C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 48

#AmReading The Truth in Lies by Gemma Cartmell

My ratings (1-5):
– sincerely dreadful [in which case I probably wouldn’t post a review at all]
– not for me [again, unlikely to review since this is subjective]
– ok, mostly liked it
– entertained me
– loved it

[image error]Cover Artist: Ben Baldwin

I’ve actually finished a new book!! And since it’s #ReviewMay I’m dropping my review. This was a novella I found via the Horror Novels Facebook group, The Truth in Lies, by Gemma Cartmell. I found myself liking this one, so it’s from me…

Book Comparisons: THE SLEEP ROOM X ALICE IN WONDERLAND

Film/TV Comparisons: John Carpenter’s The Ward, Sucker Punch, Split, Shutter Island, AHS Asylum

I’m not comparing the prose style with F. R. Tallis in the book comp – more that this is in a similar genre, and plays with the same tropes and conventions. The film comps are a better overall view of what the novella is about, and what tropes/conventions and atmosphere/aesthetic it evokes.

The story itself is a disjointed nightmare sequence full of dream-logic, symbols, confusing turns, grotesqueries and imaginative creatures, held together by an unreliable narrator. Don’t expect too many psychological or psychiatric accuracies, and if you are familiar with this genre then the reveal at the end will not be a surprise, but the journey towards it is surreal and was enough to keep me gliding towards it, like skimming over the surface of someone else’s nightmare.

The narrative doesn’t pull you in deeply – I was distanced from the narrator by the close third person narrative and at the start there was a little bit of head-hopping between Oliver, the protagonist, and Dr Clarke, which was a little off-putting. Once that settled down and tightened on Oliver, the disjointed and deliberately confusing narrative played out with blurred edges, in dreamlike style. The distance helped create this sense of dreaming weightlessness, dropping the reader into different situations and strange illogical quests, as Oliver unravels. It’s a fairly quick read, light and entertaining.

The gore and grotesque elements have the same nightmare quality to them in terms of description: some dismembered bodies are bloodless, for example, a strange dream-like view of body parts that bears no resemblance to reality. There is heavily implied necrophilia (by the antagonist, Jared), but since it’s doubtful that he or anyone else exists, this is another horror of the waking dream or lucid nightmare variety, providing an ick-factor but (from my perspective) fairly mild.

I actually think this novella would be better as a graphic novel, as it relies heavily on the set pieces, the landscapes, the creatures, the symbols, the transformations, and other visual elements. If this was ever going to be a Kickstarter project I’d be really up for that.

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Published on May 10, 2020 07:26

~A Little Insta-Fic~ #FlashFiction #MayWeWrite

I’m playing #MayWeWrite on Instagram this month, hosted by @33nbeebe, and one of the prompts was to post 3 random words on your account, then head to the tag to find other people’s words and make a 1-sentence story out of them. I had a go and it was a lot of fun!

Follow me on Insta @cm.rosens!

Here is a selection of the results (and a few other authors to follow on Insta!):

[image error] DINOSAUR / WOODY / PORK CHOPS @tlhanigan

[image error] LAMENT / MUSIC / LIGHT @tessa.tal.writer

[image error] RAINDROP / WEREWOLF / PUDDING @d.allyson_writes

[image error] STRANGE / LITTLE / SPECIES @karmamchesnut

[image error] BRUSQUENESS / INEXORABLE / DOGGEDLY @andrewbast24

[image error] WILDERNESS / BELIEVER / BLAZE @fridaypaulayo

[image error] FLAME / FORTUNE / WILD @jacob_devlin

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Published on May 07, 2020 06:25

~Book Chat & Book Reviews~

It’s #TuesdayBookBlog on Twitter so I thought I’d do a quick round-up of all the reviews I’ve posted to my site so far! I’ll try and do more of these each week, but my brain may not cooperate so bear with me. My concentration isn’t conducive to reading and hasn’t been for the past 3-4 months. The last time my focus was good enough, it was … December?? Hoping my focus will return! Short stories are about my speed at the moment, as long as they are very short. So perhaps I’ll do some of those.

Werewolf Talk Series

Not all ‘reviews’ per se, but I did a series of author interviews (ongoing!) to get me back into the mood for revising my own werewolf noir thriller, Real Meat. It’s a complete first draft at 70k words at the moment, but a mess. Here’s the WT series so far!

