There is an urban legend in Wrexham which tells of something not quite human. Forever on the peripheries of society, he stalks the night, living amongst the shadows and feeding on the scraps. His sallow complexion and reddened grin led to the sinister moniker Colours the Clown. Stories forged around the campfires and graveyards of this vicious bogeyman and, gradually, his savage notoriety bloomed.
Meanwhile, Bernie Davies is seeking one last haul before the holidays; he has habits he needs to fuel. Unable to resist the pull of one particular house, he has unwittingly set himself on a collision course directly with the nightmare that is Colours.
This is the debut novelette by author C S Jones.
Dark bleatings, my tribe! Just a wee little review today of this scary little wee novelette, Colours.
Bernie is an addict and also a thief, and though he does bad things to fuel his compulsions, he is not morally bankrupt. One night, he breaks into a house and is just minding his own business robbing it when he realises something is amiss. There’s a baby in the house and it’s in the clutches of a hideous, baby-eating (I think!) clown monster. Bernie could decide this is nothing to do with him and split, but he opts to rescue the baby, at great personal expense.
There’s a clear reference to another infamous, child-eating clown here, one that the author alludes to, which made me appreciate this story as a sort of homage to what is arguably the greatest and most well-known evil clown story of all time.
Anyway, Bernie ends up imprisoned for hurting the kid that he actually saved, and is sentenced to time in the slammer. I don’t know why I phrased it like that – I’ve never once in my life referred to prison as “the slammer”. It must be Bernie’s influence – I reckon he’d say “the slammer”. Sadly for Bernie, that’s not even the worst of it… it appears that Colours the Clown has followed him.
It’s a creepy story with an appropriately scary villain for this type of horror. It’s all made more grim by Bernie’s circumstances, and particularly because of the location. I’ve never been inside a prison myself but the thought of it made me see the whole story in some sort of stressed grey-scale. I won’t divulge further information about the story, lest I spoil it for you, but it’s a nice little spooky tale bound up nicely in a rotting black bow.
I’d recommend it to fans of supernatural horror. If you’d like to check out the book or the author, you can find them through the links below:
Happy Goat Horror 
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