The Call of the Void

'How strange... I was having a most wonderful dream.' When Gillian collapses at her granddaughter's ballet performance, her son Bradley is forced to confront his fears about vulnerability and mortality, still raw from a recent loss. But as doctors puzzle over her condition, Gillian becomes convinced that her deterioration is being caused by something - or someone - far beyond the explanation of medical science. Are her memories playing tricks, or is the voice in her sleep reaching for her - and, perhaps, for the rest of the family? A story about ghosts, whether they be real or imagined...

Derek Smawk was an easy man to loathe. A squat figure with a pinched face, his track record prior to election had shown him entirely unsuited to the role of a public servant. Lazy, incompetent and a congenital liar, his all-round unattractiveness was matched by a kind of bullish incoherence when he spoke in public, as if he didn't really think his audience merited the effort to make actual sense. He was, if nothing else, an unlikely person ever to be a Prime Minister, lacking as he was in personality or any notable skills.  This was his biggest strength as a politician: being unelectable puts a person in a position of absolutely no responsibility at all, enabling them to make all kinds of promises that need never be tested. In this story, we find out what happens when somebody unelectable unexpectedly gets elected, and their promises suddenly become a little bit significant... (It's just a story, of course - this sort of thing could never really happen, could it?)

It's the first rule of the internet, isn't it? Be careful what you put out there: once online, it's there for everyone to see, for the rest of eternity. Yet here we all are, spaffing our thoughts all over social media, distributing our photographs whether mundane or indecorous, and generally putting every last bit of our personal lives out there on blogs, vlogs, tweets, tiktoks, snapchats, instas and, er, podcasts. (This is entirely a work of fiction, by the way. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. And that goes for all of the other stories on Neurotic Literature, got it?) Probably, too many of us have woken up to discover that the brave, bold post of yesterday evening is the huge error of judgement of the here and now. But for Ben, who perhaps should found a more conventional way to deal with his anxiety (say, counselling, prayer, or good old fashioned repression), an unwise video turns out to be just the first step into an uncertain new world of online celebrity... A story about how one man's therapy turns out to be everyone else's entertainment.

This is a story about Derek, the mole who didn't like digging. He liked all kinds of other things. Digging just happened to be a thing he did not like. Which might have been fine, except that he was a mole. And being a mole meant that certain things were expected of him. Digging, for example. But Derek was a very obstinate mole. Listen to the whole story to see how that works out for him. (Though there is a small clue in the title.)

It wasn't Timothy Jenkins' fault. If nobody explains to you that content is intended only for a teenage, female audience, a juvenile reader will assume that it is all part of the rich pageant of literature, a glass held up to the lives of others in the way that is a feature of all fiction. The publishers should have made it clearer, probably. But they would no doubt argue that it was an issue of branding. That any prolific and bestselling author of children's books is marketed with a certain consistency as a matter of course. If you're apportioning blame, the publishers would say, blame the publicists.  Regardless of whose fault it was, the issue remains: ignorant though he was as to the intended audience of the books he was getting through, Timothy was reading girl fiction, written for girls and about girls, its concerns entirely the concerns of girls. They were, in short, books meant for girls. You might argue that, in any case, it was a little bit late to be apportioning blame. But as far as Timothy's parents were concerned, somebody needed to be held responsible. The question was, who? As to whether or not it was too late... that would turn out to be an even trickier question to answer.

A glimpse of some of the delights awaiting in the hotly anticipated third season of Neurotic Literature, arriving imminently!

It's a tough business, writing. All those hours, days, years even, of sweat and toil, writing and rewriting to turn out something heartfelt, original and possibly even brilliant, only to discover that you have merely completed the first leg of a far more arduous journey, one that will probably end with your finely wrought prose being discarded and read by nobody. Take this podcast, for instance. Blimmin' ages, it takes. The writing, the recording, the editing, the coming up with something pithy and enticing for the blurb (is this one succeeding? probably not). And for what? A handful of listeners, a few compliments, a modicum of attention in the ghastly vastness that is the world wide web. Mere crumbs, dear listeners - and you can't live on crumbs. (I am, by the way, most grateful for the listeners, the compliments and the attention. Do keep them coming.) Publication, though: that's the Holy Grail for many an author, and in this day and age it is not easily won. Still, if you have talent, if you're prepared to learn the market and perservere, if you can counter rejection with resilience, and keep making your writing stronger and more marketable, then you're in with a chance. That's what they say. But what if they're not telling you quite everything you need to know...? A story (as yet, unpublished) about the murky underworld of literature, and why you can't always trust your agent.

"You know what I reckon? They're so up against it, right, with the state of the hospitals and underfunding and so on, that they don't know who's in for what. So they do everything on everyone to be on the safe side." You will, no doubt, have your own views on the state of the NHS and the reasons (calculated or otherwise) for its 14 years (coincidental or otherwise) of neglect and underfunding. Do feel free to bang some pots and pans on your doorstep if it makes you feel better, but whatever your political viewpoint, I think we can all agree that our health service has been through some rough times lately. Even so, there are some things one doesn't expect from a routine operation. But mistakes happen, don't they?

Folklore tells of a town where everyone was a mathematician. Each person was an expert, whether in arithmetic, algebra, geometry or topology; thanks to this expertise, measurements were always very precisely measured, definitions very precisely defined and costs very precisely calculated.  Yet, as a mathematician called Simplex discovered, just because people think they've got everything worked out, doesn't mean they won't find themselves confronted by new ideas... A story about quadrilaterals, and the difference between knowledge and understanding.

Shame. Most of us experience it. A few of us are burdened with it in unusually (and, some would say, unfairly) high quantities. Whilst religious and political authorities have at times encouraged shame as a means of self-control (or, frankly, a way of ensuring that fun things feel less fun), these days it is generally felt that shame is a bad thing - that negative self-evaluation can stunt our ability to make progress, can be a motivation to quit, can cause pain, distrust, and feelings of worthlessness. But according to an obscure text by Edward J. Peng, the impact of shame is worse even than that. Much, much worse. A deep dive into Peng's theories opens up a world of startling implications for the way in which we ought to understand life and death itself. It suggests reasons for some of the deepest injustices in human society. But they also leave a lot of questions unanswered, and when one advocate for his work begins digging for answers, it leads to more horrifying possibilities than even Edward J. Peng could have imagined... A story about living with shame. And dying from it.