Posts filed under 'The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With'
It’s the tenth instalment of Bury Me With… and the book dark cosmic speculist Laird Barron wants to be buried with is…
“T.E.D. Klein’s Dark Gods, a quartet of novellas that hit the stands in 1985 as a follow-up to his famous novel The Ceremonies. Klein, a respected former editor of The Twilight Zone Magazine, gave us a tour de force with his novella collection and demonstrated his standing as a master craftsman possessed of a sophisticated and cerebral style matched by perhaps a handful of modern fantasists.
The contents of Dark Gods include Children of the Kingdom, in which the author is enthralled by the tales of an old priest regarding lost tribes, subterranean kingdoms, and an ancient evil that occasionally rises to plague the surface world; the events of Petey transpire during a housewarming party in a remote Connecticut mansion as guests slowly uncover a macabre puzzle left behind by the former, utterly mad occupant; Black Man with a Horn may well be the crown jewel of the set — certainly a classic homage to Lovecraft’s Mythos in which an elderly author shares a plane ride with a missionary who’s convinced agents of a diabolical tribe are stalking him; Nadelman’s God is the tale of a man whose melodramatic college-era poetry has been co-opted by a lunatic who believes it possesses the power to summon a monstrous supernatural entity. Hilarity ensues.
Dark Gods has exerted some influence on my writing career. It reinforced my long held notion that novella-length horror is the genre at its most sublime. Klein’s masterpiece, alongside Peter Straub’s Ghost Story and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, is always close at hand. I often open it at random to instruct myself in the fine art of building atmosphere that gradually, and inexorably, draws in the reader and delivers unto him or her an exquisite thrill; a glimpse of the numinous in the yellowed and curling pages of an ‘80s paperback.”
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About Laird Barron:
Laird Barron is the author of two collections: The Imago Sequence & Other Stories, and Occultation; both from Night Shade Books. His work has appeared in places such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound, Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, Clockwork Phoenix, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies. Mr. Barron is an expatriate Alaskan currently at large in Washington State.
May 17th, 2010
The ninth featured author is the truly scary Adam Nevill, who tells me about the book that means everything to him…
“I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the age of sixteen. At that age my relationship with fiction was based upon classic ghost stories, Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Lovecraft, Stephen King, pulp horror, and more Lovecraft. Which was all accompanied by a relentless soundtrack of pounding heavy metal, chiefly Iron Maiden and Deep Purple. I was also an acutely sensitive, self-loathing and angry misfit, displaced from New Zealand, and quite ashamed of the maelstrom of creative energy I had no outlet for, as well as being convinced that I was destined to be a pariah and too absurdly different from most anyone I knew. A familiar profile, I’m sure. And then I passed into the sixth form and just had my eyes opened on the A Level English Literature course.
I was surrounded by great novels at home, but had churlishly resisted anything that wasn’t horror or fantasy, as I’d foolishly imagined that anything else was conservative, dull, impenetrable, and not meant for such a loathsome creature of the shadows such as I. A levels back then were more rigorous than degrees and very hard to pass; you would study a dozen texts in minute detail with senior teachers in small classes, over two years, and then pass or fail in two three hour exams per subject at the end of the second year; there was no assessment. Less than 10% of school leavers made it to university. And I remember when my teacher Mr O’Brien, took me through Joyce’s Portrait in the lower sixth, I was stunned. Just stunned by revelation after revelation within the text. It was as if I’d waited my whole life for that one book to make sense of myself.
The lead character has a poor Catholic boyhood in turn-of-the-century Ireland, which was about as far away from Birmingham in the 80’s as you could get, but the young Dedalus’s responses and reactions to the world – the very manner in which he felt and perceived life – I identified with at a profound level. This book articulated how I had always felt. It overwhelmed; nothing had inspired me as much until that point; I felt confirmed and immensely comforted by reading it; it made me feel more defined. No work of art, nothing, had been such a revelation. It sounds horribly self-serious and pretentious now (and I was all of those things, as Dedalus is too), but I finally better understood what I could be. And as it’s a narrative of infancy to adulthood, I felt as if Dedalus’s childhood, his boyhood, and his adolescence were emotionally and cerebrally a mirror of my own; there were a hundred years between the character of Dedalus and myself, and a sea, but the underlying basis to our characters, I felt, was the same. Applicable to me in my time.
