”) and “Peeping Tom”, before Sackcloth & Ashes took it (it went between us three times and each draft came back with excellent and well thought out editorial comments). Thank you, Andrew Busby.

The part with Melanie takes place at Tresham College and the Cornmarket car park in Kettering and the graveyard is the one near Market Harborough, where “Ha Ha Ha” is also set.

Having A Bad Day
My original idea for this was about a man who wanted to emulate his favourite serial killer and found that everything that could go wrong in his pursuit of this did. I couldn’t get that to work and then, all of a sudden, I realised I could do it as someone who is so stressed by modern life (as I sometimes feel) that an event just pushes them over the edge.

When I got to the bathroom scene, I decided (having just read “Come Out Tonight”) to ‘do a Richard Laymon’ and go for it. A subtler me would have cut when she put the hedgetrimmer against his shoulder but I don’t think that would have worked for this story. The blood, guts and problems make the comedy, I think. The idea of having her stopped by the police came later and was just another hassle for poor Fay to deal with.

The house is an amalgamation but, the bedroom and bathroom are ours and The Lakes makes its first appearance in my short stories. The ending - intact from the original - was suggested by Jonathan Litchfield, after I explained the idea to him when we were out walking one evening.

This took a while to go, because it was either too long or people just didn’t get it, but thank God for Brian Keene at Horrorfind.com!

Empty Souls, Drowning
This came to me in a flash one Sunday and was fed, obliquely, by a couple of other ideas that I’d had. The central image was of the hero, lying in bed with a woman with red hair that never featured in any of the drafts and as I laid in bed that Sunday night, most of this plotted itself out. As I began to write, I knew it would be bleak but I didn’t really have any idea as to how dark it would become. After about half a page, it occurred to me that maybe I could do the original plan for “End Of Season” (a short, bleak tale that turned into a bleak novella length tale) without killing off that earlier story (which is still one of my favourites). The town, for all intents and purposes, is Great Yarmouth and the arcade is the same one that Alison and I discovered (where she did, indeed, beat all comers on the Sega Grand Prix) when we were there.

The hardest part of the writing, to be honest, was resisting the temptation to make it chirpier and I’m pleased that I did.

I sent this initially to Paul Lockey at Unhinged - he liked the story but didn’t think the way the characters spoke to one another in the arcade worked properly. I looked at it and saw his point, so I re-wrote that section and sent it to Mick Sims at Enigmatic Tales, hoping for the best. He came back saying that if I took out the swearing (which I did, they were superfluous), they would be glad to publish it. He also wrote, on the bottom of his letter, the comment, “You are an interesting writer with a range of ideas that are fascinating” which made me feel wonderful.
(The published version was accompanied by a superb illustration by Gerald Gaubert)

Dead Skin
I was getting into bed one Saturday night and I suddenly saw this woman, in a mortuary, getting friendly with a corpse. I knew it was a dodgy idea but I ran it past Alison the next day, when we were going for a walk. She agreed that it was sick, but thought I could do something with it, so I wrote it. In the first draft, Rebecca visited an S&M place but I cut that because, after the first draft, it didn’t seem to work. I also had trouble with the ending - originally it was over really quickly and then it got like “The Darkest Hour”, where I playing around with it over and over again.

Necrophilia holds no attraction for me whatsoever, but I wrote Rebecca’s touching of the corpse as a fetishistic act and I think I’ve probably done what I wanted (Nasty Piece Of Work called it erotic). For the record, I have seen a dead person and it wasn’t the best experience of my life, though I had to write it that Rebecca wasn’t disturbed or made to feel queasy at all.

The story is set in Gaffney but the hospital and corridors are Kettering General and the mortuary itself is based on those in “Re-Animator” and “Silent Witness” (with Amanda Burton). I did once flirt with the idea of asking for a guided tour around a mortuary, but I’ve no real intention of ever doing so.

I originally sent the story to Nasty Piece Of Work who came back and said it was a little over the top for them (!!!). I then sent it to Sackcloth & Ashes and Andrew came back, saying he’d received a lot of stories of this type recently. Finally, I sent it to Paul Lockey, without changing a word and he took it first time, calling it a “delightfully sick (and) morbid story”.

