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The Trouble with Horror

November 16, 2012 /

In a recent blog post for The Guardian, Stuart Kelly asked us to ponder the question of horror fiction, and whether it was a genre doomed to literary hell. The post itself is interesting; even more so is the comments stream that follows, a discussion that also expanded sideways into further personal blog posts and on Twitter. If nothing else, it shows how this issue has the power to get people talking. I was struck in particular by a comment made by Jonathan McCalmont:

I really like the idea of horror lit but I’ve never found any I really liked.

Which he then extended by saying of a recently published and much-lauded commercial horror novel:

I thought the first half was cliche-ridden and the second half was just silly.

This certainly rang true for me. From personal experience I’d also add that almost all of the commercial horror novels I’ve tried to read recently have been rendered unsatisfactory, for me at least, by an identical fault:  often graced with a compellingly readable beginning, they inevitably unravel into a farrago of ridiculousness, cliche and generic predictability in the second half. That this just happens to be the same lethal virus that has infected ninety-nine percent of commercial horror cinema can be no coincidence. Paradoxically, the danger for many new horror writers is that they grow up loving horror. They devour horror any which way they can, and in the process they grow used to a particular grammar of horror, a set of tropes that, like all tropes, were probably exciting once, but are now staid and safe. These writers repeat in print what they’ve seen on the screen because that’s what got them into horror in the first place. It’s understandable. It’s also threatening to make horror a laughing stock.

I grew up loving horror, and when I finally decided to start taking my writing seriously it was horror that I wanted to write. I lost count of the number of horror novels I got through in those first few heady years when I was rediscovering the genre and trying to work out where I fitted into it, if at all. Looking back on that period now, I can see that what I experienced was in effect my own mini, speeded up history of horror: in the beginning, everything seemed new, and thrilling, and just about the best damn thing I’d ever read. As I became more knowledgeable I started to discern recurring themes, a certain repetitiveness, a certain lack of freshness in approach that made me begin to worry that maybe horror was all used up. The final stage of this intensive period of discovery was a coming to terms with the fact that horror, more than any other genre, is actually a closed system, and that the only way of ensuring originality in horror is by busting out of it.

It sounds obvious to say it, but whereas science fiction and fantasy are abstract concepts, horror is an emotion, something you feel. Science fiction as a genre – and in this SF is no different from social realism or historical fiction – is an umbrella term for a whole gamut of varying approaches. It is a house of many mansions, many shades of dissenting opinion. Most importantly, it does not have a dominant, nay determinant, tone colour. Compare one hundred SF stories and there is room, in theory if rarely in practice, for one-hundred percent diversity. Compare a hundred horror stories and they will be bound together, to some extent at least, by the genre’s self-defining demand that it feast only upon itself.

If what we’re looking for in horror is originality, this is going to be a problem.

The logical extrapolation of this problem is that horror will be less widely read even than SFF, because large numbers of people will convince themselves from the outset that it’s not for them. “I don’t like being scared.” “All that monster stuff is stupid.” “I can’t stand blood and gore.” At least with SF, you might have a reasonable chance of persuading a non-initiate that it’s not all men from Mars now, that there’s all sorts of fascinating stuff they might be interested in – the ethics of cloning or human fertility or near-future scarcity or plain old crisis of identity, you know, just like in Dostoevsky’s The Double. It’s difficult to try convincing anyone that you can have horror literature without any horror in it. When I try telling non-horror buffs that the audience at FrightFest don’t all wear Texas Chainsaw T-shirts (well, we do, but that’s not the point), that the atmosphere is one of the friendliest and most inclusive I’ve ever experienced, that the level of discussion at the Q&As reveals an articulacy in the language and culture of cinema a hundred miles in advance of anything you’re likely to find in an average audience for, say, The King’s Speech, what happens is that they look at me and shake their heads: you’re just a horror nut, what would you know?

It’s an uphill battle, doomed to be lost because generic horror seems largely content to sit on its arse and not do very much other than talk to itself.

And yet there is no shortage of marvellous horror fiction out there, no shortage at all, especially if you’re prepared to look for it in more out of the way places. When people say horror’s dead, I say they’re reading the wrong stuff.

