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Thin Places in Hard Concrete
From the author of Municipal Gothic and Intervals of Darkness comes a collection of 10 brand new weird stories in the tradition of Robert Aickman and Ghostwatch.
The son of a dictator living in exile visited by vengeful spirits from his country’s past.
The ghost of a music hall singer trapped forever in the tape loops of a haunted Mellotron.
An official report into the exit from a motorway interchange that should not be there.
And seven more stories set in cemeteries, super basements, alleyways, apartment blocks, holiday flats, high streets and town centre temples that didn’t exist yesterday.
The son of a dictator living in exile visited by vengeful spirits from his country’s past.
The ghost of a music hall singer trapped forever in the tape loops of a haunted Mellotron.
An official report into the exit from a motorway interchange that should not be there.
And seven more stories set in cemeteries, super basements, alleyways, apartment blocks, holiday flats, high streets and town centre temples that didn’t exist yesterday.
165 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 6, 2026
Another great collection from Ray Newman, and exactly what the title promises: a set of stories about the points where reality gets porous. A motorway exit that shouldn’t exist (‘The Interchange’), a building that rewrites itself into a woman’s memory (‘The Horseman’), unwelcome reminders of the past physically manifesting in the present (‘Wolf in Exile’); the throughline is an uncanny sense of encroachment.
The best stories here balance concept and character perfectly. The brilliant ‘Unreleased’ is the obvious standout – a wonderfully layered story about a lost song (Beatles-adjacent but skewed just enough to feel off) that progresses through a hidden occult history and makes its way to a present-day collector. It’s funny, specific, eerie, and best of all is anchored by such a lovingly crafted narrative voice that the characters bound off the page. ‘The Presence Chamber’ does something similar with wealth and power, building a suffocating atmosphere around an underground reconstruction of a Tudor room, but also incorporating great character work. ‘One Star Review’ is pure fun; a similar idea to Eliza Clark’s ‘The Shadow Over Little Chitaly’, where a sinister picture emerges through a string of online reviews.
Characters circle the ‘thin places’, all rationalising just enough to keep themselves in place – especially Lucy in ‘The Horseman’, who just keeps telling herself a temple (and a whole religion) everyone else recognises must always have been there, somehow. Even when the premise leans towards the speculative (like in ‘The Lost Seconds’, when some people find themselves out of sync with the rest of the world), there’s still that same emphasis on things just being a bit out of joint. This makes the collection feel cohesive without being repetitive. Very satisfying.
The best stories here balance concept and character perfectly. The brilliant ‘Unreleased’ is the obvious standout – a wonderfully layered story about a lost song (Beatles-adjacent but skewed just enough to feel off) that progresses through a hidden occult history and makes its way to a present-day collector. It’s funny, specific, eerie, and best of all is anchored by such a lovingly crafted narrative voice that the characters bound off the page. ‘The Presence Chamber’ does something similar with wealth and power, building a suffocating atmosphere around an underground reconstruction of a Tudor room, but also incorporating great character work. ‘One Star Review’ is pure fun; a similar idea to Eliza Clark’s ‘The Shadow Over Little Chitaly’, where a sinister picture emerges through a string of online reviews.
Characters circle the ‘thin places’, all rationalising just enough to keep themselves in place – especially Lucy in ‘The Horseman’, who just keeps telling herself a temple (and a whole religion) everyone else recognises must always have been there, somehow. Even when the premise leans towards the speculative (like in ‘The Lost Seconds’, when some people find themselves out of sync with the rest of the world), there’s still that same emphasis on things just being a bit out of joint. This makes the collection feel cohesive without being repetitive. Very satisfying.
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April 24, 2026Not that Intervals Of Darkness wasn't a fine selection of weird tales too, but Thin Places In Hard Concrete shares with Ray's first collection, Municipal Gothic, the masterstroke of a title that summarises the contents so well as to make any further attempt on a reviewer's part redundant. Which is probably for the best, because otherwise I might be tempted to come up with some SEO monstrosity like 'John Grindrod meets M.R. James', and nobody needs that. The Interchange and One Star Review both update the venerable ghost story approach of implying something terrible through a feigned assembly of documents, except here it's not bundles of letters and mouldering tomes, it's bureaucratic records of problems with a roundabout, and a genre exaggeration of the way that whenever you look at the feedback on holiday accommodation, some people always seem to have had a much worse time than others. Unreleased does something similar, except for me it was playing on hard mode because it's grounded in the endless, exhausting muso fascination with every last detail of a band I don't much rate; still, it does at least get a nod to the great XTC in too, and given my sentiments, its ingeniously neat conclusion was actively cheering. Other tales use suspension of the normal operation of the world to bring fitting fates to annoyances minor (wannabe street photographers) or major (billionaires, escaped dictatorship failsons), or simply put regular people through the wringer because why assume another layer to the world should make it any more just? All are at least very good, but I think my favourite might be The Horseman, in which a woman is surprised to see the local church has been replaced with a temple to a strange new faith... except it's not new, it's clearly an old building, which everyone else remembers having always been there. So far, so Arkham City, but what elevates it is that rather than playing out like a grand cosmic horror narrative, the replacement faith operates with the same faint crapness as modern British Christianity, all Henry hoovers in the holy places, awkward attendance at occasional ceremonies to placate older relatives, and an air of cringe around anyone too thoroughly into it.
