Wildblood takes on a new horde of slayers

I’m very pleased today to be able to unveil my next medieval action-adventure novel, THE DARK ARMY, and to announce that it’s now available for pre-order. Just follow the link.

Those who enjoy historical adventure fiction might already be aware that this is the second in the THURSTAN WILDBLOOD SERIES, and the immediate sequel to THE DEVIL’S KNIGHT, and that it is my fourth foray into this genre overall.

More about this upcoming release further down, including a few choice snippets from the first book in the series.

I’d also like to announce today – because I’ve been asked about this a lot – that an Audible version of my ninth Mark Heckenburg crime novel, NO QUARTER, is now in production. 

I have no actual publication date for that yet, but rest assured, I’ll post it here as soon as I do.

It’s also time to let it slip that a short collection of horror stories of mine, IN THE FOREST OF THE NIGHT, will be coming out from Black Shuck Books in July. Again, more info about that – jacket art, table of contents etc – will be posted on here as soon as I’ve got it all to hand.

And now …

MEDI-EVIL

I use that sub-header wisely, I think, and not just because it sounds cool, but because my two Thurstan Wildblood novels to date, THE DEVIL’S KNIGHT and THE DARK ARMY, which follow the fortunes of an English knight gone to the bad and form two halves of the almost incalculably difficult quest he undertakes in order to redeem himself, while not what you’d classify as High Fantasy, have plenty to do with devils, demons and the sorts of eerie supernatural influences that medieval man believed were all around him.

Book 2 in the series, THE DARK ARMY, will be published by Canelo on October 8, and is already available for pre-order. To whet your appetites a little more, here’s the blurb we have thus far (though this may change before it appears on the back cover):

To protect a saint, he must become a devil …

Thurstan Wildblood, English crusader knight, does not believe in God. But after a fever-dream encounter with a demonic bishop leaves him seemingly invincible in battle, he begins to wonder.

He is on a quest to deliver Melinda of Jerusalem, believed to be a living saint, back to Canterbury Cathedral in England on the orders of Richard the Lionheart. The road so far has been hard, the men of his company having fallen one by one until only his squire remains.

This unlikely trio must now face a procession of dangers as they seek to cross Europe, including the ruthless Order of Siegfried, sell-swords in the pay of the German Emperor.

Will Thurstan's unnatural prowess see them safely to Canterbury? Or will their safety cost Wildblood his immortal soul?

***

A few additional thoughts on the Thurstan Wildblood series …

I’m well aware that anyone who hasn’t read Book 1, THE DEVIL’S KNGHT, will probably be hesitant to buy Book 2. I’ll say again that they are two halves of a whole, and I don’t think THE DARK ARMY would be quite the reading experience if you weren’t aware what had gone before. Hopefully, though, that will tempt people to buy both books.

In a nutshell, they concern an English knight, Thurstan Wildblood, who during the reign of Richard the Lionheart, has risen through the ranks thanks to his sheer ferocity in battle but also his ruthless approach to enforcing the king’s will. Inevitably, Thurstan travels with Richard to the Holy Land to participate in what will later be known as the Third Crusade. By any standards, it’s an horrendous war: extreme conditions, a crusader host suffering every kind of privation, and battles that are total bloodbaths.

Without giving too much more away from this point (though a couple of teensy SPOILERS are necessary, I’m afraid), Thurstan, by this time the king’s favourite knight and commander of his elite Familia Regis, is tasked with returning a young Italian/Egyptian woman, ‘Melinda of Jerusalem’ to England under armed escort. It is believed the woman controls divine powers and can heal mortally wounded men simply by praying over them. Unfortunately, England and Canterbury Cathedral’s gain will be Rome’s loss. So, not only is it the case that Thurstan and his small group of handpicked knights must now fight their way past the terrifying Assassins, one of the most determined and proficient Muslim war-bands in the Middle East, but their own Christian version of that as well: the Knights Templar.

Other enemies, some of them unspeakably evil, also lurk on the long and arduous road ahead. Thurstan’s group have one advantage in that their leader possesses a martial prowess that is second to none. But deep down, Thurstan Wildblood is a knight in torment, certain that he owes his invincibility to a dreamlike encounter he had with a demonic being on the night he executed 2,000 Muslim prisoners.

Did he sell his soul at that moment?

Is he cursed?

More to the point, will safely installing Melinda of Jerusalem at Canterbury save his soul or damn it all the more because in doing so, he’ll be defying Rome, he’ll be defying the Knights Templar, and perhaps, in taking this living ‘saint’ away from the battle-torn lands where she could do only could for the ailing Christian cause, he’ll be defying God.

It’s as much a story about a war of the soul as a war of kings and sultans.

THE DARK ARMY picks up Thurstan’s quest at its midway point, where he and his companions still have unimaginable distances to travel and face all kinds of terrible opponents. But I’ll say no more about it for now. With luck, that’s aroused your interest sufficiently. But just in case you’ve yet to dip into the first book, THE DEVIL’S KNIGHT, here are 25 very brief snippets that I’ve taken from it, which will may encourage you to start at the beginning:

     ‘When you do the Devil’s work, you take on the Devil’s mantle,’ Thurstan said.  ‘At least in the eyes of those you’re doing it to. You hear me, Pandulf? There’s no real Devil here. Men can do terrible things without the Evil One standing at their backs…’         

     ‘We English hate each other more than we hate you Danes,’ Thurstan said. ‘For the crimes you committed against our forefathers. Though given your religious vows, perhaps you might want to apologise for that right now?’
     The Templar appraised him coolly...

