HOME

SHOP

BOOKS

BIOGRAPHY

VIDEOS

LINKS

CONTACT

BLOG

LATEST POSTS

You must be logged in to comment

Maggie's House and the music of the 70s

	
Posted: 24 Jun 2024 at 13:29:24

Maggie’s House is set in the summer of 1973. Like any other fourteen-year-olds of the era music plays a huge part in life of the main character, Ranks, and his two cohorts, Danno and HC. All three of them sport shoulder length haircuts in an attempt to emulate their heroes, Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood of Faces, the group which consisted of former members of The Small Faces and The Jeff Beck Band. The feather cut, kind of a mix between the long hair of hippies and the more stylised cuts of the mods, was huge in 1973. Rod and Ronnie probably sported the best feather cuts of them all. Rod Stewart had two record deals at the time, one as a solo artist and the other as lead singer of Faces. Members of the band often played as backing musicians on Rod’s solo work. There was a time when it seemed they were never out of the charts and always on Top of the Pops.
A lot of what Ranks listens to at home comes from catching snatches of what his older sister, Libby, is listening to in her room. Libby has a part time job at the record counter at Woolworths. In the early 70s Woolworths were the biggest record retailer in the UK, with counters in all of their stores up and down the land. Libby is using her staff discount to buy many of the classic albums of the period.
She’s not buying vinyl though. She’s buying versions that are on cassette tapes. From the late 60s onwards the potable tape recorder became more and more popular with teenagers. Before the advent of the Walkman these were blocky oblong shaped devises with buttons for play, record, fast forward and rewind. As they grew in popularity all the major record labels put out their album releases on cassette. Not only could you play prerecorded tapes you could record the top ten from Radio One’s Sunday evening show onto blank tapes (something which was technically illegal, but widespread amongst the nation’s youth.)
Amongst the albums and tracks that Rank’s hears Libby listening to in her room are Rod Stewart’s ‘Never a Dull Moment’, David Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’, T Rex ‘Slider’ and Roxy Music ‘For your Pleasure’.
I devoted a whole chapter in Maggie’s House to a scenario that plays out in the local youth club Friday night disco. Gordon, the grandson of the owners of the newsagent where Ranks works as a newspaper boy, is the disc jockey. As well as his decks he has an array of strobe lights and oil lamps, all bought for him by his overindulgent parents, He sports a Led Zeppelin tee-shirt. I remember a bit of a class divide back then when it came to music. Middle class kids, bound for university, were into heavy metal and prog-rock, working class kids, bound for the factory floor, were into chart music and glam rock. In a later chapter, when Gordon’s girlfriend is introduced, she’s wearing a Deep Purple tee-shirt.
But Gordon is savvy. He knows the audience he’ s playing to in a youth club on a council housing scheme. Here’s a track list of what he plays in the chapter.
Tony Orlando and Dawn – Knock Three Time and Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree
Slade – Skweeze Me Pleeze Me and Cum on Feel the Noize
Suzie Quatro – Can the Can
T Rex – The Groover
The Sweet – Hellraiser
Lou Reed – Walk on the Wild Side
Nazareth – Broken Down Angel
Wizzard – See My Baby Jive
10cc – Rubber Bullets

Through Danno’s dad, the villain of the piece I also get the chance to reference an earlier musical era. Danno’s dad was a teddy boy in the 1950s, the decade which holds the key to the horrors of Maggie’s House. He still sports the long sideburns and swept back hair he wore as a teenager. In one part of the book Ranks and HC reminisce about one Christmas when Danno’s dad was in unusually good spirits, playing them records from his old favourites such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. In the early 70s there was a lot of nostalgia for 50s music, with many of the glam rock bands doing covers of early rock ‘n’ roll songs, and bands like Mud and Showaddywaddy adopting the teddy boy style as their stage image.
70s music, with a sprinkling of 50s and 60s is going to be the subject of an upcoming guided walk, Lambeth Rocks, which follows a route from the Oval to Vauxhall and takes in the diverse rock heritage of the area. Details can be found here…

https://LambethRocks.eventbrite.co.uk

Maggie's House - Lies and Deception

	
Posted: 30 May 2024 at 11:31:30

Lies and Deception



“Our lives are often built on lies. They come in all shapes and sizes. Big lies and small lies. Lies told out of compassion to protect someone we care for. Lies told out of malice to hurt someone we despise. Lies which cover up dark secrets. Lies are the mechanisms by which we compensate for our faults and our regrets. The bad things we wish we’d never done. Sometimes lies are simply the things that are never spoken out loud.
I’ve had it with lies.
I’m going to come clean about what happened in Maggie’s house.”

This is how I open Maggie’s House, set in the summer of 1973.

What follows shows how people and events are effected by lies and what happens when the lies begin to unravel. The book is full of lies and deception, liars and deceivers. The ghosts that haunt Maggie’s house have had lies told about them and they are prepared to use malevolent forces to expose the truth. The story behind what happened in Maggie's House and the ghosts that are said to haunt it has a number of different versions. None of them are true. The real story turns out to be far worse than these made up versions.

The biggest and most obvious liar is HC who has been given the nickname HC because the stories he tells are as tall as the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. One of his biggest lies is about his uncle who served in the King's Own Scottish Borderers. According to HC his uncle has been everywhere and has done everything. Since leaving the army he has apparently been working for the British Secret Services tracking down IRA terrorists. The reality is far less glamorous and HC's lies are designed to cover the truth about the uncle he idolises.

