A funny thing happened in the 1950s. An insidious enemy grew from within the heart of America, spreading out and infecting all it touched. Neighbour turned on neighbour, beloved celebrities were now the enemy and not to be trusted for the things they said. No this wasn’t an early version of Covid. This was McCarthyism. An paranoid-fulled horror whereby everyone was suspected of being a Red Spy, a Commie in disguise, leading to a period of American history so bleak that it’s been likened to the Witch Trials a couple of centuries earlier. One of the consequences of this newfound mentality of ‘seeing enemies everywhere’, was the inevitable and always awful book burning. Not just figurative, but literal. Actual piles of ‘unAmerican literature’ were burned in the streets. And the removal of such ‘threats’ went further than burning the existing pages. Like a boss monster from Resident Evil, this paranoia mutated into the worst and most horrific form imaginable: legislation.

Comic Books, the subject of this article (I’m getting there, I promise) were hit particularly hard by the new rules. Given their primary audience of such easily-influenced young minds, they were forbidden from depicting anything Un-American, such as the bad guys winning or extreme violence. Given that we’re talking about America here, just take a moment to share an Edna Krabapple-style ‘HA’ at that last statement. As you might expect, the inability to depict violence affected everything from Crime comics, to Sci Fi, to Superheroes. This is the era when Batman became a campy silly character rather than a brutal vigilante.

But arguably hit worst of all, were horror comics. For some reason, the idea of beings returning from the dead to enact revenge, was judged as UnAmerican. This was most likely because it’s judged as being Un-Christian, which is odd given that returning from the dead is exactly what their main guy does.  But in any case, the inability to depict such things as vampires, zombies, mummies, ghosts or anything or the sort basically did what bullets and fire had always failed to: it killed the monsters. Horror comics weren’t just being burned in the streets, they couldn’t even be published anymore. This change also meant that not only could publishers not release titles that were solely dedicated to the tales of such things, but they couldn’t even be featured in other kinds of comics. You weren’t likely to see Superman fighting any vampires, for instance. That all changed in the 1970s.

The introduction of the Comics Code Authority had been the face behind which these impossible restrictions had hidden. Over time, this unduly-harsh legislature was relaxed repeatedly, allowing more and more things to slip through. Eventually it was decided that comics could once again feature Monsters and violence and the good guys not winning. And regarding the first point there, the comic books of the 1970s took that news and ran with it.

There’s so many full-on horror comics from the 1970s that it’s too many to list. Marvel had its Tomb of Darkness, the return of Journey Into Mystery (now a full-on horror title in itself having previously been fantasy-based, and even being the title that gave birth to Thor) and more. DC had House of Mystery, Ghosts and several others. Then there were the outliers from smaller companies, such as Boris Karloff’s Tales of Mystery, and Ripley’s Believe it Or Not. I’ve got a massive stack of all of these and more, and they’re an absolute treasure trove of horror tales. But the sudden horror invasion didn’t stop there. Oh no, it started to creep into the ‘nicer neighbourhoods’. I mean, of course you were going to get supernatural beings in graveyards and haunted houses, but in the 1970s you were about to encounter them in the centre of New York, or Gotham City.

Michael Morbius bares the oft-disputed (and even when researching this article, I found conflicting statements about this) honour of being the first vampire in comic books since the relaxation of the dreaded code. And where did he appear? On the pages of a horror comic, right? Nope. He was introduced in Spider-Man.  That’s right, not even Dr Strange. Marvel’s first vampire character would face off first of all against the friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man. If that seems an add choice, I should add the context that in the 1970s, Spider-Man was used to introduce a whole gamut of new characters. Got a new villain to try out? Put him up against Spidey. New hero? Have him work alongside Spidey. There’s a whole title called Marvel Team-Up, in which every issue is basically one of the above scenarios. So whilst having Spidey fight a vampire might seem odd, it perhaps seems less so given this context.

