Horror Fiction

Today, someone wrote this on another site:

I've noticed there are lots of these writers who start writing horror fiction at some rebellious/difficult stage of their lives and when they find balance (redemption?) they suddenly give up writing horror.

I have noticed this myself (particularly when people get married or settle down with kids etc.). I've even noticed this in myself from time to time, but, at the age of 58, I still fight against it! :-)

I don't think I actually write Horror Fiction, but rather Swiftian fables in the mould of 'Modest Proposal', but my output seems to appeal (where it appeals at all!) to those interested in Horror or Surreal or Absurd or Nemonymal fiction (I don't like the term 'Weird' even though I invented a character called 'Weirdmonger' in 1988!).

Just to finish, in the early nineteen nineties, this (now, to me, quaint) article written by DF Lewis appeared in a popular American Horror magazine:

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AS I SIT here --within my chalet bungalow close to the North Sea where recently, due to a storm, many pleasure beach-huts were smashed to smithereens or even entirely snatched away --I wonder what defines an island. The world is an island, I suppose. I am one, too.

The horror art (i.e. the words and pictures we manufacture to depict the dark side of humanity) is perhaps a personal sea against which our mental and physical coast-defences will eventually crumble. But before this happens, we should seek out the sandbags....

The only thing we are possibly good at is this art of horror. And we want to be famous, remembered after we are dead, rumours of our existence to be blessed with at least the lifespan of this island planet. But to be remembered as being sick! No, never! But that's what will happen, if we don't beware. Our families and friends will remember us as people who got carried away by our art, subsumed by our own insular minds. And if we couldn't control ourselves, what sort of people were we?

Unless, of course, we can justify the art of horror itself.

Many ordinary people love horror. Simply that. Everybody is cruel at heart. Why not give them what they want? Lay the horror on as thickly as possible. But people like a lot of things that are not good for them. This argument of personal responsibility is an unending one. If we could resolve it here, we would deserve to be famous.

Or is Horror actually good for people? A purge. A catharsis. People have evil built into the fabric of their souls at birth. And what the horror art does is dilute the real horror with its imaginary equivalent. And imaginary horror, surely, is preferable to any other kind.

On the other hand, perhaps we are intrinsically evil, inexcusably warping people's imaginations. Our corrupt soul needs an artistic outlet for its own self-satisfaction. But why also submit such art for others to publish? We want to provoke. We have always provoked people since being kids, haven't we? Mainly in minor ways. Ways that we thought would not harm them. But perhaps we are more harmful than we ever expected. We must never admit that, though. Even if it's true.

Sticks and stones may hurt our bones, but names will never hurt us. What harm can there be in simple words or drawings on a page? But we want our art to get under the skin. Be more than just art. Perhaps, if we are truly honest, we want to bite home. Only nasty medicine can cure, they say.

There's something we are missing. An imponderable that we cannot even set down on the page properly, let alone successfully address. Monsters can live in our nightmares and by describing them, hopefully we circumscribe them. By writing, I circumscribe myself. I fetter myself from creating the only horror that will harm you as well as me: me.

Yet, there is much humour in our art. Sick humour, perhaps. But it's meant to make people laugh. Laughter and horror are often bedfellows. Audiences burst out into chortling at the most frightening bits of films. Mischief and the poking of fun are part and parcel of our attitude. Seriousness could only lead to unwelcome admissions.

Perhaps we are the appointed providers of horror. Without bad, there couldn't be an equal measure of good. Good is only good when compared with bad. We are thus do-gooders. But this absurdity means we have run out of further thoughts. Leaving us with Nothing. Bliss. Nirvana.

We hope that we are forgiven by our loved ones--especially when our final artist's block comes...or after the abandon-edit button is pushed before anything is saved.

The sea is in an ugly mood again, tonight. Even the fish have fangs and flop ashore, bleating for breath. And horror surrounds me with wave upon wave of self-doubt. But, as some philosopher once said, doubt is strength.

