Those of you with your fingers on the Horror Reanimated pulse – er, I mean flatline – will know I rarely review books. However, every now and again something truly unique comes along. Mendal Johnson’s Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ is one of those books.
It’s difficult to attract attention to a novel without ruining its mystique but that’s my aim with this post. This is an unmissable read.
1974 was a good year for horror. Carrie was published and so was this little frightener. One of the authors went on to greater works, greater wealth and greater fame. The other was dead within two years. Interestingly, both men had trouble with alcohol. In Johnson’s case it was the death of him; he succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver. And, whereas King is wonderfully prolific, Johnson died leaving only three unfinished manuscripts. He was 48.
The plot: Bobby and Cindy’s parents go on holiday for a week, leaving a pretty babysitter named Barbara in charge. Along with their friends John, Dianne and Paul, the kids call themselves Freedom Five. They’ve been playing games together for years. The day after the parents leave, Freedom Five ‘capture’ Barbara and a new game begins.
I don’t want to say too much about the story. If you have a genuine interest in dark fiction, you should read the book. Here, in glorious black on white, is torture porn from thirty-five years ago. I expected it to be badly handled and poorly written. Neither was the case. Mendal Johnson wrote in tight, measured prose which is, on occasion, beautiful to read. This wasn’t just a book of vicarious thrills either – though, believe me, they are there if you want them – it was an examination of the psychology of children, and therefore, of our own. Each character is fully and tragically realised; their logic and the logic of the novel itself, though twisted, is always rightly fulfilled. The pace and plotting is near to flawless, tension rising all the time. The moment you put the book down, you want to pick it up again and, if you have the time, it’s one of those you could read in a sitting – if you can handle it.
I’m not saying LGPATA is an accurate appraisal of your average child’s mind. Freedom Five are a little isolated. They are a little odd. A situation arises in which their earlier games together can be explored further. One thing leads to another and group ‘morality’ overcomes the morality of the individual. But what I’m also not saying is that these things never happen. They do and it’s well documented. Cases occurred before the book was written and many more have occurred since. And that, perhaps, is what makes the book so utterly chilling. Whether victim or perpetrator, it could be your child. It could have been you. Maybe it was. Who is really prepared to speak of the questionable things we did in our ‘innocent’ youth?
This author, for one, is.
For a truly in depth look at the life of Mendal Johnson and more background about the novel – read it first, if you don’t want it spoiled – there’s a brilliant 3-part blog covering it all right here.
“I Sell the Dead” is the latest film from Larry Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix and Scareflix production companies and, like most films from Larry, “I Sell the Dead” REALLY delivers!!Starring Dominic “Lost” Monaghan, Ron “Hellboy” Perlman, Angus “Phantasm” Scrimm and Fessenden himself, the film revolves around a pair of 18th-century graverobbers, Arthur Blake (Monaghan) and Willie Grimes (Fessenden), as they TRY to make a (dis) honest living but are constantly running a-foul of sinister doctors, murderous competitors and, of course, the law.
The film has a wonderful vintage look to it, lots of fog and leafless trees, and I was really impressed when I realized that “I Sell the Dead” was shot entirely in New York State.The production design really captured 18th-century Ireland and the actors had their Irish/Cockney/British accents down.There were also some great humorous set pieces, mostly between Monaghan and Fessenden – with their chemistry, they could well be the 21st-century’s answer to Abbott and Costello – and even Perlman and Scrimm had their moments.And not always necessarily on-screen.
The story unfolds as young Arthur Blake is recounting his years of graverobbing to a priest, Father Duffy (Perlman), before he goes to the guillotine as Grimes has just (hilariously) done.Starting young, Blake (Daniel Manche plays the young Blake) is introduced to the dead in all their gruesomeness and beauty.But when the sinister Dr. Vernon Quint (Scrimm) starts applying some serious pressure on our protagonists to bring him “FRESHER!!” bodies so that he might “work”on them, the two graverobbers start digging up…things…even they can’t quite explain.When they come across a female vampire, one of my favorite “corpses”,hilarity ensues as well as revenge.
Besides Dr. Quint and the law, our boys must also deal with a sinister rival grave robbing clan, the House of Murphy, run by the menacing Cornelius Murphy (John Speredakos), the masked-because-her-face-is-so-disfigured-that-she-kills-with-it Valentine Murphy (Heather Bullock), Bulger (Alisdair Stewart) who has a mouth of razor sharp teeth and the never-seen-except-in-silhouette head of the clan, Murphy Senior.
This movie is just SO much FUN!!Zombies, vampires, body parts, Blake and Grimes themselves and their peculiar adventures as well as the Hammer Film look to the movie all add up to another great movie for Halloween (add “Trick ‘r Treat” to this for a great double feature on All Hallow’s Eve).
The DVD, which comes out in the UK on November 2 from Anchor Bay on both DVD (£15.99) and Blu-ray (£24.99) has extras which include two commentaries: one with producer/actor Larry Fessenden and actor Dominic Monaghan and the other with writer/director Glenn McQuaid.There is also an hour-long “Making of” featuretteand a 10-minute visual effects Behind the Scenes.The DVD should also come with a full-color comic book (we think!!!).
FantasyCon 2009 was one of the best weekends of my life.
I rubbed shoulders with many creators and purveyors of fantastic fiction and art. Some of them have appeared on Horror Reanimated already, others I hope to see here soon. Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror are arteries in the body of the world’s imagination and you can be assured these arteries are healthy and well supplied, pulsing with magical blood.
Among the heroes of the world’s imagination whose hands I shook, and in no particular order, were the following:
Graham Joyce, Simon Bestwick, Conrad Williams, Marc Gascoigne, Lee Harris, Carole Johnstone, Gary McMahon, Tim Lebbon, Mark Morris, Ramsey Campbell, Sarah Pinborough, Mark Deniz, Guy Adams, Chaz Brenchley, Adam Nevill, Allyson Bird, Andrew Hook, Peter Crowther, Mathew F. Riley, John Lenahan, Lee Thompson, Rio Youers, Andy Remic, Raymond Russell, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Andy Barker, David Flint, Geoff Nelder, Raven Dane, Vincent Chong, Peter May, Alex Davis and several others I can’t remember on account of being variously over-stimulated.
I was nervous about attending the convention even though I wasn’t taking part in any panels or readings. I shouldn’t have been. The warmth of the atmosphere and the obvious camaraderie that goes back generations was a welcome embrace. Like an orphan reunited with its family, I relished every second of it.
