July 2025

I. Dream sequence

II. An update from the sick room

III. Some stories recently enjoyed

IV. Some new publications

VI. Heads or tails

I. Dream sequence

On the hospital corridor, in the dead hours, sleepless fathers-to-be nod to one another at the tea and coffee station. The coffee was awful — obviously the coffee was awful — but in the dead hours, on that hospital corridor, I thought it tasted pretty good.

The antenatal ward was empty when we arrived at 2am. The Maternity Assessment Unit at the Royal Sussex, where Sally* was booked in for an induction the next morning, had told us their labour ward was full, which made it dangerous, they would get the senior midwife on shift to call us back. The senior midwife called us back and told us the labour ward was full, which made it dangerous. Well, it sounded full. So my dad picked us up sometime after 1 and drove us out of town, out of Hove and onto the downs, over the dark hills of the downs to Haywards Heath, the Princess Royal. I’ve been there before, on scheduled visits, drove my dad there years ago when he banjaxed his knee playing football, other things, always in the daytime. It felt very different in the night. Wrong Royal, but it worked out well. The antenatal ward was empty when we arrived at 2am. Eerily so. 

I’ve always liked being driven over the Sussex downs at night. Sally had me logging her contractions on an app. I was exhausted, was running on adrenaline, and the possibility that this might bring on the mother of all ME/CFS crashes was never far from mind. Nothing to do about that then, of course. Sally herself was keyed into one thing and one thing only: ‘The pain focussed me,’ she’d say later, when I asked her to look at this before I posted it. ‘I went inward. I was aware of what was going on around me but I couldn’t respond or react to it. And the noises that came out of me— do you remember? Like an animal.’ I rubbed her back. I logged the contractions, and watched the dark hills from the window of the car. There was something out-of-body about that short journey, for me, half an hour that went on forever; it might have been some kind of a dream sequence. In memory, it is.

By ten in the morning, Sally had reached the second stage of labour. In about 12 hours, which was quicker than she would have hoped possible. Induction-related horror stories from family and friends had made her keen to avoid the same. 12 hours was unexpected, to say the least. But as it turned out she hadn’t reached the second stage of labour after all. You get ‘phantom pregnancies’, as I learned years ago when I worked as a receptionist for midwife clinics, so perhaps this was a phantom second stage of labour. Perhaps you get phantom births, phantom children growing into phantom adults, leading phantom lives. She’d had oxy and an epidural, but the baby, very much not a phantom, had other plans, and it was time to sleep. I fancied some oxy too but figured they’d heard that joke before. Later, we’d learn that the baby had turned around.

I’ll skip ahead. I find myself thinking about dream sequences and memory. In dream sequences you get to skip ahead. You can skip backwards, or sideways. 

At 4.30pm Sally was rolled into theatre. An intervention was needed, and anaesthetic required. They had a Bluetooth speaker for her playlist, Soothe Operator:  ‘1979’ by the Smashing Pumpkins, ‘Breakfast in Bed’ by Dusty Springfield’, Sade’s ‘Smooth Operator’. I had to skip Britney’s ‘Sometimes’ when it came on a second time; Sally got me to skip Rihanna’s ‘Rude Boy’ because the vibe was off. Is ‘Rude Boy’ soothing? I don’t know.

Can you feel this? Yes.

Can you feel this? Yes.

Can you feel this. No.

This? No.

At 4.43pm, Joseph** entered the world.

You get six weeks to come up with a name. We had gone just over five when we finally registered his birth. We’d had a shortlist but while girl names, and some gender-neutral names, we both liked hadn't been too difficult to agree upon, traditional names for boys proved much harder to find. Throughout the pregnancy Sally had wanted the baby’s sex to be a surprise. I’d asked if I could ask the midwife-sonographer, in the basement of an NHS building that felt like something out of that TV series CHERNOBYL, to tell me, and I promised not to tell, wouldn’t let on, I can keep a secret, but that didn’t fly. It would have simplified the process of agreeing on a name.