Weirdmonger Wheel

I've recently re-sighted the 'Weirdmonger Wheel' so as to check who exactly is riding on it.
Please contact nemonymous@hotmail.com should you wish to receive the new address.
des

Stefan Grabinski

A kind friend recently sent me a copy of 'The Dark Domain' containing a selection of stories by Stefan Grabinski written 1918-1922, as translated by Miroslaw Lipinski. I'd never read this author before and I am enjoying the experience. The following passage struck me from the story entitled 'The Area':

"‘Yes, yes,’ the heads of the literati sadly nodded, ‘he wrote too much too soon…’ […] Wrzesmian wasn't too popular. The works of this strange man, saturated with rampant fantasy and imbued with strong individualism, gave a most unfavourable impression by inverting accepted aesthetic-literary theories and by mocking established pseudo-truths. His output was eventually acknowledged as the product of a sick imagination, the bizarre work of an eccentric, maybe even a madman. Wrzesmian was an inconvenience for a variety of reasons and he disturbed unnecessarily, stirring peaceful waters. Thus his premature eclipse was received with a secret sigh of relief."

Non-Fiction

Fiction

Fiction describes but does not shape. However, inasmuch as fiction describes itself, it does in fact also shape a competing world where positive revolutions (and resolutions) can be managed within the overall context of any single fictioner's spinning of that world.

The real world is either simply that (i.e. real) or indeed a fictioner's world in competition with all others. Within this context itself and inasmuch as the 'real' world is capable of being real, so may any fictioner's world be arguably real, neutralising evils by contextualising them.


Fiction as Magic

Separate to above, how far is it possible to see fiction as fiction that is magic rather than fiction about magic or fiction like magic? The last two are common in literature. But the first one is a giant leap. In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (and, ironically, I can't currently find the relevant passage again!), fiction is used as magic itself - or thought about in that way. This is the first time (in print) that I've seen this concept starkly broached in this way. (I had coincidentally written (The Tenacity Of Feathers) about this myself before I read JS & Mr N).

This is as if fiction - when written 'properly' - can be in itself a book of spells that can change the world, ie. not just a fiction about characters using spells to change the world or not just a fiction about fiction as a book of spells. And I wonder if JS & Mr. N is the nearest any book (currently in print) has reached out towards making this giant leap. In fact, it has, arguably, indeed made this giant leap, feasibly allowing others to make the same leap if they are imaginatively muscular enough.

I've greatly enjoyed JS & Mr N and in many ways it is a flawed masterpiece - and I would not class it as one of my favourite books. Too much like 'Harry Potter'? However, what I'm saying - whether one enjoys it or not - I consider it to be the first printed book to be an example of (i) below as well as of the more common (ii).

(i) A fiction that is magic (a big claim and deserving of scrutiny by others).

(ii) A fiction about magic as well as about fiction working as magic.

I don't think I'm able to judge (i) properly because I have found myself preoccupied with such concerns when writing my own first novels (before reading JS & Mr N).

I see all other artistic activities as secondary to magic: ie. art as 'happening' or 'happening' as art. Art is not magic, although it tries to import magic as a symptom or ingredient, but an attempt essentially corrupted by a self-awareness that this is what is going on. Only magic is magic, I feel. And I had sense that JS & Mr N was nearing an unself-conscious (literal) equivalence to true magic as far as possible without risking counter-claims of literary (as well as literal) madness in thus claiming this to be the case. It's just coincidence that the book is also about magic (though it helps). This is something I've been trying to do without consciously trying to do it (whilst remaining hopefully unpretentious or unself-aware - and this is all very much in hindsight!): with my fiction and with 'Nemonymous' since 2001: and what Elizabeth Bowen did with her fiction ie. almost accidentally approaching the true state of magic without the intervention of pretension or of self-awareness or of gauche ulterior motives for art-for-arts-sake ("buried art") or even of a desire for success in doing it (so might as well throw it all away on a dele(c)table blog).

Furthermore, even if unintentional and a flawed masterpiece in itself (imho), JS & Mr N should be admired at least for evoking such thoughts (adjacent or noumenal as they may be in turn or simultaneously).


The Ominous Imagination

My greatest love in fiction is the 'Horror/Dark Fantasy' core that I find in most sorts of literature, old and new, literary and otherwise.

