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…
Matt Wesolowski
A shamed pop star
A devastating fire
Six witnesses
Six stories
Which one is true?
When pop megastar Zach Crystal dies in a fire at his remote mansion, his mysterious demise rips open the bitter divide between those who adored his music and his endless charity work, and those who viewed him as a despicable predator, who manipulated and abused young and vulnerable girls.
Online journalist, Scott King, whose Six Stories podcasts have become an internet sensation, investigates the accusations of sexual abuse and murder that were levelled at Crystal before he died. But as Scott begins to ask questions and rake over old graves, some startling inconsistencies emerge: Was the fire at Crystal’s remote home really an accident? Are reports of a haunting really true? Why was he never officially charged?
Dark, chillingly topical and deeply thought-provoking, Deity is both an explosive thriller and a startling look at how heroes can fall from grace and why we turn a blind eye to even the most heinous of crimes…
KR: Deity made my best books I’d read in 2020 list. Check the list out HERE
You can buy Deity from Amazon UK & Amazon US
Books
Del-Del by Victor Kelleher
I was about eleven years old and on holiday to some part of rural France with my family when I first read Del-Del. My mum kept urging me to go and play with the local children but being a socially awkward little bookworm I could think of nothing worse and instead spent my time, hiding from the blazing sunshine, reading this book. On the surface, it is a terrifying tale of demon possession in a young child. But, really, there’s a lot more going on. Del-Del is a much deeper story about loss, about grief and about love. It scared me quite profoundly; I remember shivering in the baking heat of that French summer but it also awoke in me a subconscious need for these kind of stories and a desire to write stories that had this degree of emotional depth. I never looked back. Del-Del still scares me to this day and moves me quite profoundly on every read.
Nothing To Be Afraid Of by Jan Mark
My parents were early audio pirates – on Christmas morning, I would tear open my stocking to find an inevitable C90 audiobook taped from the local library, complete with homemade cover. This was obviously a ploy to keep me from waking them up at 4am; however, these audiobooks became milestones and the books became steady favourites. Nothing to be Afraid of was one of these; it’s a superb collection of short stories. They’re not all horror; in fact, none of them are, really, save one. They’re odd, quirky, but deeply profound, and all of them are interesting takes on how children perceive the world. Jan Mark never patronises; endings are not nearly tied up with a bow and all of these stories still linger somewhere inside me after all these years. I still hear them when I write and I recently read them to my nine-year-old son, who loved them too. I know them all virtually by heart and will never tire of them. I have to add – the final story is a horror one; entitled ‘Nule’, it is perhaps one of the most terrifying stories ever written.
It by Stephen King
This is one of those books. When I first read this one at about thirteen, I was all-in for a scare, for a clown in a storm drain, for good vs evil. For a terrifying creature terrorising a town. Which is all there in the most wonderful way. Yet, It surprised me as, like so many other of my favourite books, it is so much more than that. Thirteen-year-old me did not expect the depth of storytelling, of characterisation, of the sub-plots of friendship and growing up and standing up for yourself and those weaker than you. Thirteen-year-old me did not expect to cry at the end. Thirty-nine-year-old me still does. It is so much more than a clown in a drain. It’s beautiful.
The Dead School by Patrick McCabe
Patrick McCabe is one of my favourite authors in the world. He has a voice like no other. His voice is dark, it is fractured, damaged and plunges you deep into whatever desolate part of small-town Ireland he wants to take you. McCabe’s books are always about the marginalised; the beaten-down, the forgotten. His narrative is stream of consciousness from damaged minds but fused exquisitely with a sort of dirty poetry. I love everything he writes and this is my favourite of them all. The Dead School tells a dual story of two teachers from different generations, both adrift in a society that’s left them behind and their twin spirals into madness. It takes me months to recover after every read of The Dead School. But I keep going back.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
There’s no book like it. There’s no book, in terms of absolute immersion and twisted graphology that can even remotely compare. Many have tried and many have failed. This is a maze of a book that, without really being aware of it, once it has consumed you, it is very difficult to find your way out again. Endless footnotes, pages of references to fictional studies; sometimes a single word on one page, at some oblique angle. It sounds pretentious, but this is anything but. The bizarreness of it just somehow makes sense and the story is fantastic, almost Lovecraftian; transporting the terror of R’lyeh’s non-euclidian geometry to suburban America along with the madness that comes with it. Don’t be put off by its strange and awkward angles. Like Hill House, this one will utterly consume the weak and whatever walks there, walks alone…
Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes
Lauren Beukes is one of my literary heroes. Everything she writes is brilliant. Lauren Beukes is the master at weaving the magical with gritty reality and making it work effortlessly. This one might be my favourite. Set in a decaying and gloomy Detroit, there’s a serial killer on the loose, fusing the bodies of the dismembered victims with bit of dead animals. But like so many of my favourite books there’s so much more to this than a simple crime story. This book is about the cracks that spread through people and a broken society. It was the first book I read that incorporated social media into the narrative and was hugely inspirational. Lauren Beukes is a trailblazer and you should read everything she writes. Broken Monsters is where it started for me.
