The story behind "Conjure"

“a couple, at the seaside and there’s a witch”

Newly pregnant, stuck in a job she doesn’t like and mourning the death of her cousin, Beth Hammond’s life isn’t working out the way she thought it would. So when her boyfriend wins a weekend away at the seaside resort of Heyton, Beth thinks this could be just what they need — to get away, relax, and make plans for the future.

But as they begin their weekend, a JCB driver accidentally damages a centuries-old memorial at the beach. He hopes no one will notice, but something has… a presence that was buried beneath the memorial, sealed in a stone tomb. Now that presence wants its revenge on the people of Heyton.

"A powerful and convincing piece of horror fiction.” 

- Gary McMahon, author of the Concrete Grove trilogy.

“Mark West is a talent to watch.”
- Peter Tennant, Black Static

“Mark West’s writing has a heart and soul that many writers would kill for.”
- Jim McLeod, Ginger Nuts of Horror

“Mark West’s stories have a well-crafted, slowly increasing tension and dread, sometimes with a hint of creepy paranoia.”
- Gene O’Neill, Bram Stoker Award winning author of The Burden of Indigo

"Conjure flaunts some genuinely spooky moments [and] the supernatural element works so well because the author merges it with fears we understand, such as abduction and infanticide."
- Matthew Fryer, The Hellforge

"Mark West has created a marvelously enjoyable short novel which captures some of that faded glory of the seaside resort.  It’s a strangely British tale and reminded me of something that may have been produced in the seventies by Hammer or part of Tales of the Unexpected but very much updated with modern quotas of brutality and gore."
- Colin Leslie, Highlander's Book Reviews

My short novel “Conjure” has just been re-published, in print and digital editions, by those good people at Greyhart Press and I thought it might be an idea to write this, an article about how the book came together.

Written under the working title “The Mystery Of The Witch’s Curse” (in honour of The Three Investigators), “Conjure” was started on December 20th 2003 with the fourth and final draft being completed on April 11th 2005. The first draft was 82,773 words long, the final published version was 54,318 words long.

It started with an email conversation I had with John B. Ford, whose Rainfall Books was just about to publish my debut collection “Strange Tales”.  In one missive, John wrote “If you have anything around 30,000 -- 40,000 (or if in future you write anything around that word count) I'll be eager to see it.”  To this day, I don’t know if he was serious or not but I took it as a sign and started to think about a story, having never written a novella before. No big deal, thought this fool.  I spent a couple of weeks trying to figure out what would have enough sweep to justify the length and what I could use as the driving force of the book, whilst two factors (a family event and the fact that the novel I’d just written was very gory) led me to aim for something quieter and more supernatural.

(original interior illustration)

For the location, since I’d used my main fictional town of Gaffney in the novel, I utilised another of my creations, the east coast resort of Heyton, that featured in my short story “Empty Souls, Drowning” (which appeared in the collection).  I love the British seaside and Heyton is essentially Great Yarmouth, a place I knew well - plus it had a funfair and a cinema called The Empire that I could use as key locations.

Thinking of the cinema reminded me of an incident from the mid-80s, when my best friend Nick & I went to see “Beetlejuice” there.  More than the film and the interior of the venue, my clearest recollection - and each time I see the image, I feel overwhelmingly sad - is a little girl, standing at the entrance, giving out pamphlets. She was obviously with the owners of the cinema and stood there whilst we all walked past her, with her little dress and cardi on, her blonde hair in bunches and a snotty nose. She didn’t look unhappy or unfed, but it just seemed like such a jarring thing to me, this little girl with a cold standing in the evening air, giving people pamphlets about coming attractions.  I never used any of that in the story, but I wanted to get some of that feeling, the quiet air of desperation, of trying to get the punters in and keep the business going.  As I was turning over the idea of the cinema in my mind, I suddenly got an image of Beth (my heroine) standing in a glamorous Art-Deco toilet, hearing something moving about but not being able to see it and then having everything disappear around her. I liked this and told Alison about it (who didn’t like it!) and realised I had my first set piece.