For me, this core should be and is being expanded by the current vogue in fiction genre-crossing and genre-betweening (Interstitiality), i.e. acting like a magnet, and making other fiction traditions conducive to the 'Horror' spirit or, as I would like it to be called, The Ominous Imagination. Indeed, I believe, most good fiction is (and has always been) imbued with and steeped in this type of imaginative spirit, in any event.

This is really what, when articulated, I have been trying to do in ‘Nemonymous’, especially if you ignore its radical aspects of Anonymity etc. for a moment. All issues contain stories each of which are representative of a different fiction genre/tradition as well as stories that, actually within themselves, contain various genres/traditions -- but all, inevitably, with the Ominous Imagination.

Those who publish genre-specific outlets in the Horror fiction field, for example, perhaps allow the hard-fought beach-heads of 'Horror/Dark Fantasy' to crumble and separate out, thus allowing these particles of fiction already gathered for the 'Horror/Dark Fantasy' core to escape from that core because such genre-narrowing outlets tend to crystallise that core AS a core rather than as a magnet.

des

Dr Who

The new series of DR WHO (in UK this weekend) seemed to start in a very wildly unfocussed way where it wasn't worthwhile even to tussle through one's own eye muscles to watch it - and it seems to me that the only episodes worth watching are those not written by Russell T Davies. (Based on my subjective experience of the last series and a gut-feeling about the new series.)

Also, Cordwainer Smith together with 'Cities In Flight' (New New York?) by James Blish come to mind as derivables for this first episode of the new series!

des

The Nemo

Further to the bits about the nemo in my post earlier today I've just read this appropriate section from an article in today's Independent newspaper (written by Richard Schoch):

Many people are trapped in a spiral of consumption that compels them to buy ever more luxurious items to maintain a consistent amount of pleasure. At some point, and it arrives sooner and sooner, pleasure turns first to boredom, then to dissatisfaction, and, finally, to anxiety. We torture ourselves by asking why our hard-earned possessions fail to make us happy. Our clothes are never stylish enough, our cars never fast enough, our homes never palatial enough.
One secret of happiness is to moderate our pleasures, so that we find ourselves in the hugely more satisfying state of tranquillity, where simple things yield as much enjoyment as luxuries. Once we grow accustomed to simple things we have a better time in life, because we appreciate luxuries all the more, if they come along.

And I make an oblique (possibly, opaque) alignment of the above words with this quotation below which I think I may already have made famous by quoting it in "Nemonymous" and elsewhere over the years!

The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by lightning. We run screaming from this mysterious shape in the middle of our town, even though the real terror is not in itself, but in our terror at it.
-- John Fowles 1964 (from 'The Necessity of Nemo' in 'The Aristos')

Carrying His Own Skin

The crowd was silent
Reading the poems of Baudelaire.
Suddenly, completely unpremeditated,
They lurch forward, in unison,
And sing the National Anthem.


"The problem of hollowness, then, of a-Voidance, is really one of secondary satisfactions, the attempt to find substitutes for a primary satisfaction of wholeness that somehow got lost leaving a large gap in its place. The British novelist John Fowles calls this emptiness the 'nemo' which he describes as an anti-ego, a state of being nobody. "Nobody wants to be a nobody," writes Fowles. "All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mark the emptiness we feel at the core.""
from COMING TO OUR SENSES by Morris Berman

"... there is a way of going about enterprise, particularly as it applies to creativity, in which the activity is preceded by wholeness, rather than being a frantic attempt to achieve it. This frantic approach to life is not inevitable; we really don't have to spend our lives chasing ecstasy in an effort to shut down the nemo [nemo: a feeling of hollowness, an anti-ego, a state of being nobody].”
from Coming To Our Senses : Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West -
Morris Berman (Unwin Hyman, 1990, page 316)

"Next to her hung a further small picture, showing a saint carrying his own skin.”
-- Robert Aickman (The Cicerones)

"Her pillow sounded hollow with notes and knockings, notes and knockings you hear in condemned rooms.”
--Elizabeth Bowen (No. 16)

""WHAT do you call him? Nemo?" says Mr. Tulkinghorn.
"Nemo, sir. Here it is. Forty-two folio. Given out on the Wednesday night at eight o`clock, brought in on the Thursday morning at half after nine.""
-- Charles Dickens (Bleak House)