Speckles
Another idea that came when I was in bed. It was late, on a really warm evening and when I turned the lamp off, I had this strong image of a man sitting in a pub finding speckles on his trousers that only he could see. I began to play with this a little in my head but it didn’t go very far (though the title came first) but I started to write it on Monday and it just all came out in about two hours. The ending wasn’t there when I started (which is unusual for me) but after the first page I knew what he would do to try and get rid of the speckles. The rest of the story, the location of the bedsit and what happened to break his family up - all out of the ether as I was writing it. According to my Mum, I’ve never been keen on getting my hands dirty but I must admit that I seem to be getting more fastidious as I get older - let’s just hope that I don’t end up likke poor old Martin Anderson.

There’s something about this story, the atmosphere and pace and language, that I like. I don’t want to come over all precious or pretentious, but I think I caught something with this story and I neither know exactly what it is or how I did it.

Initially, this was going to be fairly short and, when I sent it to Andrew Busby, he commented that it was a bit ‘hefty’. I went back and cut 300 words, re-sent it to Andrew and he accepted it.

Up For Anything
I used to get a magazine called Nasty Piece Of Work and I tried to get a story into it for ages. The June issue came and I read it over a couple of nights, finding it - once again - to be a mixture of vaguely unsettling stuff and stuff that was so unpleasant it made me feel bad. With it was a flyer for Chris Teague’s proposed “Nasty Snips” anthology, he wanted stories of up to 1000 words and that set me off. I spent a day thinking about something nasty to write that was short and then it came to me. I’d had the image for a few days of someone sitting in a bath full of bloody water and another of someone eating a shish kebab made up of human toes. And from those, came this. Originally, it was one story with a natural break that could allow it to be two - the first would be called “Up For Anything” and would feature a woman torturing a man. The second, “Bath Period”, would have a woman in a bloody bath, reminiscing about her past and having oral sex with a decapitated head.

The full version was rejected by Nasty Piece Of Work, so I split the story into two and never marketed the first half (the seduction, for want of a better term). The 2nd half is all that exists now.
“Nasty Snips” was published without me but Chris accepted this for Tourniquet Heart, which became a paying anthology that also featured Ramsey Campbell and Christopher Fowler.

Together Forever
The imagery that made me write this story was the motorway services at night. When we first got the Escort, Alison and I took it out for a spin one night and ended up at the old Blue Boar services. It was quite a cool evening and the car park was almost deserted and, looking around me, it was like standing in an oasis of calm after the motorway. I knew I could use that feeling and the rest of the idea fell into place one Friday, after I’d been out with work. It was a still night and as I was lying in bed, I heard a train roll by and I suddenly saw this man, in a service station, seeing someone in a car park.

At first, the hero was a lonely man who had been on a disastrous blind date. At the services, he saw a child crying who took him around the back of the station and absorbed him into the phantom culture in the woods. This changed as I made the initial event a funeral and the crying child became the ghost of his ex-girlfriend.

At the time of writing this, I was experiencing a bit of a writers block but the story (it has a cold heart, but the warmth around the edges makes it) helped to wipe away that doubt altogether. Especially since it went to Twilight Showcase who paid 1c a word for it!

The Darkest Hour
This started when Interzone rejected “27:32” saying that it wasn’t for them. As it was my first rejection from the small press and, knowing how gutted I got when my novels were rejected, Alison kept on at me to keep going and not give in. The next day, I was reading “Dark Terrors 3” in bed and looking at the list of other published titles. One was something about a pavilion and the other was called “Darkest (something)”. For some reason, these kicked off an image of a bandstand in Abingdon Park in Northampton (there isn’t one), it’s dark and a man and a woman are standing in it. Through the course of the story they meet, the woman confesses to a love of horror stories and it ends with the woman hanged and the man walking away, thinking the woman looks “just like the others” (my original choice of title). It was pretty much formed then and I wrote it over the next few days, the biggest addition being the start in the nightclub (based on Reflections when we went there for my stag night) which I hadn’t planned to do but I needed to show them meeting. The worst bit was the last bloody line which bugged me enough that I re-wrote it twenty times (and even then it was Alison who actually made it work by adding “had” at the end of it).