And that was it; I knew what I was going to do in this life: I was going to write. I remember plodding past the lower school field, silver-framed glasses twinkling, a long fringe in my eyes, scruffy bag over my shoulder, denim jacket festooned with Rainbow and Iron Maiden patches, when the vow was made.
And as set out by Joyce, I then followed the old school route to writing: reading the canon of what had gone before me; acquiring experience for its own sake; endlessly revising to acquire the craft; seeking mentors. A purpose for life. It guided the choices I then made for my future. It’s the book that changed my life.
And Joyce was a great poet; he is a master of language like a great poet, so his language is so precise, his description in the novel so multi-sensory, so transporting, so powerful. I can think of few better written novels. The closest I had come to such richness before was in Ray Bradbury’s fiction. Becoming a better reader makes you a better writer; it opens your eyes to different ways of writing, not just the means of expressing yourself, but choices that can be made about narrative, about point-of-view, about voice. I then looked at the seemingly endless library of literary and canonised fiction and felt utterly humbled by my ignorance. So I took an English degree to find a way into it – especially modernism – and to find teachers who could unlock it for me. I put down my pen and decided I could not write again until I had read much more. So much more.
I never returned to reading genre fiction until about ten years later, but have a better appreciation of the weird and fantastic in fiction now because of this break, in which I read widely of the 20th century classics, with an emphasis on modernism, and am a better equipped reader now to fully appreciate the best in our field too.
In terms of the affecting nature of Joyce’s language, there are many passages dealing with Stephen’s terror of eternal damnation, while he is tormented by the great struggle within himself, between a calling to the mysticism of the Jesuits, and his desire to be an artist, that just terrified me. It made my own pathetic inner turmoil pale in comparison. Here he dreams of hell:
A field of stiff weeds and thistles and tufted nettle bunches. Thick among the tufts of rank stiff growth lay battered canisters and clots and coils of solid excrement. A faint marshlight struggled upwards from all the ordure through the bristling greygreen weeds. An evil smell, faint and foul as the light, curled upwards sluggishly out of the canisters and from the stale crusted dung.
Creatures were in the field; one, three, six: creatures were moving in the field, hither and thither. Goatish creatures with human faces, hornybrowed, lightly bearded and grey as India-rubber. The malice of evil glittered in their hard eyes, as they moved hither and thither, railing their long tails behind them. A rictus of cruel malignity lit up greyly their old bony faces. One was clasping about its ribs a torn flannel waistcoat, another complained monotonously as his beard stuck in the tufted weeds. Soft language issued from their spittleless lips as they swished in slow circles round and round the field, winding hither and thither through the weeds, dragging their long tails amid the rattling canisters. They moved in slow circles, circling closer and closer to enclose, to enclose, soft language issuing from their lips, their long tails swishing besmeared with stale shite, thrusting upwards their terrific faces …
The poetry of terror is right there; perfect choice of diction, precise repetition. It’s probably only bettered in the novel by a description of eternal suffering, that left me aghast and agape.
Portrait also developed in me an insatiable appetite for the great outsider literature, and eventually led me to Hunger by Hamson, Steppenwolf by Hesse; The Moon and Sixpence by Maugham, Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Outsider by Camut and Colin Wilson respectively, Notes from the Underground by Doestoyevsky, Ask the Dust by John Fante, Factotum and Post Office by Bukowski , Youth by Coetze. Novels about the great struggle of self actualisation in a creative soul; the inner conflict between a calling and convention, between exile or a life of quiet repression; and the external battle between the artist and components of the world, ranging from family, society, religion, the status quo, or consensus of a particular time, in order to pursue art/writing as a vocation, as a purpose for life. And there is no greater examination of the alienation and eventual self-imposed exile of an artist than in Joyce’s Portrait.
When Dedalus is finally confirmed in his purpose, after a experiencing an epiphany, a moment of striking beauty in which a mixture of the divine and the natural world combines around him and within his senses, there is this great moment of becoming. It follows a simple, innocent and purely visual encounter with a girl on a beach; a girl that becomes his muse:
She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness – He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.
Her image had passed into his soul forever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph. To recreate life out of life.
I can’t think of a better way of expressing the role of an artist. I’ve kept this as a kind of motto: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph. To recreate life out of life.” Stephen then collapses amongst the sand dunes “that the peace and silence of the evening might still the riot of his blood.” I just love that: “the riot of his blood.”
