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Dimmer

Dimmer

Dimmer is a new story published in January 2025  by Salo Press as one of their Flirtations, a series of one-shot stories or short poetry collections that includes work by  David Frankel, Andrew Hook, Tim Major and many more. 

The story again features the paranormal investigators Henry and Rowena. It can be read independently, of course, but there are a few callbacks and resonances that will add an extra layer if you are in the know. It is also the earliest story in the Henry-Rowena chronology so far (I seem to writing them backwards, from grave to cradle so to speak).

When a mysterious photograph of an unearthly figure, allegedly taken at a paranormal black spot, the legendarily bottomless Lake Mott appears on r/eerie_england,  Henry and Rowena set off investigate. Once at the lake, the bleak waters stir in Rowena’s uncanny senses premonitions of doom . Meanwhile, Henry becomes distracted by the nearby site of a retreat once frequented by Britain’s most celebrated horror writers. Against Rowena’s better judgment, they head into the woods looking for ruins.

Origin Story

The merest twinkle of Dimmer appears in the first Henry and Rowena story I wrote, The Hinwick Effigy (Cloister Fox 2), where in Henry’s list of previous investigations he mentions ‘The Lamia of Lake Mott’.

I busked the story quite quickly when I wanted to answer a call for submissions for a folk horror anthology. I received no reply or rejection to this submission.

Salo was the next publisher I sent it to. I’m grateful they accepted it and it has found a perfect home.

Launch

Dimmer will be launched on February 12th at The Holloway bookshop in Norwich.

Extract

After we’d hiked across the moor and found the lake low down in the flatlands, rather than help me scope-out and catalogue the site, you became overly involved with your reflection in the black water. I must have been standing a little further back than you. Some trick of the light made my likeness a zigzagged blur on the surface tension of the water. In contrast, your eyes and mouth and foxish cheekbones stayed shiningly distinct. I did like the way we looked: mysterious and serious, hazy and rock-hard, the psychic detective girl and the cultural geography maestro out to investigate the striking but contentious photograph of the so-called Black Lamia of Lake Mott, a cause célèbre in certain quarters you were sure already was another fake.

Although I doubted it – you being you – I wondered if the stories attached to Lake Mott had unsettled you. The lake is bottomless, according to legend, and the haunt of a long-armed, snaggle-toothed water demon with an insatiable appetite for human life. On certain forgotten feast days, this Black Lamia will the float on the surface of Lake Mott the face of one who will drown someday at noon, and use the wind to call his name.

The wind was harsh and persistent that day, if you remember.

I elbowed you. Don’t stare too hard, I said. When water isn’t water, it can stare back.

Reviews

Patience!

Eeriepedia

There are a few references to other stories here in what will be the Eerie England collection beyond the inclusion of Henry and Rowena. 

r/eerie_england: Subreddit where various skeptics, believers, lunatics and hoaxers congregate to discuss reports of hauntings, apparitions, cryptids, aliens, cults etc. First appeared in The Hinwick Effigy. Also appears in Vacancy and Under the Tower that Fell. Adam Pasmore from The Crumbling Edifice is banned. 

Astraea Themis: Legendary horror writer and author of the cursed collection The Underkin and Other Stories . Appears in The Validations and others. 

 

Dimmer is available to order direct from Salo Press, or come to the launch at The Holloway on February 12th, hear me read and pick up a signed copy.

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Launch Event for Dimmer

Find yourself invited to the inauguration of DIMMER, my new chapbook.

Published by SALO PRESS, and launched along side new poetry anthology PISSOIR, DIMMER will be thrust into an unprepared world on February 12th at The Holloway Bookshop in Norwich. Revels kick-off at 7pm. 

Come, listen, mingle, buy a signed copy.

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How Beautiful You Are

How Beautiful You Are

This story appeared in Black Shuck’s annual anthology, Something Peculiar: Great British Horror 9 in September 2024. It’s a stand-alone story, though one with repercussions. The story should end up as the first in my new collection, tentatively entitled Eerie England. 

How Beautiful is the story of Alfie Tanner, 86-year-old ex-soldier and long-time resident of Tanzler House, a tower block in the bleak outer London suburb of Crobe. When Alfie wakes up in the middle of the night, his wife missing, his flat swarming with an aggressive mould called the Black Autumn, his head fizzing with delusions and flashbacks so begins a fraught and phantasmagorical journey through the rotting building.