     He was clad entirely in black. Thurstan ripped at the garb, exposing a white tunic underneath tied with a blood-red sash.
     ‘Assassins!’ Bertrand looked dazed. ‘The Assassins are here!’
     Creaks sounded from the passage, made by multiple pairs of feet...

      ‘You can be certain of only one thing, Pandulf,’ Bertrand said. ‘Thurstan Wildblood will die in battle. At some point. We all of us share that destiny. The best any of us can hope for is to die well…’

      ‘There’s an old tradition in England… That in the presence of spirits, fire burns with a blue flame.’
     Melinda’s eyes roved the mist-shrouded firs. ‘You fear a supernatural foe?’
     Again, it seemed that a shapeless something had just withdrawn from sight...

      ‘Our Muslim servants would tell stories of the djinn, demons of the desert, who would waylay lone travellers. The Muslims would pray to Allah, and he would protect them.’
      ‘Alas,’ Pandulf replied, ‘I don’t think we enjoy our God’s favour enough for that.’

      ‘My life is a tale of longswords stained with blood, and burning towns under smoke-black skies,’ Thurstan said.
     ‘All the more reason for you to persevere,’ Mother Turilda replied.
     ‘Keep ploughing forward until my chance for redemption comes?’
     ‘What else?’
     

     Even half a day behind, their pursuers were distinctive in their heraldic garb.
     ‘Templars,’ Pandulf said glumly. ‘They have a willpower that can’t be broken.’
     ‘Thankfully, the same can’t be said for their bodies,’ Thurstan replied...

      ‘One must admire Thurstan’s perseverance,’ Melinda said. ‘It’s an impossible task he’s been set. It’s killed all his men already. Yet he struggles on.’
     ‘He’s safeguarding a saint.’
     ‘He doesn’t believe that, Pandulf. He doesn’t believe in anything sacred.’

      It was so alien to Melinda, this land of rock, ice and shadow. The cold too was relentless. And then there was the eerie stillness. It was easy to remember the age-old tales she’d heard about far-distant Europe, with its ogres, werewolves and witches...

      ‘Anyone dreams of Bishop Belphagor, I pity them.’
      ‘You know such a churchman?’ Bertrand asked.
      ‘Learned about him in our village chapel.’ Mercadier clucked with disapproval. ‘Am I alone in that?’
      ‘Who is he?’ La Hors said.
      ‘Who else? The Bishop of Hell.’

      When they’d brought Melinda along the passage the first time, she’d been playing dead. With eyes firmly closed, she hadn’t seen through the bars into any of the adjoining cells. Now she did and it was an effort not to scream with horror ...
     

     De Vesqui laughed. ‘You really think we’re doing God’s work? You believe that by committing mortal sin after mortal sin, your souls will be saved? Just because some rodent in a mitre says it will? Don’t any of you understand? We’re already damned!’

     Melinda hung back, hands over her face.
     ‘Just remember,’ Thurstan said, steering her on past the new-made corpse. ‘He was complicit in these horrors.’
     ‘I know… but it should still be for God to decide.’
     ‘God’s deciding right now.’

     The atmosphere of that terrible feast lingered: the darkness, the decadence and decay, the gluttony all around him, the rankness of the air, the globular and bestial Bishop Belphagor, draped in his blood-red vestments…

      ‘This is the Holy Land?’ Bertrand said. ‘More like a land of demons.’
      ‘There’s more in that than you know,’ Bishop Hubert replied. ‘These empty places in the East are filled with evil spirits. Anthony the Great was taunted by the most hateful fiends…’
     
     ‘My lord archbishop! Divest yourself of these illusions!’
      ‘Lord king,’ Bishop Hubert protested. ‘Archbishop Ubaldo is Rome’s agent. He is God’s representative…’
     ‘And I am God’s Fist!” Richard thundered. ‘And God’s Fist trumps all powers on Earth!’

     Bertrand greeted Thurstan with haggard eyes. ‘We should bury them,’ he said.
     ‘The desert can have them.’
     ‘Thurstan, these were Christian men.’
     ‘They chose their own beds, Bertrand. They should have known they’d be lying with ants and scorpions...’
     

     The blood in his veins simmered again, and when he sensed the wall of spears and shields closing from all sides, it turned to brimstone. He felled the first two with a single stroke of his longsword...

      He was in a roughened, raddled state, his hair a matted mop, his beard a bush, his features ingrained with dirt. But all these things he could tolerate, and worse, if they could reach their goal: Jerusalem, where their souls would be saved...

     ‘The city of Gomorrah once stood here,’ Bertrand said.

      They gazed across the empty plain, now scorched and strewn with blistered rocks. Great gusts of hot, black dust swirled over it ...

      The nun’s habit was cinched at the waist by a rope of beads, which accentuated her generous bosom and round hips. Uncombed straggles of straw-blonde hair hung down. Her mouth was full and red. She stared at Wildblood with eyes as blue as honed steel...