There were so many stories about young or inexperienced authors (now renowned) receiving invaluable help and support from those who have gone before them. Similar expressions of gratitude came from established authors who still need the encouragement of their peers to stay on course. It’s so easy to go around thinking about yourself, worrying about your own work and career or the lack thereof. But at Fantasycon, you meet publishers whose sole passion and mission is to bring small voices like your own to the fore, even though it means they will never be wealthy. You meet authors who will write until they die – published or not – because there’s a fire inside them which cannot be extinguished.
All this both humbled and inspired me. The most humbling thing of all, however, was the beautiful shock of winning The Sydney J Bounds Best Newcomer Award. When you consider that my BFS membership had lapsed and that, having had a superb curry instead of attending the deadly banquet, I was half intending to nip to the cinema to see District 9, it’s a wonder I was even there to accept it! But friends in the know steered me to the double doors of the banqueting hall and there we stood, watching the awards ceremony from afar, sometimes barely able to hear the nominations. I remember little of what happened after I heard my own name announced, merely the heart thumping overload as I walked to the stage and made a few stumbling remarks of gratitude. You can see the moment for yourself right here.
And here’s Tim Lebbon winning the award for Best Novella (The Reach of Children)
Not to mention Allyson Bird scooping the award for Best Collection (Bull Running for Girls)
And William Heaney/Graham Joyce accepting the award for Best Novel (Memoirs of a Master Forger)
Whether I’d won an award or not wouldn’t have changed the impact FantasyCon had on me. I discovered something far greater than myself (no mean feat when your ego’s the size of Jupiter), something worth giving to not just for my own sake but for that of others. In our rush to be discovered, get deals, be on the shelf - something writers enjoy - to get bigger deals and to advance, it’s easy to forget what writing is for.
Writing is for magic. Writing is magic. I can’t pretend to understand how or why but I know that much about it.
Whether we’re just starting out, languishing in a slump or at the top of our game writing will always be our attempt to reach out to something greater than ourselves. And there are few pleasures in this world as lasting or as true as knowing you’ve grasped a tiny thread of the beyond and brought it back for others to touch.
This suits me because, in essence, I function on a mystical level. When writing, I am certain of nothing from one day to the next. What was true yesterday may no longer be true today. Mostly, I take my cues from the mythic voice of nature. No path, artistic or otherwise, leads anywhere worth visiting save that path which appears from direct contact with the mystical, with the unknown and the unseen. Writing is a way of stretching into the abyss. Somehow, The British Fantasy Society works in exactly the same way.
I hope therefore, having found my spiritual kin within the ranks of the BFS, that I will be able to give something back to the society, something that will bring value and richness to its many members.
Or perhaps I can just buy everyone a drink. Like this one…
Joseph D'Lacey celebrating with a very nice cocktail
I had to watch this Danish film twice to make sure I was correct in my initial reaction to it.This film, about a substitute teacher (actually a chicken farmer’s wife who is infected, almost “SLiTHER”-style, by an alien spore) and her wary class of 6th graders is freakin’ hilarious!!
When Ulla Harms (the delightful and delightfully named Paprika Steen) shows up to sub for a teacher who has come down with salmonella poisoning, the students are horrified at how she insults the kids: one boy has buck teeth – she tells him to correct something on the blackboard but be careful not to trip over his teeth on the way.And when she finds something funny, there is no holding back her mirth – she guffaws almost to the point where someone REALLY needs to slap her or she will piddle on herself.
One of her students, the withdrawn and picked-upon Carl (Jonas Wandschneider) who lost his mother recently in a car accident, starts to notice things about Ulla that just don’t add up.How she read his mind in class, how she knew every student’s name without consulting any sort of seating chart, how she just…knew everything (the students started quizzing her with complex math equations which she promptly answered, adding “Everyone knows that.”).During recess, Carl sees Ulla standing in front of a window, completely “switched-off”.Oooeeeeoooo!!
Other strange things occur when things aren’t going Ulla’s way – her first day in class, the students are fighting when every single one of their cell phones go off plus she has the ability to change what comes out of a student’s mouth, if it’s an insult to Ulla.My favorite was when poor Albert of the teeth (Jakob Fals Nygaard) tries to call Ulla a “cruel monster” and it kept coming out as “cool hamster”.
At a hastily called parent-teacher meeting, when Ulla is running late, Carl observes her with her satchel and a strange large silver ball.And what he sees that ball do…Well, you will just have to check this movie out.
The children gather the courage to break into Ulla’s home which is deserted, unlived-in, with huge piles of broken furniture in every room.While there, Ulla returns home and the students manage to avoid her until she decides to have some “lunch”.The kids run screaming from her house.Of course, later that evening when the students are tyring to get their parents to understand what they saw, the parents decide to pay Ulla a visit and, naturally, the house is immaculate and beautifully decorated.Carl’s friend, Philip (Nikolaj Falkenberg-Klok) even whispers to Carl that he knew this would happen.
Slowly, the parents of the students come to adore Ulla and in a particularly hilarious scene, after the 6th graders have earned a trip to Paris with their crazy teacher, it is every 6th grader for themself, fighting getting on the bus, fighting their parents – you just have to see it.Everyone calms down, though, when Carl’s father, Jesper (Ulrich Thomsen) announces that since the original bus driver was sick from salmonella poisoning (detecting a pattern here?) and Jesper knows how to drive a bus, the students reluctantly board the bus but the shots of them with their faces pressed to the windows, saying “goodbye” to their parents is also funny – they act as though they are “walking the Green Mile”.
I could tell you a LOT more about this little gem of a movie: the mysterious map Carl finds, the ooga-booga moment Carl has when Ulla comes to have dinner with him and his father (who Ulla seems to have designs on), Ulla’s family’s past and the REAL reason Ulla is there, as well as the final scene between Ulla and Carl and a “pressing machine” at the chicken farm, but you should really enjoy it without too many spoilers.Very funny with some unexpected scares, very original and Ulla can be downright creepy.And then there are the chickens…
One word of advice:I have read several viewer complaints about how badly dubbed this movie is.Well, a simple solution to THAT “problem” is, when setting up the film, click on Danish Dolby instead of English Dolby and you will get an undubbed film with English subtitles.Problem solved,
Banquet for the Damned combines several very real elements – night terrors, shamanism, anthropology, witchcraft and heavy metal – in a very real location; St. Andrews. It’s one of the creepiest books I’ve ever read. I had shivers across my skin as I discovered within its pages the histories of the covens of Europe and the studies of evil spirits and familiars in the shamanic traditions of South America and Africa.
