C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 38

Monstrous May

I’ve been participating in the Monstrous May Challenge on Twitter, and posting all my content to Ko-Fi. Today’s bonus podcast episode is a Monstrous May special, where I read out 2 of my supporter-only posts – Iconic Settings and Baby Monster. Yes, you’ve heard Iconic Settings before, but it’s my favourite so you’re hearing it again.

Baby Monster is a scene from my 1940s-set novella, which is currently at around 8K words and along the lines of Wakewood X The Thing, but make it sapphic and fae, and throw in some Welsh mythology.

Enjoy! If you want to read the text of the two shorts, you can drop a single one-off tip in the jar on Ko-Fi and read those and all the other supporter-only posts for 30 days. Loads of content to enjoy! Just for you!

Podcast: Eldritch Girl

Find my page here: https://ko-fi.com/cmrosens

Podcast S01E16 ~ Chapter 14 Up Now!

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Chapter 14 of The Crows is online today!

CW for mutation and eldritch body horror.

CHAPTER 14: VICTORY IS MINE

Links on my podcast page.

Chapter 14: Victory is Mine

…in which Part One of Ricky’s prophecy is fulfilled…

The front door opened and shut.  

Her footsteps made him smile. She would be the first to see him Change. That felt fair, somehow.  

“Oh my God, Ricky!”  

Her hand reeked of processed sugars, but he tried not to show his distaste. 

“Good, you got here,” he managed, as the split reached his throat. “Not – not long.” 

“What’s happening?” 

(Oh, she was doing it again, stroking his head, the decadence, that delicious, edible feeling, flowing through him, corrupting like sepsis.) 

He rolled his eyes back, pressing his head into her hand. His guts ached, the Changes rolling and breaking in feverish waves.  

“It hurts,” he moaned, another knife-twist wrenching something free that shouldn’t be. “Fuck me, it bloody hurts…” He looked down: his stomach bulged, skin in two flaps like an unbuttoned shirt, draped uselessly over an amniotic sac of anaconda coils. Mucus coated his hands as he tried to hold himself together, hands he didn’t recognise as his.  

(His, or hers? Was there a difference? Can’t tell, can’t see, can’t feel anymore.) 

“Ricky, what do I do? What’s happening?” 

His eyelashes fluttered involuntarily as he forced himself to focus on her face, and it took him a moment to realise why she appeared to be strobing.  

(What’s that? Never seen that expression before. She worried, or what?) 

————————————————- (…they call it ‘concern.’) 

(You in here too? Bloody hell, head’s getting crowded, head’s bursting.) 

That was a conscious thought too far. The pressure-pain shot into his skull, breaking over his brain beneath the bone. Thought evaporated. Skin split. Nerves screamed, wrenched apart. Synapse flares dotted his blank-eyed vision, turned in on himself, inside-out, ripped open. Things crunched into place.  

He threw off his old name with his old skin, both too small for him now. They lay discarded on the kitchen floor as he stretched, setting his monstrous beauty free. At last, it tasted the air, opened its third eye, saw the glory of the wyrd as plainly as the dancing constellations of the sun-robbed sky.

~ C. M. Rosens, The Crows, pp. 298-99

So this is where Ricky’s full body change happens – from his POV so you’re not entirely sure what he looks like, since everyone knows that kind of horror is indescribable – but he has also intertwined himself with Fairwood and Carrie. I couldn’t make Fairwood’s thought be right aligned on its own in this format, and that’s why there’s a row of dashes to keep it over the other side of the page where it’s supposed to be!

Fairwood’s thoughts now look the same as his (…in brackets and not in italics, but they keep the ellipses at the start), and Carrie is also thinking in the same way that Ricky does (in brackets, not italicised). When her own thoughts reassert themselves, you’ll see them

in italics and centre aligned

to show that she’s now caught somewhere between Ricky (left) and the house (…right), and struggling to be who she is, rather than who they want her to be. It’s difficult to represent this by reading, so I’ve taken out the background whispers until Fairwood gets back to thinking more like itself. It was the best way of visually representing the total mess it becomes once everyone invades everyone else’s heads, and the way the three of them are so interconnected but want to have their own agency.

It’s easier when you’re just reading the book to see what’s going on! But I do explain this at the end of Chapter 16 on the podcast where all 3 thoughts end up in Carrie’s head at once. So if you haven’t bought it yet to read along… what are you waiting for?

If you’re waiting or the audiobook version – then yes, that is coming, and once the podcast S1 has finished I’ll collate the episodes and produce a ‘clean’ narration of the text with the sound effects and so on but no intro/outro, just the chapters running straight through. You’ll be able to buy it as an mp3 file from my Ko-Fi shop, and I’ll try to submit it to Audible if the file is good enough quality. Again – I’m not a professional! The audiobook will cost the same as the ebook.

The Undead Hour ~ ESP and The Face

Welcome to the first Undead Hour, where C. M. Rosens, representing Pagham-on-Sea’s History Society, interviews medium Penelope Holdfast. Ms Holdfast is the owner of ESP – Entities living Sympathetically with People – a therapeutic service offering counselling for those who need to learn to co-exist with their hauntings. ESP is based in the old White Horse Bed and Breakfast, which is now Ms Holdfast’s place of business and place of residence.

Future episodes of the Undead Hour will be hosted by either C. M. Rosens (interviewing the living about the undead) or the revenant Clem Wells (interviewing fellow undead and discussing current hot topics and undead issues).

The Undead Hour with Penelope Holdfast (ESP) and The Face

CMR: Hello, welcome to the next episode of Eldritch Girl, and today I’m interviewing Penelope Holdfast, the medium and owner of ESP, which is Entities living Sympathetically with People, and this is a new venture which has just come to Pagham-on-Sea, so it’s lovely to have Penelope with us, do you prefer Penelope or Penny sorry?

PH: Penelope. That’s my name.

CMR: Penelope, yes sorry yeah. And so, would you like to introduce yourself Penelope, and tell everyone about your business and the reasons why you’ve moved to Pagham-on-Sea, because you’ve just come down haven’t you, you’re very relatively new to the area, and so yeah I will hand over to you.

PH: Yeah sure so. Obviously I’m Penelope, I’m a 34 year old medium. And my business, ESP, as you’ve mentioned, I set it up and it tracks entities. It registers whether they are on the corporeal scale which is a little bit like radiation on the Geiger scale or the Richter scale for earthquakes – it’s based on spectral energy levels. Generally my aim is to help humans or other entities, you know non-humans, affected by hauntings to live in harmony with spectres. I mean, that’s not always possible, but I was hoping that we could kind of talk about that and it help me to raise awareness of my business locally, because I think it’s so important to teach humans and non-humans to live with hauntings.

CMR: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so you’ve recently moved into the White Horse B&B [Bed and Breakfast] which I think most of our listeners will will know, our Pagham-based listeners, and what brings you to Pagham-on-Sea and is that where your business is going to be based?

PH: Yeah so business is going to be based from the B&B. I’ve set up my office there. It’s also where I live, as well, because I think is quite important to kind of have that connection between the two, particularly as the B&B is so haunted, and we’ll be hearing from one of our main spectres in a few minutes. But, it’s really interesting and in terms of my journey to Pagham-on-Sea. So I know that I grew up in Pagham-on-Sea.

CMR: Okay!

PH: Um. But I don’t remember being here, but I’ve dreamed about it from the age of 10 years old.

CMR: Right.

PH: It’s quite a long journey, if we can kind of get into that. So, I, as I said, I don’t remember living here. My parents were very transient up until I was about 10, you know they were hippies and they’re interested in going to places to feed off what they call psychic energy and the supernatural and I don’t just mean anything ghostly or monstrous or anything, but anything to do with like unexplained phenomena, although they don’t have the same the abilities that I have developed over time.

So we lived in a few places: Glastonbury, York, Knock in Ireland to name a few. They’d say there for a bit and then they’ve kind of move on after they’d got what they needed out of the place, and they do rituals with crystals and things like that. And apparently they were at Pagham-on-Sea the longest – we were there for two years – but again it’s like a weird block in my mind. I can’t remember ever being there, but I remember moving, the day that we that we left Pagham-on-Sea. And we moved and ended up settling in Milton Keynes where my parents live to this every day in the very same house.

And it’s strange because my parents are such complete hippies, but when we moved, my dad cut off his hair and worked as an insurance salesman. My mum went to work at a bank and they just totally settled down became regular mum and dad like I always craved, but when I was in Milton Keynes when we first moved there as I said I was 10, and I started having these dreams. And all of my dreams were involving a space in the wall, and they start becoming more detailed over time, these dreams, to the point that over four years ago, I was having these dreams constantly every night. I’d wake up from my dreams, and still feel like I was in that place. It was just calling to me and getting louder and louder.

Also, from the age of 16 I started seeing ghosts and predicting events before they happened but again, that kind of happened over time, too, but it’s really interesting, so my dreams started to get more vivid and vivid, and I knew in my bones it had to do with Pagham-on-Sea. And my parents tried to stop me from from coming here in the first place, and then I decided I needed to come here and I such an uncanny feeling, I felt like I knew all of the streets and where to go like the back of my hand. But I couldn’t work out where this thing I was dreaming about, where this thing in the wall was.