     ‘It’s pity you can’t conjure up a real miracle,’ De Verneuil told the girl. ‘Maybe make the sky fall on our enemies’ heads.’

      ‘Whatever powers I call on, I’d never direct them to do harm,’ Melinda replied.
      ‘Then in all honesty, what use are you?’

      Thurstan loosed, hitting his target square in the chest. He didn’t like using the crossbow. It went against all his chivalrous vows. But he needed to remind himself that these were pagans, and pagans must feel the wrath of God any way it came to them...

      ‘You didn’t really think this fabled Christian brotherhood that brought all these people East was going to last, did you?’ Thurstan replied. ‘We’ve been fighting these Saracens for the last hundred years. But we’ve been fighting each other a lot longer.’

Obviously, this lower section of the column is illustrated with original medieval depictions of knights in battle. I have no idea who the original artists were or who might have done work on them since. I simply found them floating around online. They were in NO WAY created to portray or endorse the two novels under discussion in this post. However, if anyone has a reasonable objection to their use in this context, I will happily take them down, or alternatively, will give credit to the artists where it is due.

When thrillers intensify into full-on horror

So … at what point does Thriller fiction delve so deeply into the darkness that it also becomes classifiable as Horror? In addition to that, does it ever stray into the realms of the Gothic? Does it ever, in effect, become Gothic Horror? My personal viewpoint is that it certainly can, so we’re going to talk about that today in some detail. However, I’m not going to single out novels. There are simply too many of those. Instead, I’m going to opt for movies, and I’m going to pick ten of them – ten thrillers that are so relentlessly frightening and grim that they could easily pass for horror movies.

I have a vested interest in this, of course. My next novel, THE LODGE, is published this week, on Thursday (Jan 15), and the thriller/horror crossover is precisely the slot I’ve pitched it at, so it’s entirely relevant to this week’s chitchat.

You’ll find all of that a little further down. In addition, I’ve posted another Thrillers/Chillers bulletin, in which I offer thumbnail assessments of recent works of dark fiction I’ve read, which includes some exceptional efforts by some equally exceptional authors. As usual, you’ll find that at the lower end of today’s blogpost.

I’m also going to take the opportunity at this point to mention that THE ISLAND, my last crime thriller, is currently ONLY 99P ON KINDLE in the UK and only 1.99 AUD in Australia, and it will remain at those bargain basements prices until the end of this month. THE ISLAND got to No. 2 in the Bookseller’s bestseller chart during its first week of publication. So, come on, folks, this is an opportunity not to be missed.

And now…

When Thriller becomes Horror

As an idoliser of all kinds of dark fiction, I gobble up crime, thriller and horror novels like there’s no tomorrow – I posted about this, discussing the reasons why, in my last blogpost (just scroll down past this current one, and you’ll find it – and one area that constantly fascinates me is that twilight zone lying between Thriller and Horror, where a story is so stressful on the reader’s nerves that it could comfortably be classified as either.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with dictionary definitions of what the words ‘thriller’ and ‘horror’ mean. We all know. I’d argue, just for the sake of clarity, that the supernatural, paranormal, weird science etc are more firmly at home in horror, whereas thrillers tend to dwell in the real and recognisable world where we all live. But aside from that, when it comes to hitting the reader hard between the eyes, they can sometimes be indistinguishable from each other.

Note … it’s NOT JUST ABOUT GORE. Horror doesn’t need to be filled with blood and guts. But it can still demand a lot of the reader, as it does (or should) offer an overwhelming intensity of terror and suspense, a doom-laden atmosphere, no-way-out situations, the appalling nature of adversaries (even if you hardly ever see them) and constant indicators that frenzied madness is only a hair-trigger away.

You won’t need me to tell you that thrillers can also go there, and this is exactly the territory I’ve sought to explore in my upcoming novel, THE LODGE (which, I repeat – sorry – is published this week, on January 15). Without wanting to give too much away, I should add that it contains hefty Gothic overtones as well, so not only is THE LODGE a suspense-laden crime novel and a good old-fashioned murder mystery, it’s also, I trust, a tale riddled with traditional Gothic Horror – Black Tarn Lodge is in so many ways your isolated, mist-enshrouded mansion – and it takes no prisoners in its subjection of everyday humans to a force of utter malevolence (one of the characters is veteran horror star, Edgar Karnwood, an amalgamation of Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, whose movies, while lurid and camp, were built around imaginary characters and scenarios wherein evil reigned supreme – but what happens if some of these horrors are acted out for real?).

Anyway, that’s THE LODGE, and it’s out this Thursday. But, as promised before, and just to show that I’m not the only person who’s ever done this, here are ten movies (in order of release, not preference), which have also crossed the line from real-world thriller into nightmarish horror.

NB: I’m not going to waste your time with big, well-known movies that have done this. So, to avoid stating the obvious, I won’t be bothering to mention Psycho, From Hell, Cape Fear (pictured above), Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, The Hound of the Baskervilles, or Phantom of the Rue Morgue (pictured at the top) etc.

What, you may be wondering, have we got left? Well, let’s see …

1. THE LODGER: A STORY OF THE LONDON FOG (1927)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Based on The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes

In fogbound London, a young woman becomes fascinated by the mysterious lodger upstairs, not least because he increasingly seems to match the description of the Ripper-like killer terrorising her neighbourhood … Hitch makes his first big impact in the movies, transforming an original narrative about Jack the Ripper into an immersive trip through a world of shadow and mist. Expressionistic in style, but already rich in Hitchcockian visual suspense. With its extreme emphasis on terror and madness, it was controversial on release but is today regarded as a classic.

