Graeme Reynolds's Blog

Over the past few years, I think it’s fair to say that I’d been struggling with my writing. I put an awful lot of time and effort into the publishing side of things with Horrific Tales, putting my own work on the back burner. However, after a couple of debacles with the publishing side of things – great books like Wasteland Gods by Jonathan Woodrow, Deadside Revolution by Terry Grimwood, High Cross by Paul Melhuish and The House of Frozen Screams by Thana Niveau in particular failing to get any traction despite my best efforts – and me then throwing all of my eggs into a single basket with a book from a well known author that I had to pull mere weeks from publication because they went down a very public antivax conspiracy rabbit hole at the height of the pandemic, I really lost my enthusiasm for that side of the industry. I lost thousands of pounds and I was not doing right, I felt, by the authors I was publishing, so I gave everyone the option to have their rights revert, and got back to my own writing career.

I picked up a Freewrite Traveler in May 2021 and immediately fell in love with it. It had it’s quirks for sure, but having that little portable typewriter with an e-ink screen and next to no editing capability transformed the way I worked. For the High Moor novels, as well as the short stories I wrote, I tended to re-read what I’d done in my last session to get me up to speed on the story before starting the new days work, often editing and tweaking as I went. What that meant was that I tended to have fairly clean first drafts that took me an absolute age to produce. In addition, I found it quite easy to get distracted by social media popups on a laptop as I worked. The device simply did too much and plugged into every single thing I could use to procrastinate. What the Freewrite gave me was the ability to get into a flow state – to just get words down with no need or even the ability to tinker with them. It meant that, while subsequent drafts needed a lot more work, as a drafting tool it was fantastic. It was light, portable and the e-ink screen meant I could sit outside in direct sunlight and work in a way that I never could with a laptop.

I wrote Dark and Lonely Water almost entirely on the Freewrite and then got on with my current WIP, Night Bleeds Into Dawn on it. I got about 50,000 words of the new book written and then the unthinkable happened. My beloved Freewrite died on me.

It didn’t die outright, however. It started acting up. It messed with the formatting of the text as you can see above. I couldn’t even backspace past the bits that it mangled. And the resulting text file that was synced to my PC behaved strangely as well, as if there were hidden characters in there, screwing things up.

I contacted Astrohaus support and was told to factory reset the device and then bring the firmware back up to the latest version, which I did (it took 24 hours to get it there – not the fastest process). Unfortunately this did not sort the problem out and, infact, seemed to make it worse. The device was freezing up and became generally unusable. So, knowing that it would be out of guarantee (and then discovering that the warranty is only 90 days!) I asked about a repair. “Sure,” they said, just send it back – that will be $150 plus postage. That seemed fair enough, despite postage costs to the US being extortionate. However when they found out I was UK based, they instead tried to get me to buy a new device with a 25% discount. When I pushed on delivery costs, they quoted me $130 postage costs – more than double what I could send it for myself via UPS. And of course, even if I bought a new one, a good chunk of that discount would be eaten up by the delivery fee. In other words, I was stuck with it.

Now, I didn’t want to throw it away, so I looked into repairing it myself. I’m not skilled in these things by any means, but I can do some soldering. I discovered that this problem seems to be caused by the Lithium Ion battery swelling over time, putting pressure on the membrane keyboard from behind, causing the problematic behaviour. On examination, however, the battery is very long, very thin and glued rather solidly to the rear of the keyboard. It flexed and bent with even the slightest attempt to remove it and, given the way that LiOn batteries tend to burst into flames when stressed, I decided against this course of action. I missed my freewrite but was not about to burn my house down trying to fix it.

I was left with a quandry. My stepson is borrowing my laptop during his exams, so I tried heading to my favourite coffeeshop with my Samsung tablet and keyboard. Which was fine until it auto-hotspotted to my phone and I got a bunch of Facebook messenger popups that broke me out of my flow. And then I went and tinkered with the text I’d written and suddenly I was back in my old, bad way of working.

So, as a stopgap measure, I headed to Ebay and picked up an Alphasmart Neo for £80 to tide me over until I could decide what to do. No way I would go for another Freewrite until they made the batteries user replacable and apart from a Japanese device that had its own issues, there weren’t really many other options on the market.

