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.
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.