2. PEEPING TOM (1960)

Directed by Michael Powell

Original script by Leo Marks

In the early days of swinging London, a seemingly harmless cameraman films the terror in the faces of his models as he kills them with an impalement device of his own construction, but finally arouses the suspicion of a kindly neighbour ... It is difficult to know what was more startling about this very early slasher, the fact that its mild-mannered antagonist was clocking up victims in order to create Snuf movies for his own vile pleasures (way back in 1960!), or the fact that it came from revered director Michael Powell, whose career was visibly damaged by the critics' hostile response. Only in later years, was its psychological complexity and cinematic artistry rightly recognised.

3. THE PSYCHOPATH (1966)

Directed by Freddie Francis. 

Original script by Robert Bloch

A Scotland Yard cop investigates a series of crazily gruesome slayings in which the victims are always found with mutilated dolls, in due course uncovering much more than just a serial murder case … At first glance not especially original, a masked killer butchering his victims one-by-one in grisly and theatrical fashion, though the back-story is more complex than usual (and the murders more imaginative), and while it’s been described as overlong, a range of famous old character actors have an awful lot of fun, which adds to the experience. Something of a British Giallo, it was unsurprisingly a very big hit in Italy.

4. AND SOON THE DARKNESS (1970)

Directed by Robert Fuest 

Original script by Brian Clemens and Terry Nation

Two British nurses take a cycling holiday in central France, but when one of them unaccountably disappears, the other can get no assistance from a rural community that has suddenly gone suspiciously quiet … A genuinely stylish chiller, Rob Fuest making amazing use of the eerily empty French countryside and thus scaring and disorienting us even in a beautiful setting and broad daylight. Hailing from the era of psycho-sexual exploitation, it would be easy to dismiss this one as more of the same, but there’s no time for sexual shenanigans. Tension swiftly becomes terror as appealingly innocent heroine Pamela Franklin faces the constant threat of an unknown menace.

5. 10, RILLINGTON PLACE (1971)

Directed by Richard Fleischer 

Based on Ten Rillington Place by Ludovic Kennedy

The true story of London’s wartime strangler, John Christie, and the various means by which he lured young women into his house … Divisive stuff from Dick Fleischer, who’d met similar opposition two years earlier with his movie, The Boston Strangler. In this case, no real effort is made to examine the killer. Instead, we focus on his spider-like existence in the depths of the grimly realised 1940s slums, and the cold, efficient manner by which he reeled in his victims. Richard Attenborough won praise as the quietly deranged Christie, laurels also going to John Hurt as the wrongly hanged Timothy Evans. A dark drama rather than a thriller but laced with horror throughout.

6. FRIGHT (1971)

Directed by Peter Collinson 

Original script by Tudor Gates

A lone babysitter in a remote rural residence faces a night of terror as she struggles to prevent a madman from gaining entry … In the opinion of many, the original ‘babysitter in peril’ movie, though here the besieged heroine is not pitted against a wandering maniac, but the mentally imbalanced former husband of her employer. This brings a touch of realism, which is added to by a central performance from Susan George that proved she wasn’t just a kittenish beauty. Lots of familiar but effective tricks of the trade are utilised: a mostly unseen enemy, heavy breathing, POVs through exterior windows. A low-key, low-budget British effort that does exactly what it says on the tin.

7. STRAW DOGS (1971)

Directed by Sam Peckinpah

Based on The Siege of Trencher’s Farm by Gordon Williams

A US academic relocates to the UK and falls foul of Cornish rednecks when he offers sanctuary to a mentally ill man suspected of murdering a child … The most controversial film on this list, Sam Peckinpah’s notoriously ‘no holds barred’ British western shocked its audiences even in 1971. The violent rape is a scene of horror on its own, but the real unease stems from the presence of a bunch of bullying, uneducated louts at the heart of an otherwise placid community, a story replicated across towns and cities everywhere. Gordon Williams absolutely hated the film, Sam Peckinpah didn’t care what Williams thought, and star, Dustin Hoffman is later said to have felt ‘queasy’ about it. It still ranks as one of the best British thrillers around if only for its sheer, unapologetic grit.

8. THEATRE OF BLOOD (1973)

Directed by Douglas Hickox 

Original script by Anthony Greville-Bell

A supposedly deceased actor enacts a long revenge on the theatre critics who ruined his career by executing them all using Shakespearean methods … Horror veteran Vincent Price hams it up wonderfully in this breezy, campy and yet often quite violent pastiche of so many other films he made (in particular, the Dr Phibes duology), but is ably assisted by the sort of cast most directors could only dream of: Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry, Diana Dors, Jack Hawkins, Robert Morley and Dennis Price to name a few. It never takes itself too seriously, and at times perhaps overdoes that a little, but the genuine London locations give it an air of authenticity, while the regular comedy asides from the star are a joy. Price fans and Shakespeare addicts still adore it.

