After the end…

Posted on October 4, 2024 by Mark Hayes

For the Latest Harvey Duckman Presents anthology, which was released today, I wrote a story set after an apocalypse (as this was the brief given this is a collection of post apocalypse stories) about an old man walking up a hill 70 years after the end of the world…

Except that is not what the story I wrote was about at all. It is the story I set out to write because after several false starts that never quite seemed right I finally started writing a story for this book after the book had been given a name by its wonderful editor in chief CG Hatton, and so i knew the book was to be called Death+70 based on the conceptual idea of how quickly nature will recover post the end of the world.

If you have ever seen ‘Seven monkey’ and the over grown streets of New York post virus you will get the idea. Just as if you see footage of how fast the wilderness has recovered and thrived around Chernobyl, or regrown over abandoned buildings anywhere. Nature is resilient, the end of our civilization would not bother it in the slightest, no matter how big the bang we go out with. To the trees we are just walking fertilizer that has not gone back into the ground yet. (the trees could well be farming humanity btw, think about it , we breath in oxygen and turn it in to the carbon dioxide they need, and we are basically a sack of carbon and chemicals which are their main food stuff)

The point was the natural world recovers, and as that was the title of the book I thought well if I have a character who was about fifteen at the end of the world, he would be eighty-five seventy years later. Some one with vaccines in there system from before the fall, and who benefited from modern nutrition while they were growing up could go on to live that long. So I came up with an old man climbing a hill to visit the grave of his lost love, seeing the world that regrew after the apocalypse. It fitted with the title of the book and seemed a nice idea.

So as I say I wrote a story about an old man walking up a hill 70 years after the end of the world…

But as I said that is not what the story I wrote at all, it was the story i set out to write, what I wrote instead was an allegory on a different subject. A story about the helplessness of old age, the insidiousness of creeping dementia and ultimately finding some dignity in death. This was not my intention, it is merely what the story became, stories have a habit of doing that, finding ways to be about something other than you intended. To become personal, when you intended them to be otherwise.

Dementia is a subject close to my heart, my mother has been slipping from in degrees for several years. It is a slow death that kills the mind before the body, and you watch your loved ones wither before you. It is also the future I expect will come my way in time, which frankly terrifies me. As I say, sometimes, more often than we perhaps admit, the stories we write become personal in ways we did not intend.

In any regard, I will be donating my ‘fee’ for this story to the charity Dementia UK. I do not actually take a fee from ‘Harvey’ as a rule, so in actuality I am donating the amount my fee would be if i took one. In essence it is the same. The below is from Dementia UK’s website, and more eloquent than I on the subject.

One in two of us will be affected by dementia in our lifetime. Families living with the condition are often left feeling exhausted, overwhelmed and alone. With your support, together we can provide vital specialist dementia nursing services, so more families can access our life-changing support and live as well as possible, for as long as possible. Please donate today and help ensure no one faces dementia alone.

When a new book is released I generally urge people to get a copy and my tale aside it is a wonderful collection of stories and you should get one. Really you should , there are a host of wonderful writers in there, with wonderful stories. Frankly I think it is probably the best collection I have ever been part of. All the stories are amazing and the wealth of imagination that went into them astounds me and I helped curate it. So please buy a copy

But regardless if the book doesn’t appeal to you, or indeed if it does and you do buy a copy (which i hope you do) , please take a few minutes out of your day to visit Dementia UK’s website and read about there work at https://www.dementiauk.org/ If only for the memory of an old man who may one day walk up a hill

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A Gentleman

Posted on September 24, 2024 by Mark Hayes

There follows an orphaned piece from my scraps folder, which I think was originally written as the opening to a short story that would have served as a prequal to my 2020 novel Maybe. That it was written in 2021 suggests I intended to write it for one of the originals Harvey Duckman anthologies, applying uncommon good sense and writing something linked to open of my novels for the anthology. Which was also probably why, as a short story, it never got finished. It is however a fun little piece, involving two of the major Characters in Maybe, Benjamin West and Gothe.

A Gentleman

“It seems to me, that the use of lockpicks should fall under the remit of a gentleman’s valet, rather than the gentleman himself.” Benjamin West grumbled just after he snapped his second pick in quick succession. 

“I’m sure there are those who might agree with you West, but sadly I regret to inform you that I do not.” His former manservant observed, in a voice which were you to describe it as arid would be to suggest it was moister that it was. Think instead of the word desiccated… 

“Really? And why is that Gothe?” West asked, more to distract himself than out of genuine interest.   

Gothe waited until his employer managed to hook the broken tip free and had once more commenced his efforts to pick the desk draw before replying. When he did it was with typical stoicism. “In the first instance, West, I am not in fact your valet. While in the second, I neglected in my youth to be trained in the arts of the common thief.” 

The lock was frustrating, mostly because it should have been simplicity itself. A simple mortice, locking a desk draw. Opening it should have been the work of a moment to open. The lock however seemed to be deceptively complex. He narrowed his eyes and stared at it while he pulled a third #2 short-hooked-pick out of the small fold over leather case at his side he set about using it. Though at this point he was not so much trying to pick the lock as clear the broken tip of the previous pick from the keyhole.  

