A Ghostly Glimpse

My latest short story to be published is "Open Book" in The Black Beacon Book of Ghosts. Always a believer of "try before you buy", here's a ghostly glimpse of my tale...

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Like most professional genealogists, it started with an interest in my own family tree that soon grew to the point of obsession. It sinks its teeth in, you see. The not knowing gnaws at you night and day, and with every discovery, a new mystery arises, casting a shadow of doubt upon the discovery, so that it becomes a greater mystery than it was in the first place. It’s frustrating but fascinating at the same time. Once hooked, there’s no turning back.

My name is Thomas Alasdair Douglas, or Tommy Dee for short. Not that my name particularly matters, because this strange story—oh, and that it is—has nothing to do with my family tree. What you are about to read happened while I was working on the genealogy of one Erwan Josso. I wouldn’t have believed a word of it either if it hadn’t happened to me.

It started in Edinburgh, as unoriginal as that may be for a ghost story—but that can’t be helped. Although I reckon myself a man of the world, the Scottish capital is my home, and I’ll argue until there isn’t a drop of single malt left in the bottle that it’s the finest city in the world, and the most haunted to boot. That said, while the story you’re about to read started in Edinburgh, it soon took me elsewhere—to another land renowned for its legends of enchanted and haunted sites. You see, I was back home visiting family and friends, and doing a spot of research, after a long stint working in the genealogist’s El Dorado—the U.S. of A. I met up with a few friends over a pint one Friday night and a Breton exchange student from university days happened to be in town. Naturally enough, we got to reminiscing about the old days—if a tad over a decade ago can be considered thus. He knew I’d always been interested in family history, but he was surprised to learn I was now earning a crust as a genealogist. He thought that was “so cool”, and you’ll perhaps not be surprised to learn that it’s not the usual reaction I get when I make that particular confession. Likewise, knowing Erwan Josso came from a Breton family of some standing, I must admit I thought it was pretty cool when he invited me to stay with him in the Breton manor his recently departed paternal grandmother had inhabited.

‘You see, I need your help,’ he went on before thoughtfully sipping at his porter, and I think trying to find the right words in English. ‘There’s a mystery surrounding my great-grandmother. My brother and sister are not particularly interested in family history. Our parents even less so.’ Again the slow sip. ‘I am, however. I didn’t want to—euh, I forget the expression—while my grandparents were alive.’ A long pause, and I think he was waiting for me to find the missing expression.

‘You didn’t want to stir up a hornets’ nest?’ I offered.

Review: The Hills Know

The Hills Know by Breanna Leslie is the book I chose to review this month from among those requested by authors as part of the review club hosted by The Book Hangout Spot on Facebook. This is Breanna's début novel and she has published it herself...and done a fine job.

The Hills Know is a haunted house story that uses the tropes of the genre and classic plot devices in an original way. The writing is engaging and the characters believable to point of feeling that there might just be a touch of autobiography...a disturbing thought in view of how the tale unrolls.

The story starts with Mel and her husband, Jamie, moving from California to West Virginia after Mel inherits a house. They change jobs, move in, and start renovations...and Mel unexpectedly turns pregnant. This, the reader will immediately understand, becomes the key to what follows. Like I said, not an original premise, but Breanna owns her story and tells it well, weaving the idiosyncracies of the setting into the tale and exploiting local folklore and customs to often chilling effect. This is a brooding ghost story that turns the screw little by little, building the tension slowly until we reach a dramatic climax, and there are passages that will give the reader a shiver or two.

Having recently read Ghost Story by Peter Straub and A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson, I finished The Hills Know without a doubt in my mind that this is a far more successful example of the genre than those two famous novels. We sympathise with Mel and Jamie; her struggle to work out what is happening now and has happened in the past, and his patience as he bears the full brunt of the physical and psychological changes she is going through. The setting, characters, and particularities of West Virginia (not that I've ever even been to the States) carried the plot and added to its mystical flavour and infusing a contemporary story with colonial traditions of witchcraft and superstition. A short, well-crafted, and spooky novel for fans of ghost stories.

Find this review on Goodreads.

Dark Inside the Haunted Train: An Interview with Karen Heard

British short story author Karen Heard is one of the writers whose stories are featured in the soon-to-be-published anthology The Haunted Train: Creepy Tales from the Railways. Here she answers questions about childhood fears and writing inspiration.

Have you ever seen a ghost? Tell us about the experience.

I haven’t seen a ghost but quite often I dream that I meet people who in my waking life are now dead - and at the time don’t realise that I’m dreaming. Sometimes it’s nice as I get to tell people that I love them, and clear the air about things I’m sorry or angry about. At others I forget that they are dead and we still argue like we would in real life or I‘m trying to take the opportunity to save them from whatever killed them. When I wake up, I have the same mixed feelings you might have if visited unexpectedly by a ghost from your past.

What scared you when you were a child?

When I was a young child I found it really hard to sleep as I was convinced that when falling asleep I might never wake up. At the same time I believed there was a monster living under my bed that came out at midnight, stared closely at my face, and would murder me if it saw that I was still awake after the witching hour.

