Rustblind and Silverbright – Cover and a Launch Event that Must Not be Missed

Here at last is the first public look at the cover for Rustblind and Silverbright, though it has been on my facebook pages for a few days now.  The book is currently at the printers and I am awaiting the delivery of the proof copy, to tell me if everything is ok.  As you can see, this one is an even more bizarre cover than usual in terms of structure with a massive rear ‘contents map’ on the back that extends right onto the rear flap.

With the launch of this, the first true anthology I have edited, we are planning a big event in London entitled Slipstream Journeys, which will bring several new books by several specialist presses together into one evening of readings and wine.

The books involved will be:

• Rustblind and Silverbright: Slipstream Stories of the Railway, edited by David Rix
• Defeated Dogs, by Quentin S Crisp
• Stardust by Nina Allan
• Helen’s Story, by Rosanne Rabinowitz
• Jane, by P.F. Jeffery

The event will take place at the Review Bookshop, Peckham on the 4th July at 7PM.  I hope you can make it.  There will be wine to drink and authors to meet.  Readings to listen to and books to buy!

Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/535004643230635/

On the Map – Danny Rhodes

In the hectic time leading up to the publication of Rustblind and Silverbright, our anthology of railway-themed slipstream and horror, I have invited short blog contributions from the authors included in that book, which I will be publishing at irregular intervals over the next month or two.  Here, Danny Rhodes gives a quick insight into how his story ‘The Cuts’ came to be. 

N.b – the illustration shows a request stop station in Norfolk.

On the Map

By Danny Rhodes

I decided pretty early on in the process that if I was going to write a story about trains it might be on the Beeching cuts. I knew if I was planning to submit the story to David, a train enthusiast (I hesitate to use ‘anorak’ as I’ve never met the bloke), it seemed to me, then I ought to try to give the story some accurate historical grounding. I spent some time flicking between various sites on Beeching and Google maps, checking out landscapes and trying to discover a suitable ‘culled’ branchline on which to set the story.

Somewhere around this time I had to take a train to Prestatyn and it was while I was on this journey that I learned there are remote, unmanned stations in Wales (and perhaps in other places) where the passengers have to make ‘request stops’ in order for the train to halt there. I’d never heard of ‘request stops’ on railways before. An idea dropped into my mind, of a man waiting at a station for a train, a man in danger, and the train not stopping, the train leaving him there to his fate.

In the end I didn’t set the story in quite so remote a location. I found the perfect line for a story though, on Anglesey, and using Google Maps I was able to follow the old train line out of Gaerwan north through the countryside, noting its flat topography, and thus arrive at Rhosgoch, a village that once had a station but no longer. If you go to Google maps you can do the same. I’m finding the ‘street level’ element of this quite a tool. Us writers can go virtually anywhere these days and write fairly accurate visual descriptions of locations we have never been to. What’s exciting about this is that we are not rooted to the popular, worn out ‘tourist trail’ settings anymore. We can wander quite freely into any corner of any place on the planet where the Google cameras have been…if we want to that is, if we don’t want to let our imaginations take over at some point, as I found I did, if we want to create our own worlds and base them in a reality of our own choosing.

The Gaerwen to Amlych line has gone now, good only for walking. There seem to be various people doing just that on Google maps. You can see them if you look hard enough, strange, two dimensional individuals with blurred faces, sometimes staring in wonder at the Google maps camera van as it moves on its merry way, mapping and capturing every inch of the world (or those places that have agreed) for reasons we have not yet begun to comprehend…

The Underground Diaries – R D Hodkinson

In the hectic time leading up to the publication of Rustblind and Silverbright, our anthology of railway-themed slipstream and horror, I have invited short blog contributions from the authors included in that book, which I will be publishing at irregular intervals over the next month or two.  This time, R D Hodkinson addresses a tender elegy to a London icon . . . 

The Underground Diaries

By R D Hodkinson

There is a reworking of the London Underground map in which the names of all the stations have been replaced by those of cultural luminaries drawn from the arts, from sport, science, religion and any other area of human endeavour the artist found fit. My local station is Steve Martin, as in: incidents of knife crime have reached unprecedented levels in and around Steve Martin this year.

The name of Simon Patterson’s whimsical work is The Great Bear, which suggests the tube network re-imagined as a great, grotty constellation, plucked from the heavens and shoved underground, presumably as some Olympian punishment for failing to maintain the escalators at Swiss Cottage, or repeated signal failure at Theydon Bois.