Morbius himself was an unusual vampire, in that his origin was scientific. Ultimately he was still pale, strong, had a need to drink blood, an eastern-European accent, and was vulnerable to sunlight. But he wasn’t afraid of the cross or holy water, and his vulnerability to garlic was explained scientifically rather than being a spiritual thing. These technicalities of his origin did make him fit a little more in the colourful world of Spider-Man than you might expect, at least in his early appearances. Morbius’ popularity was such that, as the years rolled on, he’d get his own title (several of them, as they never seemed to last particularly long. Some folks are just better as support acts, I guess), and become part of the early 90s ‘Midnight Sons’ series, which was when Marvel brought together all of its darker supernatural characters in what was basically the Goth Avengers. Morbius is actually the subject of a new movie starring Jared Leto, which looks fun enough from the trailer, but I suspect it will be overshadowed by more tales of pretentious douchebag behaviour from Mr Leto off-camera.

Hot on the heels of Morbius, Marvel introduced a whole pantheon of horror characters that were much more in the line of ‘classic’ monsters. We had Dracula, Frankenstein, Zombie, The Mummy, Werewolf By Night, and others. If Morbius’s introduction had perhaps suggested that ‘real’ vampires don’t exist in the Marvel Universe, then the Tomb of Dracula title put this idea back in its coffin pretty damn quickly. Here we had the actual lord of vampires doing…..lord of vampires stuff. To be honest the quality of his title varies a lot, even from issue to issue. It’s usually either him battling another vampire who wants his title, fighting another monster, forcibly interacting with the human world (and very occasionally, actual superheroes), or else being hunted by vampire killers. An example of the latter saw the introduction of a group called the NightStalkers. These were a group of well-trained vampire hunters who each had their own reasons for stalking the undead (not in a Bella Swan way). Perhaps most famous in this group, was a young chap named Blade.

If you’re picturing the comic-book equivalent of Wesley Snipes – long leather coat, sunglasses, fangs and one-liners……you’re way off. Well, not with the one-liners. But the Blade we now know and love was a later development. In his original appearances, Blade had an afro, wore flares and a tanned suede jacket, and didn’t even have any powers. His origin (his mum was bitten by a vampire when she was pregnant with him) had only served to give him an immunity to vampire bites and mesmerism, and a vague ability to sense when they were close to the undead. Which aided with hunting them, naturally. But that was it. There was none of this ‘all of the strengths and none of the weaknesses’ DayWalker stuff. That came later. Some sources suggest that was introduced specifically for the films, but I don’t think that’s true as the Midnight Sons stuff featured Blade before the first film came out, and here he was much closer to the super-powered version we know.  At the time of writing this, a new Blade film is in pre-production to bring the character into the actual MCU canon of films, so it’ll be interesting to see how that pans out.

As mentioned above, Dracula wasn’t the only classic monster to make his way into the Marvel Universe. We also had the Frankenstein Monster, The Mummy and even a Zombie. The stories featuring all of them were mediocre. There’s a reason Tomb of Dracula stuck around for years and they didn’t. Despite the oft-times ropey nature of Dracula’s stories, he managed to plant himself firmly in the Marvel world, becoming an important part of the darker side of that world’s mythology. The other ‘classic’ monsters didn’t fare quite so well. Perhaps the runner-up to Dracula was WereWolf by Night. The protagonist here was a young man named Jack Russell (apparently the writers who created him swear to this day that this name wasn’t intentionally meant to be a canine name) didn’t become a werewolf by the usual manner of being bitten, however. No, he was the bearer of a family curse that began on his 18th birthday. Long ago, one of his ancestors had messed around with a cursed book called the Darkhold (basically Marvel’s Necronomicon, and now making appearances in the MCU itself) and subsequently given his bloodline a case of the hairies. What made the Werewolf stories stand out to me, is that there was actual collateral damage from Jack’s transformations. More than once he killed or maimed actual friends and family members, and the fallout from that stuck. One of his closest friends spends the rest of his life in a wheelchair after an encounter with the werewolf, for instance, and Jack has to live with that. That was some heavy stuff for 1970s comic books. Sadly, ultimately they gave Jack the ability to control himself when he becomes a werewolf, leading to him being like any other superhero, and things went downhill from there (it’s very telling that his title was cancelled not long after this change.)