Danno tells lies to hide his domestic circumstances and the violent outbursts he endures from his alcoholic father. Danno's father has been living a lie for 20 years. He may be the only person who holds the key to what really happened in Maggie's house

Ranks fancies himself as an impressionist. He often hides behind his impersonations of famous TV and movie characters of the 70s era to cover up his own emotions. Ranks hasn’t seen or heard from his dad in years. His mum may well be lying about his dad's whereabouts.

In the book I reference two authors whose works have different levels of deception about them.

Skinhead Novels

Skinhead (1970) by Richard Allen was the first of a series of novels published by the New English Library, followed by Skinhead Escapes, Skinhead Girls, Trouble for Skinhead, Skinhead Farewell, and others of the same ilk, such as Suedehead, Boot Boys, Smoothies.
The skinhead novels feature 15 year old East End juvenile delinquent, Joe Hawkins. They were cult reading amongst teenagers in the early 70s. In the novel Ranks says that he believes that in his school there is only one copy of each novel, endlessly passing from one kid to the next.
That's pretty much how I recall them. No sooner had you progressed from primary to secondary school than you started hearing about the graphic depictions of sex and violence contained within the pages of Richard Allen skinhead paperbacks. By the time a dog-eared copy of one of the series was surupsticiously nestled amongst the jotters and text books in your school bag you were filled with a mixture of curious excitement and get wrenching trepidation about what you were about to read.
They didn't disappoint, every second page involved Joe Hawkins in some sort of violence or altercation. They were also somewhat racist, sexist, and right wing in their outlook. Allen claimed he was simply portraying the prevalent youth culture of the day.
But for someone like me, growing up in a little semi-rural town in the Scottish Borders, rather than an inner city, they directly influenced the way people of my generation talked, dressed, and acted. Reading them was like a rite of passage. They stole you innocence from you and effectively corrupted your outlook on life. Drew you into a notion that violence was normal, something you either afflicted on others, or had afflicted by others on you. They were subversive, and not in a good way.
The deception involved is that we perceived Richard Allen and his psychotic skinhead anti-hero to be one and the same person. Allen, we thought, had lived the life that Joe Hawkins lived. He’d experienced what Hawkins experienced. He dressed the same as us and listened to the same music we did. He was bound to. How else could he have written this stuff so vividly?
In truth Allen was a middle aged Canadian, already in his early 50s when the Skinhead series was published. His real name was James Moffatt. Richard Allen was one of over 40 different pen names he used in a pulp fiction career that spanned over 690 novels in genres ranging from horror, Dracula and the Virgins of the Undead (Ettiene Aubin) to the fake, sensationalised autobiography, Diary of a Female Wrestler (Trudy Maxwell).
As the old saying goes 'I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger.

T Lobsang Rampa

Another series of books that circulated amongst pupils at my school were the books on Buddhism and Eastern mysticism by someone going by the name of T Lobsang Rampa. These were the polar opposite of the Skinhead novels, full of the type of peace and love philosophy that Ranks’ mother and sister in Maggie's House refer to as 'hippy trippy shite'.
In the novel Ranks finds a tattered copy of T Lobsang Rampa's ‘Wisdom of the Ancients' amongst the belongings of Catweazle, the tramp whose corpse the boys find inside the house. I quote a lot from the book and it becomes the vehicle by which Ranks begins to have supernatural encounters and experiences.

Tuesday Lobsang Rampa purported to be a Tibetan Monk. When he was exposed as a fraud from Devon, real name Cyril Henry Hoskin, he claimed to have been possessed by the spirit of T Lonsang Rampa when he fell out of a tree as a child and carried on writing under that name. Between 'The Third Eye' (1956) and Tibetan Sage (1980) he wrote 20 books, all on allegedly non-fiction occult themes. 'Wisdom of the Ancients' came out as a Corgi paperback in 1966. When I was writing Maggie's House I remembered a very battered and yellowed version of it coming into my possession when I was about 14. Maybe it was originally brought into school by a pupil during the hippy era of the late 60s? Even if the whole concept was based on a deception its survival, passing from hand to hand from the late 60s till the early 70s provided a good counterbalance to Richard Allen's violent novels, as well as reflecting the contrasts between the youth cultures of two very different eras.

But what of the lies surrounding what happened in Maggie’s House?

Why is it haunted?

How will the truth come out?

What will it reveal?

