F.R. Jameson's Blog, page 27

The Autobiography of Ingrid Pitt – Life’s A Scream

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Hammer fan that I am, even Doctor Who fan that I am (she appeared in a couple of not particularly good stories), Ingrid Pitt was always going to be someone I’d be interested in. She was the personification of unbridled sexuality in the later Hammer movies. A woman who despite a small list of credits on IMDB (the reasons for which are scarily laid out in this book) really did make an indelible mark on British horror in the sixties/seventies. So, of course when I saw her autobiography on sale I grabbed it up and devoured it quickly. But what I found as I tore through its pages was that I was at least as interested in what was glossed over as what she included.

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Ingrid Pitt survived a harrowing childhood in a concentration camp to become the embodiment of Hammer-glamour in the early 1970s. Even in that one-line description you can see that she has more than enough material for an autobiography. The first section is harrowing, whilst also – incredibly – maintaining a childhood innocence; while the second is a collection of well-worn stories she must have used to pay her way on the convention circuit. Ingrid tells us throughout how much she enjoys writing, so I presume she actually wrote it herself. Although it does have the whiff of being narrated giddily to a ghost writer.

However, the best chapter in the book is one just rushed over, It’s a fourteen-page chapter where young Ingrid marries the G.I. who saved her from drowning in a frozen river, moves with him to an army base in Colorado and has a daughter. Her husband (who remains unnamed) starts feeling neglected by the mother/daughter bond and volunteers for Vietnam. Not wanting to be a pining wife at home, Ingrid effectively ends the marriage and joins a terrible travelling theatre company which tours the mid-west and where she never gets paid because ticket-sales are too small. Realising that such a hand to mouth existence isn’t going to last, she does a moonlight flit from her guest house and tries to drive to New York towards a plane back to Europe. However, she gets a puncture and comes to a halt in front of a wrecking yard run by Native Americans. She ends up living there with them for six weeks of meditative tranquillity, before the urge to get her daughter back to Europe reasserts itself. Somehow, through saving her pennies, she does get the car to the airport, but once there has no money for plane fare. A group of cab drivers comes to her rescue and helps her spruce the car up so that it looks shiny and newish, and Ingrid is able to sell it to a freshly arrived family of German tourists for $250. Looking up on the board she sees that the next flight to Europe is to Barcelona and slams the money down on the counter to get her and her daughter tickets, and they’re gone within the hour.

As I say, that’s one chapter. One fourteen-page chapter. But clearly there’s enough material there for a novel, a musical and a Coen Brothers movie. It’s incredible and frustrating to read just how rushed the whole thing is.

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Obviously true pro that she was, Ingrid gave the public what she thought they wanted – tragic childhood, film star anecdotes (Cushing and Lee, Eastwood and Burton too – she was also in Where Eagles Dare) all in a tale of inner strength and survival – but this reader just wishes she hadn’t gone with the well-polished anecdotes and instead focused on the less well known parts of her life, which sound bloody fascinating.

 

Fancy reading some of my shorter fiction for free? Something Went Wrong, my tale of monsters and madness, is available here.

Free this weekend – Foliage

My apocalyptic short story, FOLIAGE is FREE on Amazon today!!

(UK, US, Canada, Australia, India)

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If you’ve not downloaded FOLIAGE before, please do as I’d love to know what you think of it. It’s a short tale and a bleak tale (it is about the end of the world, after all), but I like to think it’s a damned gripping piece.

(If you want to know about the inspiration for it, I wrote a lovely introduction when it was published earlier this year.)

It’s totally free right across Amazon this Saturday and Sunday (just follow these links if you’re in the UK, US, Canada, Australia or India), so if you get chance please do check it out.

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And remember, if you fancy some other FREE FRJ fiction, there’s some available here. 

Me, never throwing anything away, in 2017

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Never throw anything away.

I’m not sure I can stress that enough, but if you’re an indie author never actually get rid of anything.