Des says:
In my fifties looking back at the fifties...
Excitedly waiting for the Beano comic to drop on my doormat every Thursday, the smell of its pages, the stationery smell of newsagents in those days, the smell of books in general, uniform fifties library books (which drabness seemed to accentuate the delights emerging from the print within), my Mum making me wear waterproof leggings when it rained, being able to scribble stories in pencil, using plasticene, throwing bean-bags about in PE, sitting on bristly PE mats, fuzzy grey pictures on the TV screen which, on some evenings, were indecipherable... and arcade amusements on Walton-on-Naze Pier: hand-cranked cranes that could never quite grapple with the pack of cigs wrapped round with a brown ten bob note, pinballs without flippers, ghost house tableau where a coin would produce a skeleton out of the cupboard, silver balls spinning round vertically into the lose and win holes, the win giving you another turn, the lose losing you your coin. More lose holes than win. A lesson for life?

Life On Mars

Yesterday I had my Life On Mars moment!
I took my elderly parents to see the tiny old terraced cottage where we lived in the Nineteen Fifties. They had not visited the area for many years. I was 4 to 5 years old at the time I lived there. As we sat parked outside in the car - a little boy of about that age appeared at the door and waved! We waved back - and drove off. Or perhaps, rather, it was his Life On Mars moment.
des

ireducibles

This Weirdmonger Nemonymous blog has very recently been renamed Irreducibles. I told management that I wanted it renamed Ireducibles but they said nobody would get the joke!
des

For Easter

An excerpt from my TENACITY OF FEATHERS trilogy of novels. This part to be re-contextualised whenever you can in the Nemonymous Night half of the The Hawler:


********
A bus doesn’t touch the Earth with its metal body but has a layer of toughened rubber-around-air between it and the road it treads. As it floats round the city as only dreams can allow such a large mechanical thing to float, two passengers on the top-deck chat of something people on buses would leave well alone. Death. Just past the stop for the covered market.

“We’re trapped on this bus.”

“You can get off at the next stop. It’s not like a plane.”

“Yup yup. But a human body, like my own body, is something you can’t get off. I'm trapped inside it and there is nothing I can do to escape it. To escape it is certain death. I wonder how we ended up like this in such a nightmare. Knowing it’s all going to end with a blank while incapable of waking up from the nightmare. I remember many dreams I thought were real at the time I was dreaming them, terrifying situations I thought I could never escape – until, with great relief, I wake up and leave it all behind in a quickly forgotten dream. Life’s problems, by comparison, are as nothing compared to those one sometimes meet in dreams. But this waking nightmare of the bodytrap, all our bodytraps, is not a dream you can wake up from. It’s relentlessly and terrifyingly inescapable. Who the devil landed me in this body? They have a lot to answer for. And I can’t really imagine the devastating effect of complete and utter non-existence when this consciousness within my body finally vanishes. A paradox – that I hate being trapped in my body but I’d give anything to stay trapped there forever, because I can’t face the outright blankness…”

“Yes, a paradox,” answered the other man-on-the-bus in just one more of those typical conversations that wheel through the city like stories with no baggage to weigh them down.

I watched the bus turn the corner, its top blown off like a sardine can containing explosive sardines.
**********

Guy de Maupassant - who possibly wrote the greatest vampire story ever i.e. entitled The Horla said:
"The least thing contains something unknown. Let us find it."


H.P. Lovecraft:
"This was a simple explanation which everyone could understand, and because Malone was not a simple person he perceived that he had better let it suffice."
from "The Horror at Red Hook"

**********
I hope everyone has a good holiday.
des

Yellow Patch On The Wall

Someone in the comments here yesterday asked about Elliott Carter. Yes, I have some string quartets composed by him on CD and I listened to much of the recent concerts in London featuring his work. He was present at these concerts – as testified by the TV cameras – despite having been born in 1908!! Still going strong.

Following discussion about self-promotion on the internet, I also raised the subject of any communication on the Internet being counter-productive. Perhaps many friendships have been lost because of electronic misunderstandings etc. Then there are other general factors of misinformation received, misinformation given, time wasted, too much put into writing which would have been better said...?