#1: Werewolves in the Paghamverse
#2: Interview with Richard Brown
#3: Interview with Kara Jorgensen
#4: Interview with Tom & Nimue Brown
#5: Interview with Becca Lyn Mathis

Welsh Gothic Review Series

This is the chapter-by-chapter breakdown of Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic (2013), with added historical context and, where possible, links to the texts cited/reviews and other related articles.

#1: Welsh Gothic by Jane Aaron: The Introduction
#2: Cambria Gothica (1780s-1820s): Chapter 1 and Texts
#3: Cambria Gothica (1780s-1820s): A Selection of Welsh Ghost Stories and Folklore pre-1830
#4: Welsh Gothic Fiction (1830s-1900s): Chapter 2: Historical Context
#5: Welsh Gothic Fiction (1830s-1900s): Chapter 2: An Underworld of One’s Own
#6: Haunted Communities (1900s-1940s): Chapter 3: Gothic Dissent
#7: Haunted Communities (1900s-1940s): Chapter 3: Industrial Gothic
#8: Wales, Land of the Living Dead (1940s-1997): Chapter 4: Context and Poetry
#9: Wales, Land of the Living Dead (1940s-1997): Chapter 4: Zombies and Zombification
#10: Wales, Land of the Living Dead (1940s-1997): Chapter 4: Vampire Lore and Vampire Lit
#11: Post-Devolution Welsh Gothic (1997-2013): Epilogue
#12: Welsh Gothic Tropes: Death Omens
#13: Welsh Gothic Tropes: The Witch
#14: Welsh Gothic Tropes: The Druid
#15: Welsh Gothic Tropes: The Cwn Annwn
#16: Welsh Gothic Tropes: The Sin Eater

Gothic Studies

Body Gothic by Xavier Aldana Reyes

Pulp Gothic Fiction Reviews

Echo in a Dark Wind by Julia Withers

Fantasy/Paranormal Gothic

The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb
Stoker’s Wilde by Steven Hopstaken and Melissa Prusi

Weird Fiction

Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman
The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco

If you liked these, please consider buying me a coffee to keep the website running and to help me find more time to create these posts! I think best in coffee shops…!

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Published on May 05, 2020 04:20

Wyrd Wednesday: Wyrd bið ful aræd

I took line 5b from Old English poem ‘The Wanderer’ as the tagline for The Crows because it is at the heart of the fatalistic themes of death and fate: death is inevitable, and Carrie, unbeknownst to her but very much beknownst to Ricky Porter, has 33 days left to live from when the book opens.

[image error]

Wyrd bið ful aræd | Fate is inexorable

I chose this as the tagline with the more commonly known translation, and this is a line that Ricky repeats to himself throughout the book (I think it appears a total of three times). But there are other ways to translate it, and Ricky’s translations vary a little when he thinks about fate and as he begins to struggle against it himself.

Aaron K. Hofstetter’s translation of ‘The Wanderer’ is free to read on The Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry Project, as is his discussion on line 5b. What is meant by ‘wyrd’ and ‘aræd’? How do you interpret them in the full context of the poem itself, and how else is it attested?

Hofstetter’s own version is provocatively rendered [in American English]:

“Often the lone-dweller awaits his own favor,
the Measurer’s mercy, though he must,
mind-caring, throughout the ocean’s way
stir the rime-chilled sea with his hands
for a long while, tread the tracks of exile—
the way of the world is ever an open book.” (1-5)

I like this rendering – it makes the line reflect the landscape, but also implies that for those who can read the ways of the wyrd, the paths are clear but cannot be altered, only travelled. I tried to capture a little bit of this in The Crows in the sense of being trapped in space and place as well as in time, and contrast the apparent (and actual) wildness of Ricky Porter with his caged-ness. Ricky isn’t a wandering soothsayer like some versions of Merlin, although he is a sort of Merlin figure, so this is a layer of irony he doesn’t ever recognise.

Ricky is more Merlin Sylvestris/Myrddin Wyllt, or Merlin-Trapped, bound within borders, but also locked out of places he wants to enter. Ricky is tied to the woods (The Chase) where his family home (Bramble Cottage) is located, and Fairwood House a.k.a. The Crows on the edge of The Chase, and barely even ventures into the town (Pagham-on-Sea) any more. He bounces between this tight location of a few acres square and his grandmother’s house on Sea View Road, but he doesn’t go anywhere else. He also doesn’t see himself as trapped or stuck, or at least doesn’t actively try to fight against this, until he is forced to face his own limitations and how he is also entrapped by his own wyrd.

