William Meikle's Blog: Latest, page 59

Book review: A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson

A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The perfect suburban ghost story. Matheson always did have a way with blending the mundane job of living a working life with the supernatural forces that might swirl just beyond perception and will rush in given a chance. His work was consistently at the top of the field and A STIR OF ECHOES is no exception.

It’s the simplest of simple plots. A working man gets hypnotized, hypnotist accidently opens the man’s mind to the great beyond, and man starts to experience the wider world of the weird beyond his normal day to day life – including the strange woman in his living room.

Matheson makes it work by populating the tale with believeable characters, and by hitting us with several set pieces that not only ramp up the tension but are genuinely creepy and have that ‘cold tingle in the spine’ moment that marks all the best ghost stories.

The Kevin Bacon movie went all out on the special effects for this one, but they weren’t needed. It’s the quiet moments, spent alone in the dark with what’s inside – and outside – your mind that makes this so effective.

For me, one of the best haunting novels ever written. It’s short, fast, and packs a real punch.

View all my reviews

A Free Story a Day Until Halloween – Week 4

I’ve been posting a free story every day of October so far, and will keep doing so up until Halloween. Just three more days to go!

Here’s week 4 in summary.

Day 28. Aboard the Vordlak (audio) at Cthulhu Podcast
Day 27. Carnacki: The Parliament of Owls at Lovecraft Ezine
Day 26. The Tenants of Ladywell Manor (audio) read by Morgan Scorpion
Day 25. Home From the Sea (audio) at Chilling Tales For Dark Nights
Day 24. Your Order is Being Processed at Urban Fantasist
Day 23. The Last Day of Summer (audio) at Well Told Tales
Day 22. Lacunae at NATURE Futures

A Story a day until Halloween – Week 3

I’ve been posting a free story every day of October so far, and will keep doing so up until Halloween. Here’s week 3 in summary

Day 21. At The Beach (audio) at The Way of the Buffalo
Day 20. In the Coils of the Serpent (audio) at Pseudopod
Day 19. Double or Nothing at Buzzy Mag
Day 18. Carnacki: Treason and Plot (audio) at Tales to Terrify
Day 17. Bait and Switch at Suddenly Lost in Words
Day 16. Carnacki: The Hellfire Mirror (audio) read by Morgan Scorpion
Day 15. The Yule Log at This is Horror

A story a day until Halloween: week 2

I’ve been posting a free story every day of October so far, and will keep doing so up until Halloween.

Here’s week 2 in summary.

Day 14. Variations on a Theme (audio) at Escapepod
Day 13. Twitterspace at NATURE Futures
Day 12. Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Tibetan Rug at Tales to Terrify
Day 11. Between at Lovecraft Ezine
Day 10. Frost at Read Short Fiction
Day 9. Dancers (audio) at The Way of the Buffalo Podcast
Day 8. Growth at NATURE Futures

About SONGS OF DREAMING GODS

A new novel, coming in 2017 from DarkFuse.

SONGS OF DREAMING GODS is the story of a house.

In this one you’ll find creepy china dolls, a haunted lavatory, some hippies, some large, nasty ratty things, a chess board, a reaper, some cops, the great beyond, the other great beyond, and a lot of singing.

This is another in the growing number of stories of mine in a Sigils and Totems mythos that’s been developing through BROKEN SIGIL, PENTACLE, parts of TORMENTOR and several recent short stories. It’s both a culmination of my thinking on how the strange houses work, and an opening gambit for a whole slew of other works to come.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere recently about playing in other writers’ sandboxes – well, this is me, building a sandbox of my own, and I’m going to be happily building play scenarios in it for a while to come.

This is the story of a house.

It sits on a corner block on a hill in St. John’s, Newfoundland, in one of the oldest cities in North America, a non descript, three storey wooden cube, going slowly to seed.

When local cops, John Green, Janis Lodge and Todd Wiggins are sent to investigate a multiple murder on the top floor of the property, they start opening doors and uncovering secrets. But like peeling the layers off an onion, each door opened only leads them deeper into the mystery.

