Andrew Chapman Uncategorized

Hallucinations and The Last House on Needless Street

Very interesting interview with Catriona Ward (author of The Last House on Needless Street – a book that will dominate 2021) on the Bestseller Experiment Podcast. The thing that interested me most was that she gets hypnagogic hallucinations… me too.


And now I’m going to publicly talk about something that few people know about me. Don’t be afraid. I’m still me.

They used to teriffy me until I read a book about hallucinations by Oliver Sacks and learned all about hypnagogic (hallucinating while falling asleep) and hypnapompic (while waking up) hallucinations. Now when they happen I just watch. I take in the amazing detail and marvel at the weirdness of the mind.

Sometimes, and most usually, it’s birds nesting in the curtains, or vines covering the ceiling and walls with bugs, indistinguishable from the real thing, crawling all over. Sometimes they are far more terrifying. Things watching you. Still things with still eyes.

A small blackened creature, it’s face lit by the moonlight, watching me from the edge of my office chair (back when my desk was next to my bed).

Once, there were studio lights on the ceiling.

Once, a bookshelf I didn’t own was shifting across the floor.

Once, a thing made of rubber bands crawled up my duvet towards me.

I would jump up, turn on the lights, and they would vanish.

I stopped turning on the light when I began to understand what they were. Now I watch them.

Anyway, now you all think I’m completely mad, I will tell you this; my horror writing is all the richer for it.

Hypnogogia has been connected to narcolepsy and schizophrenia but it has also been connected to alcohol. When I was at my worst with the visions, I was drinking heavily. Now I don’t and the exciting nightly terrors have almost gone completely.

I’ve only had to wake Rachel a few times in the last year to ask if she can see the grey man hanging onto the ceiling, watching us with its upside down head, or if she can see the metallic moths wiggling out of the vents.

Great episode. Good to know, as a writer, I’m not alone with my escaping imagination.



EP311: Catriona Ward — Nerve Shredder

Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street is out now –
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-House-Needless-Street-masterpiece/dp/1788166167/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=catriona+ward&qid=1617175082&sprefix=Catri&sr=8-1

Andrew Chapman An Authors Life

The Gremlin and a Public Declaration.

It’s Christmas Eve and I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a van on the way home from work. A black gremlin has just crawled out of the air vent and is now peering at me from behind the laptop screen. My plan was to write the next scene in a screenplay but this gremlin won’t stop staring. It’s off-putting. He licks his lips and blinks with one eye and then the other.

I look into its eyes and see words falling in a grey mist. I know what the gremlin is. It is nine different works in progress coalesced into a starving monster. It’s hungry. It needs feeding. It’s time to let it die.

The only way to actually kill it, contrary to logic, is to give it a full meal. Instead of writing a few hundred words here and there over a bunch of different stories I need to focus on one. So that’s it. That’s the plan. But which project do I chose?

I’ll start with the shortest one. Get that finished. Then I’ll only have eight to choose from. So here’s a public declaration; the story I’m going to focus on is a twisted little fairy tale for adults called Gnome. It’s a little known Brother’s Grimm story I’m having fun playing with. I’m giving myself a strict deadline. Midnight, Friday 31st January 2020.

Once that is done I will write The Projectionist and the Wall People. A pulp B-movie-esque horror novella. Another short timeline; three months. It will be done by midnight, Thursday 30th April 2020.

Already the gremlin is lightening up. He has gained a dopey smile and has just burped.

So, those are the two novellas I’m going to write. But there’s something else. I’m also writing a film script and I want to have the first draft finished by the end of May. I will be writing that alongside both of the novellas. It’s a different kind of storytelling and I think I have time in my week to do both without taking attention, or quality, away from one or the other.

That will free me up to start work on my next full length novel starting on Monday 1st June. By then I will hopefully have chosen which novel idea that will be. Too many ideas. I’m sure there will be plenty more new and shiny ideas that I’ll want to start working on by the time the 1st June comes around so I’ll put off thinking about that until then.

The gremlin has climbed down from my laptop and is now napping on my knee. I won’t have to kill him after all. He just needed to know there was a plan.

Okay, back to work. What shall I write? Oh yeah, Gnome. A couple of girls are about to be swallowed by the earth. Let’s hope it’s not too painful for them.