Another direct Merlin comparison is with the poem in the Red Book of Hergest, where Merlin dialogues with his twin sister Gwendydd, who asks him for his predictions about the line of rulers and what will happen in the future. It is mainly woeful, and she leaves him in the woods at the end but with a tender praise-parting. Ricky, of course, is an only child, and so he doesn’t have this sort of relationship, but he does often wonder what life would be like if he had a sister. Gwendydd, in the poem, says, ‘Praise to him who tells the truth’, and Ricky often emphasises his own truthfulness (the definition of sooth-sayer is truth-teller), and is a terrible liar anyway, in that he’s so transparent about it.

Hofstetter has a handy appendix at the bottom of his article where he lists the different ways line 5b has been translated since its first edition:

Thorpe, 1842: “His fate is full decreed”
Gollancz, 1895: “Fate is full stubborn!”
Hieatt, 1967 (prose): “Fate is inexorable”
Kennedy, 1936: “Homeless and helpless he fled from Fate”
Gordon, 1936: “settled in truth is fate!”
Raffel, 1960: “Fate has opened / a single port: memory” (same in 1998)
Alexander, 1970: “Wierd is set fast”
Rebsamen, 1971 (prose): “Fate is full determined”
David (in Pope, 1981, appears in the NAEL 9th ed.): “Fate is firmly set”
Bradley, 1982 (prose): “Fate is inexorable”
Crossley-Holland, 1983 (prose): “fate is inflexible”
Mitchell-Robinson, 1983 “Fate is wholly inexorable!”
Liuzza, 2009 (in Broadview’s anthology): “Wyrd is fully fixed!”
Williamson, 2011: “His fate is fixed”
Delanty, 2013: “fate dictates”
Bjork, 2014: “fate is fully fixed”

I’ve highlighted in bold the ones I’ve borrowed (Bradley, following Hieatt, for the tagline, and Kennedy for a sense of Ricky’s overall character arc).

If you’d like to read more about Richard Edwin “Ricky” Porter, you can meet him for free here:

Ricky Porter and A Toy Called Gerald [extract]
The Crows: Chapters 1-5 [complete and free to read]

…or head to any of these Amazon outlets to purchase the illustrated paperback/Kindle version: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Amazon.es, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr

Buy the [illustrated] eBook from any of your preferred online stores:
Smashwords, Kobo, Scribd, Barnes & Noble, Apple (iBooks), 24Symbols, and Canadian indie creator/seller/author Kerri Davidson.

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Published on April 29, 2020 07:30

Welsh Gothic in Film: House of the Long Shadows

House of the Long Shadows (1983) starred Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and John Carradine, four heavyweights of horror, who apparently didn’t even read the script before they agreed to be in it. It suited them perfectly: a gory, campy romp in a dark mansion full of terrors, a twisted family secret and a series of murders… all unravelling as an American author attempts to churn out a classic novel like Wuthering Heights in 24 hours to win a $20,000 bet with his British publisher.

This is a ‘first contact’ type, where Wales is viewed from the perspective of an outsider unfamiliar with it, its language, its culture or its people. The American author – Kenneth Magee, played by Desi Arnaz – can’t pronounce the name of the place, and neither can his English publicist who suggests it (it is owned by his unnamed friend). It’s written down and looks unlike any actual Welsh name you’ve ever seen: Bllyddpaetwr, which… while Google translates this as ‘blogger’, isn’t… no. It’s a word constructed by someone who knows that Welsh has ‘ll’ and ‘dd’ as letters (they constitute one letter of the alphabet, as the alphabet is phoenetic), and that ‘w’ is a vowel, but haven’t really bothered to look an actual name up.

[image error]

The English publicist says the nearest he ever got to pronouncing it was ‘Baldpate – Baldpate Manor’. This is fairly sinister while also being fairly silly, and doesn’t correspond in Welsh to whatever mess is on the page. The script itself is based on a 1913 novel, The Seven Keys to Baldpate by Earl Derr Biggers [free Internet Archive version here and Open Library version here], adapted for the stage by George M. Cohan, which had a number of film and radio adaptations already from 1917-1947 and was set in America. With the insistence on keeping this as the pronunciation, one wonders why they didn’t just keep the damn name.

