Trigger Warning

I like this one, though, and you do not need the photograph (of young Amanda with her mouth open and a floor covered with costume jewellery) to understand it.

The Return of the Thin White Duke

The title is a quote from a David Bowie song, and the story began, some years ago, with a fashion magazine asking the remarkable Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano to do some fashion drawings of Bowie and his wife, Iman. Mr Amano asked if I would like to write a story to accompany them. I wrote the first half of a story, with plans to conclude it in the next issue of the magazine. But the magazine lost interest before they had published the first part, and the story was forgotten. For this anthology I thought it would be an adventure to finish it, and find out what was going to happen, and where it was all heading. If I had known once (I must have known once), I still found myself reading the story like a stranger, and walking alone into the mist to learn where it was going.

Feminine Endings

Life imitates art, but clumsily, copying its movements when it thinks it isn’t looking.

There are stories it feels almost impious to put on paper, for fear of allowing the things in the story to begin to influence the real world.

I was asked to write a love letter, for a book of love letters. I remembered a human statue I had seen in the square in Kraków, a city with a smoke dragon beneath it.

When I met the woman I would one day marry, we traded stories of our lives. She had once, she told me, been a human statue. I sent her this story, and it did not frighten her away.

For my birthday, shortly after we met, she surprised me in a park in her human-statue incarnation. As a human statue she wore a wedding dress that she had bought for $20, and stood on a box. They called her the Eight-Foot Bride. She wore the wedding dress she had been a statue in on the day we were married. Nobody has seen the dress since that day.

 Observing the Formalities

I am not scared of bad people, of wicked evildoers, of monsters and creatures of the night.

The people who scare me are the ones who are certain of their own rightness. The ones who know how to behave, and what their neighbours need to do to be on the side of the good.

We are all the heroes of our own stories.

In this case, Sleeping Beauty. Which, seen from another direction, is also the subject of . . .

The Sleeper and the Spindle

Written for Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt’s anthology Rags and Bones, subtitled New Twists on Timeless Tales. They asked a few writers to create stories based on stories that had influenced us. I chose two fairy tales.

I love fairy tales. I remember the first one I encountered, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, in a beautiful illustrated book my mother would read to me when I was two. I loved everything about that story and those pictures. She read it to me, and soon enough I was reading it to myself. It wasn’t until I was older that I started pondering the stranger parts of the story, and I wrote ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’ (in Smoke and Mirrors).

I loved Sleeping Beauty too, in all her incarnations. When I was a young journalist I read a dozen thick bestsellers, and realised I could retell the story of Sleeping Beauty as a huge, sex-and-shopping blockbuster, complete with an evil multinational corporation, a noble young scientist, and a young girl in a mysterious coma. I decided not to write it: it seemed too calculated, and the sort of thing that might actually put me off the writing career I was hoping for.

When Melissa and Tim asked me for a story, I had been pondering what would happen if two stories were happening at the same time. And what if the women who were already the subjects of the stories had a little more to do, and were active and not passive . . .?

I love this story more than, perhaps, I should. (It is now available as an illustrated storybook in its own right, pictures by the redoubtable Chris Riddell.)

Witch Work

When I was a child and read books of poems I would wonder more than was healthy about the person telling the story. I still do, even with my own poems. In this case there is a witch, and there is a watcher. This was also written as an apologetic gift for Jonathan Strahan, after I realised that The Ocean at the End of the Lane was turning into a novel.

In Relig Odhráin

This is a true story. Well, as true as any story about a sixth-century Irish saint can be. The churchyard is there, on Iona. You can even visit it.

I didn’t mean to write this as a poem, but the metre turned up in my head and after that I simply had no say in the matter.

They used to bury people alive in the walls or the foundations, to ensure that buildings remained standing. Even saints.

Black Dog