What would have happened if this thing hadn't been invented? Actually, I've made a lot of friends on the internet - some I subsequently met. In fact one or two close friends have happily come my way purely because of the Internet. Equally, I've lost a few - because of the nature of the Net itself. I'm sure we all gain time and waste time on the Net, but who judges which is which?

And I understand written communication can stifle (because of its re-checkable nature) whilst verbal (by mouth) communication can liberate. I’m not talking about artistic communication here. If that lady civil servant had said 'A good day to bury bad news' to her colleagues instead of emailing it, she'd still be in her job. Equally foolish, however, saying it or emailing it, but that's life.

I understand many businesses are tied up in red tape because all their staff write emails to each other rather than pragmatically sorting things out by word-of-mouth.

Also, the internet de-iconises, over-familiarises, desensitises, overcrowds, I feel. Allows for uncensored things without any policing. Confuses with its over-dosing of information and communication. Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers become email addresses or websites tarnishing their iconicity...

Seeing relatively famous authors flouncing about on the internet also serves the same negative purpose. (append smiley)

Friendship or even love can never really join people through the bone of their skulls let alone through the distance of hyperspace. However, I cherish the friends I have made on the Internet as well as those I am lucky to know face-to-face. I hope to make many more friends by means of this blog. Devil’s Advocate argument thus ends!

To finish today, here are links to two passages from Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time about Bergotte’s death and Vermeer’s yellow patch on the wall. These are examples, I feel, of life-changing literature, beautiful and touching. You will not be the same after reading them. You can find them here:
http://www.tinyurl.com/4df96
ie. the two long posts that I made on March 2nd 2003.
des

PS: Remember: Don't eat yellow snow!

==============

The Falls

I have been reading The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates, a writer I've long admired. This is a family dynasty page-turner, where the main character is not a family member but Niagara Falls. But can a waterfall be an animate creature?

I re-read recently Robert Aickman's story Wood (not be confused with another story by him entitled In The Wood). This is a masterpiece and perhaps my favourite ever story.

Rhys wrote the following on the aforementioned TTA thread yesterday:
A certain amount of self promotion is probably necessary and maybe even desirable. The question is how does one go about doing it without looking arrogant or (conversely) a bit sad?
Very wise and, together with Mark's wise statement (quoted yesterday on this blog), makes me think that - with the internet now in use for such self-promotion - there will be more and more need for an outlet (or at least a philosophy) such as represented by Nemonymous.

I also sincerely predict that both Mark and Rhys will become very big fiction writers for the 21st century.

My group of three novels about Bird Flu The Tenacity Of Feathers (incorporating self-contained novels 'The Hawler', 'Klaxon City' and 'The Angel Megazanthus') continues to receive a high number of "hits" on the internet where I have placed their raw text. Although I would like these novels to be traditionally published, I do not expect this ever to happen (for various reasons), but in the meantime some individual readers are publishing the works themselves as bespoke books. Very gratifying and thanks to them.

I continue to listen to all forms of music. My latest interest is in the Naxos-sponsored string quartets specially written for Naxos by Peter Maxwell Davies.
des

PS: Great to win Paul Barnett's Dan Brown competition on the TTA Boards yesterday!

===========

Irreducibles

Today, I've added two stories to the Weirdmonger Wheel, one old ("The Irreducibles Of Nygremaunce" (Black Moon 1997)) and one new ("The Beer Is Free"). I haven't counted them yet, but there are hundreds and hundreds of my past published stories available for free reading. I've still got a long way to go to re-publish all of them! Please contact me for free web-link to the Wheel, if you're interested.

Last night, Mark Samuels (of 'White Hands' fame) wrote the following on the TTA thread that I mentioned yesterday:
The problem I have is with those pretty dreadful authors (imho) who are nevertheless excellent at self-promotion, and tend to concentrate on that aspect above all else. It seems to me that a lot of genuine talent can be left behind in the commercial rush. Mixing up the two attributes (ie talent and self-promotion) can lead to a sorry state of affairs. I've heard a number of publishers and editors remark that often the pushiest authors are the least talented.

Although I can empathise with what I think he means, the only real answer to this is the 'Nemonymous' approach. Any comments.

