“There are two choices here, essentially because this article serves as a kind of recommendation (and primarily, I suppose, for those reading in English) and my chosen author, Nagai Kafū, is Japanese. Therefore, I’ll have to select one translated volume, and one volume in the original.

On the website Goodreads, I notice that my influences are listed simply as, ‘Nagai Kafū’. His name standing alone like that makes it seem as if he is actually my greatest influence as a writer, and at first I wondered if this might be misleading. I suppose it is, to an extent, but perhaps not such a great extent as I first thought. It does seem curious, though, that Kafū has come to assume such great significance for me.

I was writing from a very young age, and was more interested in simply immersing myself in my own fantasy world than assimilating literary influences. The first influences of which I was conscious, however, were Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft. I wrote a number of truly terrible Lovecraftian stories in my teens, but was eventually saved from this tendency just because of the need to express myself – which cannot be done in the Lovecraftian manner for me – and also through my discovery of Japanese literature. The imagination, I saw, did not have to be overtly supernatural in order to explore its own boundaries. In a way, my emphasis had shifted. Where before I was most intoxicated by fantasy, now I was most intoxicated by beauty. It probably does not need saying that there is considerable overlap between these two things.

My first love in Japanese literature is Mishima Yukio, and his swansong, The Decay of the Angel, is perhaps the strongest influence on my writing after H.P. Lovecraft. Mishima served as the doorway, and Ian Buruma was my immediate guide when I stepped through. In Buruma’s book, A Japanese Mirror, I learned of a strange and intriguing writer called Nagai Kafū, who wrote about the esoteric world of the old Japanese demi-monde. Mishima’s form of beauty is in some ways in the major key. His titles – The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Sun and Steel, A Forest in Full Bloom, Beautiful Star, Forbidden Colours – speak of the extravagant, the brilliant, the zenith of things, the flash of a blade, the glitter of gold (with a hint behind this dazzle of the sinister and demonic). His is an extroverted introspective literature. Kafū is almost the opposite of this, but is perhaps too odd and too asymmetrical in his ethos to be quite the opposite of anything. His titles – Flowers in the Shade, Dwarf Bamboo, Quiet Rain, Coming Down with a Cold, A Tale No One Asked For – speak of the creeping grey of shadows in layers of quietude, of world-weary sophistication, of the hour past the zenith, of the rustle of autumn leaves and the sober but rich colours of an Edo komon-style kimono. It is beauty in the minor key, and a literature of introverted extrospection. Where Mishima’s titles blazon their symbolism like a banner flapping in the sun, Kafū’s titles hide their symbolism as in the folds of sombre fabric, like threadbare embroidery in the bed robes of an old and ailing man, quaintly elaborate with wonderfully decrepit allusions. In truth, Kafū is closer to what many hold to be traditional Japanese aesthetics. In the fourteenth century, the monk Kenko wrote, “Are we to admire the moon only when it is full, the flowers only when in full-bloom?” The question suggests he was reacting against the orthodoxy of the time, but his aesthetic of the falling petals and the waning moon has itself come to be something of an orthodoxy in Japan.

Conservative in his nostalgia, and in his love of the traditions of his country, still, it would be wrong to think of Kafū as orthodox. When other Japanese were still wearing kimono in their daily life, Kafū – taller than the average Japanese – cut an eccentric figure in a dark Western suit, carrying a briefcase. (He spent four years in America and almost a year in France at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.) Some of his works (including his collection Tales of France) were banned for many years on grounds of indecency. And during the Second World War, when other writers were lending their words to the propaganda of the war machine, Kafū kept what is seen retrospectively as the respectable silence of integrity.

To the company of writers, Kafū appeared to prefer the company of dancing girls, geisha and prostitutes, and these were his chief muses. Let me select two brief quotes that may give some idea of Kafū’s world. The first of them comes from Seidensticker’s translation of A Strange Tale from East of the River, and describes a prostitute that the protagonist has become ‘accidentally’ acquainted with:

The figure of O-yuki, her hair always in one of the old styles, and the foulness of the canal, and the humming of the mosquitoes – all of these stirred me deeply, and called up visions of a past now dead some thirty or forty years. I must, if it seems at all possible, state my thanks to her who was the agent of these strange, insubstantial visions. More than the actor in the Namboku play, more than the Shinnai singer, Tsuruga somebody or other, who tells of Rancho and his tragic love, O-yuki was the skilful yet inarticulate artist with power to summon the past.

The second is a quote (trans. Seidensticker) from ‘Unfinished Dream’:

He frequented the pleasure quarters with such enthusiasm that ten years were as a day; for he knew only too well that they were quarters of darkness and unrighteousness. … Indignation at the hypocritical vanity of proper wives and the fraud of the just and open society was the force that sent him speeding in the other direction, toward what was from the start taken for dark and unrighteous. There was more happiness in finding the remains of a beautifully woven pattern among castaway rags than in finding spatters and stains on a wall proclaimed immaculate.

Recently, I moved from Wales to Devon. I was forced to leave many of my belongings behind, and, more recently again, I returned to Wales to retrieve some of these, and store others of them in the attic of the cottage where they remained. Among the books I retrieved was a jacketed hardback edition of Kafū the Scribbler (The Life and Writings of Nagai Kafū, 1879-1959), a volume that contains something between biography and critical appreciation, by Edward Seidensticker, and translations of a handful of Kafū’s stories (including some excerpted fragments), also by Seidensticker. It is a book that has travelled with me all over the world, to Japan, America and back. It is not in poor condition. I received the book as a Christmas present when I was still quite young (in my early twenties, I would say), and at that age I was so leisurely in my habits that I would coat any new book I acquired with a kind of transparent laminate plastic; I did not want the books to become stained or dog-eared. The jacket of this book has just such a coating. The pages have a soft, matt quality, and a sense of thickness to the fingers. They give off a natural, woody aroma. The print is large and friendly. Inside front and back covers are maps of Tokyo as Kafū supposedly knew it, after the earthquake of 1923, and marked with place names of particular significance in Kafū’s oeuvre. The publisher is Stanford University Press. The jacket cover is a black and white photograph of Kafū with round, black Harold Lloyd glasses, a rather wry – or ‘dyspeptic’, to use a Kafū-esque word – expression on his face, as he holds a cigarette aloft in his right hand. There was no way I could leave this book in Wales, however many times I have read it before.

Back in Devon, I leafed through the volume again, and read the opening of the first of the translated stories, ‘The River Sumida’, which is about the length of a novelette. Even in translation, Kafū’s prose is intoxicating. The tale begins:

Shōfūan Ragetsu, teacher of poetry, had missed his midsummer visit to his sister, who gave samisen lessons across the river at Imado. Every day he told himself he must go. He could not bring himself to venture out into the heat of the day, however, and so he would wait for evening.