There are houses like this all over the world, and those who suffer are drawn to them, as John, Janis and Todd have been drawn.

They have found their way in.

Can they find their way out again? And at what cost?

A story a day until Halloween: Week 1

 

I’ve been posting a free story a day of mine for Halloween since the 1st of October.

Here’s the first week’s batch…

Day 7. A Knight In The Lonesome October at Lovecraft Ezine
Day 6. The Persistence of Memory (audio) at Pseudopod
Day 5. The Dark Island at Innsmouth Free Press
Day 4. Supply and Demand at Daily Science Fiction
Day 3. Under an Uncaring Sky at NATURE Futures
Day 2. Metastasis at Starburst Magazine
Day 1. Sherlock Holmes: The Call of the Dance at The Lovecraft ezine

New Carnacki, Holmes and Challenger ebooks

I know a lot of you have been waiting for these. Dark Regions Press have issued four new ebooks of mine today.

CARNACKI: THE WATCHER AT THE GATE and other stories

SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE QUALITY OF MERCY and other stories

SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE LONDON TERRORS

PROFESSOR CHALLENGER: THE KEW GROWTHS and other stories

              

Scotland and Me

 

A lot of my work, long and short form, has been set in Scotland, and much of it uses the history and folklore. There’s just something about the misty landscapes and old buildings that speaks straight to my soul. Bloody Celts… we get all sentimental at the least wee thing.

I grew up on the West Coast of Scotland in an environment where the supernatural was almost commonplace.

My grannie certainly had a touch of ‘the sight’, always knowing when someone in the family was in trouble. There are numerous stories told of family members meeting other, long dead, family in their dreams, and I myself have had more than a few encounters with dead family, plus meetings with what I can only class as residents of faerie. I have had several precognitive dreams, one of which saved me from a potentially fatal car crash.

I have a deep love of old places, in particular menhirs and stone circles, and I’ve spent quite a lot of time travelling in Scotland just to visit archaeological remains. Orkney in particular got inside and took root in my soul – Maes Howe haunts my dreams.

I’ve also been influenced by many Scottish writers. Stevenson in particular is a big influence. He is a master of plotting, and of putting innocents into situations far out of their usual comfort zones while still maintaining a grounding in their previous, calmer, reality. His way with a loveable rogue in Treasure Island and Kidnapped in particular is also a big influence. Other Scottish writers who have influenced me include John Buchan, Iain Banks and, more in my youth than now, Alistair MacLean and Nigel Tranter. From them I learned how to use the scope of both the Scottish landscape and its history while still keeping the characters alive.

But I think it’s the people that influence me most. Everybody in Scotland’s got stories to tell, and once you get them going, you can’t stop them. I use to love chatting to people, usually in pubs, and finding out the weird shit they’ve experienced. My Glasgow PI, Derek Adams is mainly based on a bloke I met years ago in a bar in Partick, and quite a few of the characters that turn up and talk too much in my books can be found in real life in bars in Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews.

Newfoundland has settled into my head now and I’m setting a lot of stories here, but I keep going back to the homeland. I’ve recently finished a new Hebridean island horror novel, and a new Carnacki story set in Edinburgh, so the auld country isn’t done with me yet.

My most recent novel set back home was THE EXILED. Get it here.

 

In the pipe, five by five.

Part of counting my blessings today was in looking back at what I’ve done over the past 25 years – and looking forward to what’s still to come.

There are plenty of goodies in the pipeline for the rest of 2016 and into 2017

LONGER WORK

Fungoid (novel from DarkFuse
Songs of Dreaming Gods (novel from DarkFuse)
The Boathouse (novel from DarkFuse)
Sherlock Holmes: The Dreaming Man (short novel from Dark Renaissance)

