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Bus Station: Unbound (Another curious tale)

29/10/2014

PBS HAS A STICKY, RUBBER-TILED FLOOR, AND A SMELL THAT SPEAKS OF CHEAP DEODORANT FIGHTING AN ENDLESS BATTLE WITH SOMETHING NASTY AND NAMELESS AND JUST OUT OF SIGHT. YET IT ALSO HAS SOMETHING OF THE HEROIC ABOUT IT: A QUALITY OF GIGANTISM THAT CAN INSTIL A HOPPER-LIKE SENSE OF LONELINESS, THE INSIGNIFICANCE OF THE INDIVIDUAL IN AN ENGULFING ENVIRONMENT.

MARTIN BAKER, THE INDEPENDENT

"The coach inches around a corner, the wheels on one side mounting a drift of snow in the gutter. You let out a sound – a scared, embarrassing-sounding little bark – and lift an uncertain arm out to protect yourself. Seated alone at the back of the coach, you’re the only passenger onboard so you allow yourself a further sound: a brief sing-song whine. Then the coach rights itself with a jump and presses on, hunkered against the snowstorm. Since you nodded off the snow seems to have intensified: the stuff takes up the windows, flurried layers shuttering off the surrounding night. Up ahead, through the driver’s window, you can just about make out a few blurred lines of light. As the bus crawls ahead the details sharpen, dark imprecision edging into a familiar network of concrete and steel: Preston Bus Station."

Bus Station: Unbound is the first in an series of uncanny, interactive site-specific fictions.

The novel-sized work starts as a coach draws into the iconic Preston Bus Station a few days before Christmas. It is snowing heavily, it is dark and the main character wearily trudges into the station knowing she still has miles to go before she gets home to a miserable Christmas party with a family she hasn’t been in touch with in over three years. She's broke, pissed off and miserable.

So far, so festive.

But what happens when the snow continues to fall and all the buses are cancelled? When all attempts to leave the bus station fail? When strange people start to appear in the station, when she overhears stories of missing teenagers, and when a crying boy in a hoodie asks her for help?

Thiis is interactive fiction. Part novel, part photo-book, part game - you decide what happens as you navigate through the real and imagined landscape of the iconic Preston Bus Station.

This is much more than a simple choose-your-own-adventure story. As a Curious Tales digital-only project, we've made something that just wouldn't work in a print edition. The text of Bus Station: Unbound can track your choices and depending on your preferences, you’ll read a story of late adolescent despair, a grieving and fragmented family, guilt, fantasy and restoration, or a gripping and frightening supernatural tale about a notorious building many have described as ‘monstrous.’ More likely, you’ll remix a unique combination of all of these. There are over twenty endings, and no limit to the amount of times you can restart, reread and try another path.

Bus Station: Unbound is another Curious Tale and will be published as a fully interactive e-book for Kindle with photography from Helen Power. It will be available to pre-order soon.

Please join our mailing list if you’d like us to let you know when it's available.

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Halloween - Sneak Preview Event

24/10/2014

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This Halloween, we’re teaming up with the good people of Bad Language, organisers of Manchester’s leading literary evening, to bring you a preview of Poor Souls’ Light: Seven Curious Tales, our forthcoming anthology of winter ghost stories.

Emma Jane Unsworth will be reading from her new story ‘Smoke’, and Alison Moore from hers, ‘The Spite House’, in the auspicious setting of the Royal Exchange Theatre. They’ll be accompanied by a selection of the North’s premier spoken word performers, providing an autumnal evening of thrills, chills and haunted mills.

The event runs from 6 till 7 and is free to attend.

The Royal Exchange Theatre, St Ann's Square, Manchester, M2 7DH

Our events schedule for the rest of the year has also now been confirmed and can be found here. We’ll be adding more info, and maybe one or two more dates, as and when. So stay tuned.

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Richard Hirst's Top 5 Robert Aickman Stories

13/10/2014

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The Hospice (in Cold Hand in Mine)
Fans of Aickman tend to have a soft spot for the first of his stories they encountered, the one which ushered them into the heady territory of Aickmanland. For my money ‘The Hospice’ – my own personal gateway story – represents Aickman at his most unsettling, all the more so because it contains, on the surface, so little in the way of anything which appears to approach outright horror. Maybury, a travelling businessman, gets lost whilst driving through the outskirts of suburban Midlands and takes shelter in a remote hostel. Inside, seated in a dining hall of stale opulence, he is surrounded by seemingly doped-up guests and served mounds of indigestible food. Things take an disquieting twist when Maybury notices one of the guests is chained at the ankle to a radiator. The phrase ‘Kafkaesque’ is often used for shadowy and potent bureaucracy, but ‘The Hospice’ is Kafkaesque in that it evokes a nameless terror which is more abstract, and much more frightening, than anything as simple as a ghost.

