Morgan Delaney

Dark, strange and fantastic fiction

Flash fiction

Hugs and Stuff

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A ruined car parked in front of a setting moon.
Image generated by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 AI system. Prompt by Morgan Delaney

Welcome!

This week’s story is a blood-drenched psychological horror about a guy who probably needed a hug, while my recommendations roundup will tell tell you when a hug is not appropriate.

Flash Fiction: Willem Dafoe’s Face

Greg puked on the grass verge near the disco. In the moonlight, the mess of hot dogs and fries looked like an autopsy photo of guts. The blood splashed over the back seats was black oily paint.
He didn’t understand how could want them so much when they were alive, yet be so disgusted when they were dead. He could stop at the bridge to get rid of the body if he drove the long way home.
When he arrived, it wasn’t in the trunk.
He even got on his knees to look under the car, in case it had fallen out and rolled there. He had definitely killed the man in the back seat. He had definitely pulled the body out and dumped it in the trunk. The ticklish sensation of enjoying the still-warm skin, while repulsion built in his throat at the blood like greasy sweat, was fresh.
He thought he remembered the thump of the trunk lid slamming shutbefore he puked and drove off. He was always so careful. Could he have left a dead body beside a pile of puke with his DNA in it?
The car wouldn’t start. He got out again to push, but it moved an inch before rolling back to its original position. It didn’t matter about the puke, if they caught him on the bridge in a blood-drenched car.
He was trapped unless someone helped him. He dropped to his knees beside the car and prayed to God. He swore he’d never do it again, if the car would start. It was a lie, and Greg knew it. His God, who had Willem Dafoe’s face, but meth teeth and calluses on his knuckles, knew it too.
Greg stood. The body was in the driver’s seat. He met Greg’s stare of disbelief with disgust.
Greg thought about jumping into the river himself. It was where all the bodies went. There was a beauty in that pattern. But he couldn’t stand the thought of the cold water in his lungs, or the rocks on the riverbed smashing his teeth.
If he walked home, maybe he could slit his wrists in the bath before the police arrived. Caught but not caught. There was a beauty in that idea, too.
Instead, he got in on the passenger’s side. Just to see what would happen.
For the longest time, nothing did. Then the rears doors opened, and the car filled itself with the stench of sweet decay and musty clothes.
The car coughed into life, like spitting out water, and they drove off the way they’d come.

In Case You Missed It This Week:

Watch!
A comedy-horror show with puppets? Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared is as good as it sounds!
Check out the new series on Channel 4! Compare them with the original YouTube videos!! Don’t Be Scared!!! Have Fun!!?

Watch!
After being postponed due to the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Stewart Lee’s Tornado is now available on BBC’s iPlayer for UK viewers! Get blown away here!

Watch!
Jarleth Regan is a new stand-up comedian for me. Maybe you’ve already heard of him, but here’s a full hour of comedy first posted online in June 2022.

Enjoy!

(Excerpted from my newsletter dated 1st October, 2022. Sign up for the full, up-to-date experience!)

Working Condition (from September 17th 2022)

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Image generated by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 AI system. Prompt by Morgan Delaney

I’m alone this week, so it was nice to meet this friendly little chap while out exploring.

As long as there aren’t more of them, I’m not worried.

I’m almost ready to put The Squared Circle away to let it “breathe” for a month. During that time, I’ll be tackling some short stories that have been waiting to be written/finished. The book cover is also due any day now!

This week’s Main Feature is all about someone who, like me on my walk, may have taken a wrong turn somewhere, while my round up of recommendations includes NOT killling Hitler to cheer you up (#ImaginationNotMedication), and a podcast investigating reports of the supernatural world crashing into ours.

Enjoy!

(And drive safely)

Working Condition
He kept his anxiety medication a secret, which was stressful.

He couldn’t bear the gossip, if people knew: “I bet he only got the job, because he has ‘anxiety.’”

Alan knew what people were like. It was why he was taking tablets.

He worked hard to become branch manager of the bank, because the tablets were expensive, not because he liked the job. What he would have liked to do was sleep.

Just sleep all day.

Obviously, this meant he must be lazy, so he pushed himself hard to compensate for his laziness. The tablets he secretly took helped with the stress of working so hard.

Even his wife called him a workaholic because on weekends he couldn’t lie around in bed with her. He wasn’t, though: he hated work. But he was terrified that if he didn’t force himself to get up now, then he might never get up.

First thing he always did was take a secret tablet while peeing and trying not to think about a photo of the world’s fattest man he’d seen.