It’s not as if the family – the Grimstones – are Welsh, and the Anglicisation of the Welsh gentry was historically a sore point that generated tension and caused them to be Gothicised in texts from the nineteenth century on.

The journey to Wales depicts fields and pleasant landscape, until the dramatic thunderstorm and arrival at the railway station in the dark. While this is a Gothic stereotype (cross off ‘It Was A Dark And Stormy Night’ from your Gothic bingo cards, friends) it’s also a common stereotypical joke about Welsh weather.

Here, the Railway Station Scene [embedded below] takes place, which ramps up the negative stereotyping. This has been discussed by the Wales In The Movies wordpress blog, in the post Dark Welsh Houses, where you’ll see how it compares to other representation. (This post says it was the only feature film set in Wales made in the 1980s. There were two other feature-length films set in Wales [rather than just having some scenes filmed in Wales] in the 1980s other than this, and both were made in 1987: On the Black Hill and made-for-TV adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales.)

Setting aside the undertones of civility vs barbarity discourse, as casually demonstrated by the line, “I’ve almost forgotten what civilisation’s like”, there’s a lot going on in this scene. It’s all the usual things you’d expect from a [negative] first-contact text.

The obstructive, superstitious station master (check the Superstitious Unhelpful Locals off your bingo card now if you’re playing along at home) is not a Welsh actor, but is played by Norman Rossington, a Liverpudlian, who manages a passable Welsh accent (comparatively, in that you know what it’s supposed to be) but doesn’t pronounce the ‘ll’ when he says BLLYDDPAETWR. Instead, he inserts an ‘a’ in there to make it sound more like ‘barlth’, to support the mispronunciation.

The English couple that Magee meets at the station have already primed us not to expect help from the locals by their offhand generalisations, saying that ‘the Welsh’ in general, ‘especially the older ones’, are all ‘terribly nationalistic’ and ‘hate the English’, to which Magee counters, ‘I’ve never been accused of being English before. I’ll have to wear a leek, show I’m a friend.’

This isn’t exactly a bonding of Outsiders (who outnumber the actual locals in the scene, to wit, the station master, who is absent for most of it), since Magee rejects the ‘English’ label and reinforces his own, unique, American identity. His attempt to remain neutral in what is presented as parochial, xenophobic concerns actually reinforces his isolation (check that off your Gothic bingo cards, folks), but it also patronises the Welsh he’s trying to ‘keep on side’ by appropriating the leek (a national symbol). Not that it’s the appropriation that’s really the problem: more the fact that no one wears leeks except on St David’s Day and at rugby matches, and it was chosen for the purposes of this dialogue instead of ‘a daffodil’ or ‘a dragon pin’ because it sounds funnier and more ridiculous.

The plot-purpose of the scene is to introduce the English couple, who will be back later, and the mysterious woman, who arrives in the storm and immediately rushes to the Ladies’ loos at the mention of ‘Baldpate Manor’. She then apparently escapes by breaking a window and hurling herself back out into the dark and stormy night, for reasons we can only imagine. She, too, becomes more relevant later on, and is revealed to not be a local but another English woman sent to distract and scare Magee so he doesn’t win his bet, so she doesn’t qualify as a Strange Local Madwoman. If you crossed that off your imaginary bingo card, I see you. Too soon.

We are now 15mins into the film, and if you’re holding out hope that there will be some Welsh representation to follow, no, that’s it, it has been and gone. Sit back and enjoy the next hour and a bit, it gets wild. Carradine, Cushing, Lee and Price (when he finally shows up) are perfect. The plot is completely barking and just what you really want in a film like this. There is a killer hunting the stranded guests at the manor, no one is who they say they are, and the effects are pure early-80s gore.

BUT. You do occasionally have to remember, in the midst of this plot-run-amok, that it’s set in Wales and the manor is in Wales and the backstory – the savage murder of a pregnant young teen from the village – is therefore the story of an Anglicised gentry family who have destroyed and terrorised the Welsh in their sphere of power and influence. The Railway Station Scene, by making the Welsh the butt of the Othering jokes and off-hand comments, has already positioned the English as superior, civilised and rational, and the Welsh as inferior, [negatively] nationalistic and superstitious. Therefore, the murder of a young teen girl by one of the Grimstone family many years before plays into this positioning and context whether it was meant to or not.