How leisurely and how elegant is the flow of Kafū’s writing. How simple and opaque it is, and yet, in the perfection of its selected detail, how endlessly evocative. Whenever I revisit Kafū, I wonder why I have ever been away. It is one of the most prominent peculiarities of my taste in literature that I like writing that stands up to being quoted in excerpt form. Kafū is not quotable because he is epigrammatic, but because he is lyrical. Especially reading his work in the original, I feel that I could break it down to a sentence at a time and still quote it with savour. More than that – a word at a time. Clearly that’s a ridiculous statement, but such are my feelings about Kafū. I should also emphasise that Kafū’s writing is significantly greater in the original. One thing that does not translate is Kafū’s absolutely masterly sense of rhythm, with long, elaborate sentences held in perfect balance over many clauses.

In his Preface, Seidensticker writes:

It might be argued that the rather fragmentary and in-between form I have chosen is more appropriate for introducing a lyric poet than a novelist. I would reply only that Kafū is a very discursive sort of novelist. Excerpt treatment does not damage the dramatic unity of his works, for there is little dramatic unity in the first place.

Seidensticker views Kafū as a deeply flawed writer, largely because of the lack of dramatic unity he describes, and yet he does not stop to admire the fact that Kafū’s work stands up to be excerpted in such a way when the work of so few other writers does. I feel as though I can dip into Kafū’s work anywhere, as if it is, in a sense, all one great work, though Kafū does vary his style considerably. In other words, all Kafū’s pieces are, in a sense, additions, enriching endnotes to a vision that has no particular beginning or end. Kafū, like Lovecraft, like Peake, is one of those writers who gives us new glasses with which to view the world. What he allows us to see is indefinable, but distinct. I begin to see Kafū everywhere, and especially in the works of writers I admire (though not all writers – not, for instance, Mishima). Mark Samuels, Arthur Machen, Denton Welch, Justin Isis – to my knowledge, these people have not been influenced by Kafū, but I see Kafū in them in ways that are sometimes hard to describe.

There’s a kind of mystery to Kafū’s writing, which consists partly in the fact that he does not present mystery. On questions of metaphysics (in which I have great interest), he is almost entirely silent (though it would be impossible, I believe, to remove all hints of the metaphysical from literature). Yet he cannot have been a shallow man. I say this because, if he were, he would have been unable to write works of such profound consoling power. It is as if, where others (a very few) perhaps found the Fountain of Youth, Kafū, who continued to age, found something else, just as rare, that made his aging unimportant – the Fountain of Understated Beauty. Those who drink from the fountain are able to see anything in life from an aesthetic point of view, to gain a sense of beauty through distance. The Fountain of Understated Beauty frees you from the body. Kafū, freed thus, recreated the places he loved and haunted and loved to haunt, through his prose. To immerse oneself in that prose is therefore to be similarly freed. As with metaphysics, also with psychology, Kafū is unusually (for a modern novelist) lacking in interest. The layers of depth in Kafū’s work are not layers of human psychology (at least not as understood by a psychiatrist); they are layers simply of the aesthetic – of atmosphere. In this sense, he is the perfect writer, though an unusual one, since he approaches more nearly to the idea of writing for writing’s sake than anyone else I can immediately think of. It’s not that he has no opinions – these he expresses quite freely when he feels like it – it is simply that, whatever point he might be making is somehow contained within a greater aestheticism that is beyond all pontification. Other writers may affirm or deny there is a meaning to existence, and I am far from being immune to such questions. When I read Kafū, it does not matter whether or not there is a point. The struggles of other writers to make this or that point seem faintly ridiculous. Indeed, nothing matters, because I have once more sipped from the waters of the Fountain of Understated Beauty. If this sounds nihilistic, the experience of it, though tinged strongly with resignation, is for me far from nihilistic. It is no more nihilistic, in fact, than friendship, or that notion that Kafū in so many ways embodies – art for art’s sake.

It is perhaps fitting that Kafū’s first western biographer, Seidensticker, should take such a cranky view of his work, given the eccentric nature of that work, and of Kafū’s life, but even Seidensticker, through his deprecation, has this to say of Kafū:

[He is] the writer of whom I was probably fondest [though] affection and admiration are not the same thing. … Though he was not such a good novelist, he has come to seem better and better at what he was good at. … As I try to keep alive memories of how things were [in Tokyo], Kafū is a dearer companion than ever.

I do not agree with Seidensticker’s assessment that Kafū was a bad novelist. Kafū was a great writer, and whether he was a ‘novelist’ or not, as judged from a hidebound Western point of view, is irrelevant. Nonetheless, reading these words, I forgive Seidensticker, and feel disposed to take his cantankerous biography and really not bad translations to the grave with me.

Since it would be wrong to take only a translation to the grave, when I love the original texts so much more, I would also like to take volume 5 in the Shinchō Japanese literature series – a hardback of selected Kafū in a creamy bamboo-beige box, with an ‘N’ motif on both box and jacket. A wraparound slip that comes with the box sports my favourite photograph of Kafū, in which he is giving a gap-toothed grin. The stories contained inside are, Udekurabe (Geisha in Rivalry), Bokuto Kidan (A Strange Tale from East of the River), Sumidagawa (The River Sumida), Hikage no Hana (Flowers in the Shade) and others. Many of my favourites are missing, but Kafū wrote a great deal (I have his collected works in 29 volumes), and I must face the agony of choice.

What will they bring me in my grave? That, I hope, which they have brought me in life. I quote again, this time from the story ‘Coming Down with a Cold’:

… it brought the supremely soft consolation of knowing that he was at home.”

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About Quentin S. Crisp:

Quentin S. Crisp was born in 1972 in North Devon, England. After a period of five years working with Wolf and Water Arts Company, he attended Durham University where his degree was Japanese Studies. He graduated in 2000.

He has had a number of books published – mainly short fiction – including Morbid Tales (2004), Rule Dementia! (2005), Shrike (2009) and All God’s Angels, Beware! (2009).

His latest book is the novel Remember You’re a One-Ball! from Chomu Press.

• More information and interviews with Quentin at Wikipedia
• Visit Quentin’s website, The Directory of Lost Causes

“Let’s sort out our terms of reference here. I’m assuming by ‘the book I’d like to be buried with’ that we’re granting me some kind of zombified afterlife in which I can read, and that I’ve been buried with one of those booklights, and maybe some peanuts to keep me going when I get peckish? I’m also assuming that we’re meaning ‘a book I’d like to read again’, which helps – it means I can discard all those books I’ve enjoyed but am unlikely to tackle more than once (Danielewski’s House of Leaves, for example, which I thought was great, but I really can’t be bothered doing all that ‘holding the book upside down and reading great long lists of stuff’ again). In the end, this came right down to the wire in a all-out scrap between three books, all of which I’d have been perfectly happy to read in my coffin at leisure as the Rapture happened around me. The two losers (let’s not call them that, actually: let’s call them the two equally wonderful books that I didn’t pick this time) are The Collected Ghost Stories of MR James and Junji Ito’s three-part graphic novel about a town cursed by spirals, Uzumaki. Both of these are superb, nigh-on faultless, pieces of art which have brought me hours of pleasure, but in the end, I didn’t really have a choice. So, the book I’d like to be buried with is Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.

