While most of the stories being released in the coming months will be polished-up new edits of Manic Expression stories that have been in print dating back as far as twenty years, 10 new short stories are making their debuts. The Last Spike is the first.
Written in 2024, The Last Spike is the culmination of an idea that dates back to junior high school for me. A historical drama set in Victorian England, this story concerns the men who built the British railroad, better known as navvies (short for navigators).
If you bought Bloodshot last week, The Last Spike will offer you the first glimpse at the connections this shared universe has to offer. Every story, whether grand in scale or an intimate character piece, is part of the same millennium-spanning cosmology. While the bulk of the stories are set in the 21st century, there are many, like The Last Spike, that explore the past of this alternate timeline.
What The Last Spike is about: Set in 1843, The Last Spike tells the story of Edward Collins, a loving husband and father who wants to provide a better life for his family. Leaving his wife and children behind, he sets off from Ireland to England to seek his fortune as a railway navvy. Working in dangerous conditions and living in squalor, Edward tries to hold on to some sense of dignity.
The long, strange road to this release: Inspiration can come from the most unlikely of places. I first became fascinated with the railway navvies when I was 12 years old. I had just discovered the band that still to this day remains my favorite of all time—Genesis. They had just released their fourteenth studio album, We Can’t Dance, upon which was the sprawling ten-minute-long track “Driving the Last Spike.” This rousing epic quickly became one of my favorites, though I had no idea what the song was about. I assumed at first that it was about going off to war, only to discover in the liner notes that it was actually about… building a railroad?
Huh!?
But when I started thinking about it, laying track in the 1840s would have been like going off to war. This was dangerous work: blasting through mountains, moving tons of earth, all without modern construction equipment. These were unskilled workers being taken advantage of by an industry that saw them as expendable.
I had always wanted to write my own tale of the navvies, but the sheer scale of the story staggered me. I envisioned a grand historical novel with a cast of hundreds. At some point the story wound up on the scrap heap, as it felt too daunting to tackle.
Then, in 2024, I made the decision to write several new stories set in the Manic Expression universe. Given that framework, I suddenly saw how to tell my navvy story in a way that fit my writing style—a character study with the railway as the backdrop. I wasn’t writing an epic; I was writing a quiet story of one man searching for his own self-worth.
To tie The Last Spike into the larger Manic Expression universe, I decided to weave in the living emotions from Bloodshot and its sequels. My everyman lead would be Edward, who chronologically appears next in the story Day’s End as the incarnation of Courage. I even decided there was room in the story to include a cameo from Cindy, my villainous Bloodshot temptress, sowing the seeds of doubt 160 years before her encounter with Will Stevenson.
I also wove in a piece of my own family history — my great-great uncle was a renowned fiddle player in Ireland. Giving Edward that same talent and using it as his emotional anchor to home felt incredibly meaningful, a piece of my heritage I was finally able to explore.
To all you aspiring writers out there: Don’t let the scale of a story constrain you. I let the size of The Last Spike intimidate me for decades, but I am so happy I made it my own instead of what I felt it “should” be.
And now, more than thirty years after Genesis introduced me to the world of the navvies, I’m proud to release, for the first time, my love letter to those brave souls who worked and died to build the future.
Grab your copy today.
Let me know what you think of this new story. Did any of you have relatives who worked on the railroad? I’d love to hear your stories!
See you next week for something a little lighter.
James Daniel Walsh
About Author