This ironically fits with the Welsh Gothic themes of the early Welsh Gothic of the eighteenth century, where the English were usually depicted as rapists, seducers and destroyers. It also fits with the later Welsh Gothic themes of indolent Anglicised gentry destroyed and haunted by the past, although here it is a specific family secret around the death of this young girl, not the weight of the medieval heritage and expectations of fallen princes and betrayed leaders.

All in all, House of the Long Shadows is a weird trippy ride as well as being a great Gothic romp, and it’s hard to see what sort of a classic Magee managed to create after that 24 hours, but then again…

It’s a really great showcase for Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, John Carradine and Vincent Price, in that you can tell how much fun they had together making it, and that kind of joy oozes out as they run around screaming murderous threats at each other and hammering each other with axes. It’s definitely a film I’d watch more than once, Welsh stereotyping notwithstanding, but maybe I’d fast-forward to 15mins in.

Early Gothic texts featuring rapacious upper class Englishmen/colonials:

Anna: or Memoirs of a Welch Heiress: interspersed with anecdotes of a Nabob (1785), Anna Maria Bennett
Cambrian Pictures (1810), Ann of Swansea
‘The Prediction‘ in Tales of Welsh Society and Scenery (1827), Thomas Richards

(Read the full post – Cambria Gothica I: 1780s-1820s)

Gothic texts featuring Anglicised Gentry doomed and haunted by the past:

‘The Doom of the Griffiths‘, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1858), Elizabeth Gaskell
‘The Doom of the Prynnes‘, in Twilight Hours: A Legacy of Verse pp. 27-52, (1868), Sarah “Sadie” Williams.

(Read the full post – An Underworld of One’s Own: 1830s-1900s)

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Published on April 27, 2020 02:24

Folklore of Pagham-on-Sea: Jennet, Jenny and Pinnie-Pen

A folktale from Pagham-on-Sea, recorded by Rev. J. D. Allardyce (1904).

There’s a tale told of Barrow Field though no folk believe on it now, of the time Old Joss Hunderby went widdershins around the largest of the barrows there after a lamb, and before he knew what was what a door opened in the side and out of it he heard a strange sound like singing.

Old Joss he crossed hisself and said a prayer and peeped in at the door to see what it was all about, but before he could do any more it all went dark inside and a voice calls out,

Come horse, come cow, come small brown hen,
Come Jennet, Jenny and Pinnie-Pen!

Well, Old Joss wondered what this was and thought it was the farisees and their little tricks, but he couldn’t move from the spot, it were like his legs were stuck together. He tried and tried and tried again but he couldn’t go back, and he couldn’t go left, and he couldn’t go right, but he could take a step further into the barrow. ‘If I can’t go back, and I can’t go left, and I can’t go right, I might as well go forwards,’ Old Joss thought, and he took a step inside the door.

There in the barrow Old Joss saw three figures, all strange-fashioned in the gloom, two with large heads, one with small, and all bundled up in old travelling clothes. He scratched his head and thought to sneak out another way, but the door closed and he was there with no way out, all in the dark tomb of stone with the grass growing tall over it. Well, Old Joss was afeared and he clutched at his smock, but it was no good now for what’s done is done and there’s no going back from it.

Then he heard the voice again, coming from one of the figures.

“Well Jennet,” said the one, “I heard the batfowlers last night in the woods, a-catching fowl. The fowl say beware the false feathers.”

“Well Jenny,” said another, “I heard the flittermouse last night in the fields, a-catching moths. The moths say beware the false lights.”

“Well Pinnie-Pen,” said the third, “I heard the kime last night in the hedgerow a-catching meese. The meese say beware the false smiles.”

Old Joss could take it no more: “And I heard the mawkin last night in the fields a-catching cold!” He burst out, “And I’ll not be a-listening to you no longer!” And with that he groped around the stones until he found the door again, and the three figures took down their hoods and stared at him behind their mummers’ masks, one with a horse-head, one with a cow-head, and one with the head of a small brown hen.