Whilst we’re still on Marvel, it’d be wrong to ignore the character who is arguably their most famous horror icon: Ghost Rider. Originally a stunt rider who made a deal with the Devil and found himself bonded with a vengeance-seeking demon, the Rider would later become an angel, an interdimensional warrior, and even a cosmic alien herald of Galactus.. All of which was just….ugh. But what do you expect; Marvel gonna Marvel. But if you want to read the proper Ghost Rider, it’s the original 1970s tales you want. Cursed and lonely Jonny Blaze, travelling down route 66(6), fighting demons and ghostly truckers and the like. Whilst both attempts at making a Ghost Rider film were pretty bad, there’s some imagery from the first one which is really great. And the more recent version of him that appeared on Marvel’s Shield series was very cool (although that was Robbie Reyes and not Johnny Blaze, but they did reference Blaze.)

Moving away from the cities and highways and into the more rural side of America, the 1970s found not one but two swamp monsters. Like The Heap from the 1950s, these guys were big, slimy and strong, yet actually served the forces of light. Marvel had the Man-Thing, and DC had Swamp Thing. The latter was introduced in House of Secrets as a one-shot horror story character, but his popularity was such that they brought him back for a full title. Well, sort of. You see that original story had Swamp Thing as being set over a century ago, which didn’t let him fit with the current DC universe. So they re-wrote his origin to fit in the modern day instead. Interestingly, a later Swamp Thing story by Alan Moore introduced the idea that Swamp Things were like Slayers in the world of Buffy, in that there was one per generation. This now meant the original Victorian-era Swamp Thing was allowed to exist in the history of the DC world, which was a nice workaround.

Both Man-Thing and Swamp thing would deal with a variety of mystical and supernatural threats, human misunderstanding and abuse, and occasionally encounters with actual superheroes. And both would go on to be part of some larger destiny. Swamp Thing became the god of the Green, the protector of the natural world. And Man-Thing would become the guardian of the Nexus of Reality, basically an interdimensional hotel lobby in the centre of the swamp with doors opening and closing to all sorts of place. Some nice, mostly not. Both of these characters have also had movies made, a common thread here, but none have been great. Swamp Thing did have a high-budget TV series made a couple of years back, which was promising, but sadly it got cancelled. This makes the experience of watching it rather annoying, because everything you see is a plot thread that will be set up and never resolved.

Finally, let’s talk about Batman. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t talk about Batman, so it would be rude to miss him out here. When the Comics Code Authority relaxed a little, allowing violence back into comics, one of the first characters to take advantage of this was Batman. It must have upset him, not being able to punch anybody for so long. The writers at DC clearly wanted to make Batman a dark character again, surrounded by shadows and fear. But they weren’t quite sure how to do that. Frank Miller’s reinvigoration of the character as the gritty one we know today was a decade away, so what to do in the meantime? The answer, as it is to many things in life, was monsters.

If you pick up a run of Batman comics from the 1970s, you’d absolutely be forgiven for being surprised at how many damn monsters there are in them. Most notably, this era saw the introduction of Man-Bat, a scientist-turned giant bat monster. As with Morbius over at Marvel, this character would become so popular that he’d go on to get his own series, be it short-lived. The years rolled on and Man-Bat fell out of a favour a little, meaning we don’t see him all that much in the modern era, but he remains an iconic example of the time when Batman fought monsters of the literal kind. He wasn’t alone, though. Batman also faced off against Yetis, Undead creatures, and even a demonically-possessed and seemingly-immortal Adolph Hitler (yes really).  Unlike the previous characters I’ve talked about, no, none of this has made it to screen yet. Although I personally think a 1970s-set Batman movie featuring supernatural threats would be a fun change of pace for the franchise, I can’t see it happening.
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So there we have it. The 1970s reopened the cemetery gates onto the worlds of comic books, and they’ve never quite closed again. If you’re interested in reading any of the titles I’ve spoken about above, but don’t want to spend an absolute fortune on 50-year-old comics, may I suggest looking up the collected editions that both companies now put out in book form? Marvel’s ‘Epic Collection’ series, for instance, will give you around 10-15 comic books for less than £20, which is far less than it would cost you to buy the original comics themselves.

Lex H Jones is a British author, horror fan and rock music enthusiast who lives in Sheffield, North England.
He has written articles for premier horror websites the ‘Gingernuts of Horror’ and the ‘Horrifically Horrifying Horror Blog’, and appeared on multiple podcasts covering various subjects such as books, films, videogames and music.