So I paid quite a bit of money to some Underground urchins, and there’s some really rough folk, and they took me to an abandoned shell of a property… I won’t name the street for privacy reasons, obviously, but clients will know where my property is. But before I entered I just knew in my heart this was the place. And that’s how I came to this B&B, and everything was leading up to that moment and I went upstairs and the entity in the house who I call the Face, he manifested to me and I felt complete. And that’s kind of why I’m here.

CMR: Wow that is such an interesting story, do you …. do you know why your parents didn’t want you to come back?

PH: They just won’t discuss it. And I don’t know if it’s they can’t or they won’t, they just completely shut down whenever I try to talk to them about it. They didn’t think I was going to move here, they thought it was just going to be like a bit of a day trip, I went here I just knew I needed to move here, so I spoke to the Council, I was able to buy the old B&B at a real knockdown rate, because it was in such a state of disrepair.

CMR: Yeah. I think it is, is it an offshore consortium that owns it, or owned it, and they were just kind of letting it fall down because it was easier than doing anything with it. Because the front of it’s Grade 2, isn’t it?

PH: Pardon?

CMR: The front of it is Grade 2 listed.

PH: Yeah, it is. It’s absolutely beautiful, but an absolute wreck inside.

CMR: Yeah it’s just such a shame, but, as you say, I mean it’s got such a reputation for being haunted. I say reputation… I mean, it is. [laughs] But yeah. How many spectres do you think there are in the B&B?

PH: I mean there’s so many. There’s such a big well of entities. There is a main, a dominant entity, called the Face and, within that, there’s several others that kind of swirl around, but I think the Face is like a big net that traps other spectres, so I think if something even were to walk passed the house they’d be sucked in. I’ve never seen anything like it, it’s like the kind of you know, like the eye of a needle of the storm sort of thing.

CMR: Oh wow, yeah, I’ve never heard of anything like that before. That’s really interesting, okay, and… and are we are we going to… are you able to contact the Face, like, can we, because I knew that you said we would do that on the show, is that something that’s possible, or?

PH: Yeah so the face is actually right here, it’s kind of manifested in this section of the wall now.

CMR: Oh my God! Yes, I see it.

The Face Manifests

PH: Face, how are you doing today?

[pause]

Face: Hello.

CMR: Hi!

Face: Good morning.

CMR: Um.

Face: Well, thank you. How are you.

[pause]

CMR: I’m good. Thank you. So. Can we… is it okay…

Face: I’m manifesting through the wall here.

[pause]

CMR: Yes. Yes you are. Is it okay to ask questions, or…?

Face: Oh, I am very good at asking questions. Not so good at answering them.

PH: This is typical. Face will get a bit more chatty as we go through, hopefully.

CMR: : Okay, is this just because it’s like manifesting for the first time in a while or? Is this just how… it is?

PH: It’s just how it is.

CMR: Okay. yeah that’s interesting, it sounds quite fragmented as well.

PH: I think yeah, I think, do you have different echoes in there, do you hear kind of different voices at all?

CMR: Yeah- kind of? Sorry yeah I was wondering if it was because… it’s hard to tell because, obviously, since we’re doing this via video chat, it’s really hard for me to tell if it’s a lag my end, but yeah yeah or if it’s like an echo on that end, but yeah I think so.

PH: Yes, actually I moved into the house and the Face was here, and I just… I felt such a connection, with the Face.

CMR: Mm. Yes, that’s really… unusual like it’s such a – I’ve never heard of an entity that manifests in that particular way but has those sorts of properties or, or powers, that’s… I mean, I can hear him like really, really clearly.

PH: Face, do you want to talk about some of your powers?

[longer pause]

Face: I can manifest … … in a wall.

[pause]

Face: I can also manifest … … in … … a floor.

CMR: Wow.

PH: What about your properties, how would you describe what you’re like?

[slight pause]

Face: I would describe myself, and some might disagree with this, as … glutinous.

PH: I see the face is really, really being so humble and underselling himself right now but he’s underselling his powers, I mean what you can’t see is that when he transfigures and moves around it creates such a massive what you call it seems like a shift in reality and a shift in elements around it: everything sort of changes and warps and I think I said to you earlier when I take readings on my energy device, I mean, these are the most unusual and highest and most fascinating readings I’ve ever encountered. It’s so powerful I mean almost, god, I think Face and the ghosts… This is like, like a God, this power.

Face: I think I have caused some of the mortar to dissolve.

PH: He’s just so humble.

CMR: Wow okay yeah um. I mean it’s so interesting that you’ve got like, this kind of corporeality that’s affecting not just other entities in the house, but also affecting the physical building itself that’s … yeah so do you think that’s an ectoplasmic reaction, or?

PH: I don’t know I think I mean that’s awesome, as I said before, it’s I mean this is a good word for it because the consistency is just so solid and I’m not used to this, for example, so I said to you before you know I’ve been a medium for years, I picked up on ghosts, but previously, you know, ghosts for kind of like a faint whisper that I’d hear, a mist out the corner of my eye, whereas in this situation, I mean it’s like thick goo, it’s solid stuff, and that sounds a bit disgusting, but it’s just so… yeah it’s just remarkable and I’ve never met an entity like this.

CMR: yeah I mean it’s also very three dimensional like I can, I can kind of see the way that it’s manifesting it’s definitely not like a pattern on a wall. It’s a manifested face in a wall.

PH: Right. And the way it can slide through things as well, it’s very snake-like in its movements as well. How would you describe the way you move?

Face: I would say the way I move is elegant, attractive, and not dissimilar to a slime-mould.

PH: [proudly] Yeah, I guess so.

CMR: [not quite as convinced] yeah I … I put those adjectives with slime mode. Yeah that sounds… yeah that’s… okay, that’s really interesting, I don’t know but, would you be able to move now like, for us to just… I mean I appreciate this as a podcast so you’d have to – the listeners will have to rely on description, but would you be able to do that just so that I can… see it?

Face: Yes, I probably could.

[longer pause]

PH: Can you see it?

CMR: OH yeah!! Oh, it is like slime mould.

PH: Yeah well look at the way it’s kind of… it’s so strange, it’s not really altering the brick, nothing’s come off the walls. Like, can you see the way it’s going over that painting and it’s not moving.

CMR: Oh yes, oh wow that’s weird okay, because that’s obviously something there. Like obviously it’s a physical thing but it’s not affecting the canvas and like I would expect… is that a watercolour as well?

PH: Yes it is a watercolour actually, I got it off a local artist. It’s beautiful, yeah.

CMR: Oh! [laughs] yeah but it’s it’s yeah no I would expect, like the… like you’d expect it to be warped. And it isn’t.

PH: Yeah and you’d expect maybe some of the plaster or something or the paint to start chipping but it just…

CMR: It doesn’t.

PH: No. It’s this effect… I don’t know how to describe it.

CMR: Yet, but at the same time, and you said that you – sorry Face, you said that you also dissolved things, like you have actually impacted the house physically, is that just… do we think that’s over… what’s the word… cumulative, over time?

Face: I don’t dissolve anything that doesn’t need dissolving. I’m very respectful of this property.

CMR: Oh OK, I see.

PH: yeah it’s an intentional act isn’t it when you do something like that.

Face: Oh, I have a fine creative mind, yes, I exert considerable influence over the structure I inhabit.

PH: When I moved in and I was obviously trying to do things up, I think you weren’t very happy at the beginning, so there was a lot of that dissolving. I think you were kind of acting up and kicking up against me then.

Face: Oh, I think it was all in good jest. We had a good time.

PH: We did.

CMR: Yeah.. what, did you sort of find wallpaper that you put up coming off the wall, or something like that?

PH: A whole section, and at one point the adjoining wall between the dining room and the kitchen, that… all the bricks were somehow knocked out, but I don’t know how it’s possible. It’s almost like, you have to imagine something like a big truck in reverse and all the bricks had come out.

CMR: Oh wow, that much force?

PH: Yeah [laughs] that cost quite a bit of money, didn’t it Face, we had to get the builders in.

Face: Well it’s, obviously one has to spend money on an older building. Estate agents traditionally, would say around 2% of market value per year.

PH: And a big shout out to our builders, by the way, Matthew Raven [Raven & Sons] he’s had to come over quite a lot. He’s a specialist kind of, you know, paranormal sort of builder, so he knows how to work around things like this. I always recommend him to my clients in case they have any issues.

CMR: That’s – yeah, I mean. I can’t imagine many people having issues quite like this. I can see why that would be a really difficult thing to work around or work with, and in terms of your – I mean, in terms of your business as well, I imagine, this is the kind of thing that you’re helping your clients navigate I mean not necessarily a face in a wall, but like, poltergeist activity or that sort of thing, and haunted house issues?

PH: Yeah, poltergeists and demonic entities… we’ve had all sorts really, so I think the biggest thing that I’m finding is it’s about teaching humans and non-humans to live with hauntings. And that’s kind of my catchphrase you’ve probably heard me say this quite a lot during the course of this podcast, but you got to remember really that a lot of these spectres, dark energies, whatever they are, they’ve lived in a place for many years, and you come in and you’re the usurper. You’re coming into their place. And then you’ve got to kind of take back control almost, so it’s about establishing authority and boundaries and lines of communication, like I did with the Face, you know but it depends on how corporeal they are.

