Iain Rowan's Blog, page 6

Snouts in the trough (part 456,000 in a series of 6,789,000)

One of the arguments that the Coalition government made for the tripling of higher education tuition fees was that it was not fair for a cleaner or gardener or bus driver to pay taxes to support other people throughout university.

The MPs have no reticence though in letting said cleaners, gardeners and bus drivers pay taxes to support MPs shovelling steak into their gaping maws. In the subsidised Houses of Parliament restaurants for MPs, for every £10 that an MP spends on food, the taxpayer - most of whom are on salaries much smaller than an MP - spends £7.60.

So please, if you're ever at any event where an MP is speaking, and they play the 'why oh why should taxpayers' card or the 'waste in the public sector' card, ask them: 'why should someone on minimum wages pay taxes so you can have a cheaper lunch?'

This Is The End

Four visions of the end of the world. And of what comes after.


'The Lone and Level Sands' is the apocalyptically-themed latest issue of Penny Dreadnought, from the unhinged minds of the Abominable Gentlemen.


"Precious Metal" by Aaron Polson
"Only the Lonely" by Iain Rowan
"The New Words" by Alan Ryker
"He" by James Everington


'Penny Dreadnought: The Lone and Level Sands' is 20,000 words,  approximately 80 pages. You can buy it at:

Amazon / UK
Barnes & Noble
Smashwords

Coming soon...

In ebook and print editions, from infinity plus.

And...breathe

Busy week so I've been rather quiet on all things blog and Twitter and Facebook. Just about reached a point where I can relax, take a breath, take stock.

This week's story is up over on 52 Songs, based on a song by Wild Beasts ('Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants').  It's the seventh story of the year, only forty-five more to go. I'm pleased I've been able to keep it going so far, but aware that it's a long way to go. But then, in part, that was the point of doing it.

52 Songs was averaging around seventy-five unique visitors a week. Last week? Over a thousand. It's been an interesting insight into what happens when you get linked to by someone with 140, 000 followers on Twitter, or linked to from a site like Metafilter. I hope that some of them stick around.

Some big news for me, publication-wise. Some time back I wrote a novel that was short-listed for the CWA's Debut Dagger award, and landed me one of the highest profile agents in crime fiction. For a year or so. It's a long and complicated story that takes us to where we are now, but infinityplus are just about to publish 'One of Us' on Amazon, and for the first time, in print, and I am more than a little excited about the whole thing. More here when it happens. Actually, more everywhere. Sorry, you won't be able to miss this one.

The Abominable Gentlemen are pressing on with world domination - or rather, given our post-apocalyptic theme this time, what's left of the world - via the third release of Penny Dreadnought. 'The Lone and Level Sands' will be out soon, but for now here's a taster of Alan's excellent-as-always cover artwork.

Elsewhere, there's a post I like very much on Neil Schiller's blog. It's about his love-hate relationship with writing, and some of what he says really had me nodding. In an agreement sort of way, not a narcoleptic sort of way.

As I mentioned, it's been a madly busy week. Today though, I have had time to slow down. Been sitting drinking tea, watching the skies darken, and listening to music like the song below.

On writing

"How to succeed as a writer in the current market" - some interesting and wise thoughts from Keith Brooke on the virtues of diversification.

Caught By The River

This week's story is now up at 52 Songs, and the song that prompted this one is 'Caught By The River', by The Doves. (Not to be confused with the excellent Caught By The River blog, although that is run by people from the Doves' record label and also named after the song, or the excellent book the website spawned, or...)

Coming up next week will be a story inspired by Wild Beasts' 'Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants'. Don't think that one's been taken for a book title, yet.

The Willows

"The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world."

Next choice in my series about influences and inspirations.

The first time I read 'The Willows', I was thirteen, and I had the flu. Proper flu, the kind that lays you out for days. I was over the worst, well enough to read, but still caught in that half-life between being ill and being well again, and now and then the fever would return enough that when I lay back down I would feel like I was dropping down through the sheets, through the bed, head as heavy as a boulder in an endless, infinite drop. Blackwood's languorous prose, the shifting temporary islands that come and go in the torrent of the Danube and the shaking, whispering willows seemed like part of my fever dream.

The narrator says at one point: "It seemed to me that my breathing came with difficulty, and that there was a great weight upon the surface of my body. In spite of the hot night, I felt clammy with cold and shivered." Yeah, knew how that felt.

The Willows is a story of two men, an un-named narrator and his travelling companion, who is only ever referred to as 'the Swede'. They are on an adventure, travelling in a canoe from the source of the Danube, all the way down to the sea. Beyond Vienna, the river takes them into Hungary, beyond civilisation, into 'a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes'.

The river surges, the water rises, the wind howls, and exhausted, they beach on one of the many small islands that the water will destroy in a day or two, and strike camp among the oppressive willows. They are not there long before they see something in the water that they think at first is a dead body, and then an otter. Maybe. Then they turn again, and see a man in a boat. Maybe.

