Trusted by 500+ fans to find the fun in the funereal, the absurd in the macabre, and delight in the darkness. Join fiction author Morgan Delaney three times a week for genre-bending stories of cozy horror, dark fantasy and a brain with mind of its own...
Feeling Exhausted? Try This!
 My uncle was the joker in the family, and he had 2 favourite jokes. One was about a dog in the Wild West searching for the man who shot his paw. The other was to pretend outrage whenever he saw an ad for “DC Exhausts.” There were a surprising number of these ads in Dublin, usually on the backs of buses. My uncle’s initials were DC, so he enjoyed pretending it was a public service announcement warning that he, DC – my uncle – made people tired. Rather than it being an ad for car parts. He lived in the US for a few years, and I’m convinced he returned to Ireland because he missed his joke. In the States, the ad would be for “DC Tailpipes”, which isn’t the same. I never understood Dublin’s fascination with exhausts. I’ve moved around a lot, and have never seen another city advertise them so intensely. And out of respect for my uncle’s joke, I’ve never looked into it either. The truth couldn’t live up to my uncle’s mock indignation which served as the punchline for that beloved, ridiculous joke. Even now, the back of a bus reminds me of DC Exhausts and my uncle. We’re like that, aren’t we? We connect a place, or phrase – or automobile part – with someone, and it always reminds us of them. That’s certainly the case in my new video. In this week’s flash fiction video, it’s a particular smell. Come find out why a pleasant hint of bleach hangs over everything in “Little Ducklings” on YouTube now! (FYI, this one’s a bit darker.) Chat soon, |
Dark, Strange and Fantastic Fiction
Trusted by 500+ fans to find the fun in the funereal, the absurd in the macabre, and delight in the darkness. Join fiction author Morgan Delaney three times a week for genre-bending stories of cozy horror, dark fantasy and a brain with mind of its own...
it’s been all bloody go here at the HQ of the Official Hawkinge-By-Hythe Historical Society. First, I had those man sniffles, then a sudden change in weather gave me a migraine. And then I got lumbago. Look, I hate making a fuss, but I’m putting my foot down – carefully, because of the lumbago – whoever has the Morgan voodoo doll, could you stop now, please? The internet tells me “lumbago” is an “outdated term for lower back pain”, and I agree. We should all be using the more evocative German...
Made you look, you dirty duck. Made you look for nothing. That’s the version we sang as children after tricking someone into looking at nothing. Or “gnaw-tin” with the proper Irish accent. Different places around the world have different versions of the song. Perhaps you were a dirty crook rather than a duck. Or at risk of being turned into turtle soup. But the game is best played in Germany, where they don’t seem to know it. When we moved to Heidelberg, our flatmate Anne loved to suddenly...
Listen. Do you hear that? Numbers, floating in the air around us. Trying to tell me something. Listen. It can’t be a coincidence because in my next book, The Cat Wore Black, radios come to Hawkinge-By-Hythe. People love them. Radio gives them all sorts of things. Music, news, entertainment. And when the station stops broadcasting at night, the radios transmit strange random numbers. Which gives them the willies. Then I read in Wired that plastic surgeons use the formula of the Fibonacci...