Catching Up

I've had a couple of people—who aren't even related to me—ask recently if I was going to be posting something to my blog soon, which is gratifying, even as it made me realise that I really didn't know what to write about, specifically ('Calls herself a writer,' I hear you grumble). The truth is that while I did manage to write a daily diary entry every day for more years than I care to remember, most of what goes into a diary isn't (be honest) what the world at large wants to read about ('Got up; v. cold this morning. Bertie brought me two cat toys and a napkin during the night. Cute. Five minutes scraping the ice off the van; why can't someone invent an ice scraper that actually works? Four more story submissions by e-mail today, one from someone who ignored the guidelines about sending an attachment, and pasted it into the e-mail. How does someone expect to be taken seriously as a writer when he can't follow a simple instruction? Coffee grinder seems to have packed it in; back to the old one. Thank goodness I didn't throw it away.' etc., etc.).

On the writing front, I've finished proofing my collection Northwest Passages, which is on target to be published this October by Prime Books. It was a rather odd experience, to sit down and read ten of my stories back to back; I noticed certain preoccupations and themes emerging in a way that they don't when you consider a story in isolation. However, I'm pleased with the diversity of the tales, and think that they hang together as a whole, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the two new stories—'Out and Back' and 'After'—stand up well with the others. 'Out and Back' was inspired by a website that was brought to my attention by my cousin Sean Lavery, who sends me links to weird and wonderful websites. One was to an abandoned amusement park—Chippewa Lake Park—in Ohio, and the pictures on the site immediately sparked my imagination. The park ran for a century, between 1878 and 1978; it was abandoned that year, and the midway rides were left in situ to rot away. Some time ago on this blog I wrote about the Pacific National Exhibition ('All the Fun of the Fair') and my annual trip there, as a child, with my father and brother. I loved the PNE, and to see a fun fair left the way Chippewa Park was left tore at my heart, and I knew I had to write about it somehow. Click here to see the pictures that inspired the story (scroll down for the pictures, and click on them to enlarge). Sadly, I saw on another site that some of the buildings—notably the Coaster station and the Bumper Cars building—have deteriorated even further, and the Bumper Cars building has now collapsed completely.

The other new story in the collection, 'After', is inspired by the Kent murder case of 1860, which shocked and fascinated Victorian England in equal measures: shocked because of the age of the victim and the ferocity of the crime (Francis Saville Kent, not quite four, was found dead with his throat cut, so viciously that the head was nearly severed from the body), and fascinated because the murder remained unsolved for five years, during which time the details of Kent household—which would be called dysfunctional today—were laid bare for all to see. I was familiar with the main facts of the Kent case because of the influence it had on Victorian detective fiction (Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon all drew on details of the case in their fiction), but last summer read Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, a book-length study of the case (which subsequently won the prestigious Samuel Johnson Award for non-fiction). Summerscale quotes extensively from a number of contemporary documents, and two statements attributed to Francis's half-sister Constance, sixteen at the time of the murder, intrigued me, as did the character of Constance herself. It was, in many ways, a very enjoyable story to write, told as it is in very Victorian language, yet owing a tremendous debt to James Hogg's wonderful The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a favourite novel of mine. I wrote it during two very hot weeks in July of 2008, and in the course of researching what the church service would have been the Sunday before the murder—these things are very carefully laid out in The Book of Common Prayer—I came across a fact which, to my mind, has tremendous bearing on the events of a week later, but which has not, so far as I know, been commented on before. It was a hot Saturday morning when I stumbled on this discovery, and I confess I shivered when the full implications of it sank in. If you want to know more, you shall have to read the story. . . .

I have a few irons in the fire, story-wise; the only other news to report is that my story 'Endless Night', which first appeared in Exotic Gothic 2 (and which will be in Northwest Passages), has been chosen for inclusion in By Blood We Live, a reprint anthology of vampire stories being published by Night Shade Books in August 2009. I sent the story off for consideration last July, and it was a very pleasant surprise to get the good news from John Joseph Adams yesterday.

I recently wrote an introduction to The Light of the World and Other Stories by Peter Bell, to be published later this year by Ex Occidente Press. We've been very pleased to publish several of Peter's fine tales over the years, and I was honoured when he asked me to write the introduction for his first collection. Anyone who enjoys suspenseful, elegant, and assured tales of the supernatural in which the tension builds gradually but inexorably will want to get a copy of Peter's book.

Last but not least, Christopher and I have finished our introduction to a new Barnes & Noble reprint of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Tag team writing is an interesting sport; not for everyone, I suspect, but we've come up with a system that works for us, and it was enjoyable to be immersed once more in that world where it is always 1895, and the game is perpetually afoot. Would that our own world were so captivating.