My short story titled "The Enfilade" has just been included in The Best Horror Of The Year #16, edited by Ellen Datlow. Whilst the book came out in November 2024, due to a mailing issue I've only recently received my copy, which is why I've delayed posting about it til now.
The anthology contains 19 short stories all of which were previously published in 2023. My story originally appeared in the now defunct Black Static magazine (although check out Remains, a new publication by the same editor, Andy Cox), and so I'm going to repost part of my original blog about the writing of my story below:
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.