Lex’s first novel ‘Nick and Abe’, a literary fantasy about God and the Devil spending a year on earth as mortal men, was published in 2016. This was followed in 2019 by noir crime novel ‘The Other Side of the Mirror’ and illustrated children’s weird fiction book ‘The Old One and The Sea’. His latest release is a collection of ghost stories, ‘Whistling Past The Graveyard’. Lex also has a growing number of short horror stories published in collections alongside some of the greats of the genre, and in 2020 he co-created the comic strip series ‘The Anti-Climactic Adventures of Detective Vampire’ with Liam ‘Pais’ Hill.

When not working on his own writing Lex also contributes to the proofing and editing process for other authors.

For most of my formative years, I possessed an imperfect but quite personal relationship with Death.

I was raised by my grandmother and great-grandparents, so I was constantly in the orbit of the oldest members of my family.  I attended a number of funerals before I hit my teens.  The pageantry, the grieving – all of it confusing and off-putting.  I finally came to understand that a funeral = death, and then I hated them even more.

It wasn’t Death himself that truly scared me.  I understood He was a constant and tat life was finite, but the unrestrained grief at these events felt unbearable.  At each funeral, I struggled with the suffocating emotional pain washing over me, threatening to suck me down into a vortex from which I would not be able to surface.  I would come home upset, confused, and unable to adjust immediately to the land of the freely breathing – the land of the living.  For a little kid, I got quite morbid after each funeral, like, noticeably so.  After each gathering, my grandmother would do everything she could to get me to take interest in my friends again.

Finally, around the age of 10, I put my foot down.  I would not be attending any more funerals with my family.  I was done.

Good people that they were, they respected my wishes.

There was still Death in my world – an elderly relative here, an elderly neighbour there – but I remained safely cocooned in my stubborn insistence to not attend funerals.  I saw my grandmother cry, usually upon hearing the news of another life slipping away, but I didn’t see the raw grief on display at a public memorial of any kind.  That’s the deal I struck, and it seems workable, right?

I thought I was “good” with Death right into my mid-teens.  He picked off elderly folks, helping them shuffle off their mortal coils, while I went on with my life – young and immortal.  My senior year of high school, however, disabused me of the notion that He and I had any détente to speak of.

I took the phone call before leaving for school one beautiful autumn morning in September of my senior year.  In one month I would turn 17.  I was so engrossed with my morning ritual of curling my hair and putting on makeup that I didn’t even think it strange that the phone rang at 7 am.  My friend’s mom was on the line, asking to speak to my grandmother.  I cajoled her, what had my friend done now?  Was he in some kind of trouble?  He was quite the prankster, and his parents were prohibitively strict, so I was having trouble imagining what might necessitate a call from his mom to my grandma this early in the day.

“He’s dead,” she said, then all I heard was sobbing.

Nineteen years old, playing goalie for his soccer team, and he dropped dead of a heart attack mid-game.  Nothing they did could revive him, and he was gone.  Just like that.

Just. Like. That.

The rest of that day is a haze.  I remember handing over the phone.  I vaguely remember some screaming in my bedroom, along with tears, and that familiar pull of grief from so many previous funerals.  I remember going to school and hearing people openly speculate about what happened, even though none of them had spoken to his family.  All of them were guessing and spinning scenarios in that particularly cruel way that teenagers in a small town will do.

I remember telling one classmate, who falsely insinuated a drug-related incident, that I hoped she never had to go through something similar with her friends.  In what turned out to be a painful moment of prophecy, she lost her younger brother to a one-car DUI accident almost exactly two years later.  The whisper campaign was vicious, but that’s high school, right?

I wrestled with the need to protect myself and the need to see my friend one last time.  In telling my family that I would no longer go to funerals, I was also making a vow to myself, one that I was willing to break only for a chance to say goodbye to a dear friend.  I finally accepted the realization that Death would not be kept at bay by my funerary quirks and going this once would not give Death any extra power over me.

Attending my friend’s funeral turned out to be a mistake.  A theatrical production that combined strict religious tradition with melodramatic high schoolers, it was worse than any school play you’ve ever endured.  So much performative grief, including his girlfriend of a few weeks in the star role of The Grieving Widow.  His parents – father sitting stoically, mother sobering hysterically.  This wasn’t who he was.  This wasn’t what he would have wanted.  I left the funeral home sick to my stomach.  I threw up next to my friend’s car in the parking lot, a brief but untidy remembrance of a horrid day.

