The Brit Horror Mixtape

Last year I curated the King For A Year Project (which was great fun to do) and a lovely side-note to it is the occasional email from people saying they'd read a review that had prompted them to pick up a book they wouldn't have tried otherwise.

With that in mind here's a similar project that might be smaller in scale but definitely isn't in scope.  Harking back to the 80s glory days of the homemade mixtape (that wonderful teenage rite-of-passage), this is a compilation of short horror stories by British writers - some you might have heard of, some might be new to you - that are all well worth a read.  Who knows, you might discover a new favourite on the list!

Where possible, the title/author link will take you to Amazon where the story is available as an ebook (usually as part of a collection) - why not load up your Kindle for your summer reading?  

The 'chosen by' link will take you to that writers website.

The Tiger's Bride, by Angela Carter 
Aged 17 I was riveted by the Neil Jordan film, The Company of Wolves, so I went back to the source- Angela Carter’s collection of fairy tale subversions, The Bloody Chamber. My favourite is The Tiger’s Bride, her take on Beauty & the Beast. It speaks of objectification, desire and our true natures. It seemed disingenuous to me, even as a child, that Beauty loved the Beast for who he is inside and, loving the Beast also, I was disappointed when he was transformed into a handsome prince. I felt it suggested there was something wrong in him being different that could be “fixed” by love. Carter’s inversion of this ideal seemed very powerful to me. It thrilled me as a reader and it made me want to write.
chosen by Priya Sharma

Later, by Michael Marshall Smith 
I first read Later in a Stephen Jones anthology (the name of which kind of gives the game away) in 1995 (having never read MMS before) and instantly fell in love with the story and the tender romance  it describes between the unnamed narrator and his girlfriend Rachel.  Beautifully written, with a wonderfully melancholic tone, this perfectly captures in telling little details the truth of love, friendship and grief and remains my favourite short story.  Simon Duric’s film adaption is also very good.
chosen by Mark West

August Heat, by William Fryer Harvey 
At 11 years old I found my Dad’s box of Continuing Education-issued books for his pursuit of a high school diploma.  Limited as I was to tidy childhood stories, August Heat - ending one hour before the action finished - was a revelation, driving me to invent endings for days.  I had never engaged with a story like this and the idea that I might be able to share this feeling gave me the idea that I too should start writing.  My Dad eventually received his high school diploma, although he never returned the boxes of books and I'm working on sharing that feeling while writing a novel about an LSD based nature commune set in the depths of the Northern Ontario.
chosen by Kim Talbot Hoelzli

Mackintosh Willy, by Ramsey Campbell 
My first reading of Mackintosh Willy was in the Dark Companions collection, sometime in the late '80s. I wasn't a writer then - I was newly divorced, living in London and mostly drunk. But there was something that crept in that story, something about the urban decay, hopelessness and the way we treat the other that rang a bell with me, and I found myself thinking about it more and more over the next few years.  My personal circumstances improved, I got remarried, escaped London...but Ramsey's story stuck with me, and when I started writing for myself in the early '90s, some of Ramsey came along with me, for which I'll always be grateful.
chosen by Willie Meikle (no relation)

The Lady Of The House Of Love, by Angela Carter 
From The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Penguin, 1979), which is full of jewels, including The Company of Wolves from which the weird and lovely film was made (I was mad about Lydia Lunch turning into a wild wolf girl and the cursed wedding party with wolves in gowns and powdered wigs!). I must have bought this slim collection while I was in the 6th form as it has a bookmark made from an NME cutting. This particular tale is of a lonely “somnambulist” Countess who sits in a chateau above a deserted village, surrounded by faded decadence as she draws the Tarot, always producing the same three cards: La Papesse, La Mort, La Tour Abolie - until one day she draws Les Amoreux. A handsome soldier on leave cycles into town, and they become each other’s tragic fate. She’s doll-like, with teeth like “spikes of spun sugar”, prettily conjured, so she’s not the cause of fear in this story with her harmless munching of rabbits. That would be the “revenants”, her old victims. The soldier isn’t one of those, for all the good that will do him. Strangely, when the rock group Daisy Chainsaw based their video for Hope All Your Dreams Come True on this story, they didn’t much seem to like the idea of the soldier curing her vampirism and escaping, so they changed the ending. Still pretty cool, though.
chosen by Donna Scott

After The Ape, by Stephen Volk 
One of my favourite short stories is ‘After the Ape’, by Stephen Volk. I first came across it in Stephen Jones’s Best New Horror 21, so around 2009ish, but I’ve read it a few times more since.  It addresses one of my favourite films, King Kong, but does more than simply retell the familiar. It’s a story about celebrity (and post-celebrity) status. It’s about the exploitative nature of stories but also the personal nature of them. Horror holds hands with sorrow as Ann Darrow laments the fate of her great ape, while further layers of complexity exist in the parallel between her father and the beast she grieves. The story functions as a powerful post-9/11 text as well. To ape is to mimic, and ‘After the Ape’ shows us the animals we can become in the wake of so much horror.
chosen by Ray Cluley

Lost And Found, by Richard Farren Barber 
Back in 2013, I received an ARC of Richard Farren Barber’s novella, The Power of Nothing and I’ve been a fan ever since! I find his writing style has a bit of a 'Twilight Zone' quality to it.  The recently released What Haunts the Heart includes one of my favorites titled, Lost and Found. After decades of marriage Michael and Bess still find ways to keep their love alive. But, memories can be a tricky thing. What sometimes feels so true is nothing but strands of what was. This is a bittersweet story, that will surely tug at the heartstrings.
chosen by Paula Limbaugh

The White People, by Arthur Machen 
I read it first when I was twelve and found it insidiously haunting. Every time I've reread the tale it has grown more powerful. It's the greatest use of the naive voice I've read, and I find its sense of the uncanny profoundly disturbing, not least because it's beyond analysis, at least by me. It's only a fragment of a novel Machen abandoned - what might that have been like? The only other works that convey undefinable terror to me so viscerally are some of the films of David Lynch.
chosen by Ramsey Campbell