 Origin Story

The base idea for How Beautiful came to me when I read a report in The Guardian called Damp, Dirt Decay: is the mould in this east London housing block the UK’s worst. The description of stalactites of mould provoked a what if: what if the mould is sentient? What if it’s alive, with needs?

Later I read about the Tanzler Case (the Floridian doctor Carl Tanzler in 1933 exhumed one of his patients and lived with her corpse for several years). Initially I had Alfie living with his wife unsure whether she is alive or dead, or unaware she is dead. In the end, I chose to take a different path, with Alfie on the move and confused, though Tanzler remains in the name of the tower block (the rest of the blocks in Crobe are named after men who lived with corpse-brides; it’s that sort of manor). The name of Alfie’s neighbour, Marie-Elena is also a reference to Tanzler’s victim. 

I wrote the story in January 2024 after Steve Shaw from Black Shuck asked me to contribute a story to GBH9 when we were chatting at Fantasycon in 2023.

The title comes from The Cure song How Beautiful You Are from the album Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss, which I believe is adapted from a Baudelaire poem. This has no bearing on the story. I was just listening to the song a lot at the time of conception. 

Extract

Black Autumn appeared soon afterwards. No one in charge took it seriously, or could be bothered to do anything about it. It was suggested that residents were using these home-grown oyster mushroom kits and letting the spores get everywhere, self-inflicting nothing more than a creepy but nonetheless trivial mushroom annoyance. It was suggested that the residents were just moaners and scroungers and deadbeats and shirkers and should have just moved somewhere less fungal. The residents of the East Ditch were left to cope as best they could, given that in the past they had weathered somehow everything thrown at them. They must, therefore, be damn-near unbreakable, or had done things so wrong in past lives and tenancies that they needed a trial by ordeal. That is what Old Joe on Level Two had said, anyway.

The first Alfie heard of the Black Autumn was when Yara on Level 12, who Iris knew from the women’s coffee morning that met on Tuesdays in the community centre on Alferi Street had told Iris that a weird black mould was in her kitchen and she was pretty sure it was why her plants were dead and her baby not sleeping.

Then Dorin, who had a flat on the level below and was Maria-Elena’s uncle, mentioned to Alfie that after he’d smelled a nasty dank odour he found a thick, pulsating growth behind the skirting board of all places. Dorin had been a chemical engineer back in Romania, maybe in some sort of military capacity, knew lots of tricks, a regular mad-scientist type who could make a battery from a lemon and fires invisible to the naked eye. At a push, he could whip up some napalm, or homebrew Agent Orange and exfoliate the entire borough. In his kitchen-stroke-lab, he’d concocted what he described to Alfie as Love Potion Number 999, aka, the Muckraker, Satan’s Blitz, the Mould-Killer from Hell. It seemed, though, that the more he attacked the mould with the 999,  the more it not only defended itself but counter-attacked. Soon it was under the carpet. Then it was the carpet, and quite soon after that, Dorin’s lungs, oesophagus and eyes.

Alfie himself had first seen the mould creeping up the interior wall in the entrance lobby where the most forbidding staircase in the western world hits bottom and the lifts have not worked since Euro 96. At first Alfie had thought it was just his eyes, and there was no mottled pattern inching up the wall so rapidly he could watch it darken and spread. On inspection, though, he was pretty certain it was the same mould Dorin and Yara had described.

 

Reviews

How Beautiful You Are made it onto Ellen Datlow’s Horror Recommendations list for 2025.

Screenshot

 

 

Eeriepedia

How Beautiful You Are does have a few references to other stories in the Eerieverse. 

Farworth: The setting for the story, Crobe, is adjacent to the more upmarket district of Farworth, which appears in The Crumbling Edifice. Alfie’s neighbout, Maria Elena works in the same Murder Ink  tattoo parlour that Pasmore visits in The Crumbling Edifice.

Jane Moffo, one of Alfie’s ex-neighbours, is the same Jane whose disappearance Rowena  investigates in Vacancy.

Something Peculiar: Great British Horror 9, edited by Steve J Shaw, contains How Beautiful You Are and ten other amazingly strange tales and is available from Black Shuck Books, bookshops and online retailers. 