Draped in black crepe and smeared with ash, my 17th birthday came and went with little fanfare and even less interest. No one really felt like celebrating, least of all me, but with my increasingly cynical and sullen attitude, who would want to party, right?

Later that month, things were just beginning to return to normalcy when another classmate was murdered by his brother.  I’d been bus mates with him for a few years, and he’d graduated the previous June.  I didn’t know him well enough to go to his funeral, even though that didn’t stop many others with less tenuous connections from attending or from playing up their attendance when they returned to school on Monday.  Again, the whole high school fell into a maudlin pantomime of grief and loss, fuelled by typically petty teenaged one-upmanship.  The beginning of my senior year had all the trappings of an extended funeral, which I had the privilege of attending six hours a day, five days a week.

When November rolled around, I remember thinking now who will we lose?  These things come in threes, right?  I felt like Death was lying in wait, flowing through the periphery of my life, and I wondered when he would come calling again.  A gentleman suitor I neither wanted nor needed, but persistent in his stubborn interest in my life and pool of friends and acquaintances.

Just after Halloween, a friend offered me a ticket to attend a symphony concert with her family at the college near our homes.  She and her mom picked me up, and we enjoyed a lovely evening of Tchaikovsky.  It felt so grown up to sit in a blouse and skirt and listen to classical music for a few hours.  They dropped me back at my house around 10 pm, and my dad’s car was in the driveway, an unprecedented happening when he wasn’t stopping by to pick me up for the day.
Few things are more concerning than early morning or late-night calls and unexpected visits from family.

When I went inside, my grandmother was crying in the kitchen.  She wouldn’t, couldn’t talk to me.  My dad lead me into our living room, which we rarely used, and asked me to have a seat on the couch.

“There’s been an accident,” he started, talking tentatively, feeling his way through each word, each intonation.

I interrupted, like I often do when I am nervous, was it my great-grandmother?
No, he said quietly.

My great-grandfather?

No, he said again.

You said “accident.”  Were they both killed in a car crash?

“Levi is dead.”

I remember shaking my head in the negative – my mind swimming.  Or was it sinking?  My baby brother Levi couldn’t be dead.

No.  You’re wrong.  That’s not possible.  I remember repeating “no” again and again in increasingly hysterical tones, growing louder, until the word itself had been wrung dry of all meaning, my dad reaching toward me as I pulled away.

But it was possible.  It had happened. Levi slipped and drown in the bathtub at the age of three years old.  Far too young for Death but gone just the same.

After staying while I needed him, to let me cry and wail, to let me scream to the heavens about the unfairness of, well, everything, my dad finally left some time after midnight.  My grandmother retreated to her bedroom long before, incapacitated with heartache.  As soon as my dad left, I transformed into the adult in charge.

I grabbed my grandmother’s emergency credit card and bought us plane tickets to Florida for the funeral.  These were pre-internet days with an airline agent on their 800 number.  I kept my voice calm and low, impersonated my grandma, and arranged all of our travel.  I called a friend in Florida, a true friend who took a 3 am call, and he agreed to meet us at the airport the next afternoon.

I placed a call and left a message with my high school, again impersonating my grandma.  Casey is not coming in tomorrow and won’t be for the foreseeable future.  There’s been a terrible accident...

The next few weeks reside in my memories in hazy way, a muted palette in monotone with splashes of colour from lucid flashes, snippets of that time.

Getting off the plane to the familiar smell of rot and humidity endemic to the subtropics, the sun blinding after so many hours of jolting awake after trying to sleep on the couch the night before and on the flight that day.

Being approached by a couple of hippie dudes as I cried on the sidewalk outside of my brother’s funeral home viewing.  They stopped, and one said, “It’s gonna be okay, little sister.  One day, it’s all gonna be okay,” before moving on by.

The cold, waxy feel of Levi’s forehead as I kissed him goodbye.  Tucking in a favourite toy with him.

Getting out of a limousine at the graveyard and having to catch my grandmother as she collapsed with grief.

Greeting people at my mom’s house – accepting their casseroles, sandwich plates and condolences – because my mom couldn’t talk to anyone.  She just sat on the couch and stared into her drink.

I picked up all the adult roles because no one else seemed capable.  Besides, staying busy is a great way to avoid your feelings, right?