The Great God Pan, by M. John Harrison 
First encountered in Douglas Winter's anthology Prime Evil, every reread makes me feel the same way the first read did more than twenty years ago, like the world around me is altered, as askew as it was for those the characters in the story the morning after, walking back through the fields. For more than two decades I've been wondering what happened on that fateful night—and one of the things I love best about the story (which became one of my favorite novels, The Course of the Heart), is that Harrison doesn't tell us; only about the aftermath. A masterful story that meditates on one of my own obsessions: what becomes of a person who touches the ineffable?
chosen by Lynda E. Rucker

Again, by Ramsey Campbell 
I'd read Campbell's work before but this was the one that really made a mark. There's a nervy, queasy tone to the tale that you just can't wash off.  A young hiker spends a day on the Wirral Way and finds a house where an old woman seems to be trapped. He tries to get inside to help her...and that's when the really weird stuff starts.  This is Campbell stripped back, laid bare. There are few of his usual stylistic flourishes. What we get instead is the most hideous, greasy, horrific atmosphere imaginable. The ending haunts me still.
chosen by Gary McMahon

Sredni Vashtar, by Saki  
I first encountered Sredni Vashtar when I heard Tom Baker reading the story (alas not in real life but on YouTube). On the surface, it seems a very ordinary story of a ten-year-old boy living with an overbearing elder cousin, who to escape the mundane of his life imagines a ferret, which he keeps in the garden shed, to be the vengeful god, Sredni Vashtar. It is in fact, a very dark, delightful tale of revenge. The end is a corker.
chosen by Cate Gardner

The Mezzotint, by M. R. James 
Though it possesses no actual feeling of jeopardy where the central characters are concerned, I’ve always considered this one of the creepiest ghost stories ever written.  I think the reasons for this are twofold.
   To begin with, it was the first of his tales I ever encountered. It was back in the early 1970s, when I wasn’t quite a teenager. In those days, we would commence our Halloween celebrations, usually in my friend’s sister’s mouldy old Wendy House at the far end of their autumnal garden, by sitting around a jack o’lantern in our costumes and telling one scary story each.  My dad often kick-started proceedings by reading some classic horror story onto tape, and then we could play it back later (adults not being allowed in the actual party). This one year he taped The Mezzotint, and it had an enormous impact on us, in my case long-term.  The unadulterated evil of its supernatural villain – I mean this damn thing abducted and murdered a child, for God’s sake! – sent shivers through us all as we sat in the chill and the damp and the mildew-scented darkness, an entire night of spooky festivities stretching out ahead of us. It’s the main tale I remember from that time, and it galvanised me into seeking out all the other M.R. James stories, which I duly did over the following years.
   The second reason it had such effect is because it’s so damn frightening. Again, even though the main good guys are in no danger themselves, which some reviewers have deemed to be a weakness in the tale, the growing sense of horror as they continue to check on this engraved image and watch the shocking crime of a century earlier unfold again, with nothing any of them can do to prevent it, is bone-chilling.  And of course, the ghoulish nature of the main antagonist is full-on.  I mean, a skeleton wrapped in malodorous rags is pretty standard, but it’s handled with such skill by the author – we only see it in fleeting glimpses – that our imagination does so much of the work. But look at some of the other neat touches: the fact that it crawls on all fours like an animal as it encroaches on its prey; the fact that it has a cross painted on its back, indicating that in life it suffered a terrible fate of its own – slow strangulation on a crossroads gibbet.
   On top of all that, it’s concise and impeccably written. The pitch, the tone, everything in the story is bang-on, without a word wasted. James’s usual characterisation is all there, even though it’s not a long yarn. We’re told very little about Williams and his academic colleagues, yet we can hear them, see them, we can feel the scholarly world they inhabit.
   Great high concept horror from a master at the top of his craft.
chosen by Paul Finch

The Tower, by Marghanita Laski
I first read this in high school (when dinosaurs roamed the earth). It was in the English Reader we had and I can’t remember what else was in there, but The Tower has stayed with me. It’s quite brief and I recall admiring how Laski had done so much with so little: setting, build-up, tension, dread, and a starkly terrifying climax all in a few pages. It’s the tale of a lonely young wife touring Italy while her husband works: one day she visits the Tower of Sacrifice where a long-dead mage Niccolo di Ferramano dabbled in the dark arts.
chosen by Angela Slatter

Eric The Pie, by Graham Masterton
There are 100’s of short stories that I could probably have picked for the Mix Tape, but this was the one that immediately sprung to mind. Graham Masterton’s masterpiece of grossness will always stick with me - a story so extreme it was credited with being the cause for Frighteners Magazine getting shut down. I never saw it in Frighteners - in a pre-Internet day I had to wait until a friend of mine photocopied the story, something he got into a bit of bother about ("never use a facility photocopier for copying nasty stuff like this!"). The tag line of the story was 'you are what you eat' and that may well explain why I am 100% prime horrific ginger.
chosen by Jim Mcleod

The Monkey’s Paw, by W. W. Jacobs
I can’t remember when I first read this famous story, but it made a deep impression on me with its feel of a wonderfully English Victorian fireside tale (though it was actually published a year after Queen Victoria’s death). And it’s essentially about magic, though it’s a dark, twisted kind of magic, designed to show that ‘to interfere with fate only caused deep sadness.’ And it is that sadness, I think, that gives it enduring appeal. It uses the neat fairy tale format of three wishes to turn the natural longing of the parents against them – it robs them of their son and gives them the hope of having him back again, only to raise a terrifying spectre. All their love has turned to horror – what could be more effective than that?

chosen by Alison Littlewood

The Wailing Well, by M. R. James 
The BBC and Robert Powell got me into the eerie tales of M. R. James back in Christmas 1986. On seeing this and other stories told on the television, I bought his collected ghost stories the very next week. This story really caught my attention - with its main character, plain old Stanley Judkins, a well in a clump of trees and hedges in the middle of a field - suddenly going from mundane to terrifying in a few short pages. Creeping figures, and a terrible finale let it live long in my mind years after it was read.
chosen by Peter Mark May

