Citrus Asphyxia

A brand new short story, Citrus Asphyxia, is now available over at my site for your viewing pleasure. This is a strange surreal, nightmarish story that I've been writing over a long period of time. I initially wrote the opening segment in a violent fever, but couldn't think of anything to follow it with. It was when writing Meet the Veals that I realised the dual-point-of-view could work really well for it, so continued one narrative with ideas from nightmares and old poetry I had written, and intertwined these with a second narrative in the style of hard-boiled detective fiction. I think they go really nicely together to make one big surreal freakshow, inspired a bit by a G.K. Chesterton novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, that I read last year. The story works really well if you listen to Clint Mansell's soundtrack to the film Black Swan, adapted from Tchaichovsky's Swan Lake, when you read it. This is the kind of paranoid rumbling I imagine rolling around in the head of the main character when he thinks his evil thoughts.

I love the challenges and variety that writing short stories throws up. Every time I finish one I aim to concentrate fully on my novel, but there's always another idea for a short story lurking in my mind. I hope you enjoy this one.