“Yes well…” West said began then bit his lip as he tried to concentrate on the task at hand. He tasted the salt and iron of blood in his mouth and paused to dabbed at the small cut in an absent-minded fashion before returning to his task, and levering up what he hoped was the last of the pins, before sliding in the crank and giving it a satisfying twist to the right.  

The lock clicked.  

West turned to his former manservant, his face a picture of smug satisfaction. “Luckily one of us knows the value in the ‘arts of a common thief’.”  

“I am sure that is a matter of great pride for your grandfather having paid for your expensive education West.” Came the arid observation in return. 

Benjamin gifted Gothe a flinty stare as he pulled the draw open. 

If perhaps he had been paying closer attention to the draw and less to his former manservant’s pallid visage Benjamin West might have noticed the trick latch that sprung up as the draw opened. Had he noticed he could have held it in place with his spare hand while he hooked it in place. It was after all a simple trap designed to catch out an amateur thief. 

There was a flash and explosion of black powder filled the air. Caught out by the trap, Benjamin had not the wit to hold his breath, and thus got a lung full of whatever foul concoction the dust trap contained. Whatever it was it burned, and he collapsed reeling to the ground half coughing, half choking. 

Gothe looked on impassively, thinking to himself of the advantages of breathing been more a choice than a necessity. 

What is in the draw and why was the draw trapped? Well, I know the answer to that, but its not really something I need to trouble you with, save to say what is in the draw directly leads to Benjamin West and his former manservant Gothe attending a funeral in a drizzle, and making the acquaintance of Miss’ Maybe’ aka Eliza TuPaKa, who promptly due to a misunderstanding shoots one of them… But that’s just the opening chapter of ‘Maybe’.

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The End of the world is not the Ragnarök

Posted on September 20, 2024 by Mark Hayes

I write stories, you may be aware of this… Some stories are written for specific projects, others just begin because I am throwing words at a page and seeing what happens, and some stories are written because they want to be. Sometimes all three.

Quite a while back now, I was asked to write a story for a forth coming anthology of stories. The brief for which was Tales of the Post Apocalypse. As is my want, I began by more or less ignoring the brief, in order to find the story I wanted to tell. The first attempted involved a world over run by werewolves, which was a some what hairy apocalypse. But while I liked the seed of the idea it did not grow. So I started over. This is not unusual, I often do this, many a tale never gets past a few hundred words. But conversely some that start out as nothing more than a half idea of an interesting scene can grow beyond all measure. Sometimes a seed needs a few years to germinate.

This is why I always keep the seeds, the scraps of stories…

For the anthology I found a lot of seeds but none of them were the right seed and when the deadline approached I was still scratching around in the wasteland for a seed that would grow. Mostly I was trying to approach the brief from different angles. This went on a while, in fact I missed the deadline, and the second deadline, and almost missed the ‘okay this is defiantly the final dead line it goes to the printers on Monday’ So in desperation I wrote a story about an old man walking up a hill 70 years after the end of the world. Almost annoyingly that last attempt with a simple premises work out rather well. It ended up being a story about something I had wanted to write for a long time, deeply personal in a somewhat oblique way, and a ‘perfect’ counterpoint, in my opinion at least, to the many other great stories in the anthology written by other writers.

That last part if often my goal in any anthology, which is something of a conceit. The degree to which the story, ‘The Tawny Eyes of Caroline’ is a ‘perfect’ counterpoints other stories in the anthology is debatable, but I think this one in particular works well in that regard. Which is my excuse for it taking so long to write…

In any regard, one of the scraps I wrote for this project that I rejected was a interesting idea that morphed into something of a prose poem. A poem about another man at the end of the world, sitting in a cave in this case rather than walking up a hill. It was however the wrong kind of apocalypse… Or to be more exact the idea was to start within one apocalypse myth and move through others.

That is not how it worked out, it wanted to stay where it started and the idea I had for it wasn’t going to work, in part because it was far too ambitious for the purposes of the anthology (I wrote out a ‘plan’ in note form and realised that if I took this where I wanted to then this was a novella length idea, and novella length prose poems are so 1700’s… I did however enjoy writing the piece, and while it is far from complete, its is more stylistic than a tale right now, I still liked the results.

So anyway, here is the most complete excerpt of the prose poem, that isn’t going to be in the forth coming Harvey Duckman anthology of post Apocalypse tales ‘Death +70’ and was instead replaced by a story about an old man walking up a hill 70 years after the end of the world.

This may be called ‘fimbulwinter’ but I really couldn’t say.