Whenever he thought of it, the man had Alan’s face. He looked happy, though, rather than trapped by his own body.

When news of the layoffs came, Alan tried to look as worried as everyone else, but he hoped they might get rid of him, too. He could relax if he had some time off.

Then he realised he wouldn’t have any deadlines or bosses, and would be relying on himself to muster up the energy to arrange job interviews.

He took a sneaky tablet at lunch and worked harder.

He got promoted to the main office and felt bad that he must have taken someone else’s job.

One day, he decided he wouldn’t keep his anxiety a secret anymore. He was high enough up the food chain now, and he could help others. Show them it was nothing to be ashamed of.

Being a role model made him feel good about himself.

But that made him feel bad about feeling good about other people feeling bad.

So he took another tablet.

Oh, and…
Read!

Here are 7 very short sci-fi stories. All free to read online. My favourite is “Wikihistory”. Check them out here!

Listen!

Uncanny is an invetigation of real-life reports of supernatural events from the BBC. I really enjoyed this. I recommend starting with episodes 1, 5 and 15, all of which deal with “The Evil in Room 611”. Listen here!

Look!

I just came across these awesome photoshop collages by Chemical Messiah. I like!

See you next week!

Robots Can’t Replace Us Quickly Enough (from September 10th 2022)

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Image generated by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 AI system. Prompt by Morgan Delaney

Puri is Georgian for “bread”, and this is our closest puri shop.

You can’t go in, you shout, “Gamarjoba, erti (or ori) puri” through the window. That means “Hello, one (or two) bread.” Easy.

I’m also sporting a brand new haircut from our local beauty place. courtesy of a Belarussian lady called Ana.

It’s not what I asked for.

It doesn’t look like the photo I showed her.

So this week I’ll be learning how to say, “A haircut like the one in this picture, please.”

I’m working my way through the third and final big round of edits for The Squared Circle, after which I’ll give it a polish, leave it for a month and then send it off to the first editor. Then more edits and editors.

Then I’ll be sending it off to advance readers… hint, hint.

This week’s story is not fantastic, but definitely dark, even nasty, so be warned.

My list of recommendations rounds off this week’s email, but I’d love to hear from you. What was the best thing you watched, listened to or read recently?

Hit reply and let me know!

Robots Can’t Replace Us Quickly Enough

We needed someone for the marketing, because neither of us wanted to do it.

We held interviews and picked Lisa. She looked like she’d do what she was told: small, hunched shoulders, and a bruised eye that her makeup didn’t quite cover. Pretty, but in an annoying way.

Not as pretty as some others, so we expected her to work extra hard to make up for that.

It was a small team: I was the programmer, and Jamie brought the contacts and worked the spreadsheets. And Lisa, if she turned out to be useful. We told her she’d never work again if she wasn’t. Just to motivate her, but she hid her face behind her long hair.

We made apps. Like computer programs, but cooler?

Our latest one used AI to calculate when your shoes would wear out. Nike loved it, because their premium customers don’t want to be seen wearing busted footwear, so they added the app as a perk for their members.

And it sucked up all sorts of personal data, which we could sell to other people.

Lisa was there when we signed the deal, but I had already talked to Nike, so it didn’t count. She was on very thin ice, if she wanted to keep her job.

The next app sold better. It put injected real-time targeted ads into emails, so if you read an email near a Starbucks, it’d say, “Hey, how about a dark roast grande Americano with cinnamon sprinkles right now?” Lisa talked to Starbucks, but one win didn’t mean she could be part of the team.

She needed to do something about that long hair and her air of being a doormat. Nobody likes a goddamn doormat.

She cried when I called her a doormat, which made me feel bad, which made me angry. Things got awkward.

Tears trigger me, you know?

I told her she had one more chance, then she was out.

She came up with a winner.

An app to help victims of violence. It was genius, if I say so myself. There was a support forum, emergency call numbers, and location tracking, so people didn’t have to worry about taking taxis, or whatever. Basically, the users and emergency services did all the work, but we made it An Experience.

And everyone was talking about toxic masculinity, so this was marketing gold. We were the good guys, and the money poured in to develop it.

And with all that data pouring in, we knew exactly where to find all those victims.

That data would be worth a fortune to the right people.

Oh, and…
Watch!

If you enjoyed (my spiritual comedy animal) Stewart Lee’s Snowflake last Sunday, make sure you catch his Tornado this Sunday at 22:25 on BBC iPlayer!

Read!

