Horror Reanimated… the home of Bloody Books

Interview with Conrad Williams by JD’L

June 17th, 2009

I know nothing about Conrad Williams and I knew nothing about his latest novel ONE until I started reading it – coming to a book cold is the best way, I find. At its core, ONE is a story about the nature of hope and it got right under my skin. It moved me. It also scared me. That doesn’t happen very often and ONE has become my favourite book of the year.

So, it was with a good deal of pleasurable excitement that I wrote my questions for Conrad…

Joseph D’Lacey: When I was halfway through ONE, I knew we had to have you on Horror Reanimated so I’m delighted to be talking to you. What aspect of you was it that brought forth this novel – if that isn’t too odd a question? Was it something you’d planned over some time or did the story simply demand to be told? Perhaps all your tales come in the same way – could you tell us a little about what happens to you when you’re working?

Conrad Williams: Thanks for inviting me, Joseph. ONE came about principally because I’d always wanted to write an ‘end-of-the-world’ novel. I think every horror writer has one simmering away on the back burner. I have notes from years ago for a novel that was meant to be called DARK MATTER (a title snaffled by Peter Straub now, curse him) in which the surface of the Earth is fried by a massive solar flare. In ONE, a gamma ray burst from the death of a nearby star is to blame, although this is never mentioned explicitly. Once I had the event, and the explanation for my protagonist’s avoidance of it, the rest of the story was pretty much nailed on. I had to write about a father and son. I have three of my own; the book could not have been written without them.

JD’L: ONE’s themes have been explored in other post-apocalyptic tales. I’m thinking of Stephen King’s The Stand, for one. However, the closest and most obvious parallel is with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; another of my favourite books from the last couple of years.

Were you touched by these or other eschatological tales or did ONE feel like something new for you, something without a particular precursor?

CW: THE ROAD changed my life. I’ve never read another novel like it. I read it every year and it takes me a day and it always makes me cry. It is at once the most perfect horror story and the most perfect love story I know. I wanted to write a UK version. The States seems to have a monopoly on this kind of thing. I wanted to claim a bit of misery for Blighty.

It’s always going to be hard to write a post-apocalyptic novel without these huge shadows at your shoulder. THE STAND and I AM LEGEND are also very precious to me. But you can’t really avoid writing an extinction level event story, if you’re a horror writer.

JD’L: I love post-apocalyptic stories – both the reading and the writing of. It seems like there’s a lot of them about right now. Is all this Armageddon fiction arising from a common psychic weather pattern, a kind of morphic resonance that writers everywhere are picking up on? Are we feeling our planetary mortality more acutely than ever before?

Hey, maybe the world really is about to end…

CW: I think there’s probably something in this theory about horror becoming more popular when there’s something laying waste to the population, be it economic meltdown, terrorism, disease or war. And apocalyptic fiction, or survival horror, has a special impact because it is an everyman story. You survive the warheads raining down, you prove to be immune to the aggressive strain of flu, you happen to be working on the seabed when the ozone layer is roasted off the face of the Earth, then this will be you. This is your story. It’s a constant, worming fear that this will happen to us all one day. All apocalypse fiction is prophetic, in a way.

JD’L: In terms of genre, ONE could be survival horror. Some people will call it science fiction. Certainly, both elements are present. The theme, however, struck me as being about hope and how it sustains people – how it can even twist them.

Do you think horror writers have a greater thematic scope than writers of mainstream fiction? I suspect the genre allows us to go much deeper into the core of what it means to be human.

Do you agree or am I full of it?

CW: I do agree. I think that it’s only in extremis that we discover who we really are, what we’re really like. Every day we wear masks. We spend so much time projecting the image of ourselves that we wish to be acknowledged that we end up strangers to ourselves. If you crash in a jet about to take off from a runway, and survive impact only to see a wall of fire rising up the aisles behind you, will you be one of those people who politely queues up for the exits and waits for instructions, or will you be clambering over the seats, mashing old people and children back into their chairs in a bid to be out of the fuselage first. I’d like to think I’d be a hero. Last off the plane. But I just don’t know myself well enough – nobody does – until you’re in the moment. Stripping those false identities away and presenting our crude, fundamental structure is what interests me about horror fiction. Ordinary people trying to cope with extraordinary events, sometimes succeeding, often failing.

JD’L: I don’t want to say too much about the novel because almost any information will spoil the freshness of the story. However, I do want to discuss the protagonist, if that’s alright.