When the Neo was delivered, I have to admit I was a little disappointed. Where the Freewrite Traveler was a sleek, streamlined piece of modern design, this was a big, ugly lump of green plastic. It looked every inch a two decade old piece of technology. In terms of looks, the Freewrite has it beaten, hands down.

Then I took it out and did a writing session on it. And rather quickly changed my mind.

The keyboard is far better. Infact that keyboard is gorgeous. An absolute joy to use. The Freewrite Traveler’s keys are unresponsive and spongy by comparison. I rattled off 1500 words in a coffeeshop in record time. A definite win for the Neo.

Then there is the battery, for which I’d had so many problems. The Freewrite has a bespoke Lithium Ion battery that lasts a good few weeks on a charge and, when it finally gives up the ghost, renders the £500 device largely useless. The Neo uses a couple of AA’s, lasts allegedly for about a year on those, and also has a standard coin battery in there to keep internal settings and the like. So that is another massive win for the Neo.

The Neo’s LCD screen seems fine in all but the most direct sunlight, so is a little worse than the Freewrite’s e-ink one, but its hardly noticable. What is noticable is that the Freewrite had some lag between the key being pressed and the character turning up on screen. Not something that was hugely noticable unless you are typing up a storm and then have to give the device a second to catch up. The Neo doesn’t have that lag, which is something inherent in e-ink screens. So I’d edge the Neo ahead on that score as well.

The last area for comparison is the file transfer. The Freewrite has come on in leaps and bounds with its firmware in recent years. It connects to your cloud storage – dropbox, google drive, onedrive etc, and uploads a text file to a postbox folder. Or you can email it to yourself with a send key. This used to be flaky as hell and would sometimes require a hard reboot to make the device send your files across. This is far better with the v2.0 firmware.

The Neo needs to be connected to a USB A port with a cable, which is less convenient. If you get the management tools from the net, it will download text files into a folder of your choice. You can also open the document you want to input and press the send button, at which point the device will update the document a character at a time. I kinda like watching this but also realise that I’m probably going to get bored of it and use the file upload module most of the time. It also, annoyingly, mixes up the @ and ” characters due to a keyboard layout mismatch that I’ve not sorted out yet. So a win for the Freewrite but by no means a deal breaker on the Neo.

The last thing, though is the cost. Alphasmart vanished back in 2013, so these devices have not been made for over a decade. But you can find them on ebay and the like for about £80. I also found a place in the UK with plenty of spares and who repair broken ones for £40. That means that the Alphasmart Neo I bought is six times cheaper than a Freewrite Traveler. And that is a number that is hard to ignore.

I have to say, when I picked up this archaic old typewriter, I was expecting to have it a few weeks or months at most. A stopgap before I caved in and bought another Freewrite. I was not expecting to actually prefer it.

I’m sure that either Astrohaus will address the issues with their Freewrites to make the batteries replacable, or someone else will bring out a cheaper and superior product at some point as there is a definite gap in the market.

But for now, I’m more than happy with my old Alphasmart Neo.

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Hey, everyone. It’s been a while since I last updated this site, but exciting things are happening so I thought I’d share some news with you all.

My first new novel in seven years (7!) is called Dark and Lonely Water. I’ve actually finished writing it and it’s currently being shopped around some publishers with a hopeful release date of 2023.

Here is a temporary cover that I mocked up using Midjourney for some ARC copies I’ve sent out to beta readers and to some other authors in search of blurbs, to whet your appetite.

I’d say that, in some ways, this book is a slight departure for me (mostly in that it contains almost no werewolves at all), although I can confirm that it is set in the High Moor Universe. Instead of full-on, balls-to-the-wall tension, gore and violence from the first page, I’ve tried my hand at something a little more along the lines of folk horror. However, I’ve taken the elements of folk horror that I do enjoy, such as taking existing myths (both ancient and recent in the case of this book) and building a narrative around them), while discarding some of the parts I’m not so keen on (glacial pace, massive groups of elderly cultists running around with their knackers flapping in the wind). The resulting book is most definitely a Graeme Reynolds novel, with my trademarks of real-world locations, (hopefully) realistic characters, a twisting plot with elements of humour, and some really rather dark and brutal parts too.

