Liner Notes for The Strandbridge Seven

Liner Notes for my story The Standbridge Seven

The last Strandbridge Tale for now and it’s back to the pub. Or rather it’s a pub crawl, and also a magic ritual. Pub stories have come up before, especially Filthy Night and The Good Boy, as well as The Red Cap Of Old Hobb Mill (in Kaleidotrope). In a small town, the pubs make up most of the night life. And as we know magic comes out at night, so these are a proper match.

Though the bit that makes Strandbridge so odd, is that the fantastical elements come out in the daytime too. Which makes this a most unfitting story to finish. It’s at night, a time that makes everything more mysterious. Our characters are drinking, making things blur and soften, the edges of reality. Does anything actually magical happen? Or is it just the strangeness that occurs when you wander around a town, a few drinks in you, after dark? And meanwhile following weird rituals.

Anyway this is Strandbridge, of course the magic’s real. And if they don’t do the rite the sun will come up again, for sure, though it might not have it’s power. What power? The power to give life, and also to burn, to warm and to overheat, to illuminate and blind. All that stuff. Not just literally, though maybe that too! Quite a responsibility for a small town. What if they fail? What if it wasn’t done, perhaps in 2020, when covid raged and a pub crawl was foolish?

I went back and forth on when these were set. The two with Faith and Delia, this one and Down From London are clearly in 2021, when they were written. They’ve got an emphasis on covid that I maybe should have toned down. Or maybe not, as writing this in October 2022, we’re heading into our fourth covid wave of the year.

Other stories, The Flaying Fox, Standbridge House Accommodation, Seven Generations and especially Candlewife are less time-fixed. Or not; I’ve declared when Flaying Fox happens in this story, and because of internal evidence Accommodation and Generations are in the last five years or so.

Anyway back to this actual story. The ritual looks quite sloppy and haphazard. And it is! It’s mostly going to a particular pub and having a more-or-less thematically appropriate drink.

And this, of course is magic indeed, a ritual meal, of intoxicating, mind-altering liquors.

Anyway this is all backdrop for a platonic friendship, two women deciding to be best friends. And move in together. I didn’t know that was where I was going with it when I started to write this story, but really I should. Faith is leftover as a character from my Lacey Lee, lockdown-written, detective stories. But her name is Faith Renard, she’s obviously a Strandbridge character! So from peripheral detective-story person, she’s moved to being outsider-protagonist in urban/folk fantasy.

A promotion of sorts, from reluctantly being on the fringes of crime stories to having weird occult nonsense happening to her.

The pubs aren’t real. I mean they are, every room  is one I’ve been in, every barkeep, every drink, every stranger watching, or ignoring, or just being loud. But you can’t find The Black Dog, a grim dive divided in two by a bar, with a garden and cast iron furniture out the back, and an alley leading away that way. The interior doesn’t match the exterior, and the quality doesn’t match the layout, and none of them exactly match the real example I’m basing it on.

This is all of Strandbridge. A lot of it is real places – real events – put re-mixed, re-matched and then re-imagined as being creepy or spooky or just magic.

I started this piecemeal, writing some stories where magic or strangeness intrudes into normal life. And at the end of it that’s all I’ve got. But maybe a bit more intense. I started looking for oddness as I go about, buildings that don’t fit, plots of land no one goes on, stories that are strange, roads that go nowhere. There’s a road near where I live called No Name Street and there’s an amusing story behind how it got its (no) name. But maybe it’s better if I don’t tell it here, just leave it as a mystery.

That’s Strandbridge I guess. So we leave it with a ritual, a magic spell. I don’t do magic, so this story is not a work, it’s just a story with no more power than the words on the page.

Unless you make it otherwise.