welcome to long words

We take in so much information on a daily basis. It makes sense that certain things will just slide past our attention after we’ve seen them enough times. Building sites, shops, queues at bus stops. They’re in our world every single day. They become white noise, background details. Scenery. I had a moment yesterday when I noticed something on my wife’s desk at work that I had completely been looking through for months. Don’t worry, it wasn’t divorce paperwork.

Oh, summer. Cruel, hot, possible globally catastrophic summer. Soon you will be gone, never to dark our barometers and shorts drawers again. No longer will people walk into a room and declare ‘oh, isn’t it hot in here’ or ‘oh, isn’t it cold in here’ like some demented, inbred thermometer parrot. No longer will people claim to love the summer but always seem to be the first to reach for the air conditioning, thus exposing themselves as a total fraud.

It’s been a while since we were been treated to a new K.B. Goddard publication. Her last novella, the chillingly atmospheric ‘The Girl with the Roses’ came out back in 2017. Thankfully, it’s not been a complete drought for fans of her work. Since 2017, she’s gone onto become an award winning horror writer with stories popping up to terrify you on both The Wicked Library and The Lift podcasts. As well having a story featured in the first Lift anthology. Now, though, she’s managed to find the time to gather some more tales to haunt the e reader of your choice.

It was a magic trick that very rarely received the applause it deserved. Certainly it wasn’t as flash as some. No ladies were cut in two. No one stepped over a bed of scolding nails or guessed the capital city that someone in another room had written down and sealed in a golden envelope. Still, it was magic none the less. Just of the more everyday variety. Similar to the strain that occasionally left a fiver in a summer jacket pocket.

She always killed spiders. She’d been raised to kill spiders. Her mother killed spiders. Her grandmother killed spiders. Generation after generation of women in her family had raised the tea towel, slipper or newspaper in defence of their homes. Probably while the closest male ancestor rolled their eyes, turned up the TV or noisily rustled his paper.

He’d watched too many versions of the same myth. He could spot the seams between the ad breaks now. The recognisable traits. The revolving carousel of non-threatening villains. The shiny fights. The interweaving soap operas. The cameos just for the true geeks, there to invest a marketing exercise with a little purchased history, borrowed as credit for credibility.