So, if you’re looking for something as a Christmas gift for someone who likes books? Just a suggestion.

My own story, I suppose falls into that category in a number of ways, exploring a the disintegration of a relationship, but through book titles. There is a distance in the plot as well as in the form, I suppose. Still, it’s quite different to almost every other story I’ve written, and also has a joke in it. I told my dad what it was. He didn’t get it.

Exhibit A is available to read on the website as one of the samples from the issue, but I’d urge you to support this fine journal and buy a copy, or take out a subscription. Every issue is full of great, interesting pieces of writing from a wide range of very fine writers.

This is also the third piece of writing of mine that shares its title with a song by The Cure. In this case, it was by complete accident. Although I can’t deny that the track ‘Sirensong’ from their last album 4:13 Dream was probably one of the better tracks on that album. A better song to look to for an atmospheric setting to this piece, is the brilliant cover of Tim Buckley’s ‘Song to the Siren’ by This Mortal Coil. Beautiful.

Crank House is a story that came together pretty quickly. It deals, again, with my love/hate relationship with hospitals, although in this I guess it’s mostly hate. The idea came to me after walking through an area of Glasgow where I used to live and seeing the new hospital that had been built there, across the road from the old Victorian hospital. The contrast was quite striking, between old, Gothic, dark, and modern, new, white and clean. I knew that on the site of the new hospital there had once stood an old school building about the same age as the old hospital, and from there the idea formed of living in one of the apartments near this site, of watching this modern monolith being constructed, and then fusing that with my own sense of terrible dread about these places.

I am pleased to say that the new Novak EP, Singularities, is now finished and ready for your listening pleasure! It has been a long time coming, some of these tracks date back a few years to 2009, but finally I have got it sorted and pulled this stuff together. Five tracks of droning, ambient guitars, distorted drum loops, samples and field recordings, all closing off with a nice slab of sludge.

Go on, dig in.

Big thanks to Mark Ashworth of ZnO, for mastering magic.

Download Singularities

Ethel’s brave and deeply personal stories have inspired me to look to my own life for inspiration in my own writing. It’s something I’ve consciously not done before. Not because there is necessarily anything dark or terrible there, but because I’ve never been able to make it work, never been able to make it sound genuine. I have written a few pieces that have used real experiences as a basis, but they have been heavily fictionalised in order for me to get the required distance necessary for me to make it sound ‘right’. After reading Ethel’s taught prose, it has made me question not just what I write about, but the way I write it. I’m not saying anything is going to change, but it has certainly made me think more about what I am doing.

In Hospital Greys, published today by Spilling Ink Review, is a story influenced almost entirely by personal experience, and draws heavily on my fascination, and loathing, for hospitals.

I have many, many memories of strange, bizarre, frightening things, happening either to me, or to others in those white halls of medical bureaucracy: from the time I awoke after having my tonsils removed at age 5, with two nurses trying to make me eat an ice lolly while a car crash victim, who seemed to be bound head to foot in bandages, screamed on the other side of the ward; to the day my mother, a belly full of pills and vodka, looked me in the eyes and cried that she just wanted to be allowed to die. In between I played amongst the abandoned ruins of psychiatric hospitals, told and listened to ghost stories in playgrounds about old local hospitals, boarded up for decades, stalked by sinister shadows and the echoes of long dead patients.

I remain drawn to and repulsed by these places, and wherever I live, there always seems to be some gothic Victorian pile of ageing, smoke-smeared sandstone looming somewhere amongst the bustle of modern city life. It’s the dark architecture that has haunted my entire life. The grit in the eye that never washes out.

My review of ‘By Invitation Only‘ is also up at PANK. It’s a fairly straight forward review. I did try something different with it, but it failed to impress me. I did really enjoy the book though, so if you like short story collections, be sure to check it out.