Episode 45 The Men in the Snow by Alex Boast

Alex BoastAlex Boast is a young British writer, born in Ipswich, raised in Surrey and living in London. He has an MA in Creative Writing and is constantly improving his skills by writing on https://medium.com/@boastalex (Medium) and https://www.quora.com/profile/Alexander-M-Boast (Quora) as well as doing Master Class courses and attending writing courses by the British writing school The https://www.arvon.org/ (Arvon Foundation). He has a love of ghost stories and references H P Lovecraft and Stephen King as influences as well as J R R Tolkein. Alex had been working in health marketing which necessitated frequent global travel and due to the Coronavirus epidemic, he was laid off. Fortunately that made him focus more on his writing, so every cloud has a silver lining. He has just been commissioned to write a horror movie script based on the Irish legends of the Banshee.  This is only the second interview Classic Ghost Stories Podcast has done with a living author, but we figure there are more of you out there, so if you write ghost stories and want to have them appear in Classic Ghost Stories Podcast then get in touch. If you want to read Alex's story, you can get it from Amazon https://amzn.to/2xKaWMO (here) The Men in the SnowInevitablly when you read a new story, you try to catalogue it with others you have read. On the podcast now we have read a wide range of stories written by authors born in the 18th, 19th, 20th, and soon the 21st centuries. Styles change of course When I read the Men in the Snow, I was struck by the weirdness of it. We don't know if the perceptions of the young girl narrator can be relied on. Some of them seem distinctly odd; her father sitting reading the paper in the kitchen who never moves and never speaks. Her mother who yells at her to stop shaking and later disappears. The newts in the pond, her only friends. So it starts off as purporting to be a naturalistic, realistic story, but then gets shunted off into the odd. This is something I find w