So what would be the supernatural menace?  I’d written plenty of ghost stories, I was then in the middle of co-writing a massive vampire novel (before they got all sparkly), but I’d never written about a witch before.  Not knowing much about them, I did some research and realised - with a wonderful sense of pieces falling into place - that the folklore around Norfolk is ripe with such tales and that county would be where Heyton existed.

Around about this time, I saw a picture of Monica Bellucci from her calendar, where she was lying on her side in some water and really fell for the concept of that.  That led me to the witch being a young woman, helping out at a farm perhaps. The farmer’s wife is pregnant, the witch and farmer have an affair, the baby is born deformed and the witch gets the blame for it. They test her in the sea, she’s exposed and killed and buried. Alison pointed out that she couldn’t be buried on the beach, so we agreed that it would be on the heath area. If that were the case, perhaps her grave could be disturbed if the council were building new coastal defences like they have at Morecombe Bay. I heard something else click into place.

In the summer of 2003, Alison and I went to Yarmouth with my sister-in-law Laura (‘Flo’s Diner’, in the book, comes from my nickname for her) and a child had disappeared a few days before. Whilst I didn’t want to go into that in any great detail, I thought it could be used as an element, that people’s worry and stress is feeding a negative energy into the town, perking up some of the town ghosts.

At the same time, I read an article about Albert of Monaco, which mentioned a curse put on the principality by someone who was raped. What if, my over-active imagination cried, my witch put a curse on Heyton - all this time, she’s been waiting for the opportunity to come back and wreak havoc on the township that killed her?  A priest condemns her body to the ground, her tomb is sealed and it’s not disturbed for several centuries, until that pesky coastal defence system is constructed.

At the Princess Louise pub in Holborn, London, I told John my ideas at the ‘official launch’ of “Strange Tales”, selling him the concept based on the Monica Bellucci picture (mocked up into a cover) and the synopsis “a couple, at the seaside and there’s a witch”. He liked it so I kept moving and whilst we were Christmas shopping, a week or so later, it suddenly occurred to me that Beth was pregnant - that linked her to the witch (by this time I had her name - Isabel Mundy), who was pregnant by the farmer and what if she told him, just before his wife gave birth to their still-born child?

(original interior illustration)

I decided I had enough at this stage, made a set of bullet points for the plot and a week later started writing.  169 days later (I’m an expert at procrastination plus I was doing three nights a week studying at college for my professional exams), the first draft was completed.  I wrote the second through July 2004, copies of which I gave to my pre-reading band and John and he wrote to me in late September, saying that he’d love to publish it - and also agreeing to me creating the cover art and interior illustrations.

I wrote two further drafts and finished the copy-edit and artwork glitches two days before my son was born, in late May 2005.  Since my sister Tracy passed away before I started writing it, I asked my parents if they would mind my dedicating the book to her and they were happy for me to do that.  My Dad built me a miniature of the memorial (see post here) for the artwork and Gary McMahon gave me a brilliant cover blurb.

As it was, it took another four years before the book was published, due to personal circumstances at Rainfall Books.  That edition sold well and the book got some nice reviews, which I was really pleased about.

In 2011, I was approached by Generation-Next with a view to them publishing an ebook version.  I agreed, it appeared, it was badly formatted and didn’t include the bonus short story my revised cover art said it would and I retracted it from them (several of my stable-mates withdrew their books too).

In 2012, my friend Tim C. Taylor (who runs Greyhart Press and is a colleague from the Northampton SF Writers Group) asked if he could publish it, having read the ebook.  I agreed - I like Tim and Greyhart books are wonderfully designed and produced - and designed a new cover for it (which, I happen to think, is the best one it’s had).  I pondered, for a while, over revising the text (it was completed before digital cameras were widespread) but decided, in the end, that those little touches (which, essentially, age it) were quite nice.

