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The Mechanic's Curse

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  • You can buy or order this book in print and eBook formats from Amazon by clicking on the book cover to the left, or by using the order button.

  • You can also buy or order this book from your favoutite bookseller by quoting the ISBN numbers listed here.

  • You can read a synopsis and a sample from this book in the following sections...

Hardback:

Paperback:

eBook:

978-1-913500-81-8

978-1-913500-03-0

978-1-913500-75-7

Story:

Coming Soon

Anime Sketch

synopsis

The Mechanic's Curse brings together Clive Gilson's collected short stories in a single volume. These stories have been previously published in anthologies and online magazines. Clive's love of magical realism from writers such as Angela Carter, and the glories of traditional folk and faery tales shines through.

These stories in particular mix the macabre and the fey and tradition with a loving touch.

These are intimate tales, focusing on broad but subtle themes and personal recollections. Clive Gilson's stories continue to link recurring themes of fantasy with urban and future decay – splintered glass, dust motes and cracked plaster; the loss of loved ones, of the ability to remember; black and white movies of the mind; shafts of golden light shattered by war; haunted memories and the night darks.

A Sample...

Glasshouse Tango

Broken glass underfoot. A heel twisting. A booted heel. Cuban. Grinding slowly, twisting, pressing down upon sharp but brittle fragments. He listens to the sounds of deliberate destruction. He hears his own breathing, soft and slow, beneath which he revels in the scratchy soundtrack of glass turning to powder. He looks up. Above his head he sees a splintered wooden roof truss, leached grey by sun and rain, made soft and spineless by ice and thaw and spore and worm. He smiles and walks slowly forward down the central of three aisles. The sound of denims, tight and boot-cut, brushing the skeletal remains of wooden glasshouse benches thrills him. He loves the solitude of the derelict. He adores the way that he and the sparrows and the rats and prowling cats can lay claim to a space once thriving with flora and green human thumbs, a place now effectively moribund. In the heart of the city, bounded by clogged arterial roads, constricted by the particulate cholesterol that forms diesel soaked platelets in veins, he can, despite a midriff heading south, still squeeze through relatively small gaps in chain link and board, losing himself in these abandoned places. There are always abandoned spaces if you know where and how to look for them. The city positively metastasises with them, an endless proliferation of corrupted cells wrinkling and decaying as neighbourhoods and districts fight through their endless cycles of dereliction and renewal. He has an Oyster card. He roams at will.

When he awoke earlier this Saturday morning he had felt instinctively that today would be a good day for trespassing. In spite of an intermittently wheezing cough, a remnant of thirty odd years on filter tips and cheroots, he felt generally and contentedly positive this morning. He decided that he would visit his new gem, his most recent shift along the twisting paths of West London’s suburban DNA. Choosing the Piccadilly Line for a short hop towards the west he had taken the tube from Acton Town to Boston Manor, and skipping lightly across the main road opposite the station he had dropped down through streets full of solid, nineteen-thirties, bay-fronted, semi-detached houses towards the Manor Park boundary walls. At the back of the park, down where the scrubs still lay undeveloped behind the crumbling concrete block-work of an abandoned windscreen wiper factory, there lay the remains of an urban nursery. He had long ago scoured the factory bones, and felt no inclination to visit those rusting, rain and piss pooled halls today. His fascination lately focussed on the skeletal remains of these old glasshouses. His obsession consumed the time and dust caked bones of a memory, of a summer and autumn colour that, despite the fading years, was still brighter in his mind than any current shades of existence...

If you want to read the full story (and many others), then buy this book now on Amazon...

© Copyright Clive Gilson 2011-2025
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