Peter Straub’s Shadow Land, Ramsey Campbell’s Incarnate, Patricia Geary’s Strange Toys, Mark Danielewski’s The House of Leaves, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Handling the Undead and Stephen King’s The Shining are all brilliant horror novels, most of them probably familiar to horror readers. But Nicola Barker’s Darkmans is also a horror novel, so is John Banville’s Mefisto, John Burnside’s Glister, Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, Roberto Bolano’s 2666, Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs, M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart, Susan Hill’s The Beacon, Patrick McGrath’s Martha Peake, Hilary Mantel’s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street and Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher.  What is Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones if not a horror novel? Or Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace? If you’re secretly thinking that ‘literary horror’ is somehow a soft option, or ‘not really horror’, then go away right now and read Joyce Carol Oates’s mind-scorching Zombie or Gabrielle Wittkop’s extraordinary novella The Necrophiliac. One of the most original and striking voices in contemporary short fiction, Robert Shearman, is also one of our finest horror writers. The book that won this year’s Edge Hill Short Story Prize, Sarah Hall’s The Beautiful Indifference, contains four horror masterpieces. Stuart Kelly quite rightly mentioned the American writer Brian Evenson as a contemporary master of horror; recent collections from Paul Meloy, James Cooper, Margo Lanagan, Thomas Ligotti and Kelly Link similarly showcase modern horror in intriguing, diverse and strikingly original ways.

What unites all the above is 1) excellent writing and 2) the fact that these are books that make highly effective use of horror, but not horror exclusively. They are all, first and foremost, stories. Narratives. Experiments in novelistic form. Extended character studies. Subversions. Tales of madness. Explorations of situations or people or ideas or places that absolutely compel both reader and writer to find out more. I’d argue that Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie is one of the darkest and most disturbing horror novels ever written. It got to me so much I almost couldn’t finish it, which has to be just about the highest compliment you could pay a horror novel. It has stuff in it that many generic horror writers would shrink from using. But what makes Oates’s book a masterpiece and raises it far, far above the level of the black-jacketed clones more commonly shelved under ‘horror’ at your local Waterstone’s is the sheer quality of Oates’s writing, her attention to characterisation and to those aspects of the story that do not directly inspire horror in the reader – in fact in the case of Zombie they inspire pity. One of the many things that makes Stephen King a writer rather than just a best-selling horror phenomenon is the fact that backstory, surface detail, sense of place, and the poetical rhythms of vernacular language matter as much to him as monsters, sometimes more.

This may sound controversial, but I believe that if you set out to write horror (as some say you should) with the sole aim of horrifying, terrifying, or penetrating the dark arse end of the human psyche then what you’ll end up with won’t be very strong. The books and stories I’ve referred to above were written, I would argue, for a whole variety of reasons and with a whole variety of inspirations as the starting point. That the reader will, in the course of reading them, be horrified, or terrified, startled out of their comfort zone or on occasion even feel that they are indeed penetrating the dark arse end of the human psyche (I defy you to read 2666 or The Kindly Ones and NOT feel something of that kind) is more or less a certainty; that this is a part, but never the whole, of their literary journey is a certainty also.

When a horror writer begins work on a new story, she should be thinking about the story as a whole and not just the horror. Above all, she should be ambitious. Because a certain depth of purpose is a prerequisite for interesting writing, and because dynamic writing, writing that lasts in the mind and stands the test of time is rarely monochrome. It contains a whole spectrum of tone colours.

Because horror should be deep, not cheap.

Since finishing work on Maree last month, I’ve been working on a couple of horror stories. One of them, which is really more dark fantasy I suppose than horror (although it does have horror in it), was more fun to write than anything I’ve attempted since ‘A Thread of Truth’. There was just something about the narrative voice that made it feel as if I was listening to the story as well as writing it. This doesn’t happen often but when it does it’s exciting. The second story, which I finished earlier today, couldn’t have been more different. Even though it – just – has an affirmative ending, its tone is so bleak, so sad that I found the story preying on my mind in a way that felt unusual and not a little disturbing. But I think that’s a good sign.

I’ll say more about these two stories in due course. For now, I guess what I’m driving at is that horror can be – should be – anything you want it to be. The only rule is to make it indisputably your own.

Result!