Well, Old Joss lay bethered after that, and for three long weeks he never stirred, until one night his son came in to say he had seen the strangest sight: marching down from the long barrow in Barrow Field at sunset was a troop of little men all scarce four inches high, and all wore fern-fronds in their caps that bobbed like feathers, and they made their way merrily down the road in procession, the lad following them at a distance to see where they might go, until they came to the grounds of the big house, and there they danced around the well in the garden. And the lad hid in the bushes and watched the little men dance, and as they danced strange lights like small dandelion puffs rose out of the well and danced with them, glowing like tiny pearls. And the lad watched and watched until one of the little men stopped dancing and called out, “I twets, do you twet?” and the lad couldn’t help but laugh – but laughing gave him away and the little men all scattered.

“You must beware the little men with their false feathers, false lights and false smiles,” Old Joss told his son, remembering the words he’d heard in the barrow. But the lad was curious and although he promised his father, he went back to the big house to hide in the bushes the following night to see if the little men would return.

Well, this time, the little men came back and danced with the lights around the well – and this time as before one stopped dancing, all out of breath, and cried out, “Puck! I twets, do you twet?” And as before the lad couldn’t help but laugh and give himself away.

But this time the leader of the little men came to the lad with a smile as long as a staff, and invited him to dance with them. “You little fluttergrub, hiding there in the dirt,” the little man said, “Come away with us, and we will fill your pockets with riches.”

Well, the lad was sorely tempted, and although he had promised his father, he soon found himself dancing with the little men, around and around and around the well, and then when he could dance no more they caught him up, some on his right leg, some on his left, and lifted him like he weighed no more than a sparrow, and they took him off down the road and back to the barrow where they came from, and the lad was heard of no more.

Old Joss got hisself out of bed to find his son, and went widdershins about the barrow again – but no little men did he find, only the darkness of the tomb and the stones, and the three misshapen figures, all dressed up to go travelling. And again he heard that voice saying,

Come horse, come cow, come small brown hen,
Come Jennet, Jenny and Pinnie-Pen!

“I’ll give ye Jennet, Jenny and Pinnie-Pen!” Old Joss roared, and set about them with his cane, beside himself for the loss of his boy. “Give to me my child, you little devils!” And he set about to pull at the heads of the figures to see who was playing tricks. But as he pulled at them they fell all in a heap; for what he took to be mummers’ masks were no masks at all, and his fingers found the blood-stiff yarn stitches that sewed the heads to their necks.

And they found Old Joss fitting in Barrow Field and he died that same day, and they never found the boy, not ever, and they say there’s still lights in the well of the big house from time to time, and singing too, if you listen; but no one believes on such fancies nowadays and the Hunderbys sold off the field years back, and the long barrows lie asleep under grass and sun, and are filled with stone and silence and nothing more.

widdershins: anti-clockwise
farisees: Sussex dialect for fairies
batfowlers: bird-catchers with nets who go out at night
flittermouse: bat
kime: weasels
meese: mice
mawkin: scarecrow
bethered: bedridden
twets/twet: to sweat
fluttergrub: a man who takes a delight in working about in the dirt, and getting into every possible mess

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Published on April 24, 2020 07:35

Pagham-on-Sea: Dark Tourism

Why come to Pagham-on-Sea? Well, if you’re a big vampire fan with money to burn but can’t afford a weekend in one of the bigger, more expensive cities like London where the upmarket vampire scene is pretty elitist, then Pagham-on-Sea has several B&Bs and a TravelInn.

There are three vampire-owned clubs in the town and two vampire-owned all-night cafés. Packages can be bought online via shady dark-web websites, with a QR code sent to your phone. No code, no entry.

Your package can vary from just club entry, where you can hang out with vampires in a look-but-don’t-touch situation, to being fed on privately (more expensive), to being fed on after consuming opiates including laudanum (some vampires miss the taste) and/or absinthe containing a wormwood infusion, as per the original recipe.

Some packages are marketed as ‘assisted dying’, and do not require you to be terminal or even unhealthy to qualify, but they do require you to pay through the nose. No one will ask questions, but you will not be resurrected afterwards.