She utters honeyed words of violence to sooth the savage that waits within the child that whimpers at her breast
I hear her words, but they mean as nothing. Utterances of the lost, spoken to the raging of the darkness in her mind
The madness has taken her, as it has taken so many. Only the child that whimpers at her breast hold her in check.
A thread of sanity, waiting to be snapped
They huddle behind me in the darkness of the cave around the fire that gives out only the memory of heat
Heat has left the world, the fimbulwinter is upon us. The serpent stirs the black waters of the ocean
Fenris prowls the even night, his children howl in the dark hunting
hunting us.
I sit cross legged at the entrance of the cave and stare off into the darkness
My axe is cold, frost crisscross’s the handle and the fingers that hold it, but the blade is sharp still and blood still flows in he that would wield it.
The Ragnarök is over, we are what remain

She utters honeyed words of violence. I hear them not as words but liken to the hiss of the serpent, the hiss of madness
She utters honeyed words of violence and the child whimpers at her breast and I sit, the ache in the small of my back grown the longer I remain still. The ache in the small of my back reminding me I am alive, despite the ice that forms upon my beard.
Ice forms in my tears, blurring my eyes. The fimberlwinter is upon us. The serpent stirs the black waters of the ocean
Fenris prowls the even night, his children howl in the dark hunting
hunting us.
I sit cross legged at the entrance of the cave and stare off into the darkness
My axe is cold, frost crisscross’s the handle and the fingers that hold it, but the blade is sharp still and blood still flows in he that would wield it.
The Ragnarök is over, we are what remain

I found them on the road. Lost in the twilight of the world, lit by neither moon nor star, only the fading afterglow of the falling world.
I should have left them there. The woman and the child at her breast. I should have left them to the darkness and the howling of wolves.
Had I left them they would be dead. Lost to the Ragnarök. A feast for Fenris, bones to be picked by ravens, haunted things, ghosts unto the world.
Had I left them it would have been a kindness. A quick death, bereft of suffering. But I am selfish, I would not be alone in the ever dark
My axe is cold in my hands, my finger bitten by the frost, but blood still flows, and the heat of my anger sustains me.
Beyond the cave mouth fires burn upon the waters and the serpent moves through the waves. The monstrous children of Loki do their fathers bidding, and my breath freezers in the air.
The Ragnarök is over, we are what remain

The anthology this tale will not be appearing is as I said, called ‘ Death +70’ it is the latest Harvey Duckman anthology and is rather good,

It features disturbing, thought-provoking, darkly funny and entertaining short stories from Kate Baucherel, Jenna Warren, Nimue Brown, Lee Arrowsmith, Ben Sawyer-Walpole, Robin Blasberg, Ross Young Sarah Spence, Melissa Rose Rogers, Anna Atkinson-Dunn, Keith Errington, CK Roebuck, Tamara Clelford, R Bruce Connelly, Nyki Blatchley, Phil Sculthorpe, Mark Hayes and CG Hatton.

And a story about an old man walking up a hill 70 years after the end of the world… Which is in no way a story on the theme of dementia, quality of life, the bitter sweet beauty of nature and the right to decide if it is time for you to lay down for the last time. It is just a story about an old man walking up a hill 70 years after the end of the world…


Harvey Duckman presents… DEATH+70 is due out 6th October 2024… in paperback and on Kindle.

You can find out more about the Harvey Duckman project here https://harvey-duckman-is-alive.ghost.io I urge you to do so.

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The darkness

Posted on September 19, 2024 by Mark Hayes

I am the darkness that dwells in your head

I am the secrets you’ve never said

I am the malice that lay at your heart

I’ve always been with you, right from the start

I am the darkness behind your eyes

I am words spoken you know to be lies

I am the whispers heard on the wind

That say you are worthless and that you have sinned

I am the questions you ask yourself in the night

The answers you fear when you turn out the light

I am the whispers you try to deny

The thoughts that come to you while in bed you lie

I am the thought that you’re better of dead

I am that darkness that dwells in your head

I am given birth by nothing but lies

Tomorrow will come and with it sunrise

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Dear Edgar #20 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Mark Hayes

As authors go you would be hard pressed to find many with a legacy as influential as that of our own dear Edgar. Poe’s works have inspired directly or indirectly much of what we now perceive as the western cannon. Few modern horror writers can not trace the roots of their influences back to Poe in one regard or another. He laid the popular ground work for detective novels too. While surrealist fantasists certainly owe him a debt or two. As for Gothic fiction, he has arguably been of greater influence than even Shelley and Stoker (who was himself much influenced by Poe) for while they created lasting characters that informed their own sub-genre’s, Poe work informs so much more of the work that came after him.

Despite the broad influence of his work, however, the majority of Dear Edgar’s body of work and influence stems form his poems and short stories. Poe, like Lovecraft after him, only completed one novel in his life time. The ponderously titled ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket’. The novel was written between the early 1830’s and 1837, With the first two chapters originally written as short stories for a collection he never released.

It was finally published in 1838 after it was delayed for a year by the publishers after the stock-market crash of 1837. Yet even when the novel was first published in full it was done so not under Poe’s name directly, but the name Arthur Gordon Pym and presented at a true account of his adventures, not an unusual publishing device at the time. Fictional ‘true accounts’ were often presented as authored by the narrator. While it is not an uncommon literary device to write a story presented in the reflective first person, it is rare these days that such stories are not published under the real authors name, and even rarer that they are presented as ‘truth’. Though found footage cinema has been trying to pull this trick for decades…

The first time Poe’s name was actually attached to the novel was when it was published without his permission in London. Ironically, as his main complain was they used his real name, the novel was more or less responsible for first making Poe’s name in British literary circles and led to many of his earlier works finding there was, with or without permission, into British periodicals. His fame in Europe only grew from her on and was soon eclipsing his early renowned in America, and also lead to later editions in the USA carrying Poe’s name as author and being presented as the fiction it was.