November 5, 2012 /

We heard last night that Lavie Tidhar has won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel with his superb Osama. This is such brilliant news, not just for Lavie himself (I forget exactly how many publishers turned this book down originally, or wanted Lavie to change the title – bet they’re kicking themselves now… ) but also for SFF. Osama was so clearly the right choice – and what a wonderful way to end this year’s awards season.

At his recent gig at Foyles to launch the Solaris paperback edition of Osama, Lavie talked passionately about speculative fiction and the European tradition, why genre is irrelevant, and some of the difficulties he experienced in getting Osama out to us. The man lives and breathes ideas, which for some might be explanation enough as to why he’s so readily found a home within the SFF community. But the other thing about Lavie – the most important thing – is that he’s a bloody good writer. Read Osama and you won’t just find one of the most daring and original alternate histories of recent years – you’ll also find muscular, evocative prose, a resonant sense of place, a revelling in detail and criss-crossing everything the acknowledgement that our existence here is above all a human story, not just an ongoing historical and technological experiment.

I’ve just been reading ‘Strigoi’, a short story by Lavie recently published in Interzone. It’s set in an Israel of the future, the ‘Central Station’ which is now Earth’s chief space port. But what we have here is not the bright, shiny, impossible and rather tedious future we’re already tired of (the way SF has so often been misrepresented in and by the mainstream). We don’t have a doomsday scenario either. What we have is pragmatism, a kind of positive uncertainty. Above all we have detail:

The Shambleau called Carmel came to Central Station in spring, when the smell in the air truly is intoxicating. It is the smell of the sea, of salt water and tar, coming from the west. It is the smell of orange groves, of citrus trees in bloom, coming from the distant plantations of the Sharon region. It is the smell of the resin or sap that sometimes drips from a cut in the eternally renewing adapto-plant neighbourhoods surrounding Central Station, sprouting like weeds high above the more permanent structures of the old neighbourhood; it is the smell of ancient asphalt heating in the sun, of shawarma cooking slowly, drenched in spices, on a spit, close to a fire; it is the smell of Humanity Prime, that richest and most concentrated of smells. There is nothing like it in the Outer Worlds.

The old collides with the new here in a form we can recognise and thus feel a part of. Here is a world that is still in the future and yet all around us, a world we have a stake in, even as it arrives. It is the fine detail, the minutiae, that make this world real to us, as much as any overarching concept. Tidhar’s world is a world we feel as well as imagine.

We sense its reality.

This is the kind of SF I want to be reading.

Congratulations to Lavie Tidhar, and to all this year’s World Fantasy Award winners. This has been a good one.

Oh, and you can read another of Lavie’s Central Station stories, ‘The Lord of Discarded Things’, right here at Strange Horizons. I recommend it.

Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring

October 12, 2012 /

In his 2005 Vector review of Gollancz’s omnibus edition of M. John Harrison’s short stories, Things That Never Happen, Paul Kincaid described Harrison thus:

He is one of the essential writers of British speculative literature; anyone who does not know his work cannot know what the genre is capable of.

‘Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring’, a story that was first published in the SF magazine Omni in the mid nineties, forms the central, pivotal point in that particular gathering-together of Harrison’s work. It’s a kind of Janus-story, looking equally back in time towards his 1983 collection The Ice Monkey and forward towards Travel Arrangements, the collection that appeared almost two decades after The Ice Monkey in the year 2000. You could almost say that ‘Isobel’ is MJH in microcosm.

It bears many ur-Harrison trademarks: gaunt cityscapes in decline, disenchanted individualists in terminal disconnect mode, intimations of the marvellous. The language of the story manages somehow to be both resolute and dissolute, a gradual persuasion of the drab towards incandescence.

Like all M. John Harrison stories, it can be read on many levels. Thus in ‘Isobel’ we find a simple and agonizing exposition of what happens when a relationship breaks down, when passion wears itself out, when the love between two people is ineradicably soiled by the incursions of a third:

For forty eight hours all she would do was wail and sob and throw up on me. She refused to eat, she couldn’t bear to sleep. If she dropped off for ten minutes, she would wake silent for the instant it took her to remember what had happened. Then this appalling dull asthmatic noise would come out of her — “zhhh, zhhh, zhhh”, somewhere between retching and whining — as she tried to suppress the memory, and wake me up, and sob, all at the same time.

I was always awake anyway.