I think I was about 12 when I first read ‘Salem’s Lot; I’d read Carrie previous to it, which I’d enjoyed but which hadn’t done too much for me, so my buying it wasn’t because I was a King fan per se. No, I bought it for three reasons: firstly, I was on holiday in Wales, in a rainy caravan park, and just before we’d left home, I’d seen the first part of Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of ‘Salem’s Lot on TV – I was concerned that my parent’s very basic video wouldn’t tape the second part, and I wanted to know what happened, damnit! Second, the cover had a big, bald creepy vampire face on it, which intrigued me. And, thirdly, it had a cover quote by the Manchester Evening News, my local newspaper (“Triple H for horror!” was another quote, if I remember correctly, although not the one from the Evening News, I don’t think). I mean, how could I not buy it from the camp shop? Despite my mum’s misgivings, I used some of my own money and bought the book, and read it over the course of the week’s holiday. As the rain boinged on the caravan roof, I became entirely immersed in Maine, and in the goings-on in a small town, and I was genuinely, absolutely entranced.

For me, in ‘Salem’s Lot, King does so more than tell a vampire story (although he does, and a damn good one at that); he paints a town. I loved (and still do) the way King allows his characters (the town included) to unfurl, opening out before our eyes. It feels, somehow, like we’re not so much being told a story as let into a series of secrets that, almost accidentally, form a narrative. For an imaginative young boy just beginning to expand his reading choices into the world of ‘adult’ fictions, it was almost revelatory, that you could spend time over the small details, could let things happen at their own pace. It seems so obvious now (and I also know King wasn’t the first to do it; after all, ‘Salem’s Lot is, according to him, simply Peyton Place with vampires), but at the time it was a major lesson in how stories could and should work. As an adult, I can analyse why ‘Salem’s Lot is so good, and tell you that it’s because the set-pieces are thrilling, that it’s both creepy and moving, that the characters are complex and believable, that it never tries to make the vampires anything less than alien and vicious, that King’s eye for the details of a small town, and the lives that small town contains, has never been finer, but none of that really matters. No, what matters is this: at the time I first read it, ‘Salem’s Lot felt real.

It’s not a perfect book, by any means (how does Barlow get into the Petrie’s house without being invited? Huh? Huh?), but all of the faults that (for me) came to characterise some of King’s later work are held in check – the plotting never gets flabby, the authorial voice never gets too folksy, the characters are likeable without being contrived and, perhaps most importantly, despite its length, it never contains simply too many unnecessary words or feels too big. Sprawling and grandiose, yes, but always manageable. And in Straker and Barlow, of course, you have one of the greatest villainous double acts created, both urbane and violent, selfish and driven by lusts and yet veneered with charm and able to intellectually rationalise the horrors that they perpetrate. Before them, the human frailties King gives his other characters seem tiny but are never insignificant, which is how it should be: humans are worked upon, twisted and reformed by exposure to something evil, made into something new and less pleasant. Barlow and Straker are Evil, and when our heroes go into battle against them, it makes the stakes (no pun intended) as high as they can be.

I’ve reread ‘Salem’s Lot fairly regularly between that first experience and now (most recently listening to it as an unabridged audiobook on my iPod, which was a new and fun way to experience it), and whilst I’ve never quite caught that anything like that initial rush of sheer enjoyment that the first time delivered, each subsequent reading has given me something new and something good. Barlow and Straker, Ben Mears, Susan Norton, Mark Petrie, all may have aged since I first found that paperback in a dreary shop in Wales, but they haven’t dated a bit.”

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About Simon Kurt Unsworth:

Simon Kurt Unsworth was born in 1972 somewhere in the northwest of England, on a day during which no mysterious signs or portents were seen. He spent most of the following years growing, and hasn’t stopped yet, although he’s swapped upwards for outwards these days. He lives in Lancaster (just below the Lake District) with his wife and child, which is a good place to live if you like that sort of thing – it has a river, some pubs and roads of varying quality. He writes when he’s not working, spending time with his family, cooking, walking the dogs, watching suspect movies or lazing about.  His stories have appeared in the Ash Tree Press anthologies At Ease with the Dead, Exotic Gothic 3 and Shades of Darkness, as well as in Lovecraft Unbound, Gaslight Grotesque, The Black Book of Horror 6 and Black Static magazine. His story ‘The Church on the Island’ was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and was reprinted in Stephen Jones’ The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #19 and The Mammoth Book of the Very Best of Best New Horror. His first collection, Lost Places, was published by the Ash Tree Press in March 2010.

• Visit Simon’s blog

“‘The Wine Dark Sea by Robert Aickman would have made joint first choice but that problem has been decided for me because it has already been mentioned in this series …the other is Nest of Nightmares by Lisa Tuttle. A friend in California sent it to me last year and I was devastated when I had to send it back. Quite fortuitously, as copies are hard to come by now, I went into the dealers’ room at WHC Brighton this year and found a copy quickly. I asked Lisa to sign it – a wonderful moment for me.

In Nest of Nightmares Lisa Tuttle gives me the mystery I long for and everything isn’t neatly tied up. I don’t always want that. And, there is much more going on than the literal meaning of the words. Her fiction is enigmatic and all the stronger for being so. Her characters are ordinary people facing the strange and I remember the imagery long after the final page has been turned. Women are mad, or are they? They are taken over, as are some of the ones they love — but by whom or what? They feel trapped. One protagonist is belittled (Robert Holdstock mentioned this when he talked of the story, Flying to Byzantium in Horror 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman) and others are driven by ‘forces’ supernatural or otherwise. They face life and death and we wonder if they live …what will be the outcome? They are never let off easily. The way back can be fraught with danger and some make the choice to stay or can’t get away from the ‘supernatural’ knowing a price will be paid.

And then we come to The Nest at the end of the collection. A real horror story for me, and as with many of Lisa Tuttle’s stories, it can be read on many levels. There is so much pain and yet hope in that story. We are all mortal and just perhaps… whether it is something we shouldn’t wish for… there might just be more about our world that we can’t comprehend.”

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About Allyson Bird:

Allyson’s debut collection, Bull Running for Girls, won The British Fantasy Society award for best collection in 2009. Her second, Wine and Rank Poison from Dark Regions Press, will be launched at Fantasycon this year. Autumn sees the publication of her first novel, Isis Unbound, from the same publisher. She is also co-editing an anti-fascist, anti-racist anthology, with Joel Lane, called Never Again. This is due out from Gray Friar Press in September.

A little on Wine and Rank Poison.