A novel you abandoned? Absolutely keep it.
A short story you came to dislike? Hang on to it, there was a reason why you pursued that original idea, and you can rework it.
A napkin on which you scribbled down a great idea which also has stains from a badly spilled madras? Well, maybe the napkin itself you can let go, but the idea – make sure you keep it.

This is a message I’m passing on ruefully. There are short stories I wrote back in the 90s, even a novel that I cannot place my hands on right now. They’re not on my computer, not on my old computer and I don’t have printed out copies. It’s damned annoying. Not that I’m expecting them to be any good, but there’d be stuff there I could use, concepts I could rework. Them being lost just makes them a missed opportunity, rather than a possibility.

(There’s a chance they’re at my parent’s house. I meant to look the last time I was there, but got sick instead. If they are there, I’m sure they can wait for Christmas).

Lunchtimes this week, I’ve been rewriting a novella called DEATH AT THE SEASIDE.

This has been interesting for me as I wrote it originally in 2002, rewrote it again in 2008, but in that pre-kindle world couldn’t really figure out what to do with it. Now however I have a place for it, so I’m reworking it again.

A lot of it isn’t good, a large amount has to be redone, but there’s a lot here that I’m really happy with as well. The character at the centre I find quite compelling, even though he’s a terrible human being. The narrative dances around him, taking his voice, reflecting his views, getting ready to punish him.

15 years this story has been with me and now I’m getting ready to finish it.

Please, never throw anything away!

 

Fancy a free FRJ short story? There’s one available here.

The Cove – part three

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Not one of them called the police. The entire night no one called the police.Despite their terror, despite their muffled cries as they realised they were trapped in their homes by the thing at their front door – the things that used to be their men – not one of them thought to call the police.

How could they?

There was scarcely a policewoman for fifty miles and given all that had befallen their men, it would be wrong to invite the boys in blue uniforms into the village.

Besides, how do you call the police on your man when he’s just doing the same harmless thing he’s always done?

So, they rode through their terror. Clenched their fists tight, held pillows to their faces to muffle their cries, and prayed for dawn.

Somehow they knew, all of the women knew, that this – whatever it was – would have an endpoint.

Indeed, by the early morning’s light, they were gone. Every one of the men had lurched and shambled and limped (and in some cases crawled) back to the sea.

Once the front door had stopped shaking with inchoate fury, when the incoherent mutterings had started to drift away, tentatively the women emerged from their hiding places.

From the windows they watched their men leave. The first glints of red sunlight poking through the clouds, their sons, fathers, brothers and assorted loved ones, pulling themselves back into their new home. It was like a scene of evolution in reverse.

That morning, the women stood together and wept. Their grief bursting from the depths of their souls, shaking their bodies and trembling their spirits. It was catharsis, but it couldn’t last.

There was a gasp of relief, hugs among the women in the morning, even as there was a sense – as clear as the one that daylight would bring some kind of respite  – that on another moonlit night the men would be back.

There was no one to call, no one they could explain it too, and so they swallowed and steeled themselves and tried to be ready for the terror ahead.

Except for Beryl – beautiful, tall, elegant Beryl who had so much promise – who stood and shouted at the sea. Wanting to know why, wanting to understand what was happening. Articulating the questions the entire town of women wanted answered.

 

Missed parts one and two? Then just follow the links.
Another free FRJ short story is available here.

The Cove – part two

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The sea had claimed them both, father and brother.

Accident, misadventure, it didn’t matter what you called it. The sea had them. They’d been taken so completely that their bodies hadn’t even washed up. How cruel that was, particularly for her Man, that they didn’t have anything to bury. Nothing physical to mourn.

Some of the men of the village went out to look for them, but they didn’t come back either. The sea was calm, they were experienced fishermen – there was no way they should have been lost. And yet their boat went out and wasn’t seen again.