Nothing on the shortlist felt quite right.

Then there were three possible names. We went through phases of liking one, then another, then the last. One name would feel briefly perfect before reverting back into its state of not-quite-rightness. One of the names would become his middle name.

Three months later, it’s weird to think he ever wasn’t Joseph, and weird to think that we knew then, looking back, that it would be weird to think he ever wasn’t Joseph.

*Sally is not her real name, but one of the names her parents considered before choosing something else.

**Joseph is not his real name, but one of the names we considered before choosing something else.

II. An update from the sick room

The expected ME crash after the birth never arrived; or perhaps I was on a longer fuse. I’d had four or five very good months, months in which I’d felt so normal it was easy to imagine I wouldn’t relapse again, which I had partly attributed to the effect of a stimulant prescription I’d started on in October of last year. Stimulants alter cerebral bloodflow; mephlyphenidate also seems to decrease ambient stress levels, among other things, for those who find it useful.

The ME caught up with me, I think, six or seven weeks ago. I’m still amazed that night in hospital and the subsequent days didn’t trigger it. It’s such a weird illness. It’s one of the things I plan to write about on this blog, and which I’ve written about in my fiction at length, one way or another, over the last three years and nine months.

Sometimes when I think about ME, I find myself thinking about phantom pregnancies. Morgellons. Electrosensitivity. Which is not because I think it's comparable to these phenomena.

It feels weird to say, but this installment in the neverending story of my ME, relatively mild by most standards, has been one of the best. Joseph is a joy. Sally’s recovery, while difficult, has gone well. I was off work sick for two weeks but managed to avoid the usual accompanying depression. Then I went back in for a week before two weeks of annual leave began.  I spent that time cooking, reading in cafes, looking after Joseph, resting, and writing. I’ve finished three stories, a 500-word capsule horror story set in a peculiar house, called ‘Motor’; a short story inspired by this horrifying phenomenon, called ‘Visitors’; and a novelette, ‘Heavyness’. 

Novelette, incidentally, is the French for good luck trying to sell this one.

III. Some stories I’ve recently enjoyed

i. Lucia Berlin

Someone somewhere mentioned Lucia Berlin, I can’t remember where, and I’m burning my way through *A Manual for Cleaning Women*, a selection of her stories published in 2015, eleven years after her death. 

The writer most cited in comparison to Berlin is Raymond Carver. It’s easy to see why. In her letter to August Kleinzahler, extracted in the LRB shortly after her death in 2004, she wrote:

Yes I love Raymond Carver’s work – before he sobered up & sweetened his endings – (& before that bitch pimped his work to Short Cuts – awful thing to do). I wrote like him before I ever read him. He liked my work, too – we had good talk. Recognised one another immediately. Our ‘styles’ came from our (similar in a way) backgrounds. Don’t show your feelings. Don’t cry. Don’t let anyone know you ... more than exquisite control blahblahblah.

For my part I really loved Short Cuts.

“What are you drinking?” he asked.
“Shirley temples,” I said, but she said Manhattan. He told the waiter to bring me a Shirley Temple.

My favourite short stories so far have been: ‘Stray Dogs’, ‘Phantom Pain’, ‘Todo Luna, Todo Año’, and the chilling ‘Sex Appeal’. In this last story, an 11-year-old girl accompanies her glamorous older sister to dinner at the Hotel del Norte in El Paso, a hotel in which the latter hopes to meet the recently-divorced movie star and son of the millionaire owner of said hotel.

Bella Lynn went to powder her nose. I didn't go, didn't know yet that you're always supposed to go, to assess the situation.

I’ll have more to say about Lucia Berlin soon.

ii. I guess that’s what this is. A horror story.

