I had mixed feelings writing this and even more mixed feelings about sharing it, anxious that it was maybe just a bit too personal. For anyone who’s ever been strung between the highs of success fantasies and the lows of impostor syndrome, here’s a thing about a dog…
Big thanks, as always, to T Kent Writes for hosting me on this leg of the blog tour – this time with a short article on the weirdness of not belonging.
Read the full article at T Kent Writes.
It’s a pleasure and a thrill to write an essay for the exceptional Volume 1 Brooklyn, especially a (brief) memoir of growing up in a house that may (or may not) be full of ghosts. If you like appropriately ambiguous true stories of the weird, then I hope you’ll check it out!
Read the full article at Vol.1 Brooklyn.
It was a banging scene, back in the day. Before Cadman came out of the shadows, touting his weird black shit.
Back then it was all colour and sound. Everyone off their bone, grinning like nutters, sweating and gurning and losing it to the lights and the tunes. Lasers slicing the dark. Bass beats kicking up from the floor. Fractal lead lines like living things, like creatures of light that danced the sound, that danced the rush that was all of us. It was like another world. A magic kingdom.
Fucking La La Land.
I’d tell Mum I was staying round Dog’s, then we’d catch the bus out to Tescos carpark. The warehouse was always this big secret—the flyer in my pocket didn’t say nothing more than a time and a place for all the ravers to meet. No one knew where they was going ’til the lead car pulled in and everyone drove in convoy to the night.
Me and Dog was too young to drive, so we had to be there in time to cadge a lift. We’d go early and slip into the bog before the supermarket closed. Sometimes we’d roll one. Other nights we’d sniff whizz off the bog seat, come out sipping Strawberry Ribena, breaking the seal on a brand new pack of Benson & Hedges. Then we’d strut out between the cars, looking for mates or a friendly face, grinning and bobbing, blowing smoke rings into the cold, still night…
Read the full story for free in Issue 21 of Dimension6.
From the briefest burst of flash fiction to the stately novella, there is something about the short (and not so short) story that is perfectly suited to the dark and the weird. The best of them are incandescent, flaring brightly within our darkest spaces, burning shadows onto our vision that change how we see the world, see ourselves.
The list of my favourite short dark stories could have been much longer, but here I’ve chosen seven that made a deep and lasting impression on me. Stories that still burn brightly inside me, even years after I first read them…
Read the full article at T Kent’s blog. Then go follow her on Twitter at @TKentWrites.