9. MURDER BY DECREE (1979)

Directed by Bob Clark 

Based on The Ripper File by John Lloyd and Elwyn Jones

Sherlock Holmes joins the hunt for Jack the Ripper, uncovering a complex, bloody conspiracy, which may have consequences for the very highest in society … The idea that a masonic plot lay behind the 1888 Ripper slayings was not a new one even in 1979. But this was probably the first time it had been fully investigated on film. Christopher Plummer and James Mason give us a warmer-than-usual relationship between Holmes and Watson, and this sits at the heart of an engaging and satisfying, if fog-shrouded, Holmes adventure. In addition, attention is also paid to the lives and sufferings of the victims, which makes for a welcome change. Still one of the go-to Jack the Ripper movies, even if it’s all very far-fetched. Warning: contains terrifying murders.

10. SHUTTER ISLAND (2010)

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Based on Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

US Marshals visit a high security mental hospital on an isolated island to investigate the escape of one of its most dangerous inmates, only to find themselves enmeshed in a progressively more disturbing mystery … Martin Scorsese said almost from the start that this hugely successful outing was intended to be ‘his horror movie’. If so, it’s horror of the ‘psychological breakdown’ variety rather than a stalk-and-slash, while it maintains the look and feel of a Neo-Noir throughout. Contains some exceptionally chilling moments, and the denouement, while a kind of redemption, is also horrifying as well as heart-breakingly sad. A deep and serious movie to end our list on, but if you just want to be scared, hell, it works on that level too.

THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS

Works of dark literature that I have recently read, thoroughly enjoyed and heartily recommend (sometimes with a few lighter ones mixed in).

METROPOLIS – Philip Kerr (2019)

Hard-drinking cop, Bernie Gunther, is tasked with capturing two serial killers working simultaneously through the chaos of Weimar Berlin. The last in the classic series, even though it takes us to the dawn of Gunther’s career. The atmosphere of pre-WW2 Germany is astonishing, the country’s economy devastated, lawless immorality the rule not the exception, and all the while, the Nazi influence spreading. Vivid work by Kerr, the city crumbling, the investigation looping, the tough hero meeting no one he can trust. Compulsive, hair-raising reading. Euro-Noir on a grand scale.

THE HEATHEN HORDE – Steven A McKay (2023)

England, 864 AD, and Alfred the Great, still an unprepared princeling, takes on a key leadership role as a vast Viking army attacks his brother’s kingdom of Wessex. A dramatized but blow-by-blow account – quite literally – of major events in British history, as seen through the eyes of a young noble coming of age in a crucible of war. Enjoyable and accessible Dark Age epic, focussed on the main characters, packed with action and reading at great pace. Thundering good stuff.

INCIDENTS AROUND THE HOUSE – Josh Malerman (2025)

A young family are terrorised out of their Michigan home by a malignant entity. An Amityville-type suburban chiller, as told by an eight-year-old child. An unusually formatted but, overall, rewarding tale of domestic supernatural horror. The immediately undeniable existence of the demon jars a little – manifestations like these make the movie, Poltergeist, seem tame! – but the utter isolation of the afflicted family is hugely effective, while the scare moments are top drawer.

THE TRIBE – Bari Wood (1981)

A rabbi’s son is murdered by a Brooklyn street gang, only for the killers themselves to be murdered afterwards by a hulking, superstrong assailant. A stressed-out cop joins forces with the original victim’s widow to track a killer who may well be the mythical golem. It sags a little mid-narrative, and the monster is underused, but it’s crammed with engrossing cabalistic detail and rises several times to moments of high nightmare. Another quality repub by Valancourt.

DEADWOOD – Pete Dexter (1986)

In 1876, Bill Hickock arrives in the Dakota mining town of Deadwood and finds it a chaotic hellhole. Wild Bill has a reputation for cleaning up lawless towns, but the legendary gunfighter is ageing and sickening, and Deadwood harbours some very bad men. Real life Wild West history given an unforgettable fictional spin by one of America’s great chroniclers of its inner darkness. Not just a western. Both funny and tragic, gritty, dogged, crammed with real-life characters, and atmospheric of the Old West as it was, not as you’d want it.

CREEPERS – David Morrell (2005)

A band of New Jersey urban explorers seek to conquer a century-old hotel built by a prohibition-era eccentric and said to be packed with bootlegger treasure, only to find themselves the object of a deadly hunt. The ultra eeriness of the rain-soaked ruin soon shifts aside for thrills of the action-movie variety, making this rapid-fire page-turner a little like two novels pressed into one. Despite slimmer than usual characterisation, Morrell entertains throughout, hitting us with multiple desperate scenarios and constant hair-trigger violence.

HARE HOUSE – Sally Hinchcliffe (2022)

A disgraced teacher arrives in a remote community in the Scottish Lowlands, where she encounters an atmosphere of mystery and rumours of witchcraft. A twisty psychological thriller with a rural setting rather than a typical folk horror, but very intriguing and filled with menacing and macabre touches. Concisely but exquisitely written and featuring characters so real you can touch them (not least the Galloway landscape itself). Enigmatic and effective scare-fare.

