The Darkest Corner of Blogger

Hi friends and readers alike, here comes the initial preamble.  It's been a hot minute since I shared anything here. Between completing, editing, and starting pre-order promotion for my next novel (SOMA, available from October 2nd, just in case you didn't get the memo), I've been quite the busy fella recently. With that in mind, I figured that I'd try to keep my toes in the water so to speak. As a result, the following blog post might be a bit longer than usual, as I try to make up for lost time. When I relaunched this blog (I've been fairly shit when it comes to blog consistency in the past, so sue me), it was always my intention to use it primarily as a means of relaying some of my thoughts on the horror genre and all things dark in general, leaning pretty heavily towards those people and things that have inspired me, along with the sort of aesthetics that light my own creative spark. I've previously looked at body horror, along with the use and prevalence of ...

'You back again? Okay, perhaps you’d better shift around a bit and get yourself comfortable, I’m in the mood to ramble even more than usual. This time around, I want to talk a little about fear, about some of the things that scare me. I want to mention a few of the things that inspire that sense of foreboding in me, that break me out into a cold sweat and have me fidgeting nervously as I glance around twice to check that everything is still okay, as well as one or two things that really don't. Ready? Here we go… It can be said that horror is a lot like humour in many respects. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that the two are quite close cousins. How often have you read or watched something only to find yourself in a position where you're not sure whether you want to laugh or scream? Ask yourself just how frequently you or someone you know has used laughter as a means of covering up the fact that they were actually scared shitless by something. Awareness of this al...

"You had a big imagination with your little pirate show." Creepypasta : If you're reading this post, then you're probably familiar with the term and what it entails. Itself a corruption of the term copypasta (derived from the nowhere near as 'net-friendly copy/paste ), it's a name given to short pieces of writing that are freely copied and shared around the internet, originally on message boards such as 4Chan (remember that one, kids, or have you tried to scrub it from you memory?) or Reddit.  Sticking to the adage that it's all-round good clean fun to creep someone out, disturb them or, if push comes to shove, gross them out, many such pieces tended to be horrific in nature, hence the term creepypasta . Pretty clever, huh? Over time of course, the subgenre (if you want to label it as such) morphed into something bigger, spawning whole online communities, along with short sharp shock pieces of fiction, usually written in an almost urban myth friend-of-a-fr...

Hello friends, readers, and everyone in between.   This time around, I want to talk to you about the body. The human body, to be precise, and its role in horror fiction. The aim here is twofold; to paint a brief generalisation of what I consider to be a vitally important aspect of the horror genre, as well as to touch upon how the concept inspires me personally. So, huddle up tight in your favourite corner of the room, put your dinner to one side (especially if it’s a nice, rare steak), turn any mirrors to face away from you, and here goes… I’ve found that a frequently recurring theme in much of my own written fiction is a somewhat overt concern with the human body, fitting quite neatly into the sub-genre of body horror, if you like. For want of a better way of putting it, this is one of the niches of dark fiction with which I have grown to feel particularly comfortable, probably because writing becomes that little bit more authentic when the author can relate to the s...

George A Romero. I think it's pretty fair to admit that the Pittsburgh native had a pretty big influence on my writing. That might sound a little unusual, but I promise it isn't really. Despite being a prose author, I am usually inclined to try and visualise the work that I write, pretty much as though viewing it and I'm pretty sure I can't be the only author (there's that word again!) who works in such a way. A series of snapshots, images or entire scenes spill their way out of my head and onto my screen. I tend to see my characters and their surroundings, before trying to summon up the right words to best describe them. So the logic should follow that I have a strong appreciation for film that is rooted in my creative side. When it comes to the works of Romero, I was probably a bit of a latecomer to the party. I was about thirteen or fourteen years old the first time I saw  Night of the Living Dead . I recorded it from a late-night television airing and, in a stro...