I thought ‘The Babies Who Have No Eyes’ by Lillie Franks in Hex was extraordinary, a perfect very short horror story in which the narrator knows they’re living through a horror story, knowledge that does absolutely nothing to save them from their fate, which amounts to a kind of accommodation with the horror. It’s beautifully written, and its central image remarkably potent and upsetting. A strange one to read with a newborn of your own. It has stayed with me; I’m marking my favourite stories in my reading log, and I’ll be returning to this one before long.

iii. I had become susceptible to some unsettling notions.

I renewed my subscription with the wonderful Nightjar Books, published and edited by Nicholas Royle, and the first of the four new stories I read was R.L. Summerling’s ‘Through Narrowing Veins’. The story follows a man’s personal apocalypse, in beautifully rendered prose. ‘I rolled onto my back and stared at the Artex ceiling, the texture of cottage cheese’ delighted me. That personal apocalypse may or may not amount to a larger phenomenon, implicating the wider world; in my reading it hovered between both. One interpretation, for which I won’t go into detail as I want to avoid anything like a spoiler, might relate it to the phenomenon of ‘learned helplessness’. The story isn’t yet on the Nightjar webpage, but I imagine it will be soon. I also highly recommend her story ‘Vanitas’, in Interzone #302, as well as everything else she writes, some of which can be seen here.

IV. Some new publications

Lisa watched the shadow, what she had taken to be a shadow, first sway and then appear to shift from its position below the shutters.

I was delighted to learn that my short story ‘Warmth’ made the Notable Stories list for Undertow’s new Best Weird Fiction (vol. 1) anthology. You can read the story in Interzone here, for an inexpensive single-issue price, or you can visit their Patreon and get immediate access to this issue and all back issues of this iteration of the magazine.

She was sitting in one of the booths in the corner of the pub, a candle in the wine bottle before her, the tip of a cigarette glowing between her knuckles, a half pint of brown beer beside the candle.

I was even more delighted to learn that Michael Kelly had selected another story, ‘Black Water’, for the official ToC. You can read that story in Weird Horror #9, online here; but you should buy the anthology, because it rubs shoulders with some bangers from people like Thomas Ha and Joe Koch, and will encourage Undertow to continue doing their thing, which they do so very well.

She must have nodded off after all. All night through the early hours unsleeping, then Gwen found herself awake. There was a wrongness: something was wrong.

As of Friday of last week I have a new story out at ergot. It has buttons, and it’s called ‘Buttons’. This one improved considerably with editor Samuel Moss’s input.

Hove, Aldrington, Portslade, Fishersgate. Erin dreamt she was aboard a train passing through the night.

Earlier this month, Interzone released issue #302, which included another new story, ‘The Toy’. Purchase issue 302 here; or, as before, subscribe to the IZ Patreon if you’re willing and able. 

Incidentally, Interzone editor Gareth Jelley asked if I’d like to offer a discount for IZ single issue epubs to the readers of this newsletter. I said I would, so here: ‘spb50’ (without quotation marks). This is valid for issues #294 onwards, until the end of this month, on any purchases through the IZ shop.

V. Heads or tails

I’ve wanted for a couple of years now to make tête-bêche chapbooks, two stories back-to-back, head-to-tail, because so many of my stories seem to come in pairs. I’m not a designer, but I’ve taught basic, introductory InDesign to BA and MA Photography students for years, so I figured a chapbook wouldn’t be beyond me. In the two weeks I was off work I finally got round to it. The first one isn’t finished yet but it’s getting there, with greatly appreciated assistance from R.T. Ester, Gareth Jelley, and Ray Newman.

The format, 111 x 181 mm, is a reference to the classic postwar Penguin paperbacks, their design overhauled by Jan Tschichold. I went down a rabbit hole reading about Tschichold, about book design and typography. The typeface is one of Tschichold’s, Sabon, set at 10.5 pt.

In due course these and other chapbooks will be on sale through this website.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. And if you have any thoughts on anything I’ve covered here, or anything else, and want to respond, please do.

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I promise future issues of this newsletter blog will neither be so long nor so personal.

Thanks again for reading,

Seán