Over the next few weeks on the blog, I’m delving into the seven short stories and novellas contained within my recently released Love and Other Punishments dystopian sci-fi anthology.

This week: Bleed with Me

In a near future, when Hadron Collider experiments and the like are in full swing, ghostly apparitions of people who suffered violent or sudden deaths are increasingly common. These are scientifically explained as “memory bleeds” or “quantum contamination”: Images from the past bleeding through into the present. Scott Murray is a qualified quantum contamination cleaner who uses scientific apparatus to locate the source of the contamination and neutralise the quantum particles. He is often used as a police consultant in murder cases when quantum contamination offers clues.

One such case particularly interests Scott. Police were unable to find the killer of Judy Armstrong, but he purchased the house in which she lived, without cleaning the quantum contamination. Every day, he watches her regular ghostly appearances, trying to put together what happened, becoming increasingly obsessed. Then, in a peculiar twist of fate, he encounters another young woman, Lena Meadow, who is the spitting image of Judy. There doesn’t seem to be a connection between the two, but Scott is determined to find one, believing they must be long-lost twins. Are they? Or is there an even more unsettling explanation?

I think Bleed with Me could well be my favourite story in this volume. It’s a 20,000-word novella in seven parts, and although it sounds like a ghost story, it’s firmly planted in the science fiction tradition of something like Minority Report rather than anything in the horror genre. That said, it has been influenced by classic mystery films such as Otto Preminger’s film noir Laura, and Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo, in its musings on obsession and how sometimes, it is better not to know the truth (another idea explored quite a lot in my writing).

Bleed with Me is a brooding, melancholy tale, which also explores self-fulfilling prophecies, and the dangers of accepting our projections of who we think a person is. What inspired it? I’m honestly not sure. It just occurred to me in a sudden download of inspiration one morning. Not for the first time, as I outlined the story, something seemed to take over, as though I were getting the story from something outside of myself. I know other writers claim similar things happen to them, so at least I’m not alone in sounding a little bonkers.

To order an ebook or paperback of the Love and Other Punishments anthology, click here (for Amazon in the US), or here (for Amazon in the UK). Digital versions are also available from Smashwords (and their various outlets) here.