But to those of us who have spent much, or most, or all of our lives in the capital, the tube map is also a memento mori to a galaxy of personal experiences now dead and gone: catastrophic regurgitation of kebab at Putney Bridge, catastrophic romantic tryst at Finsbury Park, catastrophic business meeting-cum-full-blown fist fight at Ravenscourt Park, homes – some more catastrophic than others – at Richmond, Hounslow East, Barons Court, Highbury & Islington, Leicester Square, Highbury & Islington again, Dalston Junction and, now, Steve Martin. (In defence of the author, the business meeting that went to twelve rounds at the York Hall was a one off, and the unscheduled reappearance of meat products, while less rare, was at least restricted to my younger years. As for any catastrophic trysts, like most men I can offer no reasonable excuse.)

After three decades of riding the rails there is barely an inch of tube map I can look at without becoming misty-eyed or wistful or furious or wracked with shame. It is the same for every Londoner, each projecting his or her personal cartography of experience onto that famously clean schematic, the only map that makes sense of the capital’s chaotic layout. It’s all there: Hopes (both thwarted and realised), triumphs (real and imagined) births, marriages and deaths ineradicably stamped on each traveller’s psycho-geographic version of the map, an impression made stronger by one’s actual proximity to death while travelling underground. Press your hand against the tiled tunnel walls of the deep bore Central, Piccadilly, Victoria or Northern lines and how far can you be from the remains of a dead Roman or a former Tudor-bethan? Or a blitz victim awaiting rediscovery by a man with a hard hat and a JCB? The clay above the stations holds a great communion of the London dead, a silent counterpart to the crude, noisome, self-interested crowd above, though every now and again one of that number will peel away and join the ranks of ex-Londoners by buying a ticket for the tube and opting for death by Circle Line, the second most selfish method of suicide yet devised (number one being Sylvia Plath gassing herself with her children still in the house, silly cow.) Do not be tempted to end it all under the wheels of a rush hour train: no one will weep for you and your terminal moment will be tormented by images of irate commuters picketing your funeral because by the time they got home Tesco’s was shut and Masterchef had finished.

I have never kept a diary and I will never need to. The only aide-mémoire I shall ever need can be picked up for free from any tube station and folded to fit a wallet: a map not of a great city’s metro system, but of my entire adult life. Even the bits I would pay good money to forget.

Stations are How Towns Dream – Douglas Thompson

In the hectic time leading up to the publication of Rustblind and Silverbright, our anthology of railway-themed slipstream and horror, I have invited short blog contributions from the authors included in that book, which I will be publishing at irregular intervals over the next month or two.  Next in the series is Eibonvale regular Douglas Thompson with a characteristically metaphysical and thoughtful musing on the nature of the familiar railway station . . . 

Stations are How Towns Dream.

by Douglas Thompson

Stations are how towns dream.

If you are lucky enough to have one of those Victorian ones left over, not crushed and brushed away under the onslaught of sixties modernism and brutalism that swept through our world like a rabid brontosaurus and lurched off around the corner of our minds in a hazy childhood cloud of half-remembered concrete dust. If you have a real station building with timber trellised eaves and cast-iron fretwork of interlacing beams like corset work, you’ll know that you are licensed to dream there, and that as you do: the town and all the long-dead men who built it are dreaming with you.

At its station, the limits of a town’s identity cease in a wistful demarcation, a petering out, and the town dreams of being by the seaside, or at the foot of a Highland glen. The station dreams of being Euston, Paris Gare Du Nor, Istanbul, a gateway to the Orient, its cool marble slabs spattered with the exotic spices of foreigners gabling in obscure tongues like music. The word ‘gay’ becomes somehow innocent and playful again under the canopies of a true station, built in the golden age when the world first became aware of itself and its true extent. There is something forever festive and celebratory in the architecture, like frozen flags and buntings. We are all going somewhere, or someone much beloved is coming home again after a long trial. An exciting beginning or a happy ending.

In stations, the buildings themselves dream that they are not bound to the ground by foundations, that like us they might up sticks, gird their loins, and shimmy off towards the far horizons drawn by the sight of a wistful puff of summer cloud that says “Escape”. Station architecture dreams of timber bathing huts by the seaside, of Alpine villas and the bracing air of snowfields and natural springs.

