Going over to the dark side …

It must be about twenty years ago that Ra Page at Comma Press asked me if I would be interested in submitting something for a collection of horror stories dealing specifically with modern life. I said to my husband. ‘I don’t think horror is really my thing.’ He said, ‘You’re a writer, aren’t you? So write something.’ Oh! Ok …

When I thought about it, I realised that I might not enjoy visceral horror, but I did like the classic ghost stories of M. R. James and what are sometimes termed ‘tales of unease.’ An atmosphere of creeping dread and suspense was already something I was aiming for in my crime fiction. I was talking to some friends about this and one of them (thank you, Martin!) told me about the time he was working in a care home for adults and heard a baby crying over the monitor when there was no baby there. That was the starting point for my story ‘Safe as Houses,’ which appeared in Phobic: Modern Horror Stories, edited by Andy Murray (Comma Press, 2007).

Writing this kind of fiction is a libration from writing crime where everything has to have a rational explanation. It’s also a challenge: how to convince the reader – even if just for the space of the story – of something that in real life would seem incredible. So I was happy to contribute a story to Monster Capital: Tales of Modern Unease, which has just been published by Comma Press. My story was inspired by an article that I read years ago about a woman, a local government official, whose job was tracing the next of kin (if any) of people who had died alone in their home. In,’Modern Domestic Appliances’ she discovers a lot more than she’d bargained for.

‘Safe as Houses’ is also the title story in a collection of my stories to be published by Comma later this year.