When The Walls Bend
I've a tendency to over-think when I'm writing, to believe that a story needs some kind of intellectual underpinning before I can begin it. To compensate, I often force myself to write something based on a simple, archetypal idea. Here I just wanted to write a haunted house story.
I had to have some way in though, and the idea for this story came when I wondered why so many haunted houses in fiction were big, sprawling mansions owned by screwy upper-class people. Do the rich really have a monopoly on the afterlife as well? I wanted my haunted house to be small, cramped, and squalid. I also love ghosts stories which are as much about the person being haunted as the ghost.
This was another story for which I struggled finding a title; I was playing Radiohead's Hail To The Thief album constantly at the time, and eventually I 'borrowed' the title from a lyric from a track called The Gloaming.
I've always liked the last line of this story, and it seemed an appropriate way to end the collection as a whole.
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