Conjure

Conjure - The ebook edition

2011-01-30T02:22:00.000-08:00

I’m really pleased to announce that my short novel “Conjure” has just been re-published as an ebook by those nice folks at Generation Next Publications. This edition features a new cover design by me, though none of the interior artwork from the book version but, to make up for that, it does include my short story “Empty Souls, Drowning”, which first appeared in my “Strange Tales” collection in 2003 and was the story that introduced my east coast seaside town of Heyton.

The book was first published in 2009 by Rainfall Books (thanks John!) and picked up some good reviews along the way but, through circumstances beyond anyone’s control, wasn’t as widely available as we’d hoped. Which is why I decided to approach Stephen James Price at Gen-Next, to see if he’d be interested - it’s a good story, I like to think it’s well told and it’ll be nice to see it have another crack of the whip. The decision to remove the interior artwork was one based on formatting, but it does add a uniqueness to the print version (which I like the idea of) and I like ‘bonus features’, so suggested we include “Empty Souls, Drowning”. Thankfully, Steve agreed and so this features a story that was first published in 2000, reprinted in my collection in 2003 and hasn’t been available since - a unique selling point for the ebook. Everyone wins.

There’s a dedicated page for the book on my website at here, which has a lengthy afterword, some teaser artwork and some behind-the-scenes info (on the illustrations and the memorial miniature my Dad made) and I’ll post the artwork up there in time.

The ebook version is available through Smashwords - direct link here - for the princely sum of $2.99 (or approx. £1.92 in “real money”) on a wide variety of formats (some of which offer a sample 20% of the text!).
There’s also a Facebook group for the novel, which can be found by clicking this link. Join up, say hello, have a look at the pics!

To further make up your mind, here’re some review highlights:

From Matthew Fryer’s review, at his Hellforge website
Mark excels at dialogue and characterisation [and] the setting is perfect, [it] reminded me of several faded resorts: old fashioned and hard-up, but soldiering on with a stiff but weary upper lip. I particularly enjoyed the gothic cinema; a wonderful place that I would love to visit, and now actually feel as though I have.

Conjure flaunts some genuinely spooky moments [and] the supernatural element works so well because the author merges it with fears we understand, such as abduction and infanticide.

This is a strong short novel that only loses points on a couple of issues. I noticed that while his prose is sharp, Mark has a jarring tendency to end sentences with a preposition. And while the plot is well executed, it is somewhat generic. That said, it avoids cheap twists and builds up to a finale that manages to feel classic yet original at the same time. It concludes with a tasty uppercut, just in case you’d forgotten who was in charge.

Highlander’s Book Reviews (4 out of 5)
Mark West has created a marvelously enjoyable short novel which captures some of that faded glory of the seaside resort. Add to that the complex relationship of a young couple who are about to have their first child and all the stresses and joy that comes with it and you have a firm base for the tale. It’s a strangely British tale and reminded me of something that may have been produced in the seventies by Hammer or part of Tales of the Unexpected but very much updated with modern quotas of brutality and gore.

It’s the first I have read from Mark West but he is definitely a name I will be looking out for in the future.

Sam Haine’s bookshop - from the website:
I didn't get to meet Mark unfortunately as he was only at the Con for one day but everyone who mentioned him said he was a good bloke. His book, too, is a good, fast read - it could actually have done with being a bit longer in my opinion, but it's another good 'un.

Gary Greenwood - from his website:
It's a good, solid horror novel about revenge from beyond the grave affecting the lives of a young couple who have their own, more realistic worries having just discovered that Beth is pregnant. To be honest, the interaction and lives of the couple are the more interesting aspects of the book with the horror taking a bit of a back seat in places so that when it does intrude, it's something of a shock, obviously the intent.

Go on, give it a go.

Afterword

2010-01-12T08:01:00.000-08:00

“Conjure” (which had the working title of “The Mystery Of The Witch’s Curse”, in honour of The Three Investigators) was started on December 20th 2003 and the fourth and final draft was completed on April 11th 2005. The first draft was 82,773 words long, the final published version was 54,318 words long.

It all came about from an email ‘conversation’ I had with John B. Ford, bemoaning the fact that “In The Rain With The Dead” was still without a home (at the time - Pendragon Press subsequently published it in 2005). In one missive, John wrote “If you have anything around 30,000 -- 40,000 (or if in future you write anything around that word count) I'll be eager to see it.”

Whether right or not, I saw this as a signal that he would be open to novella length stories, so I started to think about it, having never written a novella before. Well, I thought, it’s no big deal. What a fool I am.