So with my business, what I might suggest to a client is that we undertake a séance or if they’re, again, not very corporeal, we might create a system or something like knocks in Morse Code, because I’m finding that ghosts, they’re often very frustrated and lonely, so you think they’re terrifying and they want you out, but actually they’re trying to communicate with you, but they just don’t know how or it’s been so many years since they communicated with anybody they’ve forgotten the the means to do that. They don’t know who they are, what their origins were.

And it’s not that kind of – you know, it’s not that kind of Exorcist “the power of Christ compels you” stuff, I don’t come in and do that, it’s just to recognize that you don’t need to be afraid of them and that you can peacefully and happily coexist with them. And that’s my end goal, I think.

There’s only been one occasion I’ve seen where the entity was fully malevolent. It was demonic, and it was very ancient. But we contained it and we came to an agreement with both parties to re-house it, and it’s much happier where it is now actually. I helped it move.

CMR: That’s nice.

PH: Yeah, it’s in a space now and it can really fully do what it wants and it’s not near churches it’s near farmland and has a body of water, like it’s great. I visit once a month and we have a chat about the old ways and the old gods, and it’s brilliant. But luckily, Face and I, I mean we… I think we happily coexist now don’t we. There were teething issues at the start, but I try to apply a lot of the lessons with Face to my business. Would you say that you’re quite happy now?

Face: We have a very agreeable existence.

PH: Yeah. I think we do. Especially during lockdown as well I’ve been here all the time, so it’s really a bit harder for you.

Face: Oh, everything is fine, I positively enjoy the contact of people.

CMR: Hm. Um. So, I assume that… I mean obviously this was a B&B at one point – was the Face present when it was a B&B? Or?

Face: Well you see, I imagine I have been here a very long time. I would have been a fine feature for any kind of hospitality establishment.

CMR: Very true, yes, and do you did you actually remember anything about who, you were or you know, whether you… how far back do you remember?

[pause]

Face: Well, we all have a history.

[pause]

Face: Oh I’ve seen some things in my time.

[pause]

CMR: Yes…?

Face: I mean, I … … remember a lot of things.

PH: Can you give any examples, Face, of things you remember?

Face: I remember that time a cat came in.

CMR: Okay…

Face: That was some time ago.

PH: Was that when you were human, or when you were what you are now? Respectfully.

Face: I think you shouted at it.

PH: So that’s more recent, then.

Face: Is it? It tipped over some paint.

PH: Oh god, I should have… that was about three months ago! Dr Socks, the neighbour’s cat, came in.

CMR: [laughs] Aw, that’s cute!

PH: Yeh they’re cute but you’ve got to make sure… that cat is really attracted to this place. I think it knows things.

CMR: Cats do know things.

PH: They do, but I think you’ll get a lot of answers like that, with the Face, I don’t think he does remember when where he’s from or anything like that.

CMR: So, it seems really difficult to communicate with the Face, I’m getting that it’s, as you say, a little bit fragmented. How is your relationship progressing, how do you find that?

PH: Very difficult. Because the face, you know talks in riddles, when you try and have a conversation with the Face it just slithers off somewhere or disappears or doesn’t manifest for a few days. You know, he goes off on tangents he doesn’t get a straight answer … so communication has been a real challenge, but I really do enjoy living with him and I enjoy our friendship our relationship, whatever is, and I might be interested in more one day between us. But I just don’t think he’s there yet.

Relationship Support Group Set-Up

PH: But it’s interesting to me really because I’ve been thinking of setting up a support group for people of Pagham-on-Sea who have this very issue, that they might have friendships or family members, or they might have kind of romantic or sexual feelings in terms of you know, the hauntings – hauntings and people or hauntings and non-humans and at the moment, my different support group is kind of focused on kind of what I’m experiencing; you know entities in houses and things that kind of might not be “appropriate” by human standards, you know, they might be an inanimate object, or they might not be fully corporeal.

But if that support group is successful, I might widen it to anyone who has an unsatisfactory or unfulfilling relationship with something that’s a supernatural being, and I can’t really discuss who’s going to attend, but a few people’s relationships, of all things, like a spinning wheel, tarot cards, and a haunted bicycle.

CMR: Oh wow!

PH: Those kinds of things that people might be in a relationship with or might be in love with. And it’s really hard for them to accept their realities, and I could widen it a bit more, and have like an agony aunt service for humans and creatures, like a dial-in radio show, you know, a bit like a Frasier Crane for the deceased.

CMR: Oh wow, I love that, that sounds like a really good idea.

PH: Yeah so the things like that, but going back to a question about the Face, I mean our relationship, it does have its challenges, he’s very obtuse, but also we have quite a satisfying friendship in other ways. I mean, during lockdown he’s been my sole companion and we do quite a lot together now, though I mean we watch TV shows together, he’ll come and kind of manifest just above my shoulder and we’ll watch things. Like we’ve got through Sweet Home and Kingdom and Game of Thrones and all sorts of stuff and so now, I put the TV on and I pick something I think he might want to watch like Baki, which is an anime…

Sometimes you’ll sit there for hours and just watch that and then the TV will turn itself off here that Netflix has stopped working and I have to come back in and fix it, but there’s quite a lot that we do now don’t you think, Face?

Face: I’m often in this house, and so are you.

PH: Yeah.

CMR: Yeah. Good. That seems very fulfilling. I mean… I know that there’s… have you linked up with the undead support group that meets in The Mermaid?

PH: I’ve tried but they’re a bit… territorial. Aren’t they?

CMR: Um. I know what you mean… but I mean they’re a lot more inclusive than other groups that I’m not going to name. And I guess it’s because it’s, it’s a group for the undead.

PH: I’m really interested in a setting up a bit of a partnership between the two groups because, for the people that love or care about the people in that cohort over there, but they’re just a lot of them so I’m interested there a few that kind of wanted to reach out and things like that, but a lot of them, they just want to keep that as their exclusive group and leave the rest of us on the outside.

CMR: It, it is difficult, I think opening dialogue is very difficult, with undead discourse the way that it is.

PH: Yeah, there’s distrust of outsiders, and I haven’t been here very long either, so I think there’s a bit of distrust there.

CMR: Yeah I think a lot of it is… yeah it’s very difficult when there’s no pre-existing relationship. I just thought I’d mention it, I mean it’s run by… so, Gary the landlord of The Mermaid is obviously human and alive, and he’s, he’s generally quite – he’s very community orientated. So it might be worth, I don’t know, keeping communication open with him.

PH: I didn’t speak to Gary, I actually turned up to the support group itself and everyone just kind of swivelled and turned around look at me and you know, but I mean that the haunted monkey was sort of you know, banging its cymbals…

CMR: Oh, god yeah. Fred.

PH: Everyone was absolutely horrified.

CMR: Fred’s alright, Fred appears and disappears and then just goes somewhere else. Fred’s a toy monkey for anyone who isn’t sure what Fred is, I guess if you go shopping in a particular area of town you’ll know who Fred is because Fred appears in the windows of different shops, and his favourite trick is trying to get you to buy him. He’s very… yeah, he’s very mischievous like that, and then you obviously you take him home and then all sorts of things happen.

[laughs]

Yeah, he’s funny. He’s basically like a plushie, for people who don’t know what he is, with the big eyes and the little prehensile tail.

PH: Yeah it’s interesting, I’d not have that level of… I don’t know. It wasn’t the usual kind of you know malevolence or distrust you have from supernatural entities it felt different it felt more some more territory or more, this is our patch, so I will have a chat with that landlord.

CMR: Yeah, do. Gary. So his uncle used to run it, yeah, and then he came, so he’s kind of new here as well, because he moved down from Chichester.

PH: Okay.

CMR: So I think he actually lived, coincidentally, in Pagham near Chichester. Then he moved to Pagham-on-Sea, so he moved from Pagham to Pagham. But yeah Pagham, obviously, near Chichester is far less haunted than our one…

PH: It’s not going to be as fun is it.

CMR: Oh, I think it’s a lovely place to go on holiday. But yeah if you if you want to have a break from the hauntings.

PH: It sounds like a place I could go for my holiday. Because, honestly, since I’ve moved here, I think as I said to you earlier, so it’s not just the ghosts are 3D, it’s not just that I can hear a lot of people’s thoughts as well, and – god, if you go past like a Porter or a Wend and you know exactly what they are.

CMR: Oh god.

PH: Terrifying.

CMR: Oh, yeah. okay. Fun times.

PH: Yeah so I might need a little bit of holiday soon.

CMR: Yeah definitely I mean there are other mediums as well and there’s a couple that, um, do you know Tina [Harris]?

PH: Tina, yeah.

CMR: Yeah she’s really nice.

PH: We’ve gone out for a few beers and that. She’s really cool.

CMR: Yeah, she is nice, yeah. She’s also like one of the people who isn’t going to be… she, she’s… I don’t think she’s very territorial in terms of like… yeah she’s really lovely. But um yeah so she does seances as well, and things like that, but that’s not her primary business, whereas for you obviously this is, like, ESP is your your main sort of… it’s your main business isn’t it so that’s slightly different.