THE BLUE RING – A.J. Quinnell (1993)

A former French Foreign legionnaire vows to destroy a Mediterranean-based sex trafficking ring. Rousing, butt-kicking actioner of the old school. I didn’t believe the character of Michael, a 19-year-old lethal weapon wise beyond his years, but Creasy (about whom five novels have been written, and who was portrayed by Denzel Washington in Man on Fire) is a cold, hard hero who makes 007 look tame. Committed revenge thriller of a sort you tend not to see these days.

ELEMENTAL FORCES – edited by Mark Morris (2024)

The hideous thing that lived deep in the pool. The note on the door that spelled utter disaster. The effigy they should have burned, and the horrors it wreaked. The living curse that worked its way through one generation after the next … and more. Another eclectic anthology of gut-chilling fiction from Flame Tree, again as edited by horror polymath, Mark Morris. Ranges from unsettling to smack-in-the-face terrifying, with wow!-quality writing always at the fore. Long may the ABC of Horror reign over us.

Why do I dabble in this deepest darkness?

 

Someone asked me the other day: ‘Why do you dabble in the darkness so much? Why, in your writing, are you so obsessed with the frightening and the horrific?’ It was a fair enough question, and it got me wondering if maybe it sometimes seems a little odd, even worrying, that my interests, (outside of sport!), lie almost entirely within the realms of dark fiction (and sometimes dark nonfiction like folklore or true crime). So, clearly, it’s a question I need to answer. And in today’s entirely self-indulgent blogpost, I’m going to attempt to do just that.

I should also mention that I’m penning this missive in eager anticipation of THE LODGE, my next novel and without doubt my darkest crime thriller to date, which is published on January 15 (yep, in only nine days’ time, though alternatively you can pre-order it right now!). Early reviews include terms like ‘captivating’ and ‘suspenseful’, and mention characters who are ‘a great mix of dynamic personalities and sarcastic wit’.

On the subject of books, I also need to announce that one of my novels of last year, THE ISLAND, is currently only 99p in ebook (this applies both in the UK and Australia) and will remain so until the end of this month. Come on folks … I know the New Year sales aren’t much to write home about anymore, but here’s one that you surely can’t afford to miss.

And now …

What took me to the Dark Side?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a happy chap. My interest in the scary and grotesque does not stem from some deep-rooted inner depression or soul-destroying spiritual horror. So, never fear – I’m not going to spend the next few paragraphs baring my innermost sorrows. Far from it. My interest in dark fiction is an interest of the exhilarating kind. It thrills me, inspires me. It’s not a curse, it’s a gift. But it must have come from somewhere, right?

In my case it goes back to roughly when I was about three. That’s approximately the age I was when I realised that the best parts of fairy tales were the bits with the witches, the goblins and the ogres (you couldn’t beat Rumplestiltskin, right, for truly darkening a ‘well loved tale’). 

Now, I don’t mean this in a “heh heh heh … secretly I’ve always been evil!” kind of way. No, not at all. I’ve always rooted for the good guys, but one thing I learned very early on was that, in fiction, it’s not the hero or heroine’s inherent right to win. Victory has to be earned. The good guys must first overcome immense odds. And the key to this often means surviving colossal hardship and getting the better of opponents who, quite simply, are devastatingly bad.

Top-drawer enemies

In some ways, of course, even that’s a cheat. Because the troubles that bedevil us in the real world are often onerous, intractable, heartbreakingly complex, and cannot just be condensed into the form of a dragon or giant, which, scary though they are, can still be dispatched with a judicious sword-stroke. Nevertheless, the opponents encountered in our longest-lasting stories and most profound lessons for life always reflect this if they can, confronting us with marquee villains, top-drawer enemies whom it costs our heroes dearly to defeat.

You see this even in theology. Jesus Christ was pitted against none other than Satan himself and in order to achieve total victory, needed not just to perish, but to perish in horrible fashion. Perhaps in my case, that’s Ground Zero ... where it all really started. I was raised in a devout but non-oppressive Catholic household, where there was always a focus on doing the right thing but also an understanding that sometimes we fail, even though that latter should never be a source of despair to us because the ultimate price for sin had already been paid by Jesus himself.

So, there you have it, possibly. Ingrained into me from my earliest awareness was the notion that triumphing over evil may – in fact must – exact a very high price.

The same message is found throughout folklore and legend, and in all great fiction, and so again – and please pardon me for making this thing so personal – I’m going back to my beginnings.

The spark

My father, Brian, no mean playwright himself, was undoubtedly the spark.

He too had a deep fascination for the strange and uncanny and would assail me with stories drawn from our eeriest fables. The Greek myths were a particular favourite, containing, as they did, some of the most fiendish villains in all of human imagination: Medusa, the gorgon; the multi-headed Hydra; the bull-headed Minotaur; and Telos, the unstoppable bronze giant.

But the tale that stuck with me the longest was not Greek, but Norse.

The story of Beowulf, which comes to us in the form of an Old English poem dated to somewhere between the eighth and tenth centuries, made such a deep impact on my young self because it had an air of the real. Now … please let me explain that outlandish statement.

To start with, the most memorable antagonist in the story, Grendel (depicted right on the cover of John Gardner’s marvelous novel), has an actual personality. He isn’t just evil for the sake of it. He’s been provoked, though when his dark and barbarous nature overtakes him, he decides that if he can’t have men’s friendship, he’ll have their fear. And what an opponent he makes. His first attack alone sees him slaughter thirty victims and then drink and smear himself with their blood. After that, he doesn’t just continually ransack the wreckage of King Hrothgar’s golden hall, Heorot, he prowls the fens and the lonely roads, killing everyone he encounters. In so many ways, he is the prototype serial murderer: a reviled outsider who lost his soul under a tide of uncontrollable hatred.