To find out you will need to read the novel…

https://www.amazon.sg/Maggies-House-David-Turnbull/dp/1786958775

Maggie's House Blog 1 - 1973

	
Posted: 16 May 2024 at 14:46:16

In the summer of 1973 I was fourteen years old. I lived on the Wester Langlee council housing scheme just outside the market town of Galashiels in Selkirkshire on the Scottish Borders.
It was a time when kids like myself and my mates would often be disparigingly referred to as NEDs (Non Educated Delinquents) and essentially written off. An era of contractions where you could idolise effeminate glam rock stars like Marc Bolan and David Bowie, while at the same time trying to emulate the aggressive hard man machismo of the so called' boot boys. I had a job, delivering morning papers to houses on the scheme, earning money that I mostly spent on cigarettes and cheap paperbacks.
Not far from the Wester Langlee housing scheme, near the town gas works, on a narrow little road nestled between an abandoned railway track and the banks of the River Tweed, on the other side of the river to Abbotsford, former home of Sir Walter Scott, there was an abandoned house. Dilapidated and in a state a bad repair was said to be haunted. The subject of an urban myth with many variations. We called it Maggie's House. All sort of exaggerated stories did the rounds about Maggie's ghost and the terrible things kids who dared to go in there had encountered. A hairy werewolf type hand clawing it's way around from the inside of a door that sat ajar is one story that sticks in my mind.
I plucked up the courage to go in there a couple of times. Always with other people, never alone. I remember the ominous smells of damp and dust and decay. Jagged glass hanging in clawlike shards from the windows, faded wallpaper and peeling paintwork, floorboard that creaked and groaned under your weight. Random bits of old furniture that made it all the more unsettling because they were proof that someone had once lived there, and that their ghost might have stuck around.
Those creepy stories you'd heard running wild in your imagination. Making malevolent mischief. Heart beating a tad faster. A knot in your belly. Nerves tingling. Convinced that something truly horrific would be lurking behind the next door you pushed open. The experience coming back in fevered dreams. In those dreams the dark ruins of Maggie's house inhabiting the landscape of those scary old Universal and Hammer horror movies that were shown on Friday evenings on TV in the early 70s.
I don't recall ever finding out the true story behind that house, or if there was really someone called Maggie who owned it. But the memory of it stayed with me for over 50 years to became the inspiration for Maggie's House.
What if three fourteen year old kids, very like those in the picture, from a council housing scheme made a gruesome discovery inside an old house reputed to be haunted? And what if this discovery brought about the awakening of ghosts who went on to manipulate events in order to exact revenge for terrible events that happened in the house long before the kids were born?
Those what ifs gave me the starting point for the story I wanted to tell, partly based on my own teenage years and partly a work of the imagination. I knew all of this had to happen in 1973 so I have filled the novel with cultural references from the era, film, TV, music, fashion, books. I hope I got the balance of nostalgia and unsettling creepiness right.

I will be blogging about more aspects of Maggie's House and the 70s setting in coming weeks.

https://fiction4all.com/ebooks/b19121-maggies-house.htm

Dragons

	
Posted: 19 Jan 2024 at 14:05:19

Dragons feature heavily in my Fiction4All fantasy steampunk adventure The Dragon Breath Chronicles. Dragons of all sizes and hues. I created all sorts of dragons who fly like birds in flocks - Common Greens and Horned Ridgebacks amongst them.

The biggest and most fearsome dragon is the White Sow, a gigantic albino dragon, viewed by the dragon hunters as the greatest prize of all. There's also Hargmir (Ghost of all Dragons) a fearsome creature who haunts the Far Tundra and is said to be the ghost of the dragons killed as a consequence of dragon hunting.

Dragons are hunted for their potent breath which is the main source of energy in the world I created for the book. Once weakened by the taking of their breath the poor dragons are then set upon by the scavengers who harvest them for everything they can possibly sell - wings, teeth, claws, bones skin and even their meat for a delicacy known as dragon jerky.

Opposed to the dragon hunters are The Friends of the Dragon, who want to outlaw the taking of dragon breath and the nomadic Ghibheline, who see themselves as their proctector. The main character Euan Redcap is first kidnapped by dragon hunters but later alligns himself with cause of Friends of the Dragon and goblinlike Ghibheline.

The Dragon Breath Chronicles started off life in 2012 as a short novella called The Tale of Euan Redcap. There was then a few dragon themed short stories set in Euan's world which were published in short story anthologies. Now The Dragon Breath Chronicles extends the adventures of Euan Redcap to an epic quest in three parts.

I wanted the story be like an old fashioned adventure in the style of Treasure Island and Call of the wild, combined with the dragons of fantasy and the airships of steampunk.

My next blog will be about the numerous airships which feature in the novel.

Sink Your Teeth Into Christmas and other Horrors

	
Posted: 08 Dec 2023 at 09:33:08

'Sink Your Teeth into Christmas' would be a great stocking filler for anyone who loves horror stories. A mini anthology of nine tales of seasonal ghost and ghouls. Don't believe them when they say nothing is stirring, not even a mouse. Plenty of things are lurking in the shadows. Edited, as ever, by Dorothy Davies, there are all sorts of supernatural things going bump in the night in this collection.
My story 'He's Behind You' concerns a pantomime dame haunted by the vengeful spirit of his former partner in a comedy duo.
I previously had a Christmas story in 'Haunted Holidays' Thirteen O'Clock Press, also edited by Dorothy Davies.
'The Tannenbaumteufle' featured a struggling writer who takes a Christmas job in an office block shut down for the holiday. Inspired by the Christmas tree in the foyer he composes a poem in the style of Edgar Allen Poe, about a hideous creature which lurks within the branches. When he recites the poem out loud something stirs behind the tinsel and baubles and it isn't going to end well for him.
Christmas ghost and horror stories have a long tradition going back to tales told around the fire.
In the Victorian era they truly came to the fore, often serialised in illustrated magazines. Charles Dickens wrote five Christmas themed tales in the 1840s, the most famous of which was 'A Christmas Carol' with its cast of ghosts visiting the miser, Ebaneezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve.
The advent of the Penny Dreadful brought about a seasonal version known as the Christmas Crawler. Robert Louis Stevenson's tale 'The Body Snatcher' came out first as a Christmas Crawler. The following year 'The Strange Case of Doctor Jeckyle and Mister Hyde' was due for the Christmas market but his publisher recognised its wider potential and held back it's publication until January.
One of my favourites from this period is 'The Old Portrait' by Hume Nisbit, published in the Penny Illustrated Paper in 1896 it features a vampire rather than a ghost. Its tomb is an old painting bought by the protagonist who finds himself in dire peril when she emerges from the painting on Christmas Eve.
In H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Festival' the main character is witness to a Yule Festival said to be far older than man. Deep in a subterranean tunnel he witnesses a terrifying ritual which invokes horrific winged creatures from the dark and gloomy depths.
A writer synonymous with Christmas horror and ghost stories, and cited by Lovecraft as a major influence is Algernon Blackwood, born in 1869 in, what is now, the Shooter's Hill area of Greenwich. In 'Transition' published in 1913 a man rushing home with Christmas presents for his family begins to see monsters on the streets. He arrives home to find a house full of visitors, but his wife and family can't see him there. It doesn't take a genius to work out why this is.
Blackwood appeared in one of the first BBC TV shows, 'Picture Page, telling a ghost story. He went on to become known as the ghost man due to his regular ghost story recitals on both TV and radio.
Another ghost story writer with a BBC connection is M.R. James. From 1971 to 1978 the BBC produced an annual series called 'A Ghost Story for Christmas'. Other than 'The Signalman' by Dickens, the majority were based on M.R. James stories. The series was revived in 2005 and again the bulk of the stories were based on M.R. James narratives.
One of the writers brought in to work on adaptations for the new series was Mark Gatiss, part of the League of Gentlemen team who had their own success with the spooky, dark humour of their own Christmas specials.
Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, also both members of the League of Gentlemen, have had their own success with Christmas stories linked their cult anthology series 'Inside No 9'.

