MOON BLOOD-RED, TIDE TURNING by Mark Samuels

“I was only twenty-four, and when I think of myself as I was then, I realise how much of a stranger that younger man appears to me now. The memory of his hopes, his dreams, his view of life, all fill me with contempt. He would hate this future self, and regard me as a usurper.”

A new story by Mark Samuels, that had, right from the start, an aura – via the male narrator working in his relative youth at the Samuel French theatrical publishers – of Reggie Oliver, and at the end, I finally saw that the story is dedicated to Reggie.
A satire dealing with tradition versus experiment in the theatre, the time-bending journeys from London to Cornwall, a vaguely unrequited romance with a woman who gets her own negative requital at the end, the nice touch of a Powysian amphitheatre built into a Cornish cliff, and a reprise of Dr Prozess from another new story that I read recently.
I was rather taken with the Brechtian drama production that induced audience alienation. I wish I could have seen it.

This story was published in TERROR TALES OF CORNWALL (2017) Edited by PAUL FINCH