I’m in this edition with my story ‘Ghost of a Fossil’
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It’s still a yarn I’m proud of. Indeed, I liked the characters of the crotchety but wise farmer Antrobus and the perplexed but determined estate agent Wingood so much that I’ve finally begun writing them a new tale. With the working title ‘A Glass Darkly’, this story is set two years after the events that culminated in the destruction of that eldritch house, Marchley Howe. And this time our two ageing protagonists are attempting to help a young photographer who has had the misfortune to be possessed by an entity out of folklore associated with an ancient barrow, Erl’s Low.

Darkness is brewing once more. Will Antrobus and Wingood save the lad before it’s too late? What’s more, will they survive the terrible climax when they confront the thing in the mound?

I am now about 20k words in. And, as I’m a ‘pantser’, I still have no idea how or where this yarn will end up. It began as a short story, then Wingood and Antrobus butted in and made it their own. However, I’m aiming to have it ready and edited by late summer. Watch this space!

I’m writing still.

At the moment, I’m in Istanbul/Constantinople, the year is 1937. The seal ring of King Solomon has been discovered; its rediscovery portends war! Yes, it’s the penultimate story of the redoubtable German detectives Karl von Hallerstein and Gustav Wessels. Their debut was in ‘The Beast of Babylon’, but the tales have grown….

Of course, their adventures are not simply an historical romance set in a turbulent period of world history. It is more than a hard-boiled detective novella - though that genre plays its part. For in these pages also lurks the Weird. The two men navigate both a material reality that is in itself tumultuous, whilst at the same time, encountering things from beyond.

Inevitably, they must ride the storm of history that envelops them. But outside of those earthly challenges, they struggle to overcome threats from realms where mortal man should never knowingly tread.

Dark Reich, coming in 2026!

It’s a guitarist’s cliché, like a scene from Wayne’s World (remember that, anyone?). But I’ve just re-listened to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’. It blew me away.

It’s a song I’ve come to avoid. I’ve heard it so often, heck, I’ve even played it (badly) in the past.

I’m a Sabbath and Purple guy. I’ve always appreciated Zeppelin, but they were never my go-to music. But I’m sorry I’ve neglected ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for so long.

It’s a beautiful song. More than that, it is, to me, a perfect song.

I’m no music connoisseur. I just know what I like.

And Plant’s vocals are immaculate. The introduction of the guitars, Bonham’s drums rolling in… and that voice!

It’s like waking up from a deep sleep and realising that there really is magic in the world.

There we are, got that off my chest.

Anyway, it’s almost Christmas. I’m off to drink some more.

A Blessed Yule and a Merry Christmas to you all!

Amazon UK

https://www.amazon.com/Bizarchives-Weird-Tales-Monsters-Machines-ebook/dp/B0FWH6LS4B/

“Over the years I have often been asked what a ghost looks like... Well... Sometimes they look like real, solid people. Sometimes they are like the wraiths that have been so spookily realised on the silver screen. Sometimes they seem as if they are interacting, and sometimes they are like sad tape recordings, appearing and disappearing in an eternal, ever-repetitive role.

But sometimes they are not good to look at, at all...”

In this volume are six uncanny accounts of the paranormal as experienced and recorded by Vernon Smith, occult detective. And throughout his memoir, Smith unveils a world that lies just beyond, a place where dark things yet lurk.

Last weekend I spent a very pleasant couple of days revisiting old haunts in the Northwest of England, the lands about the Mersey Estuary specifically. It is the landscape of my ancestors, and the one that I was born into and where I lived until I was sixteen. I’ve lived in many other places since, including an extended stint in South Africa. Now I have settled in a remote valley in Wales, surrounded by rising heights and bands of dark conifer forests. As a result, returning to Cheshire, I am always struck by the flatness of the landscape. The Helsby Hills, that wooded promontory of sandstone that rises above the marsh-lined southern banks of the River Mersey, is the terminus of a small ridge that extends like a worn, crumbling backbone south through the county for about twenty miles. But all about and for miles on either side, are the level, bucolic pastures of the County Palatine. When I was a child, I used to climb the tall willow in my back garden where, from the topmost perch, I could see to the east the hazy humped line of the Pennines. To my west were the nearer, rising walls of Wales. But stretched between was an imagined shire of hedged, patchwork fields, extended oak woodlands, black-and-white timber framed villages, and stony relics from the distant past. I knew that there was modernity scattered there - factories, and railways, and pylons, and housing estates, and motorways. But I believed, imagined, that there was another demesne that could be reached by the dreamer. Sometimes it might be glimpsed on the other side of a hedge, occasionally it could be found by a stumbling walker on a moonlit path. I dreamt of it often when I had moved away. And now when I came again, I knew that it was still there, if only I could approach it in the right way, I might see it, tread its springy turf, smell its air once more…

I hadn’t supped a pint in ‘The Bear’s Paw’ since 1989. But most of all I was filled with a childlike excitement to look about inside. As with other parts of this fondly remembered landscape, it has featured several times in my fiction. ‘The Bear’s Paw’ is ‘The Atheling’s Arms’. I’d first used it in The Horror Beneath. It is the main protagonist’s local. What surprised me on entering was how I had accurately remembered and fixed certain aspects of the interior into the stories. There, to the left of the bar, was the room with the great fireplace where, in The Horror Beneath, Antrobus and Wingood had had their startling conversation about what to do about the thing beneath Marchley Howe. It was at the oaken bar that a young man had sought Dutch courage before having to reluctantly return to an old house he’d inherited off of his unmourned uncle (A Weekend at Uncle Andrew’s). In the snug was where young love was kindled in A Whisper of Words… and so on. That seventeenth century coaching inn has, in my stories, often served as the terminus of one world, and the gateway to another.

I am, of course, not unique in this as a writer. Machen had his Wales:

“You see the mountain, and hill following after hill... but I tell you that all these things... I say that all these are but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes.” Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan.

And Lovecraft his New England:

“I could tell I was at the gateway of a region half-bewitched through the piling-up of unbroken time-accumulations—a region where old, strange things have had a chance to grow and linger because they have never been stirred up.” H. P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness.

There is a lingering Genius Loci in some landscapes, just waiting to be awoken by the curious traveller who stumbles upon its realms. And in my imagination, I often seek that curious gap in the hedge, eager to rediscover the slumbering secrets of the dreaming lands beyond.

“Over the years, I have often been asked what a ghost looks like... Well... Sometimes they look like ordinary, solid folk. Sometimes they are like the wraiths that have been so spookily realised on the silver screen. Sometimes they seem as if they are interacting, and sometimes they are like sad tape recordings, appearing and disappearing in an eternal, ever-repetitive role.
But sometimes they are not good to look at, at all...”

In this volume are six uncanny accounts of the paranormal as experienced and recorded by Vernon Smith, occult detective. And throughout his memoir, Smith reveals a world that lies just beyond the veil, a place where dark things yet lurk...