I want this to be a platform for EVERYONE within the horror community; authors, publishers, bloggers, reviewers, actors, directors, artists. I could go on, if you work in the genre then you are more than welcome to apply for the job.
The rules are quite simple…
You are invited to imagine yourselves as warden for an old graveyard, and choose eight books, preferably horror/dark genre, to take with you to cover your shift; here you can discuss why you chose the books.
As well as the books, wardens are allowed one song/album to listen to. Again, an explanation for this choice is required.
You must also discuss one luxury item you can bring, which must be inanimate and not allow communication.
If you’d like to take part in The Graveyard Shift then please submit an application to gavin@kendallreviews.com
A new shift is about to begin. The warden for the week’s #GraveyardShift is…
James Brogden
YOU SHALL REAP WHAT YOU SOW
Struggling with the effects of early-onset Alzheimer’s, Dennie Keeling leads a quiet life. Her husband is dead, her children are grown, and her best friend, Sarah, was convicted of murdering her abusive husband. All Dennie wants now is to be left to work her allotment in peace.
But when three strangers take the allotment next to hers, Dennie starts to notice strange things. Plants are flowering well before their time, shadowy figures prowl at night, and she hears strange noises coming from the newcomers’ shed. Dennie soon realises that she is face to face with an ancient evil – but with her Alzheimer’s steadily getting worse, who is going to believe her?
You can buy Bone Harvest from Amazon UK & Amazon US
‘Behind You’, by Brian Coldrick
I’ll be honest, this isn’t a novel. It’s a collection of one-shot illustrations – cartoons, if you like, though there’s not much to giggle about in them, unless it’s the kind of giggling you hear in lunatic asylums. The characters in them are caught in that moment just before they turn around and see the thing that’s been stalking them. The artwork is gorgeous, in that wimmelbilder style that pulls you in with the details and makes you part of its world, and the online version is even creepier as the images are animated – only slightly, just enough to make you wonder if you really did see that thing in the corner move.
‘I’m the King of the Castle’, by Susan Hill
Better known, I think, for ‘The Woman in Black’, this is less self-consciously over-the-top gothic Victoriana and so much more disturbing for the restraint with which its horror is told. The tale is about 11-year old Charles Kingshaw, whose mother takes him to live in a brooding, isolated farmhouse owned by Joseph Hooper, to whom she is engaged, and Edmund Hooper, his sociopathic son. Essentially, it’s a story of psychological torture, manipulation, emotional and physical entrapment, and the darkness that breeds in the enforced isolation of rural communities.
‘The Monk’, by Matthew G. Lewis
But if you want full-bore gothic mayhem, then this is the beast. Censored in 1798 for blasphemy and obscenity, this tale has incest, deathbed sex, a sadistic Prioress, rape, murder, sorcery, dungeons, rioting mobs, Inquisitorial torture, a ghost called the Bleeding Nun, and a fallen monk with the glorious name of Ambrosio. It was written by the 19-year old son of a prominent politician who was doing everything he could to avoid following the career track laid out by his father, and I was reading it when I met my wife-to-be, so she can’t say she wasn’t warned.
‘Rebecca’, by Daphne du Maurier
I’m going to get into trouble here. For my money, this is the best ghost story without a ghost that has ever been written, including The Turn of the Screw because at least duMaurier knows when to finish her sentences, and as a setting Manderley is a better evocation of what it’s like to be haunted by a place than ‘The Haunting of Hill House’, because of its emotional foundations. Yes, the protagonist is infuriatingly passive at first, but seeing her fall from innocence to become complicit with the darkness at the heart of the ancient estate is, again, more disturbing than shocks or carefully crafted ambiguity.
‘Needful Things’, by Stephen King
Got to have a King in this list somewhere, and this is one of my favourites, because of the way that its supernatural threat preys on the town of Castle Rock not by involving killer clowns or ancient Indian burial grounds, but by manipulating the prejudices, superstitions and obsessions of the townsfolk, as well as the feuds and simmering tensions between them. They are offered everything they want, and given everything they need to tear themselves apart. It’s a satire on capitalism, religion, and the petty evils of small-town life, compared to which Leland Gaunt is so gleefully nasty and disdainful of them that you can’t help rooting for him as much as the story’s heroes.
‘Picnic At Hanging Rock’, by Joan Lindsay
I have a particular affection for this book, for a number of reasons. First I suppose because it’s a wonderful piece of slow-burning Australian gothic that communicates a sense of the threat and mystery of the landscape of my childhood. Secondly because of its publication history; the final chapter, which resolves the mystery (to some extent) was only published after the author’s death. And thirdly because so many people think that its story – about the disappearance of four schoolgirls during a Valentine’s Day picnic in 1900 – is based on real events. Creating something that believable is the hallmark of a master storyteller. Just don’t ask me about the TV mini-series.
