Corpse Road Blues is my short fiction collection that’s due for publication on the 28th of February from Demain Publishing. The fifteen stories in the book look at what it means to be haunted; what drives an apparition to cling to this earth, to those still living; is there a way to be rid of a tortured soul, and is that what we really wish for?

Leading up to the release of Corpse Road Blues and beyond, I’ll be posting a series of blog posts revealing the inspiration behind each story. Welcome to the countdown, it’s a pleasure to have your company.

When the Sun Shines is the first story in the collection, and remains one of my personal favorites.

The first story I ever published was an epistolary piece about a disappearance. The magazine that published it was the product of one woman working all the hours to put together a bunch of weird stories, every month (I think), for readers of speculative fiction. I was nineteen at the time, and I don’t have my contributor’s copy anymore, nor do I remember the title of that magazine or the story, but I do know that the work was about a portal in a pond. I always wanted to explore this idea further. I just didn’t realise it would take another thirty years.

There’s something about finding the peculiar and the horror in the ordinary that appeals to me, and a lot of my fiction deals with this. The portal I imagined for When the Sun Shines took the shape of that transient body of water: the puddle. I love how puddles appear in liminal places like pavements and roads and abandoned sites, the middle of fields after a heavy storm. They are often gloomy, but can be uplifting, too. They invite the child in everyone to splish and splash in their shallow bodies. I’m also delighted by the word itself, pud-dle. Puddle. It sounds like a resigned, self-effacing state of mind, or a humorous mess. Certainly not murderous.

That had me thinking. Soon I picked a particular puddle, then added a chunk of reality that has hopefully transformed the story into a gut-wrenching tale of grief, sibling rivalry, and ultimately, acceptance.

If you’d like to read When the Sun Shines, you can pre-order Corpse Road Blues here.