C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 21

Interview with Paula D. Ashe

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Paula D. Ashe is an educator and an award-winning writer of dark fiction. She lives in the Midwest with her family. Her collection, We Are Here to Hurt Each Other, was nominated for the Bram Stoker award for ‘superior achievement in a fiction collection’.

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CMR: Hello! Welcome back to Eldritch Girl, and today we’ve got Paula D. Ashe with us. I am so excited. So Paula! Can you introduce yourself for us, please.

PDA: Sure. Yeah, Thank you so much again for having me. My name is Paula D. Ashe. I’m the author of the short story collection We are Here to Hurt Each Other, which came out in February of 2022 from Nictitating Books, and it was recently nominated for a Bram Stoker award for a superior achievement in a fiction collection. That phrase is so surreal to me. But I mean I got to say it. So. Yeah. But thank you. Thank you so much for having me, CM. This is exciting.

CMR: Yeah, this is. It was well deserved, I think! I’m really excited for you yes. I love that collection. And yes, it did fuck me up quite a lot.

PDA: That’s what it does. That’s my lane, apparently. That’s… yeah, and it’s funny, because, you know, I think, you know, anyone, like, which is true for a lot of writers… Most of us live pretty normal… Quote unquote “normal”, you know, lives, and so when I tell people I’m a writer, and I say, I want, you know, a horror writer, and I like oh, cool like Stephen King, and I’m just like… No. Mm-mm. No, no, and they’re like, oh like what? And I’m like, I don’t know if you should read it because you won’t talk to me anymore. But it – you know, it works out okay, but it’s pretty extreme stuff for sure.

CMR: No, I did really enjoy it, though, and I’m excited because you’re going to read an extract from one of the stories in the collection. Would you like to introduce that and kind of give it a little bit of context for it?

PDA: Yeah, absolutely. So this story the excerpts is from a story called Jacqueline Laughs Last in the Gaslight, and it is the only historical piece in the collection. And I actually wrote this story because, I mean I’m sure as you can tell I’m in the United States, I’m American for better or for worse, and so I wrote this story after visiting London, and specifically the Whitechapel district. And that’s kind of what this, what this story is about, and this is the opening paragraph.

And so yeah, so I’m gonna read it. And just be aware, as with you know, a lot of my stuff, it’s pretty… not all of my stuff, but this excerpt in particular, is a little racy, let’s say, and it has some language. So yeah, so that’s it.

Alright, so I’m gonna go ahead and read.

Extract from ‘Jacqueline Laughs Last in the Gaslight’

Early July 1888.

The young bride and her handsome Deacon, her hand like painted porcelain nestled delicate and safe in the sanctuary of his forearm. In Whitechapel’s rookery of wastrels the fine pair is as prominent as a hanged man’s prick. Spectacles of health in a garden of steaming grime.

They walk the Flower and Dean, mouths stiff but smiling as cutthroats and pickpockets threaten the woman with rape. Slatterns with pickled brains emphatically offer the Anglican a variety of slick and tight delights, flipping their ragged skirts at the pass of his shadow to give him a glimpse of their puckered and pestilent holes.

This is their honeymoon.

Jacqueline Laughs Last in the Gaslight – Paula D. Ashe

Interview Transcript

CMR: Wow, yeah.

PDA: It’s racy.

CMR: Yeah, it’s yes, it’s just … grimy.

PDA: Yes, no it really is! I always forget sometimes when I read that part. I’m just like, That’s so… yucky. On various levels, you know what I mean? I’m like, yeah, ew!

CMR: Yeah, it reminds me, because you use like a lot of that kind of body horror, and that you do a lot of body horror in your work. And it kind of reminds me of the Rotting Man, I think it is.

PDA: The Rotting Man is in the story All the Hellish Cruelty of Heaven. Yeah, that that character is from that story. Yeah.

CMR: Yes, and you’ve got this real talent for creating very visceral but also a weirdly beautiful imagery at the same time. And there’s something about that, like the beauty and the grotesque. And then it’s great, because it kind of crosses that line into ‘no that is just revolting’, and then back again into oh, oh, that’s… *approving sound* Yeah, I love that about your prose. That’s one of the reasons I was excited to chat about it with you.

Paula D. Ashe on Body Horror

So how central is body horror to your work? And what drew you as a writer, to focus on the body as a site of horror in some of your stories?

PDA: it’s funny because somebody… there were a lot of people in the book first came out, a lot of folks were were saying… They were comparing it to David Cronenberg, which was super flattering to me because I love both Cronenbergs’ work at this point, but I grew up on, you know, Cronenberg the the elder, and so that was really flattering to me. I didn’t realize that what I was doing was body horror. It just kind of came natural to the way that I tell a story, and I didn’t… it never… I mean, again, like it didn’t strike me until the collection came out, and people started to respond to it, that’s what they were seeing, and that’s kind of what I was doing. I mean. I guess it’s central, because I think for me the reason why I feel so drawn to body horror… I feel drawn to body horror for several reasons.

One of them is I’m just not scared of supernatural stuff in literature. Just doesn’t often scare me. That’s not to say that I don’t like it, or that I think it’s not valid or anything like that. I just, as a writer, I don’t feel like – I don’t know, like that just doesn’t spark my imagination, for whatever the reason is, it just doesn’t, cause I think I think I know me as a writer, and I would use the supernatural as like a ghost in the machine kind of thing, like I would be like, Oh, I don’t know how to end this story, so I’ll just have some ghost show up. You know what I mean, because they can do, and so for me, to make it a challenge that I can tangle with creatively and intellectually, it has to be grounded in reality, and it has to be grounded in the body. So that’s part of it. It’s just so stupid. And again, it’s like, you say that I don’t write about supernatural stuff – I have, and I’m sure that I will in the future. But for this collection in particular, me and the editor, Shawn Thompson, talked a lot about the body horror aspect of it, and how it’s like you said after the the excerpt. It’s grimy. It’s meant to be. It’s a grimy kind of embodied focus.

I think also as far as my work goes, I choose a lot of body horror because I feel like as a marginalized subjects on a lot of different levels, that women are kind of conscripted to the body. Like that’s that whole binary, that duality thing, like you know, men have the intellect, and women have the body, and so I think just that kind of – not saying that that’s true. But just… A lot of my background is in a lot of feminist theory study, and I just think that’s really interesting. I’m familiar with the work of Julia Kristeva and Monique Wittig and all of these feminine theorists who talk a lot about the body and embodiment, and so that’s also a big part of it, too. I really am fascinated by Julia Kristeva’s work on objection, and how like you know, the body as the site of both life, but also death and decay. And you know the undeniable kind of corporeal reality of our bodies, that’s just really interesting to me. I like to play around with that. because I also just find bodies gross like, let’s just… I mean like, being an embodied subject, sometimes it’s gross, and that’s a side [of it that] I think – we have a lot of anxiety for people for a lot of reasons, and I think that my work kind of plays around with that as well.

CMR: Yeah, definitely, I think like that’s… the corporeality of the horror makes it so much harder to deny, as well. And you have to then face up to things like, not just mortality, but also changes that you can’t control within yourself and the outward expression of those changes. And that can be incredibly frightening on multiple levels, whether or not there’s a supernatural element to it, because the cause at that point is kind of by the by, it’s what’s actually physically happening to you that you have to reckon with, particularly if it’s irreversible, or it appears to be irreversible in the moment.

PDA: Sure.

CMR: I’m thinking about the one story that actually maybe stop reading for the longest time. I had to pause the whole collection because I couldn’t carry on [laughs] – was the Carcosa one. which is – for anyone who hasn’t read it – it’s told via email. So it’s kind of epistolary which I love.

PDA: It’s my favourite.

CMR: I love that form that’s really cool. You’ve got that that distance and the ability to tell that story through sections, but also just the concept of this drug that makes you mutilate yourself in a trance-like way. But, oh, my God, I was like No.

[laughter]

PDA: I’m sorry that you had that experience. But thank you so much for telling me that because that’s so flattering to me as a writer! I’m like Yes, yes, she was repulsed! Hooray!

CMR: Loved it. I think that one is probably the one that still haunts me from there [there = the collection].

PDA: Sure, sure. That one, that particular story messes with a lot of people, and I’m really proud of it, because that, like you were saying, that epistolary format is really hard to nail down. I know we’re talking about body horror, and we’re going to go too far off on a tangent, but it’s so hard, I think, to tell a story in that format well, and I’m just so blessed that worked. I’ll just I’ll leave it at that. But this so, Thank you. But glad that worked out.

CMR: Yeah, definitely. And I think, like that brings us on to the whole, to the other question that I had, which is about the weird fiction elements in your work, because it’s not just about the body horror. And I think there’s a lot more we can dig into with the body horror as well-

PDR: For sure.

CMR: But something that I found was also the uncanny nature of it, and that idea of your body changing, and something familiar becoming very unfamiliar. And that direct reference to The King in Yellow as well, which is the Robert Chambers King in Yellow, play kind of story, reference, playing about with Lovecraftian mythos. And I found there were quite a few other sort of classic Weird fic elements and tales in your work. And so there’s definitely a weird vibe with the uncanny nature of some of them.

Paula D. Ashe on Weird Fiction

So how and when did you get into weird fiction and did that naturally present itself as a vehicle for storytelling for you?

PDA: Yeah, that’s a great question. I don’t know how direct an answer I have for that one. I’ve always been into what in the nineties and early 2000s was called ‘horror/dark fantasy’ like that was its own kind of section. They were combined together, and then they kind of split apart for a bit. I think they’re coming back together for some folks, but for HDF, horror/dark fantasy, was just like my jam, that’s so much of what I read, and I particularly read a lot of Tanith Lee, and so from reading Tanith Lee that led me to… Um? I read a lot of Clive Barker and Tanith Lee and Caitlin R Kiernan, and Poppy Z. Brite, who, you know, currently known as Billy Martin, but used to write as Poppy Z. Brite, and I don’t know when I discovered Thomas Ligotti. It wasn’t… maybe 10 years ago?

But then I started reading it, and that was when, like, I started to recognize the Weird as the Weird, there was a kind of Weird resurgence, particularly in the United States, and we had, you know, writers like Olivia Llewellyn with Furnace, and you know we had, like Matt Cardin and Laird Barron and Matt Bartlett, and Victor LaValle came out with the Ballad of Black Tom, and I was just reading all these things, and just really like digging that that vibe, that uncanny strangeness, but also the philosophical implications.

One of my favorite books of all time is Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, and, like I read that book, and it just made me feel like, oh, like somebody gets it. You know what I mean like. Oh, somebody understands. It’s fine, I mean, obviously it’s kind of a cornerstone of cosmic pessimism, so it’s not the most chipper kind of perspective to have, and it’s certainly a – my perspective just has changed over time. It’s really becoming a parent has changed that for me in a lot of ways.

But you know, reading Ligotti, reading the work of Jon Padgett and reading… the magazine or the Journal of Vastarien… What else? There’s just so much of that stuff that that came out in that group.

You know. Early- to mid-noughts, I guess, was just really like — I just devoured all of that stuff because it seemed to Vibe with me in such a way that it was engaging intellectually to me, but it was also it went beyond just ghosts or vampires, or werewolves. It was the nature of reality and not itself, is malevolent or off. And I just found that to be really, really intriguing. And so I really like to play around with that in my own work, and I particularly like to play around with that in my own work, because I think it resonates in the sense of what they call now kind of like social horror. But I don’t know how much I like that phrase.

But I think if you are again part of any kind of marginalized, historically underrepresented, however you want to put it, you know, oppressed group, you know reality is not always safe for you, so fiction that represents that, that plays around with that, is really engaging for me. I think it also not laundry list of names, and you know, books and stuff.

I also forgot to mention, like, probably, one of the big cornerstones of my own kind of development as a writer was the work of Toni Morrison, who is not known as a horror writer, but her work is absolutely horrific, and it’s structure, and it’s intent, and it’s, you know, deployment. So that was also a big influence, particularly the book, her first novel, The Bluest Eye, which is a story about a young, very dark skinned Black girl in the fifties, who, because all of her life she’s been told that the white eurocentric standard of beauty is the— well, that is it, and because she doesn’t fit it, she is ugly, and she’s been treated horrifically her entire young life, because of that, and it’s one of those books that made me realize, like the perspective that a person has on the world, and where they fit into it, it’s not only influenced by their experiences. It’s also influenced by how the world perceives them as well. So if the world perceives you as a threat, then you’re going to see threats in the world, right? Because that’s like how people respond to you.

And so I just — I don’t know I kind of write. I try to write often from from that perspective I think it makes things more interesting. That was a really long answer. So. [laughs]

Paula D. Ashe on Fucked-Up Family Dynamics & Themes of Intersectional Socialization

CMR: no, yeah, that’s that makes a lot of sense as well like, and it reminded me of one of the stories I think you sent a link to in your newsletter (which everyone should sign up to, by the way, links will be in the transcript), which was a very disturbing kind of weird tale, which is the family dinner and some weird shape that appears between them, and then it kind of takes— and then it it just gets massively, wildly out of control. It didn’t go anywhere I thought it was going to go, but it kind of — yeah that kind of microcosm of threats, and the strange dynamics within a microcosm of a family which I love.

PDA: Yeah, yeah.

CMR: Yeah, so that just reminded me of that. And I was like, No, I can see it. I can see the influences in that story.

PDA: That’s cool that you say that because I never even thought about that. But I think you’re right with that particular story, because I do a lot of stuff on family dynamics and family, families that are fucked up like I — that’s just my — let’s be real. And but yeah, certainly for that one, I also like the idea of a threat that only certain people can see, because that just that creeps me out. You know what I mean like that’s just really upsetting to me. So yeah, I think that’s that’s a big part of it as well, the the threat being a thing that only certain people can see, for whatever reason, I can see how that has some parallels with social horror as well, and being part of a marginalized group, because in those cases, certain context, the threat is only something you can see. I mean that’s what a microaggression is, right. Like. It’s something that only certain people interpret rightfully as aggressive, discriminatory behavior.

CMR: Right.

PDA: But not everybody else sees it that way because it’s not attacking that part of their identity or whatever. So, yeah.

CMR: The more I think about that Thanksgiving story the more I want to go back and re-read it, and see, like, yeah. But also, fucked up families it as it as their own thing is, is a a really interesting theme to play around with, and you can get the microcosm of threat in those dynamics, in the way that different members of that family, and then how relative power dynamics play out. And you can show such a lot about society and such a lot of that anxiety and fear and change, and all of that stuff through that kind of — yeah, is that why you like to write about families or —?

PDA: I mean my therapist probably has a different answer the one I’m going to give, but I’m going to say, [laughs] no, I think it’s because — I mean, I think you’re right, it’s a microcosm, my background is also in sociology, I’m a sociologist, and so you know, I’m very big on socialization, and the processes of socialization, and how we learn how to be human in society, and how we teach people how to be human in society, and the biggest, you know, most powerful influence when it comes to socialization is the family. We learn everything about everything from the family. You cannot escape that, you know, for better or for worse, so those dynamics echo throughout your life. If they’re positive — and again, I’m not trying to say that people are like doomed or anything, but if they’re positive dynamics, then that’s good. You can build on that very strong foundation. But if they’re not, that’s where we — that’s where you know, a lot of trauma comes from, a lot of mental illness, and things like that can come from those sorts of things, and I just. I’m always intrigued by how much power families have and how family dynamics are so — I don’t know, prophetic in a way.

I mean again, I’m not trying to say — I know that people don’t like to hear, particularly for people who come from, you know, like abusive backgrounds, that you know, that’s all that they’ll ever be. That’s not what I’m saying, but what I’m saying is, it is difficult to view the world as a safe place when your first experience of the world was was one where you weren’t safe, right?

So that’s kind of the thing that I find really. really fascinating, and I come back to over and over again. And to be fair, I grew up in a relatively, in a comparatively safe household, I think, certainly less safe than some others, but I think it’s all kind of — you know, it all kind of just depends. But, for me, I think I was very acutely aware of that when I was young. I don’t know why, I just always have been kind of aware of that.

And I think one thing that I’ve also noticed, as I’ve, you know, like I’m a parent, is realizing how difficult it is to keep, you know, to protect your family, to protect yourself, to protect your children from like the forces outside of your home, whether it’s like, you know, economic chaos or social strife, or, you know, like even interpersonal stuff. But you have to compartmentalize that for your family, and that’s really hard, and it just makes me kind of think about how difficult it is to maintain those kinds of structures and keep all that stuff in place, you know, while at the same time, like being a productive number of society and all of that other stuff. So it’s a lot to deal with, I think.

CMR: Yeah, and I think — you kind of said, the generational cycles as well,

PDA: Yes, mm-hm.

CMR: I think that’s what you were alluding to there,

PDA: Yeah, yeah.

CMR: -They’re really, really hard to break out of, and it’s really hard to be a cycle-breaker,

PDA: Yes, for sure.

CMR: especially when you’re the first person to do that, and you have no kind of reference. You have no—

PDR: —You have no model. You’re just doing it all on your own, and it’s so easy to make those same mistakes. I think you start to realize that a lot of times people, you know, it’s because there’s no model. There’s no frame of reference, like you said, it’s so easy to go back on that, you know, those past generational traumas, because, it’s all, even if it’s terrible. It’s almost like it’s easier to do that, because it’s familiar, than it is to strike out into the unknown. So yeah, I think that’s a big part of it too, as well, I think, yeah.

CMR: yeah, and that kind of brings us interestingly back to body horror Doesn’t it?

PDA: It does!

Paula D. Ashe on the Interplay between Internal Suffering and Physical Deconstruction with Reference to Religious Horror

CMR: Cause like, yeah, families inscribe themselves on you in that kind of way. You can’t help but look like the people you’re related to you, you literally carry their DNA around, you literally embody them, and you embody that cycle, and there’s all sorts of yeah, studies on how trauma literally changes your DNA and changes your brain and all of that. And I was really interested, looking at your brand of body horror — I don’t know if you have a brand, but the kind of body horror that you like to write — and there seems to be a really strong connection, especially in the collection, between internal pain and physical deconstruction. And again, I’m thinking about the Carcosa story in particular. But yeah, just because that’s just in my brain like a brainworm.

PDA: [laughs]

CMR: But how do you see that relationship manifesting in your work and the connections between those two themes?

PDA: Between like, internal pain, and then —

CMR: Yeah, between internal pain and physical deconstruction, and how does that go together?

PDA: So okay. So I’m gonna try to think of how to explain this in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a complete lunatic. I probably disappointed you already. I mean, I think there’s certainly a connection there. I think so. I keep talking about ‘my background is in… blah blah blah’, and it sounds like I have like 17 different majors, but I studied a lot of stuff. I’ve been in school for quite some time. So another thing I studied was abnormal psychology, and I was really fascinated by that. And so I am really interested and intrigued by – there’s no way to talk about this without sounding weird, but this is the Eldritch Girl podcast, I’m guessing ‘weird’ is what people are here for, so!

CMR: Yeah…

PDA: I’m really fascinated by self mutilation. Whether it’s for religious reasons, whether it’s for what we might call pathological reasons, whether it’s, for, you know, I like to call it self-expression, whether it’s piercing or branding, or like the hooks that –? Like meathooks, basically?

CMR: Yeah yeah yeah, the hooks people like to hang themselves from, meathooks, yeah.

PDA: And I’m so fascinated by that and why people do that. (Also I have to have an aside and talk about, yes I am obsessed with Hellraiser, how did you know?) I’m really intrigued by that. I think that as somebody who was also raised in a very evangelical household, there’s so much — There’s a lot of physical suffering in Christian theology, right, like there’s just…. that’s just name of the game, and I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of transubstantiation and transformation, and then, like transfiguration, and how you can change yourself, like so kind of, I think kind of similarly to what what you were saying, CM, about the way that you carry your family in your body, like you wear the face of people who came before you that you’re related to. What if you don’t like that? What if you want to change it?

And so one of the ways you can do that is by — You know, what we would call mutilation of the face, or, you know, piercings or tattoos, or you know, branding or scoring, or what have you. And I’m always, I’m interested in that, because one, I think it’s a really fascinating way to look at expression and trying to break some generational curses or generational trauma. But then I also think it’s really interesting in a more spiritual sense, like you defining who you are, and also you having agency over your flesh in a way that you like, I can’t change my DNA, but if I look like somebody in my family, or you know, whatever the situation is, I can alter myself, you know I can alter myself physically. I can alter myself externally, and maybe I can’t change myself internally, but I can change.

I can alter myself externally, and if I get to see that in the mirror, and be reminded of myself, and my own choices, and my own power, rather than looking in the mirror and be reminded of the people who came before me, that can do something to help shift my perspective toward some kind of actualization of some sort, or some kind of like, you know, a sense of agency, some kind of sense of an internal locus of control.That’s the one thing I can control, right, I can control – to an extent – how I look. And I think for a lot of people, and I’ve studied a great deal — I have plans for a novel that plays around this idea, in a much kind of bigger way – uh-oh [laughs at CMR’s excitement while on mute] You’re like ye–eeessss. [laughs] Thank you, thank you so much.

CMR: Literally sitting here like yeee-ess. [laughter] Yesss, excellent.

PDA: Bless you, thank you so much. But, um, that plays around with these ideas of mutilation and apotheosis. Like I don’t know, I know it’s weird –

CMR: Yeah.

PDA: I can’t really explain it, I think in a linear way, because it’s not linear, it’s, you know, I mean at least particularly within, like the Christian faith, like that’s – you know, the way that salvation works, not the only way but one of the clear ways that we tend to celebrate is through suffering. And so I mean, I don’t know, that’s kind of what we’re given to work with in a lot of ways, and I think that’s really interesting.

CMR: Yes, yeah, definitely. I’m a medievalist. That’s my background. I was also raised in a a a Welsh Baptist context, via Greek Orthodoxy with a little bit of — [laughs] So I grew up partially on some of the Greek islands. So I, yeah. So I had quite a lot of the iconography of suffering. But also I find Greek Orthodoxy as much more also about the expression of joy. But it’s more the aesthetic of the small churches, the very gloomy, no natural light except candle light… And Papa Petros, who used to pick me up so I could like candles because I was too small, you know, like that. He was just this like pillar of black. I would look up, and there’d just be this black cloth and then a beard up there somewhere, so you know. And so I kind of remember those sorts of things. And then coming back into a coming back to the UK and growing up in the UK, in a very Welsh Baptist context, and hearing about that that emphasis on suffering and also personal suffering, and that the idea that Christ came to suffer and to be lonely and to be mortal and experience that, and I had that real kind of… that resonated a lot with me, I think.

But then, when I so studied medieval expressions of Christianity and medieval traditions, I think one of the things that I was thinking of as you were talking, there was a priest who was concerned that he didn’t really believe in transubstantiation. So he prayed to God to give him the kind of definitive answer. Is this the body of Christ? Am I to believe that these wafers [correction, should be bread not wafers at this stage] are literally You? And he had a dream. As you should do in all good —

PDA: Oh, sure

CMR: you know. So he had this dream about someone performing the Eucharist, and as he lifted the bread to bless it, it was a baby. And then he tore the baby apart.

PDA: [laughs like what the fuck]

CMR: Literally a literal, actual baby, in the dream, and that obviously was Christ, not as a man, but as an infant as the Incarnated. But and that’s so… that’s an incredible visceral… horrible image. I think that’s worse than actually, you know, cannibalizing an actual adult. It’s just lifting up a baby and tearing it.

PDA: Tearing it apart, yeah.

CMR: And then he was like, oh, you’re right, you know what transubstantiation? That’s fine.

PDA: I’m good! I got it! Thanks! I believe you! Hoo boy.

[Laugher]

CMR: Yeah, so the medieval relationship to suffering, a relationship to to bodily suffering and embodied suffering was kind of off the charts. But yeah, so that that made me think of that kind of embodied visceral image and religious imagery. Yeah. So I get that. So it’s —

PDA: Yeah, yeah.

CMR: So coming at it from a slightly different angle to to the spiritual angle of expressing yourself through —

PDA: No, but I think that that’s part [of it]. I mean it — I mean it’s certainly in the sense of like. you know, as far as the Western thought, that’s kind of a big, like the whole idea of bodily suffering that transforms, you know, the spiritual access to grace and salvation through bodily suffering with that, kind of undergirds everything. I mean, particularly like in the United States, you know, the influence of Puritanism, but that’s everywhere like that’s it. It’s everywhere. It’s in everything. That’s just it, you know? it’s everywhere, it’s in everything, and I’m trying to – I’m trying to – because you said you were a Medievalist, because I’m really interested in fascinated by the Convulsionnaires and the sex, in I think it’s fifteenth or sixteenth century France. They were basically like cenobites of that time period. But they were people, and they, and it was again for religious purposes, and they just did so much of the mortification of the flesh. Just reading about it… At first it sounded like just the normal, you know, “normal” flogging, and all that sort of stuff, then they just go into some really wild places that brings us to today, and kind of a lot of the extreme, more extreme body modification practices of today. it just seems like a thing that humans are really — pardon the pun, but it seems like a thing that humans are really hung up on, is that, that — you know, I’m this thinking meat, and it causes me some issues, so I’m going to hurt myself to try and like, transcend it or transform that or something. And I just think that’s — I don’t know it fascinates me that that’s such a common practice across cultures, a common practice across, you know, time periods. No matter how intellectual we get, we still… there’s some pockets of society that still come back to that over and over and over again. And yeah, I mean, I don’t think that necessarily consciously that’s in my work. But I think certainly that’s a big, that’s kind of what’s going on in the back of my head at a lot of times and in those kinds of stories that feature, those those kinds of acts, I think.

CMR: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I can’t wait to see what else you do with those sorts of themes. Like, novels, as well. That’s going to be delicious.

[laughter]

PDA: It’s going to be really awful. Like, I’m saying now, it’s gonna be… [disgusted noise] but you know it’s… but I appreciate that, and I think that’s one thing I kind of have to say, that this was not a question that you asked at all, but the reaction to the collection, for the most part, has been really like affirming, because I think a lot of people have these kinds of questions, or have these kinds of thoughts, or, you know, are intrigued by these sorts of things, and I think that knowing that is really like, oh, okay, that kind of — I don’t know, lets some of the pressure off, I think.

Before the book came out I was really nervous about it’s content, I mean, you know there’s a very long content warning at the beginning of the book, and I was like man. I don’t know, this might be too much for a lot of people, and if it is that’s fine. You know what, that’s okay.

I wasn’t so worried about that. I didn’t you know, not release the book. I didn’t change anything or calm down anything like that. But I think it’s affirming for me that that the book connected with so many people, even though it’s it’s pretty extreme, and it’s themes, and just in the the writing itself. So I have found that to be really lovely.

CMR: Yeah, I think that goes back to what you were saying, it’s like a universal thing that people kind of — you know, not everybody?

PDA: Sure, certainly.

CMR: But like, there’s perhaps a group of us.

PDA: Yes. A small group of us you are, you know, just into that sort of thing. Yeah.

CMR: Yeah! Even if we don’t do it to ourselves,

PDA: Correct.

CMR: it’s a cathartic way, I think, and a safe way of using fiction and expressing things through fiction, and like dealing with personal trauma and stuff,

PDA: Sure.

CMR: -through this kind of physical, this fictional depiction of physical suffering or physical changing or physical something. And I think that’s that is the allure of body horror, isn’t it, for a lot of people.

PDA: Yeah, yeah, I think you’re right. I mean it’s just like you said, it’s a safe way to, you know, to explore some of these anxiety that we have, and some of these, you know, experiences that we have as as human beings that we just can’t really articulate well. But you know we can present it in some kind of visualized way that that resonates, you know.

I was watching Possession a couple of weeks ago, and I’d never seen it before. I had never seen Possession with, you know, Sam Neill and Isabella Adjani. You know everybody talks about that scene where she’s in the the subway, and she’s, yeah. If you haven’t seen Possession, you have to. I think it’s on Shudder now. I don’t know if it’s on like, UK Shudder, but I know it was on Shudder in the US, and I was watching it, and it was just like, you know. Trying to explain to somebody what that movie is about is really, really difficult. But there are parts of that movie where I’m like. I get it exactly. I totally understand what that is meant to to represent. I’ve never done those things in real life, but I emotionally, I completely understand what these characters are going through. And that’s just really fascinating, the fascination with any kind of arts or creativity is that it can make sense on some level that you may not be able to, like, verbally or even textually articulate, but like you get it, it makes sense in some way. So.

What Next?

CMR: Yeah. I think that’s a good place to end it, because that’s all we’ve got time for at the minute. [Laughter] I wish [we could go longer]. But. Before we go, is there anything you would like to plug, anything you’ve got coming out this year [2023], anything you already have that you want to reiterate?

PDA: So I do have a story coming up in this collection called This World Belongs To Us, an anthology of horror stories about bugs. My story is about earwigs, because I think they’re so gross. Yeah, they just gross me out. That collection will drop, I believe, mid to late March, from From Beyond Press. It has a fantastic line up of writers. So please be on the lookout for that.

And then, yeah, I mean the best way to to stay in contact with me or just keep up with me is probably via Twitter. Sadly enough. I’m always on Twitter. But yeah, my twitter handle is just @PaulaDAshe. But yeah, so. But thank you so so very much CM, for having me. This has been a lovely conversation.

CMR: Yes, definitely! It would be lovely to have you back and we can talk more insects and body horror and gooey things!

PDA: Yeah!

[Laughter]

CMR: But thank you so much for coming on the show, it’s been fantastic to have you, and best of luck with everything that you’ve got going on.

PDA: Thanks so much, and to you as well.

[Outro: Waltz Primordial – Kevin McLeod]

#EldritchGirl S03E08: Do you love me

Listen NowBuy the bookStatus: It’s Complicated

The chapter heading, What I did I should never have done, comes from ‘The First Song of Yscolan’, The Black Book of Carmarthen XXXIII, from The Four Ancient Books of Wales, online translation by William Forbes Skene at the Celtic Literature Collective. 

It’s a great line for a Wes chapter because that encompasses everything he’s ever done, pretty much.

In this chapter, now available as audio, Wes has another vision-episode, in which he sees himself betray a family member to Jem’s cult. Clearly, there’s an issue there. But it starts by calling back to the standalone short story Overexposure, which is 10% off in my shop over Pride Month 2023 with the discount code “PRIDE” entered at checkout, and included in the box set of eBooks, now all for £10.

The dynamic of Wes’s relationship with Charlie echoes his own addictions that he’s developing during Thirteenth, but also is established in that novel as being an unhealthy continuation of the short story. The events of the story are referenced in the novel too, and for those who want the full backstory of Charlie’s eyelid/browbone scars, Overexposure is where you’ll find it, told completely in her POV.

This section of the chapter pretty much highlights what their relationship currently looks like, and Wes trying to figure out if he’s in love with her or if he loves her in a different way or if he loves her at all, some of which is the anhedonia from his depression, and some is his own emotional dysregulation (undiagnosed, unmedicated ADHD), and some is the relationship rut of 9-ish years of this very toxic, unhealthy dynamic thrown into sharper relief now he’s sober (sort of).

Her eyes had been brighter, once. He remembered them, a vivid forest-green, brimming with life and adventure. They were muted now, vacant. Her creativity hadn’t suffered but it had gotten darker. A lot darker. Her aesthetic had shifted from finding those little details in the world that made it brighter and more playful, to minimalist voids and absences, a focus on negative space.  

Her deep red curls, dyed back to their vibrant natural colour, now looked like they were trying too hard. Underneath, the iron-grey was beautiful, he wanted to tell her. She didn’t need to hide it. He liked the way it framed her sweet, oval face in silvery tones. He knew her body now, could read its language like braille, and it was fatigued.  

She was working too hard.  

He kissed her, hard and long and deep and full of regret. She kissed him back, mouth as greedy as her eyes. He broke the kiss after counting slowly to five in his head and turned deliberately away to stare at the dead TV.  

She blinked then and only then, and in her reflection in the plasma screen he saw the pain of loss slashing through the dusty vacancy. Her eyes lit up again, sparked into life by furious disappointment as his image was erased from her mind.  

In those moments, she looked like the old Charlie.  

“I love you,” he said, half-turning back to her and cupping her chin. “Have a good day today.” 

Everything faded. Her shoulders slumped.  

“You too, baby.” Even her voice was dulled. 

It wasn’t fair that he’d got himself weaned off most of his vices and she was stuck with hers for as long as he was alive. He didn’t feel he could celebrate his daily sobriety with her or Hugo, like that would be throwing it back in their faces. It had rankled at first, but now it was just another thing he didn’t talk about. 

Charlie twisted her fingers together. “Will you be home tonight?” 

“I don’t know.” Wes shook his head. “If I’m not I’ll call you, and you can see me that way.” 

“It’s not as good, and you’ve been away a lot.” She shivered. “Kiss me again.” 

Wes nearly said no, but he couldn’t. He kissed her, and almost lost himself in the life-or-death urgency of her lips on his. He let her choose when to break it this time and held her in silence for a moment.  

“I’ve got to go,” she murmured.  

Wes released her. “Yeah, okay. I love you.” 

“Do you?”  

The question slapped him out of nowhere. 

Charlie was serious.  

He didn’t know how to answer her, so he said what she needed to hear. “Of course I do.” 

She smiled like she wasn’t sure if she believed him.

The Day We Ate Grandad, Chapter 7: What I Did, I Should Never Have Done

You can see how this all began in Overexposure, which has an audio version too. If you want 10% off anything in my shop, add the code “PRIDE” at checkout to claim your discount. The boxset already has a massive reduction applied! Full price individually all the eBooks are around £21 total to buy, and the set is now £10 for Pride Month. After that it will be going up.

Listen to overexposure NowBuy on sale

#EldritchGirl S03E07: Aren’t you worried about us?

Listen nowBuy the bookAren’t You Worried About Us?

This chapter is the full mental health crisis of Katy Porter chapter, with spiralling depression, suicide ideation, self-harm desires/intent, and a magical intervention. Katy asks Myrddin why he’s telling her to fulfill her eldritch potential and if he’s not at all concerned that they are a real threat to the world too, and his response is to point out that they aren’t that much of a threat.

The whole point of this family is a pastiche of Lovecraftian abominations like The Dunwich Horror and The Shadow over Innsmouth, in which they aren’t really a threat to the wider world except to (oh no) spread their eldritch DNA if they’re not careful. But they are this way because of their aims and values and personalities; the family culture is aspiring middle-class, and they care more about appearances and holidays in Mauritius and shopping in John Lewis than they do about world domination.

There’s a lot of mundane juxtaposition with eldritch/cosmic that creates anticlimaxes in the story (on purpose) and this is one of those moments where Katy is confronted with everything she could be versus the reality of where she is, and it’s very bald and unsympathetic, and she doesn’t take it well.

I think I also needed someone to lay out why the Triad themselves aren’t a threat, but Myrddin does this in a very blunt, critical way that probably doesn’t help.

She frowned. “Hey, so. If we’re so powerful, and you want me to – what, work with the boys? To kill Grandad? Have I got that right? Then… aren’t you worried about us? Because I’d be worried about us.” 

He took a deep breath of the stiff sea air. “If it was anyone else, the stars would turn dark, the moon would be blood, and the world would burn.”  

Katy rolled her eyes. “Bit dramatic.” 

Myrddin remained unimpressed. “And instead… your brother, who could master armies and spread his infection across continents, who contains legions and could muster them at will for peace or for war, is doing what? Running a nightclub in Brixton? Terrifying. And your cousin, who could pluck secrets from the heart of the sun and weave the tapestry of the wyrd into any pattern of his choosing, is where? Wallowing in solitude because he’s upset his missus.” He shook his head.  

“No, he’s not,” Katy snapped, before she could stop herself. “He’s doing better.” She caught his expression and scowled, partly at his scepticism and partly at herself for defending him.  

Myrddin ignored her. “And you – you who could stand and defy the apocalypse – you, who could sit on the Throne you’ve made and be the keeper of your clan and their memory, you, possessed of a form nothing can destroy… You are sitting in a park, about to cut your arms with something your brother-in-law uses for slicing tomatoes.”  

Katy’s cheeks burned. “Fuck you, old man.” 

“I see he’s rubbed off on you, your cousin.” Myrddin gave her an arch look of disapproval. “Not quite in the way I’d hoped, but it’s something.” 

“You’re saying that… that what, we’re stupid? That what we feel doesn’t matter? That we should just… we should stop being ourselves and be this… be these monsters we’re supposed to be?” Katy threw the empty can at him. “What the fuck are you doing, then?” 

He caught it without blinking. “I’m saying we are all very fortunate that you are who you are. But I’m also saying perhaps there is more out there for you than that small dark room you each insist on sitting in.” He crushed the can in his hand without visible effort. “And I am trying to ensure that the world doesn’t end, because even I have my limitations, and some acts of heroism, God help us, are for those with the powers I do not possess. Even if the ones with those powers are doing their level best to deny their potential and doom us all.” 

Katy couldn’t reply. She swallowed.  

The Day We Ate Grandad – pp. 109-110

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#EldritchGirl S03E06: Another Battle There Is, In His Eye-Socket

Listen NowBuy the bookThe Chapter Heading Explained

For the chapter heading of Chapter 5, I used a line from Taliesin’s Cad Goddeu, (Middle Welsh: Kat Godeu] The Battle of the Trees, from an old and not great translation by W. F. Skene, available here. It’s definitely worth reading in its entirety and in a better translation, but the Welsh original is transcribed here.

The presentation of bardic prowess and shape-shifting in the person of a battle-hardened warrior magician is really interesting, along with the references to words and language as intrinsic to power and magic, and I took this theme in The Day We Ate Grandad to very similar places. If you read the full poem and the idea of Gwyddion being begotten not of parents but existing in some form or other before time began, that’s all very appropriate to twist and adapt into a modern eldritch horror concept.

I’ve taken this and mashed it with Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep and The Crawling Chaos, as well as Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow to hint at the power of Wes’s image, and his ability to command legions as a result.

I love the idea of a battle in Wes’s eye, which in the poem may just mean ‘reflected in’, or in his mind’s eye, but I took this line out of context and literally. So the chapter heading relates to the things Wes can command his legions to do (if he were to become a cult leader), and to the internal struggle taking place within him, and to the conflict in the gents’ that he’s currently partaking in.

And there it is: the reason for the header!

#EldritchGirl S03E05: things left unfinished

Neurodivergence in The Day We Ate Grandad

I wasn’t deliberately writing Ricky and Wes (and Mercy in The Crows) with ADHD. It’s just that I gave them all the things that I struggle with, and all the traits that I wanted to examine in different situations, and it organically developed from there. I didn’t even know I had ADHD when I was writing them to start with. That’s why even they don’t know they have ADHD in-world.

But, based on what I’ve actually written for them, both Ricky and Wes have untreated, undiagnosed ADHD – Ricky is more inattentive with mental hyperactivity, while Wes is more the ‘classic’ example of a hyperactive type. Depression and trauma intersect with how their symptoms present, and Wes in particular struggles more with his symptoms after quitting stimulants.

Wes & ADHD

Wes associates a party atmosphere, increased libido, situational euphoria and dopamine highs with cocaine use, but in fact it gave him more focus and helped mitigate some of his symptoms. When you meet him in The Crows, before he’s been used as a guinea pig for various designer drugs, he’s a lot calmer, a lot more relaxed, and a lot less volatile.

In Thirteenth, where his substance use is really getting out of control (and taking less cocaine as he’s being forced to test a number of other things), he’s incoherent, his thoughts aren’t following logical patterns, he’s more unfocused and restless, and he’s struggling to keep himself together.

His physical hyperactivity is more obvious – he can’t stand still for very long, and people assume it’s the cocaine or other drug use, but this continues into The Day We Ate Grandad where it’s more obviously just something he does.

In The Day We Ate Grandad, he’s fully off cocaine and a number of other, unspecified things, and he’s also off the Silver Lining he was getting addicted to in the previous novel. He notes that he’s always been ‘scatter-brained’ (his mother’s term), and starts getting frustrated by his lack of impulse control, his lack of object permanence, his inability to concentrate, and so on. He shows signs of being time-blind later in the novel, and finds it hard to start tasks like packing his bags. He blames the withdrawals, but he’s not yet figured out that these are all symptoms of something else. Wes often forgets to eat and just doesn’t register he’s hungry, which exacerbates his issues with substances and alcohol.

The main scene this is most obvious in (there are a few) is much later in the book, Chapter 14.

Katy has to take control of situations because Wes just isn’t able to, in the way that Carrie needs to manage Ricky, which isn’t great. While Wes lives with Charlie and Hugo, a lot of that is taken care of for him, so it only becomes obvious that he’s not very good at coping later on when he’s forced to be by himself.

Let’s be clear though – ADHD is not the reason Wes is a selfish bastard. That’s just because he’s an arsehole.

Ricky & ADHD

Ricky’s symptoms are present constantly but hidden because he doesn’t have to worry about doing things to a schedule, or focusing on things he’s not interested in. He’s so under-socialised that he never engages with conversations that don’t interest him. He never went to school, so his autodidactic learning is completely selective. He’s only ever read books he likes, and he’s never been forced to concentrate on things he doesn’t like to do in a formal setting.

He doesn’t own a watch, so it’s not clear that he’s also time-blind. He doesn’t form habits, so everything he does is a conscious decision. When he stops being an ascetic, all of that lifestyle is just… gone. He then struggles to form a new routine, and Carrie has to try and manage him and stop him forgetting to go to bed, etc.

Ricky can sit still for hours and focus on things like the future, but he can’t get his brain to shut up. This comes up a lot – he has a lot of strategies for this, some involving substance abuse/alcohol abuse, but mainly involving some unspecified herbal tea he makes himself, introduced in The Crows and given to Carrie for her anxiety. In Thirteenth it’s referenced that long walks can help, but in The Day We Ate Grandad he’s not doing any physical activity and struggling with sobriety and depression in general. His sleep patterns are not great (for example, he goes for a walk at midnight at one point, and doesn’t come back). His hobbies are also not habits – things left unfinished is a reference to the line where he looks at his taxidermy needles and knife collection and realises he hasn’t done anything with them for a long time. Basically, if a habit is disrupted, it’s very hard/impossible to pick it back up again, and the search for novelty overtakes it. But since Ricky is depressed, and experiencing anhedonia to some degree, he’s not looking for new things to do.

Ricky only has one change of clothes in The Crows because it’s easier to manage. The cottage is kept very tidy (except Gerald’s cellar, arguably, where all his stuff is). His personal hygiene is poor because the multi-step processes of washing and bathing are hard, and he has to be prompted to do them. Moving in with Carrie means, later, that Ricky basically has someone else to help mitigate his difficulties with all of this, plus someone to make sure he eats properly.

His disordered eating is a combination of several things, but made worse by the fact that ADHD can also impact one’s relationship with food. Ricky comfort eats in The Crows and often binges on whatever he can get his hands on, whether that’s a whole packet of out-of-date mince beef, insects, or mice. In Thirteenth he swings the other way and doesn’t eat enough, and won’t unless Carrie makes him. In The Day We Ate Grandad, we’re back to depression binges, but this time combined with a lack of physical activity (including Changes), so he gains weight from January-April, where the novel begins.

Both Ricky and Wes show signs of depression and anxiety that overlap with ADHD symptoms and impact them both in different ways.

It would really benefit both of them to actually work this out and look at ways to work with their brains a bit better – and in Wes’s case, maybe try medication – but we’ll see.

Listen to the EpisodeBuy the Book

#MonstrousMay 2023: The Doppelganger

Originally I thought this was part of DI Paula Parsons’ backstory but it doesn’t fit her anymore, so this is DI Hayley Carter, Parsons’ predecessor, and I don’t know how it ends exactly, except it ends with her being booted out of the force and Parsons taking her job.

Featuring: police corruption, head trauma, murder

Monday Blues2006

Blood rushed in my ears, drowning the murmur around me. People blocked the steps up to the police station, gathered around the figure sprawled across them, half beneath the central handrail. They looked up at me and back down at the woman, while I grimly gripped the rail and let them move around me. Their faces and uniform blurred into the background of my consciousness, as I focused on the way the side of her head was deformed, caved in, clotted with blood. I didn’t have to fumble my way around her throat with trembling, clumsy fingers like PC Forester, to know she was dead.

“What the fuck, Carter?” Detective Sergeant Stanley rumbled at me, as if I’d put her there as a practical joke.

PC Forester staggered away to lose his breakfast down a convenient drain. It was his first corpse and his first suspicious death, all in one.

I tried to moisten my lips, but my tongue was dry as cardboard.

“I don’t know, sir,” I croaked.

The woman on the steps was wearing a black trouser suit I recognised – I had one exactly like it. Her hair was short, like mine. Her shoes were identical to the ones I was currently wearing. But these details of my wardrobe were lost on DS Stanley, who was focused on the bigger picture.

“Why does she have your face?”

I had no easy answer to that. “I don’t know, sir.”

My truthfulness was met with a flat, unimpressed glare. “Well, since this is your first day as a Detective Constable, I suggest you start doing the legwork to find out why.”

I nodded, stomach churning. Permission to be excused was not going to be granted. “Yes, sir.”

I had no idea who she was, or why she had my face, or how she came to be dumped on the steps of the police station.

The only thing I knew for certain was who’d killed her.