‘The Ritual’, by Adam Nevill
We’re calling this sort of thing ‘folk horror’ now, aren’t we, despite the fact that this is a good, nuts-and-bolts, scare-the-pants-off-you horror story. Four friends on a hiking expedition through the Swedish wilderness, isolated from civilisation, decide to take an ill-advised shortcut through dense forest, and find themselves at the mercy of something big an’ ‘orrible. Part gore-fest, part meditation on masculinity and the bonds of male friendship, this was given an excellent adaption on Netflix and deserves to be regarded as a classic.
‘The Twisted Ones’, by T. Kingfisher
This riffs on an old story called ‘The White People,’ by Arthur Machen, but turns it into something new and weird and genuinely unsettling. A young woman called Mouse is given the task of clearing out her dead grandmother’s house and discovers her family’s association with a nightmare realm adjacent to reality, the race of entities that live there, and their creations that still haunt the woods around her home. It’s very recent, only published this March, but feels very old.
Album
‘England Keep My Bones’, by Frank Turner
If I’m going to be pulling a late shift in a graveyard, I’m going to want something to boost my spirits with a bit of a punk-folk sensibility whilst simultaneously helping me to reconcile myself to the inevitability of death, so I’m going with Frank Turner’s ‘England Keep My Bones’. When the first track includes the lyrics “on the day I die I’ll say at least I fucking tried, and that’s the only eulogy I need”, you know you’re in good hands. The songs are about fate, history, nature, and faith in a humanistic sense of immortality through how we’re remembered for our deeds. They also fucking rock.
Luxury
Assuming that it’s going to be cold doing this gig I’ll want a hip flask of something like a Jura or an Aberlour single malt to warm my bones – or those of anyone else, living or dead, who might care to pay me a visit. There’ll be enough for everyone to have a dram, and we’ll headbang to ‘One Foot Before the Other’ until dawn creeps over the headstones and sends all unquiet souls back to their rest.
Bone Harvest: James Brogden
YOU SHALL REAP WHAT YOU SOW
Struggling with the effects of early-onset Alzheimer’s, Dennie Keeling leads a quiet life. Her husband is dead, her children are grown, and her best friend, Sarah, was convicted of murdering her abusive husband. All Dennie wants now is to be left to work her allotment in peace.
But when three strangers take the allotment next to hers, Dennie starts to notice strange things. Plants are flowering well before their time, shadowy figures prowl at night, and she hears strange noises coming from the newcomers’ shed. Dennie soon realises that she is face to face with an ancient evil – but with her Alzheimer’s steadily getting worse, who is going to believe her?
You can buy Bone Harvest from Amazon UK & Amazon US
James Brogden
I’m a Mancunian by birth, a Tasmanian by childhood, and an adopted Brummie by, er, adulthood, such as it is. My parents were Ten Pound Poms – that is, they moved to Australia on the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme when I was nary but a toddler – and before we all moved back to the UK again in the 80’s we all got made Aussies, so I’ve got dual citizenship. I probably still do, unless the rules have changed. To compound the confusion, my daughters were born out there, but raised here. All this goes to explain simply that I’ve bounced back and forth between England and Australia and that I seem to have stopped for a while. Personality-wise it also explains why I tend to be loud and bolshy and then immediately apologetic about it afterwards.
It may also help to explain what I write. I like the marginal places between one thing and another; the grey areas; the edgelands. This leads to a fascination with genre writing which doesn’t sit in easily marketable genres – slipstream, I suppose it’s called. As someone aspiring to be a professional and commercially viable writer, I recognise that this is Not A Helpful Thing.
However, this is a thing about which I do not care. Certain tropes in ‘genre’ writing bore the arse off me, and it’s probably down to what I consumed as a teenager.
I’d like to say I read lots of cool and edgy stuff when I was a teenager, but I didn’t, and anybody who says they did is probably lying. Here’s what I packed when we moved from the rural idyll and cultural sink-hole of Sheffield, Tasmania to the howling wasteland of the Cumbrian borders as a 16-year old: Tolkien, Julian May, Douglas Adams, Stephen Donaldson, Wyndham, Clarke, King, Asimov, Herbert (Frank) and probably other things I’ve forgotten, but you get the gist. I watched Battlestar Galactica (the real one, folks, not that pseudo-political-religious-allegorical navel-gazing remake), Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (the remake, folks, with Erin Gray as Wilma Deering, be still my turbulent adolescent loins), Knight Rider – indeed, anything out of the Glen A Larson stable. Look, this was Tasmania in the 70’s, okay? Moving to England and into my 20’s introduced me to Clive Barker, Poppy Z, Anne Rice, Robert Holdstock, Christopher Fowler, Simon Maginn, and Herbert (James) – all in all a bit weirder, a bit darker, but nothing massively Out There; basically when my housemates were getting stoned and freaking themselves out with Hunter S Thompson I was still writing role-playing adventures.
You can find out more about James by visiting www.jamesbrogden.com
Follow James on Twitter @skippybe
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