Strange times in Surrey

There is no greater author of weird tales alive today than John Whitbourn, and "Waiting For A Bus" is perhaps the eeriest of all his short stories. It has won a slew of awards and if you read it on Christmas Eve with the lights turned low, I think you'll see why. And after that, when the goosebumps go down and you can steel yourself to get up from your chair, take a look at the rest of the Binscombe Tales series.

Here is the review that one of my friends gave after I recommended the series to him:

"The Binscombe Tales are quite simply phenomenal, and I do not use the term lightly. It's all set in a quiet, definitively English village surrounded by a council estate in the suburbs outside London. The series is very difficult to categorize. It starts off as an almost conventional series of ghost stories, sometimes genuinely frightening and most disturbing, but increasingly becomes more and more mysterious, odd, humorous, and deeply intriguing.

"The stories are independent, but should be read sequentially as there is an underlying theme to the entire work. They are nested stories; theoretically each short story stands alone, but there is an overarching narrative that links them and forms a story in itself, which for me was even more interesting than any individual tale. They make a genuinely brilliant whole. The entire work (and world) is quintessentially English. It's just so marvellous; it has to make my top ten favourite books list."

Paperbacks

Binscombe Tales: Volume One

Binscombe Tales: Volume Two

Binscombe Tales: Volume Three

Kindle

Waiting for a Bus & other stories

Video Nasty & other stories 

Reggie Suntan & other stories

No Truce With Kings & other stories 

Rollover Night & other stories

It'll All be Over by Christmas & other stories

Binscombe Tales: The Complete Series (contains all the above stories)

Something strange in your Christmas stocking

What's Christmas Eve without a ghost story? Well, here are two, both classics of the English New Weird by its foremost living exponent, John Whitbourn.

First "Waiting for a Bus". I heard this story in the mid-1980s when the author was one of several guests at a ghost story evening chez Morris. We had a nice dinner, a little fine wine, and settled down around the fire to entertain ourselves with some cosily spooky stories; an activity that mankind has only been doing for -- what? -- twenty thousand years and more.

Then John got up and produced the story he'd brought, the first (as it later turned out) of an ongoing series. As he read, a chill dark hand closed over the group. We were transported to a suburban street under dim street-lamps, hurrying past with just a nervous glance across the road at an ordinary but suddenly sinister bus shelter. With the final words, you could hear the sigh of long-held breath and we looked around at each other with that bright-eyed smile that says you know you've just had the bejasus scared out of you. Everyone that evening had come armed with a tale to tell, and there were talented, experienced writers there, to be sure, but there was no disputing who was the storytelling king of the fireside.

"Waiting for a Bus" not only gave a shudder to those dinner party guests who were privileged to hear it first, it was picked as one of DAW's World's Best Fantasy Stories of the very next year. It has been widely anthologized since, as have other Binscombe Tales such as "Eyes" (also known as "It Has Been Said") which might put you in mind of a certain long-running horror movie franchise, but be aware that the story was originally published by the Haunted Library over a decade before the cameras started rolling on the first in that series.

But are these ghost stories, or something stranger still? This is Wrong; we don't deal in genre. Rest assured you'll get a delicious scare that's just the thing for the time of year. Happy Christmas!

Binscombe Tales: The Complete Series

Binscombe Tales Volumes One, Two and Three

Kindle chapbooks:

Waiting For A Bus & other stories

Video Nasty & other stories

Reggie Suntan and other stories

No Truce With Kings and other stories

Rollover Night and other stories

It'll All be Over by Christmas and other stories

Binscombe Tales

What's Christmas Eve without a ghost story? Well, here are two, both classics of the English New Weird by its foremost living exponent, John Whitbourn.

First "Waiting for a Bus". I heard this story in the mid-1980s when the author was one of several guests at a ghost story evening chez Morris. We had a nice dinner, a little fine wine, and settled down around the fire to entertain ourselves with some cosily spooky stories; an activity that mankind has only been doing for -- what? -- twenty thousand years and more.

Then John got up and produced the story he'd brought, the first (as it later turned out) of an ongoing series. As he read, a chill dark hand closed over the group. We were transported to a suburban street under dim street-lamps, hurrying past with just a nervous glance across the road at an ordinary but suddenly sinister bus shelter. With the final words, you could hear the sigh of long-held breath and we looked around at each other with that bright-eyed smile that says you know you've just had the bejasus scared out of you. Everyone that evening had come armed with a tale to tell, and there were talented, experienced writers there, to be sure, but there was no disputing who was the storytelling king of the fireside.

"Waiting for a Bus" not only gave a shudder to those dinner party guests who were privileged to hear it first, was picked as one of DAW's World's Best Fantasy Stories of the very next year. It has been widely anthologized since, as have other Binscombe Tales such as...

"Eyes" (also known as "It Has Been Said") which might put you in mind of a certain long-running horror movie franchise, but be aware that the story was originally published by the Haunted Library over a decade before the cameras started rolling on the first in that series.

But are these ghost stories, or something stranger still? This is Wrong; we don't deal in genre. Rest assured you'll get a delicious scare that's just the thing for the time of year. Happy Christmas!

Binscombe Tales

If we're talking about disturbing and hard-to-define stories, they don't come much weirder and more wonderful than the Binscombe Tales, John Whitbourn's series of exquisitely English creepy stories.

I've been a fan for a long time, right back to before the Binscombe Tales were anthologized in series like The Year's Best Fantasy and the After Midnight books. So I'm really a cat with the cream now that my company Fabled Lands LLP has acquired the licence to publish a collected edition of all twenty-six stories in both paperback and Kindle versions. That's due in time for Halloween, but in the meantime here's a sneak peek at one of the scariest of them: "Waiting For A Bus".