Suddenly this village which had been the most perfect spot in Britain when Beryl was a child, became a place of grief, a place of suffering, a place of fear.

It was a town where the women shook.

Before long, it was only the women left.

The sea, one way or another, took them all.

Whatever was happening was completely inexplicable, but it was like they were called into the water. All the men in the village, gone. Leaving no bodies to bury, no way to really mourn.

And then, one moonlit night, the sea let go of what it had taken.

Not that it gave them their men back, not in any real sense. Instead the corpses of their loved ones, rotting, their flesh scraped from their bones by the tide, their eyeballs having been nibbled away by passing fish, shambled drunkenly out of the water.

The screams consumed the town. Woman after woman waking up in their bedrooms and seeing this awful horde, the lurching sea-soaked corpses of their loved ones, coming up from the waves and into the town itself.

With Barry the landlord gone, no one had thought to lock the door of The Slain Saint George. Some of these ghostly men made their way into their home away from home.

Nancy Vaughan was the only one brave enough to peek in to see what they were up to. She said they were just sitting there. That no one poured a drink (why would dead men need alcohol?) and they just perched around the round wooden tables as they always did.

Eventually though all of the men – or these creatures who used to be men – did try to get into their old homes. In barely coherent panic, their wives, their daughters, their sisters, their mothers locked and bolted he doors. Terrified, they crouched in the darkness at this thing, which had once been their gorgeous loved one, shuffled and groaned in frustration. Raised desiccated fists to try and hammer their way through when all else failed.

The dreadfulness within the sea owned Beddnic that night. Not only had it destroyed the village by taking it all the men, it gave a cry of ghoulish triumph by sending the rotting corpses back to roam the streets again.

 

Part one of The Cove is available here, while you can read more free short fiction by F.R. Jameson by clicking this link. 

The Cove – part one

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Beryl marched up and down the shingle of the beach the entire day. She was bare-foot and grimy, but the soles of her feet were too calloused for the pebbles to gnaw at. Not that she’d have felt it even if they’d torn open her toes. In the grey drizzle of that afternoon, she was far too preoccupied with the sea ahead, with whatever was lurking out there.

Vaguely, somewhere in the back of her mind, she was conscious of the other women behind her. That they were staring at her as they walked the streets, or peering out of their windows at her. Not one of them approached her. They just let her get on with it. The other women may be choosing to bury their pain, but they knew exactly what she was going through.

More than once Beryl roared at the sea. A sound ripped up from so deep and low it seemed to tear at her diaphragm. Nonetheless it was swallowed whole by the crashing of the waves. She screamed out, demanding to know: “Why?”

But it was more than that. She couldn’t articulate it, wouldn’t put it into words, but to keep her sanity in place she needed to grasp just what the hell was out there.

This was her home, the place she’d grown up. What had happened to it?

Her childhood was an idyllic one of playing on this beach with her Mam and Dad looking over her. Building sandcastles with her younger brother, Gwyn, or the two of them playing chase. A dozen favourite childhood games, ten-thousand amazing memories. As they got older, they would meet other kids of the cove and pass around illicit cigarettes and plastic bottled cider. It was then that the parents pretended not to notice.

She knew it was a beautiful childhood, a happy childhood. Even in adolescence she had been perfectly delighted with the way she was and the life that surrounded her. Yes, she’d leave and go and see the world one day, but she’d be back. She’d always had a fascination with San Francisco, another town in a bay, yet one with more chance of sunlight than the South Wales coast. She knew though that even if she got there, San Francisco wouldn’t keep her. Her heart belonged to Wales, it belonged to the little village of Beddnic.

As things turned out, she couldn’t leave, wouldn’t leave.

Dad had gone. Gwyn had gone too.

Something in the sea had reached out and snatched away the men in her life. And that meant she couldn’t go anywhere. That she was trapped there roaring helplessly at the sea.

 

Fancy some more FRJ short fiction? There’s a tale available right here.