Revenge. Best served cold. Here are ten stories involving most of the deadly sins: greed, lust, envy, wrath, and pride. Strange stories woven in time and place from Ancient Greece to 1929 Odessa, Italy to the modern United States…stories that mix reality, mythology, legend, half-humans, and the inhuman…

Allyson lives near the South Yorkshire moors with her husband and young daughter.

Visit her website here: www.birdsnest.me.uk

“Although the Fifty Years of Playboy comes to mind because of the continually deviant workings of my fourteen-year-old mind, not only am I not sure that it is really a book, but even if it was, the experience of looking at pictures would eventually grow tiring and pale in comparison to the universe one can be transported to with cannonical writing.

Such is the case with Dandelion Wine. If I was to be buried with any book, it would be with my own first edition signed by Ray - Bigger Elvis - Bradbury. Not only did Ray introduce me to the coming of age (Bildungsroman) style of writing, but this truly magical novel contains everything I should ever want to read; it is a tale of horror, it is science fiction it is fantasy, it is mystery… it is truly an iconic book because it is uncategorical.

All that said, I think that the sole greatest importance that Dandelion Wine offers to the cannon of great writing is that it is a thesis on living. The most captivating idea for me as both a young adult and an adult was the notion that the main character, Douglas Spalding, believed that by owning a pair of brand-new Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes it could change his life. I’ve never looked at tennis shoes the same way since. Even now in my middling years, I can stare into a shoe store window wondering how much faster I could run, or how much higher I could jump, or how much better my life would be if only I owned those pair of shoes resting magically behind the glass. It’s a simple thing, but there are leagues of depth in the idea that a mere pair of shoes can change how we interact with the world. The shoes are of course a metaphor, and to that end, Dandelion Wine is really about the idea of living, for it was in this special summer that Douglas realized that he was not just existing but alive.

I can still remember when the world changed and I realized that I wasn’t the center of the universe, when I understood that I was but a small part of an unimaginably large whole. It was a terrifying moment, but it was necessary. And like myself, in that acknowledgement of one’s own mortality came the realization that everything could end for Douglas. He could die. And it is in that moment that he discovers the importance of everything and learns to appreciate that which he took for granted. So what better book to take with me in my death, than the book that best tells me how to live? What better book to spend an eternity with than one that can transport me to the eternal summer of my childhood, where I am running through a field of dandelions, the universe in front of me, immortality around me, wearing my own pair of brand-new Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Shoes, with the glorious knowledge that it will never ever end?”

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About Weston Ochse:

Weston Ochse is known as El Elvis Rojo south of the Mexican-American Border and has been known to appear on doorsteps singing his tales of horror and woe to the occupants who are huddled inside. The residents of the Mexican State of Sonora have begun to paint sigils on their doors to ward him away and have begun a tradition of providing offerings in the town squares of Sonoran Hotdogs, Pollo Asado Burritos and Chili Rellenos in an effort to appease El Elvis Rojo.

North of the border he is a fiction author who has won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel, and has been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in both Short and Long Fiction, as well as the Pushcart Prize  for short fiction. His most recent novel is Empire of Salt, a tale of zombie love and loss on the shores of the Salton Sea.

In his spare time, he races tarantula wasps, watches Border Patrol Death Race 2000, and bakes in the noonday sun. You can find him at www.westonochse.com.

 
Suzi Lorraine first came to my attention when I picked up a copy of the horror magazine Gorezone, which was, at that time only a demented little fledgling. Her column Diary of a Scream Queen was the reason I began picking it up and it has since grown in popularity with sales of up to 90,000 issues sold per month. I can’t help but feel Suzi had a large part to play in the success of this rag. With over 40 films under her belt, most of which are in the horror genre, her acting career has allowed her to travel all over the world, filming in Italy, Canada, London, Germany, Argentina, Amsterdam, and the British Virgin Islands. She also co-hosted The Gorezone Film Festival in London last October and was honoured by fans in Torino, Italy during ‘Suzi Lorraine Night’ at the Empire Theatre with several of her films being screened that night as part of a Suzi film retrospective. Some of the films Suzi appeared in are Claang: The Game, Sea of Dust and Bikini Girls on Ice. Won Ton… sees her working both in front and behind the camera.

 
Suzi created the story idea for (and co-produced) Won Ton Baby, collaborating with James Morgart to develop the script. Together they’ve created a fusion of comedy and horror; a riotous celebration of the perverse, the ghoulish and the zany all done in spectacular bad taste. Suzi was kind enough to brave an interview with me – she is, after all currently devising sadistic torture techniques for serial killers in Hell – and answers all my questions with great honesty. For those who want to know more, read on….

 
Alan Kelly: Hello Suzi, welcome to Horror Reanimated. Could you tell me a bit about what first inspired Won Ton Baby?

 
Suzi Lorraine: Thanks! I’m thrilled to be here at Horror Reanimated. Couldn’t think of a better place to dwell, for a spell….
 
The idea of “Won Ton Baby!” was conjured up by yours truly about 3 years ago, when I was working on a short horror film. I was playing a maid, and the director had decided on a whim that he wanted my character to speak with a “sexy accent”. So being a goofball, I decided to start speaking with a broken Chinese accent. It amused everyone on set, and I said to everyone, “one day I’m going to make a film where I keep a quirky Asian accent throughout the entire movie”. During the same film shoot, my stomach was rumbling during one of the takes, and we started joking around about me spawning a devil baby who is also Asian. One joke led to another, and the idea of “Won Ton Baby!” was “born”.
 
I further fleshed out the idea, and drew heavy inspiration from my love of 80s killer baby movies such as “It’s Alive”, “Basket Case”, and “Child’s Play”. I wanted “Won Ton Baby!” to have the same campy, tongue in cheek vibe as these movies I grew up with and loved so much.  I’m a huge fan of blending horror with black comedy.  I was also tired of the rampant CGI that is prevalent in so many films nowadays, and I wanted to go back to basics - rather than special effects, our sfx team created a devil baby made from silicone that could be puppeteered. We still have the handsome little devil, although he’s slightly the worse for wear after all of his adventures in the movie.

AK: I think humour in horror is absent nowadays. Earlier I read that Marilyn Manson is to star in a retro slasher flick called Splatter Sisters, which was described as “sexploitation-serial-killer-movie circa 1989″. Do you think horror has had its funny bone ripped out? I ask this because Won Ton Baby is hilariously OTT and you have a flair for comedy (ala Goldie Hawn, the dipsy, cute, sexy and smart character) - I watched The Human Centipede recently and it was so unrelentingly bleak, it actually left a nasty taste in my mouth (no pun intended) - do you believe horror needs to be less…nihilistic?
 