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New Story Alert: Dimmer

Very pleased to announce my first story of 2025. Dimmer will be published as a one-shot chapbook in the Salo Flirtations series. 

The book is available to pre-order on the Salo website before its launch into the world in February. 

Dimmer is another case for Henry and Rowena, paranormal investigators who have already appeared in The Hinwick Effigy, Vacancy, Under the Tower that Fell and The Scarisbrick Intuition.

‘Stokes builds a sense of dread with impeccable timing and chill-laden scene setting worthy of Robert Aickman or Andrew Michael Hurley.’ 

DAVID FRANKEL

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Under the Tower that Fell

Under the Tower that Fell

This story was published in the newish journal Dark Lane Digest 2 in July 2024. It is another story that involves the paranormal investigators, Henry and Rowena. Their investigation here precedes  those  in Vacancy and The Hinwick Effigy, and comes at a moment when their relationship is beginning to fray. 

When a video purportedly of a legendary ghost  appears on r/eerie_england, Henry and Rowena  head for where the video was allegedly made, the remote LANTA, a top secret military area containing villages abandoned in the 17th century.  Deep in the forest, Rowena starts to sense things that Henry does not, her dread amping up as they approach the weird Wallend Spur, with its ruined church, tunnels, tombs and malicious Chalk Ghost.  

Origin Story

Under the Story the Fell was written specifically after a call-for-submissions for a folk horror anthology. The story was prompted by one of the items of past investigations Henry lists in The Hinwick Effigy, The Chalk Ghost of Wallend Spur.

The story was not accepted for the folk horror anthology, quite possibly because it’s a cosmic horror story. It did find a good home in the beautiful Dark Lane very quickly.

Extract 

We headed off into the woods, in the direction of the Spur. You said, ‘look, no soldiers,’ but there were more soldiers, more of them coming up behind. The ground became boggy, the pine forest denser, the day more overcast. Light that glinted between the trees had a violet spangle to it. There was an odd tint to the sky. We must have walked ten miles. I could sense them in the underbrush. I told you. You repeated one of your theories. Black Parka, Target Practice and Zamoyski were soldiers themselves. The Zamoyski clips were either straightforward hoaxes or warnings to keep out of LANTA. Obviously such a warning would not scare people like us. You did not mention the other theory. Squaddies only faked the footage at the church ruins on Wallened Spur in Clip 3 and the sighting of the Chalk Ghost in Clip 4. These they mocked up to conceal that they had either accidentally or sadistically shot Black Parka and co and needed a cover story. You did not mention this version when we were so close to the Spur, I suspect in case it freaked me out. There were soldiers following us, all the way, of course. I didn’t freak out. I could sense their fear, too, and it was not fear of us. It was fear of something else.

 Reviews

Dark Lane Digest 2 has no reviews. To my knowledge, no one has     read Under the Tower that Fell, but this might not be true. 

Eeriepedia

Under the Tower that Fell has a few references to other stories. A few recurring things also have their first appearance here, The Anglian Book of Judgements and The Milkcurdler but you’ll have to read the story to find out about them.

Henry and Rowena: Paranormal investigators, at this point still romantically involved, he deeply skeptical of the supernatural, and she very psychic. They first appear in The Hinwick Effigy. Rowena also appears in Vacancy.

r/eerie_england: Subreddit where various skeptics, believers, lunatics and hoaxers congregate to discuss reports of hauntings, apparitions, cryptids, aliens, cults etc. First appeared in The Hinwick Effigy. Also appears in Vacancy. Adam Pasmore from The Crumbling Edifice is banned. 

Astraea Themis: Legendary horror writer and author of the cursed collection The Underkin and Other Stories that can contain a story called Under the Tower that Fell. Either meeting her or reading her book by mistake signals your worst fears will consume you. First appears in The Validations.

 

 

Dark Lane Digest 2 also includes recommendable stories by Jacqueline Chau, Grace, Wanebo, Chris Lyon, James Pate and Michael W Thomas. It’s available in paperback and Kindle from Amazon. 

I also gave an interview for the Dark Lane website. 

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Vacancy

Vacancy

Vacancy was first published in the online journal Devour in June 2024 and then appeared as an audio version in October of the same year. The story is another that features the psychic paranormal investigator Rowena Frieze-Green. As this is a direct sequel to The Hinwick Effigy, she is operating alone, without her usual accomplice, Henry Cawthra.