The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories by Arthur Machen
HP Lovecraft described this phenomenal Welsh occultist and member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as a ‘modern master’ of supernatural horror. Machen’s most famous story, The Great God Pan, was cited as ‘the best horror story in the English Language’ by Stephen King. Big words from a big name, and it’s very easy to see why. For me, Machen is the godfather of folk-horror.
There’s a plethora of truly terrifying stories within Machen’s works. Many of Machen’s stories hint at the ‘other’ – a world beyond our own, beings that were here long before us; soaked in eldritch folklore from the Welsh hills. The Great God Pan is truly terrifying; it’s a story that does not leave you and brings a new aspect of terror to even a simple walk in the countryside. The White People is pure, rural poetry about the nature of evil with a wonderfully cryptic ending. The Black Seal is Lovecraft before Lovecraft. These stories are timeless, they are ageless and more than that, it feels like they wield a power, a magic that cannot be tamed.
Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley
Andrew Michael Hurley is an author who has quietly taken up the scythe of folk-horror and ploughed a powerful and unmistakable path through the chaff to rise as some kind of harvest king in the genre. Hurley is a master storyteller; clearly influenced by many such as Machen, Blackwood and James. Hurley has masterfully brought these kind of stories into the modern era whilst simultaneously keeping the old ways as integral parts of his storytelling. He writes about grief, he writes about hauntings, in people and in places, with effortless grace. Starve Acre is exactly this and more. This story is about a couple – still grieving from the loss of their son – who find that their home in the moors is haunted by more than just their sense of loss. Rich in folk-mythology and deeply frightening, this book is still raw in my heart and you should let it in too.
Album
The Cure – Disintegration
There are very few albums in the world that are perfect. This is one of them. Every single song on this album feels like stirs a different emotion, or is tethered to a distant memory, even on first listen. Robert Smith’s vocals are faultless; the song-writing is perfection and more than just the songs, the album as a whole is a journey through the darkest fathoms of love.
Even the poppier hits like Lullaby or Pictures of You are infused with a delicate bleakness that it so difficult for any artist to capture. The title track Disintegration is a beautiful and terrible story that still gives me goosebumps on every listen.
I heard this album when I was sixteen and it felt like it was made for me. I wrote so much of my juvenilia with this album playing in the background, scraping the hollows of my soul and pouring them out onto the page. I’m still not tired of this album and don’t think I ever will be.
Luxury Item
A sharpened wooden stake – not for any profound or symbolic reason, but solely to creep out whoever is doing the next shift as graveyard warden!
Deity
A shamed pop star
A devastating fire
Six witnesses
Six stories
Which one is true?
When pop megastar Zach Crystal dies in a fire at his remote mansion, his mysterious demise rips open the bitter divide between those who adored his music and his endless charity work, and those who viewed him as a despicable predator, who manipulated and abused young and vulnerable girls.
Online journalist, Scott King, whose Six Stories podcasts have become an internet sensation, investigates the accusations of sexual abuse and murder that were levelled at Crystal before he died. But as Scott begins to ask questions and rake over old graves, some startling inconsistencies emerge: Was the fire at Crystal’s remote home really an accident? Are reports of a haunting really true? Why was he never officially charged?
Dark, chillingly topical and deeply thought-provoking, Deity is both an explosive thriller and a startling look at how heroes can fall from grace and why we turn a blind eye to even the most heinous of crimes…
You can buy Deity from Amazon UK & Amazon US
Matt Wesolowski
Matt Wesolowski is an author from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the UK. He is an English tutor for young people in care. Matt started his writing career in horror, and his short horror fiction has been published in numerous UK- and US-based anthologies such as Midnight Movie Creature, Selfies from the End of the World, Cold Iron and many more. His novella, The Black Land, a horror set on the Northumberland coast, was published in 2013. Matt was a winner of the Pitch Perfect competition at Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival in 2015. His debut thriller, Six Stories, was an Amazon bestseller in the USA, Canada, the UK and Australia, and a WHSmith Fresh Talent pick, and film rights were sold to a major Hollywood studio. A prequel, Hydra, was published in 2018 and became an international bestseller. Changeling, book three in the series, was published in 2019 and was longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and shortlisted for Capital Crime’s Amazon Publishing Reader Awards in two categories: Best Thriller and Best Independent Voice.
Follow Matt on Twitter @ConcreteKraken and on his website: www.mjwesolowskiauthor.wordpress.com/
Leave a Reply