With it being 5 years today since I published my collection of dark, speculative tales, Vulnerable In Front of Fiction, I wondered how I could best commemorate the anniversary. Well, why not give it the treatment I’ve been giving to the XTC albums this year and take a look at each story, giving you a bit of info alongside a short extract.
Back in 2020, inspired by the likes of Rob Shearman, Jeremy Dyson and the work of his League of Gentlemen colleagues, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, I decided to write a series of short, dark tales. And so on 3 October 2021, Vulnerable In Front of Fiction, Volume 1 was released. I’m planning on releasing volume 2 in 2027.
So let’s take a look at the fourteen tales, shall we?
A Little Bit of Exorcism Never Hurt Anyone
The story which opens the collection, A Little Bit of Exorcism Never Hurt Anyone sees a teenager’s dedication to pranking family, friends and strangers alike backfire massively. I love endings which speak directly to the reader or viewer (I particularly love Doctor Who’s ‘Blink’ episode where it invites you to consider that any statues you see could be a Weeping Angel), so that’s why I briefly address the reader at the end, to keep them on their guard…
Extract: “Of course nothing was going to happen. He would have to end this farce. As the old man returned to his squawking, Andrew considered convulsing his body, like he was “fighting the demon” then stop abruptly, demon defeated. Yeah, those drama classes at school had to come in useful for something.”
The Girl in Carriage No. 5
During the time of writing the book, I was working in a job that required me to be in my office full-time, which meant a 2-hour round trip on the train every day. As a result, quite a few fellow commuters became familiar to me. When people started returning to work after Covid lockdown was lifted, I noticed some of the commuters I’d been travelling with daily were no longer there, and there were some new faces, too. This is something mentioned in passing by the narrator of the tale, as he observes a sleeping girl who always appears in his carriage. If you have a spare ten minutes, you can hear the audio version of the story, narrated by Cliff Chapman, for free over on Bandcamp.
Extract: “Every day she was there, in carriage no. 5. Morning and evening, without fail. Her choice of seat would change but the sleeping figure, always slumped against the window with no belongings, became as familiar to me as the rest of my fellow travellers.”
The Great British Zombie Uprising!
The title was absolutely a riff on The Great British Bake-Off, though it doesn’t feature show-stoppers or soggy bottoms. I’ve always had a question when it comes to zombies in the media. Namely, how do the buried manage to get out of their coffins and push up through at least six feet of heavy earth to go on a rampage? Thus Sandra was born. Or rather she died and there the story begins. This is the only story where the main character is intentionally an awful person, in life and in death.
Instead of reading an extract, you can read the complete story for free on my Substack!
A Lingering Memory
I find the idea of the someone’s existence as a spirit being linked to how remembered, or known-of, they are by the living fascinating. The idea that the spirit fades bit by bit as the years and decades and centuries pass, and those who could remember were now deceased themselves. A Lingering Memory is quite a sad tale for the most part, but I couldn’t resist a darkly comic twist at the end.
Extract: “The ghost of Colwin Adams was now as visible as a piece of white thread on a blank canvas. He could barely see himself when he looked down at his body and arms. There were no living relatives anymore to remember him, and he’d no real friends before he died. Jim Davies was the only person still alive in the world to remember Colwin.”
Chucky Rooster
In this story, the protagonist Ray is a huge fan of Devil Man, a US horror fantasy series, and of the show’s antagonist, Chucky Rooster, a malevolent spirit in a similar vein to Pennywise the Clown. At the time of writing this, I’d been watching a few YouTube videos of various Comic Cons, and the writer in me wondered what if an actor suddenly addressed a viewer through the screen but no one else was aware this was happening. I think the idea of the creepy tattoo came first as a separate idea so I put the two things into one story.
Extract: “Ray hadn’t noticed at first, but he realised after a quarter of an hour that Colin was occasionally staring at the camera. ‘Nice tattoo,’ Colin said, his eyes staring out from the screen.”
The Third List
A number of years ago, one of the many many stories and series I wanted to write was about Santa Claus on his days when he wasn’t prepping for Christmas. I started writing a story in which a young woman inadvertently becomes his assistant and he ends up playing detective while on holiday. I ditched that idea not long after and left the whole premise alone, until I considered including a Christmas-themed story in this book. I’ve always loved the idea of as well as there being a naughty list and a nice list there’s another list. For the genuinely bad and evil people. And that for those on that third list, not receiving a present is the least of their worries. The choice of having a child call out Santa on having a third list (and not doing anything about it) was a no-brainer.
Extract: “His blue eyes sparkled at the choice of patisserie on the coffee table. Curse my sweet tooth, he thought, taking delight in demolishing an eclair in two bites. It was only after quaffing half the glass – a glass! – of some refreshing cider that he spotted the message stuck to the black-framed mirror above the mantelpiece: ‘Mr Clause, we need to talk’. He chuckled as he picked up the note, written on a square yellow post-it. A child’s handwriting – it had the neatness and care that most adults simply didn’t have time for.”