I flew home right after the funeral, but my grandmother stayed on to help my mom get her shit together.  It was the first time I’d ever been alone in my entire life.  A few of my close friends took turns staying overnight with me, and bless them for dealing with the night terrors and my middle-of-the-night screaming.  It was all I could do to remember to wash my hair sometimes, eat occasionally, and show up to school Mondays through Fridays.  My grades tanked.  My penchant for seeing patterns where there were none grew stronger.  My paranoia and anxiety ramped up like a tsunami slowly building from the ocean floor to become the towering sea monster that haunts the dreams of the coastal folk.

At the end of November, my grandmother, having recently returned home and hoping to give me a bright spot in the holiday season, offered me an early Christmas present.  She’d already wrapped it.  I gratefully accepted it and was excited to tear off the paper and find a Stephen King book I hadn’t read yet: Pet Sematary.  I began reading it almost immediately.

Main character traumatized as a child by the death of a sibling. Toddler killed violently. Toddler returning to life violently.  Toddler dying again violently.  Everybody dead or broken by the end. From our collective vantage point nearly 40 years later, and as horror aficionados, I’m sure you see the problem that caused, right?

My grandmother felt so bad when I told her the plot, but I assured her it was still a welcomed gift.  Fictional pain, horror, and grief were far preferable to the real thing.  I was able to parse it into emotionally manageable pieces.  Instead of finishing the book in just a few days, it took me a few weeks, but I did it.  And it was good.

When December passed with no further visits from Death, I could have sobbed with relief.  By January, I was together enough to get back to the things that reminded me how much I enjoyed life: gaming and writing.  I pulled myself together enough to finish the academic year strong, but I had a new outlook.  I made plans but didn’t revel in them.  I worked hard but took less joy from it.  Life became a series of goals, some hit and some missed, but that’s what being an adult is all about, right?

Levi’s death was really the pivot in my life.  I never feared Death, but I had a healthier respect for the damage His actions wrought.  Every relationship changed with the grief I endured during these months.  Even my relationship with myself.  My writing, a mere bud on the bush at that age, took a swift and dark turn, blooming into a crimson rose, its stem laden with thick and plentiful thorns.  Fanciful and crappy teenaged poetry made way for more philosophical and thoughtful fare, and I worked hard on my writing skills to make my words and ideas live up to this tough emotional place in which I now resided.

In college, I transitioned from games like Dungeons and Dragons to Call of Cthulhu.  I read less light fantasy and retreated into more hard-core horror.  Fictitious horror became more and more enjoyable, the darker, the better.  There was comfort to be found there, even when the bad guy didn’t always get what he deserved.  Even when Death came for all the characters with varying degrees of success.  That was like real life, right?

Now I write those horrible accidents.  I bring Death to my worlds on the page.  I drag characters through pain and grief and death and all manner of misery.  For your entertainment.  For catharsis.  For the sake of good storytelling.  For you.
Because someone out there – it could be any of you – might just need a diversion, something that fictionalizes your pain and grief and shows you that one day, it’s all gonna be okay.

And that’s all we can ask of our fiction, right?

I met Cthulhu in college.
 
In one night, I discovered his true identity, opened a portal to another dimension, banished him there, and thwarted a doomsday cult. None of this was covered during First Year orientation, but I managed. Now I must awaken him from his eternal slumber to undo a cosmic cataclysm while avoiding the prophecy foretelling my failure and the end of humanity.


Nothing in Amanda's life has ever been normal, but her college boyfriend, Ryley, was paranormal. Fifteen years after banishing him to his city beneath the waves, she needs to evoke dark magic to dispel the mounting chaos pervading the world, twisting events and people beyond madness.


Now the stars are right.


Amanda must summon Ry and save the world. But at what cost?


Cthulhu: A Love Story is a contemporary take on the Lovecraftian Mythos filled with chaos worshipping cultists, dark rituals, and cosmic horror.

 

My novel The Angels of L19 is a work of weird fiction set in an evangelical church in Liverpool in 1984 – a world I grew up in. Historically, the English novel has often presented religious belief and religious experience in negative ways: either as insincere, a pretext for self-righteousness; or as a form of delusion or madness. As one of my protagonists, Tracey, puts it to herself while watching Footloose:


"In films and books, no one ever believes something simply because it’s true. There’s always a secret, personal reason. Righteousness is hypocrisy; conviction is prejudice. God is a mask to hide behind. And the story strips the mask away."


