Local Haunts was released at the end of March by Influx Press, and has been on sale for around two months at the time of writing. I’ve resisted talking more about it on here so far, largely because I wanted to see what the general reaction was rather than pre-empting it. Thankfully, after having done a number of events in which the response has been positive, I thought I’d now write a few words about the book.

I remember the project starting long before it was sold. Driving up to Scotland with my father, appropriately on a British Film Institute location job for The Wicker Man, I remember being sat in the passenger seat on my laptop, slowly copying and pasting the 500,000 words or so of my past articles into a single document. Users of Microsoft Word, especially a dodgy 2007 Word like mine, will know what a horrifying mess such an endeavour produces. Three years later, and with a lot of graft and editing along the way, Local Haunts finally exists.

The initial thinking behind the project was admittedly rather vague. For some time, I’d noticed how ideas from this site in particular had quietly permeated into the culture surrounding various writers, films and the like. I wanted these articles in print initially in the hope of simply forcing people to acknowledge that some terms, and even basic descriptions of films taken as given now, sometimes stemmed from random articles on here. As the editing progressed, however, it became clearer that there were other factors driving the desire to collect this work; it seemed to map my life, my interests and general curiosity in a way that felt natural and far from indulgently intellectual. It was a totally unintentional by-product.

As the project continued and the document began to resemble something closer to a book, the overriding theme of the vast majority of my work over the last decade and a half emerged: place. It was location that was driving so many of the articles which I felt stood up over time, rather than the ones that, as is often the case, left me reeling with embarrassment. Location, landscape and place are so important to me, and yet it’s also important in a way that I find difficult to convey. It’s certainly not in the same arena as Nature Writing or work by most of the current landscape writers; it’s something weirder, more esoteric and less Hay Festival.

While some pieces didn’t make it in for other reasons – for example, pieces I’ve cannibalised for my Presence book project have remained there which you can read in full here – it was startling how nicely many seemed to flow together in a way I honestly hadn’t foreseen. Sometimes, gathered collections of essays, journalism and such can feel haphazard and disjointed (Geoff Dyer’s volume White Sands comes to mind, and from a normally superb writer) but this felt totally natural, giving credence to criticisms I’d read of some of my fiction from readers that short non-fiction is really my format. I like to think that my writing is still in transition, especially after the positive response to Nettles in 2022, but we shall see what happens with the next volume of fiction if it ever sees the light of day.

While I was sad in the end that the money wasn’t there to print the book with colour photos, the feeling of getting this work on the page has been exhilarating. Editing work back into my own voice, either removed previously due to the editorial demands of other websites or subsumed by the demented, warping influence of academia, has been a joy, especially when adding the odd polemical element to pieces that, in hindsight, had previously had their teeth blunted.

I’m hugely grateful to Gary at Influx for believing in yet another project of mine. That’s four books with them now, and five books overall if you include Folk Horror; all published without an agent and frankly little industry support. The day after the release of Local Haunts, I finally signed my first contract with an agent, albeit a contract simply for the manuscript I’m currently trying to sell. It’s taken eight years, five books and a rejection list longer than Ducks, Newburyport to finally convince someone in the industry to take a punt. My fingers are crossed it goes somewhere. It has, however, made me even more grateful to Gary whose endeavours at Influx have generally enriched the landscape of British publishing more than most.

Anyway, the response to Local Haunts so far has been lovely. It’s only garnered a handful of reviews (for example, here, here and here), but the events for the book have been incredibly rewarding. For the launch of the book, I was joined by Shadowlands author Matthew Green at Foyles on Charing Cross Road. I’d always felt a bit melancholy about Foyles as I’d launched my second novel, How Pale the Winter Has Made Us, there in 2020, only for everything to close a few weeks later due to COVID. To correct this and have a proper run starting from there felt wonderful. The event was great, and Matthew was a pleasure as always (I interviewed him for the release of Shadowlands at the Daunt Book Festival in 2022).

Equally, we’ve had two other great events: at Voce Books in Birmingham with the brilliant Clive Judd (author of the haunting play Here), and at Dead Ink Books in Liverpool with Andy Miller of the Backlisted podcast. Both were amazing events with a huge range of questions and the threat of being at least double their length with the amount of chat that went on. My thanks to Matthew, Clive and Andy for making the run for Local Haunts so special, and to those few bookshops who have supported the book.

And to the readers of Local Haunts so far, thank you hugely for taking the time to read my work; whether it’s new to you or whether you’ve followed this site from its very shaky start fifteen years ago. I’m in your debt.

Onward.