 Out of the Darkness collects together brand new stories by Jenn Ashworth, Alison Moore, Nicholas Royle, Laura Mauro, Aliya Whiteley, Tim Major, Simon Bestwick, Eugen Bacon, Gary Budden and many more. They all deal with mental health in some way, and many are written by people who have first-hand experience of the challenges mental illness can present. They tackle the topics of anxiety, depression, obsessive–compulsive disorder and other issues, as well as the pressures mental illness can place on family members and friends – sometimes obliquely, sometimes head-on. At times that can make for challenging reading, but the authors have all actively engaged with the central philosophy of this book: that with support and open discussion, those who are suffering from mental health problems can move out of the darkness and into the light. In addition, all the authors are donating their fees and royalties to Together for Mental Wellbeing. Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting some of the authors involved in this great anthology. Aliya Whiteley on ‘The Chorus’ I’m thrilled to have written a story for Out of the Darkness. Imagine a version of this world where everyone hears music. The music changes according to place, to mood, to experience. It is made up of many voices. They sing wordless songs that comfort you when you feel alone, or cheer you on when life is going well. Now imagine a world where everyone has that inner music but you. Feeling anxiety or depression is such an insular experience, and I wanted to write about it in a way that didn’t become overwhelming to read. It’s so easy to feel trapped, but I wanted to represent that in a way that showed other experiences of life, including the way it feels for people who care for and about sufferers, and yet can’t really understand what those conditions mean. The difficulty of communicating, the sense of imbalance within the relationship, and the need to be continually trying to reconnect: these are the focus of my story ‘The Chorus’. It wasn’t an easy story to write. At first I tried to construct it in the first person, but the emotions soon started to swamp everything, and I was determined that it wouldn’t be a story that makes anyone feel hopeless. The breakthrough came when I switched to the point of view of a non-sufferer, a person with an inner chorus. They can’t really see that their chorus is a tremendous gift; it’s only a fact of life to them. It’s the struggle to understand what it would be to live without a chorus that drives the story. I hope it speaks to people, along with the other stories that make up this important and timely anthology. For more information on Aliya, check out her website here check out ALIYA WHITELEY's books on Amazon hereTim Major on ‘Goodbye, Jonathan Tumbledown’ After a year of successive lockdowns, associated fears of the future and of other people, many difficult months of home-schooling two young children, plus the constant, dull whirlwind of a house perpetually full of chatter and with few quiet, ‘safe’ spaces, I’ve become more conscious of my own mental wellbeing, and sometimes the lack of it. My story ‘Goodbye, Jonathan Tumbledown’ was written before the advent of Covid-19, and I’m a different person now; perhaps nowadays I’d be in a position to centralise the character with mental health issues rather than observe him from a distance. The story is about the risks of ignoring one’s own mental health, and also, perhaps controversially, the idea of mental health problems acting as a fundamental aspect of personality. Our behaviour is informed by many factors, not least the physical makeup of our brains, a knot of synapses that produce seemingly unpredictable impulses. If you could rewire your brain, what effect might that have on your personality, and on the conscious ego that Robert Louis Stevenson called ‘the denizen of the pineal gland’? Would you even be you any longer? Like a lot of my recent fiction, the story is about family, and it’s also about guilt. Given that our brains are responsible not only for our current behaviour, but also our behaviour in the past, to what extent might changing your brain patterns divorce you from your past actions? I don’t think there are any easy answers about the ethical aspects, but exploring the repercussions on the external world, and on the people most affected by those actions, was an important element to me. Many of the details in this story are very personal, and writing it was cathartic. I wouldn’t be the first person to suggest that writing is a form of therapy, and I feel lucky to have this outlet, despite the discomfort of exposure. The year we’ve all lived through will have had untold, though perhaps subtle, effects on our minds, and it will affect our future behaviour in unforeseeable ways. The ripples of this difficult period will spread, and spread, and spread. I’m proud that this anthology supports Together for Mental Wellbeing, an organisation whose work will become more vital than ever in the months and years to come. For more information on Tim Major check out his website here check out tim's books on amazon hereAnna Vaught on ‘Temple’ My story for Out of the Darkness is called ‘Temple’. It is a strange old thing, set in the mid-seventeenth century for one, sweeping into today, spanning two continents, bringing in travel and witchery, not to mention patriarchal society. Here is how it begins: Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. I travelled. I travelled when I was green and when I was old; a weird and madding creature. In the New World, in a land my people stole, I made something: a temple. And I took it back home again. I mean, the spirit of this brazen place. Without giving too much away, what I am looking at in this story is misunderstanding about what mental illness and mental health problems might be; I am thinking of centuries back but I also explore how they are misunderstood now and note that some people write about mental health challenges as if they were figments of an indulged body and brain. Struggling with any aspect of your mental health, or even falling apart all together, are