Mr Stix

For The Night Is Dark is a new anthology, edited by Ross Warren and published by Joe Mynhardt’s Crystal Lake Publishing, featuring 20 stories by a great variety of writers.  One of whom is me, with my story “Mr Stix”.

The book is available in print from Amazon here and as an ebook from here.

You can also get it on Kobo from here.

I first saw news of this anthology on Facebook and, having dealt with Ross before at Dark Minds Press, I sent him a “hey, don’t forget about me” message and thankfully he didn’t.  The brief was simple - make the reader afraid of the dark.  I sat for a while and nothing came, the deadline got closer, still nothing came and then one night, I woke up as Dude got into our bed and that was it - a kid, getting into the parents bed and the dad seeing/hearing something.

The story grew naturally from that point but it wasn’t until Sam, my lead character, went into the bathroom that I realised what the monster, the Mr Stix of the title, was going to be.  I did wonder, after the initial ‘hey, that’s cool!’, how far I was going to get with it but as it turns out, it works as quite a scary image (and I have a picture of him, if you're interested...).

I like it, I think it’s a good story that tells of parental fears, childhood demons and the past not letting go and it’s in very good company here.