I've been reading 'The Brooklyn Follies' by Paul Auster recently. I liked this bit yesterday:
"That's what happens to you when you land in hospital. They take off your clothes, put you in one of those humiliating gowns, and suddenly you stop being yourself. You become the person who inhabits your body, and what you are now is the sum total of that body's failures."

and a bit about Biography Insurance!

Stop Press
Rhys Hughes (of 'Infamy' fame) has just written this to the aforementioned thread:
Des, if you perceived my comments as an 'attack' then you really need to get out more and see what misery and pain exists in the real world.
Well, it was an 'attack' within the context of the thread, unimportant though that thread is in the scheme of things. In fact I do get out, and I never think of Rhys at all when I'm gadding about! ;-)
des

Only Myself To Blame

I only have myself to blame but I feel that, today, exactly seven years since I started constant public interaction on the internet that this has now become counterproductive to my ideas, to my fiction works and to my 'Nemonymous' products. In future, any ideas, information, input etc. from me will appear on this blog. Comments welcome. Any significant DFL news will appear regularly on the main website HERE. -- Meanwhile, gratifyingly, I received in the last few days gorgeous publication-on-reading book editions of 'The Hawler', 'Klaxon City' and 'Agra Aska' for my signature and return to the reader who arranged their production for himself.

Anonymity etc.

The Two Ways of Anonymity



(one) The most common way - to say something you don't want to be known as saying, i.e. for *devious* purposes (which could be spite, nepotism, insult, cruelty, dubious joke etc etc.) -- or publishing pornography, or issuing a Valentine's card, or hiding one's identity to avoid reputation depletion etc.



(two) The Nemonymous way,

(i) whereby the fiction author wants some objective view of his work to be made without his name getting in the way -- and I, as an editor, equally don't want it to get in the way when I consider his submission for publication and

(ii) as an experiment in fiction anthology presentation as a new gestalt reading experience (i.e. stories written independently and remaining separate yet somehow more 'together') and

(iii) leading to a brainstorming approach to reviews and critical appreciation and

(iv) bringing fiction nearer to the artist-naming (late-labelling) approach of other arts such as fine arts, architecture, music etc. (instead of having the name on the spine, on the title page and, often, on the top of each alternate page throughout the book) and

(v) trying to bring fiction more easily to an interstitial or between/cross-genre optimum, thus bringing more readers for each of the separate genres themselves.



Regarding (iv), it may sound dubious – but I believe writers actually *lose out* by direct by-lining, i.e. without the advantage of the variously gradated ‘late-labellings’ that other artists enjoy.


I think it true to say that (one) above brings anonymity into disrepute, a cross which Nemonymous has to bear.



AUTHOR AS ARBITER

1) Fiction/Poem = Original Text placed in the audience arena. Nothing can change that. It is everlasting and immutable. (If it is changed, ie revised or translated, this becomes a new work, a new immutable entity).
(2) What can be taken from or given to the Text = reader's 'opinion' or 'reaction' or 'knowledge' -- countless opinions and reactions and degrees of knowledge: all different and mostly unknowable but all added to the aura of the work whether they are physically annotated on the printed page in pencil or kept inside the head.
(3) Creator (or First Mover) of Text = Just another reader with fallible rights to describe/interpret/evaluate Text, i.e. after it has been placed in the audience arena as a discrete 'sculpture' or entity of creativity.

Dies Irae

Iritis (or Dies Irae):

Iritis irks my eye rotten. And if it isn’t treated with steroid drops, the sight is likely to be burned right down to the optic fuse.

The recurrence of iritis in my left eye must be the Curse of Cthulhu. After several cruel attacks of iritis, I can now easily recognise a fresh onset of its characteristic light-tender ache and thus deal with the problem in its early stages. Yet, upon initially inspecting the red-blurred seepage into the eye's white by means of a mirror, I sense the touch of something that itself should be untouched – almost as if the eye itself is the culprit rather than the iritis.

After the first attack in 1973, there elapsed ten years before there was a further attack (in 1983) by or upon my left lit sight-bulb.

That is the only way to describe my eyeball when it’s in the iritic mode.

Then another ten years before it attacked again in 1993.

