Extend your lobes and indulge yourself, dearest listener, for today we return to that classic weird fiction author, William Hope Hodgson, and the world of audio, with a host of clickable links. Yes, The Voice of Horror returns! Many moons ago, we covered some of the recordings of WHH’s work, but that post is rather out of date now. So we thought we’d head there afresh, and at the same time include a short tribute to Hope Hodgson kindly provided by writer S L Edwards, thus extending the range of pieces which we published during last year’s centennial of WHH’s death.

Whilst we’re updating on WHH matters, we can add that the British Library will soon be publishing a collection of Hope Hodgson’s fiction, edited by Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University and a founder member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He tells us that the collection is intended as a ‘best of’ intro for new readers who may never have heard of Hodgson. We hope to interview Xavier later this year in order to discuss Hope Hodgson, Gothic fiction and supernatural literature in general.

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A related audio experience we must mention as well today is this album by Jon Mueller, originally released on CD as accompaniment to the book The House on the Borderland by Hope Hodgson, published by Swan River Press, Dublin, 2018. The album can be purchased as a digital download here:

https://rhythmplex.bandcamp.com/album/the-house-on-the-borderland

And at time of writing, it looks like there are a few copies left of that printing of The House on the Borderland. This was published in an edition of 300 signed copies and 50 unsigned, which contains:

• “Fear of a Porous Border: William Hope Hodgson’s Liminal Masterpiece” by Alan Moore
• “The House on the Borderland” by William Hope Hodgson
• “An Aberrant Afterword: Blowing Dust in the House of Incest” by Iain Sinclair

Swan River Press productions are always excellent, so grab them while you can.

http://swanriverpress.ie/title_borderland.html

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THE VOICE OF HORROR

Here we go with some links to audio recordings currently available, with the hope that the links work in most regions across the globe. It’s a varied pick, with very varied voices, and we’ve indicated the general origin of the narrator in each case.

We commence with an unusual one, which we haven’t heard recorded before. This is ‘The Seahorses’, from Hope Hodgson’s collection Men of the Deep Waters, (British/Irish narrator)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVI0OdQyyl8

To go to the other extreme, why not spend a week driving yourself mad by listening to the entire The Night Land, with all its fantastical imagery and all its dubious archaisms. This is a straight reading of The Night Land from Audiobooks Unleashed, some eighteen hours worth! (US narrator)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4eNRcXbYpk

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Less time-consuming, we can suggest some more shorter pieces, such as those recorded by HorrorBabble, in association with Rue Morgue, which include a series of Carnacki the Ghost Finder tales, narrated by Ian Gordon (British narrator):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP9_W6Xtyp4

And one of Hope Hodgson’s better known non-Carnacki tales, ‘The Voice in the Night’, from the same people (British narrator):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASIfPcyTAH0

Or you could go for ‘A Tropical Horror’, from By the Fireside (British narrator with regional accent)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVxpr3GlpX8

‘Captain Dan Danblasten’, not horror, is a Tales from the Potts House podcast (also has a podcast of ‘The Voice in the Night’):

http://thepottshouse.org/pottscasts/hodgecast/Captain%20Dan%20Danblasten.mp3

You can hear the short story ‘Inhabitants of the Middle Islet’… but not in English, only in French, as far as we can determine. We quite enjoyed it, but then we only understood about half of it. Fluent French speakers may be able to report back to greydogtales on its quality.

http://www.litteratureaudio.org/mp3/William_Hope_Hodgson_-_Les_Habitants_de_l_ile_du_milieu.mp3

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Of the more substantial works (though none so substantial as The Night Land), there are some nice audio versions. Jim Norton’s House on the Borderland, in four parts, is excellent (British narrator):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frg7ZLFVMQM&t=3s

The Boats of the Glen Carrig (British narrator with regional accent):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6rg7SO-84g

And Librivox’s The Ghost Pirates (US narrator):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qey9YfCjxBU

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Returning to Carnacki the Ghost Finder, these classic occult detective stories have, as you might expect, been recorded often. In addition to the HorrorBabble versions mentioned above, the most impressive arrival since we last visited is the magnificent Big Finish production of six Carnacki tales. If you are a fan of the Ghost Finder, this production is an absolute must-have, with British actor Dan Starkey proving a superb, definitive voice for our hero. Outstanding.

https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/carnacki—the-ghost-finder-1416

We interviewed Scott Handcock, the producer, here:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/carnacki-lives/

And we talked to the talented Dan Starkey himself here:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/doctor-who-and-the-detective-its-the-starkey-stratagem/

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The Big Finish set did not, alas, cover Hope Hodgson’s longest Carnacki tale, one which take the Ghost Finder deep into the realm of weird fiction, ‘The Hog’. However, Otis Jiry’s recording of ‘The Hog’ (US Narrator) can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ipm8bv-fCM&list=PLSKVMK38zV9hu8Zx6OMR2GKSccYjdszOW

Carnacki is still very much alive in fiction, kept sleuthing through the stories of authors such as Willie Meikle, Brandon Barrows, Joshua M Reynolds, Chico Kidd and a number of others – and through certain entries in John Linwood Grant’s own series Tales of the Last Edwardian.