SL: I know what you mean! The vast majority of new horror movies today are straight up and serious as hell! Even more serious than Tiger Wood’s obsession with hookers. These kind of movies certainly have their place, and are the backbone of the horror industry. However, for my particular odd tastes and offbeat strangeness, there are just not enough horror films with levity. I’m so grateful to directors like Sam Raimi, who is keeping the horror/comedy torch well lit. I was quite taken by “Drag me To Hell”. I’ve always been a fan of Raimi’s, and any true horror fan knows the Evil Dead series are classics!
 
As an actor and as a writer, I have to say I’m most in my element when I’m writing something that is off colour and amusing. Plus, let me tell you, it’s much more fun to make a horror/comedy than to make a horror film. More jokes and humor, less blood and anguish. Thanks so much for the kind words about my character in “Won Ton Baby!”. Do you know, it took me over a week to kick that accent after filming?
 
You know, I can’t believe the buzz that “Human Centipede” is getting! I heard about it only a few weeks ago from a friend who was quite taken with the err…. unusual…. premise of the film. And just a couple weeks later, you must be the 6th or 7th person that’s mentioned it to me. I have got to watch this. It goes to show you how important word of mouth is, and how quickly buzz can spread, particularly in the viral video/internet obsessed society we live in.

AK: Did the Won Ton crew face many challenges to get the film completed, where you all working to meet a specific deadline - what problems did you find yourself up against, both in pre/post production?

SL: Our biggest challenge was that Baby Won Ton kept sneaking off to smoke weed and flirt with the extras. 
 
Besides that, the time constraints were the biggest issue.  For a few of the locations, mainly the restaurants, we had a very tight period of time in which we could film.  The restaurant was not available until closing each night, so we began setting up around 11pm.  Our production designer Jen Morgart worked tirelessly to convert the restaurant each night from Italian to full fledged Chinese!  We shot thru the night, and needed to be wrapped by mid-morning so that the restaurant could get ready to start serving lunch that day.
 
Once the film was completed, we were working with a firm deadline to get the film completed in time for the Gorezone International Film Festival.  The film festival committee had accepted a rough cut of the film, but we still had to work quickly to get the final cut finished in time.  We had an amazing team, including our editor Ken Yankee, compositor James Todd, and composer Mars who worked long hours to ensure we met the deadline. 

AK: That slimy, lusty little bugger. Special effects guru Ingrid Okola created Won Ton Baby and what a monstrous little fiend he turned out to be - really hope he was only flirting and not eviscerating those extras - did you have a clear idea of how you wanted Baby Won Ton to look?

SL: I really did.  I pictured baby Won Ton very vividly in my head, even before the script was complete.  I knew I wanted him to be very short and squat, almost Sumo wrestler like in appearance and girth.  I knew he would have wild and wooly black hair/fur, and that he should have a definitive Asian resemblance.  And of course speak with a gravelly Chinese accent.  I wanted his teeth and claws to be gnarly and nasty.   Ingrid Okola and Paul Mafuz of Wicked EFX did a phenomenal job creating the baby from silicone and literally bringing the li’l devil to life!

AK: Those teeth are pretty nasty! Like Emily Booth’s “Movie Massacre” you have your own sidebar w/ Gorezone magazine on serial killers. Can you tell us all a wee bit about this?

SL: I actually started the serial killer project on my own dark and twisted initiative, presented it to Gorezone, and they loved the idea! I’ve always been intrigued by serial killers - far from admiration - but simply amazed by the psychology behind what makes them do what they do. Every day people may have fantasies about killing someone, but the thought of getting caught usually stops them from following thru. But for these guys, the urge is so strong, that they readily off people with complete disregard of the personal consequences.

I decided to try something new with my Gorezone “Diary of a Scream Queen” column, and write short stories/editorials about particularly disturbed serial killers, focusing primarily on the less “famous”, less notorious whackos, such as Bob Berdella, Richard Chase, and Issei Sagawa. It’s opened up a whole new angle for me as a writer, and for the readers of Gorezone, and I think this content is entirely different than what you’d find in most horror magazines.

AK: When did the Divine Debbie Rochon come onboard?

SL: That’s an excellent question. We thought of Debbie even before the script was complete! James Morgart wrote the character of Madame Won Ton with Debbie in mind, and we hoped that she would dig the character and the script and would sign on. We got in touch with her, and were thrilled when she accepted the role. I’ve been a Debbie fan for ages, and it was a treat instead of a treatment to work with her! She’s so prepared, and she brought so much life, energy, emotion, and last but not least, comedy, to the character of Madame Won Ton.

AK: You and James Morgart both worked together to put the flesh on the bones of Won Ton Baby and you’ve both collaborated before – have you any plans for a sequel?

SL: Indeed!  

Delightfully twisted visions of “Won Ton Baby! 2″ are already dancing in our heads.  Since Won Ton baby’s baby mama is part Cherokee Indian, we’re going to make baby Won Ton a Native American Indian in the sequel.  He will have a drinking problem, a wigwam, and will own a casino.  But as is customary with all things Won Ton, the white people will be the butt of the majority of jokes.  Hey, we aim for equal opportunity political incorrectness. 

AK: From the beginning I consider Gorezone to be one of the only horror magazines (I’m including genre magazines and excluding online magazines) to consistently champion underground and indie filmmakers/writers/artists. Would I be correct in saying that GZ waves -and will continue to do so - the flag for the underdog while simultaneously shining the torch on mainstream horror? What I mean is GZ puts cult/mainstream on an equal footing.
  
SL: That’s exactly it. The goal of the magazine is to help fans discover underground cult films, just as much as it is meant to help them discover and learn about mainstream Hollywood horror films. I think independent, lesser known horror films can be very exciting, in that they can really push the envelope and take risks that just wouldn’t be allowed in mainstream studio films. Often indie films are driven by passion, rather than the desire to make a buck. They’re grittier, often darker and more experimental. Indies can also step outside of the tried and true formula; you know the “paint by numbers” predictable formula that can be spotted in many mainstream films.
 
Gorezone is moving in a somewhat new direction, in that there is more of a focus now on substance, rather than just gore for the sake of gore. We don’t want to get pigeonholed into being a “blood and guts” only genre magazine. So we are definitely broadening our horizons, focusing on psychological thrillers just as much as slasher films. What’s interesting to me is that you can have a movie like “The Shining” or “Misery”, which in fact has very little onscreen gore, but your imagination runs wild. The things the viewer envisions are often even scarier than if the killings occur on camera.

AK: Won Ton Baby already seems to be generating quite a buzz — do you think horror filmmaking lacks a certain artistic or creative integrity. What I mean, there seems to be a lot of sameyness in commercial horror. Whereas Won Ton Baby, albeit very tongue in cheek - is a horror film where the viewer could see the love of the subject matter come through - it rivals and pretty much beats - or if Baby Won Ton had his way, chokes - all the other Bad Seed baby monsters that have come before (I am really hoping there isn’t a pun there, though I suspect there is — you’ve corrupted me Suzi) -

SL: I’ll grab your pun and run with it!  Won Ton’s Baby’s bad seed will be the impetus for “Won Ton Baby! 2″, as the poor drunk girl he impregnated gives birth to a whole new generation of baby won tons in the sequel….  
 
