Welcoming Sean Hogan
Flame Tree Press welcomes renowned filmmaker and writer Sean Hogan to the blog to talk about his short story “The Dark Gets In”, 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, Sean Hogan shares an excerpt from his story along with a short glimpse into his inspiration.
Excerpt:
But face it, we all know when someone’s watching us, don’t we? That little prickle you get? I certainly do. I’ve always had a sense for these things. A natural instinct. And I didn’t feel anything. Not once. Now, it stands to reason someone would have seen me. Face it, the odds are that at least one person would have been idly glancing out of their window as I went by. And I’m telling you that no one did.
Because there’s no one out there. No one at all.
You think that sounds quite mad, don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you this. I was so sure that everyone had gone, that not only were the streets empty but all of the buildings and houses were too, that I went and made absolutely certain, you see. I went around peering through windows and banging on doors and shouting through letterboxes. I made a hell of a racket, believe me. And nothing! Not a bloody peep. So where have they all gone?
Hogan writes:
“It probably comes as no great surprise that “The Dark Gets In” has its roots in the UK lockdown of 2020. Indeed, it began life as a monologue written in the early days of the pandemic, something I was considering recording with an actor via Zoom. That plan never came to fruition, but the piece never quite left my mind. So, when the opportunity arose to submit something to this anthology, I dug it out again, wondering if there might be anything in it I could use or adapt. Reading it again, I realised that, although the story began life during lockdown, aspects of it still speak to a certain COVID-spawned mindset that continues to be very much with us. Sadly, one doesn’t have to search too hard on social media for examples of this kind of thinking; the enduring notion that the world remains a deeply threatening and unsafe place, plagued by all manner of state-sanctioned conspiracies and malfeasance.”
As well as Hogan’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