Morgan Scorpion’s recording of ‘The Hellfire Mirror’, a new Carnacki adventure by Willie Meikle, from his collection Carnacki: Heaven and Hell (British narrator) is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9co2iqJDTO0

And Tales to Terrify recorded ‘The Horse of the Invisible’ paired with Meikle’s ‘Treason and Plot’. The host is the late Larry Santoro, who gives a detailed introduction to Hodgson (before you ask, the WHH death details given are corrected on the site) and the narration is by Robert Neufeld (US narrator)

http://talestoterrify.com/tales-to-terrify-show-no-47-william-hope-hodgson-and-william-meikle/

Finally for our audio sampling, one for our Spanish and South American friends – a Spanish language version of The House on the Borderland:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_JS4wxWRc8

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Foremost amongst those individuals and presses who have not only kept WHH in the limelight, but championed the Hodgsonian Revival, are, of course, Sam Gafford and his Ulthar Press.

We will be saying more about Ulthar’s expanding range of publications soon. We had the pleasure of interviewing Sam on Hope Hodgson last year, as well as hosting his poignant story about WHH’s last days, ‘The Land of Lonesomeness’, which no Hodgsonian should miss:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/the-land-of-lonesomeness/

You can find more out about Ulthar here:

https://ultharpress.com/

From one veteran and well-established Sam to an up-and-coming one, to end today’s feast, here’s that short tribute to WHH we promised – yes, it should have gone up in 2018, but Time whipped us into the New Year before we could get it done…

Voices in the Night and Other Stray Songs

by S. L. Edwards

Like many other readers, I came to Hodgson by way of Lovecraft. This isn’t entirely fair to Mr. Hodgson, who wrote earlier than Lovecraft and by all accounts established his own style and thoughts regarding weird fiction independent of his peers. Like many writers, Hodgson put himself into his characters. Unlike Blackwood or Machen, the characters in Hodgson’s fiction are kinetic doers. They pack meaningful punches, interacting with their world as adventurers and victims alike.

I have no doubt there is plenty to be said of Carnacki. Carnacki is unquestionably Hogdson’s most widely known contribution to weird fiction, no doubt a part of the spiritualist zeitgeist that also bred Dr. John Silence. The House on the Borderlands likewise sets Hodgson apart. Like Blackwood and Machen, the story revolves around a revelation, and what begins seeming as a haunted house story becomes cracked wide open. For me, the most terrifying moment of Borderlands comes as time passes on, as the narrator is made to watch the world freeze and is unable to do more than sit back and passively fade to darkness. I can think of no more terrible immortality. The story stands out as the most in dialog with other weird fiction writers, notably catching the attention of Lovecraft and no doubt influencing his own depictions of otherworldly horrors.

However, the story which stands out to me is ‘The Voice in the Night.’ Here we get a view of autobiography, no doubt informed by Hodgson’s background as a sailor. Through the fog of a sea-salt night, a voice explains to sailors that though he needs help, he cannot come aboard their ship. For those of you who haven’t read the story, I won’t go any further, but I will say that it reminds me of Clark Ashton Smith and other American weird authors dealing with the concept of plague. The characters regret their inability to help the voice, and again we see that these are so-called “men of action,” men who want to reach out and help the world much like Hodgson himself.

Hodgson, while a writer, was no man of letters. He was a fighter, a sailor and (if I understand correctly) even provided boxing lessons at one point in his life. Perhaps this why he could not stand by as WWI spread on, and why in turn died at 40 as the war began reaching an unsustainable status quo. Like too many of his peers, he died younger and sooner than expected, and we can only speculate the sort of way that his final experiences in the war would have shaped his fiction. Would he have maintained a presence in “Weird Fiction,” or would he follow other veterans-turned-writers such as Vasily Grossman and Hemingway, turning to more philosophic and literary themes mostly devoid of the supernatural? I would like to think some amalgam of both, that he could have been content writing ghost and war stories in the sort of safety provided be a glass window to an English garden. But knowing Hodgson, the man of action, such an end seems just as unlikely as a ghostly hog.

As a voice in the night.

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S L Edwards is an American weird fiction writer whose first collection Whiskey and other Unusual Ghosts is due out Summer 2019 from Gehenna and Hinnom. You can read the original Hope Hodgson story ‘The Voice in the Night’ in a number of places, such as here:

The Voice in the Night

END-NOTE: Some might call Hope Hodgson a minority interest, so we were surprised that one of our most popular articles last year was our reprint of an unusual find – a long magazine piece on WHH from 1977, by veteran author and historian Peter Berresford Ellis (aka Peter Tremayne), reproduced with his permission. Which was nice. http://greydogtales.com/blog/william-hope-hodgson-essex-born-master-horror/

As the pitches for the forthcoming Belanger Books anthology ‘Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives’ roll in, we offer a warped coming together of two masters of their craft, and some dreadful cheap humour, as usual. We point out that the strangest collaborations are chronologically feasible, and we mention a brand new Holmes book due out soon, plus an open call for Holmes tales…

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EGYPT, 1893: WHEN TITANS MEET

Holmes stepped off the almost empty felucca, and drew the warm, heavy Luxor air into his flaring nostrils. Despite the bustle at other jetties, here there was only a single figure besides himself – a small, slightly rotund young man, who had clearly been waiting for him.

“M’sieur Holmes?”

The Great Detective inclined his head slightly, and the young man smiled with relief.

“M’sieur, I am sent by the Sûreté de l’État, on behalf of the Belgian ambassador in Cairo. I have certain papers for you, of the gravest–”

Holmes would have placed the man’s accent as that of peasant stock, probably from French-speaking Wallonia in the south, but the clothes were immaculate, despite the heat and dust – a touch affected, even.