Tracey sees things differently: ‘We don’t hide from ourselves in God. He’s the secret that explains who we are.’


I wanted to write about characters for whom Tracey’s observation is true: people whose faith pushes them to become better people, not worse. But I also wanted to write about how the supernatural might manifest in their world.


In his book The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher describes the weird as an eruption or egress from elsewhere – from outside – into our world of something whose very existence disrupts our notion of reality. For Lovecraft, one of the founding fathers of weird fiction, this transcendental, alien outside was never supernatural, even if ignorant people sometimes mistook it for such. But even if we reject Lovecraft’s materialism, there is a larger problem in representing the Christian supernatural in these terms: because the invisible presence of supernatural beings is an accepted cornerstone of Christian belief. Even if few believers claim to have actually encountered an angel or demon, their existence is taken for granted. They are not elsewhere: they are all around us. We just can’t see them. As such, they are familiar, and their depiction in art and fiction is conventional – indeed, it often verges on kitsch (feathery wings, bulging muscles, luminescent pale skin and blonde hair, etc.). But this need not be so. The descriptions in the biblical books of Ezekiel and Revelation of multi-winged and –headed creatures covered in eyes are anything but kitsch: they are quite genuinely weird (even if some of this effect might be attributable to their origin in an alien cultural context). They are terrible in the same way that God is terrible. However, even these canonical descriptions are now familiar enough to lose some of their unsettling power if simply repeated verbatim.


What I tried to do in The Angels of L19 was to imagine entities whose manifestations were quite different to the descriptions in the Bible – to avoid triggering any sense of overfamiliairity – but that try to replicate some of their unsettling power. So this is how Robert, my visionary character, perceives the being he calls ‘the presence’ on its first appearance in the story:


Its body is ivory; at other times, wax. Always hairless, smooth. No articulations or openings, apart from a bubbled vertical slit in the centre of its head, like the line of glue on the wallpaper.


An egg. Sealed, but waiting to split.


Or here it is on its second appearance (it changes and evolves each time it appears):


Its ivory skin is translucent, but the white flesh has thickened underneath. Curds and whey. Fermenting.


Its head has an opening now. A dry circle. An inverted cone cut into this wet dissolution, positioned somewhere between where the nose and mouth would be – if it had a nose or a mouth. … The cone advances towards Robert, out of the head. It’s bigger than the head, even though it’s coming out of the head. And now Robert is inside the cone, which means he’s also inside the head. It surrounds him, like a caul.


The cone is black, and as it narrows towards the apex there’s a red disc. So the cone’s truncated. It doesn’t end in a point but in another, much smaller circle. The circle flashes: red, then black; red, black. No, that’s not right. More like it’s sliding in and out. Red, black. A diaphragm opening and closing.


He falls into the cone.


Eventually, Robert advances a theory about the presence: it’s an angel. But what is an angel? ‘A messenger, and also a technology for recording and transmitting the message. An archive.’ My attempts to dramatise the interventions of the presence are based on this idea – but what its message is and where it comes from are only revealed gradually (though certainly it originates ‘outside’). And Robert’s final revelation of its meaning is horrifying as well as transcendent. Indeed, this is one of my themes: horror as a kind of transcendence. An abject angel. For is not the Cross abject and horrifying too


There is also a second supernatural character in The Angels of L19, whose interventions are demonic and destructive, but she does not have fur, horns or a forked tail. Instead, she appears as a naked, starved pre-pubescent girl (but also, sometimes, as Robert, or even as Tracey).


The weirdness of these supernatural characters is inspired by Christian existentialism: its purpose is not to confirm the protagonists in their preconceptions, but to confront and challenge them. For Kierkegaard too, the God who speaks to Abraham and asks him to sacrifice his only son is ‘weird’. He is the ordering principle by which all reality exists, but He is also, by definition, not what you expect, and His manifestations disrupt your cozy complacencies about your relation to that reality and your place in the world.


All this might suggest that The Angels of L19 privileges Robert’s weird visionary experiences over Tracey’s quotidian faith. But I don’t think that’s true: the weird always appears against a backdrop of the familiar, but here the everyday is not simply blotted out by the weird’s overwhelming otherness. Unlike Lovecraft, I tried to imagine the redemptive potential of the weird, but also the redemptive possibilities of the everyday. At the end of the book, it is Tracey’s faith that saves Robert, not the other way round.