And what of the towns themselves that we glimpse from these stations as we pass on through in the train? We see them from above, we see their roofs beneath which their citizens sleep in harmonious rows like well-behaved children.  Their dead sleep there too, in their graveyards, and the dead have left their stories woven around the thousand chimney pots like drifting smoke. The living citizens each think they are unique and new as they walk around like little toy soldiers and dolls in their perfect town that the dead have left them. But bit by bit, the buildings themselves and the stories they have encoded, re-take the citizens in their dreams as they sleep at night, and make them one with the town itself, the town’s true, immortal character. History repeats itself like a stained-glass window through which each day’s new sun must shine. The colours change but the pattern is so beautiful that it creates itself, it seems always to have existed, as all great art must.

A town is a living entity, which while its citizens themselves must know birth and death, it can know neither. People are like light bulbs, newspapers, matches, a tide of necessary ephemera which comes and goes, swept in and out at its stations. What is left behind and what endures is the town, its spirit and character and hope, the character of humanity and of the earth itself, which is indomitable and indestructible. Therefore never despair of your own life and fate, but know this: that you are not the matches burnt or the paper discarded on the wind. You are the town itself, its very bricks, part of it and all of it.

A town is a living person, and its station is where it dreams.

Visit Douglas Thompson at http://www.glasgowsurrealist.com/douglas

The Gibson Square Vent – David McGroarty

In the hectic time leading up to the publication of Rustblind and Silverbright, our anthology of railway-themed slipstream and horror, I have invited short blog contributions from the authors included in that book, which I will be publishing at irregular intervals over the next month or two.  Next in the series is David McGroarty, author of the story Stratford International, who points to the strange parallel world of the London railways that you might be forgiven for never even noticing . . . 

 

The Gibson Square Vent

by David McGroarty

If you ever visit Gibson Square in Islington, you will see a cute little neoclassical structure in the centre of the north lawn. For a while last year I would take my two sons through the square on our way to school and nursery. I didn’t pay much attention to the building until my eldest tugged my arm one day and asked if he could go inside it to see the butterflies. I had been thinking it was a particularly ornate toolshed, and I told him so. “What are those?” he asked me. The roof of the building is a mesh dome, like you might see on an aviary. What had taken my son’s interest were the small, dark fluttery shapes clinging to the wire. But they weren’t butterflies.

The stretch of the Victoria line that runs between Highbury & Islington and Kings Cross station is unusually long, and runs directly beneath the residential areas of Pentonville and Barnsbury. The ventilation shaft at Gibson Square was intended to be a more utilitarian affair, but the local gentry formed a pressure group and petitioned the London Transport Board to produce something more in keeping with the area. The folly – not a butterfly house – was designed by Quinlan Terry in the style of a Greek temple.

The Victoria line is a mighty piece of railway. The most intensively-used rail service in the UK, it carries more than 30 trains per hour at peak times – and 200 million passengers per year. It connects three major mainline terminals and the commercial centre of London’s West End. And it is almost entirely invisible. Standing among the town houses of Barnsbury, the swanky offices of Fitzrovia, or the tall trees of Green Park, you tend to forget it’s right under your feet. This is true of London’s public transportation system more generally. It is a marvel: a vast, intricate people-moving machine which keeps itself largely hidden from view until it is needed. It exists almost as a parallel city, one with an entirely transient population, that weaves itself in and out of the one in which people live and work.

Those dark, fluttery shapes caught in the mesh roof of the building that isn’t a butterfly house in Gibson Square… from time to time one shakes itself free and lands nearby on the lawn. They are pieces of newspaper and leaflets and crisp bags, torn, shredded and black with soot. I imagine that these artefacts have escaped through this hidden fissure between the two places and have been somehow unable to survive the transition.

If you find yourself in London, it’s worth staying attuned to these parallel cities and the places where they intersect. I once stood waiting for a District Line train, convinced I was underground until flakes of snow began to drift from somewhere above onto the platform. The two worlds leak into each another in surprising ways.

Find David McGroarty at www.davidmcgroarty.net 

Haunted by Rail – Nina Allan

In the hectic time leading up to the publication of Rustblind and Silverbright, our anthology of railway-themed slipstream and horror, I have invited short blog contributions from the authors included in that book, which I will be publishing at irregular intervals over the next month or two.  First up is Nina Allan, who starts things off with a brief examination of the magic of trains . . . 

