A short, and fairly straightforward story, originally conceived (and probably still to find its final home) as a scare in a longer piece of work. (September 2009)
This short story was salvaged from another, aborted piece of work, for which it was originally the prologue. The final story flopped a bit, but I enjoyed the opening sequence enough to tweak the start and finish to allow it to standalone. That’s the version you’ll find here, although if memory serves the original version is posted on the main blog somewhere. (August 2009)
Final Girls is based on the idea that there’s a bit more going on between the ‘final girl’ in slasher flicks and the killer. It’s intended as an affectionate pastiche of the genre. It’s likely that this will be the first of a series. It was originally intended as part of a series, although my attention’s moved on to other projects since. Still, I think it stands up pretty well on its own. (July 2009)
The Other One is a short weird tale based on a freakish dream following a reading of T.E.D Klein’s The Events at Poroth Farm, hence the shared manifestation of malevolence. (July 2009)
The original intention behind Beanfield was to transpose the Sawney Bean story to a modern council estate. That idea was rather lost in this version of the story, but it has a certain rawness which appeals to me. Likely to be re-written sometime in the near future though. (July 2009)
Another story that came as part of a dream. Originally it was meant to be called ‘The Umbilicus Horror’, but that seemed a little jokey considering how grim the final story ended up. I wanted to write something that would make people squirm. Let me know if I succeeded. (February 2009)
The Green Clearing is a strange fable, more or less made up as I went along. Despite that, it feels quite consistent internally and I like the world of the long line and the town in the middle of the pine forest and may one day return to it. Originally this story had an anti-war theme, but the original ending (in which the immortals are slaughtered by fascist troops and rise up to take their revenge on a train full of troops) seemed A. A bit too obvious; and B. Too similar to ‘A New Europe’, which I finished a few weeks prior to this. (January 2009)
This was finished after reading an anthology of stories inspired by Lovecraft, and I think it shows. The story suffers a little from a maybe slighly overly ambiguous subject and finale, but I think the atmosphere is strong and I like the documentary style. I’d one day like to write a book of encyclopedia entries for things that never existed or happened. (January 2009)
Another documentary about something that never happened. I think that the ambiguity works better here than in A New Europe. Originally I wrote 40 pages of this as a novel, but it got too boring too quickly because it basically consisted of people hanging about outside the beseiged house waiting for something to happen. The short story is basically those 40 pages with the shit bits taken out. (2006 approx)
Stare is probably the shortest story here. I find it appealingly single-minded, every word geared towards the conclusion. Apart from that, it’s a fairly straightforward version of a classical monster tale. (2006 approx)
The Rapid Eye is a love letter that deals with shared dreams and shared fears across a landscape of images that were forefront in my mind at the time of writing. The latter part of that description could lend itself to most of the stories here, hence the reason it’s been chosen as the title of the blog, I suppose. (2006 approx)
This is the earliest, angriest and arguably nastiest story here. It came about as a result of various Ecstacy memoirs that came out in the wake of Trainspotting, pushing that ’second summer of love’ bollocks. Looking around at the people I knew who’d refused to let those days go – who spent their mid-thirties behaving like they were still some hip young thing – inspired this somewhat venomous story. I doubt I’d write it the same way now, but it still seems to hold some of its old anger and as such probably deserves to be here a lot more than other stories I wrote around the same time. (2000 or thereabouts)
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