Comprising the Details of Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827. With an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivors; Their Shipwreck and Subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine; Their Deliverance by Means of the British Schooner Jane Guy; the Brief Cruise of this Latter Vessel in the Atlantic Ocean; Her Capture, and the Massacre of Her Crew Among a Group of Islands in the Eighty-Fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude; Together with the Incredible Adventures and Discoveries Still Farther South to Which That Distressing Calamity Gave Rise.

Full subtitle of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The above is the subtitle Poe gave to the novel, which serves quite well to sum up the entire narrative.

What is missed out of Poe ridiculously long subtitle is the main character stowing away in the most literal of senses aboard the first ship and almost starving to death. Almost staving to death again on a floating ship wreck before resorting to a singular bout of cannibalism, (two pages after the cannibalism episode Pym suddenly remembers there is an axe lodged in the remains a of a mast and hacks his way into the ships stores, which had he remembered the whereabouts of the axe earlier would have avoided the whole raw long pig feasting). While ship wrecked there is also the passing a Dutch ghost ship, which is presumably a reference to the flying dutchman, and a whole lot of stranger stuff that goes on the further south Arthur Pym finds himself.

The latter half of the book, is very much a journey into the the unknown southern regions beyond the Antarctic circle, which is not the Antarctic we know. Indeed beyond the ice there is a subtropical region warmed by odd currents form the pole itself and the book ends with Pym paddling a canoe towards the pole itself and the strange bright light that burns there. It becomes in short a tad bonkers, while being written very straight there is a degree of the comical about the final few chapters. As this is all in the narrators ‘own words’ there is every chance he is a little mad and the experiences he went through on the ship wreck and beyond sent him insane. The novel has a trick ending (Pym doesn’t finish his narrative due to dying before writing of what he discovered at the pole itself) This is slight disappointing but frankly there is no real way it could have ended differently without stretching what credibility it has as a narrative beyond breaking point. There is no explanation of how two men in a badly made canoe, with nothing to eat but sea turtles, managed to get back from the south pole to Nantucket, though we know it took him six more years to do so as the opening chapters state he was away for seven in total. But frankly it is a better novel for the way it ends.

This is almost certainly the most readable of Poe stories up to this point in his career. Having the freedom of a novels format to play with clearly suited him. In effect there are several different tales here all linked in one long narrative, the first chapter is a short story that was originally published separately a couple of years before, and the difference is style is explained by Pym who says he employed a writer called Poe to present that first part of his tale as fiction, before deciding to write it himself. The story of the mutiny aboard the Grampus and eventual shipwreck is a separate tale, while the final section in the Antarctica feels like a whole different adventure story. Yet it all hangs together beautifully. Even if it is jarring to read about a bear attack on the Antarctic ice shelf and the latter half being more a fantasy than anything else. As long as you can accept the fact that little was known about the Antarctic when Poe wrote this, and his readers were not raised watching David Attenborough’s Living Planet. While this is a flight of the imagination, it was not entirely fantastical at the time, as there were many odd theories about the southern regions around.

This was over 70 years before Roald Amundsen became the first man to the south pole, ruined Robert Falcon Scott’s legacy. Scott’s infamous tragic attempt to reach the south pole in 1912 was named the Terra Nova expedition. Terra Nova being the Latin for New Earth, which offers some perspective of just how little was known about the region. Even now it remains the least explored region of earth, though an archipelago of subtropic islands inhabited by south sea islanders warmed by an unknown white light at the pole is not likely to be discovered one suspects.

I approached this novel with a degree of trepidation due to Poe devote the ‘Old Tentacle Hugger’ Lovecraft. Before embarking on the Bibliography of Dear Edgar I did the same with Lovecraft and like Poe, Lovecraft wrote many short stories but only one novel. In Lovecraft’s case it was ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ which was to say the least a struggle (though I scored it 4 out of 6, so its not terrible). Poe’s novel in comparison to Lovecraft’s is very modern and reads well. Its a little mad towards the end but then madness and Poe is nothing new at this point. It was certainly a better experience than reading Lovecraft’s novel, though not quite up there with ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ which it inspired.

A FULL FLIGHT OF MURDEROUS RAVENS…

SHOULD YOU READ IT: If you only read one Edgar Alan Poe novel in your life time you should make it this one. Admittedly it is the only one… But read it anyway, it will surprise you.

ISSUES: While it is not overt there are some issues with the text in terms of race. However, these are minor and ‘of there time’ , as opposed to the kinds of issues you come across in Lovecraft’s work.

Bluffers fact:  The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket inspired a lot of other writers and their work, but most notably Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of madness where his giant albino penguins cry out tekeli-li or takkeli. This is the same cry used by ‘deep’ Southsea islanders who slaughter the crew of the Jane Guy.

Bonus Bluffers fact: Mark Hamill plays a character called Arthur Gordan Pym, in the Poe based Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher. Supposedly this series is set after his adventures at the south pole, and Pym is now a lawyer acting for the Usher family, who refuses to talk about the adventures of his youth.