Richard Jane, the ‘one’ of the novel’s title, begins the tale as a chance survivor and then becomes a traveller as he searches for his son. There’s an ‘averageness’ about Jane, as evidenced, for example, by his choice of weapon – he’s not some military demi-god, just an ordinary man. What makes him extraordinary is his love for his boy, a love which becomes more idealistic as the novel unfolds. And yet this love and the hope that he’ll see his son again become Jane’s own high-octane fuel, allowing him to search ever-onward.

I’m not sure I’ve ever come across a character who is so physically and psychically dismantled by the end of a tale.

How did it feel to be the master of Jane’s destiny, of his dissolution?

CW: It was hard, because of course, he is, to some extent, me. I consciously wanted to write a third person novel, but from one point of view. He’s in every scene. He’s the filter for what is experienced throughout the book. So I got very close to him and there was much hand-wringing about what would happen to him and his son.

Initially he was the ‘one’ of the title. I intended to write a novel with one character. One story. But it’s impossible. You need someone else to bounce off. My old creative writing tutor at Lancaster University, Alan Burns, said that it was impossible to write an OMOHO (one man on his own). At the time I thought, bollocks. But he was right. There’s no story if there’s only one person. So the ONE of the title is him, but it’s also about something else: the title is explained in the novel.

Jane’s choice of weapon is interesting, and it caused some debate between me and my editor. I didn’t want him to become some tooled-up Rambo swaggering down the A1 with an arsenal hanging off his greased muscles. It wasn’t about weaponry. He really didn’t care about defence. So he clung to the first weapon he came across, an air rifle. A powerful one, mind. Not one of these pump-up pellet puffers we had when we were kids.

JD’L: Not only did you reduce Richard Jane as the story progressed, you also did a good job of mutating our country and capital city. You made the familiar unrecognisable and that’s probably what scared me the most – the idea that the future might somehow alter the very fabric of our world. Possibly to a point beyond which we cannot, as a species, adapt.

I have chills just thinking about it. Did you, or was it just a bit of fun?

CW: We’re a pretty hardy species, but there’s fragility there too. We’re having any rough edges sanded off us by a fondness – not a need – for convenience. We’re not hunter-gatherers any more. We’re docile animals grazing on a constant drip-feed of vacuum-packed meals from Tesco. We drive to the corner shop for the newspapers. We have umpteen remote controls to tune in to channels none of us want to watch. We have satnav and wifi and Twitter. People are getting older and people are getting more sedentary. Come the apocalypse I can see an awful lot of folk shambling outside to watch it kick off, desperate to check out immediately, because surviving will be no picnic. It will be just too much like hard work.

JD’L: Are you widely knowledgeable, Conrad? There were many occasions in the novel where I was thinking, how does he know all this stuff?! Did you have to do much research and, if so, is that a process you enjoy?

CW: My dad always said to me that it’s better to know a little about a lot than a lot about a little. I actually think it’s better to know a little about a lot as well as a lot about a little – especially if you’re an airline pilot or a surgeon. I’m curious, which is a good thing in a novelist. And there was a lot of research, especially for the opening couple of chapters. I did enjoy it, yes. I like to learn new things. I used to spend a lot of time at the British Library when I was living in London and miss the place terribly. I’m glad if all that stuff about diving and oil platforms came over without looking as if it was researched. I think it’s best to ration that kind of information rather than clout readers over the head with pages of look at all the work I did!

JD’L: As I mentioned in the intro, I know nothing about you. Could you tell me a little about your writing history – where has your fiction appeared in the past, when was your first novel published, that kind of thing?

CW: I’ve been around for a while, but I’m no longer the enfant terrible of British horror. Graham Joyce no longer refers to me as ‘Young Conrad’. I published my first short story, ‘Dirty Water’, in a small press publication called Dark Dreams when I was 18. Since then I’ve had around 80 stories published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. My first novel, HEAD INJURIES, came out in 1998. It was optioned by Michael Winterbottom’s production company, Revolution Films. Four novels since then (DECAY INEVITABLE is published by Solaris Books this summer) and hopefully many more to come.

JD’L: Your writing style, use of language and descriptive power made ONE a very rich experience. It’s a lot more than just a great story; it’s exceptionally well-executed. The blend of beauty and pace makes the tale magnetic.