The Biting Cold by Mark Henwick

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There’s a lot to admire in this creepy, intriguing quasi-vampire novella. I particularly enjoyed the way it unpacks a suitcase full of backstory, gives hints at a wider mythology, all while being an intimate chamber piece. There are two characters essentially – well, two characters who matter anyway – and the story works hard to make us care about them, while at the same time propelling the narrative forward and filling us in on everything that’s gone before.

I read it on the Kindle so it’s impossible for me to say its length for sure, but it’s easily less than a hundred pages. To fit so much in to such a small space feels like a trick performed by an old time magician.

A man goes to see a therapist with the belief that he’s a vampire, but she has her own issues she’s dealing with – but are her problems somehow wrapped up in his? If that wasn’t enough, in the background there’s a trial of a dangerous murder suspect and various other skulduggeries.

There’s a whole series of Athanate books, and I think Henwick has piqued my interest enough that I’ll check them out.

 

Fancy a free FRJ short story? There’s one available here…

Me, Writing a novel in 3 months, in 2017

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My challenge to myself in the second half of this year was to write a novella and have it published by Christmas.

I started writing it on the 31st of July, and it’s fair to say that it didn’t go quite as I envisaged.

The story I wanted to tell turned out to be much bigger than a novella. Indeed it doubled in length so that it was a short (50,000 word) novel.

I wrote in this diary a few weeks back about how I was going to miss this target. But I still think if it had stayed the novella I’d originally intended, then I’d have hit my goal.

Instead it’s a novel, and it’s a novel I’m damn proud of.

And one of the things that makes me feel particularly chuffed is that I started it on the 31st of July, and yesterday – less than three months later – I sent it off to the editor.

I used to be annoyed at myself for being a slow writer. It seemed that the most I can manage is a book a year. If that. With jealousy I used to stare at the more prolific writers and wonder how they managed it.

Now, I’ve found a way for me not to match the Stephen Kings of the world, but at least get more of my ideas out there.

Every train trip, every lunchtime, every evening at home is now structured around writing. I have the goal in sight to get this particular chapter finished, that section done, the book completed as fast as I can.

Before I begin I break the story down into thirds, and then I plot out the first third. Then knowing what’s going to happen in each chapter of that third I start scribbling them in my notepad. When I’m getting to the end of writing that third, I plot out the next one, and when I’m writing that one in the notepad I start typing up the first section. I basically get a conveyor belt on the go where I am always writing and rewriting and constantly shaping and polishing the book.

The result? I’m writing quicker, and I think I’m writing better.

The above is just a rough guide to my process. One day perhaps I’ll try and break down the formula, the schedule I’m now using, so that others out there who are struggling to write fast can take some inspiration.

For now though, if you’ll forgive me, I’d just like a little moment of self-indulgence in which to feel that little bit chuffed.

 

If you fancy reading a FRJ short story, there’s one available right here.

The Shadow over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft/The Taint by Brian Lumley

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I’m on record elsewhere saying that whereas I love the concepts Lovecraft created, I prefer it when other authors are writing about them. Lovecraft threw a fierce and unique imagination at his horror. He simply wasn’t content with the old type of scares, instead creating a new order which was rooted equally in science fiction and the evils of the past. While rarely leaving New England, his oeuvre is impressively existential and apocalyptic. The problem however was Lovecraft’s prose style: clunky sentences combine with a lack of authorly rhythm to kill some stories stone dead, even when there’s so much good in them.

Having said all that, boy, THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH is really, really good!

Of all the Lovecraft I’ve read, this was always the one which stayed strongest and strangest in the memory. But even so, I was surprised on re-reading it how astoundingly good it is.