PH: Yes, I think the main thing for me with Tina was kind of having that chat when I moved to town, because it was I’m not trying to encroach business from you. You are an amazing medium, you do what you do, but mine; mine’s more a bit more like a just a counselling service, it’s more like a more involved service so Tina could be the starting point but I’m kind of like that aftercare to help you live and deal with your situation.

CMR: Yeah and I think people will, I think it’s yeah that’s good that’s really good because, like if people get referrals from Tina like that’s, you know if people are referred to you from Tina, that would work really well, so I think as I say, it’s difficult when you move into a new place to start, especially when there’s not that pre-existing trust, yeah.

PH: yeah especially during lockdown as well, having to do a lot of my stuff you know, on video calls.

CMR: Yeah that must be really difficult when you can’t enter a property.

PH: No. But my powers are so strong though that I can still do it via a TV screen. I can still do it over the phone.

CMR: Really?

PH: Yeah, but it’s not as good as it would be in person. It’s probably about 50%.

CMR: Wow. I mean that’s like, that’s still – astounding. Is it stronger since you entered the B&B?

PH: Much stronger, I think – I think that was the thing. I don’t know if it’s the B&B or Pagham-on-Sea itself, but I do think when I’m at the B&B and working from home, sometimes this can be my strongest place, if people come to visit me. I don’t know, it’s still something I’m getting to discover. But it’s interesting because I said I have these memory blocks too. So I’m not kind of quite sure either of our origins in terms of this B&B really, why we’re so interested in it, and why you’re here.

CMR Has Some Answers

CMR: Well. I mean so you contacted the history society some time ago, and I do apologize that it took a while, for us to get back to you, but that’s mainly because a lot of the members are not as active as as they were, so… so, yeah. I have done some digging for you from, you know, as much as I can over lockdown, obviously things are easing up so it’s a lot easier for me to get access to things now. Obviously due to GDPR, there isn’t a lot of… the B&B address books and things like that they’re obviously or gone, it was very dilapidated so a lot of the admin and all that kind of stuff was shipped off to various solicitors. But what was slavaged was – you know the visitors’ books, where you can write little notes and say how you enjoyed your stay?

PH: Oh yeah?!

CMR: …And you can do that anonymously… So, those turned up in somebody’s attic, who’s a – who was a member of the local council. Which is about the time that it went up for sale the first time and so they go back to about the 1960s.

PH: Right.

CMR: And yeah and not really sure what to do with them, so I think they they just thought that maybe the history society could do something with them or … they should really be in the Archives, but obviously due to lockdown and things like that… the councillor who had them died over lockdown, so going through the stuff took time and nobody really knew what to do with that, so I have managed to have a little look. And, it’s interesting because your surname is quite, it’s quite a unique surname, Holdfast.

PH: Yeah, it is.

CMR: Yeah, and so around about the time you say that your parents came here for two years… certainly at some point, I’ve found their comments in the visitors’ book, in one of the ones for the 1990s.

PH: Oh really?

CMR: Yeah.

PH: For that B&B?

CMR: Yeah. Yeah, for that B&B.

PH: Oh, my God what? What did they say? What did – what did it say?

CMR: Well, I can email it across to you, but it was literally just like um. ‘Thanks for the lovely stay’, something about the energies being really strong in that particular area, it also mentions, um, farisee stones, do you know what they are?

[You can read more about them in the Folklore of Pagham-on-Sea Vol. I]

PH: No, I’ve not heard of those before.

CMR: Okay, so they’re quite local, it’s a local term, so farisees is the Sussex dialect word for fairies and so they’re basically like fairy stones it’s like a dialect word, so. In our case in Pagham-on-Sea – I say ‘our case’ but I don’t live, obviously I don’t live there myself anymore, but, you know, I still come back.

PH: House prices and all that, right?

CMR: [laughs] Ha, I know. I just… it’s hard to describe them really. So there’s lots of urban legends about them and and one of the origin stories of these stones is the meteorite that struck an iron works in the Roman period, so the Romano-British period, if you like, and destroyed this forge. It’s also one of the origin stories for werewolves in the area, which is meant to be a martyr’s curse, and stuff like that, and there’s like a holy well, yeah, yes, so Harry Bishop wrote a book on, I think it was Harry who wrote on that, and he transcribed and translated a load of the medieval Chronicle accounts because they used to be an Abbey, which is where the old manor house is now.

PH: That’s not far from here?

CMR: Yeah, it’s not, it’s about a 45-minute walk out of town, or like a 10-minute [drive]… it’s up Redditch Lane.

PH: yeah I know exactly where it is.

CMR: Yeah and so, um yeah, so that site was the site of the old, not the Abbey sorry it was a monastery and and I think it was Benedictine and that’s a 12th century foundation, so there was a… anyway so, farisee stones first get mentioned there [in the medieval chronicles], but not as farisee stones, but as these stones that have power. And if you wash them in the holy well then they’re meant to give you good… er, good energies, good vibes, whatever, healing properties.

PH: Can I interrupt?

CMR: What’s that?

PH: That’s, that’s the kind of thing my parents used to do… they used to get their crystals and wash them in things like, you know, the Chalice well in Glastonbury. I remember that’s the kind of thing they used to do.

CMR: Okay, so yes, yes like that. The difference with the farisee stones is that if you don’t wash them in the Holy well then you can use them to enact curses instead of healing.

PH: Oh… that doesn’t sound good.

CMR: Yes, so what’s kind of implied is that the usual state of it, of that stone, is malevolent, basically. And you have to do something to… or at least, mischievous, or you know. And what’s interesting to me about the White Horse B&B is, if you look out of the window now, where you are, because you’re in one of the back rooms aren’t you?

PH: Yes I am.

CMR: So if you look out of that window now, have a look in the garden, and you know those, um, the rocks that look… er, they usually have like a little patch of mushrooms growing around them?

PH: Yeah, I can see them.

CMR: Y-eah?

PH: [laughs] I thought they were edibles.

CMR: [laughs] Yeah, so those, those are meant to be farisee stones. [pause] Obviously they can’t have come from the same meteorite, it wasn’t that big. But they’re part of the local stories, I guess, about the White Horse B&B and one of the reasons it’s meant to be so haunted and like as a central place for hauntings, is because it’s ringed about with the stones.

PH: I thought they were common-or-garden mushrooms and common-or-garden stone, and I never would have expected that in a million years.

CMR: What’s really interesting to me is that – you say your parents didn’t have powers and yet you’re a very powerful medium. And that’s very rare to have… and especially to have somebody who can see those sorts of manifestations. I don’t know I just think it’s a really interesting. I struggle with the word ‘coincidence’. I don’t know if it, so I just find it really interesting that your parents were doing these kinds of rituals with crystals didn’t have any power themselves, but when I guess quite intuitive or?

PH: Yeah, they were always really drawn to that sort of stuff. I hate to say it, but the kind of new age hippie-ish sort of lifestyle.

CMR: Yeah. I find that really interesting because you chose a place – or they chose a place, rather – where it’s kind of like this magnified place of power, and then you end up with powers. And you would have been quite young as a child, then.

PH: Yeah so I was always about – well, I was about eight to 10 when we lived here, but I was 10 at that point, so when we moved to Milton Keynes, that’s the point I started having my powers.

CMR: Okay, so what other kind of, and you, you have no memory of Pagham-on-Sea, that … that would imply to me from speaking to various people who have moved away or have had strange things happen to them as a result of living in the town and that something happened to you, while you were here. And I’m just wondering if that’s what the connection is [the stones] and if that’s something potentially that we should be looking into.

PH: Shall we ask the Face for the… whether he might know anything about, what do you call them the farisee stones? Face, are you still here?

Face: Well I could leave the house any time I wanted.

[pause]

CMR: Okay.

PH: Can you come back in? Can you come back in? Are you able to speak to us?

Face: Well I could leave the house any time I wanted. I don’t care about [fades out] -(stones?)

PH: You don’t know about any stones? [pause] Do you know the ones we’re talking about, the ones that are kind of outside, if you look through the window over there?

Face: Oh yes. I know all about those stones.

[pause]

PH: Well, what can you tell me about them?

Face: Well, they’re made of stone and they’re all around there.

[pause]

CMR: Yep. Okay. We’re not…

PH: …helpful. Hm.

CMR: But again that’s what… yeah.

PH: So that’s the thing, so I don’t know. So I’m completely staggered that I’ve come back to this place, that I clearly lived in as a child.

CMR: Yeah, so I’ll send you the… I took photos on my phone of it because I couldn’t take the actual [visitors’] book away. But it sounds like you lived here not for the whole 2 years you were here, but for a couple of months, maybe.

PH: But then the thing that I’m really curious about is why… so this place was obviously a functioning B&B when we lived here so why did it become so ruined and abandoned like what what happened, that’s what i want to find out about.

CMR: So that’s one of the last entries in the book, and it closed not long after your parents left. And I would say… just a couple of months after, it closed. But it looks like the B&B manager just disappeared around that time. I don’t know whether that’s connected. But yes, so um – I had a little look at that.

