The Skin Reader and Other Stories

Did you ever think it is possible that a person’s skin can absorb words from the page of a book? Or perhaps that a book can digest a person?

Maybe you haven’t yet heard that a tree can choose whether or not to become a ‘mother’ or that your very old relative may have returned to his youth several times this week?

Even the Covid-19 pandemic, which has affected the human race on a worldwide scale since the year 2020, may have had an extremely unexpected effect on some people, that you probably weren’t aware of.

You are sure to be intrigued and amazed at what can happen within the realms of fantasy. Indeed, within fantasy there are no rules.

As you turn the pages of this small collection of short stories – each very different from the others and yet each with the thread of fantasy running through it – you may find yourself very nearly believing what you have read…

The Orphan Plus Others

This collection of short stories traverses times in the distant past all the way up to more recent moments in the 20th century. These vignettes provide glimpses of lives very different to our own, from the experience of war and poverty to social attitudes which might appear alien to us today. To have lived through some of these times has been a privilege, and the author looks back on them with a sense of nostalgia. The memories of the past remain, and with the aid of stories they can be passed on to future generations. These stories can evoke both laughter and tears, plumbing the vast depths of human emotion to bring history to life in a vivid and compelling set of narratives.

The Oldest Soak

“Things ’appened that changed me, is all. And when I pass this missive on to you, well, it could change the way you perceive certain fings.”

“I tell you what,” Jock began. “Following that introduction, there’s no way I’m passing this up.”

“No worries, squire,” said Ted, sighing. “Well, it all started innocently enough, just like you when you wandered in ’ere. I was coming back from the pub and it was raining. Really raining, like big fat drops that you could hear individually. It was warm, though, and the sky was full of lightning. But I didn’t care none, I was ten sheets to the wind.”

When viewed from the outside, Ted Johnson’s uninspiring penchant for living bottle to bottle was a meaningless and wasteful existence, but he alone harboured the unenviable secret of a potentially catastrophic fate for all the inhabitants of Planet Earth. Drawn together by a mutual fondness for alcoholic oblivion, Ted and Jock Ross ponder the future of mankind from the relative comfort of an everlasting tipple.

The Midnight Mannequins and Other Stories

The Menagerie

This book is a collection of eight separate stand-alone short stories. These stories will take you on a journey of suspense, adventure, mystery and horror.

There is something for everyone, whether you like gritty detective stories, mythological adventures or enticing horror, all that and more in this Menagerie.

The Lost Man and Other Tales

When our two children were small, we lived on a small farm near Exeter. The farmyard was immediately outside the house which meant I could spend a little time with our two sons at their teatime and go indoors again when they were bathed and put to bed. My wife would read to them, and then I would. As they got older, I would tell them stories too, often involving input from them too. Hence, the idea of creating stories as well as just reading other people’s writing.

A few years later, I felt the need for the extra income, so I did a one-year teacher training course at St. Luke’s College and took a part-time job at our local secondary school, teaching slow readers. A colleague there, a teacher of English, heard of my occasional scribblings and asked for some short stories for her to use in class. This worked surprisingly well.

For a number of reasons, we sold the farm in 1978 and moved to a house with a three-acre paddock near Kingsbridge. I became a full-time teacher with multiple handicapped teenagers. Not much time for writing. Also, in later years, when we were gardening beside the River Dart a few miles downriver from Totnes, there was no time for writing.

However, when we sold our smallholding and retired to Totnes in 2000, I took up writing again and got down to it more seriously. This book is the result of my scribbles over the last 20 years.

The Gray Mind

The present book, called The Gray Mind (a collection of short stories), is taken from the daily conditions of every human being that he sometimes encounters during his life and is considered a great challenge for him. But why humans find themselves in such a critical situation is a reflection of the behavioural complexities that lead them to a world far removed from individual imagination and to a world that is more like a hell that endangers their peace of mind.

In this book, the author has made every effort to portray these conditions and to show that human beings are victims of conditions left to us by the superstitions and wrong frameworks of our predecessors. The author’s attempt is simply to use the smallest spaces and the least characters to achieve the greatest concepts, which in today’s terminology manifests itself as minimalism.

The Doctor and Other Stories

A book of six short stories that move from a London doctor in the 1850s to a soldier in Sussex in the early 20^th century, and from a person who brings a dog into his life to a citizen’s view of how his beloved city has changed.

These stories will not just take you to places and eras you’ve never been to before, but will also force you to look deeper within yourself.

The Chess Board Execution and Other Stories

The stories in this book touch upon the author’s own life and his sense of humour and wide-ranging interests.

‘By the Waters of Stepney Green’ is half historical recollection, half romantic dream.

‘Gilda’, a story set in Burma in World War II, will keep you reading well into the night.

‘Gareth’ is the story of a young man from orphanage to officer and tells how deep friendship can emerge from enmity, while ‘Chess Board Execution’ is a story of love, deception and revenge.

These stories will appeal to all readers who enjoy a mixture of genres and moods.

The Camera Obscure

Supernatural secrets; psychopathy; disturbing dystopias; vanity and Victorian graveyards. Each story, evoking an atmosphere of gothic classics, will take you on a journey through past, present and possibilities, where the familiar becomes strange. The new tenant above a bookshop uncovers a terrifying truth; a man looks out of his window to discover he is completely alone; a young man’s vanity ends up ensnaring him. You will anxiously anticipate characters’ fates, whilst reflecting on your own lives and experiences. It may lead you to speculate that there are many ways to be haunted, and that the most frightening spectres walk within us and among us. 

Tales from Here and There

From country bars, back seats of cars
and colonies on Mars,
there’s tales to be told.

Three dozen such tales spanning irony,
pathos and humour from here and there
are presented in no particular order.

So, start anywhere
for your first ten minutes of distraction
from the cares of life.

Symmetry

Drawing on her thirty years’ experience as a social worker in England and three Australian states, Margaret Hughes’ stories explore the dark world at the heart of modern Western society. In this hidden world, children and the elderly suffer misfortune, violence and tragedy. The perpetrators of abuse and exploitation range from poor, illiterate parents to the privileged elite. The response from the authorities is, at times, protective and benign while at other times incompetent and even destructive.

But above all else, it is the survivors who shine through. Their remarkable resilience and their uniquely creative solutions break through the adversity they have suffered.

There is symmetry between the dilemmas they face and the answers they find.