You appear to love language itself – I’m guessing you’ll have written poetry at some point. How much notice do you think publishers take of writing style when considering submissions?

CW: I do love language, and I have written poetry, but only the kind of juvenilia that ought to be shredded and used as hamster mattresses. A love of lyrical writing remains, however. Trying to describe the most horrifying things with beautiful imagery is a real challenge, but I think it can add impact. Clive Barker knows about the beauty of an opened body, for example. In such circumstances, the writing, as well as what’s being written about, can add to the power of a scene. I want people to recoil, but be unable to look away. I love that paradox.

I don’t know if publishers pay much attention to writing style. Maybe they do. But I suspect, for many of them, it gets in the way. They want stories. You only have to look at the way Jeffrey Archer or Dan Brown write to see that the quality of the writing is secondary. I’m as interested in the craft as I am in the story, possibly to the detriment of story in some cases, certainly when I was younger. Which is bad too. There’s only so much pretty writing you can get away with before someone says, ‘well, that was beautifully written, but what happened?’ Graham Greene, Jim Crace, Rupert Thomson, these are the writers I turn to for great writing. Writers who care as much about the how as well as the what.

JD’L: The genre fiction marketplace, especially for horror, is a tough one right now – the ‘hiatus’ at your own publisher, Virgin Horror, is an example of how things can go wrong. Would you consider writing in other genres if the money was right or do you write dark, bizarre tales for their own sake?

CW: It’s extremely disappointing. Adam Nevill, who launched that list at Virgin, had assembled a superb stable of writers. I was stunned to discover that I’d be sharing a publisher with Ramsey Campbell, Stephen Gregory and Thomas Ligotti, among others. The problem is that publishing is an industry, not a crucible for experiments, and the bean counters want to see wide profit margins. You can’t build a reputation any more. There is no midlist. There has to be a big spike on the sales graph, right now. What’s encouraging is the rise of the small presses, although I’d hesitate to refer to PS Publishing, for example, as a small press any more.

I have written, pseudonymously, a crime thriller with an intended series character, and that has found favour with a New York editor who is working with me on the novel in the hope that he can convince his bosses that it’s a goer. But even that has a supremely dark spine to it. It’s still, recognisably, my stuff. I don’t think I could turn my hand to lad-lit, or romantic fiction, nor would I want to. I’m not interested in trying to surf the wave of the next big thing, like the writers who spewed out novels with ‘code’ or ‘cypher’ in the title once Dan Brown’s THE DA VINCI CODE found its way on to every beach in the world. You have to have faith in what you’re doing, try to bend everyone’s way of thinking your way. There’s nothing I’d like more than to be a full-time writer, but I’m not going to become a hack to do that.

JD’L: Whilst some imprints are shutting down or not buying new horror, others are stepping in to fill their shoes – HarperCollins’s Angry Robot line, for example. We’ve all got this feeling here at Horror Reanimated that the genre is on the rise, both in quality and popularity. What are your thoughts?

CW: I’d like to think so, despite my unhappy experience with Virgin. There’s definitely an appetite for horror, especially on screen. I hope that this gradual opening of arms we’re currently seeing among a number of publishers is indicative of a new age of horror fiction. There are a bunch of hot, hungry young authors out there. All it needs is a hot, hungry young editor to tap into it.

JD’L: Traditionally (it’s still a rather short tradition as traditions go…) our interviewees are given the power to make two awards.

The Sword of the Ultimate Darkness goes to the work in any medium that will remain a horror classic forever. Well, until the end of the world at least.

The Plague Pits are where the worst examples of horror in any medium end up.

Please make your nominations…

CW: Sword of Ultimate Darkness – I’ll go for T.E.D. Klein’s The Ceremonies. Absorbing, beautifully paced and written, and very, very creepy.

As for the Plague Pits… any of the Hollywood remakes of what ought to be untouchable classics. I’m thinking of Psycho and The Haunting, but there are and will be many more. Leave them alone, FFS…

JD’L: It’s been my great pleasure to chat to you.

I usually write a creepy intro for these interviews but ONE was so disturbing, I didn’t feel you required it. From all of us here at Horror Reanimated, I’d just like to say, Mr. Conrad Williams, you are one scary motherfucker and we love you!

Keep up the great work and let us know how you’re doing from time to time.

CW: It’s been a pleasure and a privilege. Best of luck with your own work too.

Entry Filed under: The Function of Fear,Uncategorized,Writing Chat