I will be exploring the tradition of the Christmas Ghost story at one of the stops on my upcoming 'Step Into Christmas' guided walk.
More details here.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/step-into-christmas-tickets-756178278587?aff=oddtdtcreator

Halloween Haunts

	
Posted: 16 Oct 2023 at 18:43:16

Halloween Haunts

This month I?m blogging about Halloween and the Gravestone Press anthology Halloween Haunts.
Halloween is of course a great time of the year for horror fiction. It?s the time when the dead are said to rise from their graves, and witches assemble for black masses. For many who are fans of the Halloween movie franchise it?s the time when Michael Myers dons his mask and embarks on yet another bloody killing spree. Since its first outing in 1978 Halloween has chocked up a total of thirteen movies as well as novel and graphic novel spin offs.
The wearing of masks and costumes on Halloween is now widely associated with the highly commercialized American custom of Trick or Treat, which has now been picked up in a big way by British School children, with accompanying shelf-loads of Halloween merchanise to be seen in our high street shops and supermarkets.
The notion of wearing costumes at Halloween and visiting neighbourhood houses has its origins in the British Isles. Guising (wearing a disguise) can trace its own origins back to the Celtic pagan festival of Samhain. In the 19th and 20th Century guisers, dressed in outlandish costumes, would chap on your door. You were expected to invite them in so they could sing a song, recite a poem, or perform a little play. In exchange you would reward them with a treat. I just had a story about guisers published in the Black Beacon Book of Horrors, which was fittingly launched on Friday 13th October. The guisers in this story are something entirely different, and if they were to chap on your door it would not be advisable to invite them in.
Going back to America for a moment, writer Ray Bradbury is someone whose works are closely associated with Halloween and the month of October. His novel The Halloween tree explores the origins of Halloween, including the Mexican Day of the Dead as well as the Celtic roots. It features a fantastic character by the name of Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud. Of course, one of his most famous October set novels is Something Wicked This Way Comes, featuring the equally deliciously characters of Coogar and Dark and their Pandemonium Shadow Show. My flash fiction tale Something Wicked That Way Went, included in my Fiction4All collection ?One Hundred Prediction? is a nod to Bradbury and features some trick or treaters who come to a mysterious end.
Poetry also has a long association with Halloween, in particular Robert Burns classic narrative poem Tam O Shanter about a drunken encounter with a witch filled black mass in a spooky church yard. The devil himself is there, playing the bagpipes. A gruesome stone table laid out with, amongst other items, bloody tomahawks and scymitars, the bones of a murderer, the corpse of a thieve cut down from the gallows and knife that had cut a throat. Tam narrowly escapes with his life.

My story, The Congress of Familiars, in the Gravestone Press Halloween Haunts anthology is inspired by the poem. Only it is animals, domestic cats and dogs and urban foxes, that are being summoned to the satanic ritual. A boy hears the ominous repeated barking of a dog and sneaks out to investigate. It's a decision he is going to regret. There are seventeen other Halloween horror stories by great writers in this anthology. Well worth a read in the spookiest of seasons.
For more Halloween history and scary stuff join my Halloween Horror Guided Walk around Waterloo. I have a daylight walk on the 29th October and a darkness walk on the 31st.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/halloween-horror-walk-tickets-713596364937?aff=oddtdtcreator

Tales from the Gravestones - The Origins

	
Posted: 03 Sep 2023 at 09:46:03

Tales from the Gravestones ? Origin Story

Back in July I graduated as an accredited Lambeth Tour Guide after a year of study, following a decision to take early retirement. As a writer of horror, Sci-Fi and fantasy as well as an avid reader and watcher of TV shows and movies in these genres I have started developing themed walks with references to writers, actors, TV shows and film locations linked to Lambeth, along with a blog called Lambeth Fantastical.