The End Of A Summer’s Day, by Ramsey Campbell 
"Don’t sit there, missus,” the guide shouted, “you’ll get your knickers wet!”
This first line sums up the story: there already we have the theme of sexual repression, the story’s uneasy (and very British) humour, and the character of the guide who is not be as reliable as one might like.  The story is from Campbell’s second collection, Demons By Daylight, but despite the book’s title there’s very little daylight in this.  The main character, Maria, is part of a group of tourists being led into a complex of caves, along with her new husband, Tony. There is sexual tension between them, but not in the way normally meant: Maria is nervous, old-fashioned in her attitudes to sex even by the standards of the 70s when the story was published. And Tony is - well, what is Tony?
   At the climax of the tour, the guide switches off his torch to show the group what total darkness is like, Maria lets go of Tony’s hand, and then… well, that would be telling. Suffice to say when the light returns Campbell gives us one of the most stunning, disquieting scenes in horror fiction: ambiguous, blackly comic, terrifying in its implications.  It’s a story I’ve always found utterly astounding and compulsively re-readable: a masterpiece in a few thousand words.
chosen by James Everington

Dread, by Clive Barker
I discovered Clive Barker later than most, but I think Dread had been coming for me all my life. At a childhood sleepover, we were sharing our worst fears and one girl said she would never speak hers aloud, because something might be listening to make it come true. I never forgot that. So when I finally caught up with the Books of Blood, Dread utterly terrified me, both the predicament of the girl forced into being an experimental subject and that of the the protagonist. And that ending! I had never read anything like it before. Barker is a singular writer and his horror is truly unique. I enjoyed some of the other stories, but nothing ever wormed inside my mind quite like Dread.
chosen by Thana Niveau

A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts, by Sir Charles Birkin
While I can appreciate what is commonly called ‘quiet horror’ I’m afraid it will never work as well for me as the in-your-face nastiness of the wives of prisoners of war being forced to lob cannon balls at the heads of trussed-up ‘dummies’ to see which one will (possibly) be freed by their Nazi captors. And that’s what we get in this, possibly the great Sir Charles Birkin’s greatest-ever horror story. I discovered Birkin at the age of nine with his story Special Diet, and his work has been on my shelves ever since.
chosen by John Llewellyn Probert

Do You See? by Sarah Pinborough 
I first encountered this award winning story in the NewCon Press anthology Myth-Understandings (ed. Ian Whates) way back in 2008ish, and more recently rediscovered it in NewCon’s anniversary reprint volume Obsidian: A Decade of Horror Stories by Women.  Rooted in everyday London life, the story has lost none of its impact with age and it's the quiet horror found in the mundane that makes it appealing.  Pinborough weaves a simple yet deliciously creepy tale that slowly peels back its layers to reveal the monster in the shadows, and the subtle handling of the denouement makes the story all the more scary.
chosen by Jenny Barber

The Incalling, by M John Harrison

This is one of those beautiful horror stories that gnaws at you and discomfits long after you’ve finished it. It’s about Austin, an editor who at the behest of one of his authors, Clerk, goes to witness a ritual taking place at a secondhand clothes shop owned by the Sprake family ‘somewhere in the warren of defeated streets which lies between Camden Road and St Pancras’. A pentagram of some sorts is involved, along with an inverted Gethsemane on the wall and a curious boy talented in the ancient arts of invocation. And there is his sister Alice, a child on the cusp of adolescence who dances within this pentagram, thereby performing this ‘incalling’, an event that has not been done for ‘fifteen hundreds of years’.
   The descriptions of the house in which this ceremony takes place are rich and claustrophobic. You breathe a sigh of relief when you escape outside with Austin as the ritual becomes more and more unseemly. He’s not there at the crucial moment, you suspect. But Austin has been tainted somewhat by events and, when he catches sight of Clerk by chance on the Victoria Embankment some weeks later, having lost contact with his author, he follows him and discovers that he has diminished physically and mentally from his pursuit of and obsession with Alice.
   The story captures the rushed arbitrariness of London life, and of things going on in its lesser known back streets that you don’t really want to know about. This is a city gripped by foul weather and a creeping tide of litter and areas described as being little better than ’brick wastes’. An oppressive zone of ’railway sidings, dull canal water and decaying squares’. It’s about people who are there but not there. At one point Austin registers Clerk’s face as ‘a white smear’; Alice Sprake, wearing a vintage outfit from her mother’s shop, looks like ‘the ghost of a Victorian afternoon’. Colours are at a premium in this story; everything is dimly shaded: dove grey or vinegar or pewter.
   You are left feeling dismayed at the lack of a clear resolution. There is no explanation as to what was achieved, if anything, by the Incalling. But Harrison’s cloying descriptions and ambiguities are imbued with possibility and suggestion. Reality does not neatly tie off all the strands and close a lid on proceedings. According to Clerk, the Sprakes were his last hope, and on the face of it you feel his hope was misplaced, but then you realise that was only in terms of Clerk’s physical condition.
  Harrison does much of the work in this brilliant story, but the answers you take away are all your own.

chosen by Conrad Williams

The Rising Tide, by Priya Sharma
A short story doesn’t have to be ambiguous or opaque just because it’s short. It can have a beginning, middle, and end just as complex and satisfying as a novel - as long as it’s done well. I have hundreds of favourite short stories, but last year I was on the BFS jury for best anthology, and I read a huge number of them in a very short time. One of those that lingered in my mind a long time afterwards, partly because it was that beginning, middle, and end done brilliantly well, was this, which originally appeared in Terror Tales of Wales, edited by Paul Finch. It’s an intriguing mystery, its characters are whole and engaging, and it’s an incredibly moving story about the weight of love and responsibility and guilt. It’s also beautifully written, but that’s just a bonus.
chosen by Carole Johnstone

Just Behind You, by Ramsey Campbell 
It’s not possible for me to be objective about this story. I commissioned it for an anthology I edited called POE’S PROGENY. The idea was for modern writers to draw upon the techniques of past masters as a way of illustrating their influence. I chose not to ask Ramsey to do the same, realising that his work was sufficiently influential on the current generation. This darkly comic tale takes it time to yield its delights. With its gathering of obsequious social climbers, it contrasts the playground behaviour of children with the bullying games of adults attending a youth’s birthday party. There’s an unforgettable passage of prose as the protagonist enters a school building, searching for a boy playing Hide and Seek. Some of the imagery here has lived with me for over a decade. There’s even a car chase towards the end – a brilliant passage of suspense – and then the whole ends with wry irony. I love this tale and was delighted that Ramsey named a whole collection after it and even referred to me in his afterword. I guess that makes me a footnote in literary history. Unlike the ghostly menace in ‘Just Behind You’, I can live with that.
chosen by Gary Fry