“Hush now, it will get better. I know.”

I knew because she had done the same thing to me.

We find equally a near-future horror nightmare in which the inherent toxicity of late-stage capitalism – symbolized in ‘Isobel’ by the indiscriminate dumping of hazardous waste products, genetic science run amok, a wearing-out of history as inexorable as that portrayed by J. G. Ballard in his 1962 story ‘The Garden of Time’ – has already engulfed the world. Isobel Avens’s desire for the impossible – for a power of flight both literal and metaphorical – forms a leitmotif for the insatiable avarice of our whole consumer society:

“Designer hormones trigger the ‘brown fat’ mechanism. Our client becomes as light and as hot to the touch as a female hawk. Then metabolically induced calcium shortages hollow the bones. She can be handled only with great care. And the dreams of flight! Engineered endorphins released during sexual arousal simulate the sidesweep, swoop and mad fall of mating flight, the frantically beating heart, long sight. Sometimes the touch of her own feathers will be enough.”

If ‘Isobel’ is a story about the socio-political fin de siecle-type mass hypnosis of satiation capitalism, it’s equally an examination of the hubris inherent in the creative act, its rapture and its dreadful depredations. Isobel Avens, Dr Alexander insists, ‘was dying anyway… We did far more than we would normally do on a client. Most of it was illegal. It would be illegal to do most of it to a laboratory rat… I couldn’t make her understand that she could never have what she wanted.’

The story suggests that the strength of Isobel’s desire for the impossible has quite literally changed her into something else, something not-human, or post-human, but that her most cherished goal still eludes her, as it always must. All artists exist along a sliding scale of madness, and it is probably for this reason that literature has so often concerned itself with the visionary nature of some mental illness, with the thinness of the divide between creativity and self-destruction. But stories such as this, in which the conflict is played out so graphically – where the metaphor is made so shockingly explicit – are rarer finds.

Side by side with all of this, ‘Isobel’ is unrepentantly a London story. As he brings Isobel home from her latest round of toxic medical treatments in Miami, Harrison’s narrator China Rose refers poignantly to Stepney as ‘the gentle East End,’ reminding us that this story’s consolation, if it has one, lies in the streets and stones of this tenacious and immutably accepting place, this cracked grey edifice, a city-refuge where exhausted souls have for centuries sought out a crawlspace in which to restore themselves, recover their lost identities, or simply hide.

Finally though, ‘Isobel’ is a story about writing, about the power of language to make the unreal real, to make tangible the texture of thought, to crystallize hyper-reality. To freeze time for a moment so we can breathe it in.

To paraphrase Paul Kincaid, it is a demonstration of what speculative fiction is capable of.

I reread ‘Isobel’ this week because I love the story – Signs of Life, the novel that grew out of it, was almost the first M. John Harrison I ever read and it was a life-changer – and because I wanted to make a contribution to the discussion of it that will be going on over at David Hebblethwaite’s blog this Sunday. Now that I come to talk about it though I find myself feeling doubtful, as I always do when I encounter any piece of work this well achieved, that comment of any kind is valuable or even desirable. Would I insist on talking through a performance of a string quartet by Benjamin Britten or Michael Tippett? It would actively pain me to do such a thing – yet that’s what trying to talk about this marvellous story feels like to me.

‘Isobel’ doesn’t need me to explain her. Here she is. Go read.

I like it!

October 10, 2012 /

The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime #10 now has a cover:

The anthology will be out in February of next year, and will feature my story ‘Wilkolak’, which first appeared in Crimewave #11, as well as the work of other stowaways from the fantastic genres Neil Gaiman, Joel Lane and Lisa Tuttle.

I’m getting a real kick out of being selected for this one. I love the crime genre and would love to write more in it. I get very nervous around the idea of trying though as I don’t feel I really know what I’m doing yet, especially when I see other writers ‘crossing over’ with such apparent ease. Joel Lane’s crime stories, for example, are just wonderful.

What appeals to me about crime writing is its potential for carrying as much complexity as you want within a compact form. The basic premise of any crime story is simple: something bad happened. But where you go with it after that is up to you.

I love what Barbara Vine does with that in The Brimstone Wedding. I love Patricia Highsmith’s The Blunderer, which tells the story of a murder that doesn’t happen. What Keith Ridgway does with the crime genre in Hawthorn & Child still occupies my mind on a daily basis.