“No doubt, no doubt. What is your name, sir?”

“Agatha, sir. My parents were too poor to afford a boy’s name at the time. Agatha van Wimsey, of the Antwerp van Wimseys.”

Holmes felt an icy touch upon his neck. It seemed that despite all sense and logic, Watson’s premonition of an appalling pastiche was indeed coming to pass. Taking a Reichenbach fall had not saved him; neither the hastily arranged operation on Holmes’ hiatus, nor his disguise as an elderly Persian brush-salesman, had averted the Hand of Fate…

He would face this horror, though, and trust to his keen mind, as ever. He rounded on the little Belgian official.

“You are currently charged by the Sûreté with an investigation into the death of a Bohemian at a builder’s house not far from Bruges, but were posted to Egypt by mistake, and had the most dreadful sea journey. You own a cat called Marple, you plan to grow a small, neatly-waxed moustache, and quite fancy a career as a refugee. When not about your police work, you divide your time between assessing the relative size of soft-boiled eggs, knitting cardigans, and reading travel brochures for Hastings.”

The Belgian looked shocked. “But yes, M’sieur! You are correct in all particulars”

Holmes sighed, knowing that one last act had to be played out. He glanced towards the towering stone pillars of the nearest temple, and considered a more recent addition in their shadow – a row of what might be mean, windowless dwellings, constructed of dull river mud dried hard in the sun.

“Tell me, then, if this must be. What is the purpose of those small buildings?”

The Belgian raised both eyebrows. “Why, M’sieur, did you not know? They are the famous little grey cells…”

Somewhere in the distance, atop a magnificent sand dune, a camel was sick into a fellahin’s hat.

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For those who like to explore this sort of thing, Sherlock Holmes would have been in his late thirties in 1893, at the time of his absence from Britain and the Great Hiatus; Hercule Poirot would have been in his late twenties by the most common reckonings.

The date of Poirot’s birth is speculation, though, and does vary between 1864 and 1884 – that latter end would, of course, make it unlikely that Poirot would have had a chance to meet the Great Detective professionally until the early Edwardian period, when Holmes was contemplating retirement. But if there were only ten years between them, what curious events might have occurred?

Crime writer Julian Symons considered this topic, and wrote a short story ‘Did Sherlock Holmes meet Hercule’, published as a limited edition in 1987.

A brief, far more serious discussion of Holmes and Poirot can be found here at Dennis Simanaitis’ site:

https://simanaitissays.com/2015/08/29/did-poirot-ever-meet-holmes/

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Adventures in the Realms of Steampunk

And live today is the Kickstarter campaign for Belanger’s latest two volume anthology Sherlock Holmes: Adventures in the Realms of Steampunk – a phantasmagorical range of steampunk-flavoured tales, which includes my ONLY even vaguely steampunk story ever, concerning murder in the Anglo-Egyptian Empire, almost 12,000 words…

“Inspector St John Ahmed Faroukh was not greatly popular with his superior officers in the Hammersmith Division. He had been called many things in London – a mere nuss-Arab, neither one thing nor another; a Gypti mongrel, and a Cairo dog. He didn’t mind that one – the lean, tenacious creatures of his birthplace were better adapted to survival than some of the pampered beasts of England…”

Table of Contents

The Silver Swan by Cara Fox (The Strange Case of Doctor Magorian )

The Adventure of the Pneumatic Box by Robert Perret (For King and Country)

The Adventure of the Portable Exo-Lung by GC Rosenquist (Sherlock Holmes: The Pearl of Death and Other Early Stories)

The Body at the Ritz by Stephen Herczeg (Sherlock Holmes: Adventures in the Realms of H.G. Wells Volume 1)

The Hounds of Anuket by John Linwood Grant (Occult Detective Quarterly)

Treasure of the Dragon by Thomas Fortenberry (An Improbable Truth: The Paranormal Adventures of Sherlock Holmes)

Sherlock Holmes and the Clockwork Count by Benjamin Langley (Dead Branches)

The Adventure of the Purloined Piston Valve by L.S. Reinholt & Minerva Cerridwen (The Dragon of Ynys )

The Deductive Man by Paul Hiscock (Under the Weather)

The Adventure of the Tiger’s Topaz by Derrick Belanger (Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Primal Man)

Sherlock Holmes and the Moongate Sabotage by Derek Nason (Sherlock Holmes: Adventures in the Realms of H.G. Wells Vol. 2 )

The Adventure of the Brompton Mausoleum by Paula Hammond (Alternative Truths)

A Second Case of Identity by S. Subramanian (Airship 27: Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective)

Doctor Bear, I Presume! by Harry DeMaio (The Casebooks of Octavius Bear)

You can back the modest campaign here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1306925656/sherlock-holmes-adventures-in-the-realms-of-steamp

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Get Writing: Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives

This anthology, edited by John Linwood Grant, is accepting story pitches up to 15^th March 2019, so plenty of time to get your ideas in. Full guidelines, details of pay and length etc, can be found here:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/sherlock-holmes-and-the-occult-detectives-pt-2/

It is Valentine’s Day, dear listener, and so on this special day, we explain the true meaning of the event, and share once more the delights of the little village of St Botolph-in-the-Wolds, where ‘imbecile’ is not an insult, but a mark of respect and high social status.