That got me wondering as to whether there might be a way of combining guided walks with promoting the Gravestone Press horror anthologies I have appeared in. It occurred to me that I might tie something in with the Necropolis Railway which used to carry coffins and corpses from Waterloo to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Necropolis will feature a guided horror walk I have planned for Halloween.
The idea of the Necropolis came about in response to the overcrowding in the large gothic cemeteries of London's Victorian era, collectively known as the magnificent seven. That the moved me on to the idea of setting up a series of events, starting with the Necropolis and then moving on to each of the magnificent seven. This would include a short walk / talk on each location, followed by author readings from Gravestone Press horror anthologies. Given that this was to be about graveyards and Gravestone Press the events would be collectively known as Tales from the Gravestones.
I knew that I needed other Gravestone Press writers to be involved in this to make it work. The first person I contacted was, Gary Budgen, who, like myself is in a good few of the Gravestone anthologies. Since 2012 Gary and I have been members of Clockhouse London Writers, a genre based group run by author, editor and former British Fantasy Society President Allan Ashley. We both also had stories in a number of the Thirteen O'Clock Press horror anthology series books previously edited by Dorothy Davies the editor of the Gravestone Press anthologies.
Once I had Gary on board, I contacted Dorothy and Stuart at Fiction4All.
Stuart put a call out to other authors who'd had stories published with Gravestone Press to see who else would like to be involved. The first to respond was Joseph Dowling, who lives in South London. So now with Gary and Joseph on board I needed a venue in Waterloo for the reading event. This came in the form of the Hercules in Hercules Road not far from the original entrance and former offices of the Necropolis Railway and located on a street with lots of interesting history. A date was then set to go live with Tales from the Gravestones - Episode One - Necropolis on the 11th September.
I next turned my thoughts to which of the magnificent seven cemeteries might be a good location for Episode Two. Highgate, burial place of Karl Marx, and location of scenes from a number of classic horror movies seemed the logical choice. But the challenge was that the next Gravestone writer to step forward was Tom Leaf, who is based in Bristol. A decision was therefore made it move this one online. And so Episode Two - Highgate was scheduled for Monday 25th September on the zoom platform.
It was fortuitous that this decision was made because the next writer to come on board hails from even further afield. Harry Steven Lazerus lives in a small village on the outskirts of Chicago. So now Episode Three which focuses on Nunhead, one of two members of the magnificent seven located south of the Thames will go out on Monday 9th October, with a transatlantic guest reader.
I am excited now to see this idea coming to fruition. We have reading from some really fantastic excerpt lined up. There are still five of the magnificent seven to visit, so watch this space for more live or online Tales from the Gravestones events.
Information on the three upcoming events can be found here.

Number 6 - Dark Tales Volume 4

	
Posted: 26 Jun 2023 at 09:08:26

Dark Tales about Puppets and Ventriloquist Dolls

Dark Tales Volume 4 is out this week.

Dark Tales is a non-themed anthology series. You have a lot of leeway and a free hand to explore whatever takes your fancy. There are fifteen horror stories in this anthology. Mine is called The New Adventures of Daisy Maisy. It features the faded star of a late 50s TV marionette show who takes bizarre revenge when spurned in love by her former co-star. There's a sprinkling of the supernatural thrown in for measure.
I am of a generation who was used to seeing TV shows that featured stiff limbed puppets rattling around on strings. Like many others I progressed from Watch with Mother, Andy Pandy, The Flowerpot Men and the Wooden Tops, via Pinky and Perky, to the Supermarionation of Gerry Andersen's Fireball XL5, Stingray, and Captain Scarlet.
The fact that the movements of the characters were as wooden as the material they were constructed from didn't distract me one bit from the scifi themes of the shows. Watching them primed me for what was to follow in terms of Doctor Who, Lost in Space and Star Trek.
I think the first time I associated horror with puppets was the 1964 film, Devil Doll, which I must have watched on TV in the early 70s. It was a British production with a mainly American cast and featured an evil dummy exerting influence on a ventriloquist. The story it was based upon was written by Frederick E. Smith, more famous for the war stories about 633 Squadron.
The Twilight Zone had beat the film makers to punch with an episode called The Dummy which was broadcast in May 1962. The theme of an evil puppet was revisited in another Twilight Zone episode, Caesar and Me, which was part of the 1964 season.
I read William Goldman's novel, Magic, a few years after seeing Devil Doll and couldn't wait to get a cinema ticket when Anthony Hopkins starred as the beleaguered ventriloquist in Richard Attenborough's 1978 film adaptation.
Since then evil, animated dolls and puppets have become a staple horror trope. Particularly the highly successful Chucky franchise.
A few years ago there was an American horror series called Channel Zero, which had an original take on evil puppet theme. The first season had as its central theme the disappearance of the younger brother of the main character which was somehow conne
cted to a creepy TV puppet and string show called Candle Grove.
For my story in Dark Tales 4 I wanted to turn the trope of a puppet taking on human qualities on its head by having a character who want to become a puppet and live in the cotton candy world of the character she had voiced, Daisy Maisy. To find out how she sets out to achieve this and the dire consequences for the actor she has become obsessed with you will have to get a copy of Dark Tales 4.
https://gravestonepress.co.uk/ebooks/b18478-dark-tales---volume-4.htm

Other News
My other news this time around concerns the wonderful online magazine Sein und Werden. The next issue with the theme of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral is about to be published. I will be reading my creepy story Of Mouse and Man at an online launch event on Saturday 1st July.
http://www.kissthewitch.co.uk/seinundwerden/sein.html

Number 5 Once Upon A Scream

	
Posted: 06 Jun 2023 at 11:09:06

Number 5 Once Upon a Scream

Once upon a Scream was an anthology theme I just had to submit something to. I love the old fairy tales, and the darker the better. The stories collected by the Grimm Brothers in Germany were full of murder, torture and mayhem and not the sugar coated version depicted by Walt Disney cartoons over a century later.

One writer who understood this was Angela Carter. Her collection of short fairy tale inspired stories, The Bloody Chamber, was published to great acclaim in 1979. These dark and gruesome tales are based on Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots and Beauty and the Beast. The three Little Red Riding Hood tales, The Werewolf, Wolf Alice and The Company of Wolves formed the basic material for the 1984 werewolf movie The Company of Wolves, directed by Neil Jordan, with Angela Lansbury as grannie.