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Dear Edgar #19 The Devil in the Belfry

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Mark Hayes

Order is a wonderful thing, there is a genuine joy to waking up on a morning and knowing there will be breakfast in the cupboard, because there is always breakfast in the cupboard. There is a safety and some would say satisfaction in knowing tomorrow will be much like today, and today will follow the pattern of yesterday and all the yesterdays before it. Lives are built on order, societies are build on order. Without order, civilisation falls.

Except of course, that is all very well if your little slice of the world is a pleasant one. If you are happy and those around you are happy. If everything rolling along nicely in a linear steady clockwork like way holds joy for you. But not everyone life if a happy one, not everyone wants tomorrow to be like yesterday. Some people need a brighter tomorrow, for yesterday was one of darkness and hunger. Order is not always a wonderful thing, because while some ride in the carriage, others grease the wheels, and some get rolled over. To extend the analogy the men on the deck of the royal barge have a different view to those who sit on the very bottom row of oars, pulling the barge along, down in the bilges. Order may seem wonderful, but the shit is always dropping down on someone…

Sometimes what order needs most, is a dose of chaos. This at least would seem to be the view our dear Edgar took in this satirical tale ‘The Devil in the Belfry.’ The story first saw the light of day in the somewhat ponderously titled publication ‘Saturday Chronicle, and Mirror of the Times’ A weekly Philadelphia newspaper that ran for less than 5 years. This was to be Poe’s only contribution to this erstwhile journal, submitted to its editors not long after he and Virginia moved to the city in which they were to reside for the next 6 years. Poe’s drinking was under control and his tenure as assistant editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine was about to begin. In all this was probably one of the happiest times of Poe’s life, which was also marked by the publication of his first novel ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordan Pyn of Nantucket.’ a few scant months after this tale first was put down in ink.

Given the Poe’s domestic bliss and the up swing in his literary and publish careers, you would have thought him much in favour of order at this point in his life. Thus it seems a little odd he chose to write a story about its destruction, or perhaps its not. Dear Edgar always had a penchant for self destruction. But in any regards let me bid you welcome to Vondervotteimittiss…

The Devil in the Belfry

Vondervotteimittiss, is an isolated little dutch village laid out in a very orderly fashion. If viewed from above, by hot air -balloon or some other contraption, its appearance would not be dissimilar to that of a clock face, which given the nature of the hamlet is just as it should be. There is a house at each hour, with a segment of kitchen garden planted with cabbages, that leads to the village green , in the centre of which, like the central pivot of a clock there stands the towns great clock tower, with 7 clock faces facing outward to the twelve houses of the hour where the menfolk of the town sit on there little benches watching the clock and checking it against their own watches. While the cabbages grown in their gardens are boiled in the kitchens by the womenfolk, and serve in small bowls of sauerkraut. Meanwhile the children play, in serous manner with their own watches, and all the clocks of the town are carefully set to the time as marked by the great clock.

The most important man of Vondervotteimittiss is of course the belfry-man who looks after the great clock tower. All the young boys dream of ascending to his lofty position one day and all the old men of the tower hold him in respect while being thankful the task falls to another’s hand.

There is every chance this tale was a shot across the bows of President Van Buren, the eighth and at the time of this tales publication current president of the US. Van Buren, a New-Yorker of dutch descent, was one of the principal founders of the democratic party, and is often credited as the architect of the two party state. The political model that has served american politics ever since… Given the lampoonish caricatures of the dutchmen in this story it is probably not unreasonable to assume Poe was less than fond. Certainly that was the impression made of the story by many of its earlier readers, particularly as it was framed as satire. Poe however always claimed the story was a satire in general terms hitting out in all directions at ordered societies stagnation, rather than any single political figure…

In any regard to the orderly stagnation of Vondervotteimittiss one noon, comes a devil playing an fiddle and he runs down the hill into the town and straight to the belfry where he attacks the belfry-man brutally and causes the great clock to strike thirteen. All to the horror of the inhabitants.

But here in lays issue, Poe’s devil is problematic, not because of his actions, but in his description. The order in the town of Vondervotteimittiss is disrupted by a devil described as a small black man. This in a dutch town, an orderly town of tall blonde people, that has it harmony destroyed by a rampaging black devil… This in the pre-civil war america where slavery was the great decisive issue of the day. Which brings us back to Van Buran, the Democrat president elected by the political strength of the slave owning ‘southern democrats’. Which side of the slavery debate Poe sat upon is an open question, and Poe was ever a product of his time. But there is something very uncomfortable about reading this story as a satire in the light of the politics of the day.

If you disregard the issues of the modern eye, this story is a fun little satire on order and stagnation, but little more than that. It is far from the most interesting of Poe’s work. Yet despite this it is one of surprising success. There are not one but two operas based upon it. It has been illustrated many times, and has been the title of several Poe collections. Francis Ford Coppola referenced the story in his admittedly less than successful horror movie Twixt, while Black Rebel Motorcycle Club took the name of their album ‘Beat the Devils Tattoo’ from a liner in the story. All of which is rather surprising for what is a workaday satire that is mostly forgettable and at times a bit of a trawl to get through as the first half spends a long time directing the various facets of life in Vondervotteimittiss in great if somewhat dull detail.

