by Gary McMahon
“Mum?” Terry slipped an arm around her waist and she thanked the heavens for small mercies: a mother’s love, a father’s sacrifice, the smile of a little child.
(Dedicated to the memory of Fritz Leiber, Master of the craft)
STORY NOTES
CHILL
The working title for this collection was Thatcher’s Bastards, and I wanted each of the stories to reflect in some way the results of a certain period in modern British history when new monsters were created, or old ones evolved into something different – one of the most terrifying of these, in my opinion at least, is capitalism. This story was written under the influence of the recent “Global Slowdown” in the world economy, and examines some of the fears revealed beneath that particular rock when it was suddenly lifted.
THROUGH THE CRACKS
I saw a picture online that was meant to be a Mid-Eastern Jinn crawling through a crevice in a subterranean cave. The picture was a fake, but the ideas behind it were not. This story examines the fascination we all have with what might lurk between the cracks in reality; and what monsters we might have summoned with our desire to see beyond the mundane.
THE UNSEEN
This one was inspired by reading a story by Mark Lynch, a friend of mine who’s also a damn fine writer. His tale featured ghostly beings in York; mine has the ghosts of humanity’s dead and stillborn aspirations in Newcastle.
PUMPKIN NIGHT
Because of its confrontational nature, and by way of an armoury of outlandish metaphor, horror stories are well-suited to staring into the mirror of society and reporting back on what is found there. In 2002, in a place called Soham, Cambridgeshire, a school caretaker was arrested for the brutal murder of two ten year-old girls. His live-in girlfriend was accused of covering up evidence of the crime by repeatedly lying about his movements at the time of the deaths – she was eventually jailed for three and a half years for conspiring to pervert the course of justice; he got 40 years for the murders. It seems that the woman’s loyalty blinded her to the fact that her lover had committed these terrible acts, and only when she was arrested did she allow herself to confront the reality of what he had done.
OWED
Unchecked consumerism and uncontrollable debt are twin horrors which seem to have first lurched into the limelight during the 1980s; purely modern monsters, these things don’t seem to want to go away. I have an idea to turn this story into a novella: the characters keep pestering me, and the Slitten haunt me to the extent that I want to find out exactly what they are and where they came from.
WHY GHOSTS WAIL: A BRIEF MEMOIR
I wrote this on Christmas Eve a few years ago. I was feeling a bit low (I hate Christmas) and was suddenly assaulted by visions of my infant son long after I’m dead and gone. These thoughts bothered me so much that I had to write them out of my head, so I sat at the computer well into the small hours, fighting sleep and feeling better as the story formed on the screen. Not once did I hear the jingling of Santa’s sleigh bells outside my window, but I may have heard a single distant scream.
ACCIDENTAL DAMAGE
This one started off with me fooling around and turned into something more serious. I wanted to combine some weird physical creatures with a sort of existential dread, and came up with this idea of the dolls and relics being linked to whatever is preying upon my lead character.
NOWHERE PEOPLE
I think this one speaks for itself. It was inspired by a piece I read in a local newspaper about the murder of an honest immigrant worker trying to make ends meet; a family man who was killed by ignorant thugs simply because he was a foreigner.
FAMILY FISHING
This is another story that began as a bit of a joke but ended up being deadly serious. The issues of family and the traditions we hand down the line to our children have always interested me, and the family name here should, of course, be familiar to every reader of weird fiction.
SOMETHING IN THE WAY
I’ve tried and tried to remember where this story came from, but cannot recall what specific thoughts triggered it. I think I was looking for a new way to examine a familiar theme, and the title (from a Nirvana song) would not leave me alone. The story came slowly, painfully, but I was pleased with the end result. It’s certainly one of my darker pieces, but in this case I feel the bleakness is more than justified.
A STILLNESS IN THE AIR
The title comes from an introduction by Charles L. Grant to one of his Shadows series of short story anthologies, and I guess in that case this one must be for him. I never met the man, but his fiction had a great effect on me at an age when I was looking for something exactly like it. Amid the bangs and crashes of modern horror, Grant’s voice remains a constant background whisper: quiet, restrained, yet utterly terrifying.
ONCE A MONTH, EVERY MONTH
Again, this one is about family tradition and the monsters it can create. A lot of the families I know, or have known, seem to hide the suggestion of something dark behind a façade of seeming perfection, and this story is about one such group.
SAVE US ALL
Organised religion is something I’ve always been dubious about, and this story goes a long way to summing up some of my feelings on the subject. I’ve never been a big joiner; I prefer to stand at the sidelines, watching, forming my own judgements. The people in this tale are unable to do that for fear of being left behind. I’m sure we’ve all felt that to some degree.
A BIT OF THE DARK
Fritz Leiber has always been one of my favourite genre writers. I feel smarter when I read his short fiction, and quite often he blows me away with the sheer genius of his storytelling. I was immersed in reading Leiber when I started this story (hence the referential title) and found myself with a day off work and nothing planned to take up my time. So I sat down and challenged myself to write long multi-viewpoint story: a first draft of at least 7,000 words over the course of a single day. I succeeded in that task, but was left emotionally exhausted. I put away the draft and only returned to it several months later, when I was sufficiently removed from the thing to feel capable of editing it into some kind of sense. So this one is for Mr. Leiber, and I hope that it’s not so bad that he turns in his grave…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary McMahon lives in West Yorkshire with his wife, son and monsters... lots of monsters. His fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic and he is the author of the British Fantasy Award nominated novellas Rough Cut and All Your Gods Are Dead, a collection of short fiction, Dirty Prayers (also nominated for a British Fantasy Award), and the novel Rain Dogs. Forthcoming are more stories, and To Usher the Dead — a collection of stories featuring the character Thomas Usher, a down-at-heel psychic detective. Recently two of McMahon's stories were reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, which pleased the monsters greatly.
PUBLISHING CREDITS
ORIGINAL TO THIS COLLECTION
Chill
Through the Cracks
The Unseen
Owed
Accidental Damage
A Stillness in the Air
A Bit of the Dark
Previously Published
Pumpkin Night
Estronomicon Halloween Issue (Screaming Dreams, 2007)
Why Ghosts Wail
Bare Bone#8 (2005)
Nowhere People
Supernatural Tales 10 (2006)
Family Fishing
The Black Book of Horror (Mortbury Press, 2007)
Something in the Way
Bare Bone#10 (2007)
Once a Month, Every Month
Doorways Magazine (2008)
Save Us All
Dark Doorways (Prufrock Press, 2006)
Where to find us Online
Website:http://www.morriganbooks.com
Twitter:http://twitter.com/morriganbooks
Facebook:http://facebook.com/pages/Morrigan-Books/59256739661
&nbs
p; Table of Contents
http://www.morriganbooks.com
Chill
Through the Cracks
The Unseen
Pumpkin Night
Owed
Why Ghosts Wail: A Brief Memoir
Accidental Damage
Nowhere People
Family Fishing
Something in the Way
A Stillness in the Air
Once a Month, Every Month
Save us All
A Bit of the Dark
Story Notes
About the Author
Publishing Credits
CHILL
THROUGH THE CRACKS
THE UNSEEN
PUMPKIN NIGHT
OWED
WHY GHOSTS WAIL: A BRIEF MEMOIR
ACCIDENTAL DAMAGE
NOWHERE PEOPLE
FAMILY FISHING
SOMETHING IN THE WAY
A STILLNESS IN THE AIR
ONCE A MONTH, EVERY MONTH
SAVE US ALL
A BIT OF THE DARK
STORY NOTES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PUBLISHING CREDITS