The process of writing a story can be involved and convoluted, so I’ll just stick to the key events of “Conjure” coming together. One thing that needs to be made clear is that for every idea that actually makes it into print, there are four or five that didn’t get there. Whilst they didn’t, that doesn’t mean that they were dismissed - most of them would have fed into other ideas, pushing angles and plot points and helping out as a whole. To my mind, when I’m writing something, nothing is a bad idea.

I spent a couple of weeks trying to figure out what would have enough sweep to justify the length and what I could use as the driving force of the book. Two factors (a family event and the fact that the novel was very gory) led me to aim for something quieter and more supernatural

Location is important to me, as a writer. Even if I don’t really mention it within the text of the story, I am fully aware of where an incident takes place and how it relates to the environment around it. Gaffney is my main fictional town, which I’ve used in a lot of short stories and the novel was also set there. With that in mind, I decided to set this somewhere else and, rather than just create another urban sprawl, I moved further afield. One of my stories, “Empty Souls, Drowning” (which was published in the Strange Tales collection) took place in Heyton and so I used that - I love the British seaside, I enjoyed what I’d done with Heyton in the short and so I decided to set it there.

So what would it be about? What supernatural element hadn’t I tried before - I’d done a vampire short (and was then in the middle of co-writing a massive vampire novel with my friend T.M. Gray), a werewolf short (I love werewolves) and plenty of ghost stories. But what about witches? I’d never done anything with a witch before - and didn’t know much about them.

So, I knew that I wanted it to be supernatural, I knew it would be set on the coast and I knew that it would feature a witch. Wahey, I thought, I’m on my way.

But that wasn’t the case. The name of the female character came out of the blue one day and I first saw her on an underground platform, watching someone close to her commit suicide. I still don’t know where that image came from, but I’m glad it did and whilst I worked around the idea for a while, I knew that it would open the book.

Heyton, in the short, was pretty much Great Yarmouth and I decided to leave it like that. I like Yarmouth a lot, I’ve spent a lot of good times there and it has a funfair and a cinema that I knew I could use as key locations.

With the cinema, I remembered something from way back. Nick Duncan & I (we were spending a weeks with my parents and sisters, who were staying at Holimarine) went to the cinema in Yarmouth to see “Beetlejuice”. I don’t remember much about the cinema itself (except that it was big and gothic and I wrote the Heyton Empire as I remembered it), but what I do remember - and each time I see the image, I feel overwhelmingly sad - is a little girl, standing at the entrance, giving out pamphlets. She was obviously with the owners of the cinema but she stood there whilst we all walked past her, with her little dress and cardi on, her blonde hair in bunches and a snotty nose. She didn’t look unhappy or unfed, but it just seemed like such a jarring thing to me, this little girl with a cold standing out in the evening air, giving people like me and Nick pamphlets about ‘Beetlejuice’ and whatever was coming along the next week. That image has never left me and I decided to use the cinema as a set-piece (being careful about it, as a cinema is a major location in the novel).

I wrote a story called “Flow” - which was bumped, at the absolute last minute, from the Brainbox anthology - and the editor wrote back to me, saying that he liked the way I’d used the toilet, that they can be a scary place. For some reason, this came back to me and - perhaps combined with having seen “The Ring” - I got the idea of Beth being alone in the toilet, hearing something moving about but not being able to see it and then having everything disappear around her. I liked it, told Alison it (who didn’t like it quite so much!) and decided that I had another set piece.

I discovered that I didn’t know a great deal about witches, so got some books and looked around on the Internet. Of course, East Anglia (where Heyton would be, if it existed) is bang in the middle and so ripe for all of the folklore. I read through, got to the drowning bit and remembered a picture I’d seen of Monica Bellucci. I found it, where she’s lying on her side in water and really fell for the concept of it. I mention this, because it led me to thinking that the witch was a young woman, helping out at a farm perhaps. The farmer’s wife is pregnant, the witch and farmer have an affair, the baby is born deformed and the witch gets the blame for it. They test her in the sea, she’s exposed and killed and buried. Alison pointed out that she couldn’t be buried on the beach, so we agreed that it would be on the heath area. If that were the case, perhaps her grave could be disturbed if the council were building new coastal defences like they have at Morecombe Bay. I heard something else click into place.