Below we offer three – yes, THREE – snippets on the theme of love, including a brand new Mr Bubbles story in the middle, and a sliver of Bottles the lurcher with which to finish. Astonishing, yes? If you learned how we did it, we would have to kill you. If we could be bothered…

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PRELUDE: MR BUBBLES IN LOVE

A short, heart-warming tale of romance

 

No one was actually dead. The police and ambulance crews had dragged the badly-injured walking party well away from the scene of crime, and were in the process of counting limbs, many of which were still attached. Thick spatters of blood, now congealing under the midday sun, decorated the hedgerows; someone’s ear hung off a yew tree. It had a nice ear-ring in it – the ear, not the tree.

“It’s a public footpath,” said Sandra, frowning as she fished a torn woolly hat out of the horse trough. The hat, almost bitten through, had an animal welfare badge on it. Sandra wondered if that was what writers called irony.

Mr Bubbles moved his weight uneasily from hoof to hoof.

“They looked at my turnip.” A pitch-black fire danced in the pony’s great eyes.

“They were passing by! They’re on a walking tour.” She noticed two policewoman trying to construct temporary stretchers out of runner-bean poles. “Well, they were on a walking tour.”

The pony glared at the nearest conscious rambler, and rolled a large, mottled root vegetable lovingly back into the shade of the barn. He sighed, admiring the plump curves of the vegetable’s sides, the almost coy blush of purple near the top…

“MY turnip,” muttered Mr Bubbles.

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MAIN MOVEMENT: THE CARROT WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

A new tale of equine eccentricities

 

Sandra’s cousin Mary had come to stay once more, and the farmhouse above St Botolph’s was a cheerful hive of activity. Except with no bees, or honey, or waxy cells from which small, blind grubs were waiting to emerge. So nothing like a hive, really. Sandra’s mother was unconscious under the large pine table, a consequence of confusing cough sweets with sheep tranquillisers, but the two teenagers had plenty to keep them occupied…

“Right, I think I’ve got it,” said Mary, putting down his utterly useless child-safe scissors, borrowed from St Botolph’s Mixed Infants, “A Roman Emperor fell out with a Christian priest over theology, and had the chap beaten to death and beheaded, as a warning to people who disagreed with Rome’s policies on ecumenical matters.

“Also, before he died, the priest wrote a letter to a lot of people’s daughters, saying that he might not be able to go for that drink after all, but it was nothing personal. And that’s how we ended up with Valentine’s Day.”

“Exactly,” said Sandra, trying to remove a bottle of glue from one of the less competent sheep which were milling round the farmhouse kitchen. “And so we send heart-shaped cards to those we love on February the Fourteenth each year. That one simple act completely makes up for the three hundred and sixty four days when we didn’t pay enough attention to them, do anything useful, or remember to iron the cat.”

“Like going to confession just after hacking seventeen people to death with a chainsaw, and saying five Hail Marys to make up for it?”

Sandra nodded. “The organised Church is a bit of a mystery, if you ask me.”

Her cousin stood up and brushed glitter off his pleated skirt. “These tights have had it. This glue goes everywhere – and it smells a bit, too.”

“Mrs Gayamurthi makes it from fish-heads.”

“Lovely.” Mary wiped his hands on a passing sheep. “Still, I’m done.” He held up a piece of red cardboard which resembled the results of a drunken, short-sighted junior surgeon conducting a major operation after three consecutive shifts on call. More a wholesale evisceration than an organ of love.

“I thought Deborah Buntling still hated you?”

“She does,” said Mary. “That’s why I’ve made a jolly rotten job of it. Maybe this year she won’t go on so much about me borrowing her lipstick.”

“You don’t wear lipstick.”

“No, but I use it to write threatening messages to the Latin Master at college. It makes him feel wanted.”

“That’s nice.” Sandra abandoned her own card, meant for her mother. Mother would have to make do with out-of-date chocolates from the village shop.

A sudden crash and a spray of broken glass announced that Mr Bubbles, Sandra’s beloved but slightly psychotic pony, had rammed his large head through the kitchen window again.

Sandra sighed. “Hello, boy. No, you don’t need to start complaining. We’re finished here, and have all afternoon to join you on a risky, ill-conceived adventure across the moors, seeking out unutterably evil abominations and barely managing to survive.”

“Bored with that,” said Mr Bubbles. “Want carrots.”

“I have sugar cubes,” Mary offered.

The pony gave him a look which strongly suggested the presentation of a sugar cube might result in a hoof in the face.

“Or we could look for some carrots,” said Mary hastily.

And so the three chums set off down to the little village of St Botolph-in-the-Wolds, often described as ‘picturesque’ by people who liked Hieronymous Bosch and Goya’s Disasters of War.

All was remarkable quiet on the few functional streets of the quaint hamlet. This year’s Valentine’s Day Bake-Off between the Womens’ Institute and the Esoteric Order of Dagon had been cancelled, due to an unexpected outbreak of yellow jack, whilst the highly feral Girl Guides were raiding elsewhere that day.

“They’ve gone to pillage the towns on the coast, topping up their Brasso supplies,” Sandra explained. “And to throw stones at herring gulls. I think the ducks on the village pond put them up to that part.”

A nearby duck stubbed out its cigarette and tried to assume a nonchalant air. No one was fooled..