The story I’m working on at the moment does have a murder in it. Is it a crime story though? I’m not entirely sure yet…

Black Static #29

July 20, 2012 /

Just received my copy of the latest Black Static, and can’t resist sharing the wonderful artwork, by Ben Baldwin, that accompanies my story ‘Sunshine’.

I think it looks great! I also really like the new format for the magazine. It’s smaller, but there are more pages. The interior looks cleaner and crisper and with the slightly larger font size it’s actually much easier to read. The whole production has a very pleasing ‘journal-like’ feel to it and I’m delighted to see ‘Sunshine’ included in its pages. There’s plenty of other good stuff in there too that I’m looking forward to catching up with, including a novelette by Ray Cluley and an interview with Nicholas Royle.

You can find more details and subscription links here.

Currently reading: Denis Johnson’s Angels, which is pretty astounding.

Currently listening to: Kathryn Williams’s Dog Leap Stair. I’ve had the album for ages, but suddenly rediscovered it again and have been playing it over and over again this week. I find it almost impossible to listen to music when I’m first-drafting, but when I’m second-drafting and if things are going well it’s sometimes OK. What tends to happen is that I’ll find an album that fits with my rhythm, that seems to complement my thoughts rather than interrupting them, that fuses into a kind of weird symbiosis with the story itself. The two works – the story and the album – often remain inextricably linked in my mind. Considering what I’ve been writing about this week, its relationship with Kathryn Williams seems totally bizarre, but that’s the way it sometimes comes out.

Anyway, it seemed to work, because that story’s done now. Pleased with that. Now to begin a read-through of the first draft of my novel…..

The witching hour

July 12, 2012 /

After loving Mr Fox (and previous to that The Icarus Girl) I’ve been using my reading time this week to catch up with Helen Oyeyemi’s third novel, White is for Witching. I remember the reviews at the time being mixed, which is most likely why it’s taken me so long to get round to reading it.

Turns out I was a total idiot. Taking too much notice of reviews like this, a distinctly sour-faced write-up which seems to ignore the point of the book so entirely as to make it meaningless, always carries with it the risk that you’ll end up missing out on something truly worthwhile, the kind of book that divides the critics, because it’s unclassifiable, because it’s elusive, because it’s difficult.

Trust the writer, not the reviewer, I say.

And White is for Witching is not difficult, for God’s sake. It’s complicated, yes – and deeply complex. It jumps back and forth in time and between narrators. Its language alternates between a lively and illustrative contemporary vernacular and the high poetry of witchcraft, densely allusive. Its stories are nested one within the other, back touching stomach, spooned together as its two principal characters, Miranda and Ore, lie spooned together, their knees hooked at dangerous right angles, like the legs of spiders. Times, cultures, terrors, manias, all intertwined like lovers, like interlocking pieces of some beautifully constructed and arcane jigsaw puzzle.

But all this does is to make the book sublime, not difficult, and certainly not ‘difficult’ or, even worse, ‘confused.’

Helen Oyeyemi is so for real. She’s a writer bursting with natural talent – her prose has that instinctive assurance, that quality of wildfire, that is a sure sign that she was born to do this – yet she is also a writer acutely aware of what she is doing. Her literary sensibility, her understanding of the texts that inspired her (Dracula, Uncle Silas, The Fall of the House of Usher) makes White is for Witching possibly the most elegant and knowing homage to the high Gothic that I have ever read, whilst at the same time extending the reach of this novel far beyond that, to encompass contemporary concerns in a direct and bold and strikingly original way.

White is for Witching is also bloody terrifying. In stark contrast with The Guardian‘s reviewer, I found the sense of mounting claustrophobia in the novel, especially in the scenes near the end where Ore is trying to make her escape from the house, to be as unsettling and actively upsetting as anything in Dracula and more so. This is now, after all, this is here. There’s an acute sense of realism in White is for Witching, of believability, that still has me absolutely spellbound.

This book is brilliant, in every sense. Read it. And do listen to Helen Oyeyemi talking about White is for Witching here.

