Notes

Physicists now say there is no such thing as time: everything co-exists. Chronology is entirely artificial and essentially determined by emotion. Contiguity suggests layers of things,
the past and present somehow coalescing or co-existing.

The use of twins or triplets who are virtually indistinguishable from each other can lend a spooky, uncanny edge.

It’s always gratifying to learn something when one reads fiction. Dickens introduced it.. The essay invaded the novel. But we should not perhaps trust ‘facts’ in fiction. It is, after all, an illusion.

It’s good to have undeclared, unrecognized pathologies and mental illnesses in your stories. The countryside is full of undeclared pathologies.
Unlike in the urban setting, there, mental affliction goes unrecognized.

You must get the servants to work for you. You mustn’t do all the work yourself. That is, you should ask other people for information, and steal ruthlessly from what they provide.

None of the things you make up will be as hair-raising as the things people tell you.

I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years
you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt.

How do you surpass horror once you’ve reached a certain level? How do you stop appearing gratuitous? ………………………………………………………………………...

I went into my local video shop. ………………. It’s filled with video nasties. A generation which has never known war is being raised on horror.

Don’t listen to anyone. Not us, either. It’s fatal.

Notes
East Anglia