But it’s speeding up. Five years, then two. Now, it’s sometimes merely a matter of months between attacks. Soon, I guess, it will be days. My eye’s sly susceptibility to searing could one day teeter upon the brink of strobing.

Iritis is a relatively rare disorder. No known cause. Not contagious or infectious, but growing organically from within the eye like a second disfigured eye, one that is raw with what I imagine to be the waywardly plaiting tendrils of a blindness primed to pounce.

Perhaps it’s a symptom of something far more insidious, as I’ve already hinted. Not the Curse of Cthulhu, but the eye actually is Cthulhu. Or, a little less grandiosely, a mere demon from a less believable mythos. Or one of God’s angels from the least believable mythos of all. More likely a demon keeping a beady eye on me – grooming me for the dark visions of Hell – ensuring I can’t escape. Eyes follow you everywhere, don’t they?

Eventually, I will gouge it from the socket with a screwdriver: feel it bubble and squirm in God’s ire, an agonising fire that has its seat somewhere in my soul.

Meantime, Cthulhu sits calmly in its unholy spy-hole disguised as my right eye . . .


First published in 'Mausoleum' 1996

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

I Blame The Mother

I knew George when he was a small boy. He was kept out of harm's way in his father's study, the window barred by the diffused but still articulate rays of the summer sun, a sun which always seemed to shine, probably because George was not allowed into the orchard garden to enjoy it. The glinting spines of the ranked books became a prison wall, insulating the boy from his god-given right to fresh air with the intellectual headiness of poetry and frowsty learning.

How did I know him? I was imported from a family of miscegenate second cousins to play ludo, snakes & ladders and, later, monopoly and whist. My role was the archetype boyhood chum. Pity I was a girl. But they put trousers on me and smarmed my hair down, dividing it with a ruler a third of the way across the hump of my skull.

I fell in with their designs. I pretended to like rugby and cricket, whilst sympathising openly with George's lameness which prevented him from enjoying such formative activities. He had three legs. I cannot describe him properly, my selective memory having dulled the effect. My love for him I had to conceal, you see. It did something terrible to me ... and, inevitably, to him.

He showed me some of his father's books. George's favourites were on the subject of female gods, for whom wars were no longer fought. Each time that he slowly extracted a volume from the shelf, he fleetingly placed his lips to the spine-top’s open slit to suck whatever was released by the mustiness. Then, returning to the desk scattered with board-game counters, he'd open the covers with an audible crack. One special book contained diagrams of the female form, which he'd try to explain. He was old for his age. I didn't tell him I knew half of it already. But it opened my eyes. Many of the pages bore heavy foxing.

One day, George wasn't there. Why they had transported me all the way to play with him, I cannot now remember. There was a bit of him left though - a lungful slice of stale breath where that special book had once sat in the shelf between two others.

I peered through the window to see a woman pegging out dirty clothes on the washing-line in the orchard garden. I could not see clearly enough (or I could then, but not now) to determine the anatomical nature of the skid-marked underwear blowing with the fitful sunless winds.


(published 'Dark Fantasy Newsletter' 1998)

A Writer's Mandala

The mandala (so far):

(1) Means of fiction transmission
Mainstream professional .....Semi-professional ... Small or Independent Press ... Self-published (print or internet) (publication-on-reading?).... Vanity Press

(2) Personal drive (derived by money needs, ego, artistic conviction etc.?)
Publish at all costs (or at greatest reward?) .... Art For Art's Sake or kept in cupboard

(3) Perceived talent
Very skilled ... pedestrian.

(4) Market suitability of one's writing
Commercial (bestseller material) .... commercial mainstream .... jobbing writing ... uncommercial (acquired taste)

(5) Luck
Always in the right place at the right time ... always subject to sod's law.

(6) Legacy
Durable ... easily forgotten*

*example: typical airplane or beach reading.

(7) Fanbase
Millions .... Coterie
(for example a writer could have say 150,000 on a blog but another writer 5000 for a book).



Some of the progressions above are simply positive to negative, others not.
Whilst they do intersect, they do not conflate.

Aphids

Wigeon was the name they called her. Not that she actually looked like a short-billed duck with stumpy legs and long pointy wings, but she certainly had a good go at it. She was everybody’s favourite Auntie and, until it was impossible, they all said it was pity she didn’t have children of her own. She had managed a few flings with stub-nosed gentlemen of the commercial traveller type, but none of them really took off.