May 3, 2026
A wonderful collection of short stories by Ray Newman. I have read his previous two collections, and was very impressed by the precision of the writing, but I think Thin Places in Hard Concrete is a step-up as a collection because it feels so cohesive. These haunting stories are modern-day, engaged with the present, and uncertain about technology. They build in a rather convincing way, sparking shots of unease a number of times per story.
The collection opens with the superbly constructed Interchange, which builds like collage of understated terror and ends (in the last page or two) with the following disturbing paragraph - "One witness described a naked man running along the road waving his arms and, though she could not hear him, apparently calling for attention. She did not take a photograph and was travelling at speed but her description corresponds with that of Ed Silva."
The "though she could not hear him..." played throughout the reading of the rest of the collection, at the back of my mind uneasily.
Newman follows Interchange with a dark story of war crimes and history and hauntings with Wolf in Exile. Right puts you off a nightly stroll in the rain. Then, a masterpiece of the uncanny, with Unreleased. A story of music and obsession. Unreleased is so good, I read it twice. Back to back, before moving onto Bruising the Scene.
I thought Bruising the Scene uncovered a seam of dark comedy in the collection. A photographer both trying to take pictures of people he doesn't know, and the fear of what they make think about him. The ending made me grin wryly. The Horseman, just creeped me out. It felt like the unique story in the collection. Outwith any influence.
One Star Review builds and builds, upon a superb modern idea for a ghost story. The Presence Chamber is the most intriguing story. It weaves a really modern idea of a billionaire and a journalist. The Dead Spot, I felt was the darkest story of the collection, and it is where I stopped on my first reading.
I picked the book up again for Damnatio Memoriae and The Lost Seconds, and rushed to the end.
The book is a quick 165 pages, packed with sharp writing. I loved reading it, and how it felt like a whole treatise on now. It isn't a collection of ghost stories safely in the past, but interacting with the moment.
I genuinely thought it was brilliant.
The collection opens with the superbly constructed Interchange, which builds like collage of understated terror and ends (in the last page or two) with the following disturbing paragraph - "One witness described a naked man running along the road waving his arms and, though she could not hear him, apparently calling for attention. She did not take a photograph and was travelling at speed but her description corresponds with that of Ed Silva."
The "though she could not hear him..." played throughout the reading of the rest of the collection, at the back of my mind uneasily.
Newman follows Interchange with a dark story of war crimes and history and hauntings with Wolf in Exile. Right puts you off a nightly stroll in the rain. Then, a masterpiece of the uncanny, with Unreleased. A story of music and obsession. Unreleased is so good, I read it twice. Back to back, before moving onto Bruising the Scene.
I thought Bruising the Scene uncovered a seam of dark comedy in the collection. A photographer both trying to take pictures of people he doesn't know, and the fear of what they make think about him. The ending made me grin wryly. The Horseman, just creeped me out. It felt like the unique story in the collection. Outwith any influence.
One Star Review builds and builds, upon a superb modern idea for a ghost story. The Presence Chamber is the most intriguing story. It weaves a really modern idea of a billionaire and a journalist. The Dead Spot, I felt was the darkest story of the collection, and it is where I stopped on my first reading.
I picked the book up again for Damnatio Memoriae and The Lost Seconds, and rushed to the end.
The book is a quick 165 pages, packed with sharp writing. I loved reading it, and how it felt like a whole treatise on now. It isn't a collection of ghost stories safely in the past, but interacting with the moment.
I genuinely thought it was brilliant.
May 7, 2026
I hugely enjoyed Ray Newman’s third collection of short stories and read it within a day. If you’re in a reading rut, this could be the cure.
What to expect: Horror? Broadly. Ghost stories? Yes, but not always. It’s easy to say Newman writes “Weird fiction”, but it’s neither Lovecraft worship nor (always) Folk Horror. There’s bits of all this and more. Indeed, you get the sense Newman has a strong love and understanding of genre forms, and this is part of what makes their writing so much fun to read.
