William Bundy sent me "A Walk in the Park" and I narrated it for the most recent episode of Classic Ghost Stories. Afterwards, I sat down with him for an interview about where it came from and how he works. We had a good chat about the story, its inspiration and how he sets about writing.
SPOILERS: So, stop right there and go and listen to the story first! If you don't care about spoilers, then read on before listening.
The opening establishes its atmosphere with confidence. The air is heavy. Dogs bark at something in the encroaching mist. A tall, faintly handsome man in a black cloak moves through a sleeping suburb with the unhurried certainty of a predator, his red eyes catching the moonlight. He is surveying rather than passing through, and the distinction matters.
What follows is a cycle of predatory transformation. The cloaked man has a servant – a giant, eyeless creature with marbled grey skin and stitched sockets, whose clawed hands spark into motion like old machinery being switched on for the first time. The creature does the fetching. The man does the consuming. He drapes his cloak over his victims and absorbs their features, emerging with a new face assembled from the people he has drained – a composite, an abstraction, something not quite human at all.
The story then shifts, and this is where it justifies its real strangeness. Matthew is a boy who witnesses the cloaked figure from his bedroom window one Blood Moon night when he is three. For the following decade, he suffers recurring nightmares and sleep paralysis, with a winged visitor that hangs outside his window each full moon like a bat, relaying information he cannot fully decode. He writes it down in an unknown language that feels purposeful without being readable. His face contorts when he recites the words. The doctors have no explanation.
By the time Matthew reaches adulthood, the transformation is complete in a way that subverts every expectation the story has built. He does not escape the cycle. He becomes it, finding himself drawn to a park at night, looking up at a lit window, and recognising the young boy staring back at him. The predator's successor is made, and the winged thing that guided him through years of nightmare turns out to have been preparing him for exactly this all along.
In the interview, William described the story's origins simply. It began with a misty bike ride home near Halloween – the atmosphere alone suggested a figure stalking suburban streets, and he followed the feeling. The eyeless creature arrived of its own accord during the writing, the way certain characters apparently insist on their own existence when the work is going well. He wasn't planning it.
William talks about vibe rather than plot, and I mean that as a genuine observation about his priorities rather than a criticism. He is interested in texture and atmosphere, in what a story leaves behind rather than what it explains. During the interview I found myself reaching for Thomas Ligotti and Robert Aickman as reference points – that same quality of a world that is almost right but not quite, where the wrongness is never named directly. William seemed comfortable with those comparisons without being defined by them.
The identity and transformation themes feel personal in ways he acknowledged without over-explaining. Body horror, shifting faces, the terror of looking in a mirror and seeing something other – he suggested these things connect to his own experience of mental health and self-articulation, but left the reading open rather than prescriptive. The story carries that weight without collapsing under it.
He keeps a dream journal and mines it deliberately for imagery that rational planning cannot manufacture. He mentioned Gestalt therapy, and that influence shows in the story's internal logic – things happen because they must, following a dream consistency rather than conventional cause and effect.
The power of "A Walk in the Park" lies in what it withholds. It never tells you what the winged thing is, what the cloaked man ultimately wants, or what Matthew's accumulated lives will produce. It ends on a wink and a whistle, which is exactly the right note. This one leaves you with something unresolved, and that is the correct response to the material.
William records his dreams – intense, vivid ones – and uses them as source material precisely because they resist the kind of logic that explanation destroys. He mentioned Gestalt therapy in this context, and the idea connects to Jung's understanding of the symbol: not a cipher where x equals 2y once you know the code, but the unconscious's best attempt to convey something that words alone cannot carry. The winged thing and the cloaked man don't represent anything other than themselves, and what they are, neither we nor William Bundy can tell you in rational terms. We can approach them through their feeling, their texture, their tone – the same way you approach a painting or a piece of music. Those things aren't standing in for something else. They're just themselves. The story works the same way, and William knows better than to interfere with that by trying to solve it.
William Bundy's work appears in Once in a Haunted House. You can find him and his other writing at his website, linked below.
William Bundy is a UK-based writer of dark and supernatural fiction whose work spans short stories, essays, and film.
Find his writing at www.williambundy.com,
his Substack at redsaidwrites.substack.com,
his film work on Instagram at instagram.com/redsaidfilms,
and all his links gathered in one place at linktr.ee/williambundy.
