The UK's most traumatising scare maze
💀 Interviewing author Richard Thomas + Whisper of Death + Shocktober 💀
This week in IF YOU GO AWAY - An interview with author Richard Thomas (founder of Gamut Magazine), news about UK scare mazes Shocktober Fest at Tulley’s Farm and Salvation Z, a review of Whisper of Death by Christopher Pike, plus some recommended Halloween resources for UK readers.
As Halloween continues to roll closer, I’ve ramped up my efforts to travel to some of the scare mazes and Halloween haunts in the UK with the best reputations and I think I’m reaching the point when I’ve expended as much time and money on scaring myself as my family will tolerate for one year.
In many ways it feels like I managed to reach two extremes in my pursuit of the ultimate Halloween event, travelling 230 miles to be chased around Europe’s biggest collection of scare mazes, then finding something closer to home that turned out to be the most terrifying experience of my life.
My great regret for 2024 is that I haven’t made it to Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein in Bath yet, home to a Frankenstein-themed escape room and, in October, an After Dark experience that I’ve been wanting to visit for years. That omission aside, however, I feel like I’ve managed to tick a lot of events off my wish list, and probably wouldn’t be able to achieve more until I find a way to get myself on some Halloween press lists and secure some free visits.
As much as I want to increase my reach in 2025, there’s something Faustian about getting onto the press lists of big events in the UK, offering access in exchange for a minimum number of Tik Tok tags and Instagram reels. I feel like a dinosaur in that respect, romanticising an era when critics would be invited to launches in the hope of impressing them, rather than in exchange for hashtag sponsored content. Plus I prefer the written word, which very much places me in the bracket of the almost-obsolete.
I’ve written short reviews of the events that I attended for Spooky Isles:
spookyisles.com/tulleys-shocktober-fest-crawley/
spookyisles.com/salvation-z-gloucester-prison/
Shocktober Fest at Tulley’s Farm
Shocktober at Tulley’s Farm, near Gatwick Airport, felt like the holy grail of Halloween events to attend in the UK. Advertised as Europe’s largest collection of scare mazes, this felt like the closest I’d get to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios without leaving the UK. I’ve long envied the massive variety and levels of extremity of Halloween haunts in the US, but without leaving England I’m not sure it would be possible to find a closer approximation of the experience than Shocktober Fest offers.
Just getting to Shocktober required a hotel room, an overnight stay and five hours on the train each way, which should be some indication of my commitment to the cause. Arriving there and experiencing it for myself, I had a fantastic time and am not sorry that I made the effort. Shocktober was everything that I should have expected it to be – a brilliant spectacle and an example of what Halloween can look like when the event organisers have a big budget to play with, but with the queues and production line feeling that you get at a busy theme park.
The things I loved about Shocktober were the details that smaller endeavours can’t afford to replicate. There was a witch trial scare maze so filled with smoke, lit a sickly, wan green, that I struggled to see my hands in front of my face. Wandering those wide halls, completely alone and lost in the mist, while silhouettes of witches began dancing in the swamps around me, was a singularly unique experience and something that I’ll never forget. Likewise, in the oldest haunt in the park, we encountered actors who were determined to give a good performance, literally scuttling between the walls of corridors like spiders inspired by The Exorcist. Moments of brilliance like those ones punctuated the night, hinting at what might have been possible if the mazes were less busy.
The flipside was exploring mazes that were objectively impressive in their design and build, but were ruined by crowds of visitors bumping into each other and queuing through the attractions. That was our experience in Doom Town and Wastelands Penitentiary, the mazes I had most looked forward to visiting and saved until last. In hindsight at these Halloween events, you’re more likely to get the best experience at the beginning of the night before there’s a pressure to keep the long queues moving, but I don’t think I can be blamed for wanting to save the best until last.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that I returned home from Shocktober and was overflowing with obsessive ruminations on whether I would make it to another big Halloween event before the season ended. My horror-loving friends live across the UK, generally nowhere near me, which makes it difficult to coordinate these trips. I felt incredibly relieved (absurdly so) when somebody agreed to meet me in the city of Gloucester to attend what was being advertised as possibly the last year of Salvation Z, a scare attraction housed inside the decommissioned HM Gloucester Prison.