The theme Newman keeps returning to is the horror of the mundane and the unremarkable: the weird building on the corner that you swear you hadn’t noticed before; the roundabout exit that seemingly goes nowhere; the strange noises in the background of a tape. The protagonists are constantly confronted with these “thin spaces”, as alluded to in the book’s title - the liminal thresholds between our world and another, and often between life and death.
In such preoccupations, Newman is surely following a particular literary tradition (Nigel Kneale, Alan Garner, Alan Moore etc) of slippery portals and different realities breaking through the mundane - preoccupations that Mark Fisher explored so well in The Weird and the Eerie (2015). For Fisher, “weird” fiction is defined by this sense of things that don’t belong and that can’t be reconciled with ordinary life, and the glimpses beyond. And as themes go, it’s one I’m an absolute sucker for! “For Madmen Only”…
Another key element of Newman’s writing is that the horror is set amongst high rise flats, shopping centres, office buildings - the decaying midcentury infrastructure that most of us live amongst, rather than the Gothic mansions of yore. His first collection was aptly named Municipal Gothic, after all. But what feels different in this collection is the explicit reminder that this midcentury infrastructure has itself been host to very real horrors within our living lifetime, emphasised through clear allusions to the bloody rule of Ceaușescu and the snipers of Sarajevo. For Newman this approach feels new but very welcome, and brings to mind Rod Sterling.
But beyond the subject matter I just love Newman’s style. Each story is a kind of experiment, ideas pushed to execution that other writers wouldn’t dare. A ghost story told through Airbnb reviews? A horror told through the medium of a National Highways report? Inspired! But such experiments aren’t distracting, and you get the sense they were as fun to write as they are to read.
The book’s centrepiece, and probably my favourite overall, is a story built around the John Lennon ‘Glass Onion’ mythos, which deftly combines extracts from a fictional Beatles biography with an unfolding narrative that actually does feel Lovecraftian.
Newman isn’t the only contemporary writer mining this kind of territory (Will Wiles’s The Anechoic Chamber definitely scratched a similar itch), but for sheer quality they always deliver and I’ll be eagerly anticipating whatever comes next.
What to expect: Horror? Broadly. Ghost stories? Yes, but not always. It’s easy to say Newman writes “Weird fiction”, but it’s neither Lovecraft worship nor (always) Folk Horror. There’s bits of all this and more. Indeed, you get the sense Newman has a strong love and understanding of genre forms, and this is part of what makes their writing so much fun to read.
The theme Newman keeps returning to is the horror of the mundane and the unremarkable: the weird building on the corner that you swear you hadn’t noticed before; the roundabout exit that seemingly goes nowhere; the strange noises in the background of a tape. The protagonists are constantly confronted with these “thin spaces”, as alluded to in the book’s title - the liminal thresholds between our world and another, and often between life and death.
In such preoccupations, Newman is surely following a particular literary tradition (Nigel Kneale, Alan Garner, Alan Moore etc) of slippery portals and different realities breaking through the mundane - preoccupations that Mark Fisher explored so well in The Weird and the Eerie (2015). For Fisher, “weird” fiction is defined by this sense of things that don’t belong and that can’t be reconciled with ordinary life, and the glimpses beyond. And as themes go, it’s one I’m an absolute sucker for! “For Madmen Only”…
Another key element of Newman’s writing is that the horror is set amongst high rise flats, shopping centres, office buildings - the decaying midcentury infrastructure that most of us live amongst, rather than the Gothic mansions of yore. His first collection was aptly named Municipal Gothic, after all. But what feels different in this collection is the explicit reminder that this midcentury infrastructure has itself been host to very real horrors within our living lifetime, emphasised through clear allusions to the bloody rule of Ceaușescu and the snipers of Sarajevo. For Newman this approach feels new but very welcome, and brings to mind Rod Sterling.
But beyond the subject matter I just love Newman’s style. Each story is a kind of experiment, ideas pushed to execution that other writers wouldn’t dare. A ghost story told through Airbnb reviews? A horror told through the medium of a National Highways report? Inspired! But such experiments aren’t distracting, and you get the sense they were as fun to write as they are to read.
The book’s centrepiece, and probably my favourite overall, is a story built around the John Lennon ‘Glass Onion’ mythos, which deftly combines extracts from a fictional Beatles biography with an unfolding narrative that actually does feel Lovecraftian.
Newman isn’t the only contemporary writer mining this kind of territory (Will Wiles’s The Anechoic Chamber definitely scratched a similar itch), but for sheer quality they always deliver and I’ll be eagerly anticipating whatever comes next.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews