Competition Winner & Poem Announced!

Hello all,

I hope you had a good weekend. Mine was splendid, spent with my partner in Ashdown Park Hotel & Country Club, a place of immense natural beauty and old-school class. It was only a one night stay, but sometimes one night in another location is all you need to feel rejuvenated.

As you can see from the picture, Ashdown Park Hotel could easy be mistaken for the box cover art of Betrayal At The House On The Hill. Inside, the corridors are like something from Amnesia or else The Shining; somehow none of this took away from how relaxing the stay was. Anyway, thanks to Michelle for taking the picture and for the perfect weekend too!

However, I’m sure you did not come here to hear about ‘natural beauty’ and perfect weekends saturated with romance and love and all those strange nice things in life. No, you came here for horror! Leading up to the release of Four Horsemen I hosted a competition over Twitter & Facebook for who could give me the best definition of ‘enantiodromia’, the title of the final volume in the Four Horsemen collection. The winner of this competition would receive a personalised poem on a subject of their choosing. I can now announce the winner was…

James Wood

Congratulations James, he gave in a sterling definition which kept to the 140 character limit. Here’s what he sent in:

‘The phenomenon by which a superabundance of any force will inevitably generate its own shadow opposite.’

How’s that for concision, eh?

Here’s the poem he received, which he kindly has permitted to be shared. The theme he gave me was realising that you have become the thing you hate most (nice and depressing, thanks). It’s a sonnet – and I hope you like it.

 

THE GOD OF MONEY

for James Wood

‘One day, I looked in my mirror / and I saw someone that scared me.’ – Jimmy Nail

 

He is a poet, a prophet,

his declarations are spelled with swordpoint,

precise as a surgical cut.

He has no fear; he is anointed

in ink and tears by the universe,

as young men so often seem to be.

The corporate dead, a parasitical burst,

throng against him like so many fleas,

but he is a harpoon to pierce the machine

and deconstruct its brickwork with alchemy:

transmuting dead and android into human beings,

restoring souls with songs, necromancy

reversed. We hailed him as the saviour, the one,

only, one day he put on a white shirt, and prayed to Mammon.

 

Thank you all for reading, for taking part in the competition and a massive thank you to all those who have downloaded Four Horsemen so far! Remember, it’s free, so if you like horror, dark fantasy, sci-fi or are just plain curious, then there’s no reason not to get yours!

@josephwordsmith