Tag Archives: Short stories

Infestation Unpacked: Regression

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My recently released book Infestation: A Horror Anthology features my Infestation novella – a six-chapter sci-fi horror tale – along with five other short stories. Continuing this series examining each story in the collection, today’s tale under the microscope is Regression.

Jack Walker is a divorced English teacher haunted by a terrible secret in his past. When new neighbours move in next door to Jack, their young daughter reminds him of his secret, bringing up long-buried feelings of guilt. Even more unsettlingly, the girl seems to know things about his past, which ought to be impossible as she didn’t exist when the events took place.

A creepy, psychological, supernaturally tinged tale previously published on Medium, Regression deals in themes of guilt, conscience, and punishment. How much the girl really knows, and how much is a projection of Jack’s paranoia is left teasingly ambiguous throughout, inviting the reader to bring their own interpretation of events as lines between fantasy and reality begin to blur.

Photo by Joyful on Unsplash

The story for Regression originated from my youngest son, who came up with the bare-bones idea a couple of years ago, with a slightly different central mystery. I then did the hard work of fleshing out the details and making narrative tweaks. Regression also shares DNA with some of Daphne Du Maurier’s short creepy gothic mysteries, as well as elements of MR James and Susan Hill. Ambiguous ideas about reincarnation and ghosts derive inspiration from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. There’s a little bit of Arthur Conan Doyle in there too.

Infestation: A Horror Anthology is available on Kindle and paperback from Amazon here (in the UK) and here (in the US). It can also be ordered via Smashwords here.

New Short Story: Leave

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I’m interrupting my series examining each short story in my most recent release Infestation: A Horror Anthology to draw attention to another recent short story of mine, published in Medium publication Fictions.

Leave isn’t a horror story but a romantic tale, involving a young wife desperately missing her royal marine husband during the recent Afghanistan War. Life takes an unexpected turn for her, though I don’t want to say too much more about the plot.

Hopefully this story will be an agreeable respite for those among my readers who aren’t partial to horror. It features an underlying mystery of sorts, so is more akin to earlier romantic stories of mine such as Papercut.

To read Leave, click here. I hope you enjoy it.

Infestation Unpacked: Influencer

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My recently released book Infestation: A Horror Anthology features my Infestation novella – a six-chapter sci-fi horror tale – along with five other short stories. Continuing this series unpacking each story in the collection, this week I expound a little on Influencer.

Janice Hopper is a young, Oxford-based social media influencer with a considerable following. Manufacturing an online persona that is on-trend and relevant, her writing has proved popular and lucrative. However, to say she is prone to exaggeration in her writing, stretching the truth to breaking point, would be an understatement. When an online commenter accuses her of lying in a piece about sexual abuse, events escalate into a nail-biting tale of stalking and revenge.

A previously unpublished story exclusive to this volume, Influencer draws on themes of wealth, privilege, and self-deluded, self-justifying narcissism. A series of shocking and satirical twists make this a distinct, singular take on the overall theme of guilt running through the stories in the Infestation volume.

Photo by Cristina Zaragoza on Unsplash

Influencer draws inspiration from noir novels and the cycle of psycho-horror thrillers from the late 1980s and early 1990s – think Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Single White Female, and Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear. It also nods to satirical elements in recent TV thrillers such as Netflix’s You. Influencer is certainly the most darkly comic tale in this collection. However, I’d argue the undercurrent of suspense and dread, not to mention the bloody finale, push it firmly into the horror bracket.

Infestation: A Horror Anthology is available on Kindle and paperback from Amazon here (in the UK) and here (in the US). It can also be ordered via Smashwords here.

New Short Story: Apocalypse 1983

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I recently had a short story published in Fictions on Medium that I’m rather pleased with. It’s entitled Apocalypse 1983 and is inspired by the real-life 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident, which you can read about here. I won’t spoil my take on this alarming historic incident, but I will say my story was a response to a writing prompt from Fictions that specified the story be set in 1983 and feature a radio at some point.

Apocalypse 1983 is a good deal shorter than my usual short stories (just north of 2,000 words as opposed to the usual between 10,000 and 15,000 words), but it packs in quite a lot. I hope you find it interesting. You can read it in full on Medium here.

New Short Story: Call the Number On Your Screen

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Call the Number On Your Screen is a new short story by yours truly, available for your reading pleasure in Illumination, a publication on Medium. It concerns a corrupt televangelist who takes extreme measures to find his blackmailer. Satirical of a certain kind of American televangelist, it also draws inspiration from hard boiled noir crime fiction. As such it’s a little outside my usual genre, but writing it was a fun experiment. Besides, the themes – corrupt religious figures, abuse of power – will be familiar from my other works.

Click here to read the full story.

Papercut Returns

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My short story Papercut was recently removed from the Short Stories section of this blog, but it has now returned. The reason for the removal was that I submitted a screenplay version to the BBC Writers Room. It didn’t win, but I did make it to the second round (the top 10 percent of five thousand odd submissions). I received an encouraging note from the BBC saying this was no small feat considering the competition. They also encouraged me to send further screenplays, which was nice.

Papercut was originally published in the Dragon Soul Press romantic fantasy anthology First Love. The story concerns a lonely teenage boy living with his ultra-strict Jehovah’s Witness mother. In his dreams, he is visited by a mysterious girl made entirely of paper, leading to a fantastical journey into… Well, click here to download the story for yourself.

If you’re curious, you can also download the screenplay version which streamlines and reinvents one or two areas of the story, particularly in the first act. Translating from one medium to another is a challenging task, especially when trying to find visual equivalents for inner monologue.

In case you were wondering, the above images, from classic fantasy adventure movie Jason and the Argonauts, and the iconic music video to A-ha’s 1985 hit Take on Me, were a visual and tonal influence on Papercut.

New Short Story: Trial Period

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Photo by Sepehr Safaeian on Unsplash

Trial Period is the latest short story by yours truly, available for your reading pleasure in Illumination, a publication on Medium. It concerns a former publisher and his young female subordinate, who form an unlikely friendship whilst working for a herbal remedy company. (No, nothing sexual happens, so if that’s what you’re after, look elsewhere.)

Instead of doing the usual thing of publishing it in chunks (it’s just over 10,000 words), Illumination have published it in full, mainly as a stats related experiment I won’t bore you with. However, in my view, having it all in one hit like this makes for a more satisfying reading experience, instead of needing to click from one part to the next.

This is a bit of an offbeat piece for me, but some of it reflects my present predicament. The protagonist isn’t me (he can’t be, as he doesn’t like horror) but he’s one of the closest characters to me that I’ve yet written. Speaking of horror, this isn’t a scary tale so anyone can read it, although it does have a supernatural tinge at one point.

Trial Period can be read here. Enjoy!