Into this world of student revelry and stuffy intellectualism, comes a renegade writer and explorer of altered realities, Eliot Coldwell. And he’s brought something nasty with him. Something hungry. Students begin to disappear from the campus.
At the same time, following the break up of their band, guitarists Dante Shaw and his best friend Tom travel to St. Andrews. They plan to meet Eliot Coldwell, Dante’s spiritual hero and author of the notorious cult novel, Banquet for the Damned. Dante intends to make a concept album using Eliot and his work as the theme.
But instead of finding inspiration in St. Andrews, Dante discovers nightmares stalking the town’s ancient streets…
*
It’s no secret that Bloody Books and Virgin Horror were in direct competition for the same share of the genre market. When the Virgin line folded, we were kind of pleased to be left in the game.
Horror Reanimated seeks the best in the genre and, as time went by, we featured Virgin titles and talked to their authors. (See our posts on Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell and Conrad Williams). Having read plenty of Virgin Horror, it now strikes me as tragic that such high quality fiction will no longer issue forth from that elegantly twisted horn of plenty.
My most recent read was ‘Banquet for the Damned’ by Adam L G Nevill. Originally published by PS Publishing, this title gripped me as hard as any supernatural tale ever has. It is a superbly crafted, beautifully told and genuinely frightening novel. As a final tribute to a noble and prematurely buried imprint, I bring you a candid interview with Adam L G Nevill, author of Banquet and editor of the Virgin Horror line.
We honour the genre’s slain; enemy and friend alike, generals and foot soldiers equally. Why? Because when you throw the festering undead into a pit, they stick together!
But that’s not all. Adam has recently proved himself truly undead having risen again with a major two-book deal…
Joseph D’Lacey: Adam, I’m going to thank you in advance for agreeing to what I realise may be an uncomfortable interview for you following the termination of your horror list.
But I’d like to talk to you first about Banquet for the Damned. This novel came right out of leftfield and slammed me hard upside the head. I’d long believed my supernatural ‘fear’ nerve to be burned out through overuse. Apparently not. What chilled me about the story was the depth of research the characters had done on witchcraft, familiars and evil spirits. It was all too real. What can you say to reassure me that you made it all up?
Adam L G Nevill: Thanks for the really kind words JD’L, and for reading it so carefully. There is nothing more satisfying than finding an ideal reader.
As for reassurance that it’s all fiction, who can say … Night terrors are an absolutely real and universal form of sleep disturbance long associated with witchcraft. My story is inspired by the many actual histories of witchcraft and demonology that I read and researched. And the authors of those tomes were pretty convincing …
While I was based in St Andrews and matriculated at the university, I discovered the most incredible archive of old books on the occult bequeathed to the university library by a former rector. And the university also has a world class anthropology department, with some terrific sources on the occult and superstition in the developing world too. I remember having 40 books on witchcraft and the supernatural on my post-grad library card, when a curious librarian finally asked me what I was doing at the university. It was Lovecraftian – some of the books had not been borrowed since the sixties and I would scurry back to my room and pore over them. I had a year up there and had the time to read dozens of secondary texts on the subject of the unworldly. From that I took great creative license with specific histories and idioms to create the sense that my fictional scholars were authorities in order to make the supernatural element seem authentic. I blended bits and pieces from many documented stories and phenomenon to create my own history of a forgotten pagan god/witch’s familiar that had been called by many different names and moved through the ages, worshipped by one cult or another. I wanted its origins and long story to reflect the patterns of how real history is interpreted and revised, so that even the documentation and sources seemed authentic.
Making the supernatural believable in a modern setting is no easy task, so the carefully wrought history, the scholars, the academic environment, are designed to add credence to a preposterous notion I want a reader to accept. I lose interest in so much horror fiction because of its errant silliness from the beginning, but well-researched books like Matheson’s Hell House, Blatty’s Exorcist and Legion, or most recently Simmon’s The Terror and Brookes’s World War Z unsettle you far more because of that sense of authenticity and plausibility. Place the unrecognisable subtly amongst the recognisable and it’s easier for a reader to lose themselves in a story.
JD’L: Great. Like I’ll sleep a wink tonight knowing all that.
Our resident supernatural horror author, Bill Hussey, doesn’t believe in ghosts, spirits or the afterlife. Aside from the research angle, how much actual experience of the supernatural do you have? Do you think there’s a world we can’t see, a world where dark forces conspire to enter ours?
ALGN: I suffered dreadful night terrors while writing the book. I’d never had them before. Bizarrely, two readers have emailed me to declare the same while reading it. Which would suggest we all induced them subconsciously while either writing or reading a book featuring vivid night terrors. Or, I do wonder, did I make myself receptive to a phenomenon that was actually there anyway? I began the book in St Andrews, but continued writing the novel’s first draft for 18 months in Kent, when these experiences occurred. I would awake periodically to see the outline of a very tall and thin figure standing before the curtains of my room, silhouetted by both the ambient light passing through the curtains and by a thin line of red light, like fire, around its shape. I would sit up, pinch myself, blink, make certain I was fully awake, but the figure would remain there, more or less at the foot of my bed, staring. You can imagine the terror. I even called out and challenged it on a number of occasions, but received no response. It would eventually walk the length of the room, then turn and vanish through the door. I base one scene in Banquet on what I experienced. My landlord in Kent was deeply uncomfortable with such talk, and his girlfriend told me of a family tragedy involving fire which explained his reticence. I said no more about it, but she also pointed out to me how a second shadow would follow my landlord from room to room in this lovely old house we lived in. And sure enough, it did. The second shadow was a different size.
Add to that, as an undergraduate, while billeted in halls that were once part of a military hospital, I would often wake because someone was standing beside my bed and leaning over me, with their face close to mine. It used to scare me witless. Door handles would also turn, doors would open, no one would come through, though other residents at the end of the corridor featuring the affected rooms would see a woman in a white uniform entering or leaving.
On holiday, in an old cottage in Dorset, we would sit in the living room and hear footsteps walk the length of the rooms upstairs. It was terrifying at first, but by the end of the week we became accustomed to the walking figure (though no one would go to the toilet alone). The owners of the cottage informed me that nearly every visitor experiences a haunting there and someone even took a photo of the ghost, looking through a window. Needless to say, we never went back, and I am relieved it was not me that saw that face at the window.
