Episode 45 The Men in the Snow by Alex Boast

Alex BoastAlex Boast is a young British writer, born in Ipswich, raised in Surrey and living in London. He has an MA in Creative Writing and is constantly improving his skills by writing on https://medium.com/@boastalex (Medium) and https://www.quora.com/profile/Alexander-M-Boast (Quora) as well as doing Master Class courses and attending writing courses by the British writing school The https://www.arvon.org/ (Arvon Foundation).He has a love of ghost stories and references H P Lovecraft and Stephen King as influences as well as J R R Tolkein.Alex had been working in health marketing which necessitated frequent global travel and due to the Coronavirus epidemic, he was laid off. Fortunately that made him focus more on his writing, so every cloud has a silver lining. He has just been commissioned to write a horror movie script based on the Irish legends of the Banshee. This is only the second interview Classic Ghost Stories Podcast has done with a living author, but we figure there are more of you out there, so if you write ghost stories and want to have them appear in Classic Ghost Stories Podcast then get in touch.If you want to read Alex's story, you can get it from Amazon https://amzn.to/2xKaWMO (here)The Men in the SnowInevitablly when you read a new story, you try to catalogue it with others you have read. On the podcast now we have read a wide range of stories written by authors born in the 18th, 19th, 20th, and soon the 21st centuries. Styles change of courseWhen I read the Men in the Snow, I was struck by the weirdness of it. We don't know if the perceptions of the young girl narrator can be relied on. Some of them seem distinctly odd; her father sitting reading the paper in the kitchen who never moves and never speaks. Her mother who yells at her to stop shaking and later disappears. The newts in the pond, her only friends. So it starts off as purporting to be a naturalistic, realistic story, but then gets shunted off into the odd.This is something I find with https://amzn.to/3dRE05z (Robert Aickman) too. His settings are ordinary, mundane almost, and seem to be naturalistic, but he injects the unnervingly odd into them.The other story that popped into my mind was https://amzn.to/3dTK6Cx (The House of Leaves) by Mark Z. Danielewski. This was because the house in The Men in the Snow changes size. If you don't know the House of Leaves you should read it. In fact, our narrator is growing larger, the house isn't shrinking!And as for the advancing angry eyes...So, it was great to have a modern story and greater still to interview Alex. I hoped you liked it as much as I did.And finally,By the time this episode of the Podcast goes out, we should finally be seeing some light at the end of the tunnel of the Coronavirus epidemic. I hope you and yours (and me and mine) all come through it safely. Take careTonySupport Us!Ways to support Tony to keep doing the show:https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/classic-ghost-stories-923395 (Share and rate it!)http://bit.ly/2QKgHkY (Buy Tony a coffee) to help with the long nights editing!Become a  http://bit.ly/barcudpatreon (Patreon) to get additional stuff and allow the show to go on in the long term. Facebook GroupWhy not join Classic Ghost Stories Podcast on https://www.facebook.com/classicghoststories/ (Facebook) for the lastest news?MusicBeginning music ‘Some Come Back’ is by the marvellous  https://theheartwoodinstitute.bandcamp.com/album/witch-phase-four (Heartwood Institute) . The end music is by MYUU Bad EncounterDarkworldsI’ve just launched a new podcast of my book Darkworlds, a horror sci-fi story set in a virtual reality 1927 London.https://darkSupport the show

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