If you still haven’t jumped on the Witches of Woodville bandwagon, and you live in the UK, then now is the time. Get the first book in the series, The Crow Folk, for 99p. Hurry, Google has already switched back to full price, but Apple, Kobo and Amazon, still have it on offer. Get it here!

Look!

While checking what my favourite weirdo-metallers, Old Man Gloom, are up to. I discovered that “duck face” is still a thing. This is what it looks like when #MetalDoesDuckFace.

Research!

Annabella “Bell” Plumptre was a British writer and translator born in 1769.

That’s right. Although her family name was “Plumptre”, “Bell” obviously seemed to think it was her first name that people were having trouble with.

Chat soon!

Canary (from September 3rd 2022)

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Image generated by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 AI system. Prompt by Morgan Delaney

Thanks to everyone who bought People Skins, Volume 2 last week! We made it to #62 of the British and Irish Horror charts! 
If you’re still thinking about it, you’ve only got a few hours before it goes back to $4.99.
Get it here: https://books2read.com/PeopleSkinsVolume2
Then come back for this month’s short story about someone who keeps making the wrong decision, and my selection of this weeks best links!

Canary

“There’s nowhere to go but–” Overuse has rubbed out the rest of the white postcard’s message.

Two identical, unvarnished wooden doors stand in front of you. One of them will continue to take you down, as impossible as that seems. The other one, presumably, will lead you to the exit.

Billed as the ultimate escape room on the UrbxnAbxndon website, this is the worst game you’ve ever played. Possibly also the last one.

Your body cam is still recording, but you can’t imagine the feed is getting through. Even if it is, it won’t be much of a video.

Metal steps wind their way around the concrete wall, with a drop into the bottomless dark in the middle of the stairwell. Everything is pitch black, with your torch, on its last set of batteries, providing too little light.

Only these landings with the doors and a card break the monotony. But whichever door you choose, you go down further.

You can already see the comments below your video saying it’s all a trick, that you’re using the dark and bad quality footage to disguise the editing. There’s no way stairs could keep going down that far.

And yet here you are.

You’ve been here a week, always heading down. Your supplies are exhausted, as are you.

Only the doors break the monotony, yet you dread them, knowing that every time you choose, it opens into more dry blackness, leading you further down.

You hope it is an illusion, and that these steps will somehow lead you back to the top. You don’t have the energy to return the way you came.

The nausea of circling around and around and around for days made you vomit dozens of times, but you’ve acclimatised now. Still, the disorientation would make it easy to fool you into believing you’re going down.

Perhaps that’s what the card means. “There’s nowhere to go but up!”

A hint that you’re on the right track. You rub the card gratefully with your thumb.

It’ll be over soon. Air, water, light. No more migraine from exhaustion and crushing vertigo. Even standing before the doors, your body is spinning around and around.

The last card said, “Hang in there!” That was a day—thirty flights of stairs—ago.

You had thought they were making fun of you, and imagined finishing the game by tying your belt to the railing protecting you from the hole in the middle of the stairwell and jumping.

But it must have been for motivation.

You choose the right-hand door, because there are five words on the card, and five letters in the word “right”.

When you pull the handle, the lock on the other door snicks closed forever.

There’s nothing behind the right-hand door except more feathery darkness.

Metal steps lead down.

With nowhere else to go, but suddenly feeling hopeful, you continue on into the darkness.

Oh, and…
Read!

Awesome monthly short fiction magazine The Deadlands is now free each month. All you have to do is sign up to their newsletter for FREE fiction. Sign up here!

Read!

I like Kingsley Amis’ books. BookBub is currently offering the ebook of The Green Man for 1.99.

It’s one of those old (it’s from 1969), posh English books about drinking too much and failing to have sex, BUT this one is set in a haunted pub. Definitely one of Kingsley’s more interesting books.

I have no control over when BookBub will end this offer, so grab it here quickly if you’re interested.

Watch!

Here’s an entire hour of Alfie Brown doing stand-up comedy. This is my new comedy find. Funny, but dark enough for fans of this newsletter. Watch him here!

Watch!

And once you’ve seen Alfie, you’ll need to see the man I intend to keep calling my spiritual comedy animal until he asks me to stop, Stewart Lee.

His Snowflake show is on BBC iPlayer on Sunday at 22:35! I’m guessing you need to be in the UK to watch this without a VPN.

Listen!

In case you missed it, this is what a black hole sounds like. I have this on repeat while writing!

Listen!

Max Booth III has released his book Maggots Screaming as a five part audiobook on his podcast. You can listen to that here!

See you next week!