I sent it to Interzone who rejected it out of hand, saying that it was poorly put together and that the ending wasn’t a surprise. Slightly gutted, I made a couple of minor trims but did absolutely nothing at all to the ending or the structure. I read it to the Writers Workshop who liked it, my regular readers liked it and so I sent it to Sackcloth & Ashes, who also rejected it (though they were a lot nicer and more constructive about it). I then sent it to Sian Ross but Sci-Fright had closed for submissions so it looked like the story I wrote to stop me getting depressed about rejection was going to be stuck in rejection-limbo forever. Then I saw an ad for Unsane, who dealt - they said - with urban paranoia and madness and they loved it, agreeing to pay me £5 for FBSR. As it was, Unsane closed before they could publish it so I published it myself, on the Strange Tales website when that first went on-line.

The City In The Rain
The image that started this off was a tramp, between pillars around County Hall, getting absorbed into the brickwork. That survived right up to the 5th draft, when I cut it because we had already seen two people get absorbed and another just wasn’t necessary. The idea of the buildings having cancer came to me as I wrote, though I do prefer the older parts of towns and cities and it amazes me how sturdy and beautiful a lot of old buildings are. As for the rain, I disagree with Lawson - I think rain makes the surroundings brighter (though you can’t beat a twilight summer evening!).

The cancer information is deliberately vague but the imagery and emotions come from what I saw at Kettering Hospital and Park House in Wellingborough. The locations themselves take in a mix of Kettering, Northampton and Leicester (especially the buildings right at the end) and the chase after Katy is based on streets and accessways we saw in Nottingham. Thankfully, I’ve never seen any people get absorbed into brickwork.

I liked the fact that this took a really off-beam idea and treated it as something the narrator accepts, because his mind is attuned that way due to bereavement. It was rejected by Dark Terrors (“not what we’re looking for”), The Dream Zone and Enigmatic (Mick Sims felt the original ending was too sentimental - the shape really is Katy). I then approached Pray For Morning, who accepted it straight away, got it on-line within a week and then shut down for good a fortnight later. Brian Keene accepted it for the first flush of stories that appeared at Horrorfind (he told me during a Masters Of Terror live chart) and then reprinted it in the superb “The Best Of Horrorfind”.

Dreaming Of A Black Christmas
John B Ford, chief of the Terror Scribes, published guidelines for a collection to be published on his Terror Tales web-site over Christmas (I thought the collection was called “Black Christmas” but I actually managed to write the eponymous story!). At first, my ideas centred around someone getting a present for Christmas and finding a little monster in it. Then, on my way home from Tech. one Thursday night, I thought - for some reason - about someone receiving a head in a hatbox. I wrote it the next day and it all seemed to pull together, the initial image slotting nicely into a little tale of infidelity and homicidal madness.

I tried for a more laidback approach to the descriptions of acts in this (bearing in mind it was written directly after “Having A Bad Day” and “Some Excitement”!) and, in doing so, I think I’ve found some good images, especially the way the mother-in-law screams like her daughter did (and the way she wipes her hands on her apron).

I ended up writing four drafts because I found that, when I read it to Alison, I’d made the punchline too obvious by having Kevin constantly shifting the box in his hands. I took out all but one reference to that and also moved the part with Paul’s underpants to the latter half of the story.

Beach
This came about because I was looking at an old Jobs In Hell and saw an entry for an anthology that was looking for ‘flash-fiction’. Rather than think too long and hard about it, I decided to have a go and work on it like I did with “The Compound” - just start messing around and see what happens. And it worked.

I don’t know where the general gist of the story came from but the beach is based on the one in Wales, where we went on holiday (from where you can see Dinas and Caernarvon, if the light is good enough). The town that he sees is the same one that appears in “Empty Souls, Drowning” and the way that George thinks about smoking is the way that I feel too. The reason that he’s called George is that I started writing this at work and a bloke called George walked by my desk when it came time to name the character.

I enjoyed writing this, because it came out of nowhere and it proved to me that my short story engine hadn’t conked out (it was only the third short I’d written since starting my novel “In The Rain With The Dead” the year before). However, the anthology that it was aimed for didn’t materialise and so it’s published in this collection for the first time.

Launch Report

2009-09-04T09:07:00.000-07:00

Strange Tales launch
BFS Open Night
Princess Louise, Holborn, London
5th December 2003

Being quite a way out of London, I don’t tend to go to BFS Open Nights, since they’re usually on a Friday evening and don’t start until about 8pm. However, I made an exception for this one as John B Ford was launching his Rainfall Books titles.