Personally I an not sure where the lasting appeal lays…

NOT QUITE ENOUGH RAVENS TO BE A MURDER…

SHOULD YOU READ IT: The story has its merits and has enjoyed a surprising impact for what it is, I sit somewhat on the fence about it because it is dull to start with, then itchy in all the wrong ways due to the description of the devil. There is however no denying it has lasted the course and has a place in Poe’s cannon.

Bluffers fact: Vondervotteimittiss, if you want to be literal is more or less Dutch for ‘Wonder what time is it’. Which possibly explains the towns obsession with orderly timekeeping.

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The Return of a Semblance of Hope

Posted on August 19, 2024 by Mark Hayes

In March two and a half years ago I posted a blog post entitled ‘A semblance of hope’. In part that blog was about perspectives, and viewing things from other perspectives. It was also a book review of a book by Nimue Brown that at the time was due to be available as part of a kickstarter campaign then later on general release…

Time has past… Strange epochs are upon us, the stars are finally right and the thing that was prophesied will now come to pass… Also there may be coco!

So, what follows is mostly what came before, with additional abridgements at the end… that the opening line is ‘This may be a familiar experience’ is pure, if delightful, chance…

This may be a familiar experience, it may not, but I often find myself intrigued by the idea of ‘another perspective’. Everything I write, everything I read, everything I watch, the world it self and every aspect of life in fact can always be viewed from another perspective.

This included my own past. Something I suspect we all feel at times. there are things I did in the past that had I done something even slightly differently would have changed everything about my life. Events I view now from a different perspective, because I am no longer the person to whom those things happened. I am not my teenage self… So my perspective on the events of my teenage years are not something I look back on now with the same thoughts and views as I had at the time.

As for those I interacted with, how they view those events would also be different. No one has the same perspective, no one witnesses an event the same as you do, or looks back on it the same way as they did at the time. The sister at the bar who was interest in me when I was fool enough to say her sibling was pretty, because I was both too shy to admit it was her actually I found interesting and too dumb to realise she found me interesting, for example, probably looks back on that conversation thirty odd years ago very differently to me. Though to be fair she probably doesn’t look back on it at all.

Never tell a girl you like that you think her sisters pretty, it is never what they want to hear…

~ life lessons learnt by my teenage self

Perspective’s are a concept I also find fascinating in literature. You read a story, particularly one told in a first person narrative, from the perspective that is given to you by the writer. The writer who generally has an incline of very other characters perspective even if they don’t tell you as much. Thus I often find myself wondering how events unfold from the perspective of that character who saunters around the edges of the narrative, but is never centre stage. The non-protagonist. The passer by…

Hannibal Smyth, my self-aware liar, braggard and coward who finds himself boxed into corners where he does heroic things out of self preservation and self interest is very ‘honest’ in his own assessment of his motives and undertakings. But viewed by those around him his actions at times would seem truly heroic and self-sacrificing. Their perspective, and their views on his character are often different from those he professes. Something I need to remember whenever I write Hannibal stories is that everything Hannibal is whispering in my ear is only how he saw events. So when other characters do things he considers odd, its often because how they saw events is at odds to his own perspective.

Occasionally, just occasionally, I have considered writing a Hannibal story from someone’s else’s perspective. His ever present Bad Penny for example who I (as the writer) know has an entirely different view of his nibs that he does… Maybe one day I will, but I have enough projects ahead of me to say it won’t be any time soon. However to temper your disappointment at this confession (imagined or otherwise) the wonderful Nimue Brown has more or less done that exact thing and written a story set around the events of the first book of Hopeless Maine viewing those events and life on the island from an entirely different perspective. The perspective of Hopeless’s own and only journalist Frampton Jones in a new novella ‘Semblance of Truth.’

Now as it is quite possible you are aware, I am a bit of a fan boy when it comes to the work of Nimue and the esoteric creation Hopeless Maine (and Nimue’s writing in general). So when I was given the chance to read a early copy of Semblance of Truth I jumped at the chance.

The narrative is in effect Frampton Jones journal, written by him, for him and him alone, as he tries to catalogue events on the island as a whole, as well as those events that only effect him personally. Things he could never put in the paper, because even in a place as strange as Hopeless Maine certain things would strain the credence of belief among his readers. The are are also somethings he just wants to keep to himself, like the worrying way his cutlery keeps disappearing and the notes someone keeps leaving him, that are written through the medium of fish…

As the islands journalist Frampton also keeps track of births, deaths, and has to report on (these attended with various levels of willingness) various civic events like founders day, the annual church picnic, the fossilised bones of one of the islanders ancestors walking around the shore. The grand enterprise of building a bridge to the mainland. The not so grand failure to build a bridge to the mainland…

Because the narrative is told in journal entries, some long, some short, some of significance Frampton is unaware of, some that seem unimportant yet which he worries at… the narrative slowly unwinds in the present tense in the respect of how he writes it, while it is all in a very immediate past tense. Things he has just done, or witness, or seen , or not seen, or at least he hoped he did not see, but has a horrible suspension he did see, and what’s making that noise in the kitchen? As well as important advise on the rearing and care of meeps, as well as the importance of not going mad and forgetting to harvest your meeps, and why you should not feed your meeps off cuts of meat.