Add a whole raft of inexplicable sixth sense experiences to these brushes with the uncanny, as well as the fact that everyone has a ghost story, so I don’t rule out ‘activity’ after death. Both positive and negative activity (most of our family hauntings were positive farewells from the recently departed, and I have two relatives with psychic tendencies). I may revile religious fundamentalism, and am no fan of most organised religion either, but I do find the current atheistic lobby tedious. And believing in nothing but status and money seems to be a modern dilemma.
I think the very act of writing has an element of mysticism involved too, and I have sympathies with Machen and Blackwood’s creative visions, who were both mystical writers. A deep involvement in fiction, both reading and writing, has also given me transcendent experiences and I wouldn’t be without them.
JD’L: Banquet is set in locations that are very well known to you. Dante and Tom set off from Birmingham and spend most of the novel in St. Andrews. To begin with, I thought these real locations were going to kill my suspension of disbelief. In the end the effect was the opposite. Such was the power of the writing that I could see the streets of St Andrews and its old buildings and dark alleyways – even though I’ve never been there. How important do you think the setting was to the success of the novel?
ALGN: Thanks again JD’L. St Andrews is pretty much a character in the novel. I drove up there knowing I wanted to write a novel of supernatural horror, with a vague idea of the story featuring a notorious but nearly forgotten book and occult scholar. But when I received my first sighting of the town, I knew I had found my setting. The town was such a tremendous inspiration – it is one of those places that make the supernatural seem possible. The wealth of history, the architecture, the tributes to martyrs, the shadowy courts, the very age of the place, just conjured macabre fantasies. I was absurdly terrified of doing it an injustice, and was so enthusiastic about the town, I did my absolute best to recreate it in language as precisely as I was able at the time. Again, I do think a detailed sense of place and conjuring of atmosphere through specific details lays the ground for the insertion of the implausible, the impossible, and aids the suspension of disbelief. The very physical presence of the ancient town, twinned with extensive reading, allowed the story to write itself. So without St Andrews, there would have been no Banquet.
JD’L: There are so many passages in Banquet that are a delight to read. The story is magnetic but the way you tell it is reminiscent of the literary styles of bygone horror authors. It put me very much in mind of M. R. James. Was that a deliberate ‘one-off’ or is this the voice of Adam L G Nevill that we can expect to hear again? I’m particularly interested in your answer because I know you’ve had some good news recently…
We’ll get to that soon…
ALGN: I do wear my influences on my sleeve in Banquet. And M R James was the chief mentor that guided my hand. My dad read many of the classic supernatural writers to my brother and I when we were boys: James, Poe, Mare, Collier, and his shelves were groaning with Lovecraft and Blackwood, which I then explored on my own. Such dark matter had a deep impact on my imagination at that age – I truly experienced what one critic called “the sublime of terror” – and I was pretty much destined to try and recreate it in my own fiction at some point. So my reading of the canon of the supernatural in fiction will always be apparent, and I’m deeply in debt to the classic masters. As I also am to the modern masters in the field. Robert Aickman, Thomas Ligotti, and Ramsey Campbell have taken the weird tale to the mountain, not only in terms of their actual bodies of work, but in a mastery of language and style that few can be consistently compared to in any genre. All three of those writers have given me wonderful examples of introducing more speculative and surreal elements to a treatment of the supernatural in fiction. I think this is evident in my second novel. I also think it’s worth mentioning that your development as a writer is in tune with your development as a reader. I was never sophisticated enough as a reader when I first began writing seriously, but by reading great writers patiently, pennies began to drop. So often these days I’ll pick up a book and think, this writer hasn’t read enough.
JD’L: Banquet is a brilliant example of the triumph of style over gratuity. It’s tense and claustrophobic and the exact nature of the evil remains veiled even when you describe it directly. When violence and malevolence occur, when blood is spilled, it’s done with great delicacy and poetry. How did you manage this?
ALGN: When describing the supernatural, producing risible descriptions is probably the easiest thing to do. And it is the bane of the field. Fear is also difficult to describe. Producing clarity and impact, is bloody hard. I doubt there are many books as bad as bad horror novels, nor films for that matter as bad as bad horror films, but there are few books or films as powerful as great horror novels and films. I aspired to, and looked to, the best in the genre. I pretty much took two years out from work and lived on about three grand a year, in the late nineties, to deliberately hone the craft and improve as a writer. I paid a lot of attention to cultivating subtlety through glimpses and suggestions, as opposed to full reveals. There are no better examples of this style in the field than in the fiction of M R James, who only wrote fiction with the full intention of frightening and disturbing a reader. It was my goal to combine the stylistic traits of the better late Victorian and the Edwardian authors, like James, within a thoroughly modern multi-plot structure that Stephen King and Dan Simmons made their own, and to also write in the present tense to emulate a cinematic feel. If a reader could accept that immediate-tense narration, I hoped the actual appearances of the supernatural in the novel might take on a more vivid nature within the reader’s imagination. Perhaps in a personal film. I also wanted the power of a short story to endure throughout a long novel. What was I thinking? In hindsight, I realise many seem to believe that it cannot be achieved in a horror novel. Stylistically, it was a bloody ambitious book to write, though the occult element may appear conservative and ‘old school’ to many as it deals with possession and witchcraft. So, Banquet was every bit as much of an example of a new writer trying to achieve a particular set of criteria within a novel, and also hoping that it would be a good story for an average reader who would be unaware of the scaffolding.
Did it work? It took three years of constant revision to complete the book, and I remember being profoundly disappointed when I finished it. Looking back, and reading generous praise from readers, I feel much happier with that debut.
I also read a terrific thesis by Peter Penzholdt, in which he identified and explored various treatments of the supernatural in fiction, including M R James. His study identified techniques that I was only occasionally stumbling across, on an instinctive level as a writer, and wondering afterwards how I’d achieved a certain affect. His study helped me find more consistency. My tutors at St Andrews were also poets, and poets are masters of language, which is why I chose St Andrews in the first place to study writing formally. I never doubted my ideas, but I was right to doubt my ability at expressing them. I desperately needed a mentor – someone who could look at my actual writing and tell me what was wrong with it. Get the actual writing right first, is the best advice I can give anyone. At times the criticism was crushing and I doubted whether I should even continue writing. I’d go back to my room after a tutorial, deflated. But by the end of the year, I’d experienced nothing short of a personal renaissance. I learnt how the use of simple, innocent diction, in a calculated and coercive fashion, can build and build, and prove more powerful than the use of language that on its own, in isolation from the rest of a sentence, carries an unpleasant meaning. I eschewed the latter, and used the former. M R James preferred “wet” to “slimy” and I do too. Good poets and short story writers consider the music and image of every descriptive word to create the desired effect. I’ll approach every scene in that way, then look at how these scenes are attached to the one preceding and following, and then rework to maintain fluency and pace without losing descriptive power in the set-pieces. Above all I learned that good writing is all about rewriting. Draft after draft with long breaks in between each draft. Eventually when the removal of one comma will cause a total collapse, it’s as good as it will get.
