Welcoming Marie O’Regan
Flame Tree Press welcomes acclaimed author-editor Marie O’Regan to the blog to talk about her short story “There’s a Ghost in My House”, 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, Marie O’Regan shares an excerpt from her story along with a short glimpse into her inspiration.
Excerpt:
I don’t remember a lot of the conversation after that. She rambled on about the holiday she was about to take, in an attempt to thaw the atmosphere. Two weeks on the Isle of Wight. How is that a holiday? I’d much rather go somewhere like Paris, or Venice. So much to see! I made the appropriate noises, but didn’t take a lot of notice. There were the usual questions, I’m sure. Was I eating, was I sleeping, was I seeing family, friends, taking my tablets… I made encouraging noises, told her what she wanted to hear – the tablets did nothing. I stopped taking them weeks ago – but all the time I was looking at her. Really looking. As she nibbled at her biscuit and gulped tea in between sentences, I could see it spreading. Decay. The skin of her fat little hands was growing pale, mottled, as if the veins beneath were congealing further by the minute. Her eyes had taken on that sunken, milky look that told me life was ebbing from them. She was dying, too.
O’Regan writes:
“When the editors of this anthology, the lovely Lee Murray and Dave Jeffery, asked me for a story dealing with the theme of mental illness, I was delighted – and also a little bit stuck. I had some ideas, but wanted to find something I thought would be unusual – at least, I hoped it would be. I remembered hearing about a condition called Cotard’s Syndrome, in which the sufferer believes themselves to be dead, often to the extent of denying the existence of their own body. They believe they can infect others, and the illness often includes self-starvation and delusions of immortality. Why do they need food, if they have no body? How can they die (again) if they have no body to do so?”
As well as O’Regan’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