Vampire Clubs

Twilight Crypt

Off the back of the YA phenomenon, Twilight, vampires exploited the growing, easily manipulated fanbase of teens and tweens looking for a good time and their very own Edward Cullen. The Twilight Crypt is lax about ID, and the vampires who work there are chosen for their youthful appearance and angelic aesthetic. On special ‘Shimmer and Shine’ theme nights, they cover themselves with UV body paint and glitter, so that they sparkle in the club lights. This is a notoriously dangerous place and a big favourite with the thrill-seekers, so be prepared for raids. Always take silver nitrate with you in a spray bottle and aim for the eyes/mouth.

2. Velvet Snuff Box

Unsurprisingly, this club has several cellar rooms where snuff films are made from the ‘assisted dying’ packages. Vampires are quite blatant but in this case they always get consent. Apart from that, it’s a very popular venue and one of the town’s biggest clubs. No QR code, no vampire package: it’s just a normal night. The Box is two townhouses knocked into one. The first floor has the cloakroom, foyer, and quieter bar area. The second floor has two dance floors, and the third floor has the offices.

3. L’Éclipse

An undead-inclusive cocktail bar and disco, L’Éclipse is a chic, modern club with cheesy EuroTrash nights, a big Eurovision Song Contest weekend, and a strict over-18s policy. The vampire owner, Maria Tsadilas, is (literally) in bed with Detective Inspector Paula Parsons, and keeps her club above-board. The only packages for dark tourists that include entry to L’Éclipse are cocktails only, no feeding on the premises, booked through private companies and third parties as ‘group bookings’, and are not endorsed by the club.

All-Night Cafés

Eastern Lounge

Once a Shifter cafe owned by the Azeman family called the Lúlú, The Eastern Lounge is now in the hands of Count Lászka’s nest and is a vampire café that unofficially serves opium, laudanum and imported absinthe at proofs illegal in the U.K.. You have to have an official invitation and an assigned ‘Decadent’ [your approved vampire feeder for the evening] to access this part of the establishment, behind a trick bookcase (of course). In the old days [the 1960s-80s] when it was still the Lúlú, the ‘secret’ part of the café was where people hung out to smoke weed. It officially serves Turkish coffee all night, and is famous for its belly dancers and baklava.

2. Stranger Earth

This is a cafe for the vampires and other undead who like the dark and damp, and look like Nosferatu’s grandad. Unless you’re okay with black mould, grave dirt, and lecherous, mouldering corpses slavering over your vital signs, best not to go in here. You can really only access it via the sewer system anyway. Is it really a café? Well – yes, in the sense that you can sit on packing crates and take tea made in a centuries-old samovar over a camping stove. There may or may not be dead mice in it, it’s pot luck. It’s called STRANGER EARTH because that’s the only readable slogan graffiti’d on the wall behind you. It’s probably paint, yeah, but we’re not sure.

Want more?

Check out these posts on the undead of Pagham-on-Sea:

Undead Fashion – guest blog by Revenant Awareness activist and CEO of Open Casket Clothing, Clementine Wells

The Undead of Pagham-on-Sea: Lychgates – how to gain access to the undead communities as a new Riser

Meet the Locals: Mercy Hillsworth – undead-adjacent short on a Resurrectionist character in The Crows.

View more on C.M. Rosens's website »

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Published on April 23, 2020 06:44

The Undead of Pagham-on-Sea: Lychgates

Most people think vampires when they think of the undead, but the truth is that the undead communities are diverse and far from homogenous. Even the ghoul community has its complexities, although they are pretty close to zombies when their brain functions deteriorate through hunger. This post is going to look at how newly undead folk of all kinds gain access to an existing undead community, and future posts will expand on the communities themselves.

Vampires are implied in The Crows but not formally introduced, with the possible exception of Sheila Azeman, whose nature is hinted at but not made explicit. Sheila lives in Barker Crescent because her late husband was a werewolf, but while an azeman can day-walk and shift into animal form, they are more vampiric in nature.

Vampires of the ‘verse ARE going to appear in Eldritch Girls Vol. 3: Euro Trash Eldritch Girl, which is in the outlining stages as we (moi et la belle sauvage Nita Pan) finish the first draft of the sadly vampire-less Eldritch Girls Vol. 1: Eldritch Girls Just Want To Have Fun. The second volume, also being outlined, does not feature vampires either, sadly: that’s a noir slasher romantic road trip across the US with far too many Dolly Parton references, currently titled Eldritch Girls Vol. 2: Have You Met My Eldritch Baby?