I agree - I see a trend of very similar themes in indie horror lately.   Some filmmakers like to “paint by numbers” - i.e. scantily clad girl/s get chased by madman wielding ax, knife, etc. and then offed one by one.   It’s a formula alright, but not terribly creative.    With “Won Ton Baby!”, we wanted to of course keep the elements of suspense and horror, but focus on the hilarity and insanity of the baby.   And the relationships between the Won Ton family members were paramount.  James Morgart did a phenomenal job fleshing out the characters in the screenplay.
 
The true test of a movie is whether you care about the characters.  If you’re half way thru, and you don’t give a “dalmation” whether the lead characters live or die, then the movie failed.  It was really important to us to make the characters very robust and even heartfelt, so that people would relate to them, and hopefully root for them.

AK: When did you first fall in love with the horror genre, was there ever a time that you can remember thinking: “this is the dark twisted avenue I’m gonna go down”?

SL: I think it all goes back to Alice Cooper. There was just something about that first time I heard “Steven” from the Welcome to My Nightmare album. My brother played it at full blast, and I remember it echoing and resonating thru the walls, particularly lines like “Steven, it’s time to come home!” and then the baritone “I’m a little boy”. “No, I’m a great big man”. It was just so creepy, and yet so enthralling at the same time. I think during that one month, I must have run back to my brother’s room 6 times asking him to play that album.
 
In terms of actual films, the imprinting (ahem… damage) had to have been done while watching “When a Stranger Calls”, or “Halloween”, or perhaps “Carrie” or “Psycho II”. It’s so hard to pinpoint the first horror film that I watched that really made a hard imprint. I can’t honestly remember, I just remember them always being a part of my family. My brother and father are horror fans, so I literally grew up around that stuff. I remember being about 9 years old, and being incredulous when my friends told me their parents said they can’t watch a movie. I was like “Whaatttt?? Why can’t you watch “Nightmare on Elm Street” with me? Or even worse, the friends that would say, ‘Suzi, I’m scared to watch those movies”! I honestly didn’t get it, and felt bad that they were missing out so dearly. And therefore, they had to pay!! Mwahhhh!!!!
 
My cousin (decidedly a non-horror fan) can tell you stories about how I terrorized her (lovingly, of course) by scaring the living hell out of her at sleepovers. I would trigger some kind of creepy horror soundtrack/song that I had recorded, and then magically it would start playing and freak her out. Or I would cut all the lights and toss stuff around, telling her it was the ghosts. Or even better, I would dress up as a ghost, and scare the living daylights out of her! (Editor’s note: HR staff found this very amusing…)

AK: Could you give me three titles from film, literature and television which you loved and why?

SL: TV: “Twilight Zone”. Brilliant sci fi/horror tales, with an impactful moral message at the end of every episode. I love the creativity and originality of the series. Riveting, and fascinating. And I love the fact that an episode could be completely creepy and/or terrifying without showing a drop of blood onscreen.

Film: “The Shining”. An example of an all around perfect horror film. You have a picturesque and oh so creepy old mansion, feelings of complete exclusion and isolation from society (and reality), and of course, the one and only Jack Nicholson, who was simply brilliant in the role, as he becomes slowly unwound and homicidal. Not to mention the ground breaking cinematography and art direction of the master Stanley Kubrick.

Literature: “Solitaire”, by Kelley Eskridge. It’s a sci-fi styled fictional account of a young woman in a post modern time who was convicted of a crime she didn’t commit, and was setenced to many decades of solitary confinement. However, in this futuristic world, the justice system has been using a technique in which prisoners are put into a catatonic style “sleep” in which hours seem like days, even years. So an 80 year sentence feels to the prisoner like 80 years, but can be completed in a year or 2. It was a really riveting account of this young girl’s struggles and the way she dealt with the insanity of being isolated for such a long period of time. The book also details her return to society, and how many demons she had to deal with as a result of her solitary imprisonment time.

AK: What are you thoughts on horror on the small-screen, you mentioned The Twilight Zone above – I’m excited about The Walking Dead and really like True Blood and Being Human.

SL: I think horror on the small screen can have tremendous potential, however there really haven’t been too many lasting series dedicated to it as of yet. Of course there are a million and one forensics/crime dramas out there like CSI and Criminal Minds, which are fantastic in their own right, however they are more psychological thriller/forensics based than actual horror.

I have also heard great things about the TV series “Dexter”, although I have yet to check it out. I recently discovered the “Chiller Channel” here in the US, and am loving the content! Speaking of good TV series, they recently played an “American Gothic” marathon on Chiller. What an intriguing show, with outstanding characters. I love that great comedic character actor, Gary Cole, and young Lucas Black (”Swingblade”) is also outstanding in the series.

AK: Thank you Suzi for taking the time to talk to me…

SL: Thanks so much for doing this interview with me Alan! It has been a lot of fun. I loved all your questions!

“The book I’d like to be buried with is a non-fiction travel book called Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon. I stumbled across it in a charity shop when I was 18 and it has become one of the most important books I own.

In the early ‘80’s, after a painful divorce and redundancy from his job as a Professor, Least Heat-Moon buys a van, decks it with a bed, table, cooker and toilet so it is liveable and in accordance with Native American resurrection rituals, calls it Ghost Dancing.

He then drives for 13,000 miles on the ‘Blue Highways’ of America, the small back water roads (coloured blue on the old Rand McNally maps) that take him through forgotten and lost towns; he purposely steers clear from the fast motorways and big cities. He retells the histories of the areas he passes through, talks to the people he meets along the way – be it a born again Christian who hitchhikes for no other purpose than to spread the word of God, a family who have a book recording every death in the community for several generations and take solace in the fact that one day their names will also be added to the book - to Brenda, the waitress he meets in a roadside diner, with whose dialogue (as with everybody he meets) he recreates on the page, and it’s beautiful to read.

Blue Highways is wistful, witty, heart warming and painful. The knowledge that many of these people knew that they were the last of their kind before they were swallowed up by faceless consumerism that lurked at the edges of their communities is extremely sad and touching.

The book inspired me so much, that I took my own road trip, at 19, all around the UK. I spent one year on the road, just me with a tent and a rucksack and I hitchhiked and found work in whatever town I landed in and met many amazing people, some who I’m still in touch with 15 years later. And the book went with me every step of the way, and it holds pride of place on my best bookshelf, battered and dog-eared, next to the signed Pan Horrors and the Not at Nights…”

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About Johnny Mains:

Johnny Mains is a relative newcomer to the genre. He has had a couple of short stories published in the Black Book of Horror series, has written for SFX and interviews cult authors and artists for  The Paperback Fanatic Magazine.

