Welcoming Alan Baxter
Flame Tree Press welcomes award-winning author Alan Baxter to the blog to talk about his short story “Eighty-five Per Cent, Give or Take”, which appears alongside a stellar line-up in the groundbreaking anthology This Way Lies Madness, releasing in September from Flame Tree Press in our Beyond & Within series. In the introduction to the work, the book’s co-editors, Dave Jeffery and Lee Murray, say the anthology “defies convention by bringing together authentic, sensitive portrayals of mental illness in a genre that has notoriously lacked such tenets.” Comprising 23 stories and poems, the book also includes accompanying vignettes offering insight into the authors’ motivation for their work.
Today, Alan Baxter shares an excerpt from his story along with a short glimpse into his inspiration.
Excerpt:
Around and around we go. He’s not actually suicidal, just thinks he has no right to the life he’s still got. How do you address that?
A couple more pints and he lightens up a little, glimpses of the old Andy shining through. The jokes, the wry observations, the ridiculous non-sequiturs that somehow make sense with applied Andy-logic. The way he always used to be before the accident. The way only booze and weed makes him now, partially melting the wall of guilt and paranoia that cages him the rest of the time.
It’s funny how the process has gone. Not funny “ha ha”, of course. Funny like how fucked up life can be.
Baxter writes:
“It’s always fascinating to me, and absolutely terrifying, how mental illness can be such a slow but devastating creep in a person’s life. So much so that, in my experience, it’s often not even noticed at first, both by the affected person themselves and the people around them. It can be an incremental corruption of ‘normal’ that those around the person eventually start to perceive even as the person affected doesn’t realise anything untoward is happening. In that process, the most well-meaning friends often don’t have the necessary tools to support people when they’re struggling and can even enable the affected person’s further descent through inaction or incorrect action. Mental illness is isolating in more than one direction –for the person affected, as they feel more and more that others don’t understand what they’re going through, and for that person’s close friends and family, feeling helpless to stop the slide. Both unable to help and unable to find help from elsewhere by the time they realise a serious problem is arising. It can be a vicious cycle of ongoing descent, a kind of vortex with the affected person at the centre and everyone around them either drawn in or pushed aside.”
As well as Baxter’s story, Murray and Jeffery invite readers of This Way Lies Madness to discover “tales of trauma, dissociation, body dysmorphia, psychosis, depression, anxiety, and more, captured in all forms of horror from the extreme to the nuanced. There is jaw-dropping violence, skin-crawling body horror, and quirky dark humour, alongside the quiet, heartbreaking introspections of people spiralling into madness. Yet all the stories and poems in this volume are framed so that the insensitive, stereotypical presentations of mental illness commonly found in horror are resoundingly and appropriately absent.”
"A mesmerizing and remarkably ambitious mosaic of delicate minds possessed, of spoiled and haunted hearts, of gaping wounds both seen and unseen. This Way Lies Madness weaves a beguiling and profoundly revealing tapestry of psychological terror with such nuance and depth in each collected story." – Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
This Way Lies Madness is out September 9th 2025: Pre-Order Now
