C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 27

SpookyMonth Showcase ~ THE RELUCTANT HUSBAND

The next one is my Weird historical fiction parody, slightly shorter than a novella, just a bit too long to be a short story. A novelette, in fact! It’s featured in THE UNCANNY AND THE DEAD anthology, but next year I’ll be releasing it with some other historical shorts set in the Pagham-verse.

Get the EbookGet the PaperbackThe Reluctant Husband

This story came about after I wrote the Eleusinian Mysteries, or the Neo-Eleusinians, featured in the FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA. I really liked the journal format and I decided to do that in honour of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch and Frank Belknapp Long, whose stories in journal format work fairly well until some fool decides to write their final scream rather than stop writing and run for it. Looking at you, Hounds of Tindalos.

I already knew the genesis of the Porter clan was when Dierdre Wend “married out” (i.e. married somebody outside the family), and the Porters were second-class citizens in the family because of this, much like the Wend-McVeys. I wanted to write that story, and so created a very odious, occult-obsessed middle-ranking civil servant (Nathan Montague Porter). Nathan is Church of England born and bred, and has a massive chip on his shoulder about not being upper middle-class enough.

Naturally, the eldritch girl he ends up with is a maid at his employer’s country house, so a massive step down for him while also offering the secrets of the cosmos (so there’s that), and while he resists her dubious charms, the snake-like whatever she’s got going on with her breasts becomes too much to resist. Apparently.

The spoiler is in the title: it’s all about their terrible courtship while Nathan is attempting to implement his employer’s nefarious plans. If you want to read about one man’s slow descent into madness, featuring body horror and cannibalism, try this.

Plus, you get 7 other stories to try!

The Uncanny and the Dead eBook – £3.99

Segment of a Verified Amazon Purchase review relating to my story:

*On THE RELUCTANT HUSBAND:*
Yeah, I’m biased… I love C. M. Rosens THE CROWS so when I was reading THE RELUCTANT HUSBAND and realised it was basically a prequel to that novel… I literally did a little squeal of joy If you’ve read THE CROWS and want to read more about the history of , that alone should be a reason to pick up a copy of this anthology

5 Star Verified Purchase Amazon Review

Get the EbookGet the Paperback

SpookyMonth Showcase ~ FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA (The Punch and Judy Man)

Are you looking for a spooky read? Let’s see what I’ve got… I’ll be showcasing my work through the month of October! Buy links are at the bottom of the post! This one is an anthology of fictional folklore and urban legends from Pagham-on-Sea, East Sussex, and I’ll be doing a couple of posts about this as we go.

Contents:
The Meteor Strike ~ introduced in a previous post!
Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen ~ introduced in a previous post!
The Greenlad, or, The Girl Who Saw Herself ~ introduced in a previous post!
Farisee Stones ~ introduced in a previous post!
The Neo-Eleusinians ~ introduced in a previous post!
The Punch and Judy Man of Hangman’s Walk

Some of these can be read on my blog already, in their original forms. It’s only 99p so if you’d like to own them all as an eBook, all the creepy stories in one handy place, you can grab it from a variety of stores or directly from my Ko-Fi shop. If you get it from my Ko-Fi, I get all 99p rather than 20-30p royalties so I’d selfishly encourage you to do that if you can!

The Punch and Judy Man of Hangman’s Walk

I never really minded Punch and Judy shows. I liked puppets as a kid and I wanted to learn how to play with marionettes and glove puppets properly. Sadly I was never dextrous enough… but I do appreciate how creepy puppets are, and since Mr Punch is a staple of the British seaside, I thought that this collection wouldn’t be complete without a related tale.

This one is a prose poem inspired by Dylan Thomas’s UNDER MILK WOOD and the CHILD’S PLAY franchise, but I wanted to twist this into an urban legend for some ‘modern’ folklore that the town has.

I’ve prefaced it myself – in the ‘Folklore’ world, C. M. Rosens is a character affiliated with the History Society, as opposed to being my pen-name:

THIS FREE VERSE POEM seems to have been the origins of a modern folktale or urban legend about the Punch and Judy shop in Hangman’s Walk, with several distinct variants attested to by 2010. Nothing can be found before this was printed, and since it was anonymously published it is not possible to ask the author if they based this on something they themselves had been told, or if this was an entirely original piece of creative writing.

The core of the story in each version is the same: the protagonist enters the shop and is by the end turned into a puppet. In one version this is done by the puppets themselves, wishing to replicate; in another version, the puppets are cursed people who need to be replaced by another person-puppet to gain their release from their curse. In a third, the attack is carried out by the ‘Old Man’ figure, and this is the ‘slasher’ version of the tale which generally becomes competitively gruesome when told at Halloween parties and other gatherings. Some versions keep the spirit of the original poem, however, claiming the transformation is due to the mesmerising effect of the Punch and Judy show itself.

~ Folklore of Pagham-on-Sea, by C. M. Rosens

Here’s me reading the story out loud, as it was meant to be read, for Romancing the Gothic’s Author Showcase event.Folklore of Pagham-on-Sea – 99p

A lovely, hyperlocal, folkloric mini-collection to lead into the author’s novel, The Crows. 

5 star Goodreads Review & Verified Amazon Purchase

I enjoyed reading this book. This was the first time that I’ve read Gothic fiction and I enjoyed it. The prose is great and so are each of the folk stories within the book. There are some great twists within it and I was engaged throughout as I read. The format of the stories (poetry, diary entries, etc) was great too and so was how Rosens wrote from the POV of the characters of the stories (sometimes first person, sometimes third person, but always done well).
Rosens did a great job!

5 star Verified Amazon Purchase

buy from ko-fiBuy from ebook storesbuy from amazon

SpookyMonth Showcase ~ FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA (The Neo-Eleusinians)

Are you looking for a spooky read? Let’s see what I’ve got… I’ll be showcasing my work through the month of October! Buy links are at the bottom of the post! This one is an anthology of fictional folklore and urban legends from Pagham-on-Sea, East Sussex, and I’ll be doing a couple of posts about this as we go.

Contents:
The Meteor Strike ~ introduced in a previous post!
Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen ~ introduced in a previous post!
The Greenlad, or, The Girl Who Saw Herself ~ introduced in a previous post!
Farisee Stones ~ introduced in a previous post!
The Neo-Eleusinians
The Punch and Judy Man of Hangman’s Walk

Some of these can be read on my blog already, in their original forms. It’s only 99p so if you’d like to own them all as an eBook, all the creepy stories in one handy place, you can grab it from a variety of stores or directly from my Ko-Fi shop. If you get it from my Ko-Fi, I get all 99p rather than 20-30p royalties so I’d selfishly encourage you to do that if you can!

The Neo-Eleusinians

This one is prefaced by an extract from Harry Bishop’s book, Fairwood House: A History (1987) that Carrie reads in THE CROWS Chapter 6. It’s followed by extracts from Peter Sauvants journals, found by Carrie in the house, and edited by the local History Society after the events of that novel.

I was thinking a lot about weird nineteenth-century cults and occult practices, and listening to some dodgy weird fiction from its late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century heyday, and basically wrote a parody of that in which the preoccupations of sexually-repressed/sex-obsessed men come out in very odd and gruesome ways.

I wanted it to be affectionately bad Weird fiction, so the ending is as subtle as a brick to the face and then just sort of ends there, with a mysterious, disembodied penis flopping about on the floor.

This is also an origin story for the hyper-fertile soil which has the power of resurrection, and is referenced in THE CROWS Chapter 6.

It’s basically inspired by that, and classic Hammer Horror films.

You can read a version of it for free here.

Folklore of Pagham-on-Sea only 99p

A lovely, hyperlocal, folkloric mini-collection to lead into the author’s novel, The Crows. 

5 star Goodreads Review & Verified Amazon Purchase

I enjoyed reading this book. This was the first time that I’ve read Gothic fiction and I enjoyed it. The prose is great and so are each of the folk stories within the book. There are some great twists within it and I was engaged throughout as I read. The format of the stories (poetry, diary entries, etc) was great too and so was how Rosens wrote from the POV of the characters of the stories (sometimes first person, sometimes third person, but always done well).
Rosens did a great job!

5 star Verified Amazon Purchase

buy from ko-fiBuy from ebook storesbuy from amazon

SpookyMonth Showcase ~ FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA (Farisee Stones)

Are you looking for a spooky read? Let’s see what I’ve got… I’ll be showcasing my work through the month of October! Buy links are at the bottom of the post! This one is an anthology of fictional folklore and urban legends from Pagham-on-Sea, East Sussex, and I’ll be doing a couple of posts about this as we go.

Contents:
The Meteorite Strike ~ introduced in a previous post!
Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen ~ introduced in a previous post!
The Greenlad, or, The Girl Who Saw Herself ~ introduced in a previous post!
Farisee Stones
The Neo-Eleusinians
The Punch and Judy Man of Hangman’s Walk

Some of these can be read on my blog already, in their original forms. It’s only 99p so if you’d like to own them all as an eBook, all the creepy stories in one handy place, you can grab it from a variety of stores or directly from my Ko-Fi shop. If you get it from my Ko-Fi, I get all 99p rather than 20-30p royalties so I’d selfishly encourage you to do that if you can!

Farisee Stones

This one is a hyperlocal variant of a real English folktale called The Rose-Tree. I tried to deliberately mimic the style of folktales and fairy tales collected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, like the one linked here by Joseph Jacobs. I wanted it to sound like the kind of thing “Rev. J. D. Allardyce” might have collected or re-written for his audience in 1904.

I included the farisee stones in this one as another example of what they are and what they can do. I introduced the concept in The Meteor Strike story, and thought it would be fun to have a few notes from Allardyce about other historical ‘examples’ of the stones being used. I took the opportunity to add in a bit more of the Pendles and their history into these preface notes, too.

Allardyce explains what the stones are:

FARISEE STONES ARE the pieces of rock that children used to collect from the site of the meteor crash, thought to have been the site of a Roman ironworks. The stones were variously thought to ward off fairies (or ‘farisees’ in local dialect) but also thought to have powers of their own. For example, if the stones are planted in earth and the pot placed by the bedside, it is said they will grow sweet dreams. If placed under a baby’s crib, they protect the baby from being taken and replaced by a changeling. Some older folk use the stone in their superstitious ways, to ward off evil (when washed in the water nearby, said to be a holy spring), or, if unwashed and sometimes befouled with grave dirt, then to put a curse on someone.

~ Folklore of Pagham-on-Sea, C. M. Rosens

I added a bit more to this, referencing an incident in 1693 to illustrate how belief in farisee stones has persisted in the town, the Pendle family’s influence, and the power the Sauvants had as a family over the area.

FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA 99p

A lovely, hyperlocal, folkloric mini-collection to lead into the author’s novel, The Crows. 

5 star Goodreads Review & Verified Amazon Purchase

I enjoyed reading this book. This was the first time that I’ve read Gothic fiction and I enjoyed it. The prose is great and so are each of the folk stories within the book. There are some great twists within it and I was engaged throughout as I read. The format of the stories (poetry, diary entries, etc) was great too and so was how Rosens wrote from the POV of the characters of the stories (sometimes first person, sometimes third person, but always done well).
Rosens did a great job!

5 star Verified Amazon Purchase

buy from ko-fiBuy from ebook storesbuy from amazon

SpookyMonth Showcase ~ FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA (The Greenlad)

Are you looking for a spooky read? Let’s see what I’ve got… I’ll be showcasing my work through the month of October! Buy links are at the top and bottom of the post! This one is an anthology of fictional folklore and urban legends from Pagham-on-Sea, East Sussex, and I’ll be doing a couple of posts about this as we go.

Contents:
The Meteorite Strike ~ introduced in a previous post!
Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen ~ introduced in a previous post!
The Greenlad, or, The Girl Who Saw Herself
Farisee Stones
The Neo-Eleusinians
The Punch and Judy Man of Hangman’s Walk

Some of these can be read on my blog already, in their original forms. It’s only 99p so if you’d like to own them all as an eBook, all the creepy stories in one handy place, you can grab it from a variety of stores or directly from my Ko-Fi shop. If you get it from my Ko-Fi, I get all 99p rather than 20-30p royalties so I’d selfishly encourage you to do that if you can!

The Greenlad, or, The Girl Who Saw Herself

This story was based on a dream I had when I was about ten or eleven about a pale, grey/silver-skinned boy on an altar of stone beneath the church, lashing out at us with his long nails, and it stuck with me a lot. It’s based on that dream, just with a different local setting and a deliberate link to a saint’s day (the saint that the fictional parish church is dedicated to). I added in a few more things, like medieval green children tales (e.g. the Green Children of Woolpit, Suffolk), and death omen superstitions.

The green children were always unsettling to me when I read those stories as a kid; there was something unbearably sad and melancholy about them, and I felt that vibe lent itself to a creepy folktale about a plucky girl facing mortality.

This one is heavy on the dialect as well, but the Sussex Dialect Dictionary can be found here. It should be easy enough to work out from context: this one, unlike Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen, doesn’t have a glossary at the end.

FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA – 99p

A lovely, hyperlocal, folkloric mini-collection to lead into the author’s novel, The Crows. 

5 star Goodreads Review & Verified Amazon Purchase

I enjoyed reading this book. This was the first time that I’ve read Gothic fiction and I enjoyed it. The prose is great and so are each of the folk stories within the book. There are some great twists within it and I was engaged throughout as I read. The format of the stories (poetry, diary entries, etc) was great too and so was how Rosens wrote from the POV of the characters of the stories (sometimes first person, sometimes third person, but always done well).
Rosens did a great job!

5 star Verified Amazon Purchase

buy from ko-fiBuy from ebook storesbuy from amazon

SpookyMonth Showcase ~ FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA (Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen)

Are you looking for a spooky read? Let’s see what I’ve got… I’ll be showcasing my work through the month of October! Buy links are at the top and bottom of the post! This one is an anthology of fictional folklore and urban legends from Pagham-on-Sea, East Sussex, and I’ll be doing a couple of posts about this as we go.

Contents:
The Meteorite Strike ~ introduced in a previous post!
Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen
The Greenlad, or, The Girl Who Saw Herself
Farisee Stones
The Neo-Eleusinians
The Punch and Judy Man of Hangman’s Walk

Some of these can be read on my blog already, in their original forms. It’s only 99p so if you’d like to own them all as an eBook, all the creepy stories in one handy place, you can grab it from a variety of stores or directly from my Ko-Fi shop. If you get it from my Ko-Fi, I get all 99p rather than 20-30p royalties so I’d selfishly encourage you to do that if you can!

Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen

This one was inspired by mummers plays, the Salisbury Giant in Salisbury museum, and creepy rural folklore. I had been watching/re-watching a lot of folk horror, and the masks in THE WICKER MAN really stuck with me, so I paired this with the pre-existing long barrows in my fictional region to create a darker story of supernatural child abduction and a little bit of dream-like body-horror with those kinds of vibes.

You can read a version of this story on my blog for free.

I also read a lot of Sussex folktales and used the vocabulary from these, as well as phrases from Sussex fairy tales. You can find some online to get a flavour of these, but there are also some good collections by Jacqueline Simpson and Michael O’Leary. The Sussex Dialect Dictionary is also available online!

I created a fictional antiquarian, Rev. J. D. Allardyce, to collect these stories at the turn of the twentieth century, and put in some of his notes at the start of these collected stories. The introductions have Easter eggs relating to characters in the novels. Here’s the introduction note to Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen, recorded by the good Reverend in 1904:

This tale was collected from Richard Pendle in the parish of St Mark’s, Pagham-on-Sea. Richard Pendle’s uncle, Thomas Pendle, was the gamekeeper of Fairwood House. Richard Pendle married Eleanor Hunderby of Barrow Farm in 1873.

This is a tale passed down by the Hunderbys of Barrow Farm, although since the disappearance of Eleanor in 1876 there has been great animosity between the two families, resulting in Richard Pendle’s estrangement from his own relations.

It was a rare event that I was able to speak with him, for he is a solitary man and greatly dislikes company. Richard Pendle was the last to bear the Pendle name: his three cousins, Beverley, Olive and Eileen, all took married names and bestowed these upon their numerous children, although their husbands are something of a mystery and there is no record of their marriages in the parish records.

~ Margin note for this tale by J. D. Allardyce

FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA VOL. I ~ C. M. ROSENS

Dickie Pendle and his cousin Beverley “Belle” Pendle appear in THE SMEECH MAN, which I wrote for #MonstrousMay 2022 using the prompt “Monster Under the Bed”.

FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA VOL. I – 99p

A lovely, hyperlocal, folkloric mini-collection to lead into the author’s novel, The Crows. 

5 star Goodreads Review & Verified Amazon Purchase

I enjoyed reading this book. This was the first time that I’ve read Gothic fiction and I enjoyed it. The prose is great and so are each of the folk stories within the book. There are some great twists within it and I was engaged throughout as I read. The format of the stories (poetry, diary entries, etc) was great too and so was how Rosens wrote from the POV of the characters of the stories (sometimes first person, sometimes third person, but always done well).
Rosens did a great job!

5 star Verified Amazon Purchase

buy from ko-fiBuy from an ebook storeBuy from Amazon

SpookyMonth Showcase ~ FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA (Meteor Story)

Are you looking for a spooky read? Let’s see what I’ve got… I’ll be showcasing my work through the month of October! Buy links are at the top and bottom of the post! This one is an anthology of fictional folklore and urban legends from Pagham-on-Sea, East Sussex, and I’ll be doing a couple of posts about this as we go.

Contents:
The Meteor Strike
Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen
The Greenlad, or, The Girl Who Saw Herself
Farisee Stones
The Neo-Eleusinians
The Punch and Judy Man of Hangman’s Walk

Some of these can be read on my blog already, in their original forms. It’s only 99p so if you’d like to own them all as an eBook, all the creepy stories in one handy place, you can grab it from a variety of stores or directly from my Ko-Fi shop. If you get it from my Ko-Fi, I get all 99p rather than 20-30p royalties so I’d selfishly encourage you to do that if you can!

Buy from my ko-Fi shopListen to my interview on Folklore POdGrab it from an ebook storeThe Meteorite Strike

This one was inspired by translations of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The British Library gives an example of the style:

Ann. dccxciii. Her pæron reðe forebecna cumene ofer norðhymbra land .  7þæt folc earmlic bre?don þætpæron ormete þodenas 7li?rescas . 7 fyrenne dracan ?æron ?ese?ene on þam lifte fleo?ende . þam tacnum sona fyli?de mycel hun?er . 7 litel æfter þam þæs ilcan ?eares . on . vi . id. ianr . earmlice hæthenra manna her?unc adile?ode ?odes cyrican in Lindisfarna ee . þurh hreaflac 7 mansliht . 7 Sic?a forthferde . on . viii . kl. martius.

Year 793. Here were dreadful forewarnings come over the land of Northumbria, and woefully terrified the people: these were amazing sheets of lightning and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. A great famine soon followed these signs, and shortly after in the same year, on the sixth day before the ides of January, the woeful inroads of heathen men destroyed god’s church in Lindisfarne island by fierce robbery and slaughter. And Sicga died on the eighth day before the calends of March.

British Library Transcript and Translation ~ https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126532.html

This story is supposedly taken from a medieval chronicle written by one of the monks of Beaubois Abbey [Fairwood Abbey] in the twelfth century and translated by Harry Bishop, one of the characters in THE CROWS.

I mimicked the style of a 1970s translation of a medieval text, and used it to play with some local myths. This story talks about three local saints, and I might use their martyr legend later for something else, but this is primarily a werewolf-origin tale! It also introduces the concept of the farisee stones, or fairies’ stones, but gives a medieval Christian interpretation of their origins.

FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA Vol. I ~ 99p

You can read the meteorite story on my blog as a taster, if you’d like to!

A lovely, hyperlocal, folkloric mini-collection to lead into the author’s novel, The Crows. 

5 star Goodreads Review & Verified Amazon Purchase

I enjoyed reading this book. This was the first time that I’ve read Gothic fiction and I enjoyed it. The prose is great and so are each of the folk stories within the book. There are some great twists within it and I was engaged throughout as I read. The format of the stories (poetry, diary entries, etc) was great too and so was how Rosens wrote from the POV of the characters of the stories (sometimes first person, sometimes third person, but always done well).
Rosens did a great job!

5 star Verified Amazon Purchase

buy from ko-fiBuy from ebook storeslisten to my interview on folklore pod

SpookyMonth Showcase ~ FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-on-SEA (Meteor Story)

Are you looking for a spooky read? Let’s see what I’ve got… I’ll be showcasing my work through the month of October! Buy links are at the top and bottom of the post! This one is an anthology of fictional folklore and urban legends from Pagham-on-Sea, East Sussex, and I’ll be doing a couple of posts about this as we go.

Contents:
The Meteor Strike
Jenny, Jennet and Pinnie-Pen
The Greenlad, or, The Girl Who Saw Herself
Farisee Stones
The Neo-Eleusinians
The Punch and Judy Man of Hangman’s Walk

Some of these can be read on my blog already, in their original forms. It’s only 99p so if you’d like to own them all as an eBook, all the creepy stories in one handy place, you can grab it from a variety of stores or directly from my Ko-Fi shop. If you get it from my Ko-Fi, I get all 99p rather than 20-30p royalties so I’d selfishly encourage you to do that if you can!

Buy from my ko-Fi shopListen to my interview on Folklore POdGrab it from an ebook storeThe Meteorite Strike

This one was inspired by translations of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The British Library gives an example of the style:

Ann. dccxciii. Her pæron reðe forebecna cumene ofer norðhymbra land .  7þæt folc earmlic bre?don þætpæron ormete þodenas 7li?rescas . 7 fyrenne dracan ?æron ?ese?ene on þam lifte fleo?ende . þam tacnum sona fyli?de mycel hun?er . 7 litel æfter þam þæs ilcan ?eares . on . vi . id. ianr . earmlice hæthenra manna her?unc adile?ode ?odes cyrican in Lindisfarna ee . þurh hreaflac 7 mansliht . 7 Sic?a forthferde . on . viii . kl. martius.

Year 793. Here were dreadful forewarnings come over the land of Northumbria, and woefully terrified the people: these were amazing sheets of lightning and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. A great famine soon followed these signs, and shortly after in the same year, on the sixth day before the ides of January, the woeful inroads of heathen men destroyed god’s church in Lindisfarne island by fierce robbery and slaughter. And Sicga died on the eighth day before the calends of March.

British Library Transcript and Translation ~ https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126532.html

This story is supposedly taken from a medieval chronicle written by one of the monks of Beaubois Abbey [Fairwood Abbey] in the twelfth century and translated by Harry Bishop, one of the characters in THE CROWS.

I mimicked the style of a 1970s translation of a medieval text, and used it to play with some local myths. This story talks about three local saints, and I might use their martyr legend later for something else, but this is primarily a werewolf-origin tale! It also introduces the concept of the farisee stones, or fairies’ stones, but gives a medieval Christian interpretation of their origins.

FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA Vol. I ~ 99p

You can read the meteorite story on my blog as a taster, if you’d like to!

A lovely, hyperlocal, folkloric mini-collection to lead into the author’s novel, The Crows. 

5 star Goodreads Review & Verified Amazon Purchase

I enjoyed reading this book. This was the first time that I’ve read Gothic fiction and I enjoyed it. The prose is great and so are each of the folk stories within the book. There are some great twists within it and I was engaged throughout as I read. The format of the stories (poetry, diary entries, etc) was great too and so was how Rosens wrote from the POV of the characters of the stories (sometimes first person, sometimes third person, but always done well).
Rosens did a great job!

5 star Verified Amazon Purchase

buy from ko-fiBuy from ebook storeslisten to my interview on folklore pod

SpookyMonth Showcase ~ THE SOUND OF DARKNESS

Are you looking for a spooky read? Let’s see what I’ve got… I’ll be showcasing my work through the month of October! Buy links and the link to the Spotify Playlist are at the top and bottom of the post! This one appears in an anthology by Red Cape Publishing, called F IS FOR FEAR, and is also available as a standalone short for £1.99.

Get the anthologyGet the Short alone from your preferred Ebook storeGet the short direct from my Ko-Fi ShopListen to the Spotify playlist!The Sound of Darkness

This story started from the F IS FOR FEAR anthology submission call, which asked for stories focused on common fears and phobias. I already had an idea for the darkness, as part of my Pagham-on-Sea folklore. The result is a Working Class Gothic short story set on a council estate in South East England.

It has some Guillermo Del Toro’s DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK vibes, with a dash of Ray Bradbury/Ramsey Campbell weirdness. If you enjoyed Campbell’s Brichester-verse novels/stories and collected shorts like THE INHABITANT OF THE LAKE AND OTHER STORIES, that’s the vibe of Pagham-on-Sea, but in East Sussex.

This story ended up being a bit more personal for me. I wanted to show some progression through fear of the unknown and intangible to embracing the unknown and intangible, as part of a journey that people can go through from childhood to adulthood. It’s often strange how we realise as adults that things we fear have a basis in unresolved, unchallenged moments from our childhood, and that now those reactions and fears are out of place and don’t serve the same purpose as they once did.

I was thinking a lot about being disinherited from my own family and heritage as a kid, and that swirling nothing that was the gap in my identity and almost invariably presented as something negative and dangerous and Bad with a capital B. Anything physical about me that didn’t match my mother’s side of the family was dismissed or downplayed or lightly criticised then forever ignored. I was only ever given warnings about Türkiye and its people in general, and I never asked about my father more than a handful of times because those questions were not well-received. Consequently, when I had a chance to connect with that side of my family, and reconcile with that missing side of myself in my late 20s, I had a breakdown. I couldn’t explain to anyone why I was having a breakdown. But that happened, and then eventually (therapy, support etc) I came through that and learned to embrace the part of my life that I’d always felt was some kind of swirling, nebulous, dangerous darkness.

I wrote that into this story of a similarly disinherited half-Turkish lad called Murat whose dad, in this case, has died, and there’s nobody to connect him with that side of himself. His friends and family now call him Mat for short, so even his name is now a site of confusion and erasure.

As a kid in the 1990s he lived in Pagham-on-Sea’s council estate, outside the old town proper, and confronted (and escaped from) the darkness within the estate that was rumoured to eat children. As an adult, he has moved to Luton, and lives alone. He has a good job and a stable relationship, but he is still terribly afraid of the dark. When a light blows in his living room, he makes himself relive the memory of confronting the sentient dark as a child, how he heard the sound of its breath, and has to decide whether to step into the room and listen to the sound of the darkness again.