I’ll give you a little background on how the idea came about…

Back in 2017, I came across a recent urban myth – that of the Manchester Pusher. There have been a couple of documentaries on the subject, but the upshot of them is that in both Manchester and the North West of England in general, statistically the number of people drowning, especially young men, is significantly higher than the national average. From memory, I think it’s as much as four or five times more. The belief among the populace is that a serial killer is pushing people into the canals and waterways, and then keeping them in the water until they drown. This claim is refuted by the police.

You can view the channel four documentary here.

Now, as a horror author, I often see stories like this and think “what if…?”. In this instance, my thought process went along the lines of “What if this was being done by a supernatural creature?” So, of course, my next course of action was to start looking at myths and legends of the North West of England that involved water. Which led me to the story of Jenny Greenteeth.

Now, there is a good chance that some of you will have heard of this legend. A quick google search will reveal that she is a water witch that tempts children into the water to devour them, and it was widely believed to have been a story created to keep children away from ponds and rivers covered in duckweed, which would tangle their limbs and close over their heads, drowning them. I quite liked the idea of combining the modern myth and the ancient one, so the idea for Dark and Lonely Water was born.

Then I started to dig a little deeper into the legend of Jenny Greenteeth and came across the newspaper clipping below.

This image was from the Liverpool Echo, around the turn of the century. The story is that, while Liverpool Cathedral was being excavated, a life-sized wooden statue of a woman was unearthed. The statue was found in the centre of what seemed to be a small, pre-roman settlement and was inscribed with arcane symbols on its base. Despite its extreme age, the statue was in exceptional condition. Unfortunately, this statue disappeared within twenty-four hours of being unearthed, never to be seen again.

There are other bits and pieces of lore surrounding Jenny (or Ginny) Greenteeth that I came across and a lot of it is incorporated into the novel with only one or two embellishments. I won’t go into further detail for fear of spoiling the book, but I’ve tried to remain true to what I found wherever possible.

And yes, the name is taken from the harrowing public service film from the 1970s, narrated by Donald Pleasance which you can traumatise yourself by watching below.

So, there you have it. Watch this space for future details about the book’s eventual home and release date

Graeme

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It’s quite astonishing to me that on November 15th this year, High Moor will have been out for ten years. To celebrate this fact, I’m releasing a VERY limited edition hardcover box set of the original trilogy.

As you can see from the image above, the cover art for each book has been reworked by the wonderful Ben Baldwin. The books are dust jacketed case laminate hardcovers measuring 8.5 x 5.5 each. But that’s not all…

The books also contain colour illustrations from key moments in the story by the amazing Michelle Merlini, who did the illustrations in the Leaders of the Pack anthology.

There are short stories and novelettes set in the High Moor universe in each book, including some that have never previously been seen and that are set AFTER the events of Bloodmoon.

And there are a couple of random ramblings from myself about the influences, themes present in the book, and why they were very personal to me.

The book will ship in November or December 2021 and you can pre-order it at the following link. There will only be 150 copies of this, and its already selling well. If your budget won’t stretch quite that far then I’ll be issuing regular case laminate hardcovers later in the year that don’t include the illustrations or additional content.

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The Rats And The Ruins: James Herbert’s Domain.

James Herbert’s career, of course, began with The Rats. It established his trademark style very early on: direct and confrontational, with solid, often working-class characterisation and a take-no-prisoners attitude. And it created a highly effective monster for the 1970s and ‘80s, imitated by a host of lesser writers pressing normally innocuous creatures into service as bloodthirsty flesh-eaters.

Nearly all these imitations fell flat, because they were missing one vital ingredient: the ability to locate and tap into a deep, universal fear. Time and again, Herbert, at his best, had it.

Many people fear feral rats: dirty, disease-spreading creatures, vicious when cornered or when their prey was helpless (just ask Orwell’s Winston Smith.) Herbert, born and raised in London’s bombed-out post-war East End, knew that very well. By making them bigger, more aggressive and more ruthlessly cunning, he linked them to another primal dread – being eaten alive – and created a genuine nightmare creature, one he revisited in two further novels, Lair and Domain.