Even Beowulf, an archetypical Viking hero, brawny and fearless, underestimates him, or at least underestimates the threat that Grendel embodies, because though he inflicts a mortal wound on Grendel in their first battle, he never imagines the monster might actually be part of a family, that he might have a mother – the Water Hag – who then comes creeping through the darkness herself and tears off the head of Aescher, King Hrothgar’s closest companion.

Beowulf ultimately kills the Water Hag too, though this encounter is far more terrifying, the hero having to track her through a network of dank caves heaped with the rotted corpses of the multiple victims she and her son have murdered.

Of course, Beowulf himself eventually sacrifices his life while trying to protect his people from the story’s definitive foe, the Firedrake, whom he also fatally wounds during an epic battle. The story of Beowulf would not be the same were it not for the terror inflicted by Grendel and his mother, the original ‘walkers in the dark’, and later, by a dragon so massively powerful, so vindictive that it spreads wanton and total destruction at a mere whim, so unstoppable that JRR Tolkien would use him as the blueprint for his own dragon, Smaug, and his own ‘monster of monsters’, Ancalagon the Black.

But for me, it doesn’t end with Jesus Christ or Beowulf. Not at all.

A pleasing terror  

Those were only my earliest years, and yet my head was already filled with stories in which heroes squared off against an evil so massive that it might be the death of them, against monsters that would turn you to stone with a glance or wrench off your head while you were sleeping. Not much there in the way of fluffy bunnies or cute little fairies.

The real question though, is why did I enjoy it so much? Why, even as a very young child, did I find pleasure in the terror imposed by these fearsome adversaries? Okay, it was a safe kind of terror. No matter how scary the story got, you always knew that no real gorgon or cyclops was going to come into your bedroom at night. It was a ‘pleasing terror’, a term that scholars would in due course use to describe the ultra-frightening ghost stories of MR James.

It also landed at the subliminal level, as I’ve already mentioned. It didn’t just make the good guys all the more admirable, it worked nicely if you were looking for a truly dramatic tale with thrills and chills but wrapped around a positive message.

Brave hero = good; carnivorous brute = bad

But this was during my infancy. What about my teenage years, when I commenced that seemingly endless ascent towards adulthood? Would I grow out of all this, or would the opposite happen?

Generation X

These formative years, or so psychoanalysts tell me, are the most important period of our ‘growing up’ process. A time when all our intimate hopes and fears finally crystalise, when the attitudes we’ll hold for ever more are formed. And mine occurred during what in social terms was truly one of the strangest, most dramatic periods in recent British history.

The 1960s and 1970s were not, as is commonly believed, the dawn of a new age, they were the end of an old one.

In some ways, when I was a boy almost nothing had changed for decades. Bomb damage was still in evidence from World War Two. The town I grew up in, Wigan, was still forested with tall chimneys, all smoking, while most men worked in factories, coal mines and textile mills, and married women tended to stay at home with the kids. In other ways, though, things were changing and changing fast – perhaps too fast.

Like it or not, the sexual revolution had unintended consequences. It certainly liberated a lot of young folks from constraints that many considered Victorian in origin, but at the same time, in other cases, concepts like restraint and decency also waved adieu. Prostitution and pornography didn’t just come out into the open, everyday sex and explicit nudity were suddenly all over the place: on our cinemas, on our mid-evening TV schedules, on the shelves in our local newsagents. And this was the shocking new world than a latchkey kid like me suddenly found himself trying to navigate, having been completely unprepared for it of course (aside from hearing repeated assurances that indulging in ‘filth’ would not only get me a good hiding, but also was a guaranteed ticket to Hell).

But it gets even worse. With the new permissiveness, the gloves were taken off in other fields of endeavour. For example, my mother had shelves of Agatha Christie titles: yes, the Queen of Cosy Crime, and yet the covers to her books in that era were among the most horrific I’d ever seen. Remember the skull among the bobbing apples for Hallowe’en Party?, or the rotting face of the murdered old man on A Caribbean Mystery?, or the tarantula emerging from a split-open head on Appointment with Death?

At the same time, actual horror films, which as prepubescents we’d mostly only glimpsed if our babysitting grandparents fell asleep late on Saturday nights and which usually came in crackly black and white and starred Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, seemed a lot less quaint when, thanks to Hammer, the blood ran a vivid shade of red and most of Dracula’s victims were nubile young women who often were killed in scenes reminiscent of rape-murders. And this newfangled near-nihilism would double down on itself even more in the 1970s, hard-hitting movies like The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre genuinely shocking and horrifying their audiences.

Such new slap-in-the-face entertainment was even reflected on television. It wasn’t just late-night horror shows like Thriller, Beasts, or Dead of Night; it emerged in more prosaic TV series like Play for Today – Robin Redbreast, anyone?, Penda’s Fen? – on public information films warning about household hazards, and even in children’s television. 

