Four Uncanny, Genre-Bending Stories 🧌

It’s #ShortStorySeptember and some of my favourite social media accounts have been reading a short story a day. The short story is one of my favourite forms, and you can read a few of mine published online or in ebook format. If you read and enjoyed any of these stories, don’t forget to SHARE, LIKE, COMMENT and SUBSCRIBE! All of these things help me craft posts for the future.

The Middening at Fireside. This contemporary retelling of the kelpie myth is set in an abandoned outdoor swimming pool—inspired by the Tarlair Pool in Aberdeenshire.

Gald is published in the 40th anniversary issue of Luna Station Quarterly. A short story set in a post apocalyptic north east Scotland, where a mythical Pictish potion has the power to transform lives. Available as an ebook.

The Wintering Party is my short story based on the Dyatlov Pass Incident was published in Witness in 2008. I'd written this piece years before Hollywood treated it, and it had a mystery to me that perhaps has now been lost.  At the time I wrote it, the case was closed and none of the images of the dead were public. (I don’t recommend doing an image search on this…)The case has been reopened by the Russian government and now pictures of the dead are widely disseminated on the internet. At the time I wrote the story, online paranormal forums were a storm of wild conjecture. You can read my story inspired by this at the Witness online archive.

The Ghostberry Bush is a retelling of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther type fairy tale 720, "Mother Slew Me, Father Ate Me." It was inspired by the snowberry bushes that grow beside an abandoned kirkyard nestled on a cliff over the sea, not far from where I once lived in Banff, Aberdeenshire.  It can be read online here.

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