The Birds, by Daphne Du Maurier 
First published in 1952 in her collection of short stories, The Apple Tree, this remains a powerful example of ecological horror. Made famous by the loose film adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock in 1963, du Maurier's story is a tour-de-force of effective suspense and rising dread. The story is centred around Nat Hocken, a war veteran with a small family, who works part-time doing farm work. His home, positioned close to the Cornish seacoast, is one of the first to suffer a bird attack, which adds to his preparedness when the birds launch their merciless country-wide assault.  Written in the post-World War II period, the story exemplifies the English mindset of the time: making do and keeping up spirits despite aerial bombardment against which there is little defence other than to hunker down.
   I first encountered the story as a teenager in an anthology (probably Alfred Hitchcock: My Favourites in Suspense). At that point I'd already seen the film, which is now almost imprinted as a cultural memory. The story impressed me - despite being markedly different from the film - because of how du Maurier establishes the birds as a potential doomsday weapon. The story doesn't offer any explanation or solutions. Nature - the birds - has suddenly, inexplicably, turned against us and there is little we can do in the face of its indifferent massacre. The violent attacks, and their terrible aftermath, are superbly positioned in the story to provoke maximum fear.
   When re-reading the story recently I was struck by du Maurier's accomplished prose and how she begins with a typical English bucolic scene but quickly introduces the ominous presence of the birds. Later, they are downright frightening:

     'He looked out to sea and watched the crested breakers, combing green. They rose stiffly, curled, and broke again, and because it was ebb tide the roar was distant, more remote, lacking the sound and thunder of the flood.

     Then he saw them. The gulls. Out there, riding the seas.

    What he had thought at first to be the white caps of the waves were gulls. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands... They rose and fell in the trough of the seas, heads to the wind, like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide. To eastward and to the west, the gulls were there. They stretched as far as his eye could reach, in close formation, line upon line.'

   There is a timeless quality to the story, despite the elements that date it, because this is one of the collective nightmares of human experience. And for those among us who live in war zones, or face the rising tides of ecological change, it intrinsically preys upon our knowledge that as a species we remain remarkably vulnerable to extinction.
chosen by Maura McHugh


My thanks to all the contributors!

I Ran The World, 30 years ago

Sport Aid, supported by Band Aid and UNICEF, organised Run The World on Sunday 25th May 1986, timed to coincide with a UNICEF development conference.  It was a worldwide event where, at 3pm GMT, a total of 19.8m runners ran, jogged or walked 10km to support African famine relief charities.

Coming up the hill out of Rushton, heading for Rothwell.  Mark Guyett & I are in the centre of the picture (he's on the left).

Official events were held in 274 cities over 76 countries - 200,000 Londoners completed the course in our fair capital, 50,000 ran in Barcelona, 30,000 in Athens, 20,000 in Dublin and 10,000 in Melbourne.  The leg of it that I ran, with my friends Nick Duncan and Mark Guyett, started and ended in Desborough, going through Rushton and Rothwell on the way.  I remember that it was a warm day, I remember the happy atmosphere and camaraderie amongst us all and I especially remember the seasoned runners coming back from the finish line as we passed Montsaye School and calling out “only another mile to go” as they went.

Nick and me, in training.  As hard as it might be to believe now, those shorts were in fashion at the time.

Over $37m was raised and it apparently still holds the record as the sporting event with the most participants in history.  I’m proud to have been part of it.

As I recall, entry was contingent on you buying a t-shirt and they were iconic at the time - most of us wore them for some time afterwards.  I kept mine and tried it on recently and was chuffed to find that it fitted me!

Me, earlier this month

The t-shirt front and back

Dad.... (another exasperated tone)

Back in June 2014 (you can see it here), I posted a Calvin & Hobbes strip where his Dad has an amusing way of explaining certain things.

Now that he's getting older, Dude doesn't ask me so many 'big' questions and I kind of miss that (I understand the process, we're getting older, yadda yadda, it doesn't mean I have to enjoy time whipping by though, does it?) - I miss giving him the right answer and seeing the revelation in his eyes but I also miss giving him a weird answer and that little frown he has, as if to say "really?  Are you sure Dad?"

So in honour of that little boy who is eleven (where the hell did that time go?) on Thursday, here are some more of Calvin's Dad's musing, which I wish I'd thought of...

Me & Dude, May 2006 (he'd just turned one)

Me & Dude, May 2016

Interview with James Everington

If memory serves, James & I first came into contact through our mutual friend Tim C. Taylor at Greyhart Press and my novelette The Mill (which Tim re-published in a standalone edition).  James reviewed it favourably on his blog, I wrote to thank him, he interviewed me on the Pennydreadnought blog and we went from there.  A year later, we finally met up face-to-face at Andromeda One, which was held in the Custard Building in Birmingham in September 2013.  Along with Steve Harris (who I already knew) and Phil Sloman (who I also met for the first time that day), the four of us hung out all day and had a great time, so much so that we stuck together at virtually every Con we all attended after that (even branching out for our own Crusty Exterior meets).

James is a great bloke, friendly and funny and very good company - he & I managed to eat through the giggles when we each chose the sausage fest pizza that got us so ridiculed by our table-mates at Andromeda - and he’s also an excellent writer.  From his debut collection Falling Over, to his chilling novella The Shelter (which I reviewed here) and more, I thought it was time to ask him some questions.

MW:  Thanks for sitting down with me James and good to see you again.  So, can you give us a few background details on yourself?

JE:  Good to see you too, Mark. Well, I’m a writer from Nottingham, where I’ve lived most of my life (apart from a few years in Oxford). I’m rapidly approaching my forties; I have a wife, a daughter and a black sleepy cat. I like reading (obviously), good food, nice beer, The Headington Shark, sad music, chess, and  the Oxford comma.

I mainly write dark supernatural fiction, although sometimes I take a break and write dark, non-supernatural fiction. I’m a big admirer of strangeness, ambiguity and subtlety in horror stories, and hopefully they are the kind of tales I write.

Meeting at Andromeda One (Steve Harris, James, Phil Sloman, me)

MW:  When did you start writing?  What led you to it and, also, what led you towards this dark genre of ours?