Salvation Z at HM Gloucester Prison
Salvation Z is everything that Shocktober Fest is not. A relatively new attraction, taking advantage of an existing building, with a very DIY feel, from a small team determined to offer a scary experience. Getting there and back involved a total of five hours of driving after work on a Friday night, so we bought VIP fast track tickets, which included a hospital gown and the promise that the actors would single you out for special treatment.
Obviously real life offers a plethora of terrors on a daily basis, enough to paralyse even the most hardened among us, and I’m no more immune to dwelling on my impending mortality than the next man. When it comes to horror as entertainment, however, I’m always actively chasing that giddy relief that follows a genuine fright, and like any high it gets harder and harder to achieve over time. Which is a longwinded way of saying that usually scare mazes and Halloween events are fun, and I enjoy myself by going along with the actors and allowing myself to get into the spirit of the event. No pun intended. That wasn’t the case at Salvation Z.
It was obvious that things were going to be different from the first maze that we entered. I was with a friendwho is about twice my height. The first maze involved crawling headfirst through a series of sewer pipes, each leading into another chamber with more exits. Invariably the lit tunnels were dead ends, and the sickeningly lightless tunnels were the way forward. Given that my Sasquatch-like friend struggled to fit into the tunnels, this left me crawling alone, headfirst into chambers of darkness, knowing that eventually something would be waiting for me. I was absolutely bricking it.
The next indication that Salvation Z offered the next level of Halloween haunts was when we were instructed to climb to the top floor of a decommissioned prison and find our way out. Most of the building wasn’t lit, all of the cells and hospital wards were left open and derelict, there was no signposting, no indication of where to go, just floor after floor of abandoned hospital gurneys, dismembered dolls, shadows and whispers. I can’t remember ever having been so frightened. It was a genuine relief when the actors finally began to chase us, zipped me in a bodybag and force fed me I don’t know what.
Salvation Z was an incredible experience, but it was also bittersweet. Midway through the evening, we were introduced to the man who (as part of an incredible team) was the driving force behind the scare attraction. He was thrilled to see so many people enjoying the world that he had created, but suffers from a progressive health condition that will increasingly limit his ability to participate in and lead an annual event like this.
If he reads these words, I hope he knows how much his hard work has meant to us and that he created the most terrifying experience of my life, which for a lifelong gorehound lover of horror, means one of the best experiences of my life. I’m not sure that anything will ever compare to reaching the top floor of that prison and coming to the realisation that we had the full building to explore, in the dark, and that people in horrible masks could be hiding behind any door that we passed!
An interview with Richard Thomas
When I remembered that award-winning author Richard Thomas has a new novel out, Incarnate, this seemed like the perfect time to catch up with him and find out more about his inspirations and what drives him as a writer. I first became aware of Richard and his work around 2012. I was trying to find a publisher for my first novel but was very inexperienced and had some difficult conversations with George (Yorgos?) Cotronis, an incredible artist and designer who at the time was running Kraken Press. He was interested in my book, but had to gently explain to me what the reality of working with a small, independent publisher would look like, shattering my dreams of overnight infamy. I kept in touch with George (who later contributed a piece to our HERETICS exhibition in 2016), never published the novel, then began questioning my life choices when Kraken Press published Richard’s short story collection, Staring into the Abyss, and I realised that it was a beautiful, perfect collection.
A few years later Richard launched the first iteration of Gamut, an online magazine of horror fiction and dark poetry. These are obviously things that appealed to me, so I offered a little time to help with the launch PR. It was a tough market and difficult to persuade people to pay for subscriptions, so Gamut ended after its first year, returning in 2023 as a non-profit home for dark, speculative fiction.
Again, maintaining a paid literary magazine is tough, and it looks like December 2024 will mark the end of the current iteration of Gamut magazine, but the level of quality that the team achieved this time is exceptional and something to aspire towards. Throughout the past decade Richard has taught a seemingly endless amount of writing classes, geared towards the darker spectrum of art (the kind of things that most educational institutions frown upon!), published a frightening amount of short stories and novels, leading to the recent release of Incarnate, which Richard will tell you about in his own words.