It also means when he starts top go a little mad for a while his descent in to insanity, and climb back from the brink are equally chronicled… Unless of course in his mad periods he is actually seeing the world of Hopeless as it truly is, and why is no one reply to his fish writing? And what really happened at the O’Stoat house? Who’s that orphan who disappeared the night Miss Chambers was killed by…. by what killed her…? then turned up again! Oh why am I thinking about the orphan? She’s clearly not important… Now! Where did all the spoons come from? Should I ask Gerald? Is Gerald real…?

Poor Frampton, a minor character in a world where events are happening he isn’t equipped to understand. Yet he strives, with a certain ineptitude, to make the island a better place, or at least understand it better. As a journalist he is a man who seeks the truth and to illuminate that truth for the betterment of all.. (and there lay proof that Hopeless is a very strange place, me thinks.)

So there you go, finally seeing the light of day, through the dense fog-banks that surround the island… You can pre-order this utter delight direct from the publishers here

Alternatively, if your not of the american persuasion you can pre-order on amazon at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hopeless-Maine-Semblance-Nimue-Brown/dp/1954255985

Clearly I think you should do one or the other, and if you don’t, then do not be surprised if a third version turns up on your doorstep written in the medium of fish. I have some pare herring and a halibut just waiting to double up as punctuation…

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Here Today, Scone Tomorrow

Posted on July 29, 2024 by Mark Hayes

Folk law is full of places that don’t entirely exist. Places that slide off the map, and give cartographers a headache.

There is a simple explanation for this, the world is a globe, maps are square. If you have ever tried to wrap a football in Christmas present paper, apart form this clearly being an act of madness on your part, you will under stand that the only way to get a flat map to fit around a globe like surface is to fold the map over on itself in many strange ways. Cartographers these days try to draw their maps to fit the globe, because Global Positioning Satellites can now tell them where everything is. Because of this they have to stretch some places on the maps to cover bits where they have to fold the map to get it over the globe.

This is why that odd snicket between streets isn’t in the A to Z, That grove of trees over yonder that should be a narrow line seems like an oddly ancient wood when you walk into to it. That small hill that looks like it might be a barrow mound does’t appear to be on the ordinance survey map. Some places aren’t on the maps, some places are the folds that allow the maps to fit around the world. The places in the creases. the places where cartographers of old, not bound by the rules of modern cartography, simply wrote the words, ‘here be dragons’.

And of course, sometimes, if you wander, and of course wonder, you can get lost in those folds.

Make Believe: Hexford Witches book 1 by CB Hallam

So anyway, welcome to Hexford, a small village in the Yorkshire dales, that resides in the folds of a cartographers map. A village looked over by the resident of a cottage named for the brook that flows past it Kallin Beck. Dinah Nye spends most of her time in her cottage kitchen making scones, which is a special kind of magic all of its own. She however also a witch, and her cottage has been the witches cottage for generations of Kallin Beck witches.

But something is wrong in Hexford, residents are having bad dreams they can’t quitter remember when they awaken. Something is returning, something dark, something dangerous. Something that may require more than just scones baked with love and a witches ‘knack’ to defeat.

And the cottage isn’t entirely happy either.

Hallam has a gift for creating characters with edges that you want to learn more about. He also has a gift for telling stories with atmosphere that draw you in to them and make you want to know what happens next. These are the hallmarks of a good writer, the hallmarks of a great writer is to do so in a fashion that seems effortless and this is what he does.

A notes on scones, My Auntie Alene made the best scones know to mankind, a diminutive Yorkshire woman who understood the magic of the mixing bowl if anyone ever did. She has long since left these lands for the strange places beyond our ken (her and my uncle Dennis moved to Oxfordshire to live at the bottom of a country vets garden*) Thus her scones have long since departed the pennies. The Pennies are a darker place for there absence.

*The country vet in question being my cousin Andrew, and the bottom of the garden being the separate little flat over the garage

Anyway I am off to try and make a map of Teesside fit around a scale curve of the earth, I think there is a fold near my house, which if there is would explain a lot about the residents of port Clarence.

I may also need to bake some scones.

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Prose poet

Posted on July 26, 2024 by Mark Hayes

I had one of those conversations the other day with another writer on the subject of poetry. The essence of which was they held the opinion all writers should write poetry, I disagreed as I don’t. Except of course when I do. My poetry, however, tends to be prose, which many people don’t think of as poetry, the writer I was conversing with among them…

Poetry certainly can be prose, indeed one of my favourite poems is Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep. HP Lovecraft, was a particular exponent of the craft, several of his stories are prose poems.

In any regard, I pointed the writer in this direction and else where. Then they asked if they could read any of mine, and if i had a favourite of my own work. As it happens I do, it is the prose poem below which I wrote for my friends on Hopeless Maine last year. I’ve reproduced it below ( and fixed a typo) because I like it, and it also fits my mood to do so.

A Tale No Man Knows

There is a spring, on the island of hopeless. A spring from which no man drinks. Over the centuries the spring has cut a steep gorge down to the sea that no man found. The gorge leads to a beach of shale and grit sand that no man would call pretty. The tide is relentless here. Seaweed rots and dead things wash up twice each day. The decaying shells of broken boats litter the forgotten shoreline, but no man combed this beach.  

