Thank you so much!
to anyone who has bought my short story collection, Corpse Road Blues: an exploration of contemporary hauntings.
to anyone waiting for the paperback realease in April.
to anyone who has bought any of the books that feature my short stories.
and if you’ve reached out to let me know how much you liked Corpse Road Blues or if you left a review, please know that you’ve helped me continue to write.
Aglaope’s Song is Silence Now is the last story in my collection, Corpse Road Blues: an exploration of contemporary hauntings (pub. Demain Publishing). The ebook is out now, and thank you very much to those who have already bought the book; I do hope you’ve enjoyed it. If you’re holding on for the paperback, we’re looking at April. A publication date will be shared when we know one, so keep an eye on the blog, or on mine and Demain Publishing’s socials, for news. Hopefully, I’ll be putting together a few extras in time for that date as well.
So, Aglaope’s Song is Silence Now. What a ghastly tale!
Aglaope is one of the Sirens in Greek mythology. Originally, the sirens represented the dangers of the sea, but have since become symbolic of the supposed dangers of lust and temptation – and the ‘female temptress’.
When the #MeToo movement went viral, it highlighted the shocking extent of sexual harassment in society. I knew I wanted to incorporate this into a story, possibly using the Siren myth somehow, but wasn’t sure where to start.
It took another unrelated event – overhearing a work colleague recalling an incident he’d experienced – for Aglaope’s Song… to make it onto the page. After driving home from work late one evening, my work colleague turned off the engine and remained in their car, taking a moment to gather their thoughts and process the events of the day before going into the house to greet their partner and children. About five minutes in, they noticed a man walking along the residential street toward him, checking each car door as he passed. After some moments had passed, enough to be confident of the stranger’s intentions, my colleague made to confront the man, but as soon as they exited the car the man spotted them and ran off. Somewhat surprisingly, the main protagonist in Aglaope’s Song is Silence Now is based on that opportunist thief skulking in the shadows. What does the night and a Siren offer this man?
Find out in Corpse Road Blues.
As always, thanks for reading.
Nash
The penultimate story in Corpse Road Blues from Demain Publishing is a story of contrasts. Within This House uses a combination of diary form and present tense narration to create a more traditional ghost story which I used with a dystopian setting. I also tried to combine real-life horror – both alluded to and on the page – with supernatural horrors.
On her website, horror writer Sarah Budd (author of Enter the Darkness, pub. Brigids Gate Press), wrote that “to really scare your readers, you need to write about your own fears”. Like many, one of mine is the continually de-stabilising world (both politically and environmentally) that our children will inherit. A fear Within This House explores. The story is a response to the present political landscape in my country, in particular, the hostile environment that exists, and sadly, shows no signs of abating. Writing fiction can be a cathartic experience. If I can take you, the reader, along for the ride, so much the better.
Once again, if you’d like to read Within this House, and the other stories, Corpse Road Blues is available here.
Let’s climb to the top of Midwinter Hill.
In the book, The Hidden Life of Trees (pub. Greystone Books, 2015), Peter Wohlleben talks about how trees are connected to one another: that beeches for instance “are capable of friendship and go so far as to feed each other”; trees become friends that “communicate by means of olfactory, visual, and electrical signals”, and “warn each other using chemical signals sent through the fungal networks around their root tips.” Despite being an enthralling read, this didn’t really surprise me – after all, the entirety of the natural world is interconnected – but with every page I turned, something stirred in the rich soil of my imagination.
By writing these short introductions, it struck me how there’s usually at least two unrelated things that unite to create my stories. For instance, while reading Wohlleben’s book, I overheard a work colleague discuss his plans for the coming Christmas. His mother had passed away that year, and, as she had loved the holiday so much, the family were keen that she still took part in that year’s celebrations. They agreed that they would decorate her grave with a Christmas tree.
Before I knew it, On Midwinter Hill was drafted. Since then, the story has had multiple title changes, been a tale told in reverse, then finally the version found in the book.
If you’d like to read it, and the other stories, you can buy Corpse Road Blues here.
Have you bought Corpse Road Blues yet? If you have and enjoyed it then consider leaving a review somewhere, they really do help authors.
If you’ve stayed with me thus far, thank you so much! It means a lot. We’re now past the halfway mark, and are peering over the edge toward the inevitable end, just like Joel in Love Notes from the Damned, the ninth story in the collection.