The Cicerones (in The Unsettled Dust)
Frequently, the structure of Aickman’s stories involve an unassuming male protagonist stopping by somewhere remote and humdrum (or seemingly humdrum) and uncovering some disturbing and enigmatic hidden stratum of the world, as Freudian as it is supernatural. Here, a traveller visits the Cathedral of Saint Bavon in Belgium, intent on a brief look at a painting of Lazarus recommended by his guidebook. Inside he encounters a series of characters – the cicerones of the title – each of whom lead him deeper and deeper into the Cathedral, eventually into the crypt. Dense with symbolism and allusions, this is a story which touches on themes of religion, historicity, culture, and, ultimately, martyrdom.

Ringing the Changes (in Dark Entries)
Perhaps Aickman’s most famous story, ‘Ringing the Changes’ has been widely anthologised, including in the wonderful Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories, and it’s not difficult to see why. Gerald – another stiff-upper-lipped Englishman – takes his much younger wife on honeymoon to a remote coastal village where, from the off, a sense of gloom and dread hangs profoundly over them: they cannot see the sea; their hotel is populated with cryptic, unfriendly locals; and, all around, church bells endlessly ring out (asked why, one of the locals simply tells Maybury: ‘practice’). Worst of all is the reek of rot that seems to fog up from the pages as the story progresses, reaching its knockout effect in its rancid, unconscionable climax.

The Stains (in The Unsettled Dust)
This late story from Aickman – one of his last and one of his longest – won the 1981 British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. It opens with Stephen, an old-fashioned civil servant and OBE whose predictable, traditional way of life begins to unravel when he finds himself newly widowed. Recuperating in the countryside he discovers Nell, a young, beautiful woman who could well be a woodland nymph, or an hallucination, or something else entirely. Their affair, at first blissful and passionate, is increasingly overshadowed by her father whose invisible presence prowls at the periphery of a story informed by weighty tensions: liberation versus repression, empire versus modernity, domestication versus freedom, civilization versus nature. If this all sounds a bit dully high-minded, it isn’t: rest assured that violent, terrifying dénouement will stay with you for a long time.

Fontana Introductions
Not an individual ghost story but a series of brief essays on the subject. For eight years Aickman edited and provided introductions for The Fontana Book of Ghost Stories series, accompanying his favourite tales with eloquent, incisive and eminently quotable observations about supernatural fiction, but also providing an Aickman reader with something of a divining rod for his own stories’ depths. Most importantly, these are strong, readable collections, including, alongside as a number of Aickman’s own stories, some of the lesser-known greats: Oliver Onions’ ‘The Beckoning Fair One’, Walter de la Mare’s ‘Seaton’s Aunt’, Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Wendigo’.

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Alison Moore's Curious Tales

1/10/2014

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This was supposed to be a list of my five favourite ghost stories, but just as I don’t really have an all-time favourite novel/film/song/colour this is really going to be a not-at-all-definitive list of five short stories that I really like and that come to mind now; and while I’m moving the goalposts, these are not all exactly ‘ghost’ stories but are more broadly about the raising or lingering of the dead or something – some of my favourite stories of this sort are tantalisingly non-specific.

1.     We dedicated our first Curious Tales publication, The Longest Night, to MR James. If I ever find myself the only occupant of a room with twin beds, I will be thinking of James’s story ‘Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ as I lie awake in the dark trying not to look too hard at the other, ‘empty’ bed.

2.    This year’s collection, Poor Souls’ Light, celebrates the work of Robert Aickman. In his marvellously strange story ‘Ringing the Changes’, a couple honeymoon out of season in an East Anglian coastal town, arriving to a cacophony of church bells. ‘Why did you have to come tonight of all nights?... Take her away, man... Now. While there’s still time. This instant.’ This story smells of ‘dense rotting weed’ and brandy, and it clings.

3.     ‘The disease,’ says the protagonist of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, ‘had sharpened my senses’. It’s a splendid way into a disturbing story. In ‘The Spite House’, my contribution to Poor Souls’ Light, this ‘Edgar Allan Poe story about a dead man whose heart seems still to beat beneath the floorboards’ is what my character reads before having trouble sleeping...

4.     Shadows & Tall Trees has been a treasure trove of weird and creepy stories since 2010. The story that opens issue 5 is Gary Fry’s ‘New Wave’ in which a father and son move into a house at the back of which is a farmer’s field that looks ‘like a churning body of water’. Never has a rippling field of wheat been so sinister. The ending – the very last line – is just perfect.

5. Of all these stories, ‘It’ by Adam Wilmington is the one that most defies categorisation and necessitates the broader umbrella of stories about some kind of haunting. ‘It’, which won the Manchester Fiction Prize 2013 and appears in Best British Short Stories 2014, is fantastically unsettling and like all the best such stories, haunts the reader ever after.
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Bus Station: Unbound (Another curious tale)

Halloween - Sneak Preview Event

Richard Hirst's Top 5 Robert Aickman Stories

Alison Moore's Curious Tales

Curious Tales

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