Garlic and Silver Bullet at the Ready: It's Halloween!

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Halloween fiction, as its contemporary street "decorations", can be cute or can be gory. 

Or thoughtful. 

Or unsettling. 

Its aim is not to make readers flinch, but to make them read on, knuckles tensing, while the hairs on the back of the neck prickle and rise. 

Slowly. 

Its main ingredient is dread, the anticipation of the inevitable, signalled at the edge of vision by a series of tiny markers that may, or may not, be fact. It is the... not knowing. The... should we laugh, or should we run? 

Inevitably, it starts with normal life. Or what passes for normal.

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Fine art assessor, Kristin Jeffries, arrives at an address to report on a group of paintings. Why is police tape hanging from the door? Should she trust the anxious client who admits he's not the owner?

Dizzy females are often portrayed as idealised victims in Halloween fiction. Yet, some rise to match the all-pervading inevitability of their situation.

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Elaine haunts auctions held in crumbling country mansions, dreaming of a find that will make her and Gary rich. An iron-banded trunk has no key. What might it contain?

Short fiction can play to its constrained time frame, introducing the reader to genres not usually considered wedded to the Halloween theme.

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Dark tales for a dark night. Don't look here for happy endings, just an unsettling sense that, once opened, there's more that might arrive, unbidden.

I trust you enjoy your Halloween. If Halloween has not enjoyed you.

 

The British Monarch's Royal Standard

It is with sadness, and inevitability, that we hear of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II at the age of 96 years.

She was the longest ever reigning monarch of these islands, and will be sorely missed. Her sense of country, and of duty and of service to her country, will not be surpassed.

“The Queen is dead. Long live the King!”

The mystery of the missing Mystery - launching the paperback of THE FOREVER HOUSE

The paperback of The Forever House is finally live! Hurrah!!

And yes, it is a Mystery, the first of my titles which can truly be placed in the genre, though mysteries have been woven through the subplots of a number of my novels, as has History. The two come together in The Forever House. 

...Reading the inked imprints of a manual typewriter was like going back in time: the conveyance between the builder and the first buyer, the landowner and the builder, the faded copperplate handwriting of a previous land conveyance, J. Tunstall, Esq, Farmer. The names of vendors and purchasers were all present, just as they would be on the deeds to this house. So where were the deeds to this house?

I live in an early 1950s property, and have all the old conveyances to it. It was while scraping away a previous occupant's wallpaper that I discovered a message on the plaster, and the fictional storyline began to seep from the walls and into my imagination. In the writing, it became the book's opening scene.

 

Carrie Haynes and her husband are inveterate house renovators, never enjoying the fruits of their labours, always selling on their completed properties to start afresh on a new project. The Forever House dates from the 1920s, and was to be their final project, their true home.

But forever can have many connotations; the love, the sadness, the hopes and regrets of previous occupants can be locked within the rooms, beneath the wallpaper. As Carrie delves into the history of the part-renovated dwelling, she does more than learn about her Forever House, she learns about herself and those around her. Is she strong enough to break free from the ties that bind generations? Those which history has silenced?

I love old houses. ...has character... isn’t merely an estate agent’s tagline. Cottage or castle, the phrase imbues the presence of the past within its fabric.

The Forever House is now available as an ebook to purchase, is free to read within a Kindle Unlimited subscription, and finally to read in papeback. 

 

"...a cracking good story with lots of twists and turns..."

Enjoy your reading.

Some skills we hone. And some we mess up.

 

After taming new wordprocessing software to my will (ooh, calm down there...) the good news is that the interior of the paperback of The Forever House is finally finalised: headers, footers, blank pages, et al. 

Hurrah! and all that jazz. Do you like the Half Title page? I thought I did quite well with that.

However, just as when reading a good-news missive from an agent or editor, we know there's a but lurking in the wings.

The but isn't so much lurking as staring out from that embarrassed pink border which should not be there. I am so used to working with covers for ebooks that is what I've done, whereas the height & width specifications of a paperback are not the same. The trick, I now realise, is to create the paperback cover first and pull the ebook cover from it. And it is no compensation to read that I am not the first to mess this up, not by a long chalk.

But there we go. Some skills we have to hone more than others.

Smirking alone on its Amazon page, you'll find the ebook HERE.

Thanks for not throwing cabbages. I will get there - eventually.