A weird story from the English countryside. A man takes a break in a cottage in the countryside of Kent. It's an old county with many strange nooks and crannies and some families that have been there for centuries: families that harbour dark secrets.
#folkhorror #audiobooks #podcast
Back Along The Old Track
Sam Hicks is an English writer based in London. She caught my eye when I read the splendid anthology Fiends In The Furrows by Nosetouch Press.
The story was then lifted to the The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 11 . These anthologies are stuffed with good stories, but Back Along The Old Track was one of the best.
It’s strange that I don’t begin these show notes with Writer was born in 1800 and died in 1900 or suchlike because Sam is still very much alive and sounds in the pink.
In the interview we talk about her influences; where the story is based, is it based on a real place, what are her influences and it was really fascinating to hear that she’s only been writing for three years full time.
Sam is working on more stories and more of her good stuff is coming out in further anthologies as you can hear in the interview.
Hope you enjoyed this modern story. It struck me that the English countryside features in many of these stories we’re reading and we could almost chart a social history by listening to them. For example, we have The Old Nurse’s Story which portrays a countryside peopled by aristocrats in their big houses and poor peasants in the 19th Century, then we have Man Sized in Marble where we have artists coming to rent a house among the poor peasants in the early 20th Century, and here in Back Along The Old Track, we have city folk in the early 21st Century coming to a holiday let among the poor (well weird at least) peasants!
I had done an audio interview with Sam which you can hear on the original podcast, but when I contacted her for permission to upload this on KZfaq she said she’d prefer if I didn’t include the interview in the audio.
She used to be a Civil Servant (works for the Government) but took early retirement and concentrated on writing. This story was the first of hers to be published, but she had written a lot before getting this one in print.
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