The Dental School Haikyo in Ibaraki is one giant nest, a big empty shell carpeted with straw and twittering with the sound of swooping birds. Every room, corridor, and hall is scattered with their off-cast building materials, feathers, droppings, and bodies. Broken EXIT signs, fire-hose cupboards, sinks and shattered fuse-boxes all serve as their homes, stuffed with rotten straw and twigs.
Hunting Ground
REN, TEKALUS, LORIE They pick up the blip off the bait drop corner, burning bright green on the inner screen of their visors, flashing with a rapid-fire heartbeat, scouring afterglow trails into their eyes. It’s the strongest they’ve ever seen. Each blood beat swells across their visors like an explosion, waves spreading and lapping over the in-screen maps, washing out grey line buildings and buckled black roads beneath it. “He’s a fat one, eh?†shouts Lorie happily, plumps out his black armoured arms before him like they’re resting on a vast belly. Ren and Tekalus wince at the static burst … Read More
Haikyo @ Lakes Yamanaka and Sagami.
Misuterareta– Survivorship goes back to the Sagami Lake area, site of the Hotel Royale, and finds it now guarded by security vans and guard dogs. He ploughs on, and discovers a Pension Hotel surrounded by a wide and strange scaffolding walkway. He’s shooting with a D60 now, so image quality just got a bump. Tokyo Times– Lee stumbles upon and explores a conference centre near Yamanaka Lake, complete with funky brain-washing chairs and antique office equipment.
The ruined conference center built into a cliff- Yamamoto
The Yamamoto Grand Center is a gracefully aging architectural foible, tucked away in a quiet corner of Tochigi prefecture on a die-cut volcanic crag. Warm spring winds blow confetti cherry blossoms through its many gaping windows, fluttering with old receipts and leaflets in zephyrs around its stacked and musty furniture. In the Grand Hall, weeds grow up in molding grass tatami mats. Once a ribald conference and function space, its long abandonment has lent a solemn gravitas it could not have had in life.
On the Raft
I know you remember this. I woke up on the raft. I’d been sick. I’d been sick for weeks. Everything before was a delirious nightmare. The murders. The container. You. It was all merged into one with her singing lullabies over the top. Her spoon-feeding me. Her weeping at night and stroking my face and telling me everything was going to be alright. I felt better. I felt clearer. For the first time I felt I could control my body, my mind. The fog was lifted. And I realized I was starving. My stomach thrummed with pain. I realized I … Read More
Caterpillar Man @ Shelter of Daylight!
One of my stories, Caterpillar Man, has found its way into print. I don’t really know how this happened. I don’t recall the magazine editor checking in with me about the story, though I do recall them asking me how I wanted to be paid. Hey cool, I thought, and who are you? Back from my UK holiday I found my contributor’s copy waiting in the post-box- my story is the last in it. The magazine is a biannual anthology, I think I submitted the story to a sister publication about a year ago. You can buy it here. Or … Read More
The Pearl love hotel, overgrown with brambles
The Pearl Love Hotel Haikyo in Tochigi is a wreck in camouflage, deeply nested underneath a blanket of scraggy brown vines. Rooms lie in embers, grown through with ferns; once-bohemian beds, chaise longues and chandeliers lie scrapped, dropped, and despoiled with the nests of birds, spiders, and the homeless. The grand two-story executive suite still maintains some of its sordid gravitas, its sultry red round-bedded apex room as faux-regal as ever, now overlooking a graveyard of spent passion inveigled by nature’s rapacious tendrils.
The Fix reviews Freemantle Mons
The Fix– Online literature review site The Fix recently ran a review of Something Wicked- the first print magazine one of my stories has appeared in. The reviewer said this about the story: ‘In Freemantle Mons The Leviathan Smile by Michael John Grist, an old clock stops, and the people for whom it is a fixture are surprised to discover that the sun fails to rise and time fails to move forward without it. In the best tale of this issue, Freemantle Mons must discover why the sun refuses to rise and what it means not just for the city, … Read More
The dead boar of Yamanaka lake
The Yamanakako Spa Resort Hotel in Yamanashi prefecture very nearly didn’t make the cut to appear on this site, as I came close to just walking on by. It was only an hour or so from dusk, and I’d already spent hours exploring and shooting the main Resort Hotel I’d come out for. From the outside it was an unremarkable complex, a simple red brick structure set off from the road on a slight hill. The first building in the complex was bland on the inside, but the second had more to offer; a spacious main function space spread with beautifully crinkled red … Read More
Leanna Drew the Moon
Leanna knew she was a special little girl, because the moon spoke to her. She knew that it shouldn’t, and that she shouldn’t listen, but none of that stopped it from happening. She drew pictures at school of her talking to a big moon face, and the moon saying things like “try eating those soap suds, Leanna,” or “that dog wants a bite of plasticine, go on,” and in the pictures she would go ahead and do it. The moon, after all, was her friend. But it wasn’t always so nice. She was 5 when it told her to kill … Read More