JD’L: When readers see a book on a shelf and the name on its spine they rarely understand the time and effort that put it there. I’m not just talking about the novel they’re actually looking at either. So much more has to have already happened for the miracle of publication to occur. At times, I even think other authors believe those with bigger, better deals or greater sales figures have somehow lucked into it overnight. Can you tell us a little about the crests and troughs you’ve ridden from dream to publication?
ALGN: Banquet was complete in 2000. I began it in late 1997. But by 2002 every agent who accepted fiction in the Writers and Artists Yearbook had eventually turned down my letter of introduction. I don’t think anyone ever read a word of the actual book. “No horror” being the usual refrain, or “too many authors already”. And as no publisher took unsolicited manuscripts, that was that. Game over. By then, I’d forsaken a career in television a second time. I was living on a shoe-string (again) and enduring an existence above an old pub in East London and working nights as a security guard. And going mad with sleep deprivation and a sense of despair. Only my erotica novels kept me afloat.
From 1997 onwards, I was lucky enough to be published as an author of erotica. I wrote nine novels in total, for Virgin Books’s Nexus imprint (which I was asked to edit in late 2004). Approximately one each year, so I carried on cutting my teeth in another genre that was box-office back in the nineties, while horror seemed all but dead as a mainstream publishing concern. My Nexus books kept me going. Built morale. It was pulp fiction under a pseudonym, but it was the ultimate confirmation of publication and a great education in novel-writing. I even wrote one erotica novel in the second person, several from first person female POVs – with each novel I attempted a different approach to narration.
Then my editor at Virgin, James Marriott, showed one of my horror stories to John Couthard, who recommended me to Ramsey Campbell. Ramsey was putting together a collection called Gathering The Bonesand took my story, Mother’s Milk. I was amazed. My first publication under my actual name and the rite-of-passage horror story that I wrote at the end of my masters in St Andrews. Being a cheeky blighter I then asked Ramsey in 2003 for advice with the novel Banquet for the Damned, which I had revisited and rewritten again in 2002, and Ramsey recommended me to Peter Crowther at PS. I was unaware of small presses at the time, but Peter read and accepted Banquet within a week. Without Ramsey and Peter, Banquet would have remained an uneaten meal, mouldering in the pantry of my hard drive. Peter then championed the book for years and it started to develop a modest reputation among other writers and critics who said some very kind things. Had it been the eighties, the story may have been different, but I’d written a big supernatural horror novel in a publishing climate that had no interest in horror. I was bloody lucky to find a sympathetic writer of considerable reputation, and a sympathetic publisher in Peter Crowther. They brought me into print as a writer of supernatural horror.
JD’L: Having been through all this yourself, it must have been tough notifying your Virgin Horror authors that the imprint had reached the end of the road. Was the imprint doomed from the word go or do you think, if certain things had been different, the line might still be going?
ALGN: We’d been taken over by a big international corporate publisher in 2007, but were still working under the existing Virgin management and I was asked to create new fiction lines. I immediately put horror forward as one idea. Everyone was excited, we had big plans, the critical path was set, so it certainly wasn’t doomed from the get go. On the contrary. But during the first year in 2008, despite how promising the line was, the company’s strategy began moving in a non-fiction direction. New management, new staff, more changes, new focuses, and I was kind of left alone in fiction on the sidelines, but without any real resources to publish the 2009 list. Then cutbacks and title-count reductions hit with the recession, people started losing their jobs etc. Fiction was wound right back to the erotica I had been editing since 2005, plus the cult fiction reprints I was producing for Bukowski. The editorial strategy had moved almost exclusively to non-fiction, leaving horror, erotica and me, high and dry. But the list was acclaimed, it was successful at the level it was published, and may well have continued at a better level had the company’s publishing strategy not changed. So it was deeply disappointing having to tell the authors of the end after such an exciting start. Nine months later I was delivering the same message to a hundred erotica authors too. Again, not something I chose to do nor enjoyed doing. Considering the re-emergence of horror – one of the only good pieces of news in fiction publishing these days – it now looks horribly premature to have buried us thus and so quickly. Ironically, The Birthing House was the first book I tried to buy for the list and that went on to sell 150K copies for Sphere, who published it so well. I’d even say, we were ahead of our time. As I said to the authors too, we may not have swung wide the gates of hell, but we certainly took the catch of the porch door. Having Bloody Books up and dancing at the same time as the Virgin horror line, it was an exciting time to see the underground – the punks – looking to the mainstream again. We raised consciousness and published some fine books. Can’t believe I got Thomas Ligotti into Smiths Travel too – I mark that as an editorial achievement. And if you look at the breadth and quality on those two horror lists, in an age of mediocre thrillers, predictable post-colonial literary fiction, ghost-written celeb fiction, and Vatican conspiracy nonsense, I think we can hold our grizzled, lipless and mottled heads up high.
JD’L: It’s been my experience of publishing that you never know what’s round the next corner. Your personal story seems to fit with this. After all you’ve put up with, suddenly there’s some real sunshine brightening the next part of your writing journey. A two book deal, no less! How did it come about and what was your reaction?
ALGN: To quote Chevy Chase in Caddyshack, “Cinderella Story, boy from nowhere.” When my agent John Jarrold called me to tell me the results of the auction, as I held the phone, my hand shook. Pretty much waited my entire life as a writer for an opportunity like this. I started writing seriously, with it being the major focus of my every day, and as a purpose for life, in 1995. So after fifteen years, I do feel like I have spent a long time in an apprenticeship.
I finished my second novel of supernatural horror at Xmas – another ambitious three year epic, this time written around a very busy fulltime job in publishing. One publisher expressed firm interest in late May of this year, then another and another … And John set an auction date. The very word “auction” in relation to me is hard to even say, and the enthusiasm from the editors was overwhelming. And that’s not false modesty. I vividly remember 40 plus rejections to my introductory letter for Banquet in 2000. They took two years to come in, and by the time the final one had landed on the mat, my head was down. Having worked in publishing I also know how hard it is for editors to pitch and get enough positive feedback from sales, publicity, export, rights, marketing, and management about a proposal. But my second book seemed to generate that at the appropriate levels, and as I’m 50K words into the first draft of a third novel, we submitted a partial of that too. So it became a two-book deal.