PH: That’s really worrying, so you said that someone disappeared?

CMR: Yes, so the owner of the B&B disappeared.

PH: Do you have any details what his name or a picture of what he looked like, or anything like that?

CMR: Yeah I can send you the – I can send you the picture, because, like that’s … So if you go into the library and downstairs in the library they’ve got the microfilm, the microfiche machines, and so you can have a look at the Gazette‘s backdated issues. So let me just see, if I have the… [pause] This is from my notes that I’ve got… So yes, it see the manager was called Norris Weddon. Norris with two ‘r’s, Weddon, W E double-D O N.

So he’s currently – so he went missing in the mid-90s, so he’s presumed dead, legally dead, now, which is why – because he was the owner they had to wait 7 years before they could pronounce him legally dead.

PH: God, I feel – I feel really sick.

CMR: Are you ok?

PH: I don’t know why. Face, do you remember Norris Weddon?

Face: The name does sound familiar. I’m sure I must have wet – met – Norris Weddon at some point.

[pause]

PH: I’m going to – I’m going to try something.

CMR: Ok

PH: I’m going to touch the Face. [pause] Do you remember Norris Weddon? Entities. Do you remember Norris Weddon? Do you remember Norris Weddon?

Face: Norris Weddon – was the proprietor.

[pause]

PH: Where is he now?

Face: Norris Weddon is probably still here. Norris Weddon … might be very close indeed.

PH: Where? Tell me where he is.

Face: Norris Weddon… might be under the floorboards.

[longer pause]

PH: What?

CMR: oohh-kay…

Face: I mean it’s plausible. A lot of people have been found under floorboards. It’s not an unusual thing.

CMR: In fairness, that’s true.

PH: I think we should stop rolling.

CMR: Yeah? You want to pause?

[long pause]

PH: Yeah.

CMR: Ok.

Ending: Disclaimer

CMR: Well, that was. That was something. Um. That’s the end of this episode I guess, I should note that any background noise that got picked up on the recording was not audible at the time of recording, so if you do hear things like footsteps walking around or doors etc, we were not aware – or I personally was not aware of that when we were doing the video call, but apparently that’s quite normal. So if you did hear anything like that in the background, worry not, that’s apparently supposed to happen.

Uh – yeah. Since this has been recorded, I should say that the B&B was thoroughly searched and no human remains were found under the floorboards, although there was – they had problems with the sniffer dogs – there was a sniffer dog that went in and didn’t want to be in there. So I guess it’s still kind of inconclusive, and Norris Weddon’s whereabouts are still unknown.

Yeah, so that’s all we’ve got time for really. Never had an interview like that before. So I’m going to go and do some more research, and we’ll see what happens. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your week. Bye now.

~THEORIES WELCOME IN THE COMMENTS~

Podcast S01E15 ~ Chapter 13 Up Now!

Chapter 13 of The Crows is online today!

CW for head injury, gore, violence, cannibalism (“the mild Rob Zombie chapter”)

CHAPTER 13: BEAST WITH A HUMAN FACE

Links on my podcast page.

Chapter 13: Beast With A Human Face

…in which Fairwood finds a clue and Ricky has a confession…

He was off his game and he knew it.

He unrolled his toolkit, selected a sharp, curved blade, and prepared to get to work.

Some of his cousins liked to strip off when they had a job like this to do, standing amid plastic sheeting partially or fully erect, getting off on the blood or the pain or the noises. He viewed the meat they served up at family gatherings with mild suspicion and distaste: it always tasted better when you knew the butcher hadn’t fucked it first or wanked himself off during the process.

Ricky was naked, the way he usually slept, but this was a job to him, and nothing stirred beyond the occasional growl in his stomach.

~ C. M. Rosens, The Crows, p, 266

Yes, that’s a What We Do In The Shadows reference, which remains the funniest line in the whole film. This is also a fairly important moment that reinforces Ricky’s aceness, which I thought was important to stress given that he’s about to torture someone to death.

There’s no sexual drive behind the killing, no urge to kill to satisfy something like that, he’s literally just doing it because that’s what he does.

Ricky’s aceness was commented on in a lecture Be Gay Do Crimes: Queer Gothic Reimaginings given by Dr Sam Hirst for the Romancing the Gothic lecture series: removing the sexual element of serial killing and also of his and Carrie’s relationship ‘removes the impulse to purpose’ and centres other elements instead, so the emphasis is shifted off sex – sexual desire, sexual attraction, sexual threat – and onto questions around grey/a-morality, what friendship could look like in this context of trauma, abuse and monstrosity, and what being human is all about.

If you want to see the full lecture, you can find that here: The Crows is used as an example at 1:41:11.

Podcast S01E14 ~ Chapter 12 Up Now!

Chapter 12 of The Crows is online today!

CW for return of an abusive ex, violence/accidental amputation, car crash, cannibalism, head injury, animal abuse (on-page entrail reading)

CHAPTER 12: HAUNTED BY THE PAST

Links on my podcast page.

Chapter 12: Haunted by the Past

…in which Carrie gets a visitor…

Carrie pulled away and pressed herself against the crumbling wall of the cottage. She heard the door slam over the muffled curses of Ricky’s father. Before she could scramble up, Ricky stalked by her, hurling the shell of a washing machine out of the way. Carrie couldn’t stop the muffled squeak that came out as he passed.

There, in the back of Ricky Porter’s shaved skull, was a large gaping mouth. Thick white lips like tapeworms opened and closed, silvery mucus strands laced between them. They chomped on the air as Ricky ranted at the woods, a string of colloquialisms and swearwords assaulting the silent trees.

At the sound she made, Ricky spun around, nostrils flaring, face dark with anger. When he saw Carrie, he stopped. His eyes widened in horror, mirroring hers. He reached automatically for his hood, only to realise he wasn’t wearing it, or anything.

Carrie raised her hands. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “Ricky, it’s – it’s me, it’s okay.”

Ricky’s brown eyes burned a dark ruby red. His hands cupped the back of his head, protecting it from her rather than the other way around.

“Seriously,” Carrie whispered, getting shakily to her feet. “It’s fine, I’m just gonna go, okay, I’m just going.”

“You can’t be here,” Ricky growled at her, lowering his bloody hands. “What’re you doing here? I’m busy.”

“I – you invited me, remember?” Carrie pointed out. “You said I could come over for tea…”

Ricky jerked his head at her, then lunged forwards to pull her away from the cottage when she didn’t take the hint. He glowered, smearing her cardigan with badger blood. “Now’s not a good time.”

He tugged her over to the wall and let her go.

~ C. M. Rosens, The Crows, pp. 252-3

I really like this chapter because there’s so much going on in it. It’s 41mins long rather than 20-30mins, but there wasn’t a convenient place to cut it as the parts are the wrong length to neatly divide it like the others I’ve chopped in half.

The quote here is a really fun interaction, because Carrie was unconscious the first time he revealed what was under his hood, and also because she has no idea how much danger she’s in. He also didn’t invite her to tea, she invited herself and he didn’t explicitly say no, but so much has happened that she genuinely remembers their last conversation as containing an implicit invite. Ricky, clearly, does not remember it like that.

I love the ways that memory plays tricks on you, and I play with that a lot more in Thirteenth, where the characters are recalling childhood and teenage memories that they each have different perspectives on and different context for.

I also hope that this interaction demonstrates Ricky’s two modes – completely invincible or chronically insecure – and Carrie catches him oscillating between them. He’s got a lot of very complicated feelings about his body and his Changes, which he never addresses in the novel. Ricky frequently says to himself (and to Gerald) that he’s not a tool, and yet in this chapter he shows how being treated like one has affected his self-perception.

Earlier on in this chapter he reveals his glory to his latest victim, and finds it amusing to create a sense of tension and build-up with his tendrils, making the victim kneel in front of him… then brains them with a rock instead. It would have been funnier if he’d punched them out, perhaps, but Ricky uses a rock as the ‘obvious’ (to him) substitute for his tendrils – a tool, rather than his own fist. Here, despite repeatedly referring to his Changes as his ‘glory’ and wanting more rather than less, he is afraid of how Carrie will react, as if her negative reaction could profane or sully this part of himself. Later in the chapter, he is delighted when she says ‘you’ not ‘it’ in reference to the tendrils and his second mouth, because, “most people say ‘it’, like it’s not a part of me”. Add in his obsession with a particular physical aesthetic, his disordered eating habits when he’s stressed or upset, and his almost total lack of self-awareness, and there’s a lot of contradictory things happening under the surface that bubble up in aggression every so often.

The chapter also raises a few more questions about the nature of fate, at least from Carrie’s perspective.

What do you think? If you like the podcast, please rate it wherever you listen to it, or favourite it, or something, so other people can find it too!

Iconic Settings: Monstrous May Challenge

‘Love Song for The Crows’ – C. M. Rosens

The text version is available to Ko-Fi supporters only to read, but this is available to everyone to listen to. I haven’t edited this audio, as I recorded it quickly before work! 

If you like this content and want to find more, you can tip me as a on-off and get access to all my supporter-only content for the month. If the story of Fairwood House intrigues you, this is a prequel piece to the novel THE CROWS which is available to buy from my Ko-Fi Shop (digital file) or from Amazon and other ebook retailers. The paperback is available through Amazon. 