1/ What inspires you as a writer? What was it that originally drove you to write stories and what drives you now to continue?
I love telling stories, connecting with an audience, taking them somewhere they’ve never been before. It started when I was in grade school—I’ve always loved to read and write. 15 years into my career, I’m inspired by the amazing authors in the horror community, and other genres as well.
I don’t just write horror. I was finalist for a Thriller Award, and I have a story out in Lightspeed this year—a bit of science fiction. What really makes this some of the most satisfying work I’ve ever done is the response I get. When somebody “gets me,” and has an intense experience reading my work—whether that’s scaring them, helping them deal with loss and grief, or the wonder of something weird and uncanny—it feels intimate, this relationship we have.
2/ I feel like you're recognised as a teacher as much as an author. What's the most common mistake that you see when you're assessing the work of people in your classes?
I think the biggest mistake an author can make it not understanding where they come from, and what they’re trying to do. It’s the first assignment in my Short Story Mechanics class—tell me about your five favourite authors, books, stories, films, and television shows. Somewhere in there are commonalities, themes, recurring elements, motifs, and genres. But don’t ignore the anomalies, the outcasts, the weird outliers. Study what you’re drawn to, and then based on that, look at where you are, and what you’re trying to do.
Bring into your stories your race, culture, jobs, families, gender, orientation, religion, hopes, desires, and experiences. That’s what makes a Stephen Graham Jones werewolf story different than a Benjamin Percy werewolf story. If my students are open, and vulnerable, they can quickly evolve and improve. You certainly have to put in your 10,000 hours.
3/ Can you tell me a little about Incarnate and the creative process behind it?
Man, this was one of the hardest and most satisfying experiences of my career. I must have spent two years studying, doing research, filling my head with images. I watched films like The Thing, and television shows like The Terror. I revisited books and stories—The Giver, The Only Good Indians, The Fisherman, Annihilation. I filled my head with all of that, and then sat down and wrote 52,000 words in two weeks. It was intense. I wrote the remaining 30k over a series of Fridays, 4,000 words a day. I hired an “arctic advisor” in Repo Kempt, who helped me to get those details right.
I studied the arctic, Alaska, watched documentaries, YouTube videos, and read nonfiction accounts of expeditions gone wrong. The book originally came out of the manifestation of grief that I saw in a short story, The Familiars by Micaela Morrissette. I teach it in one of my classes. That, and I have always been fascinated by the long period of night, the 60-90 days of darkness up in Utqiagvik, Alaska (formerly Barrow). Out of that, what might emerge? Add to that the sin eater—a concept that has long fascinated me—and we were off to the races. Every religion has such a person—priest, witch doctor, shaman—call them what you want.
As a maximalist, I knew this setting would be a great place for me to express my maximalism—heavy setting, sensory detail, immersive horror, tense atmosphere. And every meal the sin eater ate, it was a meal I cooked—such as my chili recipe, including all of my secret ingredients. It’s a three act novel—Sebastian Pana, the sin eater; Mother Monster, in a desert wasteland; and Kallik, a young Inuit boy. When you smash that all together it’s what The New York Times called, “a must-read book for fans of strange, surreal horror.” The uncanny, the weird, the Lovecraftian—it all plays out across this narrative, that is not without hope.
4/ What moment in your creative career to date are you most proud of?
Obviously being a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, for my fourth short story collection, Spontaneous Human Combustion, meant a lot to me. Though I didn’t win, out of the 64 collections on the reading list, to make the final six, it was an honour. Gabino Iglesias reviewing Incarnate for The New York Times meant the world to me—that’s a bucket list item.
And if I’m honest, the blurb I got from Chuck Palahniuk for my last collection, that stunned me. I cried. He said, “In range alone, Richard Thomas is boundless. He is Lovecraft. He is Bradbury. He is Gaiman.” Chuck is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, so generous, so supportive. It’s really the perfect intersection of what I’m trying to do—weird, uncanny, and wondrous. It’s so nice to be seen. I thought he was going to pass on the blurb request!