Only Mr Quilling, the Village Pervert, had made any public attempt to celebrate the unjust murder of an over-religious Roman, but the ornate display he’d constructed in his front garden was neither nice nor clever. Probably its only direct relevance to affairs of the heart was that it might induce a coronary in anyone less broad-minded (or indifferent) than the locals.

Mary stared, then looked away. “I shall never eat broccoli again, that’s for sure.”

“Carrots,” said Mr Bubbles.

Alas, the village shops were not forthcoming – the root vegetable in question was in short supply that day. The sort of short supply that means when you ask ‘Can I buy a carrot, please?’, the answer is distinctly in the negative. The general store had none, though this was hardly unusual – its owner concentrated more on the ‘general’ aspect than the ‘store’ part. The Post Office had just sold out, and Mrs Gayamurthi’s could only offer large Indian radishes.

“We could paint it orange, boy,” said Sandra, stroking her pony’s black mane.

Mr Bubbles tried the end of one, and spat the chunk out through the shop’s open door, stunning a passing pedestrian. “Not the same.”

Mary gave his cousin a sidelong glance. “Look, Mr Bubbles, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but how about we go up to Grimspire Water, and see if we can set fire to some hideous, gelatinous monstrosity. That might cheer you up.”

“Carrots.”

In the face of the pony’s obstinacy, their search continued, but even the Mobile Library, which had an unusually large vegetable section, was unable to loan them a single root. Sandra and Mary sat down on the old gibbet-stone which stood by the north road. Legend had it that long ago, possibly in the early fourteenth century, the villagers had built the foundations for an exciting new means of execution, and then couldn’t arsed to finish it off. Subsequent felons had been consigned to Gibbet Hill, which – rather confusingly – was a large hole in the ground, not far from Buttersmite Fell. The people of St Botolph’s didn’t believe in unnecessary effort.

“I suppose,” said Sandra, “That there’s nothing for it. We’ll have to ask Old Aggie. If anyone has any carrots left in the entire area, it’s her. She’ll have a clamp of them from last Autumn.”

It was a dire situation. Old Aggie was a perfectly pleasant woman, but she also collected potatoes in the shape of Queen Victoria, and insisted that all visitors examine her entire collection before they were offered a sit-down or a mug of gin. As Old Aggie had three extensive cellars packed full of the things, the experience could take hours.

“Look, boy,” said Sandra, as they trudged their the way up to Aggie’s farm. She pointed towards a tall stand of gloomy, putty-coloured trees not a hundred yards away. “Those shadows on the edge of Whateley Wood! Perhaps they represent some insidious, creeping evil that we should face right away. I could go and get my pump-action Remington, and-”

“Carrots.”

Mr Bubbles was known for his intractable moods, but Sandra couldn’t work out whey he was so particularly obsessed with carrots today, especially as he must have know they were hard to get. In fact, he probably knew that they would have to end up at Old Aggie’s, so what was going on?

“He’s not ill, is he?” asked Mary as they came in sight of Aggie’s farm, which would have had to be rebuilt and knocked down again before it could achieve the status of a ruin. Much of it consisted of cellars covered with sheets of corrugated iron and the more lethal types of asbestos (still widely used in St Botolph’s, due to the natural immunity which the villagers had developed).

“Don’t suppose so.” Sandra re-tied her long blonde hair, and checked to see if she had any money in her purse. “Maybe we can get away with the two-hour tour this time,” she said, eyeing one of the few standing structures. “I’ll go and–”

“In there,” said the pony, nudging her shoulder with his velvety muzzle. He pointed one hoof at a large ramshackle shed, just on the edge of the potato fields.

She shrugged. “If you say, boy, but I would have thought…”

There was no point in arguing with him. Sandra and Mary walked over to the shed, and eased back one of the double doors, peering into the gloom…

“Gosh!” said Mary.

There, on the shed floor, lay an astonishing range of mummified legs, withered arms, skeletal fragments, oozing tentacles, and confiscated occult paraphernalia, plus half a vampire and something extremely warped with no head – and no body. Forbidden books of knowledge, such as that vile and obscene tract The Book of the Deaf, lay next to the twisted parts of a police car and a set of amulets for protection against depressed ferrets. Many of the items – organic and inorganic – had very large teeth-marks in them. All had been trodden on quite a bit.

The presence of these horrors was perhaps not so important as the fact that the whole lot had been arranged on the trampled dirt in the unmistakable shape of a huge heart.

“We did all these, you and me,” said the pony. “Knackered the lot of them.”

If the exact sight before her was indescribable, the smell certainly wasn’t – but Sandra had a clue that her best friend was making a most unusual gesture. The single red rose the pony had tossed into the middle of the appalling mementos pretty much gave it away.

“We did,” she murmured. “And it was jolly hard work, but we always had each other’s backs.” She smiled, and leaned against the warm, powerful body. “It’s… it’s a lovely surprise,” she managed to say.

“Happy Dead Unwise Priest’s Day,” said Mr Bubbles.

Mary, too, was smiling, if a little puzzled. Quite what was the point of the author putting him in this narrative? He didn’t really seem to have any useful role at all. His discontented musing was soon ended, though, by the deep, determined voice of equine hungers.

“Still want carrots. Go look in field.”

Ah yes, that was why he was here. The grunt work. Valentine had a lot to answer for. Sighing, he picked up a spade and headed out into the mud…

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CODA: BOTTLES THE LURCHER IN LOVE

A canine finds true romance

“What’s your dog doing with that stuffed draft-excluder?” asked Sandra, trying hard not to watch the excited behaviour next to the living room door.