JD’L: Any chance of a whisper of what your next novels are about?
ALGN: The second novel is haunted building story spanning generations, my London novel; the third a ‘great outdoors’ novel of psychic terror.
JD’L: Time for the awards ceremony, Adam…
You have honour of making two nominations. First is the Sword of the Ultimate Darkness which goes to the work of horror in any medium which, in your opinion, is a timeless classic.
Second, you may banish to the Plague Pits the worst example of our beloved genre in any medium.
Please make your nominations.
ALGN: I consider this a real honour. For the Sword of Ultimate Darkness, I’d like to mention a book that may have slipped under the radar for many, but it’s a magnificent second horror novel by an American writer called David Searcy, whom I know almost nothing about, but the book needs its profile raised and I treasure it. I found it in a bookshop in New York in 2004. The cover caught my eye. I read the back, checked the first few pages and bought it. It’s one of those books that both made me want to write and also to give up writing because it is so good. It’s a terrific amalgam of M R James and William Faulkner, of Daniel Woodrell and Algernon Blackwood. American noir, scarecrow horror. I read it in one sitting in Hyde Park under a tree, and found myself glancing over my shoulder as the end drew near. It’s called Last Thingsby David Searcy.
The Plague Pits are overflowing, but I’d like to cast the remake of The Haunting, starring Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta Jones, into the pit, along with the entire cast and crew for taking part in such a sham, plus the studio that probably ruined what was originally an honest endeavour. If anyone else was unlucky enough to pay to see this film, they’ll know why it belongs at the bottom of the pit.
JD’L: Lovely choices!
It only remains for me to say a heartfelt thanks on behalf of all at Horror Reanimated for joining us here in the rotting colon of purgatory. And to apologise for the smell, of course. We wish you the very best of luck for all your future projects.
It was a pleasure, thanks very much for the kind words and for having me. And also for giving me an opportunity to leave the indistinct bone-thing, that has been following me, with you. The runes are cast…
I have moments when I rue the day I started writing. I know I’m not meant to say that in public.
I’m one of those people who has periods of furious activity followed by fallow times. Fallow? Who am I trying to kid? I mean times of famine. I occupy one of two states: Writing or Not Writing. I could call it manic depression or bi-polar syndrome but that would just be an excuse. When I’m Not Writing, I’m miserable. And when I’m Writing, I’m slightly less miserable.
In the famine times of Not Writing I search myself for any evidence that I ever made contact with a qwerty keyboard in a creative way. I never find any. Sure, I can look at my laptop and find evidence aplenty – novels, novellas, short stories and poetry heaped up in drifts. But do I remember writing them, how it felt, how I even did it? Do I hell.
In the old days, that was the condition of my condition. Writing or Not Writing. Miserable or slightly less miserable.
I look back and think what a lucky fucker I was back then. ‘Back then’ meaning before I had a novel published. Nowadays, the misery is far more complex and tormenting. I’m able to explore anxiety about sales figures and Amazon rankings. And no longer can I write a book just because an idea occurred to me. Now I have to ‘consider the market’ while I do it – before I even start. So the times of Not Writing are further blackened by apprehensions about my next Everest ascent of a novel ‘not quite fitting’.
This exact thing has just happened.
After Bloody Books bought MEAT but before it was published, I suddenly realised I needed more material. ‘Christ’ I thought. ‘What if people actually like it? What if it sells really well? (DUH!!!) What if they want something more?’ Around the same time my wife told me she was pregnant. In a total panic, I sat down and wrote Weed, a depraved romp about man-eating plants taking over a country estate – 145,000 words in 14 weeks. What with one thing and another, it’s taken me two years to edit and submit. Then Bloody Books said they ‘didn’t see it as the next Joseph D’Lacey novel’ (I can see their point, of course. Weed is not strictly eco-horror). So, I can now add to my list of miseries the perpetuation of the angst-ridden process of submission/rejection/acceptance.
Oh, happy day.
And let’s not forget that I picked one of the least popular genres to write in. There are horror/sf/fantasy writers who do sell big numbers, true, but they’re a rarity. Most of us have to be happy with seeing our work make it out of the starting gate. And I am happy about that. If I dropped dead before finishing this blog post, I could rest easy knowing I’d done good work. But I plan to do better. Much better.
Next time I move out of my Not Writing phase, that is.
Assuming I don’t snuff it and do continue this ‘writing career’ – is there a special word to describe an ironic oxymoron? – I can then enjoy the knowledge, as so many genre fiction writers do, that my ironic oxymoron could be terminated forever by this time next month because what I write is not marketable. That knowledge would be easier to live with if it wasn’t for the twinned knowledge that my work could be the next big thing. It happens. Yes, it does – even to horror writers. That’s the kind of crazy hope that keeps you going in the face of overwhelming odds.
And then, one day, you do make it. You are the next big thing. Huzzah! But, irony of ironies, deep in your heart you’ll always know it was the fickle nature of the market that put you there, like some kind of literary lottery win. Not your talent because you don’t have any, not your unique voice because you have nothing important to say and not your powerful language because you write like someone who failed GCSE English!
Isn’t it strange? I’ll never be comfortable doing this. But I’ll never be able to stop.
And then something small but wonderful happens. As I wrote this post, a message came in from America. A message that reminds me I’m not working in a vacuum. I wanted to share it with you:
Dear Mr. D’Lacey,
My name is Scott Axelrod from Staten Island, New York. I wrote you a while back after reading MEAT to thank you for an amazingly, eye-opening reading experience. I ordered Garbage Man from Amazon UK upon it’s release and just got around to reading it a few nights ago. It is now 5:00 am NY time, and I have finished the book. I have to say that the careful thought and imagination it took to create such a terrifying tale is overwhelming. Staten Island, NY is well known as the home of now closed Fresh Kills Landfill–the story obviously hits a little too close to home, only a few blocks away from my own home in fact.
The detail in which you describe the fecalith’s minions is so visceral, that at times, I thought I could smell the familiar sour stench that would waft over the neighborhood many a summer’s evening. Just envisioning all of the disgusting things we toss out coming back home to us is such a ridiculous idea, but, one so powerful, that I often find myself wondering what will be done with all the garbage when there is nowhere left to unload the garbage.
The powers that be plan on turning “The Dump” into a park for children to play and athletes to exercise. There will be shops and fun things for the family to do there too. What if the fecalith is lying in wait for those always-smiling politicians to ceremoniously break ground and actually build a place of amusement atop all the muck and the filth?