THE SOUND OF DARKNESS eBook -£1.99

Darkness has never been so scary.

5 star Verified Amazon Purchase

4.80 stars out of 5 on Goodreads so far ~ would love some text reviews if anyone has the time!

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SpookyMonth Showcase ~ Overexposure

Are you looking for a spooky read? Let’s see what I’ve got… I’ll be showcasing my work through the month of October! Buy links and the link to the Spotify Playlist are at the top and bottom of the post!

Buy from your preferred ebook storebuy direct from my Ko-fi shopListen to the spotify playlist!Overexposure

I wrote this story while thinking about how Wes Porter’s eldritch Changes manifested, and there are some Robert Aickman influences in here. I had read COLD HAND IN MINE and reviewed it, and I think some of that tone and style found its way into this story. I was constantly thinking about the girl in the sword story whose name I can’t remember, but I think of her as She-Who-Lives-To-Be-Penetrated, because that’s quite literally her entire role.

Charlie is almost an answer to that, as someone who is a passive observer of life from behind her camera lens, but also someone who sees a lot more than most people do as a result. This is why she’s so good at her job, and why she’s a good artist, using photography as a medium; it’s also her downfall when she meets a man whose details evade memory, either in person or when captured on film.

The disintegration of the sword-lady in Aickman’s story and the disgust of the male protagonist is the main thing that stuck with me. I wanted to present that kind of disintegration as internal and from Charlie’s perspective, but with that same distanced narration, as if the reader is observing this happening to her, which feels weirder to me than first person in this instance.

I also wanted to present a different reaction to this disintegration: both male characters – Charlie’s gay best friend Hugo, and Wes, who is both her lover and the cause of her disintegration – want to help her, but don’t know how. She becomes abject, but not an object of disgust. Even in her final act of self-disintegration via a self-mutilation attempt, there is some hope of rescue and healing off-page, after the story has concluded. Sword-woman in Aickman’s story does not have that, but I know what happens to Charlie later as she is mentioned in THE CROWS, then appears on-page in THIRTEENTH and THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD.

Overexposure Short Story £1.99

A dark, twisted, tragic romance for horror fans – standalone short

When Charlie, an affluent, award-winning photographer, catches sight of a glamorous man at a party and immediately forgets what he looks like, she has to see him again. And again. And again. When he realises the extent of her obsession, is it already too late?

CW: self-mutilation, gore, mental health deterioration

I had to be ready to read this one as it includes characters I already loved (from the novels ‘The Crows’ and ‘Thirteenth’) but I knew it would be dark.

It is some of CM Rosens’ most elegant prose and most devastating writing. I very much recommend but it will break your heart so be prepared.

5* Goodreads Review

This was brilliant and despite not usually being a big body horror person, I’m obsessed with the concept here. The piece centers on a photographer who views life through the prism of her camera lens, something which leaves her utterly unequipped to meet with a man whose features cannot be captured. They elude not only her camera but even her memory, blink and they’re gone again.

Overexposure serves as a great introduction (or reintroduction for some if you’ve read The Crows) to characters and relationships that will crop again in Rosens’s new novel, Thirteenth, and I really recommend picking it up beforehand. Do heed the content warnings though, Charlie may be in pursuit of a seemingly harmless shot but that means little here.

The characters feel very developed despite the short space and it’s hard not to root for them. Wes is a bit of a prick but I really felt for him, Charlie is a bit of a mess who I feel for most of all, and I’ve only had Hugo for a couple of sentences but I adore him. He has a sort of Martin Blackwood-esque preciousness about him and must be minded. I’m looking forward to seeing what lies ahead for them. 

5* Goodreads Review

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