“Nothing,” Mary reddened, and wonder if he could find a bucket of cold water very quickly.

“Woof!” said Bottles.

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THE END

This programme was brought to you in conjunction with the  Bloody Valentine Bad Love Event on FB today, organised and hosted by writer Anita Stewart:

http://afstewartblog.blogspot.com/

There are also some giveaways here until the end of the day (not mine, because I’m too busy and disorganised):

https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/dUSHjp1eGvHe3Svt3Qqp?fbclid=IwAR2kwhmI3ZbV9GW-gklbyO-z0UqpHbMi7WfszzNchZvuQ7OMdkvBd1TmcZE

 

John Linwood Grant is often described as the rusty, badly painted tractor of modern weird fiction – he may occasionally plough a straight furrow, but will as often crash into neighbouring fields and spin his wheels just for pleasure. Or something like that. Today on greydogtales, as he fired questions about scary fiction and LGBTQ+ issue at so many innocent authors during January, he must now pay the price and give his own answers. It’s only fair. He even talks about writing in general – and a sort of life…

HIMSELF

 

greydog: Hi, John, and welcome to greydogtales. We have a feeling we’ve seen you before, but never mind. You can’t be anyone important, or we’d have heard of you. Obviously we’re going to ask about LGBTQ+ writers and characters in strange fiction, but maybe first you could tell the readers a bit about yourself, to set the scene. And if you wanted to share your personal identity in the context of this feature, how would you do so?

John: I’m from Yorkshire, UK, and I’m a working writer/editor – by which I mean that my partner pays most of the bills. The writing is mostly a pleasure; the editing mostly a horror, but as you get older, you don’t let opportunities pass. They may not come again.

As for my identity in LGBTQ+ terms, I’ve never known how to define myself, or worked out why I should, so I don’t bother. A ‘colourful past’ is the best I ever came up with, though I’m certainly male. And I’m all for older people being sexual animals, but with my lower back, well…

When I was at school, I had mad crushes at the same time on Juliet Harmer from the Adam Adamant TV series, and Mike Holoway from The Tomorrow People, which tells you how random I was. I’m not sure that sexual orientation is entirely static for some. I have friends whose orientation is constant and an integral part of their whole persona (straight or otherwise), and I respect that. I also know others whose feelings about their identity and choices have varied across a range over many years.

A number of my straight friends have (grown up) gay, bi or lesbian children, and they’re great kids – they make me feel more positive about our future as an inclusive society, and my place in it. My general view is that if you love them, stop trying to ram them into categories. They’ll say if they want.

greydog: How do you describe the bulk of your own work – horror, weird fiction, magical realism, speculative, or what? Would you find ‘horror’ an uncomfortable or inappropriate label?

John: I’ve no problems with some of my writing being called horror, but I’d say dark and weird are better descriptors. Horror fans might be disappointed by some pieces; non-horror fans would certainly be a bit worried (or appalled) by other stories. How someone turns their head, how they hold their hat or move a chess piece, can be far more interesting than the same old axe murderer crashing through the door and grunting threats at you.

I shift genres and styles when it suits, but ‘strange’ and ‘humane’ are two regular elements of my work. I find people fascinating, so I’m predominantly a character writer, rather than a tidy genre guy.

greydog: And what’s your preferred format and length as a writer – flash fiction, short story, novella, novel, or even book series?

John: Although I’ve written all of them, novelette to novella length is the comfy zone. An awful lot of my stories end up at seven to twelve thousand words, and then I have to chop a number of them for the markets. I have a tendency to to include observations and character interactions not strictly related to the plot, because for me, I’m watching them as human beings, with all their trivia. But I’ve been fortunate in having a number of editors and publishers who’ve let me get away with the longer versions.

Novels can be rewarding, but I find them a chore; I looked at an unpublished novel of mine the other day, and realised that it’s already three hundred pages long and not even tidily finished yet. The editing a novel needs is always more than you thought. Very short pieces, on the other hand, rarely give me room to let my characters breathe, so I don’t do commercial flash fiction. Vignettes I reserve for characters like Mr Bubbles, the slightly psychotic pony, and Mamma Lucy, the conjure-woman, because those pieces are really incidents, meditations, or jokes, related to a single, already established figure.

greydog: Were there key books and films that influenced and helped you develop as a creator? Did they include LGBTQ+ works and/or characters – and if not, did this bug you?

John: I was forged by writers like Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie; William Hope Hodgson, Conan Doyle and Shakespeare; Jane Austen, Michael Herr and James Thurber. And many more. I don’t mean that in a clever way – I was just a precocious kid with voracious and eclectic reading habits, so I’d pick any of those up and enjoy them.

In my teens I read enormous amounts of SFF (not so much horror) – Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness was probably my first fictional introduction to exploring gender identities. I subsequently devoured Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren, and William Burroughs – Wild Boys, for example. It’s curious that Dhalgren, a very odd book, is still a favourite for both myself and my (female) partner.

Otherwise, there were few LGBTQ+ protagonists in what I read. I don’t think it bugged me as such, but there was a lot of denial going on in the society around me anyway, and I always had the feeling that change was coming. It did, mostly.

greydog: Being realistic, there are times when many of us compromise, and times when we lose our cool. Have you ever dialled down the queer aspects of a piece to try and draw in a wider audience? Or dialled it up on purpose, to hammer a point home?

