He sees a man molten into the tarmac. A module of old chairs and chicken-wire becomes a twine of flame, upwards. Immensity wringing a service station into arthritis; frozen gravel coughed from dustward lungs. Whales beached into ditches by the motorway, a teenager straining at his gravity. A fallen king aloft on pallets and riven with wing-mirrors and lightbulbs. Hands held upwards to stem the kaleidoscope they will become. Soil, everywhere, even in the burning of him. Somewhere outside himself, she pauses at the door, rests her head on the surface to remember him. Somewhere, not unkindly, a voice asks, “Now do you see?”
Yes, thinks Saudad. Yes, I see.
I write literary speculative and dark fiction. My writing is heavily influenced by landscape and psychogeography, tends to be very character driven, and often looks for the uncanny and transcendental in the apparently everyday. Lighthouses, mines, service stations, observation posts, ocean rowing, artic expeditions, lunar symbolism, commercial airspaces and folk horror all seem to figure strongly.
I’m currently in talks with production companies about adaptations of my work. If you’d like to get a copy of the deck of available IP for film, TV, radio or games, please contact my agent Alex at Greyhound Literary for more details.
In my previous life as an academic, I wrote a book about DOOM. You can read it free online here: DOOM: SCARYDARKFAST (fulcrum.org). I also wrote a fair number of papers on game studies, narrative and game history and preservation. Best place to start with all of that is probably here.
You can follow my writing in all its various forms over on Substack.