I digress. Back to Pagham-on-Sea.

So why does Sheila Azeman use her identity as a surname?

…Let’s talk about lychgates.

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Lychgates

Sheila’s grandparents emigrated to London from Suriname via the Netherlands in the 1900s, and had moved from Amsterdam to London to Pagham-on-Sea, East Sussex, by the early 1920s, back when a lot of shifters, undead and others chose to be open about their identities for various reasons post-WWI.

Many of the newly undead wouldn’t use their previous life-names after their deaths out of fear they might harm their loved ones, and the population of recently undead (most of whom were severely traumatised) exploded dramatically from 1915 onwards.

For context, during the First World War, 30 June 1916, the Royal Sussex Regiment took part in the Battle of the Boar’s Head at Richebourg-l’Avoué. Five hours later, 17 officers and 349 men had been killed, including 12 sets of brothers, three of whom were all from one family. A further 1,000 were wounded or taken prisoner. The day became known in Sussex history as The Day Sussex Died. [I’m not making this bit up, this is actual history.]

The number of undead created in those five hours alone is not known. It is known that some of the boys from Pagham-on-Sea went into battle with small pouches of home soil around their necks, and this is held to be responsible for their resurrections, most of which were ‘mindless’ and resulted in them being put down again.

There needed to be a means of clearly and quickly identifying safe spaces for the newly undead, and it made sense to appoint members of the existing communities – or their ante-dead/alive allies – to ‘open the gateway’ for them and induct them into these spaces.

As a response to this, some allies or members of the existing undead communities signalled their identites/allyship by going by identity-based surnames, like Azeman, Strigoi, Lich or Lych, etc, which in later decades became more problematic as Hunters sought out targets just by going through the local phone book.

A popular code name for allies who could show an undead individual where the safe spaces were in a city or town was the ‘lychgate‘, as in the person who could open the gateway to the various communities within that area. The lychgate ideally was not a ‘gatekeeper’, and their role was not to determine whether someone should be permitted into the community but only to introduce them to it. Severe punishments would be meted out to lychgates who got above themselves and turned undead of any kind away: lychgates are disposable. It’s very difficult to refuse to be a late-lychgate’s replacement when a delegation of undead descend upon your house to insist you take over the role, especially as some of them do not need an invitation to enter.

That said, lychgates were (and are) generally volunteers, on good terms with and answerable to the hierarchy of the undead communities they served. I’m going to make this more explicit in Real Meat which is the noir werewolf thriller in the re-writing/major revisions stage, as this focuses on the undead communities more directly.

Esme Azeman, Sheila’s mother, was a lychgate, and Sheila was a lychgate until her retirement, after her husband’s death from cancer. (Yes, werewolves can get cancer: they can get things that both dogs and humans get). Hence why neither woman used their actual family name or adopted their husband’s surname.

Current Lychgates

The community in Pagham-on-Sea currently has no official person as a lychgate – times have moved on and that’s largely what social media is for – but it does have a few undead support groups advertised discretely on the noticeboard of the morgue.

Jazz Williams (English-Scottish human, London Scottish supporter, ante-dead/alive, pathologist) is currently the lychgate by default, since he works at the morgue, but then again the same could be said of his colleagues:

Magda Adebayo (Irish-Nigerian human with a bit of banshee on her mum’s mum’s side, ante-dead/alive, forensic psychopomp/morgue assistant),

Tina Harris (English with Welsh ancestry human, medium, ante-dead/alive, morgue assistant),

Derrick Hall (English human, ante-dead/alive, morgue assistant) and Celine Hayes (French-English intern, human, ante-dead/alive).

Read more about the undead of Pagham-on-Sea in these previous posts!

Undead Fashion – guest post by Clementine Wells, CEO of Open Casket Clothing

While Jazz’s partner Mercy doesn’t count as undead (she’s a Resurrectionist) she is undead-adjacent, and you can meet her here, just before she appears in The Crows: Meet the Locals: Mercy Hillsworth

NEXT TIME:

A look at the vampire communities of Pagham-on-Sea, the nests of Quatre Faces and the subcultures you might find there. We might also take a tour of the vampire-owned businesses, if you’re brave enough.

View more on C.M. Rosens's website »

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Published on April 21, 2020 04:34

The Undead of Pagham-on-Sea