Perennial favourite, Dr Who, saw the Daleks carrying out mass exterminations, homicidal giants that looked like the Devil stalking the English countryside, a monster modelled on Frankenstein brutally murdering hippie chicks on a distant planet, massive rats eating people in the London sewers, and an alien abomination sprouting from a frozen pod and turning any humans it touched into shambling, man-eating plants.

Just think about that.

Fatal infection, mindless murder, atrocities on a scale the Nazis would have been proud of … all served up as fun for the kids.

It didn’t end with TV. Comics also adopted the do-or-die mantle. Luke Cage came on the scene in 1972, The Punisher in 1974, both of whom responded to the violence of the underworld with extreme violence of their own, while here in the UK we had Action! 

This included no-holds barred storylines based on monster movies like Jaws or X-films like Dirty Harry and Marathon Man, or leapt at us straight from the blood-soaked pages of Sven Hassel’s war novels.

This cavalier approach to the grimmer aspects of life extended into everyday routine. In a town like Wigan, our outdoor playgrounds were sweeps of colliery spoil-land and the hazardous ruins of gutted factories, and no adults ever really objected to us hanging out there.

At the same time, gang culture had arrived. Mods and rockers, skinheads and Hell’s Angels filled the newsreels, and juvenile street-gangs sought to copy them, in some cases encouraged by the pulp novels of Richard Allen (real name James Moffat). Titles like Boot Boys, Knuckle Girls, Glam and Terrace Terrors, were filled with youth violence, and it was youngsters like us who mostly bought them as they were available cheaply from any newsagent regardless of your age (and let’s not talk about the Pan Horror Stories, which were also easily bought, and which were gorier and sleazier than almost anything that had gone before).

Even trips out with grandma were no protection. I remember visiting Louis Tussauds Waxworks in Blackpool, and in the Chamber of Horrors, instead of seeing murderers from long, long ago, gazed instead upon meticulously recreated, multi-fatality road accidents, not to mention scalpings, impalements and burnings on the wheel, all of course swimming in blood and accompanied by soundtracks comprising hideous groans and screams.

By the way, I should add at this point that I don’t mean to imply our parents and guardians were neglectful. But the old tradition of parental trust was still in force. Kids who endured corporal punishment both at home and school and could even expect a good hard crack from a patrolling copper if he caught you up to no good, were considered tough enough to roam wherever they would without supervision, and to deal with most situations they might encounter.

But at what point does toughness become recklessness?

Real world menace

Our independent spirit overrode concern for many kinds of dangers.

The 1960s and 1970s, both in Britain and the US, were the beginning of what is these days, somewhat distastefully, known as ‘the golden age of the serial killer’.

In this period, America’s worst ne’er-do-wells – brutal mass-slayers like Charles Manson, Richard Speck and Ted Bundy – hogged all the headlines. 

But in the UK, it wasn’t much different: we had the Moors Murderers, the Black Panther, the Cannock Chase Child-Killer, the Yorkshire Ripper. They certainly made the news over here. The new buzz-phrase was ‘stranger danger’, while every other TV bulletin seemed to carry grainy footage of lines of police officers picking their way over wasteland, or only semi-human photofits of the suspects (which were a source of terror all of their own).

And yet despite the shadowy presence of madmen like these on the peripheries of our world, we’d been through the mill so much by then that it didn’t seem to worry us in the least. There were too many games to be played in the autumn-darkened woods, too many ruined factories to explore. If anything, the fact there were real killers on the prowl inspired us. I’ll never forget the exhilaration we felt during one Halloween party when we all gathered in someone’s shed, clad in homemade costumes (so crude they probably looked more frightening than the real thing!), and told each other horror stories, including one that had come straight from the previous week’s newspaper about a young lad who’d been slashed to death with a pair of scissors only a few miles from where we were sitting. We even rechristened those regular nighttime games we played: ‘Hide and Seek’ became ‘Murder in the Dark’ or ‘Werewolf by Night’, ‘What Time is it, Mr Wolf’ became ‘Rip His Head Off, Mr Wolf!’

Embraced by the Dark Side

What was the upshot of all this close familiarity with the darkness?

Well … no, we didn’t become killers ourselves. Or at least, I didn’t. And, at the end of the day, I can only talk for myself.

It’s perhaps worth remembering that on entering adulthood, I joined the Greater Manchester Police (and that’s a whole other bunch of hair-raising stories), so I never really left that darker world behind. And in due course, when I finally started to write, I didn’t really think I could go back to anything else. All the other aspects of life seemed so tame. Deep down, I might even have been traumatised. Were those of us who’d come through all that now like war veterans, unable to adjust to normality because normality just seemed flat, boring and empty?

That’s a bit melodramatic, but who knows, maybe.

I’m now in late middle age. Still happily married, my children all grown up and moved away. Even my police career (such as it was) is far behind me, and yet I still find fear, terror and horror the most potent human emotions to weave stories around.

I understand the appeal of romantic fiction, of cosy crime, of whimsical fantasy and laugh-out-loud comedy (especially the latter, seeing as we get so little of that in modern times), but I’m sorry … for me, it’s always going to be the thriller or the chiller. Or preferably both.

A devil’s brew that is definitely best served dark and cold.

And by the way, THE LODGE ticks all of these boxes. It’s one of the grimmest, scariest books I’ve ever written, and just to remind you, it’s published in nine days’ time on January 15.