Larger Than Life

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Image generated by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 AI system. Prompt by Morgan Delaney

Originally appeared in my newsletter from August 20th. Some bits might not make sense out of context!

They’re Here For You!

Ebook of People Skins, Volume 2
They watch you, they talk to you, they’ll be your friend.
But they’re not like you.

My latest book is another collection of short stories, People Skins, Volume 2, and it looks gorgeous!

The cover is another winner from the people at MiblArt, and it contains 15 of my best new stories.

Here’s some of what you can expect in the weird, unsettling and dangerous worlds of People Skins, Volume 2:

  • a woman overcomes her fear of flying, then disappears;
  • dreamers rip open a rift between worlds;
  • a Greek donkey with a Hitler moustache stalks a lost tourist;
  • the thing under the bed won’t return to the Night Sea alone;
  • a funeral traps a man in the town he needed to escape;

and more!

Out now! Get it here!

This is going on sale very soon, so keep an eye out for more emails from me this week, containing more information and a very special offer for subscribers.

In the meantime, enjoy this week’s flash fiction and my curated roundup of the week’s best links at the bottom of this email!

Flash Fiction: Larger Than Life
My father’s corpse is naked on the rock. Birds fill the cave, preparing to eat, and they scream at me to get out, circling over his flaccid, wrinkled body.

They don’t need to worry. I’m just here to pay my last respects, having arrived too late in the small town to see him at the repose in the funeral parlour.

I wonder what to say, and whether I need to say it out loud, or if it’s enough to think it. That he really has no right to some other culture’s funeral rites.

But the birds don’t seem to care.

I step closer, thinking it might make him look more like I remember, and he leaps off the long rock and digs his fingers into my collarbones.

His hands are cold and damp, and the skin feels like wax, and the birds are making such a racket now that I can’t hear the words he’s whispering in my ear. I smell the sweet rot of his insides through his open lips, and I stagger around, trying to shake him off. The birds dart from one perch to another, settling only long enough to scream at me. Their grey wings are dull shooting stars in the cave’s gloaming.

The extra weight of my father pins me to the ground when I fall. His legs straddle me, and his fingers work their way up my neck and squeeze until I force myself into a sitting position, careful not to tip backwards. From there, I use the guano-spattered rocks to push myself to my feet.

I stagger towards the cave mouth, slipping on blood from when I fell. Thumps and taps goad me on, but it’s not my father. The vultures are launching themselves at us, ripping bits of my father off in their beaks before he escapes them.

I hurry before they can burrow their way through his body and into mine.

It’s bright outside and sunlight pours into the holes of my father’s wounds, weighing us both down.

He keeps whispering in my ear and I keep falling as I run, stagger and crawl away from the cave of birds. My dead father piggybacks a ride on my back.

“I’m flying!” says my father, over and over again. “You’re so small from up here. I’m flying!”

When I finally manage to pluck his fingers out of my neck, I wrap his arms around it instead, crossing his arms so that his fingers bore into his own forearms.

As we reach town, I straighten up, and the sunlight splashes out of his wounds. He’s lighter again, and I carry him with me.

Oh, and…
Read!

This short story by Julianna Baggott over at Nightmare Magazine is my favourite of the recent free to read fiction I’ve come across. Check out Inkmorphia here!

Fear!

Is anything more consistency terrifying than ill-conceived children’s toys? As children, we had a knitted “Miss Piggy”, who was clearly waiting for us to have an incapacitating accident so she could eat us from the toes up.

But even her horror pales in comparison to this “cheeky chappie”.

…erm?

If this isn’t a Waldorf school-trained pumpkin dancing its name, then I don’t know what it is.

But I swear I’m going to learn how to do this, too.

Hang on! Wasn’t there already a People Skins, Volume 2?

Well spotted! You should have received a subscriber-exclusive collection of 5 short stories when you signed up for this email.

If you signed up for my newsletter a while ago, that was the original Volume 2.

For ease of marketing, that’s now People Skins, Volume 0: Hidden Cuts.

It’s the same five stories, but if you want a copy with the updated – and much cooler – title, you can sign up to become a subscriber right here!

Chat soon!
Morgan

The Breath Before

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Image generated by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 AI system. Prompt by Morgan Delaney

Originally appeared in my newsletter from August 13th. Some bits might not make sense out of context!

Gamarjoba is hello in Georgian!

We’ve been busy with the move, but arrived last Thursday night. Pudding (cat) flew with us in the cabin and didn’t like it.

Manchee (dog) flew in the hold. He has revealed nothing, but my suspicion is that he liked it even less.

