Guest Post: Stories from a Different World by M.E. Proctor

 

Please welcome M. E. Proctor back to the blog today…

 

 

Stories from a Different World by  M.E. Proctor

 

 

I love short stories. I read at least one a day, usually with my first cup of coffee. It can be a recent publication by a favorite writer or a random pick from a favorite magazine. Collections and anthologies that sit on my reading pile are evening choices. They go best with a comfortable armchair and the light of a side table lamp. And when I get into those, I seldom stop after one story.

 

Then there’s what Substack drops in my in-box. Pieces from Scott MacLeod, Jim Wilsky, Liz Zimmers, or Bill Adler that I read right away. They’re short storytelling at its best. If you don’t know these writers, I strongly recommend checking them out.

 

I don’t keep track of all the stories I read but they probably represent the equivalent of a collection or anthology every week.

 

I was in my twenties when I sold my first short story. It was a crime and horror tale, with a Roald Dahl-Hitchcock Presents kind of ending. The murderer pulls it off, but there’s an ironic twist. Retribution with a wink. I still write stories like that even if I tend to be more forgiving. The scoundrels sometimes get away, but they rarely get everything they want. Perfect and blissful endings are not that interesting. Orson Welles said something about happy endings depending on where you end the story.

 

Beyond riffing on a theme that I occasionally revisit, that first story also displayed my ‘genre’ tendencies. Light horror, cracked psychology, and an unsettling atmosphere. More The Haunting (1963) than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In the years that followed, I also dabbled in science-fiction—dystopia and political misdeeds—wrote a crime novella featuring an insurance investigator who goes slightly mad searching for missing diamonds, and dedicated over half a million words to Declan Shaw, my Houston PI.

 

Until four years ago, crime short fiction was glaringly absent from my bio. To be honest, it intimidated me. I didn’t think I could write crime in a compressed format. It took me a long time to give it a try. When Bristol Noir published Cutting Edge in 2021, it was the encouragement I needed and I popped the bubbly. On that day, my writing took a turn as sharp as the knife in the story.

 

I love to lose myself in a book project but short fiction is what kept me writing and coming back to the keyboard with my enthusiasm intact all these years. It’s where I try new things with style, voice and structure, and where a variety of characters get a chance to strut their stuff. It’s also where I play with the kinds of stories that I devoured as a kid. The stories that made me a voracious reader. Adventure, fantasy, historical fiction, space opera, espionage … Anything goes.

 

Which is why I decided to put a new collection together. Unlike Family and Other Ailments, released two years ago, the selection will not include crime stories. The closest is a forensic investigation on a faraway planet that involves an android. Crime or negligence? Roboticide? Definitely a cover-up.

 

Playing with genre boundaries is the unifying theme of the collection. Twenty-four stories at last count. Twenty-five if I decide to expand a piece of micro-fiction that I find a bit too bare bones. I’m currently editing all the texts. They feel different when they’re all together.

 

A few stories lean toward dystopian science fiction. They’re set in scarred worlds where ingenuity means survival, life might be bleak but it’s not hopeless. I don’t do hopeless. The story that anchors the collection and gives it its title is A Book to Live By. It features a resourceful teenage boy and a strange girl on the run. She’s not what she appears to be. The Book of the title is a masterpiece that the boy memorized. He quotes from it, does not understand what it all means, recites or chants the words. They’re both poetry and prayer. Comfort and advice in times of danger. This is the kind of speculative fiction I like.

 

Taking a leap from pure rationality is liberating. Which is why I also play with horror tropes. The collection will have a couple hauntings, a vampire love story, a Renfield tale (with a Dracula cameo), sharks, tomb raiders, ancient gods and rituals. Just like the colorful covers of the paperbacks I grew up with. I’m no longer a kid, but my imagination is still feeding on the treasures these books left behind.

 

In Chimera, maybe the most gothic of the stories in the collection, the accumulation of recovered treasures is in full view. The plot revolves around a garden design obsession. The protagonist is a young man hell-bent (pun intended) on restoring the sculpture garden his grandfather mapped out but never completed. It’s an open-air cabinet of monstrosities and a mythological crucible. Once the main character starts putting the statues on their pedestals and the garden takes shape, the pieces of the story also fall into place. I’m very fond of that one, it’s deliciously weird.

 

Cross fingers, my publisher thinks so too … I’ll keep you posted.

 

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Latest Publication:

 

Bop City Swing

By M.E. Proctor and Russell Thayer

 

Publisher: Cowboy Jamboree Press

April 2025, ISBN 979-8315615972

Paperback: 163 pages

eBook

Amazon link: https://amzn.to/4llEsuL

M. E. Proctor ©2025

M.E. Proctor was born in Brussels and lives in Texas. She’s the author of the Declan Shaw detective mysteries. The first book, Love You Till Tuesday (2024), came out from Shotgun Honey. Catch Me on a Blue Day is the next installment in the series. She’s the author of a short story collection, Family and Other Ailments, and the co-author of a retro-noir novella, Bop City Swing. Her fiction has appeared in Vautrin, Tough, Rock and a Hard Place, Bristol Noir, Mystery Tribune, Shotgun Honey, Reckon Review, and Black Cat Weekly among others. She’s a Shamus and Derringer short story nominee. Website: www.shawmystery.com