The Spider

A new horror serial!

The Spider has started- Click here for chapter 1!

The curtain has closed on Oceanus and I am delighted. Not only have I been humbled by your response to this story but I’ve been able to sit back and say “I wrote a novel on Substack.” — not that anyone asked, but you know what I mean! The last instalment was shared last Sunday and if you want to read it all, it will be available until 29th August when it goes into the archive. The book will be released on ebook, paperback and hardback on the 6th September.

They say that when you’ve finished a novel, you have to put it to one side and do something else. That something else for me was writing a new novel. While the dust settled on Oceanus, I needed a distraction.

The Spider is my next novel that will be serialised her on Substack. Here’s the blurb:

Liverpool, 1892

Finding his fortune in Australia, John Bryant returns to his wife and child in England, moving them into number five, Percy Street. Anxious to start a new life, Frances Bryant finds herself in the clutches of a malevolent presence within the house, unable to escape it.

When paranormal investigator Daniel Muldoon is called to investigate the case, he soon discovers the haunting of number five is just the beginning of the horror that will unfold.

Lives hang in the balance, for some it is already too late. Muldoon must compete in a race against time to save those who remain caught in a spider's web.

The Spider is a supernatural horror murder mystery set in 19th century Liverpool.

The Spider is a horror novel set in Victorian Liverpool. I was inspired to write this story after producing some two sentence horror microfiction in July. One of them stood out and I had to run with it.

I’ll be sharing 2 chapters a week every Sunday starting on Sunday 11th August.

The inspiration behind this story:

Mary

“Who’s that for?” I asked my five year old as she sealed the envelope.

 “For Mary– she lives in the attic.” 

This creepy micro fiction was from 10 horror stories in under 300 words. and I just had to use it. Although micro fiction stands alone perfectly well, sometimes it offers a nugget of something larger that’s sitting beneath the surface. In this case, I brushed some dust off and found an entire novel sitting there.

Why Liverpool?

Liverpool is my home city and I know it like the back of my hand. I could never get lost here. I’ll be honest, sometimes I’ve felt like I’m not living as exciting a life as other people because I’ve never left here (or desired to leave.) I also feel that when you have lived somewhere your whole life, you have a tendency to take it for granted.

A decade or so ago, I thought I’d look into my family history on Ancestry.com. After seeing what colourful family histories people on Who Do You Think You Are? had, I thought I’d find something quirky. I didn’t. I went back 200 years and apart from arrivals from Tipperary and Hamburg (Hamburg was just one guy tbh), my ancestors were very much from here. My paternal great-grandparents came over from Kilkenny so the Ireland-Liverpool connection was predictable and still going strong into the 1930s.

As it stands today, it’s estimated that the city’s population are 85% Irish descent thanks to the Great Famine in the 1840s. Most of the Irish people who settled here had no other choice. Those who had enough money to, sailed on to America. Those who settled here relied on casual, unskilled labour and as a result, had to take up residence in the tenements near the docks, a lot of them working as dockers. My maternal great-grandfather was still working as a docker into the 1970s.

Over the years, I’ve learned to love that. I find it baffling that my maternal grandmother started her life in the same riverside slum as her parents did and their family had been there since the Irish migration of the 1840s. Those slums don’t exist any more, but most of Victorian Liverpool still remains.

A 19th century Liverpool slum with ‘back to back’ housing.

Anyway— I digress. It just had to be Liverpool. Modern horror stories set in Victorian England circulate around London (Ripper street, Whitechapel, Penny Dreadful etc) and while the classics explore the South West (Hardy) and industrial towns and cities in the midlands and the north (Bennett, Gaskell, Bronte, Eliot), there are still lots of stories to tell in Liverpool, but it’s worth mentioning one that inspired me to look closer: Silas Hocking’s Her Benny. Hocking was a missionary who had been inspired to write the story when he had seen what life was like for poor people in Liverpool at the height of the industrial revolution.

Dickens visited here in 1838 and 1842. It’s only the city that it is now because it became the first commercial wet dock in the UK and was officially recognised a city in 1880. Huge things happened here in the 19th century. This place couldn’t be more Victorian if it tried.

So there you have it... That’s why Frances Bryant moves from the older village of West Derby into the more affluent eastern part of the city, now known as The Georgian Quarter. It was the place to be if you were new money.

Tune in on Sunday 11th August for the first 4 chapters of The Spider.