Of course Joyce deliberately uses sentiment and irony and humour to poke fun at the young pretentious artist, and at himself when he was an emerging writer, but I can find no better model of becoming a writer in fiction. If things had turned out differently, I guess, this is also the book that would have buried me.”
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About Adam Nevill:
Adam Nevill is the author of Banquet for the Damned – a novel of supernatural horror, published by PS Publishing and Virgin Books, and nine other novels under a pseudonym. His latest novel, Apartment 16, (click to read my review) is published in May 2010 by Pan Macmillan, which he is signing at Forbidden Planet in London on May 20th.
May 10th, 2010
In the eighth instalment of Bury Me With… Mark Morris tells us about the book that has influenced him more than any, the book he’d like to take to his grave… or does he? It’s obviously been a difficult decision:
“Am I assuming that if I’m to be buried with this book, then I won’t be alive to read it? In which case, I might choose one of my own, just so that bodysnatchers get an idea of who they’ve dug up before carting away my mortal remains to be used in macabre experiments.
However, if the inference is that this will be the only book I’ll have available to read throughout eternity, whilst sitting on my heavenly cloud, then that’s different. There are many books that are very dear to me, not always because they’re especially good, but simply because they retain a certain nostalgic resonance. Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion by Terrance Dicks is one such example. This was the first Doctor Who book I ever bought, and its joyful impact — on my life and subsequent career — has been immense. Similarly the stories in The Eleventh Pan Book of Horror Stories scared me utterly shitless one New Years Eve many years ago, though in such a thrilling, life-affirming way that they sparked off a desire and a love for horror novels, stories and movies which has never since wavered. And talking of movies, Horror Movies by Alan Frank, a book I received as a Christmas present in 1974, and which still sits on a shelf in my study today, was the first of many movie books in my collection. Other favourites include A Heritage of Horror by David Pirie, English Gothic by Jonathan Rigby and The Hammer Story by Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes. Then, of course, there are novels. The Shining by Stephen King and The Fog by James Herbert were probably the first ‘modern’ horror novels I read as a teenager, and as such were massively influential. Away from the genre, What A Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and the various works of Magnus Mills, Rupert Thomson, James Lee Burke, Cormac McCarthy and David Mitchell have all enthralled me in recent years.
But if I had to choose just one book, I think I’d probably go for a short story collection. My favourite single author collection is probably Dark Companions by Ramsey Campbell, but I wouldn’t want to restrict myself to just one writer. I’m going to cheat here and choose as my book an anthology which doesn’t actually exist. It’s got at least 1000 pages and contains around 100 stories, each individually chosen by me. It would contain stories by all of my favourite authors, many of whom have already been mentioned above, and added to which would be the likes of Ian McEwan, Graham Joyce, Nigel Kneale, Nicholas Royle, Conrad Williams, Michael Marshall Smith, Robert Shearman, Stephen Volk, Tim Lebbon, Sarah Pinborough, Christopher Fowler, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Carroll, Joel Lane, Peter Straub, Mary Danby, Rosemary Timperley, Dennis Etchison and…oh, many many more. I’m not sure any book would be sufficient to entertain me throughout eternity, but I’m sure that such an anthology would give me a few thousand years of pleasure, at least.”
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About Mark Morris:
Mark Morris became a full-time writer in 1988 on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, and a year later saw the release of his first novel, Toady. He has since published a further sixteen novels, among which are Stitch, The Immaculate, The Secret of Anatomy, Fiddleback, The Deluge and four books in the popular Doctor Who range. His short stories, novellas, articles and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and magazines, and he is editor of the highly-acclaimed Cinema Macabre, a book of fifty horror movie essays by genre luminaries, for which he won the 2007 British Fantasy Award. His most recently published or forthcoming work includes a novella entitled It Sustains for Earthling Publications, a Torchwood novel entitled Bay of the Dead, several Doctor Who audios for Big Finish Productions, a follow-up volume to Cinema Macabre entitled Cinema Futura and a new short story collection, Long Shadows, Nightmare Light.
Visit Mark’s website
May 3rd, 2010
The seventh Bury Me With… and Devon-based, cosmically tentacled, blood sucking, mind-reading legend Brian Lumley explains his choice for his own literary-accompanied interment:
“I’ve been a fan of Jack Vance for as long as I can remember. Bury me with one of his books, by all means! Why? Because he can make light of the direst of situations — and I can’t think of a more dire situation than reading in the ultimate darkness. The book I’m talking about would be Cugel’s Saga. Anyone who hasn’t read it doesn’t know what he’s missing. Some of the funniest, cleverest stuff in modern fantasy fiction, not to mention some of the most nightmarish!
