Clive Gilson - The Story Guy
Writer, Editor & Folklorist
Don't forget to visit my dedicated YouTube channel - @CliveGilson - where you'll find over 140 folktales, myths and legends just waiting for you, with new stories dropping every week... And a huge thank you to all of my now 70,000+ subscribers to the channel - Wow!
Welcome...
Welcome to my site! Feel free to explore the menu at the top of the page to learn more about me and my work. I'm excited to share my journey with you, so dive in and enjoy!
Want to find out more about my schedule - check out my diary page...
What's New?
Just in - a great review, even if I say so myself...
Gilson (editor of the international Fireside Stories series) offers a dark, poignant collection of genre-crossing stories, all inspired by songs, that explore the fragile intersections of love, loss, resilience, and the shadows we carry. Ranging from children with superpowers to accounts of blossoming love, abusive relationships, unexpected pregnancies, and the isolating rhythm of a machine-driven society, Gilson’s stories capture raw textures of the human experience in a key suggested by their musical inspirations, which include lushly brooding tracks from Kate Bush, This Mortal Coil, Angel Olsen, The Cure, and Youssou N’Dour (the sublime “7 Seconds,” a duet with Neneh Cherry.) Gilson has a gift for moment-to-moment storytelling that grips and then lingers, like Gorilla Glue stuck to one’s fingertips, resisting even the harshest solvents of reason.
Life goes wrong in unpredictable yet resonant ways throughout these 26 compact tales, and Gilson’s vivid portrayals of scenery and emotion make it easy to lose oneself in these narratives, drowning in a wave of feeling that refuses to let go. From the Scottish Highlands to space travel to the blood-soaked earth of Danish-Viking battlefields—told from the perspective of Ulfhednar and his sacred wolf, Ulric—these stories span wide imaginative terrain. Despite some big ideas and SF elements, characterization is compelling. “The Jakey and the Nae Chancer” introduces Elliot and Fiona, who have perfected the art of detachment, the latter of whom “was almost certain that her heart was too delicate to risk breaking again.” One of the most heart-wrenching stories, “Be Well,” is inspired by a devastating loss. It's a piece that does more than tug at the heart—it reaches in and seizes hold with unrelenting intensity.
Adding a unique dimension, each story concludes with a toast to the song and artist that inspired it, an invitation to experience these briskly potent stories on another sensory level, with a soundtrack tying words to melody, emotion to rhythm. Melodies in Black Ink is not light reading—but it is deeply moving, with haunting emotional rewards.
Takeaway: Searing, surprising stories of urgent feeling, inspired by beloved songs.
Comparable Titles: Rebecca Turkewitz’s Here in the Night, Grace Miglio Pearce’s Songs from My Soul.
Tales From The Caribbean on sale from July 1st 2025
Released July 2025
Tales from the Caribbean is a vibrant, culturally rich collection of myths, legends, and folktales drawn from across the Caribbean's many islands and coastal traditions. Curated and carefully retold by a lifelong storyteller and writer of magical and speculative fiction, this book brings together voices from rainforests, mangroves, hills, and harbours-from Dominica to Jamaica, Haiti to Cuba, Trinidad to Saint Lucia.
These stories reflect the region's layered heritage-Indigenous, African, European, and beyond-offering everything from trickster tales and ghost stories to creation myths and spiritual legends. With sensitivity and respect, the author reinterprets historical sources and oral traditions, adding cultural context while preserving the original voices wherever possible.
More than a collection of folktales, Tales from the Caribbean is an act of cultural preservation and celebration-a way of remembering, resisting, and reconnecting with the magic, memory, and resilience woven through the Caribbean's storytelling legacy.
In The Works...
What's coming up over the next few weeks and months?
Tales From South America
Folk tales, myths and legends from South America - due in the Fireside Tales series some time around end of September 2025
Tales From Central America
Folk tales, myths and legends from Central America - due in the Fireside Tales series some time around end of November 2025
Proud Jenny Jay
A beautiful new collection of short stories that tell tales of Corvid myths and legends in British history and in contemporary settings,,,
Acts Of Faith
A brand new novel by Clive - telling a timely tale of suspense and political intrigue loosely based on the Lebanese hostage crisis in the 1980's...
Audio Books
Over the next few months I'm excited to be launching my first foray into the audio book world. Melodies In Black Ink should be ready in the summer, to be followed by Jenny Jay in the autumn...