My short story titled "The Enfilade" has just been published in Black Static and as usual, I'm blogging a few words discussing how the story came to be written. There may be spoilers within.
Before I go ahead, however, I want to say a few words about this issue of Black Static, as it's the final one of a very long run. Andy Cox began publishing as The Third Alternative back in the early nineties. Once I'd discovered the magazine I not only found great new fiction, but also kindred spirits in that many of the writers published in those first issues were touching on the 'slipstream' genre that I hadn't even realised I was writing. My first acceptance in The Third Alternative was a story titled "Slender Lois, Slow Doris" and appeared in issue #6 in May 1995. Several other appearances followed. When Andy Cox took over Interzone magazine, The Third Alternative became Black Static and focussed mostly on dark horror. This final issue is a 'double issue' and is numbered 82/83. It's an incredible achievement and I'm proud to have had three stories in TTA and now eight in Black Static. Production values and accompanying artwork have always been superb, and the artwork for "The Enfilade" was created by Dave Senecal. A huge thank you, therefore, to Andy Cox for everything, for basically single-handedly defining the genre in the UK and championing weird short fiction for the past thirty years.
As for the story, I'm not entirely sure how I came about the word enfilade but I liked the sound of it and when I saw that one of it's meanings meant a suite of rooms with doorways in line with each other I became intrigued. The word doorway in itself then lead to thoughts of Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception, and his experiences with mind expanding drugs, and subsequently googling architectural examples of enfilades brought me to Mysore Palace, a magnificent structure in the Indian state of Karnataka. Often it's simple connections like these which grow a story. I envisaged a set of doorways as in an enfilade but as spiritual representations within the human mind. What if someone became so obsessed with finding meaning through such doorways that they attempted the impossible? And what if they succeeded?
This was one of those pieces which subsequently wrote itself. I sat down one morning at 9am and by 5pm I had an 8500 word story. I don't have to edit much nowadays, only a word or phrase here or there, rather than anything structural, so it more or less fell out fully formed. As if through an open doorway. Here's the opening:
I first met Pryce on the grassy banks of the River Cam, although it was to be quite a different body of water that would signify his destiny. Pryce was a scraggy youth who stood with a dangled cigarette dropping ash into the water, as he gazed out towards Clare College Bridge with its three uniform arches. The structure was the oldest bridge remaining in Cambridge, and bore the oddity of a missing section of the globe second from the left on the south side. One story was that the builder of the bridge received what he considered to be insufficient payment, and in his anger removed a segment of the globe; another is that it was a method of tax avoidance, as bridges were subject to tax only once they were complete. Whatever the meaning, I was unaware of either back then. I was also unaware how the concept of completeness would be a major influence on Pryce’s life, to the point of obsession.
Regular readers of this blog will know I usually listen to music on repeat through headphones whilst writing, and this entire story was written to Coeur de Pirate's album of piano music, Perséides, on continual repeat.