In Domain, Herbert’s instinct for finding a near-universal psychological pressure point was at its most unerring. He deployed the rats in a new, imaginatively challenging environment even more frightening – and plausible – than them: the aftermath of a nuclear attack.

The novel opens with a precise, clinical description of a nuclear bomb exploding over London, then leads into a demonstration of another of Herbert’s strengths: the vignette. The in-yer-face nature of his narratives always made a high casualty rate inevitable, but for those deaths to be anything more than splatter, they had to befall people we at least gave a damn about.

Herbert had honed the ability to paint a character in immediate, empathetic terms before killing them off, and he deploys it brilliantly here. We’re used to the opening chapter introducing our principal characters, and Herbert plays on that expectation: we meet in succession an elderly Jewish grandmother, a stingy garage owner, a high-class prostitute, a phone engineer in the Post Office Tower and a police constable on his first day on the job. We meet them, we share their hopes and fears, experience a flicker of hope that this one may be our protagonist, our anchor in the chaos that follows – and then they die.

Only at the end of the chapter, with the introduction of civil servant Alex Dealey, do we at last meet one of the book’s principal characters, and even he isn’t the main protagonist: that’s ex-pilot Mike Culver, who pulls Dealey to shelter.

Meanwhile, the rats, having sensed their human arch-enemy is now weakened, emerge from hiding in search of prey…

In the aftermath of the explosions, Culver, Dealey and, Kate, another survivor, find their way to a government blast shelter. After the worst of the fall-out has dispersed, they venture into the ruined city above; later still, forced out of the shelter, they search for the government’s central bunker, only to find that the rats have swarmed through it and killed everyone there.

More bleak vignettes are scattered through the book. A work-from-home businessman hides in his cellar with his family. A teenage girl is menaced by a rapist in the cinema where she and a hundred others have taken refuge. A misanthropic salesman finds he’s sharing his homebuilt blast shelter with a cat. None end with even a glimmer of hope. In some, the rats bring havoc and death, but it’s easy to think these are the lucky ones: the other cases are often more disturbing. The saddest and most haunting scene of all portrays a housewife, her mind broken; tying her dead family to chairs around the kitchen table and serving them a breakfast of mouldy, silverfish-ridden cereal, she chatters to them as if it’s just another day.

The rats were, themselves, the product of a mutation caused by nuclear testing, so in a sense the wheel has come full circle in Domain. Indeed, at the end Culver is haunted by his glimpse of a clutch of mutant baby rats, and their resemblance to human embryos, implying we have more in common with the rodents than we’d like to admit.

Domain, to be blunt, scared the living shit out of me when I read it aged eleven, and it wasn’t – most of the time – because of the rats. It’s probably Herbert’s best novel; I still remember it years later, and it’s partly responsible for making me still write weird shit today.

Simon Bestwick is the author of Tide Of Souls, The Faceless and Black Mountain. His short fiction has appeared in Black Static and Best Horror Of The Year, and been collected in A Hazy Shade Of Winter, Pictures Of The Dark, Let’s Drink To The Dead and The Condemned. His new novel, Hell’s Ditch – like Domain, a horror novel set in the aftermath of a nuclear strike – is out now.

Hell’s Ditch

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The cinematic werewolf is one of those monsters that is done, with a few noteable exceptions, incredibly badly. The fact that the werewolf transformation effects seem to have peaked over thirty years ago with American Werewolf in London is, quite frankly, depressing and while there was a flurry of great movies in the early 2000’s (Ginger Snaps Trilogy and Dog Soldiers), the majority of films featuring everyone’s favourite cursed, hairy beast have been somewhere between crap and absolutely god-awful.

However, all is not lost. Over the last couple of years there have been a few absolutely fantastic werewolf films that may have slipped under your radar. And I thought it was about time that I shared a few of my more recent favourites, for those of you who are looking for a change from the classics.

