Falling Over (21 page)

Author Notes

Here are some notes on the stories, for those that want them. Those of you who’d prefer to avert their eyes, I won’t be offended – I’ll thank you for reading this far and let you get on with your lives.

Everyone else, here we go...

Falling Over

This story was originally written for
Penny Dreadnought –
a loose collective consisting of myself, Alan Ryker, Iain Rowan, and Aaron Polson, who occasionally publish themed anthologies of weird fiction.
Falling Over
was in the second volume
called
Descartes’ Demon
– an anthology of horror stories on the theme of ‘epistemic doubt’. 

‘Epistemic’ just means how we know things, and really there’s only one way – through our senses. Which can deceive us. Or be deceived. Scary, no? And fertile soil from which to grow horror stories. Implicitly or explicitly, I think a lot of the best weird fiction is about doubt and about the paranoia that doubt can turn into. A lot of mine are, anyway.

Oh and I’ve
always
wanted to write a ‘pod-people’ story, despite the fact that like the central character in this story I’ve never actually read
The Body Snatchers.

There’s a lot of falling imagery in the stories in this book, so that’s why I picked the title of this one as the overall title for the collection.

Fate, Destiny, And A Fat Man From Arkansas

This is the oldest story in the collection, and I guess the most straight-forward horror story here. There’s a smidgen of Lovecraft, bolted onto the age-old idea of trespassers being punished... The horror that underpins it all however is the idea of being trapped in a series of events that can’t be stopped; of being dragged to an unenviable end despite foreknowledge and one’s own wishes...

I’ve no idea where the idea of having the fat man come from Arkansas came from; I think I just like the sound of the word.

Haunted

This was originally written for the first anthology published by
Cruentus Libri Press
, the premise for which was beautifully simple. Called
100 Horrors
, the book was to feature one hundred horror authors each with a horror story one hundred words long or less.

My contribution was
Haunted
and, if you count the title, it is
exactly
one hundred words long. Yes, I am a show off.

And yes, the main character is called Eleanor in homage to the greatest haunted house story of them all...

New Boy

Another falling story...

I used to work in a building very much like the one described in this story,  although obviously the tale itself is complete fiction. I worked on the tenth floor and had a desk next to the windows, from where I could see the city. I spent a lot of time bored and staring out at the view but nothing as exciting as seeing a person fall past ever happened. However a bad job with a good view is a spur to the imagination, and sometime during that period the idea for this story came to me.

The Time Of Their Lives

The idea for this one came whilst reading the story
The Break
by Terry Lamsley – from the first few pages I was trying guess where the story was going. I didn’t guess correctly at all (Lamsley is too good a writer for that) but
The Time Of Their Lives
grew from one of those wide of the mark guesses. It took on its own life so that in the end it doesn’t share much with
The Break
apart from being set in a somewhat odd hotel and having a young protagonist. Bizarrely, when I came to edit it for this collection, it reminded me of Roald Dahl’s
The Witches
more than anything else.

I was on holiday in the Cotswolds at the time, so that’s why the story is set there. It’s a truly lovely part of the world – and as a horror writer I take that as a
challenge
.

The Man Dogs Hated

A slightly baffling one this, I admit, even to me. The words came to me, and I wrote them down, and tidied up the sentence structure and other boring things where it was needed. Sometimes your only conscious involvement in it all seems to be just getting the thing fixed on paper before the words fade. Oh I could tell you it’s a story about conformity and the theme of the scapegoat, but that’s only because I’ve
read
it a few times, not because I wrote it.

I quite like dogs, but I’m a cat person myself.

Sick Leave

Quite obviously, this is about the fear of death. More specifically, how we turn a blind eye to our upcoming deaths; how we readily speculate about what good things might happen to us in the future but hardly ever about the one bad thing that is
definitely
going to happen to us.

I’ve noticed before that children sometimes seem, from our adult perspective, morbidly interested in death. As if they, unlike us, still haven’t
quite
got their heads round it and managed to put it from their minds.