I wouldn’t want anything by Poe – let’s face it, he’s already been prematurely buried!”
More information about Jack Vance’s Cugel’s Saga at Wikipedia.
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Quite a lot about Brian Lumley:
Born 2nd December, 1937, Brian Lumley came into the world just nine months after the most obvious of his forebears – meaning of course a “literary” forebear, namely, H. P. Lovecraft – had departed from it. By his pre-teens Lumley had read Dracula and some other horror classics, but having followed the adventures of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future in the British Eagle comic, his first love was Science Fiction. Then, in his early teens – as a result of reading Robert Bloch’s Lovecraft pastiche Notebook Found in a Deserted House in a British SF magazine – he became more surely attracted to macabre fiction, an attraction that has lasted a lifetime.
Later still, in his early twenties while serving with the Corps of Royal Military Police in Germany, on finding a collection of stories by Lovecraft himself, Lumley began searching for every available item of the author’s work. This culminated in his contacting HPL’s publisher August Derleth in Sauk City, Wisconsin, in order to purchase the one or two volumes still missing from his collection. Then, after Derleth had read various “extracts” from the Necronomicon and other fictional “Black Books” of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, which Lumley had included in his letters, he asked if the aspiring author had anything solid he could use in a book he was preparing for publication, to be entitled Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Thus Lumley began writing in earnest. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Derleth included stories by Lumley in a number of Arkham House anthologies and went on to publish three of the author’s books. One was a short novel with the title Beneath the Moors; the others were collections of short stories and novellas: The Caller of The Black and The Horror at Oakdeene. These stories, set mainly in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos milieu, echoed HPL’s literary style: a somewhat archaic, adjectival mode of writing which, during the course of Lumley’s military career, he would gradually eschew in favour of his own very distinctive style.
Despite that Lumley completed a full term of 22 years with the RMP – during which time he rose to the rank of Warrant Officer and, in his final years, served as the WO Chief Instruction (the DI) at the RMP Depot and Training Establishment – still he managed to write and see published his three Arkham books plus the first of the six paperback novels in his Titus Crow series, and the stand-alone novel, Khai of Ancient Khem, while he was still a soldier. But by then: “it was time for the serious stuff!”
Having “retired” from the Army in December 1980, Lumley became “a professional author” (he had never really considered himself that way before) and of necessity began to write in earnest. he still had a projected series of four books in H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dreamlands milieu” to complete, during the writing of which he began the Psychomech trilogy, the very first of his works (with the exception of a handful of short stories) to be published in the United Kingdom.
Then came his breakthrough book. In March to September 1984 he wrote his dead-waking, ground-breaking horror novel Necroscope®, featuring Harry Keogh, the man who can talk to dead people. Not at first realizing, however, how successful this book would be (for it would eventually become a best-selling series), in late 1984 early 1985 he wrote the stand-alone novel Demogorgon. Also in ’85 to early 1986, he completed his “Dreamlands” series with a book of short stories and novellas called Iced on Aran; which will explain the gap between the writing of Necroscope and Necroscope II: Wamphyri! After Wamphyri!, however, Necroscope III: The Source, took only five months to complete in 1987, and with the first two volumes having seen initial paperback publication in the UK, finally the trilogy was picked up by TOR Books, USA. Except it wasn’t going to stop at being a trilogy!
Such was the appeal of the Necroscope books that TOR published the so-called trilogy in the space of just twelve months: September 1988 to September 1989 — by which time Lumley had written Necroscopes IV and V: Deadspeak and Deadspawn. And in just five years, 1984 to 1989, the financial problems which the author had experienced on leaving the Army were well and truly behind him. Bestsellers in the USA, his books had already passed one million sales and were heading for two million.
But still the story wasn’t finished; in fact it wasn’t half-way there yet! Such had been the success of the first five volumes, and such was the demand from readers, that Lumley went straight on from Deadspawn to commence writing the massive Vampire World Trilogy, which he considers his finest, most ambitious and important work. Begun in 1991, finished in 1993, Blood Brothers, The Last Aerie and Bloodwars between them contain some three-quarters of a million words of horror, fantasy … even a little of the author’s first love, Science Fiction.