not weakness. In one of my outings on Facebook recently, I saw someone whom I had supposed had better sense writing about how nowadays we are surrounded by snowflakes, that they certainly did not remember things like anorexia or OCD being around when they were a kid, and we ought to get on with it. You know, like we did in the war. These are misunderstandings and show a startling lack of empathy and knowledge. Mental illness, instability, the collapse of your system because of excess allostatic load, are not new, but always. Go back through time, look at early poems; look at literature from all around the world. Look, too, at the treatment of those who were considered to be ill. Explore what happened in the past to those who were different, eccentric, or in the way. This is an important distinction and one to which I drew attention in my last novel, Saving Lucia, which is about treatments, presumed insanity, hysteria, and the psychiatric institutions – the asylums. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were over 8,000 women in the Salpêtrière in Paris alone. I ought to tell you about myself if we have not yet met. I lived through long and complex trauma. I had periods of a sadness I could not express in my childhood, when I self-harmed to cope and told no one; I had depression and OCD in my teens and on we went for another twenty years of depression and awful dissociative episodes until – because that is the other thing; the paucity of appropriate care – I got appropriate treatment over an extended period. But I will never be better. Perhaps things would have been different if I had received support when I was first in the thick of it. I shall never know. Still, what happened to me touches many aspects of my life and had I been born in a different time, I might well have packed off. Even so, I have had to listen to my story – why it all happened – assiduously denied, I have been called insane, a weakling, a snowflake, a weirdo. Well, I am a weirdo, but I am also a survivor and I am not afraid of speaking. I am brave too, so you can be a bit braver; so, we sock it to stigma. ‘Temple’ is about a resplendent woman; she is provocative and brave. That does not negate her suffering or that others try to suppress her. But she speaks on. In ‘Temple’, I have deliberately given you an unusual woman. Get to know her and bask a bit in the tricky nuances of the story. She is a deliberate challenge to you. Do you assume her mad? If you do, why and what are our definitions of madness? What are yours? Look into yourself and decide who you say is round the bend. Mental health problems affect one in four people in the UK. It is my worry that, recovering from pandemic trauma, that number is going to grow exponentially. We know that mental health provision is stretched for both young people’s and adults’ services. I am reshaping my teaching, mentoring and writing over the next two years as much as I can so that I can be as responsive and helpful as possible. And I think what Dan Coxon has done here is really important. He has been putting together an anthology which looks at literature – particularly dark literature – as a medium for self-expression, for release and for facing down demons. It is a catharsis and I would argue that, if you face what is in the dark and look at it carefully, embrace its form in language, then it becomes less frightening and a conduit into something that is of the light. The light that is at the heart of that darkness, in fact. Grief, sorrow, stress, illness, the loss of our faculties whether temporary or permanent, are at the heart of life, but if we raise them up in a vibrant and fascinating language, don’t they become less terrible? In my own experience, fear and shame have been bound up with illness and incapacitation. Reading is a release and horror and weird fiction marvellous for me: the stories of the dark places. It was not #uplit that gave me back my life and propelled me forward: it was horror writing. Its expression and my reading of it. I hope that readers feel comforted and less alone by that strange and beautiful paradox which I know Dan will illuminate in this book. And with ‘Temple’, I hope you will like what my protagonist tells you about her life, as you wonder who or what she is or how she is seen before she offers you her hand. You take it tentatively. Because she is a weird; an eldritch woman, prone to flights of imaginative freewheeling and starting genius in all she does. But take her hand, as she says to you, ‘Oh. I was so glad to meet you and wish that you find, in the temple, the home and the hot acceptance for which I know you will have longed. Take my hand now, across the years and into your future and be sure that you are not and were never alone.’ For more information on Anna check out their website here check out anna's books on amazon hererelated articlesA LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS BY DAN COXON Out of the Darkness challenges some of the most exciting voices in horror and dark fantasy to bring their worst fears out into the light. From the black dog of depression to acute anxiety and schizophrenia, these stories prove what fans of horror fiction have long known – that we must understand our demons to overcome them. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, what began as a mental health crisis has rapidly become an unprecedented tsunami. The Centre for Mental Health has estimated that 10 million people will need mental health support in the UK as a direct consequence of Covid-19, with a staggering 1.5 million of those being under eighteen. Edited by Dan Coxon (This Dreaming Isle) and featuring exclusive stories by Alison Moore, Jenn Ashworth, Tim Major and Aliya Whiteley, this collection harnesses the power of fiction to explore and explain the darkest moments in our lives. Horror isn’t just about the chills – it’s also about the healing that comes after. Back the project here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/unsungstories/out-of-the-darkness-an-anthology-of-horror-and-dark-fantasy    Comments are closed.
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