I am serialising this novel weekly on my podcast, ELDRITCH GIRL. You can listen to this on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and RSS.com/podcasts/eldritchgirl.

Author Interview ~ Maria DeBlassie on Brujeria, Ordinary Gothic, Moving Beyond Generational Trauma, and Short Story HUNGRY BUSINESS

Interview Transcript ~ Introducing the AuthorMaria DeBlassie

Maria DeBlassie, Ph.D. is a native New Mexican mestiza blogger, multi-award-winning writer, and multi-award-winning educator living in the Land of Enchantment. Her blogging life started as a year-long journey to write her back into happy, healthy, and whole through daily posts about life’s simple pleasures, everyday magic, and radical self-care.

That experiment turned into a bruja lifestyle, her first book, a press, and her ongoing blog, Enchantment Learning & Living—with more literary adventures to come. When she isn’t writing, she’s reading stories about things that go bump in the night, radical HEAs, and everyday conjuring.

When she isn’t teaching, reading, and writing, she’s practicing her kitchen witchery, concocting spells (um, recipes), whipping up potions (um, cocktails), and magical beauty products. That’s when she’s not in her garden communing with her plants and herbs or listening to the trees gossip and the stars whisper their wisdom. She can also be found drinking copious amounts of tea, collecting crystals, and consulting the tarot with her familiar, Smoke, a very sensible black cat who knows his way around the world—both the seen and the unseen dimensions of it.

She is forever looking for magic in her life and somehow always finding more than she thought was there. 

podcast

Listen to the interview on my podcast

Hungry Business

Looking for love can be deadly…

You know how it goes.  You go out, hoping to meet someone.  You wade through your fair share of brainless automatons, lifeless bodies, and ravenous undead good at passing as human.  

The more you go out, the less hope you feel and the colder your body gets.  But you keep at it.  All you need is one beating heart to match your own before yours stops pumping altogether.  How hard can it be to find one living, breathing human in a city full of bodies?  

Dating. 

It’s hungry business.

Buy it nowAuthor Interview Transcript: Introduction

CMR: Hello, and welcome to the next episode of Eldritch Girl, and today I’ve got Dr Maria DeBlassie with me for the author interview. Hello, would you like to introduce yourself?

MDeB: Hi! Thank you so much for having me. Yes, so I am a professor by day I teach at my local community college and Albuquerque, New Mexico and then part time at the University of New Mexico honors college. At the Community college I teach everything from college writing to creative writing and digital storytelling, and at the university I teach courses like courses on witchcraft and pop culture and romance novels and all sorts of fun things in between all that. When I’m not teaching, I am a writer. I write about the magic of everyday life, and all the things we can do to create and conjure that magic. And then I’m a fiction writer as well, so I write Gothic and Gothic romances.

I should also say, actually, that I am a bruja, a practicing bruja in New Mexico, which means that I’m always looking at ways to use writing as, like, a form of spell casting, as a form of working through things telling different stories about people of color, particularly the mestizas like myself, women who have latinx, indigenous and European ancestry, so looking at storytelling in writing as a form of thinking about the stories we want to tell about ourselves and the matter own life stories, that we can shape and craft for healing and hope and joy.

CMR: I love that. I thought I think that’s a really interesting way of looking at storytelling as magic and words as having a power, and I think, regardless of your – you as in the listener’s – perspective, I think that that is such a universal kind of truth, if you like, that fiction and storytelling is such a powerful thing for humans. I’m sure it’s Terry Pratchett who said instead of homo sapiens, [the wise man, or the thinking man] a better thing would be ‘the storytelling man’.

“The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man‘). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.”

~ Terry Pratchett, The Globe

MDeB: Yes, yeah. I’m a huge proponent of book magic and story magic. I think, you know, reading and writing is one of the ways we discover ourselves and heal ourselves and explore the possibilities of who we can be as human beings.

I am constantly reminded that we human beings are basically storytellers. More homo narrans than Homo sapiens. We see ourselves in others’ stories. Every genuine work of art contains a small fragment of glass from a mirror.

~ Henning Mankell, Arenas Movedizas

CMR: yeah yeah for sure. I’m really excited to hear the extract because I really love the short story, which is Hungry Business, and you’re going to read an extract now from that, and then we’re going to have a chat.

MDeB: So I’ll provide a little context to Hungry Business, and it’s basically a short story I came up with about how dating is the zombie apocalypse of the soul. And you know I always think my love of Gothic is that the Gothic is about, you know, you have to face the darkness, in order to see the light in your life. So this is kind of about that, when you are reaching a point in your life where you’re like, something’s gotta change because I can’t keep living how I’m living, so… [trails off, pause] The excerpt and reading is about the protagonist going on some bad dates and then thinking about where her life could go from there. 

And, as I was reviewing my excerpt, I realized there’s a part that might be confusing. When she gets home from her dates she always goes to the window seal to wait for a cat to appear across the street from another apartment window, so she’s waiting for that cat to come to that other window. So just a little context for the section I’m about to read.

Extract from Hungry Business (Kitchen Witch Press, 2020)

He said he’d love to have you for dinner—but you are careful.

A woman has to be careful. Never give them your address. Don’t drink too much. Be aware of your surroundings at all times. Carry grave dirt to throw at them if they get too forward. Be ready to run to the nearest safe space if needed. The good news is that the Hungries, while persistent, are dumb as fuck (brain rot, you know) and slower than the sickness overtaking their bodies. Unless, of course, they are well fed, which is rarely the case.

This one looks a little better, you think optimistically.

You sit across from each other at the dinner table. The white tablecloth is as smooth and unblemished as his collared shirt. He has dressed for the occasion, taking care to hide the evidence of his affliction as best he can (though truly there is only so much he can do with a missing ear and half a brain). Still, the tuxedo and carefully applied makeup are enough to create the illusion of pumping blood beneath his pallid, blush-stained cheeks—in the right light. Which is another reason why you chose this place. Candlelight can hide a multitude of sins.

His manners are studied and smooth, as if he has spent a lot of time practicing more human-like movements and behavior. You admire a man who makes that kind of effort. He watches you as much as you do him, as if he is trying to remember what it was like to be alive. When you reach for your wine glass, so does he—only his thick decaying fingers almost crush the stem, whereas your nimble live ones carefully bring the dark red liquid to your mouth. You try not to notice how he stares at your lips—stained now from the wine—wondering, perhaps, how you taste.

As it turns out, he does get a taste of you. You’ve been surreptitiously picking at a hangnail on your pinky finger—that’s how scintillating the conversation is—when you looked down and realize it is your whole fingernail that has come off. You stare at it in horror, letting the truth of your situation sink in.

At least he has the decency to wait until you’ve left the table before grabbing your napkin and stuffing your bloodied nail in his mouth. A little color comes back into his face. He groans in ecstasy.

Nice to know you could still have that effect on a man. Still, it makes you feel cheap. Used. Like all he wanted you for was your body.

At home, you take a bath as hot as you can stand and read an old bodice ripper until the warmth returns to your veins, and the flames of hope have been fanned enough that you can crawl into your flannel jammies and be grateful you are still alive. The light in your apartment slowly seeps into your chest, and you settle into your perch on the window. You inspect the damage to your pinky finger as you wait for the cat to appear.

The bath stopped the spread of the decay but the tip is gray and blue. There is puss where your fingernail should have been. You smother it in aloe vera, grated ginger, and bandages, hoping it will be enough to bring life back into your appendage. You don’t really know how to treat something like this. You sigh and lean back against the window frame. Your orange tabby cat has made its appearance— yours, yes, thought you know you shouldn’t feel so possessive about a creature you only know from a distance. It’s just nice to know it’s there.

Here’s the thing you love about the cat across the way: It’s proof that there are other beating hearts out there. Cats won’t settle where Hungries live. Perhaps their feline instincts tell them they’re easy prey for the things that are never satiated. That’s why you never see alley cats in the humanless neighborhoods. In fact, it was their strange mass exodus from certain parts of the city that first alerted officials to the virus now plaguing them. And this cat—bright orange like a flame with a soft, full belly—seems happy enough in its home. You wonder what kind of human it belongs to.

~ Maria DeBlassie

Interview Transcript

CMR: I love it.  

MDeB: Thank you so much.

CMR: What inspired you to Gothicise the dating theme in the way that you do?

MDeB: Well, I am a hardcore introvert I should probably admit this upfront and I am not someone who’s ever, particularly enjoyed dating or thought it was fun in the way that, you know, media and romantic comedies and, you know, romance novels can sometimes portray it, so I started thinking more seriously about what would it was about dating casual dating that I didn’t like and, for me, I think the dark side of dating is that it can really commodify people and dehumanize them in a lot of ways, so the positive side of dating is that we’re doing it because we want to meet a like-minded person someone we connect with in a meaningful way and have some sort of intimate relationship, whatever form that takes but so much of dating becomes incredibly dehumanizing and a little bit soulless as you’re kind of going through the motions and thinking you know, maybe next time I’ll meet someone.