 

Of Trains and Books and Stories – Haunted by Rail

by Nina Allan

Strangers on a Train, Anna Karenina, Murder on the Orient Express, Railsea, The Taking of Pelham 123, The Station Agent, The Manchurian Candidate, The Lady Vanishes, Horror Express, The Glamour, Brief Encounter, 3:10 to Yuma – you’ll immediately spot what these classic films and novels all have in common, and no doubt you’ll have your own favourites to add to the list. And once you’ve done that, you can perform an interesting experiment: try and replace the train in your favourite railway story with a motor car.

You’ll find that you can’t do it. Even if you can, you’ll sense that the character of that book or movie has been altered in some fundamental way, and at great detriment to the atmosphere of the story. If Anna had travelled between Moscow and St Petersburg in a chauffeured limo she’d never have met Vronsky. Guy would certainly never have been inveigled into a murder plot by the obsessive Bruno if he’d driven to meet his wife instead of taking the train, and whoever heard of hunting giant moles from the back of a Nissan Micra?

Taken simply in terms of plot, railways offer a whole variety of opportunities for drama that are denied to you as a writer if you take to the road. The opportunity for encountering total strangers, for one. The time for idle fantasy about your travelling companions, the chance to gaze out of the window at the passing landscape and the architecture of unknown towns, to study the people, clustered closely together on the station platforms. You can write letters on trains, read on trains, have conversations, discard contraband, secrete monsters, murder guards, hide from your pursuers. As with the list of train books and stories itself, the possibilities are endless.

It is a lot more than simple mechanics though. There is a poetic grandeur about trains that is almost entirely absent from road transport. You might use a sports car to indicate the arrogance of a character, or financial impetuousness, or sexual garrulousness, but aside from Stephen King (Christine, From a Buick 8, ‘The Road Virus Heads North’) I can’t think of many writers who have cared enough about cars to make them the linchpin of their stories. Cars are prosaic, pragmatic, a convenient means of transport from A to B but little more. A train is a complex milieu, a contained hierarchy, a world in miniature. In Christopher Priest’s novel Inverted World, a city becomes a vast train travelling on rails that have to be laid perpetually in front of it as it goes along, rolling forward towards an unreachable destination. In Robert Bloch’s story ‘That Hellbound Train’, the train that carries the night mail becomes a metaphor for eternity in the company of the devil.

When you travel by road, there’s no time to think. Conditions inside a car are cramped and oppressive, the view is mostly restricted to the oil-streaked, potholed surface of the tarmac strip you’re travelling on or the rear bumpers of the vehicle in front. The landscape of motorways is the landscape of ruination, of defeat, of service stations and superstores and ubiquitous brand names. Revelling in homogeneity and the deadpan of concrete, the destructive, invasive architecture of roads is by its very nature ugly. The repetitious drone and grind of cars moving along a dual carriageway beats inside the skull like the noise of a hammer drill. Your temper rises, your desperation for fresh air increases, your head is filled only with thoughts of escape, of how long it will be before you reach your destination.

Train journeys we remember as rites of passage – it’s no accident that JK Rowling has her young wizards make the journey to Hogwarts by rail rather than by road. The train passes through the human landscape not as a thief but as a guest, its hypnotic clack-clacking insinuating itself inside the spaces of the mind like a mantra for dreaming. The railway’s architecture of bridges and tunnels, stationmaster’s houses, viaducts and depots and platforms and level crossings are part of the language of poetry and above all, memory. Even the rails the trains run on are of a pleasing design, silvery in the moonlight, glistening snakes of time, economical both in terms of the space they occupy and the cost to the environment.

The opening of a new railway line is an opening up of new opportunities, not just for physical travel but for the life of the mind.

• The longest railway bench in the world is on Platform 1 at Scarborough (152 yards)
• The longest railway bridge in the world is the Danyang-Kunshun Great Bridge, a viaduct on the Beijing to Shanghai high speed railway in China (540,000 ft)
• The longest station platform in the world is at Gorakhpur Station in Uttar Pradesh (1,324 m)
• The longest freight trains in the world are to be found in North America and often approach 4km in length
• The longest passenger train in the world is the Ghan, the 1,200 m train that runs the north-south route between Darwin and Adelaide

Statistics like this haunt the imagination. They command attention. They demand story.

