Goodreads asked Ian Thompson:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

Ian Thompson Many years ago, I was travelling home at night in the rain. Visibility was poor, but I was going well under the speed limit for safety. I recall hearing a dog barking and its owner calling to it... Seconds later, something hit the underside of my car. I stopped - worried that it could somehow be the dog I heard or some other animal. I checked under the car using a torch and found nothing. No damage, no blood, nothing. Clearly, some kind of street-rubbish had caused the sounds and alerted me. But I never found out what.

Ten years later, a 'ghost' of that experience reared its head in my first Short Horror Tale 'Glancing Blow'. This features a man driving home late a night, in a terrible storm. Unlike me, he does hit something - a creature that suddenly lunges across the road and cannot be avoided. Like me, he stops. In his case, he wants to see whether the animal is wounded and can be helped. The creature is of a kind he has never seen before... and it is enraged by its injury. Soon the driver finds himself in a desperate life-and-death struggle.

I'm really glad that all I encountered was someone's discarded rubbish!

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