Have you ever been home alone at night and felt like someone was watching you? The feeling so vivid, so visceral, it gives you gooseflesh? Maybe something odd happens, you spot an item in an unusual place, and for the life of you, you’re unable to remember moving it there. Or you hear a noise, maybe heavy footsteps in the loft space above your head—there it is again! Things that, at the time, you might dismiss with logic, and a wave of your hand. But these explanations you tell yourself aren’t neat. I mean, you’re not an expert so you don’t know for sure. Doubt niggles at the back of your head. Love Notes from the Damned is about frightening yourself silly.
Are you still brave enough to buy Corpse Road Blues?
The next story in Corpse Road Blues, my short fiction collection from Demain Publishing that explores what it means to be haunted, is We Are Gathered. It was originally written for the North Bristol Writers’ story-telling evening held at the Anglican chapel at Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol. The story is centred around a wedding, where the narrator guides the reader through the events of that day.
One thing that’s on my wish list – probably on the wish list of every horror writer – is to come up with a story that, not only stays with the reader long after reading, but gives them chills whenever they think about it. This was the inspiration behind We Are Gathered. And for me, ghostly tales have the very real potential to do this, much more so I think than tropes like vampires and werewolves. We’re superstitious as a species, a lot of us wish to believe – or we hope that – there is something else after death, and ghosts deliver that evidence.
The piece was devised during a trip my partner and I took to Arnos Vale – a sort of reconnaissance mission – to check out the vibe of the place. As we sat amongst the headstones and crypts spying on the chapel and the other visitors, We Are Gathered crept from the shadows into life.
Again, if you’d like to read the story, you can buy Corpse Road Blues here.
It’s PUBLICATION DAY!
and the wraiths are loose.
This piece has had a few reincarnations. First it was known as Leave the Living Alone, a humorous tale that boasted a lean two thousand, six hundred words. After a rewrite a further three thousand words were added. Another rewrite slashed two thousand off the word count, and provided it with a new name: Elsie and the Psychopomp. One more rewrite, and another trim, and I had the fourth story now in Corpse Road Blues from Demain Publishing. Please welcome the newly retitled, What the Dead Fear.
The antagonist’s viewpoint has always intrigued me. What makes the monster or the ghost tick? What drives them? Getting into their heads and knowing their story is vital, even if the writer doesn’t utilise that knowledge. What the Dead Fear is all about the ghost’s story, not necessarily the antogonist.
For a long time, I had no plot, only an image of a character: that of the ghost of a young boy, brushing his teeth, toothpaste spilt on his too-tight Marvel pyjamas. Then I started writing of his escapades in the family home. I then pieced together another character using what I knew about my fortune-telling grandmother.
What the Dead Fear did not come easily. Like its characters, it’s a story with a troubled past, a fiction that was sweated and toiled over, hammered and bullied in a wordsmith’s furnace. For that, it remains a dear friend.
If you’d like to read the story, you can buy Corpse Road Blues here.
Thanks for coming back. And if you’ve just joined us, welcome. Okay, day 14, and it’s the turn of Addressing the Heart, the second story in my collection, Corpse Road Blues, due for publication on the 28th February from Demain Publishing.
The spark that gave Addressing the Heart life was a conversation with a friend. We got to talking about mobile phones over at their place one evening. At the time, I was one of the few who hadn’t caught up with the technology, sticking with an old Nokia that was only good for texting and calling—just what I needed it for. My friend and his partner were trying to convince me otherwise by raving about the latest model from a popular brand. With some excitement, they mentioned that they were able to track each other on their new phones. The idea that both wanted to track their partners, and were indeed happy to be tracked, disturbed me enough to scratch black ink onto paper.
Of course, Addressing the Heart became much larger than a story about phone tracking. Over the years, I’ve flirted with the idea of possession, demonic or otherwise, in my work, and I saw that this story – through the process of drafting – lent itself to that topic. Here, I’ve hopefully approached spirit possession from a less used angle.
Addressing the Heart is a tale about letting go, love, and humanity, and a definite favourite with my beta readers.
If you’d like to read the story, you can pre-order Corpse Road Blues here.
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.
As 2019 comes to a close, I’d like to thank all my readers for taking a chance and reading my fiction, I hope it was worth it. I’d also like … Continue reading Publication Review 2019
Eric Nash 