The coast seemed to be working, so I kept on with that line of thinking. In the summer of 2003, Alison and I went to Yarmouth with my sister-in-law Laura (the Flo of ‘Flo’s Diner’) and a child had disappeared a few days before. Whilst I didn’t want to go into that in any great detail, I thought it could be used as an element, that people’s worry and stress is feeding a negative energy into the town. I thought this energy could perk up some of the town ghosts, such as an old woman Beth would see in the hotel, who tells her about the strange goings-on (this character was eventually split into two, one a living person, the other a ghost).

Then I worked on why the couple would be at the coast for a long weekend, especially with the recent suicide hanging over them. What if they aren’t rich or successful? She is trapped in a job just to make money, he has recently had to change his job, but they win a weekend away. Beth wants to be a photographer and inadvertently takes a picture of the witch, when she’s photographing her boyfriend outside of the Golden Nuggets arcade. So the witch then knows about Beth. I felt something else click into place and I came up with the whole early morning walk idea and the fact that, behind the hero in the picture, is this shape. When Beth looks at it more closely, she can clearly see that it’s a woman with long dark hair.

At the same time, I read an article about Albert of Monaco, which mentioned a curse put on the principality by someone who was raped. Because my mind was thinking that way, I thought that maybe the witch could put a curse on the town of Heyton - all this time, she’s been waiting for the opportunity to come back, to try and wreak havoc on the township that killed her? So what if there was a priest in the band of men who drowned her? He condemns her body to the ground, meaning that she has to stay put (ie, believing in the existence of witches means, by extension, a belief in the system of good and evil and therefore religion would have a part to play), until her body is disturbed by the coastal defence system. What if the witch was basically a nice girl, who gets caught up with the farmer but doesn’t mean harm. She helps deliver the baby, has nothing to do with its problems, but gets blamed anyway. She is killed, buried in the marshlands and rests there for a couple of hundred years.

It then occurred to me - as amazing as this may seem - to actually characterize the JCB driver. He would inadvertently rumble over the witch’s tomb and release her spirit and become some kind of gateway that she uses to get into the real world. For a while, I chased the JCB driver up a blind alley. Since I had no idea of the climax, I kept seeing it as being something in the funfair and thought that he could get drawn there and see a body hanging from the roller coaster (about the only image I had in the fair at that point, to be honest).

My original notes for the climax: The witch is somehow feeding off the energy in the town, which is building her up and giving her strength. She comes out of the ground and works her way through the fairground, meaning to raze the town to the ground. I still have no idea how this is going to end…

On December 5th, we went to London for the ‘official launch’ of “Strange Tales” and the rest of the Rainfall line at the Princess Louise. I enjoyed the evening - it was great to be away and to meet everyone and bask in the glow of the book, which sold quite well there - and I managed to tell John about the novella. Well, I say that - I sold him the concept based on the Monica Bellucci picture (mocked up into a cover) and the synopsis “a couple, at the seaside and there’s a witch”. He liked it and wrote me an email a few days later, which said; “Strange Tales is doing really well for us, Andromeda have sold out and ordered more. We'll certainly be interested in publishing the novella you mentioned to me last weekend.”

Knowing that John was interested, I kept moving, thinking about the witch. It struck me that they had familiars (usually a black cat or old woman) but that didn’t seem to work and then it came to me - what if it’s a gypsy, selling lucky heather? We saw a few of them in London and I got this sudden image of Beth getting stopped by a heather seller, but the woman looks really panicked and says, “You have to go, there’s nothing for you here” and then runs away.

Whilst we were Christmas shopping, it suddenly occurred to me that Beth might be pregnant and that could be what ties her and the witch together. To strengthen that link, what if the witch was pregnant by the farmer and she told him, just before his wife gave birth to their still-born child?

I then hit a snag with the JCB driver, when I started riffing on his side of the story and suddenly realised - to quote my original notes -“It’s only the bloody “Ring”, isn’t it?”

That threw me for six and made me go back to the start and revise, to keep the witch element but change where she was buried. From this was a set of bullet points, where I came up with her curse, the ‘psychic episodes’ that Beth has, the JCB driver kidnapping someone from the Hen party and what the actual resting place of the witch was.

Thankfully, those bullet points mad me fall in love with the whole thing all over again. I did a revised plan and that was it, the next day I started writing.

The first draft ran so long for several reasons. I revised my plan midway through, taking out a character who’d had quite a bit to do and over-wrote like mad because (after 20k words in the first two or three weeks) I went back to college and my productivity slowed right down. In addition, the toilet sequence had me taking procrastination to new heights of ridiculousness (I wrote a zombie short for Paul Kane, whilst studiously avoiding that bathroom), with fear being my biggest hurdle - that scene had seemed scary when I first thought of it, but so much later, it was more “yeah, well”. I got around this by re-planning the novella, following storylines through logically and cracked on.

