About “They”
Rudyard Kipling is the greatest writer of short stories I know. His versatility is astounding: from history to children’s stories, from romance to pioneering science fiction… and ghost stories.
Kipling wrote a ghost story called “They”. My story has nothing to do with it except its title and one plot point, but I still offer it as a sort of homage.
Mine is better, though.
Read the story when it appears on this blog next Monday. But why wait? Christmas is coming soon and the book is out already, so buy it now, for yourself and your friends!
About “Dorian Gray”
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, three goddesses visit the new-born hero Meleager and give him a lifespan as long as that of a log that is burning on the hearth. His mother seizes the log, pours water on it, and hides it safely away. Many years later, angered by his crimes, she makes a bonfire and throws the log onto it.
The “external soul” has been a part of mythologies since human beings began to think and to tell stories, and in parts of the world it still is. It was a sign of Oscar Wilde’s genius that he was the first person to add a moral dimension. No-one before Wilde had come up with an object that is not only tied to a man’s life but shows, visibly, the state of his soul.
I am not Dorian Gray. My passport photograph does not change (or perhaps I am just too dreadfully good) — and when the cover designer tore it up so that she could illustrate the cover, I didn’t feel the slightest twinge.
My “Dorian Gray” story is faster and much lighter than Wilde’s: a social comedy, in fact. The action takes place within less than 24 hours. It’s told from the point of view of a woman — intelligent, predatory, but inexperienced — who starts to suspect who her skiing companion might be, and discovers the truth by destroying his photograph.
Read the story when it appears on this blog next Monday. But why wait? Christmas is coming soon and the book is out already, so buy it now, for yourself and your friends!
About “Dougie Lewis”
It was in St Anton. I never met him, only heard of him. He was an Australian ski bum who sat on the railway line to write postcards but had his Walkman on too loud, and the train came.
From that seed something has grown that is different, and bigger. A new kind of ghost: one that everyone sees, one that you don’t want to be without.
The American hockey players are drawn from life as well.
Rllykll.
Read the story when it appears on this blog next Monday. But why wait? The Snow Cow was published last week, so you have no excuse any more. Buy it now!
The e-book is now published!
If you’ve enjoyed the ePub previews that we’ve been putting on this blog, you can now get the whole of “The Snow Cow” in e-book format from Shortcovers.com, to read on your iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry, Palm Pre, Android, or Sony Reader device. And on your PC or Mac, as well.
About “Not This Time”
This is a story about nakedness. Not about the trivial thing that happens when you take your clothes off; but the true, raw, unprotected nakedness that comes when you have nothing left to separate you from another person – nothing at all, not even skin any more. Nothing to separate you and nothing to protect you from each other. It is ultimate intimacy: but is it ultimate love, or ultimate pain? It all depends.
Read the story when it appears on this blog next Monday. But why wait? The Snow Cow was published yesterday, so you have no excuse any more. Amazon has it in stock, and your local bookshop can order it for you easily. Buy it now!
Publication day!
Actually quite a few have been sold already because Amazon jumped the gun, but now is your chance to get the book officially, and fast. Click now, and in a couple of days you’ll have the book in your hands!
About “Cold Preserves”
My friend Silvio and I had a very good time setting up this photoshoot, and an even better time eating the model afterwards. Most photoshoots don’t let you do this.
Organized chalet parties are a very British thing. A company rents a chalet for the season and employs a chalet girl to live in it and clean and cook and look after the guests. Occasionally they want you to book the whole chalet for a week or two weeks, but more often they’ll accept parties of any size and you can find yourself sharing the chalet, or even a bedroom, with perfect strangers. I remember a particularly happy fortnight spent with a party of drunk Scots doctors in Les Arcs who sang Sloop John B. every night…
The chalet girls are heroines. They all have Chelsea names and I’m sure they mostly end up marrying Chelsea bankers, but meanwhile they cook us breakfast and tea and dinner every day, and like good hostesses they try to keep everyone getting on well with everyone else. Somehow they manage to combine this with skiing, flirting with the ski bums (or waiting for their boyfriend to come and visit), and getting a really good tan.
Above all, though, they love their guests and try to give them the time of their life. To them I dedicate this story. Its heroine is the ideal to which every chalet girl aspires.
(Model courtesy of Wild Beef at Borough Market).
Read the story when it appears on this blog next Monday. The book comes out the week after next, but you can pre-order it now.
About “Downhill”
This story has dirty jokes and Roman legions, opera and orange peel, New Zealanders and Dutchmen. It could have gone on for ever — and yes, it’s another love story without any ghosts in it.
Read the story when it appears on this blog next Monday. The book comes out in the middle of November, but you can pre-order it now.
The Snow Cow 
About “All Souls’ Day”
This would logically be the direct inspiration for “All Souls’ Day” — the more so, since St Odilo instituted All Souls’ Day itself — except that I saw the fresco in August 2009, and “All Souls’ Day” was written a year earlier. It must be a coincidence; if you believe in coincidences.
If you really want a saint and a historical parallel, “All Souls’ Day” is more related to the life of St Charles Borromeo, who toured Switzerland at a time when even the bishops didn’t believe anything any more and had turned to making money from magic and sorcery (they shot at him, but missed). But that too was something I only spotted after I’d finished writing the story.
In the end, “All Souls’ Day”, like so many of the stories in this book, is really a love story: in this case, about a friendship that endures through everything and anything.
Read the story when it appears on this blog next Monday. But why wait? Christmas is almost here and the book is out already, so buy it now!