JE:  I started really when I was sixteen. We had a coursework assignment for GCSE English where you could submit a creative writing piece, and as I was a fan of Stephen King (thanks to my Dad) I wrote a horror story. I can only remember vague details, but it had a sex scene in (and at this point in my life I wasn’t following the adage of ‘write what you know’, so it was pretty bad) and I was too scared to show my teacher it. So I wrote another story. Which was also horror.

And from there I never really stopped to be honest, although it was a loooooooong time before I wrote anything I considered publishable. As for why horror, as you can see it was there from the start. My Dad let me read books from his shelves when I was relatively young–I remember reading a lot of classic science fiction like Asimov and Arthur C Clarke when I was about eleven or twelve. But something about reading Stephen King for the first time really struck a chord, and not long after that I read Ramsey Campbell for the first time, which sealed my fate really...

I don’t just read horror though, I think that’s pretty unhealthy for a writer (not to mention boring as a reader). I like to read pretty widely, it’s just I’ve realised over the years that whatever talent I have for writing is more narrowly focused than my reading tastes.

MW:  Your own brand of horror focuses more on the subtle, psychological side rather than all-out gore.  Do you prefer this style as a reader too?

JE:  Yes, that’s true. I don’t clutch my pearls at the idea of all-out gore, I can read it. I just find most of it is very boring. Lingering descriptions of bloody violence aren’t especially shocking once you’ve read a few; or rather, they’re not if that’s all the author is trying to do. It misses the point–there needs to be something else behind the gore.

Take the chest-bursting scene in Alien: that’s not shocking just because of the blood. It’s shocking because it’s a moment of realisation for the viewer: that thing has been living inside of him all this time! Violent imagery needs to be used as part of a wider whole. It should illustrate character or theme (Clive Barker would be a good example). In general I believe good writing should be trying to do two or three or ten things all at once, and I don’t find much of the stab-stab-splatter stuff does that.

MW:  Do you find your style has changed much over the years?  Has it adjusted with you becoming a father (I know that caused a shift in my own writing)?

JE:  I hope it’s developed over the years, even if that’s only a case of becoming a better. I think, like a lot of writers, there’s certain core themes and literary ideas that I’m drawn to, but in my younger days I couldn’t really express them as a I wanted. If I’d tried to write something like The Quarantined City ten years ago, I’d have fucked it up. So I think it’s been a case of refining over the years, rather than a dramatic shift.

As for fatherhood, I haven’t written a story that specifically touches on that experience as yet, but I’m sure I will at some point (even if only obliquely). It’s something that has such a big impact on all areas of your life that it’s hard to think that it won’t affect my writing too.

MW:  Let’s talk about favourites - a quick top five, with perhaps a little explanation behind each, for: short story, novel, film, album.

JE:  Okay, with the usual caveats that these would be completely different if I picked them tomorrow…

Short Stories:
1. The Willows by Algernon Blackwood–a better cosmic horror story than anything Lovecraft ever wrote.
2. The Man In The Underpass by Ramsey Campbell–I could have picked no end of Campbell stories, ranging from the start of his career to the present day, but today it’s this one.
3. Furnace by Livia Llewelyn–a new favourite, a story that’s haunted me since I read it…
4. The Fly by Katherine Mansfield–creates a sense of horror and sorrow from a trivial incident.
5. Into The Wood by Robert Aickman¬–much like with Ramsey Campbell, I could have chosen lots of different Aickman stories. He was a true one off. So I picked this one to stand in for his body of work as a whole.

Novels:
1. ‘The Trilogy’ (Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnameable) by Samuel Beckett. A descent into nothingness, laughing as we fall away.
2. We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson. For me, this black comedy just edges it over her other novels, although they’re all exquisite.
3. Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates. Utterly disturbing short novel about politics, power, and death by drowning.
4. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. My favourite of the classic horror novels; a true masterpiece.
5. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. A perfect example of how to write about characters in the moment.

Films:
1. Memento – “We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are.”
2. Monty Python’s Life Of Brian – “Found this spoon, sir.”
3. Don’t Look Now – “One of the things I love about Venice, is that it's so safe for me to walk…”
4. The Empire Strikes Back – “Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1.”
5. Alien –“There is a clause in the contract which specifically states any systematized transmission indicating a possible intelligent origin must be investigated…”

Albums:
1. Giant Steps by The Boo Radleys–madly creative and nothing like the one song of theirs everyone knows.
2. Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan–classic song after classic song after…
3. Elastica by Elastica–the sound of my long-faded teenage years.
4. In Rainbows by Radiohead–they blow me away, every time.
5. Are We There by Sharon Van Etten–probably the best singer songwriter I’ve discovered recently.

MW:  The Shelter is a novella, The Quarantined City is a novel, do you have a preferred length to write to?

JE:  Well, The Quarantined City is novel length, but its form is not that of a novel. It concerns someone hunting out a reclusive writer in the city, and he hunts for clues in the short stories he finds written by that author. So the book has a number of complete short stories embedded in (and reflective of) the novel’s narrative…

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I love short stories and can’t ever see a time when I won’t be writing them (although I’d like to do more novels and novellas too). Most of my favourite writers wrote short stories either exclusively or alongside longer works. I always just assumed that that’s what real writers did. It wasn’t until I started thinking about getting my own work published that I found out it’s accepted publishing wisdom that short story collections don’t sell as well as novels. That some readers don’t like them. It’s an attitude totally alien to me; I feel that if you don’t read short stories it’s like you’re dismissing an entire art-form. Especially so for horror, where so many of the classics of the genre are shorter works.

MW:  On the subject of The Shelter, as a fan of coming-of-age tales I particularly loved it, can you tell me how that came about?

JE:  Well, although I’ve changed the characters, the first part of the story is something that actually happened: I did go with three friends across the fields behind my parents’ house to an old WW2 air raid shelter, which we forced open with tent pegs and climbed down into. (At least, we all believed it was an air raid shelter¬–I’m not sure what else it could have been, but looking back I’m not sure why such a thing would be in the middle of the countryside either.) And like you I enjoy coming of ages tales; in particular Stephen King’s The Body and IT, and Dan Simmons’s The Summer Of Night. When the boys open up the shelter it’s almost exactly in the middle of the narrative: they’re all changed by what happens, regardless of whether they dared go down or remained above.