It’s no wonder I became a horror writer - yeah? I also remember telling myself stories in the dark cold room, to calm and distract myself from the fear and stop myself falling asleep.

After many many terrifying nights screwing my eyes shut, afraid of the monster but also afraid to let myself drift off into death, I realised that I couldn’t go on like this and had to work out whether my fears were true or not. I gathered up the courage to look under the bed.

I must have been very young, because I remember there was a child’s potty under the bed for night time use. I kneeled down, lifted up the blankets, and looked under my bed to prove to myself that nothing was there… But I was right - there was a monster under my bed! Staring at me inches from my face.

I can still vividly see how it looked… and in retrospect what I see is a, head-sized, giant, dead desiccated moth, leaning on one side with its dried out wings splayed out like a vintage aeroplane with a feral stare frozen on its skull. I think, after the first initial terror, and running from the room in horror, I worked out even at the time that it was a dead creature of some kind, but the fear of that first moment when I looked and realised that everything that I thought I must be imagining - it was all true - is probably where I get my love of both horror and irony.

When I wrote my story for this anthology, and realised it needed an extra element, apart from just the events on the train, to tie things together, I used this memory of that intense fear for when the protagonist looks to see what is inside their closet.

For your story ‘Out of Order’ in The Haunted Train, where did you get the inspiration?

I wanted to write a story where the protagonist's senses are restricted in some way, such as hearing noises on the other side of the door but not knowing exactly what is happening. I’m intrigued by the idea that suggestion can do a lot more than actually describing the events. The readers fill that space by imagining what they truly find frightened.

Describe your writing voice.

Psychological and gothic, balanced out with ironic humour.

 

ABOUT KAREN HEARD

Karen lives in London and writes short stories, plays, books and scripts. She works in digital marketing and content creation, and used to manage the website for Railway magazine. Some of her stories are collected in the book It’s Dark Inside. 

 

 

 

  ABOUT THE BOOK THE HAUNTED TRAIN: CREEPY TALES FROM THE RAILWAYS

Come on board for a Gothic journey in a funicular railway in Victorian England, a freight train in the Carpathian mountains, a high tech sky train in Bangkok, an underground railway in Tokyo. Visit stations which lure with the promise of safe shelter but harbour unexpected dangers. Meet the people who work on the tracks – stationmasters, porters, signal-men – and those who travel – commuters, tourists, dead bodies, murderers and ghosts. In this volume, editor Rayne Hall has collected twenty of the finest– and creepiest – railway tales. The book features the works of established writers, classic authors and fresh voices. Some stories are spooky, some downright scary, while others pose a puzzling mystery. Are you prepared to come on board this train? Already, the steam engine is huffing in impatience. Listen to the chuff-chuff-chuff from the locomotive and tarattata-tarattata of the giant wheels. Press your face against the dust-streaked window, inhale the smells of coal smoke and old textiles, watch the landscape whoosh past as you leave the familiar behind and journey into the unknown. But be careful: you can’t know the train’s real destination, nor your fellow travellers’ intentions. Once you’ve closed that door behind you and the wheels start rolling, you may not be able to get out.

The ebook is available for pre-order from Amazon at the special offer price of 99 cents until 31 January 2023. (After that date, the price will go up.) https://mybook.to/Train

The paperback edition will be available soon.

Haunted: Crossing the Line

It's not every day (or indeed year) I have a ghost story published, but my spooky tale, Crossing the Line, is included in Specul8 Publishing's "Haunted" anthology, which was appropriately released on Christmas Eve. It's only available in print, but it's a beautiful product and well worth it if your bookshelf needs a little haunting!

As long as people have drawn breath, they have pondered the divide between the world of the living and the realm of the dead. From the grief-stricken to the grotesque, the haunting to the humorous, stories about those who have crossed back through the veil between worlds have frightened, inspired, and awed humankind for countless centuries. Featuring poetry and short fiction from 29 Australian and New Zealand authors, this collection begs to ask the question: Is death truly the end?

Click the cover image to visit the purchase page.

I grace the pages with an amazing cast of talented writers. Here's the full list:

Mike Adamson

KM Campbell

Simon J. Plant

Chris Moss

Anthony Ferguson

Belinda Brady

Tim Borella

Cameron Trost

Karen Bayly

Matthew R. Davis

Narelle L Noppert

Taine Andrews

Issy Jinarmo

Lana Lea

Ashley Read

John Brandt

Adelae Guevara

Louise Zedda-Sampson

BG Hilton

Leanbh Pearson

Carmen Tudor

Nandi Samuel

Rainie Zenith

Kate Maxwell

Barbara Smith

Prema Arasu

LJ McLeod

Bronwyn Todd

 

Order a copy today and get ready for a spooky time!

The Man behind the Shadows

It's Christmas soon - very soon - and bookworms know what that means, right? Yes, you got it, ghost story time! "The Sorrowful Wife" is one of three ghost stories of mine to be published in 2016; an eerie accomplishment that took me by surprise. Mark Nixon, the editor of Shadows at the Door, which is a fully illustrated hardcover anthology of new ghost tales in the old tradition, has kindly accepted to answer a few questions for you, the fan of all things phantasmal.

1. What inspired you to produce Shadows at the Door? 
A love of classical horror and sharing stories. Ghost Stories are meant to be shared, and that's exactly why shadowsatthedoor.com was founded. To tell new and terrifying horror stories in an accessible way. Of course, after a while, fans of the site began to call out for a published book featuring their favourite authors, and I'm nothing if not a servant to them.

2. Where did the idea for the title come from?
Shadows at the Door represents what I believe is the true strength of horror: the implied. Once you see a monster, or a killer, fear can be deconstructed, you can plan, spot weaknesses and so on. But the unknown? A silhouette stood at the foot of your bed? Well, that could be anything, and that's terrifying! Anyone who has been home alone and spotted an unknown shadow at the door knows true fear.

3. Why would the anthology make for a great Christmas gift?
Ghost Stories are a quintessential part of Christmas, it's one of life's great pleasures to sit by the fire and read a pleasing terror. M.R. James in particular continued this tradition and many of the stories in the anthology are inspired by him. It's also a beautifully presented book, and a handsome addition to any bookshelf.

4. What are your other (not in this anthology) favourite ghost stories?
How much time do you have? I'll limit myself to some favourites such as Oh Whistle and I'll Come to you My Lad, The Signalman, Rats, Canon Alberic''s Scrapbook, The Monkey's Paw, The Upper Berth, The Mezzotint, Number 13 and controversially, The Price as I'd like to think it counts as a ghost story.

5. Where can we grab a copy of the anthology?
Hardbacks can be bought on the Shadows at the Door website, and the ebook is coming to Amazon before Christmas. The fully scored Audiobook is due in the near year!

Thank you, Mark.

A Day of Launches

Yes, that's what today was - a day of launches! No, I'm not talking about boring launches like rockets or nuclear warheads. I'm talking about the exciting stuff - books and catalogues!

The State Library of Queensland has launched "Books From Our Backyard" (refer to my previous post if you haven't, tut-tut, done so already) amidst waves of complimentary wine (thus my more colourful than usual blogspeak) and choruses of eloquent speeches. We, the authors of Queensland, are told that 4000 copies of the catalogue will bring news of literary delights to the far corners of the sunshine state (even Toowoomba!) and will be available in all public libraries, bookshops and brothels. But seriously, thanks to the SLQ and the QWC for this wonderful initiative.

The other launch was that of Zero Plus Seven, the second anthology from the Short Fiction Writers' Guild. Here's the official description:

Speculative fiction served buffet style. Ranging from fantasy to horror, this anthology has it all. From the founders and members of the Short Fiction Writers' Guild (SFWG), an organization dedicated to the celebration of all genres of short fiction, comes their second anthology, ZERO PLUS SEVEN.

Horror from Aaron C. Engler: EVENT ZERO
Event Zero is a short document from the government archives detailing the first zombie event. It is thought to be the earliest accounts of the events in June of 2016.

Epic Fantasy from Jason Varrone: KNIGHT'S OATH
Danthane has spent decades in service to his kingdom as commander of the army. When the newly crowned king orders the invasion of a peaceful kingdom, Danthane's loyalty clashes with his long-held oath. Soon, he will have to decide which is more important: loyalty or honor and his life.

Historical Paranormal from Anne Fraiser: WOMAN IN A BLACK VEIL
It's 1789 London and a handsome undertaker meets the woman of his dreams. One problem: she's dead.

Science Fiction Horror from Alain Gomez: CELEBRITY SPACE
Set in the not too distant future, Dan Cooper hopes that his new job at the spaceport will allow him to get his life back on track. While taking passengers to the space hotel Moonwalk, a collision with an unknown object threatens to bring his dreams...and possibly his life...to a screeching halt.

Adventure from Randy Mixter: THE ROCKING CHAIR LADY
Based on a young boy's fascination with an elderly lady's stories of her adventurous, and sometimes magical, life.

Science Fiction Mystery from Robert Collins: MISS MARK
Jake Bonner is approached by a young actress who's being harassed by a rival young star. Can Jake use his savvy and his cool ship to stop the rival, and maybe hand out a little comeuppance to boot?

A Haunting Tale from Cameron Trost: THE HOUSE OF SHATTERED LIVES
When the auction at Riverbend House is interrupted by a strange old lady who warns that evil forces roam unchained within its walls, all but a handful of interested parties return to their cars and drive away. Vincent and Liz Westfield find themselves presented with an opportunity to buy the property at a much lower price than they had expected. They are not swayed by the rumors. Their rational minds have no room for superstitious tales of ghosts and curses...but the house of shattered lives will soon change that.

Horror from C.C. Kelly: SYNDICATION
Doctor Maxwell is about to deliver the first human clone on live national television. The hospital is happy, the network and producers are happy, the human cloning research laboratories that have sprung up are happy, the stock market is happy and the consortium that funded the Project is ecstatic. Amidst the theatrics of reality television and marketing, Dr. Maxwell reexamines the project, the corruption and the greed that allowed it. The only thing that Dr. Maxwell is certain of is that he is terrified.