After becoming aware of a missing person’s case with mysterious overtones, Rowena heads for the bleak and dilapidated north Norfolk resort of White Ness where a revelation awaits her in the haunted and restless Salt House.

Origin Story

Vacancy features a shimmery, phantom beach house that winks in and out of existence at night and is sometimes visible from Salt House. The first glimpse of this just appeared in my mind’s eye in January 2023 when I spent hours and hours trudging around in the rain listening to Once, Twice Melody by Beach House.

I then shifted the story from a story about a couple, one of whom vanishes into the phantom beach house, to an investigation into the disappearance when I tried to write for an anthology of stories set in out-of-season resorts. In doing this, I was tempted to revisit Rowena, who I had left doing a midnight flit in The Hinwick Effigy.The story was written in two sittings over a weekend.

It did not make the grade for the out-of-season anthology and was turned down two further times before it found its rightful home with Devour, who love the idea of Henry and Rowena, paranormal investigators in a post-apocalyptic world. 

Extract

It was about a mile and a half walk from the rubble of what would have once been a mid-sized supermarket on the edge of White Ness, then along a coastal road and a dry-stone wall to the only house left. No traffic. Heavy rain. If anything the rain was heavier and the key colder in my hand by the time I reached the porch of Salt House. I was sodden. It was hardly a house, a pebble-dashed stub of a bungalow more abruptly-promoted chalet or outdoor toilet block than a house, a home. In the hall, its period 1950s linoleum was still in place. A row of yellow rubber-ball-tipped coat hooks alarmed me somehow. Pronounced smell of mould. Pronounced smell of damp. The light indoors had a brackish, silvery quality that made me feel like I was wading through a Soviet surrealist film. In the kitchen the cooker and the fridge had been removed. I would have to walk into White Ness every day to eat or buy groceries. There was no shower in the bathroom, but there was hot running water. Whether it would run long enough for a bath, I did not yet know, and I would want to bleach and scrub that bath before I sat in it. There was a lounge with sepia-coloured oblongs on the walls where pictures or mirrors once hung. Rainwater like slugs trails slid down the window. Looking at the sea was like looking through lavatory glass. I never returned to this room. I let it be.

Reviews

So far, Vacancy has received no reviews to my knowledge, though the YouTube audio has some nice comments.

Henry and Rowena

As hinted at above, Henry and Rowena are paranormal investigators, once romantically involved and the veterans of many alarming encounters. Rowena is powerfully psychic and sees ‘Things that Should Not Be’. Henry is so skeptical of the supernatural he doesn’t believe her, thinking instead her professed gifts conceal some unremembered childhood trauma.

I first intended the couple to be one-off  characters in The Hinwick Effigy but readers of that story liked them so much they wanted more of their investigations. I have been gradually writing accounts of their encounters referenced in The Hinwick, and added Vacancy. I have plans to write about them a lot more. 

Eeriepedia

Vacancy has loads of references and call-backs to what I am calling the Eerieverse, a loose sequence of weird stories that occur and cross-fertilise in the same stricken, distorted, near-future England.

There are loosely two sets of stories, The Underkin and Other Stories, which have the Great Disorder (see below) as a background, and Eerie_England, stories connected to the subreddit also described below. 

r/eerie_england: First appears in The Hinwick Effigy. Subreddit where various skeptics, investigators, believers and cranks meet to discuss paranormal activity: sightings, footage, photographs, testimony. Rowena first meets Henry on eerie_england during The Great Disorder. 

The Great Disorder: a global lockdown when the world is invaded by cosmic spores that induce a fatal psychotropic effect on anyone who comes in contact with them.

White Ness: Terrifyingly shitty resort on the North Norfolk coast. Also appears in Replacement Bus Service (Out of Darkness, edited by Dan Coxon, Unsung 2021) and The Volkhova Perplex.

The Abandoned Estate at Crobe also appears in How Beautiful You Are. 

The Eye Hospital appears in The Scarisbrick Intuition. 

The Chalk Ghost appears in Under the Tower that Fell. 

The Claustrophile: impossible-to-watch, possibly non-existent yet lethal 1998 British found-footage horror much obsessed over by a certain faction on r/eerie_england.