He has just edited Back From the Dead: The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories and has written the introduction for the re-issue of the 1959 Pan Book of Horror Stories, out in October.

He lives in Norwich with his wife Lou and dog, Biscuit.

• Visit Johnny’s website
• Read an interview with Johnny

“There are works of fiction I’ve enjoyed as much as M R James’s ghost stories, but few, I think, that I’ve enjoyed more. Certainly none have played so unexpectedly large a part in my life. I think that I first came across MRJ in a paperback edition of the Collected Stories belonging to my dad, when I was 13 or so. But the book I’d like to be buried with is a first edition of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary [1904]. (I don’t own a copy incidentally – the readers of this will have to club together in time for the funeral. No flowers, please).

Of the eight stories in this, his first collection, I would count six as absolutely first rate, and rank the remaining two alongside the best work of other Edwardian supernaturalists. Five of them, and a later story – A Warning to the Curious – form what I now call the M R James Trilogy, a set of one man shows in which I take on the role of the author telling spook tales in his Cambridge study, circa 1904.

Most people who love M R James – and I’ve only ever met those who love him or have never read him; I have yet to meet a full blooded James hater – most people who love him seem to have got hooked during adolescence. But they’re a pleasure that endure into adulthood and – for the purposes of this, anyway – beyond.

They grow on you. Of the stories I perform, The Mezzotint, The Ash Tree and Lost Hearts have increased in stature in my eyes over the years while Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you, my Lad, and A Warning to the Curious have retained their status as firm favourites.

I started doing MRJ shows five years ago, when I worked at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and got the chance to perform in his old office – the Founder’s Library, a magnificent Victorian book-lined interior with a huge marble fireplace, where he catalogued so many of the medieval manuscripts in Cambridge collections. I think I’ve probably performed Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook over two hundred times since then and I’ve really not got sick of it. The gradual build up of tension, the accumulation of detail, the spectacular, climactic apparition, and that slow, rather melancholy coda – they affect me now as they affected me a quarter of a century ago.

Perhaps, in fact,  after so many repetitions the stories aren’t quite as chilling as they were on first reading. One might think that’s a failure in a ghost story but I don’t. For me the shudders – and they are undoubtedly there – have always been only part of the pleasure that MRJ delivers. There’s a humour in the stories, a playfulness, and that distinct narratorial voice – sometimes diffident, always friendly – that make them perfect holiday reading. Particularly if that holiday is taken alone. In winter. By the sea. And one reaches it by train. I think I’ve always found something strangely comforting about M R James.

They were composed for the holidays in the first place. James wrote all except one of the stories in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary to read aloud to friends at Kings College at Christmas (the last, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas is for me the least satisfying of the collection and was written at the publisher’s request to fill up the volume). So they are party pieces, really, candlelit, donnish entertainments, to be enjoyed with wine and anchovy toast after chapel on Christmas Eve. James’s protagonists are often solitary men, even lonely men, and this often leaves them vulnerable to inexplicable phenomena, but he’s not out to describe or inspire any existential agony. He doesn’t show us a cruel, random universe. His is a world of cathedral precincts and pipesmoke-filled hotel sitting-rooms, into which the monsters and grotesques that lurk in the margins of his beloved medieval manuscripts sometimes intrude. If James has a world view it is, as he admits himself, a very simple one – that there is more in heaven and earth, Horatio…  And that golf is an inexplicable waste of time.

I also love James McBryde’s illustrations in the book. Poor, genial, doomed, talented James McBryde, MRJ’s beloved friend. A reluctant medic, he had in 1904 at last embarked upon a career as an artist. The illustration of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was his first professional job and he went at it with gusto. A framed print of McBryde’s version of the climax of Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad, hangs above the desk where I’m writing this.

A quick recap: Parkins, the Professor of Ontography at Cambridge University, is enjoying a golfing holiday on the Suffolk coast. He finds an ancient whistle by the beach, blows it and inadvertantly summons a… well it’s hard to say what exactly… but something responds to the whistle and attacks him in his room in the middle of the night, something wrapped in bedsheets.

The story makes the being’s “intensely horrible face of crumpled linen” the focal point of the terror. James McBryde pays more attention to the grimace of its victim: in the picture Parkins is skeletal, his mouth a lunatic rictus, his cheeks hollowed out by a scream. The story has him lurching out of the window to escape his attacker; McBryde hems him in against a chest of drawers, his claw-like hands reaching out to fend off a being that he is too terrified to touch. Like the best book illustrations, it not only complements MRJ’s prose, it adds to the enjoyment of it.

The young artist himself sensed that he had created something special. On the 6th May 1904 he wrote to MRJ. “I have finished the Whistle ghost… I covered yards of paper to put in the moon shadows correctly and it is certainly the best thing I have ever drawn…”

It was probably also the last piece he completed. By the 4th of June he was dead, from a botched operation to remove his appendix. It was partly as a tribute to his great friend that James published Ghost Stories… in the first place.

I’ve also grown to love the look and feel of that first edition – the weight of it, the thick pages, the brown, hessian-like binding, the Gothic script on the cover. I’ve seen and handled a few copies over the last few years and still scour charity shops and jumble sales just in case one of those mythical copies turns up, going for 50p because the vendor doesn’t know what he’s selling.

And finally I like the idea of some Dennistoun or Parkins of the future digging up my funerary copy and becoming increasingly uneasy as he reads about what can happen when you pilfer the treasure of the past. So uneasy in fact that, by the time he has reached the end of the book, he decides it might be best to return the modest looking volume to the bony grasp of the skeleton from whose grave he snatched it. Yes, that would be the sensible thing to do.”

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About Robert Lloyd Parry:

Since December 2005 Robert has been performing two one man shows based on the stories of M R James, the greatest writer of supernatural tales in English. His uncanny resemblance to the author has been noted with a shudder by more than one enthusiastic audience member.

• Visit the Nunkie Theatre Company’s website

The Objective of the title is itself cloaked in mystery as CIA Agent Ben Keynes is assigned a small Special Ops team to locate and interview a local mystic. This old man may or may not know about the massive radioactive heat signature discovered by satellites deep in an unforgiving terrain of mountains and desert. It becomes apparent that this search is only a part of Keynes’ mission, but whether or not he knows the reasons behind the team’s steady disintegration as they travel deeper into the wilderness is also unclear.

What is clear is the formula Myrick has chosen to apply to The Objective: this is The Blair Witch Project without trees (and witches). He develops a gradual unease as the lost group stumble across wooden triangles stuck in the barren landscape, possibly placed as warnings. Water turns to dust in their canteens and they see vague shimmering shapes in the distance, hazy figures walking into the triangular phenomena before ascending into the sky. As they are picked off one-by-one by a rarely seen force that literally disintegrates its victims (its geometries looking like something that might have come from a mind-meld of pseudo-scientist and new-age sf maverick Eric Von Daniken, and H.P.Lovecraft) the team is no nearer knowing what it is supposed to be doing.

