The Horsingdon Transmissions: Epilogue

The Horsingdon Transmissions is finally over - but rather let us say it is gone for now, not forgotten.

The germ of the Transmissions has been knocking around for a good few years, taking its initial inspiration from the fictional Severn Valley which formed the setting for Ramsey Campbell's early tales of Lovecraftian horror. My intention was to do something similar with my own enweirded corner of Greater London. Whilst much of so much of Horsingdon lies under the shadow of Lovecraft, the air was also heavy with folk horror when the Transmissions first began, so the many of the posts are infused with the mood and themes of the Folk Horror Revival facebook page, the sci-fi-inflected folk hauntology of Ghostbox, Chris Lambert's Tales of the Black Meadow, and David Southwell's Hookland. Matthew Bartlett's tales of sonic horror - set in the town of Leeds, Massachussetts - also helped shape a key element of the Horsingdon setting. And, of course, one should not forget The League of Gentlemen (so recently returned to our screens) - or the speculative horrors of Nigel Kneale and Quatermass.

However, the blog was never entirely successful in terms of its original aim - which was to maintain an ongoing narrative throughout the daily posts, with the end result being somethin akin to a novel in blog format; unfortunately that ended up falling outside the grasp of my creative powers during the early stages of the project. So, instead, the Transmissions ended up as a series of thematically-interlinked and occasionally-intersecting vignettes.

There are also repetitions by way of style and content throughout, such that some later posts are, in effect, rewritings of earlier missives. In this respect, I now see the Horsingdon Transmissions as a kind of commonplace book: a reservoir of ideas to which I hope to return - perhaps reworking the material into a series of interlinked short stories, or a novella. There were also other aspects of the Horsingdon region intimated early on in the series - the outlier villages of Wychford and Dedham, for example - which I never got around to exploring, but whose mysteries I mean to investigate at a later date.

Despite the ending of the Transmissions, the threads of the tales spun out Horsingdon are ongoing - it is, after all, a very real place. I should know. I live there. I would invite you to come and visit - but I'd be afraid that - like so many of the region's residents - once here, you would never leave.