I’m thrilled to announce my latest project – a horror novella of around 37,000 words entitled Nightmare Tenant.
Chivron Tower is a relic from the past. A twenty-five storey monument in concrete, steel and glass to a bygone age, for years it has been left to rot in an anonymous part of the city. But the winds of change start to flow through the Tower’s corridors, landings and stairwells with the swing of a sledgehammer, screwdriver and paintbrush. New people begin arriving after decades of dereliction. But the very soul of the Tower grows restless, disturbed by this modernisation. The story follows the new residents – the good and the good-for-nothing who realise that all is not as it seems, and the facelift is only skin-deep as they face life and death in a building occupied – in every sense of the word – by a nightmare tenant…
I’d originally started this story in October, hoping to put it out in short story form by Halloween, but this simply didn’t happen. I’d actually been toying with this idea – my idea of an innovation on the classic “haunted house” horror trope – for some time and once I started writing it I just couldn’t stop!
What’s really exciting about this story is that it’s the first novella that I have written – as I wrote the first draft, which I have very recently completed, I realised the story I had in my mind just seemed to “fit” into this form. There was too much story for a short story, but not quite enough for a novel so the novella format called and I accepted the charges! I was pleasantly surprised with the twists and turns the story took – not just a pure horror, but shades of soap opera and disaster movie threaded in there – and the work to edit it into something great begins imminently!
I’ve already got some really exciting plans for Nightmare Tenant – building upon my experience writing The Landlady, except I wasn’t shackled to writing a homage to any particular author; instead, this story contains my voice throughout it’s very DNA – culminating in an independent release in Q1 2021. Stay tuned for more updates on when you can move in!