After finishing the first draft of the novel last week I am now leaving it to simmer while I catch up on a couple of other smaller but not unimportant bits and pieces. I’ve been finishing my author profile for PS, to accompany the release of Stardust, and now I’m completely absorbed in writing the piece that will complete my collection for NewCon, to be published in 2013 as part of the Imaginings series of short story collections. The story is called ‘Higher Up’ and I’m within touching distance of finishing a first draft. It’s rather different from the story I thought it was going to be but – well, I’m kind of liking that.

A beautiful achievement

July 7, 2012 /

I’m delighted to hear that Sarah Hall has been named the winner of this year’s Edge Hill Prize for the best short story collection to be published in 2011. Her collection The Beautiful Indifference also carried off the Readers’ Prize, awarded to the collection judged to be the best by Edge Hill students.

I read The Beautiful Indifference at the back end of last year and loved it completely. I tend to prefer collections that consist of fewer, longer stories rather than a random host of unconnected shorter ones, and Hall’s collection, with its seven fine stories, three of them at almost novella length, certainly delivered on that score. I felt particularly drawn to the sense of unease that runs through all these pieces – ‘She Murdered Mortal He’, which was selected for Granta’s ‘Horror Issue’ in October last year, was undoubtedly my favourite horror story of 2011, and the title story, ‘The Beautiful Indifference’, left me mute with admiration.

Although the stories are different from one another in terms of their subject matter and narrative voice, I never strayed far from the sense that they were nonetheless linked, through their tone, which is one of dread, of trouble in waiting, and then of course through their language, which is resplendent, richly coloured, accomplished in that way that feels effortless and yet is the mark of highest craftsmanship.

SF readers will already know Sarah Hall for The Carhullan Army, which was shortlisted for the Clarke in 2008. These stories are more proof that Hall does have a slipstream temperament. I sincerely hope she will want to explore this territory further in future works. In the meantime, I do recommend this wonderful collection one-hundred percent.

Congratulations to Sarah Hall. Brilliant result.

Very pleased also to see that novellas four and five in the aforementioned TTA novellas project have now been announced. I’m particulary glad to see that Country Dark, by James Cooper, will be part of the line-up.  James is a fantastic writer, and if you’ve not yet read his collection The Beautiful Red then you’re in for a treat. This is weird fiction of the highest quality, compelling and dark and weird and wonderfully crafted. For me, it has that quality of genuine and genuinely frightening strangeness I look forward to in my favourite Robert Aickman stories.

A new story by James Cooper is always something to savour – and to learn from.

In other news, I’m happy to report that I finished the first draft of the novel on Thursday. If I haven’t said anything before it’s because I’m still feeling slightly bemused.

More on this in due course!

Spin

July 3, 2012 /

I’m delighted to be able to announce that TTA Press will be publishing my novella Spin. This is a brand new work – you might remember me mentioning it towards the end of last year – and I’m really excited about it, because after all the usual messing around I have to contend with when I’m getting started (I think there are three different beginnings for this one, all of them still in files on my hard drive) I was pleased with the way it turned out and this story remains very important to me.

Spin is a highly personal reimagining of a Greek myth. It’s a story I began work on shortly after returning from a visit to the place where my father now lives, a small village in the Peloponnese not far from where Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin once both had their homes. The Mani is a stunning and unique place, rich in mythology and with a proud historical tradition of independence from the Greek mainland. What I wanted from Spin most of all was to convey a sense of that fierceness of spirit and its embodiment in the landscape, its dry earth, its heat, its continually evolving potential for story.

As you’ll see from Ben Baldwin‘s marvellous cover art it also contains spiders.

I’m sure I’ll be saying more about Spin in due course, with an update on the publication schedule as it’s made available. In advance of that, TTA Press are currently running a special limited time subscription on their new line of novellas, whereby you can pre-order the first five titles for just £25 post free to anywhere in the world. As well as Spin, the titles so far announced are Eyepennies by Mike O’Driscoll and Cold Turkey by Carole Johnstone. Titles four and five to be revealed shortly! You can read more about the TTA novellas project here.