In 1994, just short of six years since publishing the original Necroscope, TOR began reprinting the entire series in hardcovers: a rare event in the modern publishing world. And Blood Brothers was the first Necroscope – or more properly the first series spin-off – to be published in hardcovers from the outset. The rest of the volumes in this incredible series have all followed suit. Their titles are:
The Lost Years and Lost Years Two: Resurgence – the Invaders Trilogy: Invaders, Defilers and Avengers – and the novellas: Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes – and, in the Summer of 2006, Necroscope: The Touch. Harry and the Pirates – a volume of Necroscope novellas – appeared in 2009, and one final novella is promised.
Thirteen countries and counting have now published, or are in the process of publishing these and others of Lumley’s novels and short story collections, which in the USA alone have sold well over three million copies. In addition, Necroscope comic books, graphic novels, a role-playing game, quality figurines, and in Germany a series of audio books have been created from themes and characters in the Necroscope books, and Lumley has added his “real” voice to Dangerous Ground, a Downliners Sect rock-&-roll album released in the UK in 2004.
Lumley’s works other than Necroscope – such as his SF-ish novel The House of Doors and its sequel Maze of Worlds; also a dozen collections gathered from his more than 130 short stories and novellas, most notably Fruiting Bodies & Other Fungi, whose title story won a British Fantasy Award in 1989 – have seen or are seeing print in many European countries as well as the USA, and all the while his reputation is growing apace. As far back as 1990, the readers of Fear Magazine voted Lumley “Best Established Genre Author” for The Source, and his short story Necros (not a Necroscope spin-off!) was adapted for Ridley Scott’s The Hunger series on the USA’s Showtime Television series. But best of all, in 1998 as Guest of Honour at the World Horror Convention in Phoenix, AZ, he received the genre’s most coveted Grand Master Award in recognition of his work. Moreover, the original Necroscope has now been optioned (and four times re-optioned) for a major film, and the original trilogy will be included in the deal if there’s a follow through.
From 2000 through 2007 fans of Necroscope and Lumley’s other works convened at the annual KeoghCon, and there celebrated with the author and his wife Barbara Ann, who is known to one and all as “Silky;” where each successive year forged stronger bonds between the members of this much extended “family” of friends and fans. (As for the last word, “fans:” Lumley prefers to refer to these people — his friends — as “dedicated readers.”)
Widely travelled, Brian Lumley has visited or lived in the USA, France, Italy, Cyprus, Germany, Malta, Canada, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, not to mention a dozen or more Greek islands. He still makes regular visits to the Mediterranean, indulging a passion for moussaka, retsina, just a little ouzo … and Metaxa, naturally! In addition – as icing on the baklava – Necroscope and its sequels, along with others of his books, are now appearing in Greek translations.
UPDATE LATE 2009: Recently, both Subterranean Press in the USA and Solaris in the UK have published two companion volumes of Lumley’s previously uncollected Cthulhu Mythos tales: The Taint and Other Novellas and Haggopian and Other Mythos Tales. Other books from Subterranean include a very special edition of Necroscope®, Brian Lumley’s Freaks, Screaming Science Fiction, A Coven of Vampires, The Nonesuch and Others and Necroscope: The Plague-Bearer (forthcoming).
As for the future: “Well, the future is always uncertain.” But with several books from an extensive backlist awaiting reissue, it certainly isn’t over yet!
When they’re not travelling, the Lumleys keep house in Torquay, Devon, England…
April 26th, 2010
The sixth Bury Me With… features the impeccable taste of Thespian and dark-scribe, Reggie Oliver:
“The book I would like to be buried with is A Dance to the Music of Time.
Recently I went to a talk by the revolutionary intellectual and radical 60’s icon Tariq Ali at my local Literary Festival. In the course of an interview he revealed, to my amazement, that, like me, he was a devotee of A Dance to the Music of Time, the twelve novel sequence by Anthony Powell. This is a work which divides opinion considerably. Some see it a dull and snobbish series of novels, mainly about Old Etonians and their spouses written in a slightly circuitous mandarin prose. Others, like Tariq Ali, Ian Rankin (and I) see it as a unique vision of 20th century English society which charts the course through life of some memorable characters.
The most memorable of these is, of course, Widmerpool whose rise and hideous downfall is marked by a series of comic and sometimes horrific vignettes. For the moralist Widmerpool is a masterly study in the destructiveness of egoism; to a political thinker like Tariq Ali he is the quintessence of the ruthless establishment man who walks the British corridors of power, to a fellow writer he is a superb lesson in how to build and develop a credible but memorable fictional character over a period of time.