Thank you once again for another thought-provoking and terrific read. I hope you are able to get your work into the hands of more Americans readers, because your ideas have a worldwide resonance. You aren’t just doing cookie cutter fiction. This is horror that we live and breath, but can also get lost inside of under the guise of entertaining “fiction.” I myself remain a staunch supporter, and anxiously await any and all of your furture work.
A competition tomorrow on Bookgeeks will give away three copies of Horror Reanimated’s first publication ‘Echoes’.
Echoes contains three stories, one by each of Horror Reanimated’s curators - Mathew F. Riley, Bill Hussey and Joseph D’Lacey. Of the original 200, only a few remain.
Earlier today I escaped the confines of the Horror Reanimated dungeons – nice though the new décor is – and went topside to talk to the editors of the brand new genre imprint, Angry Robot.
I say topside; the meeting actually took place with the three of us – Marc Gascoigne, Lee Harris and me – strapped top-to-tail along the nearside rail of the Central Line. Crotch first into the oncoming tube-trains, waiting to be riven from bollocks to brains if we didn’t conclude the interview within the allotted time.
I just love a thrill, don’t you?
Angry Robot is an imprint of the massive mainstream publishing house Harper Collins.
Here’s what the lads, soon to be ladies if they weren’t succinct, had to say for themselves. Amazing, really, how fast a person can speak when time is a factor…
THE REAL AR: Just to let the readers know, the evil clowns who run this debacle had filled in some answers already, way before we got to see this. The cheeky little scamps. In the interests of full transparency, kids, we have no option but to heckle them, and ourselves I guess, via an alternative tag. Beware all imitations, kids!
Joseph D’Lacey: Hi, gentlemen. I’m delighted you could join me for a quick chat about what promises to be a great leap forward for genre fiction.
Angry Robot: Just get on with the bloody questions, can’t you?
THE REAL AR: Oh no, that’s not us. We would have said something far stronger than bloody. Weaselly word, fit only for second-rate upstart horror houses if you ask us.
JD’L:As you wish. Now what was it I was going to ask you?
[…distant echo of hurtling trains…]
Oh yes, I remember now. Angry Robot launches on the 1st July. How many titles are you launching with and can you tell our readers a little about each of them?
Angry Robot: Here’s the list. Perhaps you could, like, read it later.
[I couldn’t. I was far too interested in what lies in store for genre-reading fans. I share this list with you now.]
THE REAL AR: Oh yeah, like we’d skip an opportunity to plug our books? Get real. Two books per month, all paperback originals. July is Slights by Kaaron Warren, a massively disturbing serial killer horror novel; and Moxyland by Lauren Beukes, bleeding edge day-after-tomorrow cyberthriller about losing your identity in an ID-compulsory world.
JD’L: It appears that what makes Angry Robot different from other F/SF & H publishers is their interest in cross-genre material. Is it that simple, guys, or is there more behind the imprint’s ethos?
THE REAL AR: Well, it’s not simple, but you are. B-boom. Only joshing with you. [Punches Joe’s arm. Hard.]
What my arm looked like afterwards...
In truth, there’s a whole world of difference to Angry Robot, from the obvious (the content of the books we’re publishing) to very subtle organisational and strategic differences that, if we were to explain, we’d need automated whiteboards and PowerPoint and several days.
But “crossover” is a big deal for us, that’s true. There’s a whole bunch of complicated reasoning stuff I could go into, but in my head there’s simply a little memory-impression from first playing one of the Final Fantasy games on the first Playstation. My hero is stood there in the steam train wrecking yard, eight foot sword on his back. There are helicopters and dragons in the sky, spells and guns in my backpack. And it feels OK. Better, it feels bloody great.
No-one’s got a major problem with books that mix and match genres these days. Indeed, “is it horror or fantasy” is a compliment if you ask me, and damn but you can’t move for really excellent novels that cry out to be labelled “science fantasy”. But somewhere between the bookseller’s need to shelve books here and not there, reviewers’ needs to pigeon work so they can assess it and an underlying human liking for things being straightforward, we’ve developed this habit of putting genre stuff into little boxes.
What happens when you put important things in little boxes
We were talking about this with the big SF guy at one of the UK’s biggest bookchains (no names, no fistfights). His take was that soon enough there will be a new shelf – or more likely, a table at the front of the store, cos this stuff isn’t necessarily just for the long-term enthusiasts – where the crossover stuff sits: video game-derived fantasy and horror, literary SF that’s marked for general reading, massive Facebook-boosted teen novels, and the best of the hardcore genres too. We’re just right on the tip of that wave.
There’s a second whole string to this, for Angry Robot particularly, and it’s the unwieldy but essential term “Post-YA”. If you were the same age as Harry Potter when you read his first novel, you’re too old for that pre-teenage stuff and have been for several years. If you spent the last five years loving Doctor Who, ditto. There’s a whole generation reared on fabulous new departures in SF and fantasy, whether in books, games, graphic novels.
As an aside, this generation hasn’t read every influential book published in the last fifty years. That’s going to mean that some of the books they love, and want more of, will seem like rehashes of past glories, from authors slavishly devoted to the bygone styles of earlier great authors. There’ll be moaning about derivative work. And we will encourage this with all our might. There’s plenty of resources there to help new genre readers find the greats once we, and other imprints like us, have hooked them in the first place. But we need fresh blood (leave it!) and you don’t attract that by continuing to publish the same old traditional stuff that was past its sell-by twenty-five years ago.
JD’L: Apologies in advance for the cynicism of this question but it must be asked!
Following the recent demise of the Virgin Horror line and the credit crunch destroying thousands of jobs across every sector, doesn’t it seem a little gung ho to be starting a new publishing business?
THE REAL AR: Hmm, let’s see if we can answer this without both impugning the fine intentions and dedication of the hapless Virgin crew and coming across like total arrogant cocks. Nope, probably going to fail on both counts. Let’s just say that there’s plenty of room in all the genres for good new writing, as much now as at the height of the last economic boom. Without it, genres will continue to age and become even more moribund than they sometimes seem even now. And, part two, well, we ain’t them. We’re going about it a different way, as masters of our own destiny rather than pawns of a large organisation – we’re not one editor in-house, we’re a separate division with agreed targets and strategy, but other than that full permission to go and do what we need to do.
JD’L: A personal question now to each of you. Which writers of any era have affected you most profoundly? - the genre is unimportant.