Wer (2013)

When an American family are slaughtered on a camping trip to rural France, the police initially suspect a bear or similar wild animal is responsible. It doesn’t take long for them to launch a murder investigation, however, and arrest a hirstute giant of a man called Talan Gwynek for the atrocities. An American human rights lawyer takes on the case for Talan’s defense as things are not quite adding up – chief among them being the fact that her client is suffering from a debilitating disease that should it be proven, would mean he could not possibly have committed the murders.

To say any more would do the film a disservice. Suffice to say that something that starts out looking very much like a legal drama quickly turns into a very effective, almost realistic take on the werewolf legend. The action in the later half of the film is quite brutal and the transformation scenes are subtle enough to retain the initial realism while being more than enough to show that this really is a werewolf that they are dealing with. Things get a little overdone towards the final act, but this remains a thoroughly enjoyable take on the werewolf legend, with a bit of pseudo science thrown in for good measure and enough carnage to satisfy any horror gore hound. 8/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXxYZ4VsOV0

Attack of the Werewolves (Game of Werewolves) (2011)

Tomas is an unsucessful writer who is invited to return to his childhood home to collect an award. Despite warnings from his mother he returns to his home town, only to find that perhaps the locals were not quite as forthcoming about the reasons for his invite as they could have been. He is, infact, there to end a curse that was placed upon the village over a century ago. No prizes for guessing what the curse entailed…

I love this film. Despite the fact that it’s in Spanish, the comedy comes across extremely well, with plenty of laugh out loud moments among the carnage. The practical effects are surprisingly good and it walks that very difficult line between comedy and horror with a confidence that few films manage.

I realise that subtitles films are not everyone’s cup of tea, but I strongly recommend you check this movie out. It’s hilarious, well plotted, well acted and doesn’t shy away from the blood letting. 8/10

When Animals Dream (2014)

16 Year Old Marie is going through some changes. She spends her time in a small Danish fishing village with her father, alternatively helping to care for her wheelchair bound mother and working at the local fish processing factory. She is mostly shunned by the townsfolk, who treat her with something between contempt and fear. However when it becomes apparent that she may be suffering from the same illness as her mother, the people in the town feel that they have to take action.

This film is gorgeous. From the bleak setting, to the washed out colour scheme and the absolutely pitch perfect acting, this film blew me away. Despite it being subtitled, the dialogue is minimal, with most of the work being done through action and body language. I probably could have followed the story with the subtitles turned off, such is the quality of the performances.

When Animals Dream is, in tone if nothing else, the werewolf equivalent of Let The Right One In, but in many ways I actually think this is the better film. The theme of a young girl going through change and having the strength to make her own decisions about her life are possibly a little heavy handed at times, but its a riveting, melancholy and minimalist piece of film making and deserves to be considered a classic. Probably the best film I have seen this year in any genre. 9/10

Howl (2015)

Joe is a young ticket collector for a rail company who, having just been passed up for promotion, agrees to work the late night shift to give him a chance of spending time with Ellen, an attractive colleague who is also working the same shift. When the train hits something while passing through a forest and the driver goes missing, Joe has to rally the passengers to survive the night as they come under attack by something in the woods.

I really enjoyed Howl. The beginning especially does a great job of building tension, even if its a little slow to start off with. There is a palpable sense of dread among the passengers, especially after an ill fated attempt to walk to the next station reveals what exactly happened to the driver. The attacks are fast, brutal and utterly vicious.

That’s not to say that Howl does not have its problems. Some of the characters, especially the token city boy wanker and annoying teenager, are perhaps overdone. A few of them do some amazingly stupid things (lets go off by myself into the woods, with a torch, when you know the place is crawling with werewolves, because you heard a noise… yeah…) and far too many of the deaths happen off camera. While this builds suspense early on, I found it becoming annoying as the movie progressed. Also, in the later scenes the werewolves, quite frankly, spend too much time pissing about and posturing in front of their prey, which, given the fast, brutal initial attacks, also irritated me a bit.

That said, Howl is a decent addition to this list. When it works, it really does work. The comedy elements are well done, with a few laugh out loud moments, and it has enough suspense and scares for me to forgive its shortcomings. 7/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHm8t9fCxeY

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