Howdy,
Today sees the release of Lights on the Hill, the seventh episode of The Sunset Chronicles.
We’re really starting to get into the Space Horror of it all at this point, and it’s worth noting where the roots of that run for me, because it’s something that feels like it’s not just at the root of my writing, but at the very core of me.
As a kid who went to boarding school, the holidays were difficult for me. Not because of having to be away from school – far from it, because that place was a dumpster fire – but because I didn’t have friends where I lived. My nearest friends were inevitably a good half an hour away by train, or they lived in Scotland, or somewhere in the home counties. Even when I lived in London the other kids who in the city never lived in the same part of the sprawling metropolis as me, so while we could maybe meet up occasionally and bum around the Trocadero Centre playing on the arcades, most days over the long summer break were spent at home. Alone. But I didn’t have it as bad as some.
For instance, there was a kid I had an on/off friendship with whose parents lived in Germany. He was a forces kid, and so while I had it bad enough in London, he had it immeasurably worse. He had to hop on a plane to see anyone. One summer his parents asked him if he wanted to invite a friend to come and stay a week, and he invited me.
I was pretty excited. I got to fly on a plane by myself, the first time I’d ever done so, and I got to go to Germany, a country I’d never been to before. What was more, I’d be living on an Army base for a week, which sounded tremendously exciting to the kind of kid who had more than a little obsession with tanks and heavy artillery. On the downside, me and this kid weren’t actually that close – we were in the same dorm, but we weren’t exactly what I believe the kids would now call ‘besties’.
While we might not have been close, I wasn’t counting on me and this friend of mine falling out within hours of me getting there. However, that’s exactly what happened. Looking back through the mists of time, I have absolutely no memory of why we fell out. I don’t even remember the argument. What I do remember was feeling very much alone and far from home and this friend’s Mum taking me aside and saying that she’d look after me, and maybe I might want to watch a video to take my mind off it. I can’t imagine how delighted she was to have to entertain a child she didn’t know, who her son refused to speak to.
I liked watching films, but at that stage, I didn’t watch many of them what with school and all that, but I enjoyed them enough. My parents would occasionally get me to watch one with them, if I was interested enough to do so. But stuck there on an Army base with nobody to talk to, it made sense. I wouldn’t need anyone to keep me company after all.
She set me up in the TV room with a bookcase full of videos. All black, no covers, just scrawled labels, pirated or taped off the telly, who knows. You have to assume that all the way out there in Germany there’d be a healthy trading scheme and tape-to-tape copying going on.
One of the tapes had one word on it – Aliens. I have no idea why I grabbed it, but grab it I did. If I grabbed any others, I don’t recall them now. Only one.
Aliens.
I stuck it in the machine, probably as completely unaware of the age-inappropriateness as my friend’s mother was of me grabbing such a grown-up film. Down I sat, hoping for something to take my mind off my desperate and lonely situation.
Two hours later, terrified and thrilled and transported to another world, I rewound the tape and hit play again. And again. And again. I loved it, was fascinated by it. Repelled and drawn in and absolutely captivated by it.
In the days that remained of my trip, I didn’t make up with my now-ex-friend (we would never reconcile) but I did rewatch that VHS, again and again, and again. Having never seen Alien parts of it didn’t make any sense, and as a kid, other elements were just as strange to me, but I was drawn in by it. I don’t know how many times I watched it, but it was enough that by the time I climbed the steps to get back on a plane (much to the relief of all involved, I’m sure) I knew every beat, every line, every jump.
I returned to England utterly enthused by this strange world. The first VHS I asked my parents to buy was Alien (I think they managed to hold out a little while) and the first comics I ever bought were Alien vs Predator. I bought the Allen Dean Foster tie-in novelisations, and as soon as the director’s Cut came out, I was on that, too. In short, I got obsessed in the way only kids can. Soon I branched out to other films, discovering the twin joys of Horror and Action movies, and developing a penchant for anything with Tom Cruise in it.
And now, as a man in his forties putting out a fortnightly sci-fi horror serial set on a strange land with mysterious creatures, I wonder what might have come of me if I hadn’t fallen out with the kid from school whose name I barely recall?
One thing is for sure, I reckon Wyn wouldn’t be having such a tough time on that ice moon…
So if you’ve not started the Chronicles yet, why not take the chance today and dive into a world of pulse-quickening action, blood-soaked science fiction, revelations, and revolutions?
Recommendations
Reading: I will admit that I’m watching events unfold in America with no small amount of glee. As an avowed anti-fascist, watching the Democrat party rebrand the far right as ‘just plain weird’ is phenomenal. They’re just so goddamn weird! There’s a great piece in
Parker Molloy’s The Present Age about this strategy that I found fascinating.
#nowplaying: Next week I’ll be sharing the cover to my next entirely new novel, Darkness Come Alive, but this week I’ve been pulling together the advance copy for some wonderful writers who’ve agreed to read it in advance, and so I’ve been going through and naming all the chapters. Much like with Blood on the Motorway, the chapter titles are all song titles from some of my favourite bands, so I’ll leave you with a little tease of that, with this ‘title track’ for the novel:
Watching: I watched the utterly redundant remake of Road House this week, and I have to say that Conor McGregor is to acting what the Cybertruck is to aestheticism. Not so much a recommendation as a safety warning.
That’s about it from me for this week. I’m away in sunny (I hope) Wales for a well-needed break next week, so I’ll try and get Bleakwood recorded and uploaded in time for next week’s Hollow Stone, but in case I don’t, it’ll be a double dose of Bleakwood and Sunset Chronicles when I get back.
Until then, happy reading.
Paul