Authors Electric

Scary stories read out loud late at night in a big old barn. Yorkshire, middle-of-nowhere, halfway down the valley at the end of a steep lane. It’s late November and the weather forecast is for high winds and snow tonight.  Sounds a bit of a cliché, doesn’t it?  Go to bed after a few glasses of wine. Get woken up by big bangs in the distance somewhere. It’s windy. Get up at 3am for a wee – light switch – nothing. No power. Okaaay…. A few hours later and even the security lighting has failed. Look out of the window and it’s snowing. Even more of a  cliché?  (c) Ariell Cacciola There's no power, no heat, no light. By the morning, I could at least see, so I wander downstairs, wondering which one of the 14 of us will be the first body to be found in this classic set-up for a murder-mystery! Still no power and no gas here either, so can’t even make coffee and we have to wait for somebody who knows about these things to lay and light a wood fire in the sitting room, so we ...

 I had the idea for the following story when listening to a programme on the radio. The music was Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, but it was the interval feature that really piqued my interest, talking about the great writers of Gothic fiction. The premise dropped into my mind almost immediately, and the subject matter gave me an opportunity to try and write in that style. It was harder than I'd expected - much more exposition and over-writing than contemporary fiction; once I finished the first draft, the challenge was to pull back some of the padding, but still try and retain a sense of the period. I thought this might make an interesting read for Halloween, so without further ado, please enjoy 'Reflections'.   Reflections There are moments in one's life when two unrelated and seemingly disparate ideas come together in a moment that makes one sit up and take notice. Out of such moments can come great works of science, or art, or literature; it all depends ...

Mythic and Magical by Katherine Roberts 'On my one-hundredth birthday my father made me a present of a mortal man…’   So we’re told by Kryssa, the heroine of ‘ Rubies’ , one of the stories collected in Katherine Roberts' Mythic and Magical. ‘Rubies ’ reminded me of Bradbury’s tales of supernatural families, not only in its subject, but in its sensuality: ‘Her hair, black as mine, glittered with diamonds that outshone the early stars…’   And later, as Kryssa, her hair threaded with rubies, looks at her reflection in a lake: ‘Yes, I could see myself. Or…I could see moon-pale flesh shimmering with gold, and the pinpricks of red stars surrounding me: Grandpa’s rubies blurred with the millions of worlds above…’             ‘Rubies’ is romantic, lush, Gothic, and its theme, like the other stories, is that of rebelling against the rules your society insists you live by. And, in these stories, at least, the rebels most...

It seems like yesterday that I was bemoaning the onset of winter. Now, summer is almost upon us (or at least it is here in Italy, where 25°C is considered a perfectly reasonable May temperature). And summer is, in my mind, associated with one thing above all else: the Edinburgh eBook Festival , masterminded by the unflagging Cally Phillips . Calling all Goths... This year I’ve been booked to write some contribution pieces about Gothic fiction. Since the Festival is concerned to a large extent with eBooks and self-publishing, I’d like to shine a light on some examples of good self-published Gothic fiction (ironically, I suppose, given the Gothic preference for murk and mystery). I’ve a few ideas already, but of course the sheer number of books out there is bewildering, so once again I’m sending out a plea for help: if anyone out there knows of any great self-published Gothic fiction, please get in touch. You can leave a comment, contact me via Twitter or Facebook , or email me: m...

Last month as part of the annual Chester Literature Festival I took part in a debate about Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. Now, anyone who knows my writing will know that I’m not a huge Twilight fan. I’m quite happy for people to read what they want, and for writers to do new things with established genres - so it’s not the sparkly vampires that bother me so much (although I do personally think they’re rubbish!) It’s the fact that, since Twilight’s astronomic rise in popularity, the misunderstood heartthrob vampire now seems to be the only type being written - and subsequently, a lot of horror markets have placed a blanket ban on submissions of vampire stories, which is a shame for writers like me who like vampires (and werewolves, and zombies, and other newly ‘unfashionable’ creatures!) This was actually the entire reason that me and L.C. Hu produced our anthology ‘ Re-Vamp! ’ in 2011, to counteract all the mopey teenage monsters - but I’m digressing. The thing is, in this debate, I wa...