Bleeding Concrete, Behind The Scenes

My newest release jumps into some uncharted territory for me as a writer.

Horror elements have made their way into a lot of the books I’ve written. The Four Guardians leans into horror more and more the further along the story goes, adding spice to the sprawling magic-punk fantasy. The Eye Of The Universe obviously leans into the horror of solitude and survival, and the slipping of a mind under immense stress. Red Saints and the Kodiak novellas have a far more human horror of massive institutions and war, until Kodiak #4: Corner Of The Eye, which goes into more ‘haunted house’ territory.

Bleeding Concrete is my first foray into outright horror, and it comes from a number of places that appeal to me as a writer.

I enjoy stories that are very much stripped back, with a single setting or with a small number of characters. A reduction in scope can make what you focus on more rich and feel more real, and particularly with characters it’s possible to dive deeply into what makes them tick.

The setting of Stephen Marcell’s apartment morphed a little over time. It started off as a house in a suburb, then became something smaller and poorer, and then shifted completely into an apartment in a block. The tighter space added to the claustrophobia and gave a different connotation entirely. A home turning into a prison, turning against the owner, didn’t jive with me as much as the cramped apartment that wasn’t a home, and perhaps would never be a home, turning into a place where someone was trapped.

With the shift in setting came a shift in the story. The germ of the idea was a ghost story about a deaf man haunted by the ghost of the abusive wife he killed, after she killed his mistress. All very soap opera, and not as narratively interesting in a book as it would be in a more visual medium. What was far more interesting to me was the idea of a fly caught in a web it didn’t see coming, moreover a web it had been in for years. That was where the larger antagonists took shape, and their intentions, and added the final piece to the puzzle.

As for Stephen Marcell himself, he is not the most pleasant man. His is aggressively normal and resentful of his own existence. He is in a dead end, boring job and has little going for him. For a character who is not a hero or even remotely heroic, it can be difficult for them to find a reason within themselves to act.

Bleeding Concrete was such a different book to what I write usually. It took a while to put together, even though it’s shorter than everything else, including the Kodiak stories. I have been moving between three different books, Bleeding Concrete being one of them. Kodiak 5 and The Neverending War are the others. The latter is very much a fantasy horror story as well, so the mindset is still helpful for writing it.

There is potential for Bleeding Concrete to spawn a few other stories, and those are on the drawing board. We’ll see how this one does before moving forwards with anything else. I’d like to carry on, and have some plans to, but we’ll see.