Horror writer Stephen King's 2022 offering, the aptly titled Fairy Tale, takes the traditional fairy tale motifs and weave them into an exciting and horrific plot in which the hero passes through a portal into another realm and encounters what may be the origins of many of the traditional tales we have come to know so well. British horror writer, the late James Herbert, used a similar plot device in his 2001 novel Once.

Over the years I have had short stories with fairy story themes published in a number of anthologies. The backdrop of these stories is a failed revolution in which the ordinary people led by the trickster Till Eulenspiegel rose up against the aristocracy populated by characters such as Rapunzel and Cinderella only to find themselves under the yolk of a totalitarian regime. For my story in Once Upon a Scream I revisited this world, depicting the origins of the initial uprising through the eyes of the ugly sisters with a rather gruesome trend amongst the aristocracy for self-mutilation and lopping of limbs thrown in for good measure.

My story, along with seventeen other fairy tale related horrors can be found here.
https://gravestonepress.co.uk/ebooks/b17441-once-upon-a-scream.htm


Other News

My other news this time round sticks with the fairy tale theme and relates to a scifi story I have had included in Lost Volume II Culture Cult Press. Set against the backdrop of an alien invasion this features a post apocalyptic Bo Peep investigating the unexplained disappearance of several of her sheep.
https://www.lulu.com/shop/jay-chakravarti/lost-vol-02/paperback/product-rnme22.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Number 4 Trapped

	
Posted: 22 May 2023 at 16:06:22

Number 4 Trapped

My last blog was about the Freedom anthology and escaping against the odds.

This one is about being trapped with no escape.

The theme of this one immediately put me in mind of 2010Danny Boyle film 172 Hours, which tells the true story of hiker Aron Ralston who gets his arm trapped by a huge boulder in an isolated canyon. After trying for days and nights to release his arm he finally faced with the stark choice of dying of starvation or releasing himself through as somewhat gruesome self-amputation of his lower arm.

Trapped also put me in mind of a very claustrophobic horror movie I quite enjoyed. Devil directed by John Eric Dowdle and based on a short story by fellow movie director, M. Knight Shyamalan, in which the five main characters are trapped together in a broken down lift, and one of them may well be the Devil himself.

I also thought of the Stephen King novel from 1987, Misery, where a writer involved in a car crash is trapped and held captive against his will in a remote cabin by the number one of his novels who his severely aggrieved that he has dared to kill off her favourite character. Who can forget the horrific scene in the 1990 film version when Kathy Bates breaks both legs of James Caan with a mallet to prevent him from escaping? A role which Kathy Bates received one of the few ever Oscar wins for an actor in a horror movie.

A unique take on the notion of being trapped came in the 1993 Bill Murray film Groundhog Day, in which a news reported is forced to relive the same day and same events over and over. A stage version revival of the film is currently showing at the Old Vic in London.

It was this notion of being trapped in some sort of a time loop that provided the inspiration for my story in Trapped, The Curse of Repetitive Circles, which features a boy who is living and reliving a day of his life, replete with a model train set and an episode of the TV show Casey Jones and hints toward a train crash he has been involved in. But is the boy who he seems to be, and is he the innocent victim or not. To find out you will need to read my story which feature in Trapped along with twenty two other horrific interpretations of the theme.

https://gravestonepress.co.uk/ebooks/b17161-trapped.htm


Other News

My other news this week is the release of The Dragon Breath Chronicles a three part story in one volume on the Fiction 4 All Dragon Claw books imprint.

Dragons are under threat of extinction. Relentlessly hunter by airship captains from Tennanbrau who are stealing their breath to use as gas for the balloons.

On the day of his sister`s sixteenth birthday twelve year old Euan Redcap is kidnapped by Mrs Zachariah and the crew of the Drunken Molly.

Forced to join them in their quest to bring down the biggest prize of all, the legendary White Sow, will he ever find his way back home? The journey will take Euan from his home and family in the Low Counties to the Far Tundra and back again via the magnificent sky reaching City of Tennanbrau. Along the way he will make new friends and sworn enemies, while overcoming many hurdles and personal challenges. His fantastical journey will not on only change him as a person, but will possibly change the course of history for his entire world.

https://www.fiction4all.com/ebooks/b18435-the-dragon-breath-chronicles.htm

Number 3 - Freedom!

	
Posted: 11 May 2023 at 10:00:11

Number 3 - Freedom


When I considered the freedom theme for this anthology my thoughts turned to people whose liberty has somehow been taken from them.

The first thing that went bump in my mind was the 1963 film the Great Escape directed by John Sturges with a huge cast of well-known actors engaged in determinately tunneling their way out of a Nazi concentration camp where they have been incarcerated as prisoners of war. Despite the odds stacked up against them and frequent setbacks they were a determined bunch, constantly digging new tunnels and devising strategies to outwit and outmaneuver the prison guards in their bid for freedom.

Thinking of prisoners brought me to the aptly titled 1967 TV series The Prisoner, starring and directed by Patrick McGoohan and filmed on location at the quirky and somewhat surreal village of Portmeirion on the Welsh coastline. Its premise is that McGoogan, a former British Intelligence agent, has been kidnapped and is being held captive against his will in the mysterious village. He is designated the number Six, to which he famously states ?I am not a number. I am a free man.? Like the inmates of Stalag Luft III in The Great Escape Number Six is determined to outwit his captors. But it is not watchtowers and searchlights this prison has to contend with. It is something far more sinister. A huge white balloon, known as Rover, which emits a strange light and muffled roar as it relentlessly hunts down anyone who attempts to escape, rendering them unconscious, or, in some instances, killing them outright. I have vivid memories of being chased by this balloon through my childhood nightmares.

