Authors Electric

Cracking crime! A while back, in this very blog, I came out as suffering from, or perhaps reveling in, Multiple Publishing Disorder. After making my name first of all as a poet, reducing, ditching and deleting to enrich my work, I then became a novelist. How to make a story that long, without padding! Ulp. Poetry, crime fiction, comedy fiction, stage and radio plays (of all lengths, and some including original songs), scientific articles, prose polemic/non-fiction, and a nice line in science-themed textual kinetic art installations became my lines of work: in other words, it was a shorter story to say that I wrote everything but short stories. Ooh missus!  As a reader, I love short stories (brilliant, intense, funny, scary, eg Char March's ' Something Vital Fell Through ' or Saki 's) and hate them (interminable inner monologues with long descriptions of cigarettes lit, coffee made and drunk, eg far too many I’ve been subjected to at spoken word events and ha...

I love short stories - bite-size confections, entire books distilled down into tiny, perfectly formed delicious delights ... looking along my shelves I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised to see just how many collections of short stories I have acquired over the years. Plenty of them are anthologies with multiple authors. I first came across this sort of collection while at school, where excerpts and short stories were gathered into text books which were read aloud during a lesson and then discussed. I couldn't bear listening to the stumbling, monotone reading of my classmates so used to stuff my fingers in my ears and race through several more stories while the current one was being murdered. They were good stories too, and I took note of the writers, and looked them up afterwards in the library - and in this way I was introduced to Jack London, Ray Bradbury, Saki and many other authors whose work I love, but might never otherwise have stumbled acros...

           It's Octobrrrrrr and the season of witches and spooks is here. It's time to draw the curtains, edge closer to the fire and get your nose stuck into a ghost story or two. For my money, those which are short stories work best and there are some great ones out there - tales which get it just right, scaring the pants off you and haunting you for years after, jumping out at you from dark corners of your memory at unexpected moments, and without ever needing to overstep the matter and descend into horror and grim and grisly goriness to achieve their effect.           If you need some classic examples, there's our own Sue Price's Overheard in a Graveyard for starters: it's right up there with that master of Halloween eeeek Ray Bradbury's story The Emissary from his collection The October Country .           And there are of course other m...