But there’s another side to the story too; it’s not just about being young on the cusp of adulthood, but about looking back on that time of life, from the perspective of someone for whom adulthood is a daily, unromantic reality. That was mirrored in the writing of The Shelter - I wrote a version of this story when I was about seventeen. It was shit, obviously. But years later I dug out the manuscript and saw something in it salvageable. My hope in rewriting it was that it would keep its energy and the verisimilitude of youth, but I’d be able to add a mature sense of language and craft to it.

MW:  Earlier this year, Black Shuck Books published your editorial debut (alongside Dan Howarth) with the anthology The Hyde Hotel, which I was lucky enough to feature in.  What made you want to co-edit an anthology and how did you decide on the theme?

JE:  Well, as I might have alluded to, I love short stories. And I love anthologies too, the way they give you a chance to discover new authors alongside some you already know. So putting together an anthology was something I always wanted to do.

The actual theme for The Hyde Hotel simply came from staying in cheap hotels for work; by coincidence I read some great ‘weird hotel’ stories by Nicholas Royle and Hannah Kate at that time. So I wrote a blog post about hotel horror in which I wondered why no one had put together an anthology on the theme. Dan emailed me after he read the blog and said that we should do it ourselves. And thus The Hyde was born…

MW:  The Quarantined City got itself caught up in an unfortunate situation within the UK small press but generally speaking, we have a pretty good genre community here, I think.  Do you enjoy the social side of being a horror writer, the Cons and the get-togethers?

JE:  I do, very much so. As you allude to, there’s a number of unfortunate events occurred recently, but none of that will prove important in the long run. What’s important is that writers continue to write good work and that they have a route to publishing it, in whatever way they choose. And I’ve found that, ohhh, 92% of the people I’ve met at Cons are utterly supportive of that. People give you help, advice, share their contacts, come to your readings and panels. You build up your own mini-community, of people you trust, can bounce ideas off, who you can speak to when the writing is going shit (because we all have periods when the writing goes shit). Everyone has shared interests and goals, so it’s amazing how quickly you make good friends with people. Me and you being a case in point…

It helps that we all seem to love curry, too.

Writers enjoying a curry at Edge-Lit 4, 11th July 2015
(from left - Wayne Parkin, Phil Sloman, Tony Cowin, Honey Cowin (with her fabulous glowing eyes) Steve Harris, Richard Farren Barber, Terry Grimwood, John Travis, Fiona Ni Éalaighthe's ear, James, me, Steve Bacon)

MW:  Thanks for that.  So as a Nottinghamshire lad, do you find yourself using the area a lot in your work?  Do you think it’s important to have a strong handle on location?

JE:  It varies; I believe, especially in short stories, everything needs to mesh together: character, setting, theme, plot. So if the story doesn’t call for a specific location then it’s normally just set in an unnamed twenty-first century urban Britain. But sometimes the story does need to be set in a specific place; so for example my story Home Time is about a character trying to evade his past, specifically a past lived in a Nottinghamshire mining town… or ex-mining town. I grew up in such a place myself and have a very strong memory of the day they demolished the pit-heads. And given that coal-mining is basically the retrieval of a substance created in the past, it perfectly fitted the story’s themes.

At the moment I’m writing a novella called Paupers’ Graves which will be launched at this year’s Fantasycon–it’s set in a specific Nottingham location, a cemetery where many of the poor were buried in the so-called ‘guinea graves’. On some of their tombs the lives are measured not in years but minutes. So that story again is set very specifically in Nottingham and I’ve pulled in details from the past of the city as well–the slums, the lace mills, the Goose Fair. But again, that’s all because it fits the narrative and the themes of the story. And where I’ve needed to change things to fit, I’ve felt no qualms doing so.

MW:  What’s the typical process for you in creating a story, do the ideas come from images or are you one of those lucky people who seems to get them delivered whole?

JE:  They very rarely come to me whole, and I’m not sure I’d trust one that did. For me, a story isn’t about a single idea, it’s about finding a combination of ideas that feels like more than the sum of their parts. Often I have ideas in my head for ages, and I’m trying out other ideas against them like jigsaw pieces, trying to see what fits. It’s purely subjective, it’s something I just get a feeling about.

As an example, I had a story called The Place Where It Always Rains in an anthology edited by Alex Davis titled Worms. I had the central location (the place where it does always, indeed, rain) in my thoughts for months but couldn’t think what to do with it, what plot might be set there. But when Alex asked me to write a story on the theme of worms something just clicked: worms come out in the rain. Something about those two elements felt right together; I still had no real idea of a plot but the imagery of worms drowning in rain puddles felt like something I could work from.

MW:  So what can we expect from you in the future?

JE:  I’ve got quite a lot coming out in 2016 - not through productivity, just through the vagaries of small press publishing timescales. I’ve already mentioned Paupers’ Graves and Infinity Plus will be publishing the complete The Quarantined City, so people can finally see how it ends. Then there’s a number of stories out in anthologies this year, where I’m alongside some pretty stellar company. So it’s all pretty exciting at the moment.

Then there's also my novella Trying To Be So Quiet (published today!) from Boo Books.  It's the first hardback edition anyone has done of my work so I’m pretty excited about it.

As for the longer term, who knows?

MW:  I'm sure there'll be plenty more books to come, my friend.  Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions and see you at a Con soon!

Old School Horrors 4: Worms, by James Montague

The fourth, in an occasional thread, of blog posts celebrating those cheesy, sleazy old-school pulp paperbacks from the 70s and 80s, which are now mostly forgotten.  Yes, we’re not talking great art here but these books have their place - for better or worse - in the genre and I think they deserve to be remembered.

This time around, I'm looking at a novel set on the east coast of England...

cover scan of my copy - Futura Publications, published in 1979

The Norfolk coast made for a perfect holiday - as long as the sun still shone.  But when the rain came, the creatures left the shadows...

Spectres from the past tortured James Hildebrand's mind.  His blackest nightmares were crowded with malevolent, coiling images of decay.  Then, suddenly, he knew the threat was real.

The dead alone could not quench their hunger.  And, for the living, the horrors that fed and multiplied in the darkness of the night became more terrible with the dawn...

James Hildebrand is in his early fifties, hen-pecked and locked into a joyless marriage with a wife who can’t stand him.  During a disastrous boating holiday on the east coast, he spots a ramshackle cottage he’d love to move into but his wife hates it.  As they walk across the marshes one day, he contrives that she falls in and drowns.  Now a murderer, he has to do everything he can to keep it quiet, whilst also worrying about the number of worms he keeps finding that might have something to do with the power plant being built on the marsh.