The Objective suffers by its director’s reputation, and by comparison to the aforementioned Blair Witch Project, but it is relatively well-acted and fresh enough to be worthy of your time. Having said that, I’d like to see this script worked into a short story or novella - the reader would undoubtedly enjoy a more subtle and gritty supernatural experience that would make a much greater and longer-lasting impression, as suggestion is often more effective on the page than on screen.

The Objective, 2009

Directed by Daniel Myrick

“Just realizing that this is a completely different question than What book have you reread the most, or even What book is your favorite book, though I kept trying to read it that way. Since you asked, I’ve generated lists and lists, and consulted old lists, and it’s too painful to select just one, but at the same time I keep wanting to allow myself to cheat, just string ten or twenty together here, the same way you wallpaper your room with band posters when you’re fourteen, in hopes somebody’ll walk in, see how obviously cool you must be.

Or, really, I kind of gave up on an answer, was ducking the reminder I’d set to do this. But then, yesterday, I was writing the notes for this story collection I have coming out, and it hit me, or, I discovered it on the page, which is pretty much where I discover everything: It. Stephen King’s It.

That story’s still running in my head, is probably the most permanent piece of fiction I’ve ever read. The most influential, anyway, the one I’m just now seeing that I’ve always been trying to rewrite without getting caught. Because, even just looking at it on my shelf, that’s enough for me to see some chrome eyeballs rolling my way, sure, but the real magic of that story’s those kids, their dynamic, how they’re growing up together. With It, you get the horror but you also get the, I don’t know, the distinct sense of what it means to be human, and to keep trying to be human, even when the world’s failing all around you. A completely magical book for me, and I so appreciate the way it splits into all these distinct storylines but then comes back together. I mean, reading it, just remembering it, I know it’d be dangerous to be in that story, and it’s likely stupid to secretly want to be, but, just for the chance of gambling everything on that bike ride at the end, the chance of gambling and winning, it’s got to be worth it, yeah?  My heart’s pounding, even, writing this. Just thinking about that story again, about It.

I’m going to have to read it again now, soon. Need to get back to Derry for about a thousand pages.”

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About Stephen Graham Jones:

Stephen Graham Jones has seven books out so far, two of them horror - Demon Theory and The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti (the second a Shirley Jackson Award finalist) - and has two more horror novels on the horizon: The Ones That Almost Got Away, a collection of horror stories out with Prime Books in October, and It Came from Del Rio (Trapdoor Books), Book 1 of the Bunnyhead Chronicles.

Jones has been an NEA fellow, a Texas Writers League fellow, has won the Texas Insititute of Letters Fiction Award and the Independent Publishers Multicultural Award, and, in spite of all that Texas stuff, he now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, assigning Jack Ketchum to his students every chance he gets. His next two courses are The Slasher and The Zombie.

Visit Stephen’s website at http://www.demontheory.net/

“…E Mortius Revoco, a Guide to DIY Practical Resurrections.

Only kidding.

In fact, that’s a hard question, but put a gun to my head (and let’s face it, such an act would bring the grave a tad closer) and I’d have to say Money by Martin Amis. I love it. One of those books you can read from start to end with undiminished pleasure, or simply dip into and revisit certain seminal passages. The prose is wonderful, the jokes as dark and funny as they come, and the whole thing is frequently profound, provocative and stimulating. Amis is my generation’s big UK voice. Nuff said, sir.

Here’s a short extract to illustrate only some of the foregoing eulogising:

In LA, you can’t do anything unless you drive. Now I can’t do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn’t possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop you ashes or pick your nose, then it’s an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there’s a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug.

So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown sky line carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hours, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF–BOOZE–NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren’t even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.

What I love here, as in the great majority of Amis’s work, is the brilliance of the ideas, their phrasing, the way he alludes to great literature by way of tawdry modern life (”God’s green snot”). He has made the hideous beautiful - quite an achievement. If great writers hold up a mirror to their times, what is Amis giving us? In Money, it’s the way that the whole of social life has been commodified and subjugated to the rigors of capitalism. John Self is a void, a man who moves from one effortless addiction to the next. When he goes to watch an opera, he interprets the story according to a soap opera or a tabloid headline story. He’s drunk most of the time, but those blank-outs serve another purpose. Amis also offers us a meta-reflective rumination on the nature of novel writing. Characters disappear for great patches of all novels - Self simply blacks out: a nicely judged metaphor what happens when the reader ‘isn’t looking’. But Amis goes further, and later in the book we get a character called Martin Amis who’s deliberately manipulating his central character much in the way that ‘Godlike’ authors do: a smart touch. There are other things going on in this novel which beggar belief. The complexity masquerades as endless vitriolic and painful comedy. It’s probably the funniest thing I’ve ever read. And if Self achieves a little pathos and independence towards the end of the book, what are we to make of this? Is he redeemable? Are our times? Are we?

On the basis of this book in particular, Amis has been described as a misogynist, but nothing - in my view - could be further from the truth. Selina Street manipulates Self, for sure, though it’s he who holds all the money and that’s what she’s after. And of course it’s another female character, Martina Twain, who attempts to reform Self, even though, when left in her flat a while, he spends rather less time reading the copy of Animal Farm she’s lent him than he does seeking out choice bits of photography over which he can masturbate. But come on, that’s all true - it’s so true. And that’s the bottom line for me: Amis tells it the way it is for men in these not-so-long-departed modern times.

Maybe he’s therefore a geezers’ author. I’m not entirely sure. All I do know is that his fictional worlds resonate with me. The headiness of the language is intoxicating. He does what V S Pritchett insisted all writers should do: give voice to all the wonderful thoughts inside even the most base of people. And boy is Self base. But…maybe we all are. Maybe Amis is reminding us of that, and perhaps he uses his divine gift for prose as a way of smuggling these truths through the ever-so-refined filter of ‘good taste’. In short, he challenges what literature is supposed to deal with, the higher aspirations and concerns of humanity. Well, what can I say to support that? Something in the style of the superb Money, maybe: okay, here goes - Bach, Galileo, Shakespeare, Churchill, Keats, Constable, Brunel, to name but a few - they all surely enjoyed a handjob now and again.”

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About Gary Fry:

Gary Fry lives in Dracula’s Whitby, literally around the corner from where Bram Stoker was staying when he was thinking about that character. Gary has a PhD in psychology, though his first love is literature. To date he’s had four short story collections and over 60 tales published. His first novel - a frightening haunted house piece called The House of Canted Steps - will be published in 2010 by PS Publishing. He also has a disturbing novella - the colourfully entitled ‘The Invisible Architect of Psychopathy - out from Pendragon Press in 2010: this accompanies a fine piece by Simon Maginn in a book called Feral Companions.

More news and views on Gary’s new website at: http://www.gary-fry.com/