Horror
Waiting for breakfast (3,300 words)
When I was twenty-one, the girlfriend of one of my best friends invited me to her twenty-first birthday party. I wasn’t really a partygoer, but I went. I didn’t drink, but a bunch of girls kept bringing me glasses of whisky, so I drank. Eventually and inevitably, the assembled partygoers vastly enjoyed the sight of me leaning on a wall that wasn’t there and subsiding not very gracefully into the ‘whirling pits’.
I dreamed that I watched myself write a story, leaning over my own shoulder to watch the words appear as I scribbled them across the page. I woke up early, bushy-tailed and with no trace of a hangover; I could remember every word of the story my other self wrote in my dream. I called it Waiting for Breakfast partly because that title fits the grim parameters finally revealed in the story, and partly because I really was waiting to be fed.
Don’t expect anything too horrible in this first horror story. It’s all in the subtext. I can only say that if you can imagine the oddest of odd families as clearly as I dreamed them, then I’d be surprised if you didn’t feel a thrill of horror. It’s what you might call a gentle, whimsical horror story
Future (3,700 words)
After experimenting with Downtown (which you can find listed under Miscellaneous), I wanted to try the same concise technique again, only with a longer story incorporating a mystery, some horror, and some phrases pilfered from my own poems. So Dee Dee was born, with her erratic gifts, and the plot of the story came to me over a period of several weeks.
Some years later I turned Future into a short filmscript and entered it into an online competition. This was one of those competitions where there were some 3,000 original entries; then you check the site after a few weeks and only some 1,500 are left; and then some time later only 750 remain; and so forth. Future made it down to the last 100 or so; given that it was the first filmscript I ever wrote, I was well pleased with that result.
Problems with Mother (5,000 words)
In 2021 David Longhorn, editor of Supernatural Tales magazine, informed me that the fiftieth issue was looming and he was asking the ‘stars of the magazine’ to contribute something for a special edition. ‘Does that include me?’ I asked. ‘If you can write a good one in time,’ he said.
So Problems with Mother is it. I am rather pleased with this horror story because I manage to tie up a whole lot of apparently loose ends by the time of the denouement, and—I had better admit it—the underlying plot structure is pinched from an old Agatha Christie mystery novel, although I can’t remember which one.
Did it make David’s celebratory issue? That would be telling. You’ll have to subscribe and get a copy for yourself to find out.
Cemetery (5,500 words)
I did quite a lot of research for Cemetery. What was the coldest winter in about 1888? Who wrote about locked room mysteries, and were there any real cases? What names with certain initials might you find on gravestones going back decades, even centuries? And a few other items, too, all designed to make the story more real.
As a writer, you soon learn that if you write ‘Frederic Marsh did such-and-such in 1643’, some bright spark will inform you that the name ‘Frederic’ wasn’t in use until 1762, when the lord of what is now Slovenia took the name, and furthermore nobody did such-and-such until at least 1800. I made all that up, by the way, so please don’t contact me to say I got my facts wrong.
I hope that Cemetery provides a growing sense of horror as you start to realise what is going on. I am thoroughly pleased with the events, locations and characterisations in the story, and the way in which several plots intertwine. Cemetery is, I think, one of my best stories.