This was great fun, a really entertaining read that is mis-sold by both its blurb and it’s tag-line - “When the nightmares ended, the real horror began…”  Yes, it does feature killer worms (much later in the book than you’d expect), but it’s very well written in a precise style (an emulation, perhaps, of M R James?) and is more of a very dark comedy than an out-and-out monster novel.   The characters are well defined (it’s told in first person by Hildebrand), the handful of death scenes are nicely constructed, there’s a good pace and an excellent use of the atmospheric marshes and coast out of season.  As for the locations used, I loved them - starting in Potter Higham (I bought the book in nearby Great Yarmouth) and taking in Hunstanton, I found this really pleasing and mention of the Eastern Electricity Board made me smile too.  In addition, any book that features the line“The worms of hell.  They rear in pursuit of the souls of the deceased” is alright by me.

Your liking of this will depend entirely on your taste for cheesy horror, but mine was very much satisfied so for fellow fans, I’d recommend it!


I didn't realise it when I bought the novel that Montague was, in fact, the pseudonym of novelist and screenwriter Christopher Wood, who wrote my favourite Bond film "The Spy Who Loved Me".

* * *

Christopher Hovelle Wood was born on 5th November 1935 in Lambeth, South London and evacuated to Norwich during the Blitz.  He read Economics and Law at Cambridge, graduated in 1960 and did his National Service in Cyprus, an experience that inspired his second novel “Terrible Hard, Says Alice” (1970), which fellow Bond novelist William Boyd favourably compared to Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22”.  His work for the UN in Cameroon during the 1960 plebiscite inspired two more novels, his first “Make It Happen To Me” (1969)  and “A Dove Against Death” (1983).

He married Jane Patrick in 1962 and became an account executive for Masius Wynne-Williams, a London advertising agency and used his daily commute to write.  His first two novels - serious, ‘literary’ fiction - were well reviewed but didn’t sell well so he pitched a series of erotic comic novels to Sphere and “could almost see the pound signs in my publisher’s eyes.”

The first of these, “Confessions Of A Window Cleaner” (1971), published as written “by Timothy Lea”, was a huge success and went through multiple editions.  Wood took his inspiration from tall tales he heard while working as mason’s mate and part-time postman in his teens and each novel was written in five weeks.  In a 2013 Penthouse interview, he said “they were funny then and they are funny now.  Then again, I always did like smut.”

He also created two series featuring female protagonists (again published under the characters name).  “Confessions Of A Night Nurse” (1974) kicked off nine Rosie Dixon novels (the first was made into a 1978 film, for which Wood wrote the screenplay) and “The Stewardesses” (1973) began a five book run featuring Penny Sutton.

With the success of the Confessions books, Wood quit his advertising job to write full-time and moved his family to France.  He intended to write more literary fiction but found the demands on his time were too great and decided the ‘serious writing’ would have to wait while the Confessions books were selling.

with Barbara Bach, '
Major Anya Amasova' in "The Spy Who Loved Me"

He wrote the comedy “Seven Nights In Japan” (1976) for director Lewis Gilbert who co-opted his services for his next film “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977), which had already gone through a lot of writers.  Wood later said “I just wanted to do a good job for everybody” and praised the producer Cubby Broccoli saying “everybody on the movie lived in style”.  His light approach fitted the Roger Moore characterisation of Bond perfectly (“One of the keys of writing a Bond movie,” he later said, “is to do the same thing, just differently”) and he went on to write “Moonraker” (1979), also for Gilbert.  He wasn’t a big fan of the idea though, saying “It seemed to me that we were copying Star Wars [and] I also found the idea of space slow in filmic terms.”  Since Fleming had sold only the title for “The Spy Who Loved Me”, Wood novelised his screenplay and also wrote “James Bond And Moonraker” since the film and original novel were so different.  Kingsley Amis, writing in the New Statesman, said “Mr Wood has bravely tackled his formidable task, that of turning a typical late Bond film, which must be basically facetious, into a novel after Ian Fleming, which must be basically serious. ... the descriptions are adequate and the action writing excellent.”

Judging by the timings, Wood must have written “Worms” between the two Bond screenplays.

Christopher Wood died at his France apartment on 9th May 2015, though it wasn’t widely reported until Sir Roger Moore published the news on Twitter on 17th October, acknowledging “he wrote two of my best.”  Wood, whose marriage was dissolved, was survived by a son and daughter, another son had pre-deceased him.


Christopher Wood bibliography

Make It Happen to Me (re-issued as Kiss Off! in 1970) (1969)
Terrible Hard, Says Alice (1970)
John Adam - Samurai (1971)
John Adam In Eden (1973)
Soccer Thug (1973) (as "by Frank Clegg”)
The Further Adventures of Barry Lyndon by Himself (Wood’s name doesn't appear on the cover) (1976)
Seven Nights in Japan (novelisation of his film script, as “by John Drew”) (1976)
James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
Lovely Couple (novelisation of his television script, as “by Richard Mason”) (1979)
James Bond and Moonraker (1979)
Fire Mountain (1979)
Worms (1979) (as "by James Montague")
Dead Centre (1980)
Taiwan (1981)
A Dove Against Death (1983)
Kago (1985)
Sincere Male Seeks Love and Someone to Wash His Underpants (2004)
California, Here I Am (2004)
James Bond, The Spy I Loved (memoir) (2006)

Screenplays
Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974)
Confessions of a Pop Performer (1975)
Seven Nights in Japan (1976)
Confessions of a Driving Instructor (1976)
Confessions from a Holiday Camp (1977)
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), co-written with Richard Maibaum
Rosie Dixon - Night Nurse (1978)
Moonraker (1979)
Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985)
Steal the Sky (1988), co-written with Dorothy Tristan
The Unspeakable (1996)
Eruption (1997)
Stray Bullet (1998)
Dangerous Curves (2000)