Something else I have vivid memories of is Papillon, the autobiographical novel written by former petty criminal Henri Charriere in 1969. It tells the story of his transportation and subsequent incarceration over a fourteen-year period in a notorious Penal Colony in French Guyana. I read this in the summer of 1977 when I was working as a chef in a holiday camp on the Kent coast. I was enthralled by the story. I remember reading about his attempts to escape by sea from Devil?s Island one night when there was a huge thunderstorm out on the English Channel and the thin walls of the chalet provided to me as staff accommodation shook and juddered as forked lightening streaked the sky. Two films have been made of the book and, in my view, both are a pretty decent interpretation of the novel. The first, from 1973, starred Paul Newman as Papillon and Dustin Hoffman as his friend and accomplice Louis Dega. The 2017 remake had Charlie Hunman (Sons of Anarchy) in Newman?s role and Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody) reprising Hoffman?s role.

For my story, Alliance of Absconders, in the Freedom anthology, I wanted to have a character who was determined to escape against all odds, and I wanted it to have a bit of a Papillon vibe about it. But in a horror story what might you be escaping from?
I recalled Papillon and his fellow inmates being transported across the Atlantic in a large prison ship. Based on that I decided that my character would be imprisoned on a barge and that barge would be traversing the River Styx on its way to Hell. I had my character and his accomplice escape the barge, but what horrors will they encounter on their flight, and, when they reach the tunnel which leads back the Gates of Hell how might they overcome death and damnation to pass back through to the land of the living? For the answer to that you will have to read the story, which can be found along with twenty other horrific stories of freedom and bids for freedom here. https://fiction4all.com/ebooks/b17717-freedom.htm

Other News
This week I have some nonfiction news. My article The Beetle and Dracula ? A Gothic Rivalry has been published in the fantastic newsletter Spooky Isles of Great Britain.
https://www.spookyisles.com/the-beetle-dracula/

Number 2 - Arachnofright

	
Posted: 27 Apr 2023 at 09:47:27

Spiders!
Love them or loath them?
They creep and crawl. They scuttle and scurry. They weave the webs that drape the dark corridors in the haunted houses of our nightmares. If you get bitten by one in a science lab you might find yourself imbued with great powers, while at the same time burdened by great responsibility.
Arachnophobes fear them. Arachnophiles are fascinated by them. One of them climbed up a waterspout only to be washed out by the rain. One of them frightened Miss Muffet away. The trickster Anansi takes the form of a spider to traverse African mythology.
Long before Michael Jackson hit on the idea of using the distinctive voice of horror actor Vincent Price as the vocal interlude for his 1983 hit Thriller rock star Alice Cooper had untilised him to deliver a very creepy monologue on spiders as the prologue to The Black Widow, a track on his 1975 solo album Welcome to my Nightmare. Price tells us that man has rules the Earth as no more than a stumbling, demented child king. And how, in his wake the Black Widow will rise as his fitting successor. Then Alice kicks in with lyrics depicting an apocalyptic future under spider rule.
Horror and SciFi film makers love spiders whether as monsters or mutants. The 70s gave us The Giant Spider Invasion and Kingdom of the Spiders. The 90s gave us Arachnophobia. The dawning of the new millennium gave us Earth versus the Spider and Eight Legged Freaks. Recent years have brought us Itsy Bitsy and The Spider in the Attic. All of which have put their own horrific spin on the spider theme.
Spiders have also cropped up in a number of blockbusters over recent years. Tom Cruise and his companions are assailed by a seething horde of camel spiders when they enter the Egyptian tomb in the 2017 remake of The Mummy. Likewise, the explorers of Skull Island in the remake of King Kong by Director Peter Jackson. Frodo and Sam do battle with the monstrous spider Shelob in Lord of the Rings, vividly depicted by Jackson in Return of the King.
My personal favourites include the alien spiders summoned via Tibetan chants in the Jon Pertwee era Doctor Who storyline The Planet of the Spiders. Also, the spider which appears in The Incredible Shrinking Man, the novel written by Richard Matheson in 1956 and made into a film starring Grant Williams in 1957. The spider in question is normal sized but the main character, Scott Carey, has been shrunk to an impossible size following an encounter at sea with a strange, toxic mist. The spider hunts and harries him, till finally he kills it with the aid of a sewing pin.
For my story in Arachnofright I turned to the notion of a giant spider. We had just come out of lockdown and the recollection of going on walks during the restriction and hardly seeing a soul. To recreate that sense of isolation I sent my character for a walk on an imaginary part the Cambridgeshire fens. But I wanted a structure by which the size of my monstrous spider could be measured. I thought of King Kong and the Empire State Building and came up with the idea of a windpump, something that looks a lot like a windmill, with sails and all, but used to pump water rather than grind flour. Now I had something suitably large on an otherwise flat and bleak landscape that a huge, bulking spider could scuttle over to terrorise my character.
If you like your monsters of the eight-legged variety my story On Ilken Fen, along with 18 others can be found here -
https://www.amazon.com/Arachnofright-Dorothy-Davies-ebook/dp/B0BFJFTY23
Other News
Spiders have venomous fangs and so do vampires. My flash fiction story For The Sake of a Carpathian Recipe is one of 50 vampire tales featured in the newly released Flash of Fangs anthology edited by Parath Sarathi Chakraborty. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128533186-the-flash-of-fangs