And why should a horror writer in particular admire this work? Well, Powell is a writer who has no dogma or ideology to speak of but who is fascinated by the sheer strangeness of life and human nature. There is a fascinating occult and supernatural thread running through the books: there is Mrs Erdleigh, the fortune teller; Dr Trelawney the mage, based partly on Aleister Crowley whom Powell had met; there is the New Age occultist Scorpio Murtlock who proves to be Widmerpool’s nemesis. A ghost features unapologetically in the fifth novel, The Kindly Ones. And there are scenes of true dark horror: for example the deaths of X. Trapnel and Widmerpool whose last episode reflects as in a distorting mirror the first time we see this character in the very first of the novel sequence, A Question of Upbringing.
Powell is a writer who sees life as a strange dance, full of mysteries and coincidences, whose pattern only half emerges as you approach its end. I think you will find that vision shared and expressed by many of the best writers in our genre.”
More information on A Dance to the Music of Time is at Wikipedia.
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About Reggie Oliver:
Reggie Oliver has been a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975. His biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, was published by Bloomsbury in 1998. Besides plays, his publications include four volumes of stories: The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini (Haunted River 2003), The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (Haunted River 2005), Masques of Satan (Ash Tree 2007), and Madder Mysteries (Ex Occidente 2009), and a novel Virtue in Danger (Ex Occidente 2010). An omnibus edition of his stories entitled Dramas from the Depths is published by Centipede, as part of its Masters of the Weird Tale series. His stories have been published in Zencore, Shades of Darkness, Tails of Wonder and Imagination (an anthology of cat stories) and many other anthologies including successive editions of such series as Exotic Gothic, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Black Book of Horror and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.
Visit Reggie’s website, The Black Cathedral
April 19th, 2010
The fifth Bury Me With…, and we’re thankful to Michael Marshall Smith for providing an insight into the book that has influenced him more than any, the book he’d like to take with him to his grave…
“It’s tempting to say the book I’d like to be buried with is an iPad, of course – as that way I could not only take a ton of books but be able to chase deadlines beyond the grave, too. But assuming that’s not within the spirit of the thing, then I’d have to say Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. I first read it when I was about thirteen, and it made a huge impression on me. I read it and re-read it, countless times, and it probably informed my sense of humour more than anything else I’ve ever read. Amis’ ability to find comedy in life’s slings and arrows, to use words as precise little hammers to attack the countless impotent little furies and frustrations of existence, has been an inspiration ever since. It was also the very first book that gave me an inkling that I might like to try writing for a career. Though if I’m allowed to entertain the idea that I might still be able to read in the grave, I might substitute a really big entymological dictionary instead. I love words, and especially enjoy reading about their journeys through time, shifts in their meanings reflecting changes in society an attitude, and how each of them – as Butler said – tries to enclose the wilderness of an idea. In effect every word is a little story in itself. With an eternity to get through, a couple of hundred thousand of those might help pass the time…”
More information on Kingsley Amis can be found at Wikipedia.
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About Michael Marshall Smith:
Michael Marshall (Smith) is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. His first novel, Only Forward, won the August Derleth and Philip K. Dick awards. Spares and One of Us were optioned for film by DreamWorks and Warner Brothers, and the Straw Men trilogy – The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead and Blood of Angels – were international bestsellers. He is a three-time winner of the BFS Award for short fiction, and his stories are collected in two volumes – What You Make It and More Tomorrow and Other Stories (which won the International Horror Guild Award). His Steel Dagger-nominated previous novel – The Intruders – is currently in series development with the BBC.
His new novel Bad Things is now in paperback in the UK, and will appear from William Morrow in the US in 2010.
February 2009 also saw the UK paperback publication of The Servants, a short novel under the new name M. M. Smith.
He lives in North London with his wife Paula, a son and two cats.
April 12th, 2010
In the fourth in the series of Bury Me With…, we asked zombie-rage-master David Moody about the book that has influenced him more than any, the book he’d like to take with him to his grave…
“The book I’d like to be buried with is The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham.
When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
I was 10 when I read ‘Triffids’ for the first time. Probably far too young, but I’d just watched the opening episode of the classic 1981 BBC TV adaptation (infinitely superior to the dreadful 1962 movie and the awful 2009 BBC TV adaption) and I was captivated. I can still clearly remember the horror and unease I felt at the time. I guess the story was my first real introduction to post-apocalyptic fiction, and it had a profound effect on me.