There's more than one way to be born again. Liverpool, 1984. The teenagers at Garston Chapel are the same as the rest of us: The Smiths, U2, crushes, football, mates. The grimy, low\-down politics of the Thatcher era casting deep shadows in this proud and broken city, but the kids have got other things on their minds... Jesus Christ Our Lord for one. Almost normal kids, then. But Robert isn't at all normal. Because Robert is visited by angels,  if that's what they are. He can't tell a soul about his secret. All anyone can see is his strange behaviour as he desperately seeks to understand what they mean, what they want from him. As Robert's two worlds merge, the real and the visionary intersect with increasing intensity and what is being asked of him becomes terrifyingly clear. The Angels of L19 is a moving and entirely original story of young lives at the confluence of faith and doubt, angels and demons, life and death. And where redemption is possible, even for those we think might be lost forever

Or purchase a copy direct from Weather Glass Books  

My transition from children’s books to adult was a furtive, creeping process.


My mother would sometimes drop me off at the local library and tell me to pick out a few books while she went off to do the weekly shop. It was on one of these unsupervised visits that I first slipped away from the comfortable sofas and the brightly-coloured carpet of the kids’ area into the acres of shelves that housed all the books for grownups.


I checked over my shoulder to see if the librarian was going to stop me. I tentatively—guiltily—ran my fingers over the spines of the plastic-wrapped books. I removed a book and flicked through the pages, too buzzed to actually take in the words.


Footsteps!


I quickly put the book back and returned to where I was supposed to be. But the pull was too great. I kept returning. Until, one week, I found the courage to sneak a book into my stack to take home with me.


My heart thumped in my chest. My top lip beaded with seat. Surely there some rule about a ten-year-old taking Shaun Hutson’s Slugs out of the library and reading it, wide-eyed, in snatched moments when no one was watching?


But, no. No one stopped me. This was the eighties, after all.


Before I continue, did you know that a slug has more teeth than a shark (about 27,000 in fact)? And one female slug can lay one-point-five million eggs a year? Slugs are pretty damn gross before Shaun Hutson got his hands on them and made them much, much worse.


Back to my story. The book was horrifying. Basic premise? Carnivorous slugs with a taste for human flesh. That’s it.


The first victim is devoured almost completely, leaving behind just sinew and bone, plus one lone eyeball bulging from its socket. Another unfortunate accidentally eats half a slug and parasitic worms burst out of his eyes while he’s dining at a restaurant. Later, a teenage couple get it on in one of their parents’ bed and are summarily gobbled up alive. Don’t have sex, kids.


In retrospect, Slugs wasn’t the greatest gateway book for a child. It’s not even a great book. There’s no clever writing here, or a believable plot, or characters you actually care about. But Hutson writes about gushing bodily fluids with such glee that I couldn’t stop reading.


I even returned to the library and took out the sequel, Breeding Ground. These books fuelled my ‘Creature Horror’ phase of reading. I was forever trying to replicate the level of shock and revulsion triggered by Slugs, but nothing was ever as good/bad, although James Herbert’s The Rats came close.


I went on to work my way through the small horror/fantasy/science fiction section of the library. But I gradually become more and more disillusioned with all these books that rarely spoke to me on a level any deeper than, ‘Oh my god, not his eyeballs!’


Today, I’m a YA writer with a leaning towards horror. My characters are predominantly teenage girls and when anyone asks me why, I tell them I’m writing for the teenage version of myself who never saw herself in the books she read.


Although, remembering Slugs, maybe that was a good thing.

The bestselling author of Good Girls Die First is back with an entertaining, high-octane and read-in-a-single-sitting new thriller.Welcome to the reality game show that'll scare you to death! Have you got what it takes to last the night?

Five contestants must sit tight through the night in dark and dangerous Umber Gorge caves, haunted by a ghost called the Puckered Maiden. But is it the malevolent spirit they should fear... or each other?
As the production crew ramps up the frights, secrets start to be revealed... these teenagers have hidden motives for taking part in It's Behind You! and could some of them be... murder?
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• It's Most Haunted meets I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here for fans of Holly Jackson and Karen McManus.