One Eye Grey

[benedictjjones]

'a penny dreadful for the 21st century'

anyone else read these? they're up to issue 5 now (which contains one of my stories <shameless plug>)
they're are pretty londoncentric but to me, a dweller in the big smoke, that's the beauty of them.

[benedictjjones]

issue 5 of OEG came out yesterday, another bloody good read =O)

[Calenture]

May 15, 2008 10:17:46 GMT benedictjjones said:

issue 5 of OEG came out yesterday, another bloody good read.

This looks very interesting, Benedict. Here's a few details.

21st century penny dreadful One Eye Grey can be bought online using paypal and costs £3.00 including postage for the UK and Ireland and £4.00 for anywhere else in world. Prices include postage and packing.

Disappearing ladies, off licences on the sites of ancient temples, birds who charge tolls and one’s that stalk with the pigeon hordes. All this and a couple of nasty trips underground. What more could you want from a Bank Holiday Weekend?

Magic you say? We’ll we’ve got that as well in this edition of One Eye Grey which, in contrast to all the anniversary celebrations connected with Paris sixty eight, remains resolutely London two and eight.

The latest edition (Bank Holiday Weekend) is out in May and can be ordered online or bought in these shops.

One Eye Grey is a penny dreadful for 21st century that draws on the tradition of those as well as the pulp fiction that followed. It features modern stories based on traditional London tales of the uncanny, paranormal and supernatural. The collected 2007 set (Queen Rat and other tales) can be can be bought here. More information on all the penny dreadfuls is here

Here's the link

[benedictjjones]

"and a couple of nasty trips underground"

AND ONE OF THEM IS MY STORY =o)

[marksamuels]

I picked up the first three issues of "One Eye Grey" in a bumper package for six quid from the Waterstones at Piccadilly. Good stuff.

I particularly enjoyed #3 with its series of interlinked tales and the spectacularly Birkinesque "Getting a Taste for it".

I'll have to pick up #4 and #5 the next time I'm down Piccadilly way.

Mark S.

[benedictjjones]

^agreed the 3 from 2007 are well worth buying especially since they're doing them all together for a cheaper price.
issue 4 was pretty good as well, there's a story called 'Thrash' in it which i particually liked.

[Calenture]

One Eye Grey issue 5: Bank Holiday Weekend

As someone who’s rarely ventured outside of my native county of Cornwall, I find London a genuinely bewildering concept. A place which apparently has places, villages and hamlets and ‘nappy hills and valleys’ all somehow contained within a place that I used to think of as an oversized city. All a bit bewildering for me. It’s also fascinating, with so many locations and pieces of pocket history inspiring genuinely good – and often sinister – fiction.

The idea behind this magazine is that it easily fits in a pocket (A5 size, 60 pages) and the stories – usually 3000 words or under - can be read by someone hanging onto a strap on the tube.

I’ll take these in the order I read them: first of course I turned to Going Underground by one of this site’s members, Benedict J Jones: The narrator works in the London underground system, and he’s looking forward to the end of the working day when the call comes through that one of the trains has arrived at a station minus a carriage. Thoughts of enjoying tea with the missus are forgotten as he heads with three other workers in search of the missing carriage. When they find it, they’re presented with another mystery which leads them into an older place where evil dwells.

What they find has a splendid pulp feel, and the editor’s Death Line namecheck was inevitable.

The Second Cellar by Emily Cleaver is another good one. Professor Eckersley takes a short cut through the churchyard of St Giles-in-the-Fields and finds an excavation in nearby St Giles Passage. In the pit he sees an old brickwork archway. A cellar has collapsed and the road fallen through. The area has been of particular interest to the Professor, and from the mother and daughter who run a local bookshop, he’s learned of the labyrinthine passages that link many of the cellars. The labourer working on the excavation isn’t happy about the games played around the pit by the local children. “‘Pulling the fences out of place, scrabbling around in the ‘ole at night. Bloody dangerous. What’s this country coming to when a kid can scare a grown man?’” Splendidly spooky.

EC Chainsaw Massacre III by Martin Jones seems to be written for stockbrokers by a stockbroker. It concerns “Alan Meyers. No, not Alan Meyers Inc., or even registered trademark, nor yet Ph.D...” But what happens when someone puts himself on the line instead of an abstract company and the value of the market needs to be recovered? Not my cup of tea, but bearing in mind that the idea behind this magazine is that it’s easy to read on the tube, which has an awful lot of stockbrokers travelling it – you can see why the editor reckoned it would appeal.

More of these 8 spooky tales to come...

[dem]

"One Eye Grey is a collaborative effort bringing together people who fancied creating something chilling and pocket sized to read on the tube ... "

What a wonderful concept! Maybe they could throw in a can of Super strength to Circle Line ravers with next issue, The Arsenal Stadium Mystery?

In the spirit of the thing, I've been saving this specifically for my infrequent tube journeys, hoping that someone in the same carriage will be reading a copy which would be cheering!

Anyhow, three down, three winners.

Richard Burdett - Bird Man: "A figure sauntered along the fiels at 125 mph and looked at me, his eyes lightening in a blurred landscape. He walked straight through a man who was watching the train pass, leaving a brief pink mist. And he laughed. A woman down the coached coughed, then burst into flames ....

A pigeon-poisoner's progress. The narrator reassures himself that Roger the tramp is a mental case prone to vivid hallucinations when he tells him about the Birdman and why he's so grateful to Ken Livingstone for ridding Trafalgar Square of it's pigeon population, After the terrible incident in Yorkshire, however, he no longer has the luxury of incredulity.

Benedict J. Jones - Goin' Underground: Editor Chris Roberts calls it right in his notes: "A welcome addition to the London legends of underground troglodyte communities who live off discarded burgers and unguarded commuters...."

It's approaching midnight when a tube train arrives at Moorgate station minus one carriage. Guards Paulie, Jono, Dennis and narrator Steve enter the tunnel to see what's become of it - and wish they hadn't. Reads like a shudder pulp in miniature without the Scoobie Doo 'rational' ending and, like Mark Samuels' Sentinels, Ron Weighell's The Tunnel Of Saksaksalum and Robert Barbour Johnson's 'thirties classic Far Below, a delightfully unpleasant treat for Death Line/ Creep enthusiasts, although Ben has since informed me he doesn't go a bundle on the latter film.

Emily Cleaver - The Second Cellar: Ok, so I cheated a bit with this one. I still had three pages to go when I got off the train so I completed it on a bench outside Tower Hill station. Just thought I'd best come clean about that.

Prof. Eckersley investigates a roadworks in the shadow of St. Giles Church where a 200 year old cellar has collapsed, exposing another beneath. Fantasising that - at last! - he's about to make a significant archaeological find, Eckersley inadvisedly explores the premises after dark. It is located slap in the middle of what once was the Rookeries, home to the days beggars, cripples and desperately impoverished, and not all of them are at rest even now ....

Name-check for Geraldine, long-time proprietress of Bloomsbury's Atlantis, the Occult bookshop in Museum Street.

Thanks, Ben!

[troo]

Ooo, I was considering this one. I may just have to give it a try

[benedictjjones]

BAH if you'd shouted a week ago i still had some contributors copies left. i'll have a check at home but think i've given them all away (there may be one lurking though).

[Calenture]

Black Prince by Daisy Pearce: Beth had called him Limey, and he’d called her Tex. It was their joke, and she’d crossed an ocean to be with him. But now as they move through the bright, smelly streets of the capital, he glimpses the man dealing the cards and cannot resist stepping away from her.

He watches the cards, but they’re so fast he can’t follow them; never can. If only he could catch the black prince...

“Just once more.”

“Very well, sir.”

A bitter tale.

The Temple of Bacchus by Scott Wood: Appropriately enough, The Temple of Bacchus on Coldharbour Lane is, in reality an off-licence. The young couple appear to have been hiking across South London with an A to Z, and now their enthusiasm for ‘histories and mysteries’, and their fascination with the true origins of old names, has Gavin impatiently feeling the baseball bat under the counter.

Could it be that the off-licence is built on the site of an old temple? Does a sacred spring still run in the cellar? Hermits lived near such places, and “This is Camber-Well, after all.”

There are certainly dryads and satyrs, but now they have taken the form of a drunken tramp and some squatters.

Beautifully written observations bring this piece to life.

Bank Holiday Weekend by Cee Gee: The holiday weekend is a washout but Shawnee reminds Tony that if he was still going out with laughing girl from Kentish Town, he’d be spending half of it stuck on the tube and the rest at some underground art happening. Tony knows this is true. She never had been one for the sunshine. Nor her mate Hexie, for that matter.

Proving, if there was any doubt, that the weird weather that’s been our lot in past weeks is due entirely to supernatural influences brought about by malign females...

Bird Man by Richard Burdett: “Rooks dotted the sky above him. You might have taken him for a ploughman, and the rooks gathering to pick on the fresh turned soil, but it wasn’t right. He walked too fast and I could see his face clearly, even at half a mile. A plain pale mask, with its eyes the only human bit.”

The tramp in Trafalgar Square explains why, in the heart of London, he has lived in dread of a bizarre rural deity. But now at last, because of Red Ken and a Kestrel, at last he knows peace again.

But for the narrator, fear comes sauntering across a ploughed field at 125mph.

The Toll Raven of Anerley Hill by Andrew Flynn: “I have always had this thing about ravens, a fascination mixed with dread, the relative balance of these emotions varying roughly in proportion to my distance from their object. Now, in the silence following the raven’s remarkable demand, there came into my mind a memory from childhood, an image buried away and un-thought for years, of a dead sheep in the bottom of a rocky gully on a country holiday, a smelly, broken corpse with holes where its eyes had once been, and a large black bird on a nearby rock jabbing its fierce, scythe-like beak into one of the missing orbs...”

The man has been climbing the hill to Upper Norwood, when he is stopped by the voice of a raven grimmer than the one that had disturbed Poe. It demands a toll, and the man doesn’t like the price or the knowledge that the raven has a ‘congregation’ waiting to bear witness and ‘receive’.

Receive just what, exactly?

Thank heavens for the young lady trainee curate and Delia Smith.

Consistently good writing throughout this one. A first class read.

[benedictjjones]

issue 6 is due out soon but there is still time to get issue 5 (and read "goin' underground")

[Scott Wood]

I've written for issues 4,5 & 6 so I've just head it's back from the printers and in the pink. Please forgive my enthusiasm for chucking the whole advert in... it's just that I wrote some of this...

One Eye Grey VI: The Other Arsenal Stadium Mystery

Things aren't too Pat Rice over at Highbury in the run up to the derby and in Brixton a chap finds that it is possible to get a little too PC with his girlfriend. There is a giant reptile stalking Walworth and shadow trading at the theatre by the river.

A house of secrets in Lewisham gathers the non living boys (and girls) of New Cross, whilst in Richmond there is a man whose words will steal your soul away. After all this do you really want to know about the goddess in Greenwich Park? One thing is certain and that is you don't want to look too closely at the baby in the pram, no you most definitely don't want to do that.

What could this be but the latest One Eye Grey rutting into Autumn. You may have thought Boris has created a strange and unusual London but, trust us, we are the real deal.

If you want further proof you could always take to the streets with us on some of our walks.

One Eye Grey can be ordered online or bought in these shops.

One Eye Grey is a collaborative effort bringing together people who fancied creating something chilling and pocket sized to read on the tube. We are looking for contributors as well as advertisers and more shops to sell it. There is more information for booksellers here and a series of events here and reviews relating to the publication here.

[benedictjjones]

^nice one, the new issue does look good. i shall pull out my 4 and 5 tonight in a bid to unmask you sir!!

edit-job done! (nice trilogy!)

[Scott Wood]

Getting there... part 3 is way more ghostly