I’d finished reading the whole book by the time the second episode of the series was broadcast – I was so overwhelmed by the story that I couldn’t wait for the BBC to catch up! It affected me on many different levels… the terror and helplessness of a suddenly blinded population of millions; the encroaching danger of thousands of virtually silent, emotionless predators; the horror witnessed by the few sighted people struggling to survive; a world falling apart without power, sanitation and other basic necessities… I’d never come across such a terrifying, all-consuming, nightmare scenario before – the entire world rendered helpless, literally in the blinking of an eye.
Looking back now, Wyndham’s story seems to have been the blueprint for many of the countless other ‘End of the World’ tales which have followed. In fact, the Triffids themselves seem to be the vegetarian alternative to my apocalyptic scenario of choice: zombies. Mute, devoid of all emotion, driven and relentless, preying on the last few remaining survivors in massive numbers… sound familiar?
Although it’s had its fair share of detractors, The Day of the Triffids remains an exceptional story which had a huge impact on me and which set me on the path to writing the kind of books I love – books in which the ordinary world becomes extraordinary in an instant, and there’s nothing you can do about it but try your damnedest to survive. Okay, elements of the novel seem twee and dated now, many of the characters are paper-thin and the horror has muted somewhat over time, but it’s intelligent and bleak and it still makes you think.
It certainly made me think. And that’s why I’d like to be buried with it.”
More information on John Wyndham can be found at Wikipedia.
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About David Moody:
David Moody used to give his books away for free. This unconventional marketing approach resulted in the film rights to Hater being sold to Guillermo del Toro (director, Hellboy 1 & 2, Pan’s Labyrinth, the upcoming Hobbit series) and Mark Johnson (producer, The Chronicles of Narnia series). Another of his novels, Autumn, was also adapted for screen as a movie starring the late David Carradine and Dexter Fletcher.
With the official publication of Hater and its highly anticipated first sequel, Dog Blood, David is rapidly becoming a leading voice in modern dystopian fiction.
He lives in Halesowen, UK with his wife and a houseful of daughters and step-daughters. This may explain his pre-occupation with Armageddon.
April 5th, 2010
In a special third ‘episode’ of Bury Me With…, we asked many-fingers-in-many-pies Chris Golden about the book he’d like to take with him to his grave…
He said: True Tales of Resurrection
True Tales of Resurrection was published in a special edition of Christopher Golden’s imagination only.
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About Christopher Golden:
Christopher Golden is the award-winning, bestselling author of such novels as The Myth Hunters, Wildwood Road, The Boys Are Back in Town, The Ferryman, Strangewood, Of Saints and Shadows, and (with Tim Lebbon) The Map of Moments. He has also written books for teens and young adults, including Poison Ink, Soulless, and the thriller series Body of Evidence, honored by the New York Public Library and chosen as one of YALSA’s Best Books for Young Readers. Upcoming teen novels include a new series of hardcover YA fantasy novels co-authored with Tim Lebbon and entitled The Secret Journeys of Jack London.
A lifelong fan of the “team-up,” Golden frequently collaborates with other writers on books, comics, and scripts. In addition to his recent work with Tim Lebbon, he co-wrote the lavishly illustrated novel Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire with Mike Mignola. With Thomas E. Sniegoski, he is the co-author of multiple novels, as well as comic book miniseries such as Talent and The Sisterhood, both currently in development as feature films. With Amber Benson, Golden co-created the online animated series Ghosts of Albion and co-wrote the book series of the same name
As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies The New Dead and British Invasion, among others, and has also written and co-written comic books, video games, screenplays, the online animated series Ghosts of Albion (with Amber Benson) and a network television pilot.
The author is also known for his many media tie-in works, including novels, comics, and video games, in the worlds of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hellboy, Angel, and X-Men, among others.
Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in fourteen languages in countries around the world.
April 1st, 2010
In the second in the series of Bury Me With…, we asked scary Gary McMahon about the book that has influenced him more than any, the book he’d like to take with him to his grave…
“I had to think about this one for a long time, and two or three books immediately demanded my attention – books that had a profound effect on my entire life when I first read them. Alan Garner’s Elidor, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But in the end, I went back to the first book I thought of when I saw the question:
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson.
