Authors Electric

"The other one he loved like a slave, like a madman and like a beggar. Why? Ask the dust on the road and the falling leaves, ask the mysterious God of life; for no one knows such things. She gave him nothing, no nothing did she give him and yet he thanked her. She said: Give me your peace and your reason! And he was only sorry she did not ask for his life." That’s Lt. Glahn speaking, in Knut Hamsun’s 1894 novel, Pan. Later, John Fante would take one of the phrases there for the title of his 1939 novel, Ask the Dust:   The dust, of course, is unlikely to render many answers, and yet it has been a preoccupation of literature since its beginning… “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”                                     Book of Common Prayer “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,...

In my teens I went through a phase of reading horror stories – remember those collections of short stories published by Pan with gruesome illustrations of bloody eyeballs and worse on the covers? Me and my friends passed copies around ourselves, comparing notes and shuddering over the most grisly. Finally it all got too much: one story eventually gave me such bad dreams that I stopped reading them, and moved on from horror to the much more sophisticated ghost story genre. Being able to create a delicious thrill which makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck is very much harder than horror as it doesn’t rely on the cheap trick of buckets of blood and gore to achieve its aim. It's a more subtle and challenging skill, and one which many writers fail to achieve - but those stories that do succeed you will always remember, even though you may forget the writer’s name. Recently I read a story on my Kindle, ‘Overheard in a Graveyard’ which I’d read many yea...