THE STRANGE CASE OF THE ACCOUNTABLE SHADOW – When a mother secretly watches her son’s home tutoring sessions through a hidden surveillance camera, she begins to see more than she bargained for.
A friend and I were chatting one day about home devices and she said how bizarre it was that you could have a camera secreted in the house and are able to check in to see what’s happening from anywhere in the world. Fine, she said, for when you’re away on holiday, but unnerving if you happen to be a guest. Unnerving is always a good starting point for a supernatural tale and as I was keen to have modern technology at the centre of one of the stories in the collection, I began to develop the scenario of a paranoid mother who through a hidden camera secretly watches the home tutorial sessions that take place between her son and his teacher with Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde being the text that is studied. However, as the mother watches from an upstairs room, she notices an ‘unaccountable shadow’ – a phrase I came across in a H.R. Wakefield tale – only this strange shadow isn’t there when she comes down and examines the room itself...
"With a fine grasp of character and idiolect, Steve Nallon conjures up worlds with a great sense of authenticity and an even greater sense of imagination... Steve has an uncanny ability to find fresh and disturbing images – of life and death – in what we think are familiar worlds."