5/ If time, budget and audience were no impediment, what would you most like to create, in any medium, and why?
Man, that’s tough. I’ve failed twice now with Gamut, so that certainly has left a mark. I love teaching, and hope to be able to continue doing that. I love publishing authors—the work we did at Gamut this year (and in the past) as well as my time running Dark House Press, it was a real pleasure. To connect with authors all over the world—men and women, and nonbinary voices; authors of colour and a wide range of cultures; voice across the LGBTQ+ experience; stories from so many different countries, each with their own mythology, rituals, and beliefs. What a thrill.
I’d love to just keep doing what I’m doing, while being able to still carve out enough time for my family, friends, travel, and those life experiences we all seek out. It’s always a tough balance, right? But nothing has made me happier—writing, editing, teaching, and publishing. Nothing has ever been as satisfying.
Review – Whisper of Death by Christopher Pike
In a recent edition of IF YOU GO AWAY, I discussed the author Christopher Pike, whose young adult teen horror novels were my obsession between the ages of around nine and 13. Last week I re-read his Whisper of Death, a haunting novel that plays out like a nihilistic teen episode of the Twilight Zone. Revolving around themes of abortion, which I missed as a kid and which are likely to be polarising to readers in 2024, the story features a passionate teen romance between Roxanne and Pepper with unintended consequences.
In this instance an accidental teen pregnancy is the prelude to a group of five teenagers becoming the last people alive in their town, possibly the last living creatures in the world. To make matters worse, they’re all linked to the suicide of a “quiet, brilliant” girl whose ability to persecute the teens seems to have extended into her afterlife.
At only 160 pages this, like a lot of Pike’s work, is a short and tightly focused novel, with all of the fat trimmed and no time wasted. Whisper of Death blew me away as child and it’s easy to see why. There’s a level of authorial cruelty at play here and a doomed ambience that sees transgressions punished in macabre ways. Life here is cruel and arbitrary, with hope in short supply. It isn’t a perfect novel and can come across as shallow at times, but it stands in such sharp contrast to the toothless pap that was being pedalled to teens in the comparable Point Horror and R L Stine books at the time.
Whisper of Death is brutal. There’s a ruthless economy to the engine of the narrative that catches up to these five teenagers, toppling like dominoes, making it one of Pike’s most memorable novels.
Tips for attending UK scare events
If you’re based in the UK and feel inspired by my Halloween adventures, there are a couple of resources that I’d recommend to find an event near you.
Scare Directory offers a searchable map (and diary) of UK scare events. I use it regularly to plan trips and calculate the limits of how far I can drive on a return trip in a single day. This is the most intuitive and accessible resource that I can find online for anybody who loves attending horror events.
At the other end of the spectrum, ScareTOUR is my favourite resource for news and reviews of UK scare events and attractions. The team behind ScareTOUR have been visiting and reviewing horror events for years and as such offer very credible, informed reviews, which contrasts with horror influencers who visit opening nights and create pretty Tik Tok content but who have no real critical skills to offer an objective perspective on the free drinks and exclusive access they’re being offered.
The ScareTOUR website, however, is creaking under the accumulated weight of years of review, making it more difficult to navigate than you’d expect. They also create short YouTube videos before and after each event, which give a good indication of whether a scare maze is worth visiting. The ScareTOUR team seem to visit every remotely scary event in the UK and most of Europe, and by late October they’re perpetually travelling from one Halloween haunt to the next, which means that you can really trust their recommendations.
Now feels like the right time to share my annual Halloween playlist, which has grown year on year into a medley of retro Halloween pop, modern horror-punk, and sex-crazed-Satanists.
Take time to enjoy the seasons changing around you and appreciate the changing colour of the leaves. Soon enough they’ll all be underfoot turning to sludge, the scare mazes will close and it will be time to begin counting down the days until the snowdrops emerge and tease the approach of spring.
– P M Buchan