Purchase Details

Paperback pp188 amazon.co.uk RRP£6.50 | amazon.com RRP $9.95

Kindle amazon.com  | amazon.co.uk  RRP $2.99/ £1.99

ePuB Smashwords and coming soon to other retailers…

The story behind "The Mill"

I got an email yesterday from Tim C Taylor, my publisher at Greyhart Press (and also my friend from the Northampton SF Writers Group), that my novelette “The Mill” had crept back into the Amazon Top 20 list.   Naturally - even though those statistics are only snapshots and don’t really mean much, bearing in mind the volumes - I was thrilled and I thought that rather than put together a post extolling the virtues of the book, I’d explain something of its genesis (and then extol its virtues!).

Michael struggles to come to terms with the death of his wife. He has visions of her calling to him, inviting him to the beyond.

At the Bereaved Partners’ Group, he learns that he is not the only one left behind who can hear the departed beckon them… to the Mill.

I’ve been writing fiction for a long time and discovered the world of the small press in 1998, with my first publication following the next year.   I enjoyed writing, I sold a few stories, my novel “In The Rain With The Dead” came out from Pendragon Press, all was good.

In 2005, my son was born and I was whacked by a writers block that took me a long while to climb over.   What helped was a friend of mine, Gary McMahon, asking me to contribute a story to a forthcoming anthology he was editing (I later found out that it was all lies - he felt bad for me, asked for a story, then realised he was going to have to put something together).  I wrote “The Mill” (which ran to approximately 15,000 words) and it duly appeared in Gary’s “We Fade To Grey”, which featured four other cracking stories and was short-listed for the BFS Best Anthology in 2009 - and my block had started to fall.  Things still aren’t right, all this time later, but I’m writing again and enjoying it and publishing, 

In August 2011, Tim asked me if I’d be interesting in publishing “The Mill” as a standalone piece and - very proud of the book and what it represents - I agreed.  It appeared in a new edition at the end of September 2011 and has been selling fairly consistently ever since, picking up some very nice reviews along the way and I remain very proud of it, especially because of the boost it gave my confidence.

So where did “The Mill” come from? I'm a strong believer in the school of 'write-what-you-know', in so much as you can place your characters in the most outlandish situations but they should always react how you - or your friends - would.  I first started getting building blocks of ideas for the tale in the early noughties, the concept of a ghost story that wasn't really about ghosts but more about the place though it didn't matter what I did, I couldn't get the story to fly.

It took a while, after Gary’s request, to realise that what I actually wanted to write about was something that I did indeed know, that had been rattling around in my head for a long time.  In 2003, after six months of illness, my younger sister passed away (my novel “Conjure” is dedicated to her) and I was still - four years later - trying to process my thoughts and feelings.  So why not exorcise it all in a story, get down on the page what I thought and how I felt? And that’s what I did, though for the sake of dramatic licence I changed the bereavement to the lead characters wife.

“The Mill” was a difficult story to write, as you can imagine.  Although there are moments of brevity in it and some flashbacks to a more pleasant time, it’s about bereaved partners who would do anything to spend more time with their departed loved ones.  I ploughed a lot of my thoughts into Michael, the lead character and conversations he and his peers have are ones that I had with friends.

The story was a big departure for me - whereas before, in my short stories and my novel, I used gore as a tool and used it gladly, my sensibilities had changed considerably (this is also noticeable in “Conjure”).  I didn’t want to gross people out, I wanted to scare them and make them think and make them cry.  In that sense, I think “The Mill” marks a step-change in my writing career - I’m still a horror writer, make no mistake about that at all, but I now want to move the reader without splashing blood and body parts around.  I will still spill blood, I will still lop off limbs, but that hopefully won’t be the bit that chills the reader.

Dude, standing on the "walkway" between the middle and right cellar

As with most of my work, a lot of the places in the story are real.  I grew up in a small town called Rothwell and if you take a walk down Shotwell Mill Lane (which we always called 'The Folly'), you’ll see in real life exactly what’s described in the book.  There was a mill at the bottom of it, though only the cellar areas now remain and when we were kids, we’d go there in the summer holidays to play war and a variety of other games.  The cellars are still there now, but massively overgrown. 

The hall where the group meets is based on the community centre in Melton Street in Kettering.  By day it was a nursery, whilst in the evenings the side room was hired out by various different parties.  I attended my first writing group there (and met Sue Moorcroft).

The cafe is based on the Fuller Coffee Shop in Newland Street, which my parents like to frequent (and my son loves it too).

The story is set in Gaffney, which is the location for most of my stories.  It’s an amalgamation of Rothwell and Kettering (where we lived when I started publishing) and other places - Northampton and Leicester - pop up as and when required.  I started using the town in the early days because I didn’t want to inadvertently kill someone in a particular street and then discover that someone of that name did actually live there.  Once I’d started publishing the stories, I realised I had to create a reality of the town, so there is a basic layout - in my head - to Gaffney.  To that end, it doesn’t matter if you read a short, the novel or this, the main streets are the same, the town has the same layout and the cinema is always on Russell Street (though I added a railway line to the town in “What Gets Left Behind”, my chapbook from Spectral Press).

“…An amazing novellette that is packed with more emotion and feeling than you could imagine would be possible in a story of this length.  The Mill cements Mark West's place in the ranks of the new wave of quality UK horror authors, who are turning out intelligent, thought provoking and extremely well written stories.” - Jim Mcleod, Ginger Nuts Of Horror

"West treats what could be difficult subject matter with a delicate, reverential touch and it shows. Subtle and affecting, this is a captivating read." - Paul Holmes, The Eloquent Page

"THE MILL is a haunting tale about loss and grief and the lengths people might go to just to spend one more minute with their dearly departed. A ghost story in the Susan Hill mould, THE MILL is gentle in its writing, offering respect for the subject matter as opposed to continuosly heading for the gullet." - Shaun Hamilton, The Horrifically,Horrifying Horror Blog

"The Mill is a heartbreaking ghost story that has a freshness to it that raises it above the recognisable genre tropes that are inevitable in a gothic story of guilt and loss. The prose is a delight but ultimately it is the well developed characters which enable this story to tug at the heart-strings and ensure its place amongst the very best in the ghost story tradition." - Ross Warren, This Is Horror

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Conjure artwork (the memorial miniature)

Conjure, my short novel, was sold to its original publisher with the pitch “A couple go to the seaside and there’s a witch…” so it’s not a spoiler to say that she is a major character in the book.  It’s also not a spoiler to say that there is a memorial, on the beach, which imprisons her but it gets damaged fairly early on.

The memorial was a key part of the book and when I was given the go-ahead to create interior illustrations, I knew I wanted to show it too.  The problem was, I’d made it up and - as far as I knew - nothing that looked like it existed in real life.

I whittled about it for a while and then had a Eureka! moment.  My Dad is an accomplished model-maker and when I asked him if he could help me out, he jumped at the chance. In fact, he said “let the art department worry about it” and that was it. He asked for a rough drawing (which I gave him, at the same time realising that I didn’t properly know how it should look) and he made it over the course of the week.

I was so impressed with it - still am, in fact, it takes pride of place on my bookcase - that the memorial in the text changed, to accommodate what Dad built for me.

This is the final composite image – much larger than it would normally be seen, as an element on a postcard.

This is not the original memorial photograph (which, due to not saving it as a different file name, I destroyed with the editing process), but it’s a test photo taken at the same time.  I shot it in our then back garden, to utilise natural light (a trick I learned from reading behind the scenes books on Industrial Light & Magic!).  You can get a sense of the scale from my hand and the chain-link around the small pillars is an old necklace of my Mum’s.

The grass comes from this photograph I took at Wicksteeds park, looking towards the lake from behind the rollercoaster compound. I had to dupe the picture, to make enough ground for the model to “fit”, which is why you see those same sets of shadows. I took the bush line, at the lake, as the natural line to cut the picture.

The sea comes from this picture of me, exploring some rocks near to Caernarvon in Wales. I erased myself (which is why there is a some blurring on the final shot) down to my waist and put the bush line from the grass picture over that part.

Conjure was re-published in both print and digital editions by Greyhart Press and more details can be found at the dedicated page here.

Anatomy of Death is here!

My editorial debut, Anatomy of Death (in five sleazy pieces), has just been published by Hersham Horror Books.

I was lucky enough to feature in their first PentAnth, Fogbound From Five and had great fun with that so when Pete May asked if I wanted to edit my own, I jumped at the chance.

Free to pick my own theme, I decided to go for one of the ‘phases’ that I have a particular fondness for (as a kid of the 70s and 80s), namely that explosion of ‘sleazy’ horror that ran from the early 1970s.  Think of the films of Hammer, Amicus and Pete Walker or the slim, gory and gruesome paperbacks from NEL, Corgi, Star, Hamlyn, Futura et al and you won’t go far wrong.  It was a time of  sex and violence, of pulpy horror and gratuitous nudity, of demons and monsters and no limit to what the writers would expect you to believe.

To fill out my collection, I decided to aim high first and contacted Stephen Volk.  Perhaps best known for Ghostwatch, Afterlife, The Awakening and Ken Russell’s Gothic, he’s a writer I’m in awe of and his story, an envelope-pusher if ever there was one, was ideal - grim, gruesome but also blackly comic.  A Pete Walker film made in type.

Johnny Mains, a true supporter of 70s horror, presented me with a blackly comic, rude and undeniably gruesome story that would have fitted the heyday of those garish paperbacks to a tee.

Stephen Bacon contributed a quieter tale that tells of the sins of the past coming back to haunt the present, the deliberate pace and atmosphere recalling something Hammer might have produced in the period.

John Llewellyn Probert came onboard with a wonderful Victorian drama, featuring a young lady in distress, something terrible from the Thames and a threat to London.  It cannot be read without picturing Peter Cushing as the lead character.

For my story, I decided to embrace the period.  I read a stash of 70s/80s horror paperbacks and had great fun with London during the 1976 heatwave and a glamour photographer who gets tangled up with a monstrous ‘beast’.  I’m proud to share space with these fine writers and their stories.

I produced the cover art for the first two PentAnths (co-designing the first with Neil Williams) and we went through many iterations on this project (my teaser, blogged about here, got a lot of good feedback though unfortunately we couldn’t track the rights through Robert Hale).  In the end, we decided on a simple graphic and I think it works well.

I've had great fun doing this.  It was a real pleasure dealing with writers I admired, I loved writing my story and I've had a great relationship with Peter Mark May during the process.  I’m not sure I’d like to edit again but it’s been an experience and I hope the finished product does what it’s supposed to do - thrill, sicken, terrify and entertain!

The book can be purchased, in print, from Amazon at this link and as ebook from this link

A Facebook page can be found (and liked) here

Support the small press!

If you do decide to take a chance on the anthology - and I hope you will - reviews are always great to receive and the book has its own Goodreads page here

Some mechanics of writing (or, location is the key)

As a writer, I am very keen on the idea of place - I want the reader to know exactly where they are, I want them to be able to see the location in their head, I want them to feel what it’s like to stand there. I think I’m pretty good at it and it’s something that gets mentioned quite a bit in reviews so I’ll be honest here and say that a lot of it is a cheat - I use real places, wherever possible.

Now, with my guilty secret exposed, here is the key location from my latest story “What We Do Sometimes, Without Thinking”, which was published in the NewCon press anthology “Shoes, Ships & Cadavers”.

The story takes place in Kettering (where I didn’t grow up) and centres around a bridge, at the end of the Headlands. That bridge does exist, as does the graffiti I mention in the story (which sets up the last act of the piece).

This is the first appearance of the bridge in the story:

The bridge was ahead, with signs warning me about cars, since the road led directly to the golf course. There was nothing on the road now. I rested my racer against the abutment and walked onto the bridge, which looked old but well kept. It was made with dark blue brick, as solid as you like, and the walls on either side were metal plates, with rivets half the size of my hand. At the far end of the bridge, on the west abutment, was a splash of graffiti – ‘Look Behind You!’ Directly across from it were a ravaged looking tree and some bushes. I leaned against the west wall, looking at the rails and waited.

And here is the bridge itself. These photographs were taken on 30th October 2010 (Dude & I were train-chasing) and the graffiti, which I first noticed almost 15 years ago, is still clearly visible.

Looking onto the bridge from The Headlands. If you go over the bridge and down the hill, that's where the golf course is.