I also think there’s a tremendous amount of social pressure to kind of… perform your search for The One. And that’s part of what feels soulless, it’s like it stops feeling organic, so the protagonist in this story… she’s going through the motions of, you know, this is what you do in order to find someone, and it’s not really anything that makes her happy or makes her feel good about herself.

CMR: Yeah I think it’s really interesting – [the sites of horror that you have in the story]. I think what’s worth saying is, it should be a content warning, if anyone decides to read it, that there is a section that is coded as sexual threat.

MDeB: Yes, absolutely.

CMR: But obviously because it’s a zombie apocalypse it’s not what he is after as a character, but it is definitely it’s very analogous and it’s very obviously coded as that, and I thought that part was very well done, but for me the most difficult part to read as it was very relatable.

MDeB: Yeah so there’s a zombified version of the sexual threat in there and there yeah, so I do have a content warning on my story for that, and I think part of what makes dating so Gothic is, even in the section I read, you know, she – the protagonist – runs through a list of all the things she has to do to stay safe while dating and I think it’s interesting that if you aren’t like a het-cis [heterosexual, cisgender] male, so much of dating norms are about how to keep yourself safe, versus how to have fun or how to find someone that you like. It’s more like, here’s what you need to do to keep yourself safe, and that is language that hasn’t really changed in, I think hundreds of years, you know, from like 18th century courtship novels to now, it’s all about how to stay safe and avoid predators.

CMR: yeah absolutely it was such a relatable well kind of thought out reflection of the dating world and I thought that was just such a really interesting take on it and what I really like are things that Gothicise the mundane, and that kind of everyday activity that’s looked at through a different lens, and I think it’s done really effectively. 

And I wondered what were some of your influences are for Gothicising the everyday, and how do you effectively create a sense of the uncanny within that social context?

MDeB: So um. My degree area is actually in like 18th and 19th century courtship novels. And I grew up really loving Gothic romances so there’s like a big space in my heart for them, and what I love about both courtship novels and Gothic romances is this idea that, you know, they’re taking really basic things in a person’s life and showing the real dangers, so in Gothic romances you know we tend to focus on the more outlandish parts of those stories; the madwoman in the attic or the unexplained mysteries, but the real terror of those stories are actually really mundane and domestic.

You know they’re women worried about marrying the wrong man or making the wrong decision or thinking about how one little mistake or whatever might shape the rest of their lives, and of course we’re talking about you know very traditional marriage markets in the 18th and 19th centuries, but um. But those stories have evolved to really think about our internal and domestic lives and the quiet terrors we negotiate throughout our day-to-day, so that’s always sort of stuck with me, so I write a lot about both the magic of everyday life, the kind of beautiful subtleties that we often overlook that are really quite magical, but there’s the twin side of that, which is the everyday Gothic or the ordinary Gothic. Where sometimes we go through things that we don’t perceive as traumas or terrors because mainstream society has told us not to feel those things.

So there’s a lot of social conditioning there about what we’re allowed to like in everyday life, and what we’re allowed to feel. And the mundane Gothic comes out to say, hey, that thing you perceived as trauma that people are telling you as no big deal is in fact a trauma, and it’s okay to acknowledge it as such.

CMR: yeah I think that’s really important, I wonder if that is behind the modern Gothic resurgence. There seems to be a big upsurge in the Gothic in Adult and Young Adult literature, in terms of Gothic themes, Gothic atmosphere, you know, all of that coming out, and I think there’s just so much anxiety in society, and so much push-back against what people have been conditioned to think is okay, and then everyone is kind of waking up to the fact that actually, things are not okay for a lot of people, and things are not okay, and actually they’re not okay for a lot more people than you think.

MDeB: And, and also this idea that the real terror of that is someone wanting to think everything is fine, you know the suppression of those feelings that’s… that’s the terror and the horror, whereas the Gothic kind of brings out hey, we need to talk about this stuff, we… we can’t just pretend they don’t exist, right.

CMR: Yeah.

MDeB: And that’s why I love the Gothic, because it just kind of lets all the darkness out so that we can face it, that’s part of the catharsis.

CMR: Yeah and I think it’s the way it does it as well, it’s not kind of it, I mean, I think you can go one of two ways, either Gothic or Dystopia.

MDeB: Yeah.

CMR: You know, so you can project stuff forward into the future or the near future so it’s just far enough away that you can analyze current… contemporary issues, or you can do the Gothic thing with it, however that that works for you, could send it back in time, or Gothicise it in other ways, but one of the really fun things I think about the Gothic is, like you said, it’s so much about what’s hidden. It’s not just a genre, it’s a process of exposing that which is hidden, but there’s always that kind of underlying assumption going in for for reader that you know something is hidden and it will be uncovered.

MDeB: Yes, definitely, and what I love about the Gothic genre especially is there’s a real strong sense of history, you know there’s always some sort of, you know, the very traditional Gothic like some ancient prophecy or whatever, or even just more recent history that needs to be uncovered. And so, for me, that’s always an exploration of ancestral and generational trauma, so of the things that get passed on if they aren’t exposed or brought into the light. Even something like the repressive social ideologies of dating norms. They keep getting perpetuated and that trauma gets perpetuated unless, unless you break the cycle of what society is demanding of you.

CMR: Yeah I think you’re right about the whole kind of the performative nature of the dating game and all of those expectations. It’s almost like a Panopticon kind of effect where like everyone who’s in your circle is doing stuff and thinking, you know, it’s the whole focus of the conversation, it’s the being dragged on double dates that you don’t particularly want to go on, but that’s how you are socializing with your friends now I guess. And it’s that kind of pressure to belong, and those sorts of things come out in Hungry Business, that sort of thing. I think what struck me most about it is the protagonist is, apart from the dates, completely alone. I think the only time you see her interact with a friend is going on a double date situation. And I thought that was a really interesting Gothic trope, it’s a really important Gothic trope, the ‘Isolated Protagonist’ can be key to a Gothic text, and it’s so interesting that you get that sense of isolation even when you’re performing a very social act or you’re performing a social life.

MDeB: Absolutely and i’m so i’m so excited that you picked up on that. It is like, you know, sometimes it’s like we we have all these friends or we’re out doing all these things, and even then we’re surrounded by all these people it’s intentionally, it can be intensely isolating and and soul-gutting. So I really wanted to contrast that with the scenes when she’s at home and in her apartment and it’s cozy and warm and she has all these twinkle lights. And that’s the moment where you in many ways, you know, mainstream culture might see her as at her most isolated.But really that’s where she’s at her most at peace, you know, she’s connected to herself and she has more of a sense of who she is there, so that tension starts to build in the story, where she has to say, “Society is telling me I need to do this, but I’m at a point where I have to think about what makes me feel good because I can’t just keep doing the same thing over and over again, because it’s making me crazy and literally infecting me with this thing I don’t know how to cure”.

CMR: Yeah, and I don’t want to say too much because I don’t want to spoil the end, but… yeah there’s loads of stuff I really want to get into about that, but I can’t because spoilers.

MDeB: Well, but what I can say about the ending without giving any spoilers is that the romance lover in me is huge on HEA or happily ever after, so there is a sense of catharsis and resolution and so she does find that the trick of course for her is figuring out how to get there, so for me the Gothic is always about yeah expose the darkness or really confront it, and then find your resolution from there.

CMR: I think that’s a really lovely way of approaching it as well, because I think so much of Gothic fiction is so bleak. You can have this very nihilistic approach where you’re holding a mirror up to something and you’re saying everything is wrong in the situation and things are very uncanny and unfamiliar but also very familiar and it’s very unsettling, and then you’re left with an ending that is really either very ambiguous, or very uncomfortable, or deliberately meant to unsettle you so you don’t know what’s going to happen, or it’s not going to get any better unless you burn it all down kind of ending. Then, an example of that… I guess spoilers, but it’s been published for several years now, is Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, where, even that it does film does turn into a happy ever after ending, and romanticises it, but the book has a very different spin and it’s really not the happy ever after ending where everything is fine.

MDeB: Yes.

CMR: Yeah, and that’s what you’re left with, you know, you’re left with that note of – I guess, emotional evisceration, and there’s nothing for the reader to heal themselves with after that, so you then as the reader have to go forward into your daily life and do that work.

MDeB: Yes, exactly.

CMR: It’s not always the best place to be. It’s not the most comfortable place to be. And I really like that [the hopeful Gothic of Maria DeBlassie’s work] for the Gothic as a contrast or counterpoint.

MDeB: Yeah thank you, so one of my reasonings behind that is, again, because I come from a mixed cultural background, that is, you know, has a very intense history of of colonization in the American south west and religious oppression and all this stuff. I realised very early on, like in college that a lot of the stories about Latinx Hispanic indigenous communities were about trauma, and making people aware of those histories of trauma and the violence and all of that, and that’s really important to have all those things exposed, but at a certain point, I felt like okay, where do we go from here?

Like, we know all this is here, what’s our next step forward, and what I think is really exciting now is that people within those communities like myself are starting to think about changing those narratives, okay, so we have to expose everything, but we can’t just be in that perpetual state of of wrongness and grappling with the devastation of those things as you so as you so eloquently put it, we have to think about where do we go from here, otherwise you’re in that constant state of trauma.