She was a keen gardener and they do say green fingers are the next best thing to godliness. She managed not only both her gardens, back and front, but also an allotment down by the railway line. She could often been seen – in pointy headscarf – waving at the passing commuters, hoe in hand, skirts spread wide in the freshening breeze. Only to bend back, with hoe abandoned, anxious to be literally hands-on with the friable soil. Earthed to the earth, as it were. Her brow glowed and her backside tufted like a silhouette against the dying afternoon light.

Wigeon still had one gentleman caller. By the name of Arthur Mullins. He was longer in the tooth than the average male of her acquaintance, but, after all, she was no spring chicken herself. He was a semi-retired butcher with an interest in things that go crack in the night. Like bones. Or cisterns. Or anything with the propensity to shift its weight for no other good reason than settlement. Wigeon believed he had a phobia of death, hence his need actually to believe that solid, inanimate objects had a life of their own, come what may. For instance, the shed on her allotment was one of his favourite haunts because the draught of the wind literally made it sing as sweet as a nut.

“Don’t you get fed up, squatting in my shed?” asked Wigeon, one morning when a heavy cold kept her from flapping about in the even heavier drizzle ouside. She cast a mournful look at the large carriage clock on her mantlepiece as it ticked ponderously. Arthur had not even heard her question. He wasn’t there, it seemed. He was probably in the shed listening to the hiss of the elements on the creosoted wood of the shed roof. “Ah well, Arthur, it takes all sorts, I suppose.” She shrugged as the clock mis-struck the hour by at least a minute and a half. Timeliness was only a target at the best of times. She should be spraying for aphids. Her dicky condition had put the clock back a good few days and when seasons flew by so fast at her time of life, a few days was a veritable eternity, she thought.

Aphids, she further thought, were the bane of her green fingers. She looked at the liver spots on her arms as another body-wrenching sneeze took hold. Then at the cracked skin of her knuckles. The tip of one thumb was blemished with what she’d thought was a rather outlandish wart. She blamed overuse of anti-biotics liberally scattered over her corpse like confetti. She smiled at her own turn of phrase. Time for such wistfulness when all the garden and allotment jobs had been done. She grabbed a headscarf and a grubby garden coat and, ignoring the rather hefty shiverings her body now underwent from the onset of a cold fast turning into ‘flu, she wandered fitfully into the garden, only to survey the gloomiest swags of sky she had ever had the misfortune to point her tufty backside towards.

She spread her wings like a skirt and yearned to soar into those rather enticing brown blankets of cloud: to penetrate which she thought would be the quickest way to find godliness. Time was the great healer … and she staggered on under the monotony of proverb and saying. A rolling stone. A stitch in time. Time and tide.

She crested the winds over her allotment. Arthur was seen to be digging something. A rather long trench among her vegetable patch. Aphids, she thought, sucked plant juices. She wondered how many aphids made a plague. One on its own wouldn’t warrant the worry. She veered round upon the drenched thermals and glided nearer towards her front and back gardens, as a train chugged past her allotment where she had left it. No doubt, Arthur would take up the waving, with her gone. He’d be good at that. Good for nothing, otherwise. She sniffed. “Huh, men!”

The roses in her front garden looked fine even in the rain. Make a good wreath, she thought. As long as the aphids were kept at bay. Wigeon did a cartwheel and landed with a splodge in a puddle next to the arboretum. She brushed down her coat, to no avail: the dark stains seemed to be spreading as she watched. Ducks love rain. Water off their back. She tried to scratch her brain where it itched most.

Arthur could be seen wandering through the garden gate, scraping its bottom edge against the gravel of the path.

“Hey, what you doing, Wigeon?” he asked with concern in his voice. He offered to help her up. He knew that dead weights were somehow heavier. Where did the extra weight come from, though? Death should lighten a load. He heard bones crack as he raised her to a sitting position. Her eyes stared wistfully at him. Aphids come, aphids go, he sang to himself soundlessly, as he cradled her head in his arms, as its nose continued to run.


(published 'Strangewood Tales' 2002)