Drones

This was written for
The Sirens Call
magazine, who were looking for stories based on the theme of ‘horror from the point of view of the observer’.

The observer – that’s interesting, I thought, but I haven’t got any stories that fit right now, and the deadline is in a few days so I haven’t time to come up with anything... Ah well.

Around this time I’d also been turning over a vague idea in my head about a story featuring a soldier in a modern day war, who did little but stare at computer screens all day like any other office worker. And about what he might see on those screens that wasn’t strictly speaking there. Now you’d think my conscious mind would have been smart enough to think:
Computer screens? From the point of view of the observer? There’s a connection there..!
but no. But my subconscious, which is obviously the brains of the outfit, must have made the connection overnight, for the next morning I awoke with this in my head.

Not just the idea for
Drones
mind you, but the whole shebang: the plot, the lead character’s voice, the first lines, the last lines... This has happened to me only occasionally; when it does the story seems very fragile, like a soap bubble, and I know I have to get it written down as quickly as I can before it bursts. So I went straight downstairs, boiled the kettle, and wrote the first draft in a couple of hours.

The next day I attempted to decipher my cramped and frantic handwriting, and wrote out a second draft; the day after that it was typed up and sent off to the good folks at
The Sirens Call
who accepted it, bless them.

Public Interest Story

The British tabloid press are a national fucking disgrace. Small-minded, bigoted deceivers; phone-hacking, police-bribing, corrupt bastards, blatantly serving the interests of the rich and amoral whilst pretending to speak for the public.

And we lap it up.

The original version of this story was written before the
News Of The World
phone hacking scandal came to light. If it had been a too literal a tale of press persecution I probably would have had to bin it when that story broke, because there’s no way my imagination could have outdone the actual reality of how the Murdoch press operated.

Fortunately my take on tabloid scaremongering is a more Kafkaesque, surreal trip into modern day damnation, so I still think it holds up – although who knows what press scandals and corruption unknown to me now will have been uncovered by the time you are reading this?

As well as the tabloid angle, this is also a story about crowds of course, about mob-rule. Out of all of my stories it’s probably the one that scares
me
the most. Human beings are the scariest monsters of course, and something about the idea of being trampled to death by a group of people so far gone into group-think that I can’t even reason with them anymore scares the hell out of me.

Epilogue: A Dream About Robert Aickman

This one came to me exactly as the title suggests: in a dream. Events are exactly as they occurred in that dream, to the best of my waking knowledge.

It seemed a suitable note to end on, for what is writing for if not the sharing of dreams?

You can find out more about my other books and general goings on at www.jameseverington.blogspot.co.uk.

About the author

Keith Brooke
's first novel,
Keepers of the Peace
, appeared in 1990, since when he has published six more adult novels, six collections, and over 60 short stories. For ten years from 1997 he ran the web-based SF, fantasy and horror showcase infinity plus, featuring the work of around 100 top genre authors, including Michael Moorcock, Stephen Baxter, Connie Willis, Gene Wolfe, Vonda McIntyre and Jack Vance. In 2010
infinity plus
was relaunched as an ebook imprint.

His novel
Genetopia
was published by Pyr in February 2006 and was their first title to receive a starred review in
Publishers Weekly
;
The Accord
, published by Solaris in 2009, received another starred
PW
review and was optioned for film. His latest novel,
The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie
, came out from Newcon Press in April 2010. His next novel is
alt.human
, due from Solaris in 2012.

Writing as Nick Gifford, his teen fiction is published by Puffin, with one novel also optioned for the movies by Andy Serkis and Jonathan Cavendish's Caveman Films. He writes reviews for
The Guardian
, teaches creative writing at the University of Essex, and lives with his partner Debbie in Wivenhoe, Essex.

For full details of Keith Brooke's work, including his range of ebooks, see: www.keithbrooke.co.uk.