Unbecoming: And Other Tales of Horror [Paperback]

In these – appropriately – thirteen stories, Mike O’Driscoll plays with our imagination and expectations, subverting the horror genre whilst embracing its conventions. What results is a strangely brewed cocktail of terror: dark, dangerous, and sometimes downright dirty, O’Driscoll’s stories get under your skin and into your head, where the freedom to prowl the peripheries of your consciousness becomes addictive. Uncompromising and unflinching, this is modern horror at its very best.

A man becomes obsessed by noise, another finds himself reduced to shadow, children are coveted by the perverse antithesis of loving parents, and artists stretch the limits of their capabilities. Acknowledging sensations that all is not right with the world, the characters twist and turn with each cut from life’s rusty knife: seeking redemption, finding none.

O’Driscoll writes horror from the inside out.

"Identities in crisis, lives falling apart. Wherever Mike O’Driscoll’s stories are set – downtown LA, Soho medialand or the Gower Peninsula – the light is fading to a dusky noir but his characters are still recognisable as people you know. Compassion as real as the horror: O’Driscoll doesn’t do inauthentic. The monster within is pissed off" – Nicholas Royle, author of Antwerp (Serpent’s Tail)

"Mike O’Driscoll writes mysterious, sometimes convoluted, utterly chilling stories. I’ve been reading - and sometimes publishing - his work for many years and am delighted that it’s finally available in this fine collection" – Ellen Datlow, Co-Editor of Year's Best Fantasy & Horror

Elastic Press is an independent publisher specialising in high quality short fiction.

Mike O’Driscoll lives on Gower Peninsula, South Wales. His stories have appeared in genre magazines including The 3rd Alternative, BBR, Crime Wave and Interzone, online at Gothic.net, Infinity Plus and Eclectica, and in a number of anthologies incuding Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, Best New Horror, The Dark, Gathering the Bones, Lethal Kisses, Off Limits, Darklands and Neonlit Vol. 1. Mike’s regular column on horror, fantasy and SF, Night’s Plutonian Shore ran for three years at the SF/fantasy website Alien Online, and now appears in Interzone. His story ‘Sounds Like’ has been optioned as a TV movie by the makers of the Masters of Horror tv series.

Excerpt from "Sounds Like"

Holly is crying in her sleep again. For the third night running Larry Pearce listens from across the hall knowing that the right thing to do would be to go her, to soothe her nightmares away. But instead, he tries to ignore her cries, the way he did last night and the night before. Only this time the harder he strives for silence, the more the sound gets under his skin. Judith stirs beside him but doesn’t wake. He wonders if she’s somehow immune to the cadences of childhood fear. Maybe it’s simpler than that, maybe she doesn’t want to remember what it’s like to be a child because of all the things that scared her back then. Larry wonders if Holly already has some kind of insight into fear and that her cries are an attempt to articulate that understanding.

After thirty minutes Holly’s still crying and Judith hasn’t moved. Larry slides out of bed, pulls on a pair of shorts and pads out to the hall. He hesitates at her open door, watching as a shaft of orange light from a streetlamp falls through a crack in the curtains and touches Holly’s face. He moves closer and stands at the foot of the cot, listening to sounds too ancient to come from the mouth of a baby.

He’s struck by her smallness, how alone she is and despite not wanting to listen, he wonders if it’s this isolation she’s trying to communicate. He realises that he’s holding his breath, trying not to add to the noise she’s making. Judith should be here. Not that she’d have any better understanding of Holly’s intent, but her presence alone would confirm that he’s not imagining any of this. These sounds are a language he doesn’t understand. They might be saying help me or I’m scared or make them go away. Something like that, but he’s only guessing, really he has no idea.

He sits in a child’s seat beside the cot even though he’s way too big for it. His vision is a little blurred, but it’s a few seconds before he realises there are tears in his eyes. He’s not sure why. What he knows is that Holly is scared and that he should help her but he doesn’t know how. He’s scared too but in searching her face for some clue as to her meaning, all he sees is a smile, the kind that says ‘sweet dreams in progress – do not disturb.’

Is that what he’s hearing – the sound of her dreams? No, it’s something more concrete, something he can almost touch. Her eyelids move but the little REM flickers reveal nothing of what’s going on inside her head. She rolls over on to her stomach, but the sounds persist. He wonders if there’s something wrong with her, if she has a medical condition, a syndrome or something he doesn’t know the name of. He’s not as clued up on childhood illnesses as he should be. It’s too easy to leave such matters to Judith. Not that he doesn’t care – after all, he’s the one watching over her right now. But even so, he feels he’s there under false pretences, because he’s not able to give her what she needs. She wants someone to take her fear away, someone to tell her everything will be okay. Larry can’t tell those lies. All he can tell her is to look for the silence inside herself, the one safe place.

As if to point her in the right direction, he reaches through the bars of the cot and touches her brow. His fingers tingle at the strange current flowing beneath her skin. He’s surprised at the nature of the revelation. Don’t say anything else, he whispers, keep it to yourself. Other parents might welcome such honesty but not Larry. Such openness in one so young worries him. He thinks about the future, when she’s older and all the pain she’ll have to face. He stands and withdraws from the room, but her sounds follow him back to his bed. Even when he crawls under the sheets and holds his hands against his ears, he can’t retrieve the silence.