The remains of a hut sits just above the high tide line. The roof long collapsed, one wall shattered by a storm ages ago. It is a hut now only because what remains remembers what it was. Beyond the hut a small jetty slumps, made by the same hands that made the hut. No man would walk upon it now. Even seagulls think twice before perching upon its posts.  

At the end of the jetty sits the remains no man could name. A skeleton held together by a memory no man has. Clothed in rags that are more holes than cloth. The skeleton sits and stares out at the unforgiving sea, as once in life it sat there and waits. While the wind blows along the forgotten shore, and rain and spray lash at what was once waiting.  

Each day, as the tide recedes from its apex, the thing that dwells in the sea comes. She is a thing no man has named. No man could name. Once someone did. She come and sing to the remains on the jetty. Her song, a song no man has heard for a long time. Not since the remains last struggled from their dying bed, out of his hut and along the jetty to listen to her one last time.  

She comes, the thing that dwells in the sea. She comes to sing to her lover. She comes and sings and no man hears her. Least no man remembers hearing her. She comes and sings and no man weeps. 

The tide recedes, the tide swells, and each day the thing that dwells in the sea comes to sing to no man. And no man weeps. And that which was remembers all that once was. In the cove no man would call pretty, the shade of no man remembers her lover, who visits her still.   

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Genteel light vs Grim dark

Posted on July 24, 2024 by Mark Hayes

Just to avoid any confusion I like grim dark fiction. I like heroes and heroines with shades of grey. I have no problem with a two sided coins, villains with heroic traits and heroes who are half the villain. I have no problem with characters using foul language in books and enjoy a good fantasy romp in which characters talk like, well lets be honest here, the majority of people.

That said I do occasionally think authors have forgotten the power of a well placed singular “Fuck!” round about page 251. Just there, the only F-word in a manuscript. An exclamation that is completely out of character for the heroine, jarring to the reader who doesn’t expect it and focusing the attention of that reader on the event that inspired that singular and thus profound expletive.*

If however you’re characters habitually use expletives then in no time they lose all narrative power… It is a stylistic choice to do so, some stories, some characters, and some books just work well this way. The world is not a gentle light-fulled place. It is often grim and often dark, and there is a realism about novels and stories written that way… But that doesn’t mean every novel and story should be…

*This also works with a well timed “Buggeration!”, or even a good singular “Oh Bugger!”, you don’t need the F-word at all to achieve this kind of impact.

Nor does every reader want to read grim dark tales. Reading is often a means of escape. The reason books of fantasy, science fiction, historical, supernatural, horror and their collective love child Steampunk, remain popular genres is simply that. They are a means of escape from what is often a grim dark reality, or as you may otherwise know it, modern life. These are escapist genres, and there is a place within them for escapes not only from the readers reality but the nature of that reality. Even if like me you like grim dark fiction, its is refreshing oft times to pick up a book and enter a writers world that is more gentle light than grim dark. Which brings me to the inspiration for this post…

I will get to a review in a moment, but to stick to the theme, this is very much a novel that would fall under the category Gentle Light, if such a category existed. Genteel light perhaps. As such it is very much escapism, and quite delightful. Which is to say if Shelley did throw a singular expletive in around page 251 it would almost certainly have a world shattering impact on her readers.

The Automaton Empress by Shelley Adina.

This is the second novel, though it can easily be read as a stand alone) in the Lady Georgia Brunel Mysteries. I read the first of these ‘The Clockwork City’ last year and can heartily recommend it. This one carries on in much the same vain with the adventures of those two women of a certain age Lady Georgia Brunel and her maiden Aunt Millicent. As I said in my previous review, there is something very refreshing about a steampunk novel with a pair of heroines who are not ‘feisty young women’, or ‘talented girls’.

After the events in Venice our two heroines are requested to attend an audience with the Empresses of  Prussia, who while being one of the most powerful women on the continent is also something in the order of being a ‘talented girl’ engineer who, among other things, has constructed an automaton in her own image. This proves to have been a foolish conceit on the Empresses part as our heroines discover, as the empresses it seems has been replaced by her own invention and the cunningly crafted machine is so convincing that almost no one other than our two heroines has noticed.

Has the Empress vanished of her own accord, has she been kidnapped? Is the heir apparent, a rather unwholesome arch-duke, with a lecherous nature, who takes a distinct and unwelcome interest in Georgia, behind some plot to gain him the throne?

Naturally, Georgia and Millie, with the aid of Lady Thorn and her daughter, take it upon themselves to investigate.

The plot is complex, the characters well considered, the story well crafted, full of twists and turns, not all of them expected. But the gentleness that marked the first novel is here again. It is a fun tale, with characters you want to spend time with. A tale of gentle lightness, among the swathes of grim-dark that occupy much of the genre. Its just nice escapist fun, written to entertain and entertain it does. Genteel light if you will, a genre all of her own, which has much to recommend it.

I look forward to the next.

Note. As I have said previously, I owe something of a debt to Shelley Adina, as when I first stated writing steampunk myself and wanted to delve into the genre her Magnificent devices novels were among the best ones I read. While I don’t exactly write Genteel light novels myself, I took a degree of inspiration from her novels mostly in regard to keeping my steampunk stories character driven and recommend them often to people new to the genre.

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