Johnson’s book consists of a bunch of episodic short stories, all narrated by the same character – a nameless junkie in 1970s America. The stories chart his drug addiction and his ennui, but they also show us so much more about the character and the people around him. The narrator’s voice has a fragile poetic quality, but there’s also a grinding realism to the descriptions of the world he moves through.
There’s beauty here, and pain, and even transcendence. The spirituality of the book has little to do with God or religion, but provides striking insights regarding humanity in all its shattered glory. Everyone the narrator meets is as broken as him, and rather than wallow in self-pity he is overcome with the melancholy beauty of the human condition. His observations and insights are tender and life-affirming, yet he is a true lost soul. When he tells us “I knew every raindrop by its name”, we believe him, and we feel his sense of awe as he says it.
If you’ve never read this book before, do yourself a favour and track it down. My own copy is never far from hand. I’ve only ever read it all the way through once, but I dip into it often, licking the frost off the dream (to steal and abuse a line from Charles Bukowski).
Jesus’ Son is a masterpiece: it’s a book that reminds me what it is to be human.”
More information on Denis Johnson can be found at Wikipedia.
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About Gary McMahon:
Gary McMahon’s fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.K. and U.S and has been reprinted in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He is the British-Fantasy-Award-nominated author of Rough Cut, All Your Gods Are Dead, Dirty Prayers, How to Make Monsters, Rain Dogs, Different Skins, Pieces of Midnight, Hungry Hearts, and has edited an anthology of original novelettes titled We Fade to Grey.
Angry Robot/HarperCollins will publish the novels Pretty Little Dead Things and Dead Bad Things in 2010 and 2011. The Concrete Grove trilogy will be published by Solaris Books from 2011 onwards.
March 29th, 2010
In the first of what hopefully become a regular series, Horror Reanimated asks genre authors about the book that has influenced them more than any, the book they’d like to take with them to their grave… first up is Canadian author Simon Strantzas:
“The book I would like to be buried with is such an obvious selection for me that it hardly seems worth the effort to explain. Anyone familiar with my writing might guess the answer, but for those in the dark I suspect I’d most like to be buried with The Collected Strange Stories of Robert Aickman. Aickman didn’t write a lot of fiction over his lifetime, but what he did write continues to fascinate and befuddle those of us who enjoy his work. He dealt with dreamscapes, with symbols and metaphors, and while many of his tales lack a clear explanation for what exactly has occurred in them, they are often like the best of our dreams – at times illogical, yet always adhering to their own internal logic.
Reading Aickman one can’t help but feel that it’s the reader, not the author, who is at fault if things aren’t clear – the tales make sense, 
one can feel that they do, even if how remains frustratingly elusive. To study these ciphers, to tease out their true meanings, would take eternity, and I suspect, trapped in that coffin beneath the ground, I’d have nothing more to do than put my mind to it once and for all. Imagine: to be the only corpse in the yard who understood Aickman… I wager I’d be the belle of the undead ball that year.”
The first two volume edition of The Collected Strange Stories of Robert Aickman was published by Tartarus Press and Durtro Press in 1999 and is now out of print, but available through several specialist dealers.
More informaton about Robert Aickman can be found at Wikipedia.
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About Simon Strantzas:
Simon Strantzas is the author of the critically-acclaimed Cold To The Touch (Tartarus Press, 2009), a collection of thirteen tales of the strange and supernatural. His first collection, Beneath The Surface (Humdrumming, 2008) was called “possibly the most important debut short story collection in the genre [in years]. . .” by multiple award-winning editor Stephen Jones. Strantzas’s stories have appeared or are due soon in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Cemetery Dance, Postscripts, and elsewhere. In 2009, his work was nominated for the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. Current projects include a third collection of short fiction, a novella, and a short novel. He also hopes to one day catch up on a voluminous amount of reading.
He has lived in Toronto, Canada, for his entire life and has no plans on leaving for sunnier climes.
- Visit Simon’s website
- Read a recent interview with Simon at Savvy Reader’s Bookshelf
March 22nd, 2010
Next Posts
“T.E.D. Klein’s Dark Gods, a quartet of novellas that hit the stands in 1985 as a follow-up to his famous novel The Ceremonies. Klein, a respected former editor of The Twilight Zone Magazine, gave us a tour de force with his novella collection and demonstrated his standing as a master craftsman possessed of a sophisticated and cerebral style matched by perhaps a handful of modern fantasists.