John:  I’’m an egalitarian writer – whatever turns up in my head turns up, whether straight or queer. Straight characters probably predominate statistically (I’d have to count), but sometimes I just don’t indicate. Readers can make their own decisions. I have actually been asked to dial up the gay content on a couple of pieces, where I’d originally left matters as slightly ambiguous. I quite like ambiguous, because it gives you so much room with which to play, but I’ve cheerfully written (and had published) stories with most sexual identities and orientations.

My characters come to me with their own realities, so if they’re straight, gay or lesbian, for example, they just are. I find I can’t ‘make’ a character change their orientation, even if I wanted to. For example, I recently wrote a nineteen sixties carnival story for Planet X, and the protagonist was gay. But I wasn’t looking for a gay character for any overall purpose at all. He turned up in context, and stayed. Forcing him to be straight would have wrecked the story, and made me have to start again from scratch. One of my dark fantasy characters, Malyse anBaralte, turned out to be lesbian because I ‘saw’ her in her work as a magistrate, and knew she would fancy one of the female myrmidons used to enforce the law, a rangy blonde woman with a broken nose. To me it was obvious. And I conceived of Malyse about twenty five years ago.

greydog: When it comes to LGBTQ+ characters in your work, do you tend to depict particular identities – lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transsexuals – any primary group that comes up in your writing more often than others?

John: The answer’s above, really, apart from the fact that I’ve never written about transsexual individuals, purely because such a character hasn’t cropped up in my head yet. I spent a lot of time in the SF fan community in the UK during the eighties and nineties, where a number of transexual folk were both present and welcome, so I never thought of it as strange – but writing from their viewpoint is obviously a bit further outside my direct experience. I enjoy writing what I ‘don’t know’, but it requires a lot of sensitivity and sometimes a lot of research. Never take other people’s positions, difficulties and choices for granted.

greydog: We were at an interesting panel during the 2018 UK Fantasycon, which included discussion of asexuality in fiction as part of the diversity spectrum. Have you ever covered characters who specifically identified as asexual?

John: Yes, but in rather different ways. In my dark and complicated Os Penitens world of sarcomancers, I have a major character (Hereyl), who chooses quite deliberately to be stripped of the lot – all sexual identity, inclinations and identifiers – to escape their former existence in a warped gens. Their utter asexuality in every sense is the badge of their triumph over their past. And in a Lovecraftian story soon to be published, ‘Strange Perfumes of a Polar Sun’, the protagonist is an asexual woman, but the reader will have to decide if that’s from nature or nurture.

greydog: Which piece of your own work are you most proud of, and why?

John: Possibly my portrayal of Edwin Dry, the inexorable Deptford Assassin, in various stories and in my novel The Assassin’s Coin. He spans the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, and has been called “one of the most ghastly characters in modern strange fiction” and “one of the most evocative presences in modern dark fiction – precise, relentless, inexorable.” All of which is perhaps over-generous, but it is rather gratifying, taking such a character from conception to being a living, breathing figure who worries people.

As for individual pieces, I’m fairly proud of getting into the Vastarien journal with my story ‘For She is Falling’, primarily because when you write across genres like I do, it can be hard to get acceptance as a serious writer in any particular field. Especially as I also enjoy writing Sherlock Holmes pastiches, and have had a number published. Pastiches are popular, but if you’re not careful, you can get labelled with them quite quickly.

I suspect that some people don’t even know that I write modern weird fiction, but there I’m in a different head-space from my late Victorian and Edwardian tales. Maybe I should have created a number of unlikely pseudonyms for each branch before I started? Then people who like thrilling or scary Edwardian tales wouldn’t have to wonder what the hell the rest of my work is about.

LGBTQ+ FICTION & THE FIELD

greydog: The most common phrase you hear when people object to active movements which encourage diversity in fiction is “I don’t care about the sexuality, gender, colour, etc. of the writer. I only care about good stories”. How would you respond to that?

John: I would respond carefully, because I might have thought that way myself once, believing it to be an inclusive and positive statement. And I think it can be genuinely meant well by some people. Only as you age and learn do you begin to see the flaws in it – that it’s an easy statement if it comes from those who have a dominant or privileged position and can afford to see it that way. If you have a background of being or of feeling excluded – on the basis of gender, skin colour, sexual orientation etc – then it starts to look different.

We won’t ever hear some stories, some stunning and fascinating ones at that, if we don’t actively seek their creators out, if we don’t give a greater say to a broader and more diverse range of writers. And what we encourage and support now is what our kids, or our friends’ kids will be able to read. So maybe we have to care, until the genres are so richly endowed by voices from everywhere that we no longer need to be as concerned.

greydog: ‘Straight’ is a silly term in many ways, but we’ll use it for shorthand. A number of straight creators utilise LGBTQ+ characters in their work. Do you see any inherent problems with this, or is it a good way of getting audiences to broaden their minds and reading scope. Are there any common misconceptions which get transmitted by straight creators?

John: I’m all for more LGBTQ+ characters just being there in fiction. Anywhere. As leading protagonists, villains, love interests, mad scholars, helpful posties, and unimportant pedestrians on the street. The person who comes to read the gas meter. In any and every role in fiction. So I’m for it, basically. And I like to see such characters presented without it always being about their sexual orientation and/or problems in that area.