Hinwick: Post-industrial canalside heritage site and location of Henry and Rowena’s last investigation together. The Hinwick Effigy is just about still available in Cloister Fox 2. 

The text version of Vacancy is available to read here.

The audio file is available on Youtube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 

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The Crumbling Edifice

The Crumbing Edifice

First published in March 2024 in For Tomorrow: Wellbrook High Yearbook, 1993 (edited by Dan Coxon, Black Shuck Books), The Crumbling Edifice introduces the world to Adam Pasmore, demon-hunter and qualified driving instructor. At the outset, Adam is summoned to investigate strange events in the dour outer London suburb of Farworth. A family has been murdered by an assailant with cult connections and occult aspiration. Although the killer has been caught, the demon he evoked is felt to be still corrupting the area. Adam comes to the rescue, but the escalating conflict turns very personal, with its origins in the 1993 Wellbrook High Event.

Origin Story

I was asked to write this story, but its first inkling was in a news story about a man who, misled, exploited really by malign dark-web voices, signed a contract in blood with a demon, then killed two people expecting to win the lottery in return. My initial idea was to dramatize this relationship between fool and monster. On committing to write a story for For Tomorrow, I ended up shifting the story towards an investigation into, rather than a dramatic reconstruction of the crime. The twist at the end of the story came as a surprise to me. I wasn’t intending until I sensed it when I was writing the last pages. Fortunately, the story needed little adjustment to facilitate the twist. The story was written at the end of 2022 and took about two months to complete.

Extract

“Dig a little deeper and we realise that you had been talking about your wants to people on the dark web, members of the so-called Arcane Order of the Temple of Ashes – AOTA – whose T-symbol, like a satanic version of the Sergio Tacchini logo I had seen today on the plywood board covering the Da Souza’s backdoor. AOTA had steered you to Grand Jack Thorian, who also goes by the name The Candleman, or The Remembrancer, or in Cumbria, Jack Wondrous. AOTA had shown you how to summon and bind Grand Jack and sign the contract. It was Mo Dent’s assertion that not only was Grand Jack Thorian real, he was still in Farworth. Hence her contacting a demon hunter.”

Reviews

For Tomorrow received a few good reviews, a notable one in Runalong the Shelves:

‘There feels room for dark comedy in ‘The Crumbling Edifice’ by Ashley Stokes as we meet a demon hunter and driving instructor but this story is one of the darkest in the collection. It uses the idea of those who claim they’ve done horrific deals thanks to demonic pacts and imagines what if these could be real. Neither answer will make you feel better about the world and for those of us who were isolated geeks back in the 1990s this may bring some uncomfortable moments of similarity that slightly make us worry could we ever do this. Stokes takes us on a history tour of one particular online myth and those who believe they encountered it and then in a great spooky urban location we have to decide what will happen next. A great story!’

The story also made it onto James Everington’s list of Best Horror Short Stories of 2025.

Benjamin Kurt Unsworth in Phantasmagoria said, ‘Even the more distinctly standalone stories possess a quaint nostalgia which they exploit perfectly: ‘The Crumbling Edifice’ by Ashley Stokes, notably, focusing (via the narrative of a demon hunter) on the ramifications for a driving instructor with perfect dark humour.

Eeriepedia

The Crumbling Edifice is a standalone story and has proved more a gateway to other things than part of a definite sequence like my Underkin and EerieEngland stories. It is also quite possible that Adam Pasmore will return in other stories, as could Grand Jack. 

Farworth is also referred to in Under the Tower that Fell (the paranormal investigator Henry Cawthra fatefully finds his copy of The Underkin and Other  Stories by Astrea Themis in the waiting room of Farworth Station (which is where The Crumbling Edifice begins). In How Beautiful You Are, Erasto’s mother is said to work in the Sainsburys in Farworth. Also in How Beautiful You Are, Marie-Elena works at the Murder Ink tattoo parlour Adam visits here.

For Tomorrow: Wellbrook High Yearbook, 1993 (edited by Dan Coxon) also includes fab and memorable work from Lucie McKnight Hardy, Verity Holloway, CC Adams, Penny Jones, James Everington and more. You can order it from Black Shuck Books, and if you don’t want to support a fine small press directly, from all good bookstores and online retailers