Marc Gascoigne: Aw jeez, that’s a long list; I go back a long way and I can gush for England. How about instead, a gush of authors I can think of that I’d boost to someone whose horizons I wanted to broaden? Get online and discover for yourself what the best novels to track down and read from this little lot… Mark Helprin, Keith Roberts, Matt Ruff, Daryl Gregory, Frances Sherwood, Ernest Bramah, Lucius Shepard, Nancy A Collins, Ian MacDonald, Jonathan Carroll, Marco Vassi, John Franklin Bardin, Edward Whittemore, Thomas Disch, Patrick Harpur, Marc Behm, Langdon Jones, Ben Marcus, Connie Willis, Barrington Bayley, Conrad Williams, Jonathan Littel, Barry Hughart, David Schow, Peter S Beagle, Michael Blumlein, Dan Rhodes, Christopher Priest, Edmund Cooper and about a million others… and a bit of a sneaky boost, AR author but a real talent for blowing your mind, the incredible Kaaron Warren and Slights. Fuck me, what a book.
Lee Harris: I’m not nearly as widely read as Mr G within the genre, but then I’m not nearly as old. I have some crossovers with Marco (Disch, Williams, Priest) and a few others to throw into the mix. I love the work of Mike Carey in all its formats, Richard Matheson, Tolkein (the obvious ones), much of Stephen King’s output (though I tend to prefer his psychological horror, rather than his supernatural works) and most of Orson Scott Card’s back catalogue. I’m currently working my way through a lot of Charlie Stross’ books, and enjoying discovering Graham Joyce and Michael Marshall Smith. I remember reading Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia as a child, and that was the first book I remember reading that had believable family relationships, and complex emotional themes. As for classic SF, the usual suspects: Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov. They’re considered the classics for a reason…
JD’L: Are you hoping to discover similar talent with Angry Robot? Perhaps you have already…
THE REAL AR: See previous answer, kid. Told you, that’ll teach you to send a prepared set of questions.
[At this juncture, I felt the desire for a cigar. Marc and Lee did a lot of twitching and swearing but it didn’t ruin a damned good smoke.]
JD’L: Ahh. That’s much better.
THE REAL AR: We should perhaps point out at this point that Joe actually lives on the shabbier side of Leicester, with his unsurprisingly youthful mother, and works in KFC, and wouldn’t know a good Monte Cristo if it was stubbed out in his left eye. No denying the strength of his imagination though. And we’re based in Nottingham, so why the hell he decided to pretend we were on some London underground line, well, only Joe can answer that one.
A Monte Cristo (number 5, my favourite)
JD’L: Now then, as editors of many years standing (I’m not saying you’re old or anything) and therefore based on your experience, what would you say is the function of Horror?
Marc Gascoigne: Oh, you know the answer to this one. Hell, a child of six could explain. Caves, sabre-toothed tigers, the sudden urge to piss against the wall here rather than down behind the trees next to the stream. Next question!
Lee Harris: *rolls eyes* (although, not in the usual Horror Reanimated sense of the phrase) Some of us take these questions a little more seriously, Marco.
I’ve been a fan of horror literature as far back as I can remember, and have become somewhat immune to it in recent years, and I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that horror just didn’t work for me, any more. Last summer, however, I took a copy of Ramsey Campbell’s The Grin of the Dark on holiday with me, and read it at night when my wife and children were tucked up in bed. While reading it, for the first time in many a long year I found myself curling my legs up off the floor and checking the shadows. I knew there was nothing in the room with me, nothing hiding in the shadows. I knew this. But you can never be too careful. You know – just in case. That book reminded me why I’d always loved horror: a well-crafted tale of terror should unsettle. It should make you uncomfortable. It should disturb. It should make you feel.
JD’L: We usually give interviewees the opportunity to make Sword of the Ultimate Darkness and Plague Pit awards, however, I felt it would be unfair to put two editors on the spot in that way. Besides, I’m sure these tracks are vibrating…
THE REAL AR: What are you talking about? Jesus, geeks. Here’s a suggestion: get out of the house, learn to talk to real human beings.
How I learned about Monte Cristo Cigars
JD’L: One last question, though. Apart from interviews like this one, what frightens you to your very core?
Marc Gascoigne: While typing some of these answers, I was listening to a bootleg of exotic Beatles cover versions. Forget Shatner (if you can) for I must report that Arthur Mullard’s three-falls-and-a-submission assault on “Yesterday” nearly caused unexpected leakage. In book terms, though, nothing yet. My normal reaction is more a lick of the lips at a truly deliciously nasty reveal than a shudder of terror. An admirer of the technique rather than a blubbering wreck.
Lee Harris: My wife. Alone. With a credit card.
JD’L: Well, gentlemen, this has been an absolute pleasure but I believe I can feel the approaching breath of the next train to Ealing Broadway. Must dash!
It only remains for me to add that all of us at Horror Reanimated wish you the greatest success with Angry Robot Books. I hope we’ll soon have reason to showcase some of your titles right here!
Thanks for joining us and being such good sports.
THE REAL AR: Yeah, whatever. Jesus. He does go on. Shakes head sadly.
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.
Those of you with your fingers on the Horror Reanimated pulse – er, I mean flatline – will know I rarely review books. However, every now and again something truly unique comes along. Mendal Johnson’s Let’s Go Play at the Adams’ is one of those books.
This author, for one, is.
I SELL THE DEAD (2008)
THE SUBSTITUTE
Slowly, the parents of the students come to adore Ulla and in a particularly hilarious scene, after the 6th graders have earned a trip to Paris with their crazy teacher, it is every 6th grader for themself, fighting getting on the bus, fighting their parents – you just have to see it.
One word of advice:
Add to that, as an undergraduate, while billeted in halls that were once part of a military hospital, I would often wake because someone was standing beside my bed and leaning over me, with their face close to mine. It used to scare me witless. Door handles would also turn, doors would open, no one would come through, though other residents at the end of the corridor featuring the affected rooms would see a woman in a white uniform entering or leaving.
most of the novel in St. Andrews. To begin with, I thought these real locations were going to kill my suspension of disbelief. In the end the effect was the opposite. Such was the power of the writing that I could see the streets of St Andrews and its old buildings and dark alleyways – even though I’ve never been there. How important do you think the setting was to the success of the novel?
Andrews, there would have been no Banquet.
when I first began writing seriously, but by reading great writers patiently, pennies began to drop. So often these days I’ll pick up a book and think, this writer hasn’t read enough.
Were you touched by these or other eschatological tales or did ONE feel like something new for you, something without a particular precursor?
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!
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.