ANTHOLOGY APPEARANCES

Blacktop / I Am The Abyss / Dark Regions Press
A Gentlemanly Wager / Sherlock Holmes and the School for Detection / Little Brown
Carnacki: The Lakeside Cottages / The Children of Gla’aki / Dark Regions Press
The Longdock Air / Shadows Over Main Street 2 / Cuttingblock Press
The Call of the Deep / The Return of the Old Ones / Dark Regions Press
The Last Quest / Through a Mythos Darkly / PS Publishing
A true telling of the terror that came to Red Hook / The Heroes of Red Hook Golden Goblin Press
Carnacki: The Hound / Gaslight Ghouls / Chaosium
The Color From The Deep / Summer of Lovecraft / Chaosium
The Needs of the Many / The Stars at Our Door / April Moon
The Mouth of the Ness / Cryptid Clash / 18th Wall Productions
Leader of the Pack / In Dog We Trust / KnightWatch
The Pied Piper of Providence / Once Upon An Apocalypse / Crystal Lake

COMING SOON IN GERMAN

The Dunfield Terror (Novel, Voodoo Press)
The Hole (Novel, Voodoo Press)
The Creeping Kelp (Novel, Voodoo Press)
The Night of the Wendigo (Novel, Voodoo Press)
Sherlock Holmes: The London Terrors (Novellas, Voodoo Press)
The Pentacle (Novel, Voodoo Press)
The Invasion (Novel, Blitz Verlag)
Sherlock Holmes: Revenant (Novella, Blitz Verlag)
The Midnight Eye: The Amulet (Novel, Blitz Verlag)

COMING SOON IN PORTUGUESE

The Midnight Eye: The Sirens (Novel, Retropunk Publicacoes (Brazil))
The Midnight Eye: The Skin Game (Novel, Retropunk Publicacoes (Brazil))

There’s also a couple of short stories coming in a children’s SF market in China, several hush hush anthology appearances I can’t talk about yet, along with a couple of equally hush hush novellas, and some super-duper secret projects that are so hush-hush they can only be mentioned in whispers, in the dark, at the bottom of a deep well, to myself.

I’ve also got another novel on submission at DarkFuse, with two more after that still to write under my contract, I’ve got a ghost story collection out with a publisher, and several submissions out to anthologies I’m quite hopeful of.

Lots to look forward to in the next couple of years. You can keep up to date with it all by following this blog, or watching my website.

Onward and upward.

Dance me, to the end of love.

We are creatures of rhythm and vibration. Not just us either, and not just the animal and plant kingdoms, but the whole of the universe.

A paragraph from one of my books sort of sums up my philosophy nicely.

“Life is an opportunity to create meaning by our actions and how we manage our way through the short part of infinity we’re given to operate in. And once our life is finished, our atoms go back to forming other interesting configurations with those of other people, animals, plants and anything else that happens to be around, as we all roll along in one big, happy, ever dancing, universe.”

It’s the dance that’s the thing, and our attempts to learn the steps and keep time with our partners is how we fumble through life.

Everything has a natural rhythm. The Earth spins once a day, goes around the sun once a year. The moon goes round the earth every 28 days. Your heart beats in a rhythm particular only to you. Everything has its drumbeat and everything contributes to the dance. You’ve just got to know when to lead and when to follow.

And sometimes, if you let go and let the rhythm do its thing, the music makes the magic makes the music, and the rhythm gets into you and through you and off you go, careering along with no other thought than the dance, and the sheer overwhelming joy of it.

I most recently tried to make sense of some of this in my novella TORMENTOR, where the rhythms are dormant, waiting to be wakened, and when they do make themselves known, they are not recognized for what they are.

This novella was a long time in the making. The basic idea came to me way back in 1991, but it took me a long, long time before I felt that my writing was up to the needs of the story. Then, a couple of years back now, it all finally came together and I spent some time in my head on the Isle of Skye, in a small cottage on a shoreline, listening to the beat. What came out the other end is something that is among my favorites of all the pieces I have written, one where I got everything said that I wanted to say, in the order I wanted to say it.

There’s a lot of fish, some drums, some beer, a lot of whisky, dancing, some good weather, some bad weather, weird noises in the night and some Spaniards – among other things. Things like rhythm, and booze.

And more dancing.

In the end, we all dance together.

GET IT HERE