As I’m currently celebrating ten years of being in print, I thought I’d put a few extras up on greydogtales, just for fun. So today I’m providing a full, downloadable pdf of my story ‘His Heart Shall Speak No More’, formatted as its own booklet.
Not only does it demonstrate my interest in our brooding shores, but it’s also another, almost Jamesian, example of my Edwardian cycle of tales. First published in my collection of strange period stories, ‘A Persistence of Geraniums’, it was also selected for Best New Horror #29, edited by Stephen Jones, in 2019.
“It had long been my habit to spend at least a fortnight each autumn with my friend Emilia Rawkins, the wife of a successful wine-merchant in Suffolk. The countryside there was charming, with the advantage that their house was only some ten miles from the coast, not that far from the towns of Southwold and Dunwich. Emilia herself had a passion for the natural history of marine life, which inevitably involved numerous enjoyable trips to the long Suffolk shoreline.
“I was disconcerted, therefore, to find that just before my next planned visit, I was unexpectedly placed in charge of my nephew Philip, a young man reading Law at Oxford. Philip had suffered a fearful blow that summer, having been jilted by his fiancee only days before his wedding. Neither his spirits nor his studies had recovered from the blow, and so my ailing sister appealed to me, long widowed and unencumbered by other duties as I was, to take him in hand.
“Whilst I will not say that I had maternal feelings for Philip, I was sufficiently fond of him to see that something had to be done. Accordingly, I agreed, and wrote to Emilia to enquire if an additional guest would be an inconvenience. I received a card by return saying that it would be no bother at all, and so I informed a diffident Philip that he should pack his cases”
And here it is. Click the link and you can read the pdf online, or download it to have a look later…
(Illo by Paul ‘Mutartis’ Boswell)
IT’S HERE!! Ten years on, and my sixth collection is out now. Harrumble! This time, no core character throughout, no genre sections, just sixteen strange and weird fictions, many completely new, to divert and entertain…
Purchase link below- paperback and Kindle.