The very first train journey I remember was on the London tube. I was four years old or thereabouts, travelling with my mother and two-year-old brother between Euston and Victoria on our way to visit my grandmother in Goring-by-sea. My brother dashed out on to the platform two stops early and my mother had to dash out too, to yank him back. It’s difficult to remember when I realised I was in love with trains, not just with the business of travelling on them but with the paraphernalia that we call Railway – route maps, platform tickets, trackside buddleia and cow parsley, the sharp tap-tap-tap of a pair of smart city shoes traversing the platform of a suburban station on a baking afternoon in mid July. Edward Thomas’s lines on Adlestrop, Richard Rodney Bennett’s music for the Orient Express as it rattles out of Constantinople at the start of its fatal journey into crime. All these things and many others. Model trains too, with their miniaturized perfection, their cool iron heft, their secret, steamy delight at being held in the hand. I never owned a model railway but I had friends who did, who allowed me to access their made-to-measure kingdoms of scaled down rails, of papier maché fortresses and moulded housing stock, who showed me how, if you pull the attic trapdoor firmly shut behind you once you’re inside, you can persuade yourself that you’ve entered another world.

The story I’ve written for Rustblind and Silverbright opens a window into just such a world. It also reveals the dangers that lie in closing that attic door too tightly, in forgetting that there is a world beyond it after all, that by being in thrall to one you run the risk of losing your place in the other.

Mainly though it’s a story about magic, because trains are magic in motion. It’s a story about being haunted by rail.

Visit Nina’s blog at http://www.ninaallan.co.uk/

Rustblind and Silverbright Contents List

Well – things have been a little delayed while I brushed up a few last details with a few authors, but I am now in a position to release the full contents list (minus any accompanying material) of our anthology of slipstream, horror and other fantastical fiction connected to the railways.  Congrats to everyone who made it in – and to those that didn’t as well of course.  With over 100 submissions, making a final selection wasn’t easy.  It’s a big book, but I still had to be rather brutal and a good many stories I really liked ended up squeezed out.

Act 1

Tetsudo Fan – Andrew Hook
On The Level – Allen Ashley
The Wandering Scent – Aliya Whiteley
To the Anhalt Station – John Howard
Death Trains Of Durdensk – Daniella Geary
Vivian Guppy and the Brighton Belle – Nina Allan
The Last Train – Joel Lane
Writer’s Block – Stephen Fowler (prose poem)

Act 2

Northern Line Tube Announcement – Anon (Flash Fiction)
The Path of Garden Forks – Rhys Hughes
District to Upminster – Marion Pitman
Wi-Fi Enabled Bakerloo Sunset – RD Hodkinson
Stratford International – D McGroarty
The Cuts – Danny Rhodes
Sleepers – Christopher Harman

Act 3

Embankmen – Gavin Salisbury (Poem)
Sunday Relatives – Douglas Thompson
The Engineered Soul – Jet McDonald
The keeper – Andy Coulthard
Escape on a Train – Steve Rasnic Tem
Choice – Charles Wilkinson
Not All Trains Crash – Steven Pirie
The Turning Track - Mat Joiner and Rosanne Rabinowitz

The book will now enter the design process and I hope it will be available to order in a few months.  Watch this space or my facebook page for the latest info.

The End of the Submissions Period for Rustblind and Silverbright

Somewhere amid the chaos of getting ready for Tallest Stories, the submissions period for Rustblind and Silverbright came to an end.  I am delighted to report that we clipped the hundred submissions mark for this book of slipstream and experimental railway stories. More importantly, it has generated an absolutely fantastic and diverse pile of fiction to sort through – I couldn’t really have asked for anything better. Putting this book together is going to be a sheer joy – and I promise you I have some interesting plans for this one.  Should be quite an unusual volume.

5 Days Left

Just 5 days now before Rustblind and Silverbright closes for submissions (unless an extension is needed, in which case talk to me) – *excitement is mounting*!! This is going to be a spectacular book, going by the stories received so far, and choosing between them all is going to be a real challenge.

Let’s see if we can reach 100 subs for this wild railway anthology!  We’re not far off . . .

Keep em coming in these last few days!

Rustblind and Silverbright Time Extensions

I have already received a couple of requests from writers for a time extension to finish off stories for the Rustblind and Silverbright anthology.   So I want to make it clear publicly that I am quite happy to grant an extension, up to a fortnight or so, for any writers out there who are worrying about time and want a little longer to finish off a story.  I would ask you to get in touch and let me know about it before the official deadline though, just so I know what I am dealing with and what to expect.

So for any late arrivals at the station . . . sorry, really should stop these daft train announcement parodies!  But seriously, no panics!  This is Eibonvale and you know by now how little I like to stand on formality.