The Confessions series (by “Timothy Lea”)
Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1971)
Confessions of a Driving Instructor (1972)
Confessions from a Holiday Camp (1972)
Confessions of a Traveling Salesman (1973)
Confessions from a Hotel (1973)
Confessions from the Clink (1973)
Confessions of a Film Extra (1973)
Confessions of a Private Soldier (1974)
Confessions from the Pop Scene (1974)
Confessions from the Shop Floor (1974)
Confessions from a Health Farm (1974)
Confessions Of A Plummer's Mate (1975)
Confessions of a Long Distance Lorry Driver (1975)
Confessions of a Plumber's Mate (1975)
Confessions of a Pop Performer (1975)
Confessions of a Private Dick (1975)
Confessions from a Luxury Liner (1976)
Confessions from a Nudist Colony (1976)
Confessions of a Milkman (1976)
Confessions of an Ice Cream Man (1977)
Confessions from a Haunted House (1979)

The Rosie Dixon series (by “Rosie Dixon”)
Confessions of a Night Nurse (1974)
Confessions of a Gym Mistress (1974)
Confessions from an Escort Agency (1975)
Confessions of a Lady Courier (1975)
Confessions from a Package Tour (1975)
Confessions of a Physical W.R.A.C. (1976)
Confessions of a Baby Sitter (1976)
Confessions of a Personal Secretary (1976)
Rosie Dixon, Barmaid (1977)

The Penny Sutton series (by “Penny Sutton”)
The Stewardesses Down Under (1973)
The Stewardesses (1973)
The Jumbo Jet Girls (1974)
I'm Penny, Fly Me (1975)
Penny Sutton Supersonic (1976)

The Oliver Grape series (by “Oliver Grape”)
Onward Virgins (1974)
Crumpet Voluntary (1974)
It's a Knock-Up! (1975)

For a few years now, I've been collecting old 70s and 80s paperbacks (mostly horror), picking them up cheaply in secondhand bookshops and at car boot sales and slowly building a collection.  My friend (and fellow collector) Johnny Mains once told me that charity shops sometimes pulp old books like this because the market for them is so small - I understand why but I think it's terrible.  We might not be talking great art here but on the whole, I think these books deserve to be remembered.

To that end, on an irregular basis (too much cheese isn't good for anyone's diet), I'm going to review these "old-school" horrors (and perhaps include some bonus material, if I can find it).

Previous entries in the series can be found at this link

Writer/Blogger meet-up, Birmingham, 30th April 2016

After the entertaining writers/bloggers meet-up I attended in London in April (which I wrote about here), I was looking forward to the next, once again organised by Kim Nash and held at the Bacchus bar at the Burlington Arcade in Birmingham (the venue of the first I went to).  Even better news, my good friend Sue Moorcroft would be coming along this time too.

Me and Sue outside New Street Station.  She's not wearing a top hat, that's part of  the Rotunda building behind her...

We got the 10.23 train and chatted all the way to Leicester.  Grabbing a cup of tea, we got settled on the shuttle train (a woman sitting further down the carriage answered our “which way does it go?” question without us asking) and chatted all the way to Birmingham, covering the art of writing, some family matters, FantasyCon and the schedule for her book A Christmas Promise (apparently, I’m the only person who’s heard that title and seen any kind of innuendo in it - that surely can't be right, can it?).  By the time we got to New Street station the sun had disappeared and it started to hail, so we ducked into Waterstones and she showed me some books that had similar designs to what she thought Avon would do with hers (interestingly, most of them seemed to feature a single character, in red, walking away from the viewer).  Then, braving the weather, we walked along to Bacchus which was already packed and noisy.

After getting drinks we entered the throng - Kim saw us, we said our hellos, I got my name-tag (Sue always takes her own) and we were off.  I saw Barbara Copperthwaite by the door, said hello and that I’d catch up with her later and then only saw her briefly just before we left, more’s the pity.  I also saw Rachel Gilbey to say the briefest of “hello”’s to and then didn’t see her again either.  Sue was on the far side of the room and introduced me to Lindsay Hill, who blogs as Book Boodle and we had a nice chat about writing and reviewing.  Shelley Wilson then appeared and it was lovely to see her again - we met at the first Brum gathering in January but got on so well it feels like we’ve known one another ages and today was no exception.  As time was getting on, I went to order food then chatted with Shelley and Elaina James, a writer and lyricist who has a western romance (an honest-to-goodness Western!) which is with agents at the moment.  It was nice to meet her and compare genres and I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who’s written a western before.

Linda Hill, me, Shelley Wilson, Elaina James

The food arrived (very promptly, bearing in mind how many people were about) and I sat with Sue and Kat Black to eat (and if you like that kind of thing, I can vouch for the club sandwich).  Kat was good company and it turned out we shared a mutual friend in Adam Nevill, as he was her editor for a while.  I grabbed a quick hello with Jane Isaac and then, back in conversation, our little group was joined by Holly, who runs the Bookaholic blog and Linda Hill, of Linda’s Bookbag.

We talked about current projects - neither Holly or Linda were fans of horror (to be fair, not many of the bloggers present were) but they were intrigued by Polly, especially when Shelley talked it up too (she’s already read it and enjoyed it).  It was also interesting to hear from the other side of the book fence - Linda told us she received 19 books to review this week, a figure I thought was astonishing.  She reads upwards of 160 books a year (more than double my tally) and still has a huge backlog, an issue Holly also shares.  We talked about blog activity and planning (my aim this year is one post a week, reviewers might be looking for four or five a week, which is a lot of material) and I quickly realised that to get a slot on a bookblog (as I was lucky enough to have at The Haphazardous Hippo when Neats Wilson reviewed three of my books at once) is not to be sniffed at - book-blogging is an under-appreciated art.

Me and Shelley Wilson

Shelley told me about her new project - a standalone YA fantasy - and I ran through the basic plot of the novella I’m currently working on, an old-school horror for Peter Mark May.  She liked the sound of it, which is always good to hear - I find that gatherings with writers always boost my creative drive and today was thankfully no exception.

The event was very well attended and there were a lot of people I didn’t get a chance to speak too - I stood near to one Twitter friend for a big chunk of time, but only managed to say cheerio to her - and all too soon it was time to head off.  Reluctantly we said our goodbyes and made our way back to the train station (got rained on again) and the shuttle was already at the platform.  We sat down and started talking before realising Shona Lawrence (who runs the Booky Ramblings of a Neurotic Mom blog and lives in nearby Corby) was sitting just up the carriage.  Since Sue had met her at the gathering, she joined us for the journey home.

Another excellent, well-organised get-together and - as before - I met some great people, both writers and reviewers.  Roll on the next one!