Triskaidekaphobia and Other Noir Tales

Like many of my other book projects, this short story collection was a long time in the making. As I say in the introduction, the stories were written in the 1990s and form a body of work concerning my literary leanings back then, so they all hang together as a piece. Being written and set in the past hasn’t blunted their preoccupations, in my own opinion, because the themes are as relevant now as ever.

The title, Triskaidekaphobia, was always earmarked as thus, because it’s such a great word, and one-word titles have a certain unique impact – especially within the horror genre. It grew to Triskaidekaphobia and Other Noir Tales, and recently I adopted a lengthy descriptive subtitle: Unsettling Stories of Dark Psychology, Amorous Transgression and Wry Humour, in order to readily advertise the content from a page or thumbnail on a retail site, as so many books do nowadays.

The stories range from those with distinctly ‘horror’ elements – several originally published in 1990s indie press magazines such as Sierra Heaven, Psychotrope, Threads and Flickers ‘n’ Frames – to more literary pieces, some with borderline fantasy themes and others set in quotidian British life, but with lurking dark or noir elements.

Looking back over influences, real-life and fictional, I see that the John and Lorena Bobbitt case happened almost exactly thirty years ago now, becoming a huge tabloid sensation and also generating an undercurrent of comic pathos to accompany the extreme violence, of a kind congruent with one’s worst – and archetypally Freudian – nightmares. The Ian McEwan short story ‘Pornography’, from the collection First Love, Last Rites, also resonates; and the whole métier of those stories from the ‘Ian Macabre’ period was a guiding light.

Continuing the ‘amorous transgression’ thread, the dirty phone call inclusion was based on a real dirty phone call, related to me by a female friend, who reckoned she knew the perpetrator, and was probably correct in that assumption. Road-rage was another big preoccupation of the ’90s zeitgeist, and I cannot forget a certain incident, when I turned off the M4 at the M32 junction, and I saw two cars parked up on the grass verge, their drivers engaged in a full-on fist fight, swinging haymakers at one another.

Designer oblivion is another theme, not through drugs this time – though there is one sequence of ‘temporary cannabis psychosis’ – but through deep dreaming, and through snow…Snow…? Yes, snow. As a skier, I’ve experienced this once or twice, and polar explorers and frequenters of artic regions must know it well…Lightness visible, perhaps.

Triskaidekaphobia is published today, in paperback and Kindle worldwide. For more information and purchase links, please visit: Darkness Visible Publishing