The Beth/Isobel fight was in the first draft, but it was rubbish - in later drafts, I used the bare bones and revised it thoroughly - and I wrote the Isobel-in-the-past sequences last, utilising a pond that I’d spotted just outside of Kettering for the location of her demise. The first draft took 169 days to write.

I wrote the second draft through July 2003, cutting out some 28k words (combining college and writing meant there was a lot of repetition) and I gave this draft to John and my pre-readers. My pre-readers came back quite quickly, mostly positive and with plenty of comments for me to work through. Then, at a Terror Scribes gathering in Hinckley in September, John told me he thought the book was brilliant, which did me no end of good. Later, he wrote to me; “In late September, I wrote to John and got this in response: "I'll be very happy to accept Conjure for publication next year! I think it's a great novel, very fast moving and action packed”

I was over the moon and we also agreed for me to do the cover and some internal illustrations. At this point, I asked my parents if they minded me dedicating the book to my sister Tracy, who died just before I started writing it.

There were two further drafts, using notes from my pre-readers (and, in the case of Dad’s model of the memorial, physical representation), which eventually got the book down to its published length of 54,318 words. I finished it two days before my son was born.

It would be another four years before the book saw the light of day, due to personal circumstances at Rainfall Books and so I looked at the book afresh in 2009 and it was a real treat. Thankfully, feedback has been good so far and for that, I am very pleased.

Onwards and ever upwards

Mark West
Rothwell, Northants
January 2010

(for more information on the memorial miniature and artwork, see other entries below)

Review round-up

2009-12-14T04:10:00.001-08:00

I thought it made sense to round up all of the "Conjure" reviews in one place (along with direct link URLs where appropriate) and, to whet your appetite, I've also included a brief snippet with each one...

Matthew Fryer’s review, at his Hellforge website
Despite the initial lack of action, Conjure fosters suspense from the outset and nudges it up as the novel progresses. Mark excels at dialogue and characterisation [and] the setting is perfect, [it] reminded me of several faded resorts: old fashioned and hard-up, but soldiering on with a stiff but weary upper lip. I particularly enjoyed the gothic cinema; a wonderful place that I would love to visit, and now actually feel as though I have.

Conjure flaunts some genuinely spooky moments [and] the supernatural element works so well because the author merges it with fears we understand, such as abduction and infanticide.

This is a strong short novel that only loses points on a couple of issues. I noticed that while his prose is sharp, Mark has a jarring tendency to end sentences with a preposition. And while the plot is well executed, it is somewhat generic. That said, it avoids cheap twists and builds up to a finale that manages to feel classic yet original at the same time. It concludes with a tasty uppercut, just in case you’d forgotten who was in charge.

Gary Cole-Wilkin, at the Ramsey Campbell Message Board
'Conjure' captured my imagination straight from the get-go. Mark pulls you straight in with fine characterization - indeed, the natural dialogue of his characters is a joy to read. [It’s} tightly plotted, indeed, I was very impressed how Mark intertwined his characters across the pages, it seemed quite cinematic to me.

So is there a weakness? Well, the backbone of the story seemed a little weak compared to the superb dialogue & characterisation, but Mark did end proceedings with a classic horror McGuffin which won me over 100 percent - liked that a lot!

Highlander’s Book Reviews (4 out of 5)
Mark West has created a marvelously enjoyable short novel which captures some of that faded glory of the seaside resort. Add to that the complex relationship of a young couple who are about to have their first child and all the stresses and joy that comes with it and you have a firm base for the tale. It’s a strangely British tale and reminded me of something that may have been produced in the seventies by Hammer or part of Tales of the Unexpected but very much updated with modern quotas of brutality and gore.

It’s the first I have read from Mark West but he is definitely a name I will be looking out for in the future.

Kim Fuhrman’s review, at Goodreads.com (4 stars)
We can relate to these characters, and while they have their faults, they are also good people that we come to care about very quickly. The book, about a young couple going on a holiday only to find that scary things await them in the form of a dead woman's malevolent spirit, is very suspenseful, and the violence, while not being gratuitous, is intense enough to please fans of the genre.

