An introduction

Growing up, I used to have terrible nightmares. Not just bad dreams. I would hallucinate too. Perhaps it was sleep paralysis, I can't quite remember, but I would see things in my room. A hanging dressing gown would become a black-haired spectre. The red standby light of the TV a laser beam waiting to incinerate me. Even my littler sister running across the landing to go to the bathroom at night became a possessed child coming to murder me.

At one point, it felt like I was having a nightmare every single night. I remember telling my dad that I was "Too afraid to sleep". He treated that statement with the seriousness it deserved and, looking back, I realise how tiring it must have been to have their child waking them every night by screaming at the top of their voice. But being back in that bed, waiting to slip into sleep, I was often left feeling real fear at what would be coming my way.

I was unofficially diagnosed with an "overactive imagination", something my mum assured me was a good thing. I could take the smallest glimpse of something scary and flesh it out into a full-fledged production in my nightmare cinema. I avoided horror as much as possible as a result, but you could never fully escape it. I remember BBC Breakfast News sharing the shower scene from Psycho. There was The X-Files theme tune remix that played on Top Of The Pops which had a music video filled with creepy clips from the show. Even listening to one of the kids from school describe a kill scene from the most terrifying film he had ever seen was enough to get the cogs working (Note: The film he was describing was Halloween: H20, not a great or scary film by any stretch of the imagination and nowhere near as graphic as he had described). It took very little to set me off.

My only defence was reading. I'd sit up late at night with the lamp on, reading book after book to try and fill my mind with stories that wouldn't result in nightmares. I don't think I'd have survived without Terry Pratchett and his Discworld novels. His writing and the work of many others helped keep me sane until I grew out of this period, or at least learned to recognise the difference between waking and sleep. (I do still get nightmares and hallucinate, but most of the time I can tell the spectre or demon in the room to "Get on with it and let me get back to sleep" which sort of saps the power out of the moment.)

Something changed in my twenties and I went from avoiding horror to starting to see the appeal. There are few things better than seeing a horror film in a crowded cinema, every reaction amped up as it's shared with those around you. Or you could unsettle yourself by reading a horror story just before bed, then trying to sleep while the echoes of the narrative bounce around your mind. And then of course you need to get up and go to the bathroom. Lights on or off? Being a grown up doesn't help answer the question.

It was only a matter of time before this love for horror would translate into an urge to create my own stories. To hopefully make something that inspires that same sense of dread and unease in someone else. Why would I want to scare someone else? There's something about horror storytelling that feels different. It allows you to tackle your own thoughts, feelings and fear through a prism that abstracts them enough to reach deep inside yourself and really explore your id, ego and superego. Some people might do this through fantasy and adventure. Others through deeply autobiographical pieces of work. I want to do it with ghosts and monsters.

This is starting to get a bit rambling. One day I'll get over the false modesty and learn to talk about myself a bit better. Until them, I hope you enjoy the stories on this site. They've been brewing inside my mind for a long time now. And if they give you nightmares too, that's fine with me.

Thanks for reading.

James