It’s the 14th November, 2015, and I’ve awoken from a very private nightmare into a very public one. Once more, a small number of men  of violence have transformed a major city centre on a Friday night from a centre of bustling activity, celebration, and drunken idiocy into a blood-bath. I can’t say I’m numb, exactly. Not quite numb. Sickened? Scared? Yeah, a bit. I feel… outraged. Hurt. I feel like I’VE been attacked, somehow.

Which is in many important ways bullshit and selfish and narcissistic in the extreme. For starters, horror shows like this are happening all over the world every single day, and are not only not breaking, ‘we-interrupt-our-regular-programing’ type news - they’re not news at all. Because they’re happening Somewhere Else, often to people whose skin tone is darker than mine happens to be. And if you’re reading this and thinking that on any level, yes, you are right, and I own the hypocrisy, and am shamed by it. It’s perhaps the ultimate and darkest and most poisonous expression of privilege.

But it doesn’t change how I feel.

October's My Life In Horror is a special one, Kit Power has kindly given permission to reprint his contribution to the Jim Mcleod Must Die!  anthology.  Jim Mcleod Must Die! was the brainchild of Phil Sloman, who after hearing that I would love to appear as a recurring character that got killed wherever he appeared, contacted a bunch of authors with the sole purpose of killing me in a story.  He also got my best friend Fiona Fiona Ní Éalaighthe to write the afterword. The book was printed in a limited edition of 1 of 1  by Graeme Reynolds and presented to me with many of the contributing authors present at the launch of Adam Nevill's Lost Girl.  

It was one of the greatest moments of my life.  Thank you to everyone who had a hand in in this I love you all. 

JIM DIES AT THE END. 

“What the actual fuck?”

The old nun stared up at Jim from her prone position on the floor. At least, Jim assumed she was staring at him. The milky cataracts that covered her pupils made it tough to tell for sure. Her face was pointed in the right general direction, at any rate.

She licked her wrinkled lips, giving Jim an unwelcome glimpse of the blackened teeth behind them, then spoke again.

“I said, you need to come with me.”

Jim's mind rebelled at the thought. He felt dread, bone deep, flooding his system, threatening paralysis.

“What, under the fucking bed?”

I am between eight and ten years old. I can be no more precise. I can only be even that precise because I remember the school, and the village the school was in.

Crappy fucking village. Creepy fucking village. Creepy as hell. Every bonfire night, there would be a torchlit procession from the church to the huge pile of wood in the village square. Everyone would be there. The vicar up front, alongside the bigger farmers, the shop and garage owners, the chamber of commerce types, then the regular village folks. Everyone.

In the centre of the bonfire was a stake. Big enough for… well, for a person. It was always empty. Never a Guy. Somehow, that was the worst thing about it, to me. That empty space. It felt threatening. A statement. Yeah, it’s empty… this year....

I’d always planned to talk about this movie. Jim can verify this. When I sent him a list of proposed subjects for this column, I’m pretty sure this movie was on the first page. But I’m not going to lie to you, I wasn’t in any hurry. This one profoundly bothered me. Anyhow. I figured there was no hurry. Would that I’d been right about that. Do yourself a favour, I beg ya - if there’s some creative force in your life, some actor or director or writer or singer that means something to you, speak out on it while they’re still drawing breath. Regret being a gushing idiot. It’s better than the alternative.

Guilty confession time - I’m actually kind of a wimp when it comes to horror movies. I like the idea of extreme and exploitation cinema, but actually watching it? Not so much. For some reason, for all that I could watch Die Hard or Robocop from now until the end of time, depictions of violence that seem more realistic turn my stomach. In fact, they turn my mind. Some internal part pulls away, horrified, sickened. Actually, now I think about it, Robocop is the first movie that I can remember making me feel that way - Murphy’s execution is bloody, sustained, and brutal, not to mention cruel and sadistic. It still provokes a physical response from me when I see it now, some 70+ viewings in: increased heart rate, a feeling like my throat has swollen just a little, a prickle of fear sweat. It’s fucking horrible, not to put too fine a point on it.

Note: For this column, I have resisted all urges to do contemporary research prior to writing – I want to capture as authentically as I can my own memory and impressions of the subject. So the whole 'this is not journalism' thing is particularly and spectacularly apt this time. If you're interested in accuracy with regard to the subject, I'm sure there's half a dozen wikis out there – knock yourself out.

In a previous column, I discussed a particularly dark period of my life, and how music was one of the few threads that kept me tethered to some notion of happiness, of life as something to be lived rather than just survived. That's all true, of course, but as I cast my mind back to that time, I discovered, with some small measure of surprise, that it actually wasn't the whole story. There was one other significant activity that I regularly partook of, with the small group of friends I lived with, which helped keep me, if not exactly sane, at least on the right side of chronic depression.

That activity was a product of the White Wolf publishing company. A tabletop role-playing game called Werewolf: The Apocalypse.

Was I nine? Ten? Somewhere around there.

My dad had a pretty robust approach to movies and age ratings – one somewhat at odds with his book policy. Whilst I could read pretty much whatever I liked, generally speaking, if the British Board of Film Classifications said it was only suitable for fifteen your olds and up, I was shit out of luck. Of course, if they said ‘Parental Guidance’, that was treated as good enough, which at the tender age of six led to a cinema encounter with The Temple Of Doom that I will not soon forget (see a future column for that bad boy).

So it was a rare occasion indeed where my dad would say ‘they got it wrong’ and let my younger sister and I watch a ‘fifteen’, and for that reason was a moment of deep celebration for us.

This movie was one of those times.

It's 22nd October, 1997, and my life has officially completely turned to shit. Having flunked out of the foundation theatre course I had been attending until July (which I only managed to beg my way onto in the first place by promising to also complete the BTEC in Performing Arts which I had flunked out of the previous academic year by the simple expedient of doing no work whatsoever beyond the performance related exercises – and try if you can to contemplate how supremely lazy someone would have to be to actually fail a BTEC in Performing Arts), I am no longer an unemployed  A-Level-equivalent student. Merely unemployed. For three years. With no qualifications beyond GCSE's, in an area of the country where youth unemployment is scary high, the wages for what shitty menial work does exist  is scary low, and where beating the shit out of long haired unemployed youngsters in the town centre of a weekend lingers in that grey area between recreation and amateur sport.

Basically, I am fucked.

My Life In Horror

Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 25 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.

This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.

This is my life in horror.