Tbilisi is very different from Nur-sultan. There are people and dogs everywhere! It’s exactly the shock therapy Manchee needs.

On the barren steppes of Kazakhstan’s capital city, it was possible to go for ages without meeting another person, which made it a big deal for him when one did turn up.

In writing news I’ve made it as far as “Chapter 27: The Mysterious Wonder Drug” in The Squared Circle, and I received my author proof copies of People Skins, Volume 2, so keep an eye out for a cover reveal and more details very soon! Out now!

I’m not the only believer in changing things up. P. G. Wodehouse did too, as you’ll discover in my selection of recommendations at the bottom of this email.

In the meantime, sit back and enjoy the main feature, which argues that it’s not a change but a fixed routine that you need.

Allow me to present

Flash Fiction: The Breath Before
You get better every day. According to the mantra from your free online therapy videos.

At least the daily repetition of it makes you less self-conscious when you tell it to reflection in the mirror.

The mirror is in your parent’s bathroom, and the body it reflects is as weedy as twenty years ago when you were sixteen, the last one in class to hit puberty.

But you get better every day. You’re now supervisor of the cleaning crew.

Of course, you can’t take days off, because the supervisor has to plug any holes in the team if someone else calls in sick, but you’re finally moving up that ladder.

In the mirror you see a black mark under the skin where your heart is. It looks like a bruise, but you don’t know from what.

It doesn’t hurt either.

In fact, you don’t feel anything at all.

It’s a hot day. Your crew sweat through their t-shirts and wipe their gloved hands on their trousers before wiping their foreheads dry with a squeak of rubber.

You don’t notice the heat, and you check everyone is adding cleaning liquid to their water, because you can’t smell it. Maybe you are sick.

You’ll be better in the morning. It’s your mantra: you get better every day.

You need to keep telling yourself that.

It’s just a bruise where your heart was. Is, you correct yourself.

You go to work.

You come home again.

In the morning, you tell yourself you’re getting better.

Every day.

The bruise doesn’t hurt.

Not when your parents die. Not when you realise that supervisor—hole plugger without extra pay—is the top of the corporate ladder for you.

Inside, you’re getting better.

You’re getting used to it.

Oh, and…
Research!

I’m reading P. G. Wodehouse’s letters, which are collected in Performing Flea.

Obviously, what I really want is more Blandings Castle and Jeeves and Wooster stories, but this is definitely the next best thing!

He wrote his letters in exactly the same style as his books and some of the stories are hilarious.

I also found out that he fancied trying out some different material, including a rather more lurid version of his early “schoolboy” stories under the name of Basil Windham.

This is from 1908 and won’t be for everyone. As a taster, try this bit of early dialogue:

“Is he dead, Master Jimmy?”

“I don’t know. He looks jolly beastly.”

🙂 If you enjoyed that, then you can read the rest of “The Luck Stone” right here!

The included letters to the editor are also worth their digital weight in gold for the inclusion of the phrase “playing the old gooseberry”.

Playing/being a gooseberry is acting as a chaperone/being a third wheel when two gentlefolk wish to spend time together.

Playing the old gooseberry, however, means making mischief or causing havoc because “the old gooseberry” was an archaic term for the devil.

Now you know, and my New Year’s Resolution is to work that expression into a story!

Listen!

The Joseph Boys have released their second album, Reflektor, and it confirms they are Germany’s pre-eminent proponents of Deutschpunk.

I’d normally link to Bandcamp, but it’s €13 there, which is a bit steep, so I’m linking to 7Digital instead, where you can get it for €10,49, if you’re happy to accept 320kbps MP3 files.

Steve Albini wouldn’t approve, but it’s good enough for me!

The album has disappeared from 7Digital, so I’m linking to Bandcamp after all.

Listen!

The Flatliners released their latest album, New Ruin, on the very same day. They’ve tried out various styles of punk over the course of their career (although never Deutschpunk).

New Ruin combines the best of all of them.

Get it from Bandcamp here!

Listen!

If that’s all too angry, then check out this newly released video of Richard Cheese’s cover version of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time”.

Watch!

Aunty Donna are back! Maybe it was the stress of that Netflix special, but it looks like their relationship has never been under more pressure. Intense!

Chapter 28 of The Squared Circle was to have been called “Unfortunately Badger”, but I had to make changes and lose the badger (unfortunately).

Without knowing more about the story, can you think of any other good adverb-animal combinations?

If you made it this far, you might like to know that the title of this week’s flash fiction comes from the song of the same name by Galactic Cannibal. Wonderfully shouty!