Number 1 Eyes

	
Posted: 18 Apr 2023 at 10:13:18

Welcome to the first in a series of blogs where I will be sharing thoughts and ideas on the themes of various Gravestone Press horror anthologies in which short stories written by myself have been published. I am going to call it Things That Go Bump In My Mind. Because, essentially, that is what it will be about.
I will also be sharing news about some of my other writing ventures outside of Gravestone Press.
A bit about myself. I am a member of the Clockhouse London group of genre writers. In addition to Gravestone Press I have had numerous short stories published in magazines and anthologies. My stories have also been featured at Liars League London events and read at other live events such as Solstice Shorts and Virtual Futures. My near future dystopian novella HUSks is currently on release. https://www.indienovella.co.uk/product-page/husks-david-turnbull and his collection of stories of 100 words or less ?One Hundred Predictions? is available from Fiction4All https://fiction4all.com/ebooks/b18236-one-hundred-predictions.htm
For my first blog I have decided to talk about Eyes, the theme of the Gravestone Press anthology of the same name first published in March 2022.
Our fascination with eyes has been with us since ancient times.
In Egyptian mythology The Eye of Horus was revered as a symbol of protection and prosperity. In Greek legends Perseus encounters three witches who share a single eye and pass it around in turns. Later he does battle with Medusa, the snake headed Gorgon, who has the supernatural ability to turn people into stone if they so much as look into her monstrous eyes. In the Norse legends Odin gouges out one of his eyes and drops it into a mystical well in exchange for supreme knowledge.
When I first read the Graveyard Press submission call out for Eyes my thoughts immediately turned to The Eyes of Laura Mars, a 1978 supernatural thriller starring Faye Dunaway and written by John Carpenter. The plot concerns fashion photographer Laura Mars who begins to have horrific real time visions seen through the eyes of a serial killer as he brutally murders his victims.
I remember seeing this in one of the cinemas in Leicester Square. I was working as a chef back then and when I was on a split shift, I would often go to the cinema to pass the time between lunch and evening service. Many of the films I came to love from the late 70s and early 80s where first seen by me in the little afternoon gaps that I had to fill in.
As a bit of an aside, producer, Jon Peters, was dating Barbra Streisand at the time, and wanted her to take the lead role. She turned it down on the grounds that the plot was too kinky for her. I love Streisand, but I think Faye Dunaway was a much better fit for the role than she would have been.
Thinking about movies featuring eyes my thoughts next turned a classic French horror movie from 1960. Eyes without a Face, or Les Yeus Sans Visage to give it its original French title. Based on the novel of the same name by Jean Redon the plot concerns a plastic surgeon whose daughter is forced to wear a mask because of an accident which has grotesquely disfigured her face, leaving only her eyes as her remaining recognizable feature. His attempts to rectify this involve grafting the flesh stolen from another girl?s face onto the face of his unfortunate daughter, something which was said to have caused the board of censors a lot of consternation.
I think I would probably have seen the English language dubbed version of this in the early 70s under its American release title of The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. I used to attend a youth club on the housing estate where I grew up. Each Friday there would be a disco where the hall would resound to the glam rock hits of the day. But, to avoid complaints from the residents of the houses around the club, the disco would end at 10.30pm prompt. I have vivid memories of rushing home though the estate in order to be seated in front of the TV in time for the Friday night horror film which went out at 11pm and which became my introduction to all of the fantastic Universal and Hammer horror classics.
That led my stream of consciousness to Dracula movies and how both Bella Lugosi and Christopher Lee would use their eyes to great effect, the camera panning in on them as they sought to bring their next intended victim under their hypnotic power. This, in turn, led me to recall a TV series I used to watch with my son and daughter. The very scary and atmospheric Demon Headmaster. The BBC series was based on the books by Gillian Cross and starred Terence Hardiman in the title role. The Demon Headmaster is a classic evil supervillain who plans to take over the world and establish a new order through the power of hypnosis. He wears tinted glasses to hide his piercing green eyes. These glasses are removed to great dramatic effect whenever it is his intention to bring someone under his hypnotic influence.
I had all these ideas and recollections swimming around in my head, when one night, walking home from Hither Green Station, I encountered a fox. The Borough of Lewisham, where I live, has a surprising abundance of wildlife, including squirrels and parakeets, as well as a huge population of urban foxes. It?s not unusual to encounter one or more cantering brazenly along the streets after dark.
This one was resting on its haunches, staring at me from the far end of the street as I headed toward my house. Its eyes glowed eerily as it watched my approach. It didn?t budge so much as an inch until I was almost level with it. This set me thinking about how eyes glowing like cinders in the dark are a staple trope in horror fiction, often attributed to demons and werewolves and such.
I was curious as to why nocturnal animals such as foxes and cats have eyes that glow in the dark. A little bit of research introduced me to Tapetum Lucidum, the term used to describe a layer of optical tissue which reflects visible light back through the retina, enabling the creature to benefit from superior night vision.
That gave me a title to work with. From there I developed a folk horror story about a village with residents whose eyes have hereditary Tapetum Lucidum, as well as the ability to transform themselves into foxes, and how a somewhat permissive travelling salesman gets his comeuppance after spending the night there.
I submitted this to Dorothy Davies, the editor of the Graveyard Press anthology series, and I am proud to say that it is now in print alongside twenty other deliciously gruesome and scary stories all about Eyes.
Copies can be purchase on this link https://gravestonepress.co.uk/ebooks/b17536-eyes.htm
Other News
If you are a fan of folk horror you can read or listen to a reading of my story The Waltzing of Matilda, inspired by the well-known Australian folk song Waltzing Matilda on the link below.
https://thecasket.co.uk/story/the-waltzing-of-matilda/