These were:
Black Altars, by Mark Samuels
Spare Parts, by Stuart Young
Ghosts Far From Subtle, by Joe Rattigan
Strange Tales, by some bloke I know

Since it’s not every day that your debut collection is published (especially when it’s something you’ve been dreaming about for years), Alison & I decided to push the boat out and stay overnight at a hotel in Bloomsbury. We trained down to London at lunchtime on Friday, then tubed over to Holborn and found our hotel quite quickly. It was a really old, huge, townhouse that was plush in an old-fashioned way. Our room was on the ground floor and the bed was so big, I could actually lay across it without my feet hanging over the edge. After changing into my “Strange Tales” T-shirt and stashing our stuff - and marvelling at this level of grandeur - we went for a wander and, by quite accident, found the new Forbidden Planet shop (it was huge, apparently 5 miles of shelving!). After spending ages in there, we got something to eat and then headed for the Princess Louise.

I’ve been in the pub on several occasions (starting with the MOT-Con), but I’ve never been upstairs and it was quite a nice, big room. It had its own bar, wasn’t unduly affected by the noise from downstairs and had little snugs dotted around the room. We quickly settled in one - across from Sue Philips and her family - and I used that as a base to move around from (I think Alison stayed there for most of the night, though she was very rarely on her own. In addition to Sue’s lot, Mike Philbin was a regular visitor and it’s where Joe Rattigan, Sarah Crabtree and David Price elected to sit after a while).

As it was the first BFS night I’d been to, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. In the past, I’ve found that it’s a good society to belong to (and I enjoyed FantasyCon), but I also get the feeling that there’s a sense of ‘pecking order’. Whilst I doubt that anyone in particular goes out of their way to make you feel this, it was something I certainly detected and it was evident in the arrangements. Since Rainfall Books are sort of upstarts, the arrangements didn’t seem to me to be either very clear or clever. For my reading (I chose to do “The Thief Of Road Signs”, since it’s fairly short and sweet), I ended up with a shoddy microphone and had to compete with people’s conversations. It could be that the BFS members don’t meet up very often and it’s a social occasion for them, but it was nerve-wracking for me (and, I’m sure, the other writers who read).

Once my reading was over, I took the opportunity to mingle and catch up with old friends. In addition to those mentioned above, Mark Samuels and Adriana were in attendance, Stephen Jones was milling around (didn’t get to speak to him again, more’s the pity), Peter Crowther and I shared bar space and, later, happened to go to the toilet together. Steve Lines and his partner were there, with John and his partner Lynne and I spent a lot of time at their table, signing books and slotting my bookmarks and ‘art-cards’ into copies.

In the end, I signed 26 copies of the book (some specifically for people who had bought copies there) and sold 2 of my own copies that I’d taken to the event. That was a really nice feeling.

We went for a wander when the evening was done - I was on a real high - and to celebrate my ‘success’, we got a take-away garlic bread from Pizza Hut, before heading back to the hotel.

On Saturday, since we were in the capital, we decided to do the sightseeing thing (and also pick up some pictures and atmosphere relating to “White Meat”, my collaborative novel with T.M. Gray).

We were up bright and early (for us) and took off on the tube - we went to Westminster so that I could ssee the (huge!) Boadicea statue (which features in the novel) and then walked back up Whitehall and past Downing Street (since Alison had never seen it) to Trafalger Square. From there, we tubed to Piccadilly and had a brief look around Soho (another location in the novel), then walked through Leicester Square. We tubed up to Tottenham Court Road (I love that station, since it’s the one where the commuter gets attacked in “American Werewolf In London”) and then walked back to Holborn and tubed to St. Pancras.

We got home at about 4pm and were both knackered, but it was a good weekend and it felt great to be at the launch for my first collection.

As an addendum, I got this email from John Ford shortly after the launch which capped the weekend a treat.

Hi Mark,

Just to let you know Strange Tales is doing really well for us. Andromeda have sold out and ordered three more.
We'll certainly be interested in publishing the novella you mentioned to me last weekend.
Best,
John

The novella he mentions is “Conjure”, which Rainfall will publish in 2009 (I wrote it in 2004). I sold John the concept based on a mocked up cover with Monica Bellucci laying in water and the synopsis “a couple, at the seaside and there’s a witch”.

The Rainfall Writers

left to right - Joe Rattigan, John B Ford, Mark Samuels, me
front - Stuart Young
photograph by David Price