Matthew, leaning on the outer wall, waiting for a train

The graffiti.

Life Once Lived, a chapbook

I received my contributor copies of my new chapbook, “Life Once Lived”, yesterday and it’s a very nice beast. It features two of my short stories and has an excellent cover by Neil Jackson. As I did with “A Quiet Weekend Away”, I thought it might be interesting (even if only to me) to include some backgrounds to the stories, as a kind of electronic afterword.

Risen Wife

Paul Kane emailed me, asking if I had a story for an anthology he was co-editing, that would see publication first in Germany and then in the UK. I agreed, though at the time I was working on what would become “Conjure” and I owed my co-writer, T M Gray, an edit on our joint novel “White Meat”. The only stipulations Paul had were that it should be about 3k words and not OTT gory and I noted at the time “I don’t want to write about gore - I want to write a love story where one of the protagonists is dead and rotting.”

The concept of a zombie partner is one I’d had knocking around for a while and finding my original first line - “Jenny came back today” - really kicked it off. That tied in with a lot of horrible feelings I’d had, revolving around people “understanding how I felt” following the passing of my sister. Most of that venom was written out as the drafts went on, but it was very therapeutic writing it down in the first place.

The story is set in Gaffney, using the same cemetery as the one in my novel “In The Rain With The Dead” and although the story didn’t lend itself to flippancy, there is a little in-joke - my best friend Nick borrowed my copy of “Night Shift” and read it in the bath and it did, indeed, swell up to the size of a phone book.

The book - Albions Alpträume: Zombies - was published in 2006 and was a very nice edition, but it never appeared in the UK. Hence, this is the first English language publication.

A Stirring
I got word, through an Internet group I belonged to, that an anthology was being produced that would feature classic monsters. I was working on my novel at the time, so I didn’t think too much about it, until we went on holiday to Wales a few weeks later. Whilst there, we saw an old church in the middle of nowhere and that got the creative juices flowing (along with nagging thoughts of zombies, the only classic monster I have any real enthusiasm for, other than werewolves).

It took a few drafts to get this around, though most of the story came out as I went along - I worked from the barest of frameworks and had little idea of how it would end. Canuris, obviously, isn’t real but this is set around Snowdonia and, more specifically, the town of Bedgelert (where there is a very nice pizza place that does excellent garlic bread).

This was originally published in Darkness Rising 7, in July 2003 and I had some terrific editorial input from Mick Sims.

The chapbook, published by Ghostwriter Publications, can be ordered from the publisher at this link

A Quiet Weekend Away

I received my contributor copy of “The 4th Book Of Terror Tales” yesterday, where my story “A Quiet Weekend Away” nestles in with tales by such genre luminaries as Peter James, Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Simon Clark, Peter Crowther and Tony Richards. I’m very chuffed with it.

I thought it might be interesting (perhaps only to me) to include some of the background to the story, since there’s no ‘afterword’ in the book.

The story was written during October 2002 and originally sold to Durant Haire’s anthology “Beyond The Dust” which had a quite frankly stellar TOC but died when the publisher did. I knew I wanted to do something with ghosts and, at the time, there was a mobile phone ad on TV, where leaves and rain drops created faces and it struck me as quite a scary image. For some reason, that linked in with people being menaced by something they couldn’t see and plague pits (my mind works in mysterious ways). Once I had that, everything seemed to fall into the place with the final piece being a comment by my friend David Roberts (who often reads my stuff in draft, focussing on the folk-lore and medical aspects) about the nursery rhyme “Ring A Roses”. He also sent me a PDF of plague info, so as a thank you, I named the village Berstor, an anagram of Roberts. Sue Moorcroft, my critiquing partner, also helped me out, picking up a couple of bits I’d missed.

The research on York was from mine and Alison’s visits and also the Internet and the garage and its environs are based on the one just outside of Rothwell on the A14. The bit about the beggar in the park is real - it happened to me, on my first solo trip to London and has been sitting there for the best part of 16 years, waiting to fit into a story.

I'm thrilled it's finally found a home and in such a handsome volume too! Viva Rainfall Books!