A young man goes to the town of Innsmouth and discovers a town that is seemingly dying, a society crumbling. As the reason for this decay is gradually revealed the terror builds and builds. It’s a tale which begins disturbingly and piles on detail and suspense to become more and more horrifying as it progresses. True, in the chase scene towards the conclusion we can see the limitations of Lovecraft’s writing style – he really does suck the excitement out of that – but in the concept and the development, we have a grade A piece of mounting tension and non-cliched scares. Recommended for any horror reader or writer anywhere.

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Man, if you put ‘Innsmouth’ into Google image search, you get some great images.

Immediately afterwards – in the zone, as it were – I read Brian Lumley’s THE TAINT. Now, Lumley is a British author who is hugely influenced by Lovecraft, and for my money is a much better prose stylist. THE TAINT is a Cornish set sequel to THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH, and another tale I’d read before.

Now, if you asked me last week, I’d have said that Lumley’s was the better of the two stories, but actually that’s not remotely the case. This is a tidier story, it’s a cosier story (one that smooths out the most troubling part of Lovecraft’s tale, in that the creatures are no longer automatically a lesser species that all man should be frightened of). But there is none of the sheer tension of the Lovecraft tale. It’s a good sequel, yet a largely inconsequential one after the power and weight of the Lovecraft tale.

So, two stories I’ve completely switched my opinions on. And that’s why you re-read stuff.

Not particularly Lovecraftian if I’m honest, but if you fancy a free FRJ story, there’s one available here.

 

How would you write about Donald Trump in a horror story? (part 11)

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Okay, it’s now months since I’ve done this. Months and practically a whole season since I last contemplated how one would write about Donald Trump in a horror story.

Part of the delay was me being appalled by all that’s been happening, and part of it – I confess –  was embarrassment.

Since I last wrote, we’ve had events in Charlotte and Donald looking at a group of neo-Nazis and seeing good people, we’ve had various provocations towards World War Three, and now him getting into a slanging match with a woman whose husband actually died in the service of America. There’s no doubt other stuff I’m forgetting. What an incredibly strange world we inhabit where I can’t even remember all the dreadful things the U.S. President has done over the last three months.

It’s easy to see why I was appalled, but embarrassed? Well, obviously the books about Donald Trump being the worst human being of all have started appearing, and there will be hundreds – if not thousands more – in the coming years. So, to distance myself from them, I posited writing a horror novel where Trump manages to redeem himself. Where this great existential threat appears and seems likely to wipe out human life, and he – despite his terrible nature – manages to perform his first selfless act and save everyone.

I now feel embarrassed even having contemplated that idea as clearly he is far beyond redemption. As Nathan Rabin wrote the other day, he’s not so much a character as a series of character flaws. There’s not going to be any selfless act, there’s going to be no moment which saves his soul. Simply put, he is a dreadful, terrible human being who does dreadful, terrible things.

So where does this leave this horror novel? Obviously, I need to re-frame it, but I’m not going to do it in a way that turns Donald into The Big Bad. No, his ego would like that too much. Instead if I’m going to write it, I have to do in such a way that makes him smaller rather than bigger.

As such I’m still going Lovecraftian. I’m still thinking of Cthulhu or one of The Old Ones as my main villain. But rather than save us, Donald is going to be responsible for dooming us. He won’t be the lead villain, he will be the bozo who lets the proper lead villain get a foothold. And not through malice even, but just because he’s incompetent and his small, nasty, bigoted little brain functions as a series of petty and wrong-headed impulses. He won’t plan to do it, maybe he’ll plan to do the exact opposite. But such is his lack of understanding of everything that isn’t him, he gets it wrong and that allows this unspeakable, ancient evil to thrive.

What happens to the character of Donald after that, I don’t know. Maybe he’ll realise how much real estate Cthulhu now controls and the TV ratings he’s getting, and fall into line behind our new pan-dimensional overlord. Or maybe I’ll just kill him off. But this theoretical story that I might one day write is going off in a whole other direction. One where I don’t give Donald any status beyond being a stepping stone for the real bad guy.

 

Intrigued? You can read a FRJ story which is already finished here.