So part of the the hopeful Gothic for me is like thinking, Ok, there is hope once you go through that devastating feeling and that, that rawness. You can start to begin to pave a new way forward, which is terrifying. That’s part of the Gothic, right, going into the unknown, but there’s also catharsis there.

CMR: I love that I think it’s an interesting… it’s a really good mode to bridge that gap from perpetual trauma to future planning, or a forward path, and the Gothic is a good way of going yes, everything is shit, and here are all the hidden things, but also this is how we can move forward this is how we can kind of do it – not necessarily “overcome” in inverted commas, that like how we can see where we’re going and see a forward…

MDeB: The power of knowing that that stuff is there, right. So, at the beginning of every Gothic tale, the danger is in not knowing that there’s stuff … that there is something there, but we don’t know what it is, and so, once it’s revealed, the catharsis is in recognizing… okay, that stuff’s there, it is probably always going to be there, but I have the agency now, and with my knowledge I can decide what I do, moving forward.

CMR: Yeah that sense of agency, I think that agency is really key, especially with like Gothic heroines where they spend most of the book trying to find their agency or regain that agency, or it’s that agency that becomes a battleground, like who has control of their destiny, and ultimately, it has to be, if you want that kind of resolution. Ultimately their agency has to be given back to them or attained in some way, and there has to be some kind of positive about that, yeah.

MDeB: Definitely, and I love that, yeah.

CMR: I think that works so well, and especially in terms of the dating scene.

MDeB: One thing I will say to you is i’m getting a lot of really wonderful reviews from that story of people just saying I’m so glad I’m not in the dating scene anymore, or how painfully relatable it was, and so to me that was really cathartic because, again I think it’s something that’s a little more unspoken where people just really being honest about how much it can suck out there.

CMR: Yeah and it’s so demoralizing, yes and the process of doing it over and over does kind of strip you of your agency in that kind of way because there’s also that narrative that you can’t be happy unless you’ve got someone else.

MDeB: Exactly

CMR: Or in a more general way, you know you can’t be happy unless you conform to this set of societal expectations, and finding your own space [in that society is hard].

Would you say that the themes of the business and our representative of your work as a whole, or do you like to explore the range of modes and things?

MDeB: That’s a great question. So for the most part, it is reflective of my work as a whole, I really love the Gothic and that kind of hopeful Gothic, where there’s a sense of cozy Gothic, too, as disturbing as some of the bits of Hungry Business are, there’s also some really comforting portions of the story, too, so I really like to inhabit that space. I also write in in my nonfiction – in my poetry and prose nonfiction – I write about the magic of everyday life so that looks at the same sort of issues, but from a more positive perspective, so it doesn’t quite go as dark, but it really explores the the joys of of mundane life like you know, a really good cup of tea is really a magic potion. You know, the cast iron pot is your cauldron where you can brew all sorts of amazing things. So I kind of move in between the everyday magic and the ordinary Gothic in what I write.

CMR: Yeah, that’s lovely. Have you got anything coming out that you want to publicise or let us know about, or anything coming up?

MDeB: Yes, well, thanks for asking, so in the Fall, I have my second nonfiction book in October (2021), it’s a practical guide to magical living, so again really mundane tips on how to just conjure more magic and kind of be conscious about how you are the author of your own story. Then hopefully in the Spring [of 2021] I’m hoping to get out my next short story or novella called Weep Woman Weep. It’s based on the legend of La Llorona or the weeping woman, which is a really famous creepy story in New Mexico about a woman who drowns her babies in the river, the Rio Grande, after all this stuff happens, so she’s a common archetype she’s kind of the woman in white archetype that you see in a lot of cultures, but I have a story that’s about that, and how you heal from issues of ancestral trauma so fingers crossed it’ll be out this Spring (2021) and so I’m looking forward to that.

[Update from the author: Weep Woman Weep will be out 15 June 2021]

CMR: Oh wow. I’m really looking forward to that, I’m really excited. Thank you so much for coming on the show, it’s been a really lovely chat.

MDeB: Thank you for having me, and I am actually a very big fan of your work and your writing, and it is so delightful and it’s… I’ll be honest like it’s taking me a little longer to go through, because I don’t want it to end, and so I’m like parceling it out each night before bed, because I just find that world and that space very comforting. Though it’s creepy, it’s very comforting.

CMR: Thank you!! Yeah that’s what I’m going for and then, as it goes on, I didn’t realize like how much how much creepier it gets, and then I’m like, it’s fine.

MDeB: There’s like some characters, you know, I’m like… you’re a cannibal, why do I like you so much?! I would love to hang out with you sometime!

CMR: Yeah, I think it’s the whole sort of, if it wasn’t for his family having messed him up so much, he would actually be a really sweet guy.

MDeB: Absolutely, and I love the characters in the story, all of them have this this interesting backstory of like this stuff happened to me, now, where do I go from here, like what kind of life do I want to build for myself, and so to me that’s been such a fascinating space to linger and with these interesting characters who are just like this is what I have going on now, and where do I go from here.

CMR: It’s kind of similar to some of your work!

MDeB: They’re good people at the core, you know, so yeah, thank you so much, it’s been really a lot of medicine for me.

CMR: That’s really lovely to hear, thank you very much, I’m honored. Well, that’s all we’ve got time for, thank you for listening, thank you once again for coming on the podcast!

Buy Now!Find all my Author Interviews here.

May Schedule: Podcast & Monstrous May!

I’m going to be participating in the #MonstrousMayChallenge hosted by Johannes Evans, using his prompts for the month to create content exclusively for my Ko-Fi supporters. If you’ve bought something from my shop (99p counts!) or dropped me a tip once, that means you. If you haven’t, but want to be included, go check out my Ko-Fi Shop now, or drop me a tip, and you’ll get access to all the month’s exclusive content.

Included in this will be a first draft scene from Eldritch Girls Just Want To Have Fun – so look out for a culture clash on 29 May when Sasha Shaw brings her new ‘boyfriend’ to Sunday lunch with the family. Nita Pan my co-writer is scheduling the complete scene on their Patreon so if you want to sign up for the month, now’s the time! You can listen to Nita’s interview on my podcast here, transcript here.

You can find the full prompt list with alternatives and FAQs for the Monstrous May Challenge here.

I’m also going to be creating content for my podcast’s two (2!) bonus episodes this month, which will be based on Monstrous May prompts.

Séance – interior illustration in The Crows paperback, by Thomas Brown

I had to split Ch 11 into two parts, so that threw off my schedule in April, but the projected schedule this month looks like this!

Looking forward to Maria DeBlassie’s interview on Monday 3rd May, when the transcript will also go live. We talk about zombies and the monstrous world of dating, Hopeful Gothic, and everyday magic. A pretty good start to Monstrous May even though it doesn’t quite work with the prompt – The Vampire. However, zombies are another good undead monster to contend with, so it’s all good!

Podcast S01E13 ~ Chapter 11.2 (Part 2 of 2) Up Now!

Chapter 11 (Part 2 of 2) of The Crows is online today!

CW for return of an abusive ex, murdered child (ghost).

CHAPTER 11: DAMSEL IN DISTRESS

Links on my podcast page.

Chapter 11.2: Damsel in Distress

…in which several days pass eventfully…

Carrie pinched the stem of the broken key, the nub sticking out a little way. To her surprise, it turned easily, the lid springing open with a rusty click. A broken ballerina with half her skirt missing and the rest of it sadly torn, face obliterated with age and grime, twisted drunkenly on her platform. One little arm swung from a dislocated shoulder, and all the paint had been worn away. It was playing Three Blind Mice, flat and out of tune.

(Yet another thing to feel sorry for.)

Tina sat back down in her place and held out her hands for Mercy and Carrie to take one each. Her hand in Carrie’s was clammy. Mercy’s was similarly unpleasant to grip, but there was little choice. Carrie sat still, the energies of the house rippling up through her, palms hot, part of a sorority of strangers bound by sweat.

C. M. Rosens, The Crows, pp. 230-31

This is the last part of Chapter 11! Not all the long chapters have a convenient place to cut, so Chapter 12 next week will be complete, but longer.

Since Carrie came out of her coma, after having Ricky’s tendrils slime all over her and taste her blood, not to mention the fact he’s been sleeping in her bed while she’s been unconscious, her thoughts look different on the page. They used to be just in italics, but now they are (in brackets as well.) Ricky, you’ll notice, always thinks (in brackets like this.) I can’t do much about this aurally for the podcast

What does it mean?

Did you pick up on this when you read it?

Thirteenth Release!

Exciting news! THIRTEENTH is now out in ebook format, paperback will be released 30 April! Get your Kindle compatible copy from Amazon or my Ko-Fi shop, and the epub format copy from Smashwords.

Check out my Smashwords profile here: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/CMRosens87

Check out my Amazon profile here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/~/e/B081VKJ76K

Check out my Ko-Fi Shop here: https://ko-fi.com/cmrosens/shop

You’ll notice I have a Ko-Fi exclusive sale: The Crows is available there for £2.99 and the box set of The Crows + Folklore of Pagham-on-Sea Vol. 1 + Overexposure (short story) is £4.99 for all of them!

That sale is on until Sunday 2 May.