In a related way, I recently finished a story with a key character in a wheelchair. That was how I saw him – but there’s no explanation of how it came about, nor does it impact on the story particularly. He’s not there to explore ability and disability – he’s there because that’s who he was when I thought the story up one night. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not at all against stories which revolve around personal trauma and the impact of people’s prejudices, I just don’t think that’s always got to be the point.

Two aspects where I see slight problems are a) when an author tries use or explore areas such as gay communities/social networks, without understanding the nuances involved, and b) when an LGBTQ+ character has been parachuted in as PC eye-candy, or to be exploded late in the book for effect. “Goodness, the tough lesbian sacrificed herself for us. Now let’s get on with our lives.” That’s already been done quite enough, thank you, with so many poor bloody black characters who have died in films in order to let the white couple float to the surface and have a happy ending.

greydogtales: Do you think LGBTQ+ fiction is more acceptable to a lot of straight readers when it comes from ‘nice middle-class white people’, as opposed to when it comes from additionally marginalised groups such as queer black writers?

John: I suspect so. It makes me think of earlier British sitcoms, where there could be a loveable, funny gay guy (rarely a lesbian) – the ‘acceptable’ face of LGBTQ+. They were white, middle-class, and ‘not so different from you and me’, so they could come into the living room without mutters and awkward looks. Just a joke here and there, but no rancour. People are strange in how they absorb ‘the other’ into their own narratives.

greydog: How should the big publishers and larger independents be fostering LGBTQ+ fiction and portrayals? Or is it purely up to readers to express a demand?

John: Both – but for the right reasons. It should be part of the search for, and support for, strong fiction with great characters from authors who may have been or felt marginalised, not merely to tick the Ten Percent LGBTQ+ Content Box for Head Office and the PR Department.

greydogtales: There are a number of presses dedicated to LGBTQ+ fiction. Do you view these as a good thing, or do you think they risk perpetuating exclusion from mainstream presses?

John: I think they’re essential, and have many roles. In some cases they’re the starting point, where LGBTQ+ writers can safely explore what they want to communicate, or they’re presses which understand how to promote a work to a primary audience. They may also take the sort of risks which larger presses won’t. But I’m a great supporter of small and independent presses in general, because many of them actively seek out strange and different fiction in many areas which would otherwise be called ‘niche’. I’ve worked most often with Steve Berman‘s Lethe Press, which is very cool.

greydog: Do you have a favourite line or passage from your own work, or from that of another LGBTQ+ creator, that you’d like to share?

John: I’ve read some great stuff by LGBTQ+ creators in the last few years, but can’t think of a way of naming some and not others. Maybe a different time – although the LGBTQ+ January was designed to share some names and voices, in conjunction with Gingers Nuts of Horror, who psoted some fascinating articles, so you can check those out.

To make things easy for me, I’ll simply share a passage from a weird novelette of mine that hasn’t yet found a home, ‘These Pale and Fragile Shells’. I mention it because the story includes gay, lesbian, straight and fluid characters as a natural part of a social circle, not to make any sociopolitical point – unless you include any subtext that you can be whatever you want if you have money. The narrator is Justin Margrave, a gay art critic in the late nineteen seventies.

Paul Iscariot was an artist – or an artisan. The point was moot. None of us believed that Iscariot was his real name, of course. His supposed upbringing on the Sussex Downs seemed unlikely, and Oxford had no details of his graduation, though he had been admitted there; the St Martin School denied he had ever been with them.

We did believe his stories of India, on the other hand, because others had seen him. Iscariot went there to work in a village of artisan sculptors, of interest to him because they worked only with chalk. For over a year he had learned the finest techniques, carving devotional figurines and temple adornments alongside men who spoke no English.

We called Iscariot the Artist of the White Powder, for he ran on chalk and cocaine, a stranger to to sobriety. I met him for the first time in nineteen seventy three, when he was being thrown out of a Soho gallery. Recognising him from the magazines, I plied him with questions in a wine-bar, and we had sex at my flat that afternoon. Or we would have. His approach to lovemaking was as bedevilled with minutiae as his work – I abandoned ship after an hour and left him to finish himself off.

After that our contact was intermittent, though I wrote a couple of articles on his work. ‘The confused child of netsuke and scrimshaw,’ I called it in one journal. Iscariot, in a drunken rage, threw stones at their offices, yet the next day he invited me to lunch, during which he talked of nothing but Celtic knotwork…

greydog: And what have you planned in the way of work for 2019?

John: A second edition of my collection A Persistence of Geraniums, with considerable extra material; an audiobook of The Assassin’s Coin; the Hell’s Empire anthology from Ulthar Press; Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives from Belanger Books, and some more work for 18thWall Productions.… it’s all very confusing. And probably something – I have no idea what – to do with the wryly insane East Yorkshire village of St Botolph-in-the-Wolds.

greydog: John Linwood Grant, many thanks for taking part.

John: Who are you, and what are you doing in my living room?

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THE ASSASSIN’S COIN

“With elegant, effortless prose, John Linwood Grant has created a compulsively readable work of eerie suspense. In his stark and sinister Victorian England, a resourceful heroine must pit her psychic gifts against the dangerous skills of a chilling assassin. Grant has achieved something altogether rare: a genuinely unique take on the Jack the Ripper murders, in which the famous killer is actually upstaged by the author’s original creations. With its compelling premise, memorable characters, and thrilling suspense, you’ll be haunted by The Assassin’s Coin for a long time to come.” —Amanda DeWees, author of A Haunting Reprise and The Last Serenade