It may have been PC Forester’s first corpse, but it was my first cover-up.

~~~~

It had all begun a few months ago, when the woman with my face got off the train at Pagham Parkway station. Our eyes met through the window of the station cafe. I was just picking up a coffee and revising for my detective exams – I was still a PC myself then, desperate to prove myself and pass my detective exams, and the station should have been Traffic’s responsibility, but with cut-backs it was part of my beat to swing by on the way to the TravelInn Hotel and the commuter estate on the edge of town. That day I’d thought I was seeing things. I knew weird shit happened here – Pagham-on-Sea was that sort of a town – but seeing myself, in my own clothes, sent an icy shudder down my back.

The woman’s eyes locked with mine for the briefest of moments, and I saw my own expression mirrored on her face, like a reflection. Then a group of people pushed their way to the barriers, and she was borne along with them and out of sight.

I tried to forget it. I told myself all kinds of comforting things. But I kept seeing her.

I saw her across the high street.

I saw her sitting in my favourite cafe.

I saw her going into the cinema.

I saw her going past me on the bus.

She was everywhere. This woman had got off a train one grey day in January, walked into my life, and wouldn’t leave it. I began to see her in people that looked nothing like me. I saw her in people with fair skin, who couldn’t possibly be me. I saw her in kids, too young to be me. I flinched at my own reflection in car windows, shop windows, mirrors, puddles; I recoiled from my own appearance as if it caused me physical pain, the mental equivalent of stepping on a pin. I would stand in front of my door, keys scoring their livid marks into my palm as I clenched my fist around them, staring at the door handle, the portal to my waking nightmare. The pit of my stomach churned and flipped every time I had to leave the house, every time I had to look both ways to cross the road, every time I caught a stranger’s eye. I lived suspended in the fear of knowing you’re about to fall, before you hit the ground.

That was why, when I saw her again, I followed her.

On the 17th of March at eight o’clock in the evening, I caught a glimpse of the woman with my face leaving the Prince Albert pub. I saw her in the orange of a streetlight, turning around a corner with only one swift, backward glance.

It was a seedy area, the house next to it a dilapidated, crumbling heap, and the Prince Albert itself was a notorious no-go pub for police. If someone had seen her in there, and thought she was me…

A bubble of rage burst in the front of my skull, my chest hot and tight. I ran after her around the side of the pub and down the alleyway, not thinking.

“Hey!” I don’t know how I managed to shout. My throat was dry and constricted, snakes squirming in my stomach, whipping up queasy crests that rose and fell, causing my heart to flutter and pound.

She turned, my face staring back at me with a confused expression, blank, vacant, defeated. “You,” she said, in my voice, and I stopped dead in the midst of the rubbish bags and debris from the half-demolished wall the other side of us.

“Me,” I asserted, half for my own benefit, half for hers.

“Why won’t you leave me alone?” she asked. I recognised that flat, dead tone. It was my grandmother’s tone when things didn’t go her way. She had the same puffy bags below her eyes as me, the same heavy lids and the same lines around her mouth, pulled down into the same unhappy frown.

I flashed into a temper. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

She swayed a little, staring at me. “I read about this,” she croaked, in that flat, dead whisper. “When you see yourself like this, it means you’re going to die.”

“Like hell it does,” I snapped. “I’m a police officer. You need to tell me what this is all about.”

She smiled, then. “I thought about joining the force, once.” Her eyes skittered past me, staring into the night. “I didn’t think I’d be assertive enough.”

I heard my own doubts about joining up parroted back at me, and my skin prickled as the blood drained from my face. I didn’t want to think about my double having a life independent of my own.

“What do you do?” I asked. “Why do you have my face?” I tried to swallow. “What’s your name?”

She blinked, returning my own stare to me. “Hayley,” she said. “My name is Hayley. Hayley Carter.”

To this day, I don’t remember picking up the brick. I don’t remember its rough, gritty weight in my hand. I don’t remember how my fingers closed over its edges, the size of it relative to my palm.

I do remember the sound it made when it hit the side of her skull.

I remember watching myself die.

I was sure no one had seen, or heard. No one was around. I dropped the brick and caught her before she hit the ground, but she was dead. I already knew she was dead. Her eyes rolled back in her head, the whites of them gleaming in the gloom, and fear froze my instincts, shut down my thoughts. I was in an alley holding a dead woman who looked exactly like me, wearing clothes I had bought, bearing my name. I’d met my own double, and I’d killed her.

I know no one had seen me.

Later that night I came back for the body, stashed behind the bin bags in a dark corner. No one saw me wrapping it up, dragging it down the alley and into my car. I weighed it down with the bricks from the broken wall – including the one I’d hit her with – and drove her out to Devil’s Drop. She fell like a stone down the cliffs, but I’d kicked her far enough that she missed bouncing down the sides and instead splashed directly into the sea.

So when she turned up bone-dry on the steps of the police station the very next morning, still dead, I knew this was the start of something, not the end.

#MonstrousMay 2023: Trapped

Quatre Faces, Pagham-on-Sea, 1973

It was quiet when Linn woke up, a shaft of weak, sinking sunlight trailing over the edge of her orange dress, picking out a line of cold white flesh below the short hem, the rest of her in shadow.

The window was boarded up from the inside, but one board was hanging loose, allowing the sun to slice through.

Her throat was dry. She couldn’t remember how she got here, or where she was. She remembered Suzy, her white boots, her red skirt. She couldn’t remember when they split up, or if they had. But Suzy wasn’t here, so they must have done, mustn’t they?

She found her bag, lying some way away from her on the bare floorboards. Linn stood up, legs wobbling, knees weak. She scooped up the bag, but it was empty. No purse, no lighter, no cigarettes. The only thing in there was a card from the last place they had been; THE PIT.

The Pit was a night spot she didn’t know well, and she had vague memories of red velvet, darkness, and dancers. In her fractured memory, some of them were dancing upside down.

Her attention snapped to the ceiling as she flinched at this bizarre idea, but it was a plain, high, white affair devoid of anything unusual. A plaster corbel with floral decorations was the only ornate thing, a modest chandelier hanging from the centre.

The room had two doors, one on either side, as if it was meant to be a thoroughfare. Linn tried both, her boots clunking loud on the wood, but both were locked. She tried the window, but while the loose board let in the sunlight, it refused to let her out, and wouldn’t budge, no matter how she tried to force it to part from the window frame.

There was a fireplace, and a chimney flue. This was the only feature of the room, which was devoid of any furniture or personality. Linn inspected the flue as far as she dared, but soot fell on her face as if something further up had dislodged it, and she recoiled back into the empty space.

She found the light switch and the chandelier flared into dim, flickering light. Two bulbs were gone. The remaining bulbs flooded the shadows with dull yellow.

Now other details presented themselves; scuff marks on the floor, scratches in the walls, and something small and bloody embedded in the floorboard at her feet. She bent down, trembling, to see what it was.

A human fingernail, with chipped pink polish, ragged on the edges and crusted with blood, was stuck between two boards.

Stifling a choked scream, Linn ran back to the window and heaved at the loose board again, but it wouldn’t shift any further. Neither would the others, no matter how she tried to prise them free. She returned to the doors, trying to force first one then the other, but to no avail.

From behind her, soot pattered into the grate. Linn rattled the door handle so hard it came off in her hand. Linn dashed back to the window to try and use the handle as a means of prising the boards off, or break the glass. The handle only hurt her palms, biting hard into her as she levered, and Linn dropped it. She battered the boards with her fists in the hope of attracting attention from someone in the street, but the chink of visibility revealed an empty road beyond well-kept railings.

Was she in one of the townhouses on Quatre Faces? The square was the quietest, most expensive address in the town. Nobody passed through it in the evening or at night. There wasn’t even any traffic.

Linn had always wanted to see what the insides of these great confectionary blocks were like, and she had imagined opulence and decadent parties, not something so bare and hollow. A shiver shot down her back as she took in the sinister details for a second time; this room was not a room at all. It was a coffin.

Something thudded to the floor. Linn leapt around with a scream.

An object had fallen from the flue and landed in the grate, where it now lay in a cloud of soot. It was a white PVC woman’s boot, the same size as Suzy’s. It had kept its shape, as if a foot and calf were still filling out the interior.

Numb with fear, Linn forced herself to approach it, unsure how it could have got there. Protruding from the lip of the boot was something misshapen and sharp. It was only when she got closer that she realised it was a shattered femur, snapped off before the knee, and the boot was indeed still full of pale, bloodless flesh.

She screamed until her throat was hoarse, begging someone to hear her. She threw herself against the doors, bouncing off the sides of her prison, her coffin-room, and slamming against the boarded window.

Behind her, something else slithered down the flue. Linn couldn’t bear to turn and see what it was, her voice was hoarse, her fists stinging, her shoulders aching with the effort of slamming against the unyielding doors.

The slithering ended in a solid thump, but there was more slithering, and Linn spun around in time to see the dead faces, dead hands, dead bodies, reeking of grave mould and ashes, crawling towards her in a greedy tide of leering teeth and monstrous facial ridges, hollow eye sockets long eaten clean by worms, long tongues like toads flicking out across the floor and tasting the air for Linn’s small cuts and scrapes.