These Wise Guys
This tale is perhaps the least darkest of the collection. In fact, it’s not dark at all! My plan was for the collection to be a mix of light and dark tales. Quite simply, These Wise Guys feature the three wise men of the nativity story, bickering with one another on their way to greet baby Jesus. Was I partly inspired by Monty Python’s Life of Brian? Perhaps…
Extract: “‘What good is embalming ointment?’ ‘I bet he didn’t know what to bring with him, so he grabbed the first thing he saw before he left his home.’ ‘That sounds about right. No thought put into it,’ said Melichior.
Ollie’s Army
What if you did have mind-control powers but you just hadn’t really tried to find out before? Sticking with the Python lads for a moment, back when I became a fan of Palin and co, I started writing some sketches of my own. I remember one I wrote called Don’t Let The Cat See You Move. Like half of things I write, I didn’t do anything with it afterwards. However, Ollie’s Army features a tiny little nod to that sketch, but the guy looking out the window is trying to mind-control the cat, not pretend to be a statue when the cat is looking at him. I particularly like the little twist in this tale. Trivia: the Pied Piper podcast Ollie is listening to was a little nod to The Piper, a BBC radio drama I’d heard around the time of writing this.
Extract: “How cool would it be to have a small army of lions or bears at his beck and call? Then he could go out to the pub and not worry about getting into any fights. If someone tried to take a swing at him he’d just smile at them and introduce them to his army of animals.”
Chains
This was a story I’d written before I even thought of publishing a collection. A friend had challenged me to writing some flash fiction based on a Beatles song title. I’m not sure where the idea of large, never-ending holes in the ground came from but since the title was to be Chains then it was a quick decision to have massive steel chains emerging from those holes.
Extract: “Men from the council tried removing the great hulking bit of chain visible above ground, but even the biggest forklift truck couldn’t shift the damn thing. They’d then figured they could just fill the hole, but they had to first measure how far down it went. They never found out.”
Rumbles
This is a love story. But it certainly doesn’t have a happy ever after ending. It’s also a love story with an odd love interest. To say any more would ruin the surprise, but the protagonist of Rumbles is related to the narrator of The Girl In Carriage No.5.
Extract: “Only recently had she recognised that familiar ache, like the love she’d once felt for her husband. But there was another she could not stop thinking about, whose tender words and warm wit had ensnared her. Rumbles.”
Tick-Tock
This harks back to eerie tales featuring children. While it’s not the same type of horror as the Tales of the Unexpected story, The Flypaper, Tick-Tock sees the purchase of a clock by an innocent granny having horrifying consequences for her young grandson. A little bit of trivia for you: I wrote the first draft of this while an episode of Endeavour (the Morse prequel) was on in the background, so that’s why the grandparents’ surnames are based on the two lead actors’ surnames: Allam and Evans.
Extract: “Mum didn’t show up for the next four Sundays. Seth struggled to come up with reasons for her absence. He got a sense that Granny knew Mum was staying away on purpose, though he doubted she would ever think it had something to do with the new clock.”
Moon
Moon was a piece of flash fiction I wrote for an old blog of mine quite a few years ago. There’s been quite a few moon-related stories over the years, including Wallace and Gromit’s A Grand Day Out and H.G. Wells’ The First Men In The Moon. This is just another one to add to the group. An absolutely daft one but one I hope readers enjoy anyway.
Extract: “It had been a prominent astronomer, a distinguished professor with his own decades-long TV show, that had first confessed that there was some merit to the ‘fake news’ of someone – or at least something – being on the moon. How else would that account for the writing?”
Digging Down To Meet The Dead
I’m no stranger to writing historical fiction set in Edinburgh, though this is the only one actually published – when I became an author in 2011, I published two short stories for a proposed series about time-travelling assassins. One story was The Shoemaker’s Son which involved time-travel, Burke & Hare and an Aussie assassin originally from the 1970s (I’d love to rework and republish it someday). The other was another time-travel tale set in the city. Digging Down To Meet The Dead doesn’t feature time travel (well, perhaps as a throwaway joke) but it does have two characters I named after a couple of ancestors of mine, and the spooky residents of Greyfriar’s kirkyard.
Extract: “Alexander felt a shiver down his spine as they happened upon their tools from their time as resurrectionists. He thought he’d left all that behind. Become more respectable. Robert Stoddart had just pulled him back to those dark days.”
I Heart Devouring Books
Ideally, this would have been titled I [heart emoji] Devouring Books but at the time of publishing I was having issues adding the emoji. Anyway, the story which ends the collection is all about one man’s love of books and his determination to save them when a creature begins devouring them and removing them from having ever been written.
Extract: “As the last of the Gruffalo books vanished from history, Stan reached the reception desk, grabbed a notepad that was lying there, and scribbled one of the most important things he’d ever written in his life: Every book this creature eats disappears from history and memory. Save them!”
If this has piqued your interest, you might like to know that for the month of October, Vulnerable in Front of Fiction, Volume 1 can be bought as an eBook directly from me for only £1. Visit my Ko-fi shop to get a copy! And Happy Halloween!
