Monthly Archives: August 1999
Sleep
There has only been one occasion in my life when I have truly been afraid to sleep. I have a difficult sleep clock. I think it runs on a twenty eight hour cycle. If I’m left to my own devices, I quickly slip into a routine of going to bed later and later and waking [...]
The dark
In spite of a family-wide aversion to spiders, my worst childhood fear wasn’t arachnoid in shape. My worst childhood fear had no shape. It was the dark. Rather it was what lay within the dark, in the privacy of my bedroom late at night. The shapeless, nameless, formless terror of whatever Lovecraftian monster lurked beneath [...]
Decay
I have a very specific terror. My only genuine, uncontrollable, unstoppable terror. I am afraid of death. I indulge this fear by writing novels about vampires and immortals. A silly game. It’s more specific than that. I am scared of dying without my affairs in order. I don’t want to die alone. I am literally [...]
Body horror
I knew a girl who was afraid of being sick, in case she choked on her vomit and died. I met an old woman in hospital who was so afraid of being sick she didn’t eat for six weeks. My father can’t stand the sight of blood. If he cuts himself, no matter how small [...]
Bees and wasps
Arachnids and insects. Two different evolutionary branches. The same small bundle of chitinous nastiness in practical terms. Wasps. There’s something my friend (lets call her Katy Kitten) doesn’t like. Lots of girls don’t like wasps. The standard feminine reaction to bees and wasps at my secondary school was to run away screaming loudly with flapping [...]
Sneinton
Sneinton is an odd area close to the city centre that’s split in two by a huge cliff. The top half of Sneinton is balanced on the peak of a hill. Terraced council houses squat on steep slopes beneath the masculine ego of a block of flats at the very pinnacle of the rise. My [...]