A couple of Mammoths

June 23, 2012 /

I had a lovely surprise earlier this week when I learned that my story ‘Wilkolak’, which originally appeared in Crimewave #11, had been selected by Maxim Jakubowski for inclusion in The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime #10. ‘Wilkolak’ was actually the first in a group of five stories I was hoping to write, all centred around the place I was living in Lee Green. Events, as they say, intervened, and I became sidetracked into writing one of the longer pieces that will be appearing in my forthcoming book from PS. Of course I still have all my notes for the Lee tales, and as ideas tend not to leave me alone until I make some kind of use of them I tend to think these will resurface at some later date. In the meantime, ‘Wilkolak’ is a story that is particularly close to my heart and I am delighted to see it winning new friends. TMBOBBC#10 will be published by Constable and Robinson in January 2013.

I am also very pleased to announce that a brand new story of mine, ‘Seeing Nancy’, is one of twenty-five tales selected by Marie O’Regan for her forthcoming Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women, also from Constable and due out this November. The table of contents is pretty amazing, and includes stories by Muriel Gray, Sarah Pinborough, Alison Littlewood, Lisa Tuttle, Kim Lakin Smith and Caitlin Kiernan as well as classics of the supernatural by the likes of Edith Wharton and Elizabeth Gaskell.

When Marie invited me to submit a story for the anthology, she asked if I could let her have a brief plot synopsis in advance, just to make sure that my idea didn’t coincide too closely with any of those put forward by other contributors. I was only too happy to comply with her quite reasonable request. The only problem was that the story I eventually submitted did not in any way resemble my oh-so-helpfully provided synopsis. This is why I don’t like writing about what I’m writing about. I am just not good at it.

I am, however, very happy that Marie seemed to like the story I ended up writing. Ghost stories are tricky. The beloved classics are always before you, reminding you of how difficult these pieces are to get right. ‘Seeing Nancy’, like more than a few of my stories, was actually inspired by a song, Eddi Reader’s ravishing interpretation of Robbie Burns’s Ae Fond Kiss. I was listening to Reader’s Burns album a lot last summer, and while I tried to bring the ideas around my original synopsis into a form I was happy with, I found the words of Ae Fond Kiss, the third verse in particular, working on me in a peculiar way:

I’ll ne’er blame my partial fancy,
Naething could resist my Nancy;
But to see her was to love her;
Love but her, and love forever.

 

My Nancy is of course not the same person as Burns’s Nancy, but I grew to love her anyway, and she would never have existed in quite the same way without the inspiration provided by Eddi and Robbie.

Here’s the cover art for the anthology. I’ll post a full ToC as soon as Marie officially releases it.

More with the worldbuilding – literally

May 10, 2012 /

Reading this wonderful article in The Guardian about dollshouses and the people who make them, I was struck most especially by these words spoken by Jose Aleson, a guy from North London who fell into dollshouse-making by accident but now finds himself obsessed by it:

“It’s not to play with,  but you know what, there’s nothing more relaxing than sitting here at night, with the lights off, and all the lights on in the doll’s house, enjoying that moment. I like everything to be in order, and this is a kind of perfection. It’s like you’ve stopped time.”

For me this immediately conjured a scene from a story within a story: the man making the house and imagining it as a living entity within a world he himself has built, the writer writing about the creative dreamer who has built it.

There’s no denying the power that miniature houses exert over the imagination – the same pull that real houses have, I suspect, only distilled, concentrated in line with the reserves of imagination and commitment needed to create them. The finest dollshouses are undoubted works of art, but they are something else also. They are repositories of our dreams and sometimes also our fears.

I’ve loved dollshouse literature ever since I first read Rumer Godden’s 1947 novel The Doll’s House when I was eight or nine. Another favourite is Joyce Carol Oates’s tense and frightening short story ‘The Doll’. There’s something about this – the idea of losing control over a world you yourself have created – that is terribly frightening. But then there’s also that excitement of creation – of capture, of recreation of something lost – that feeds the maker’s obsession and makes him risk everything.

I messed around with these themes a little in my own story ‘Darkroom’, first published in Allen Ashley’s anthology Subtle Edens back in 2008. I remember thinking even then that I’d only brushed the surface of the subject  – there was Mr Ashley’s 6,000-word word limit to consider, after all. But the fascination hasn’t gone away and doesn’t seem likely to.

Something to think about on rainy days, no question. In the meantime I’ll be posting ‘Darkroom’ at the Featured Story page as a kind of placeholder……

Dolls house, 17th Century, German National Museum, Nuremberg

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