Whether it was due to the slanting sunlight, or the refraction from the wonderfully illumined water, I cannot say, but, whatever the cause, I found it difficult to focus my sight properly upon the flying apparition. It seemed, however, to be a man standing upright in a sort of flat-bottomed boat, steering with a long oar, and being carried down the opposite shore at a tremendous pace. He apparently was looking across in our direction, but the distance was too great and the light too uncertain for us to make out very plainly what he was about. It seemed to me that he was gesticulating and making signs at us. His voice came across the water to us shouting something furiously, but the wind drowned it so that no single word was audible. There was something curious about the whole appearance—man, boat, signs, voice—that made an impression on me out of all proportion to its cause."He's crossing himself!" I cried. "Look, he's making the sign of the Cross!""I believe you're right," the Swede said, shading his eyes with his hand and watching the man out of sight. He seemed to be gone in a moment, melting away down there into the sea of willows.
Blackwood's fascination, as so often, is with the otherworldly, with powers beyond human comprehension. 'The Willows' is not a story that you can explain or understand. It's not a story of revenants come back for revenge, a ghost motivated by malice, an apparition pointing its bony fingers at a historic wrong, and injustice done. "We had "strayed," as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us." Blackwood's story is about forces greater than can be imagined that cannot be understood, and that are as oblivious to humanity as we are to bacteria swimming around a dirty puddle. At one point, the character who is only ever referred to as the Swede observes that, "Our insignificance perhaps may save us."  It's easy to see why Lovecraft admired him so much, considered 'The Willows' to be the finest 'weird tale', and called Blackwood, "the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere".


"You think," he said, "it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought perhaps it was the old gods. But I tell you now it is—neither. These would be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own."

And like The Owl Service, it's filled with a haunted landscape that is powerful, disturbing, alive. Which is one of the reason why it went on my list. Blackwood's good at that use of place and nature - the world and everything in it charged with a hidden power, the genius locii and the suspicion that somwhere, everywhere Pan is lurking in the trees.

You can read 'The Willows' for yourself, or download a free copy for your Kindle or whatever, over at Project Gutenberg

Supernatural Tales and Strange Stories

Some good news this week: I found out that 'The Singing', a story I wrote at the start of the month has been accepted by David Longhorn for his excellent Supernatural Tales. You won't see 'The Singing' for a little while, but another story of mine will be appearing in ST a little sooner - watch out for 'The Edge of the Map'.

Lovers of high quality weird fiction should check out James Everington's new series over at his blog Scattershot Writing. 'Strange Stories' is going to feature his thoughts on some of his favourite weird stories, and judging by the two posted so far (Adam Golaski's 'What Water Reveals' and Julio Cortazar's fantastic 'House Taken Over'), it's going to be both a thought-provoking look and a pointer to some stories you might not have come across before.

James' thoughts about the power of ambiguity in the best of weird fiction is well worth a read. It's in the introduction to Strange Stories.

Live, Sire Kyrnala!

Founding member of the Abominable Gentleman, Alan Ryker, interviewed at the Penny Dreadnought blog.

The Owl Service

"She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls."

A couple of posts back I talked about stories and TV dramas from my childhood that have shaped what I write as an adult. I promised that I'd write in a little more detail about them, and this is the first of those posts. In that  post I mentioned the (new to me) genre of 'folk horror', and although that was initially used as a description of a short-lived run of films, I'm shamelessly appropriating it for books, and 'The Owl Service' fits firmly with that idea.This description at the review blog The Bookbag resonated with me:

"The Owl Service is thick and heavy with that Celtic notion of an Otherworld being not so much other as present in all that we see and all that we do. It draws heavily on the Ancient British cult of ancestor worship and on the idea of a past whose tendrils curl and creep around the present, unseen, but never unfelt."

It's one of those books which has children as the protagonists, is read by children, usually gets shelved with books for children, but is not a 'children's book', if you see what I mean. It's typical of Alan Garner's work in a number of ways: 
It's largely driven by dialogue, which is oblique and fragmentary and sometimes obscured by dialect. The reader has to work, nothing is spoon-fed, nothing is on a plate, and much is implied.The landscape is a character itself within the book: dominating everything, embedded in everything, and utterly haunted.There's always a sense of something larger going on that is not revealed or known, and which may not even be knowable.Myth and the landscape are inextricably bound together, and myth has a power that is strange and terrible.History repeats, or at least echoes, and the characters are caught up in that, as much as they are trapped within the landscape.Read 'The Owl Service', and then read Garner's dense and complex and astonishing 'Thursbitch', written thirty-six years later, and you can see the same themes at work, the same fascination with the power of myth and the landscape that links this book with very different works like the film Penda's Fen, and with M R James' haunted East Anglia. Although James is famous as a writer of 'ghost stories', it's interesting how few of his stories contain ghosts, or at least ghosts as we usually think of them. The vengeful East Anglian king of 'A Warning To The Curious', or what Parkin accidentally summons in 'Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You' are more rooted in myth, history and the power of the landscape than they are in any spirit of the undead, returned from the grave.