Linn’s final screams were drowned in the suffocating press of their bodies against hers, mouths splitting all the way from ear to ear and fastening on her own, tongues snaking down her choking throat to suck at her stomach juices, tearing holes in her flesh with their coal-blackened talons, suckling at her wounds and draining her away.

Silence fell once more on Quatre Faces as the lights began to turn on in the eerie Square, windows veiled and boarded, rooms echoing and empty, each one an opulent shell for the dead.

#EldritchGirl S03E04: Old words make old things come out

Words of Power

That little phrase, ‘old words make old things come out’, is based on a specific concept of language and the power inherent within a language that I’m playing with in the series. Ricky refuses to speak Welsh (established in The Crows) but has a fluent command of Old English which he feels much safer using.

Tina’s heart language is Old English, not Welsh, established in The Crows, and that’s the language she conducts séances in. She had a Welsh grandfather on her mother’s side; that would be Sgt. Evan Pritchard of the Welch Regiment who was injured on the Western Front and married his (Sussex-born) nurse. His sister, Eglantine Pritchard, moved to Pagham-on-Sea after the War to be nearer to him and to help with his care and with the care of the children. Both of them, and Eglantine’s life partner and ‘companion’, Gwen Mostyn-Jenkins, were Welsh speakers, but of varying degrees of fluency.

This is based on the idea that command of a language is in itself powerful, and that by words alone, spoken aloud, a poet can recreate reality. This is kind of true: there is such power in the spoken word within an oral culture that this is literally how history is made and preserved and stories passed on and everything those stories convey about and to that society is perpetuated.

This can be crystallised – the words learned by rote, very carefully, exactly, and never changed – or part of a more flexible, fluid system of composition where the poet can show off their skills. The idea here is that the power resides in all words, and poets, by their ability to weave them into something clever and beautiful, can wield immense power.

By their words, battles are lost and won (it doesn’t matter the truth of it – what is said becomes what is remembered, and that’s often all that matters).

The dead are memorialised and immortalised. The living are burnished with gleaming reputations, or they are cursed before all society and turned into objects of scorn.

There is no power or magic higher than words, because if you know how to spin them, how to use them to capture your audience, you can do anything.

So what if that’s literally true? What if there are people – like Eglantine Pritchard – whose words don’t just impact reality in the usual way, but have the power to literally reshape it?

I’m drawing on the Medieval Welsh tradition of curse poetry (a truly great bard could make the subject drop down dead upon hearing it), and Old English poetic traditions and the ideas inherent in having an old language that carries the weight of its past and its heritage within it.

I grew up with this type of ‘magic system’ (it’s not a system) through Welsh fiction like Jenny Nimmo’s The Snow Spider, where the way to summon things to you is to give trinkets to the wind and say the names of old magicians (Math, Mathonwy, et al). The protagonist is a young boy called Gwydion Gwyn, and he’s a magician, but he’s also a nine-year-old with a missing older sister who is living in the shadow of her absence and blaming himself for her disappearance, one stormy night on his birthday. His nain believes he’s a magician and entrusts him with some artefacts to give to the wind, and also with a tiny, broken wooden horse that cannot be burned or destroyed, which he must never release. (It’s possessed by the spirit of Efnisien, who mutilated the King of Ireland’s horses over a perceived slight and caused the genocide of Ireland and also the destruction of the British armies, as detailed in the Tale of Branwen in the Mabinogi).

Words are the only thing needed, but mainly invocations of previous magicians simply by saying their names. It’s not like the names give you power over the magicians of the past, though, it’s not the same as the True Name idea of faerie lore. I’ve tried to make that explicit in the way that Ricky thinks about Myrddin’s name in the flashback of Chapter 1, and the way Ricky reacts to Myrddin speaking Ricky’s name out loud.

Names as invocations, spoken words as portals to other worlds, all of that gets bound up in this version of ‘words of power’, and it’s a thing I want to expand on later. I’m cautious about committing to projects, but I do want to look at Eglantine Pritchard’s life and times, and so if I do properly explore her as a person in some Pagham-on-Sea HistFic, this will come up as central to her practices.

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#MonstrousMay: The Monster’s Wings

1943: Nathan Porter’s Journal

EXPEDITION TO THE OUTSIDE

This trip took me along the coastline a little further than I have explored before.

I discovered, some way along, the carcass of a giant insectoid, with a monstrous head like a horse but with a mouth split all the way up the muzzle to the base of the neck, filled with extraordinarily sharp fangs, quite unlike any insect in our world.

…

The creature had gauzy wings like a dragonfly, translucent and shimmering as I inspected them. The wingspan of this creature is approximately 5 feet across, and 2 feet wide at the wings’ widest part. The wing is veined all the way across, creating uneven window panes of thin membrane like a mosaic of stained glass. They seem to be hinged on the creature’s back, embedded inside a casing not unlike a beetle, although the body seems to be segmented like a hornet. The casing is a brown-green, and covers the thorax.

The sting of the creature is enormous and would surely pierce through a man before any venom could be injected. It does seem to be venomous, as the stinger is hollow and came away when I cut at the root of it like a stubborn tooth. Venom spilled from the sacs to which it was attached, and I have collected samples for testing.

I have also cut away one of the giant wings for further examination of its mechanics and properties. If nothing else, it will make a fine mobile for the nursery, or a kite for the children when they are older.

Other external samples taken: fangs, one of the creature’s eyes, which are round orbs comprised of perfect hexagons, implying a full range of sight, and one limb of the six it possesses intact, for dissection.

I did perform a rudimentary dissection on the spot while I had the opportunity, and discovered the thing has three stomachs. I took samples of blood and attempted to sample the stomach acid but the acid burned through my glass vial. I took samples of the flesh where possible instead, to see what could resist such acidic properties.

I am not sure what the creature died of; there were no wounds upon it, so perhaps it reacted to a change in its environment, such as temperature or adverse weather. It may have starved to death; as far as I could tell, it’s stomachs were empty, although they dissolved my scalpel and other blades as I sliced them open to check.

Note: some stomach acidic spilled out upon the wing, and the wing is scorched in that spot, but has not completely eroded through. What is the wing made of?

Note: the blood is blue, like ink, and has a very similar texture.

Tom Brown (c) 2021 – Ricky In Trouble, illustration from THIRTEENTH

#MonstrousMay 2023: The Mermaid

The Mermaid: A Brief Potted History

There is apparently an old Sussex story about a giant knight (Sir Bevis) and a mermaid, which you can read here, but in Pagham-on-Sea The Mermaid is a pub. Don’t confuse it with The Mermaid Inn in Rye, which is actually nice and somewhere to stay. No. Not that one.

The Mermaid in Pagham-on-Sea is not a nice place. In fact, the only place worse is The Prince Albert, but that’s something for another post. It is home to some very human monsters, and currently some very nice undead ones.

The Mermaid is on Hangman’s Walk, which is the place where the medieval gallows was. The gallows was in use through to the eighteenth century until reforms meant that capital punishment was enacted at Horsham, notorious in the nineteenth century for its ‘hanging fairs’. Hangman’s Walk used to be a main thoroughfare along the coast, but with the advent of greater industry and new routes – such as train tracks – Hangman’s Walk became less travelled. Smugglers were hanged there in the eighteenth century because it was a main thoroughfare, and The Mermaid was a place where people gathered to drink before watching the executions.

After the execution of many members of a smuggling gang in the 1740s and 50s, and some graverobbers in the 1780s-90s, the local gaol was destroyed in a daring raid by the surviving graverobber gang, causing much embarrassment to local law enforcement and the magistrate. The gallows was not used so much after this, and criminals were usually sent in the county goal.

This meant a slow decline for The Mermaid, which had never enjoyed a ‘good class’ of clientele.

It was known to be a centre for criminal activity, and its reputation through the 1790s-1840s was of a tavern of ill repute. After a raid in 1847, it was closed for some years, reopened in 1869, by the same landlord, Joss Bell, who had purchased The Forge and Hammer in 1834, and renamed it The Prince Albert in honour of Queen Victoria’s marriage in 1840. The Mermaid was run by Bell’s nephew, Leoline Bell, and he almost immediately ran it into the ground.

By 1878, the Bells had lost The Mermaid in a game of cards to a disgraced soldier, Sgt. James Edward James, who took it over and made it turn a profit again. It became a centre for gambling and opium, with the upper rooms used as a brothel.

James Edward James was a prominent figure in the criminal history of Pagham-on-Sea, running various rackets and with a reach as far as St Leonard’s. He was eventually found murdered in the street, and no one was convicted of the crime, although there was no shortage of suspects.

The Mermaid was bought by Mrs Eliza Green, who also took over the gambling and brothel, and is the main suspect for James’ murder among local true crime enthusiasts.

Mrs Green passed The Mermaid to her daughters Lizzie and Rosa Green, and it continued in Rosa’s family for several generations.

In the 2000s, it was where Ricky used drink (underage) until one night when he cut the landlord’s hand off.

The current landlord is the nephew of the old one, and he is trying to turn things around, and make it more community-centred. As the community want nothing to do with the place, and Hangman’s Walk is dangerous for most people to spend any time in, he has started an Undead Support Group. This is working well.

You can find out more about the pubs in Pagham-on-Sea in this Pub Guide.