David Price - at the Facebook Conjure site
Chilling stuff…strong characters, and you've done a great job of adding menace to an idyllic setting. Above all, it is a real page-turner, as you never let us forget how much danger the central characters are in (that encounter with the one-armed boy and the crows is a particularly unnerving moment, and you build on that sense of dread).

I would almost describe it as quiet horror, even if you do ramp up the violence towards the end and finish on an ambiguous note. In short, a good, old-fashioned tale of the supernatural.

Sam Haine’s bookshop - from the website:
I didn't get to meet Mark unfortunately as he was only at the Con for one day but everyone who mentioned him said he was a good bloke. His book, too, is a good, fast read - it could actually have done with being a bit longer in my opinion, but it's another good 'un.

Gary Greenwood - from his website:
It's a good, solid horror novel about revenge from beyond the grave affecting the lives of a young couple who have their own, more realistic worries having just discovered that Beth is pregnant. To be honest, the interaction and lives of the couple are the more interesting aspects of the book with the horror taking a bit of a back seat in places so that when it does intrude, it's something of a shock, obviously the intent.

Another review!

2009-10-06T04:30:00.001-07:00

...from David Price this time. And he liked it!

It's published on the Facebook group site (
which is located here) and below is a lovely little excerpt:

Chilling stuff, Mark, [with] strong characters, and you've done a great job of adding menace to an idyllic setting. Above all, it is a real page-turner, as you never let us forget how much danger the central characters are in (that encounter with the one-armed boy and the crows is a particularly unnerving moment, and you build on that sense of dread) . I would almost describe it as quiet horror - in short, a good, old-fashioned tale of the supernatural. You can definitely be proud of this one.

Thanks, David!

First paying customer review

2009-10-05T03:54:00.000-07:00

The first review of "Conjure" is now in, from Mr Gary Greenwood.

Gary's review, from his website

Brief bit - It's a good, solid horror novel about revenge from beyond the grave affecting the lives of a young couple who have their own, more realistic worries...

Thanks, Gary!

Local man makes local news...

2009-10-01T05:42:00.001-07:00

This is a scan of the article and picture, about me and "Conjure", that appeared in the Kettering Evening Telegraph last night (30/9/09)

Ordering & Reviewing information

2009-09-25T02:03:00.000-07:00

ORDERING INFORMATION

"Conjure" is working its way through the printing system and is almost ready. At the moment, it can be purchased directly from Rainfall Books at:

22 Woodland Park, Calne, Wiltshire. SN11 0JX. U.K

cheques for £8.99 (free post and packing) should be made payable to Steve Lines

alternately, you can send payment (once again, post and packing is free) by PayPal (include your name and address) to either
Ford@doramail.com
or
rainfallrecords@doramail.com

In addition, Mark West has some copies - email for details and any ‘signing requests’ to m (dot) west31@btinternet (dot) com

READ IT & WANT TO REVIEW IT?

If you read the book - and I hope you do - maybe you'd like to leave a review of it?

If so, the book is now on GoodReads

Thanks!

Creating The Memorial

2009-09-04T11:54:00.000-07:00

A key part of “Conjure” - and, therefore, something that would be very important for the illustrations - was the memorial that Steve inadvertently cracks. The only problem I had with that was that the memorial didn’t exist in real life, at all.

My Dad is an accomplished model-maker and when I asked him if he could help me out, he jumped at the chance. In fact, he said “let the art department worry about it” and that was it. He asked for a rough drawing, then made it over the course of the week.

I was so impressed with it - still am, in fact, it takes pride of place on my bookcase - that the memorial in the text changed, to accommodate what Dad built for me.

This is the final composite image – much larger than it would normally be seen (mainly as an element on a postcard)

This is not the original memorial photograph (which, due to not saving it as a different file name, I destroyed with the editing process), but it was taken at the same time, in our back garden to utilise natural light. As you can see, from my hand holding it up, it’s not very big. The chain is an old necklace of my Mum’s.

The grass comes from this photograph I took at Wicksteeds park, looking towards the lake from below the rollercoaster compound. I had to dupe the picture, to make enough ground for the model to “fit”, which is why you see those same sets of shadows. I took the bush line, at the lake, as the natural line to cut the picture.

The sea comes from this picture of me, exploring some rocks near to Caernvarnon in Wales. I erased myself (which is why there is a some blurring on the final shot) down to my waist and put the bush line from the grass picture over that part.

So there you have it.

Second Teaser

2009-09-04T11:51:00.001-07:00

This was originally published on-line at the start of September.

First Teaser

2009-09-04T11:48:00.001-07:00

This was originally published on-line in March 2009.