I didn’t read anything that I would have considered to be horror until I started working for ChiZine Publications because I’m very susceptible to it. I will spend nights up, awake and terrified. At the same time, because of that genuinely visceral response I find myself more and more interested in what horror is and how it works because it’s so affective. And that’s what art should be, isn’t it? Art should move us. Art should scare us. Art should go too far. And so in some ways I like that horror really can be a sort of avant garde art form even though it’s seldom recognized as such.
(Helen Marshall, from her recent interview at Weird Fiction Review here.)
I really love what Helen says here about horror being a kind of avant garde, because it shows an understanding of the genre – of what the genre should be and what it can do – that passes way beyond many people’s conception of it.
I was blown away by Marshall’s collection Hair Side, Flesh Side, a book that combines fantastically original ideas with writing so assured and so strikingly lovely that – as with Sam Thompson’s Communion Town last year – it’s actually quite scary to think that this is a fiction debut. I’ve already nominated HSFS for Best Collection in the British Fantasy Awards, and will be doing the same for the World Fantasy Awards when I send in my ballot.
You can read Helen’s story ‘The Mouth, Open’ here. It’s my favourite story in the collection – one of them, anyway – and I do wholeheartedly recommend it. I’m delighted to learn – from the aforementioned interview – that Helen is currently working on a novel. I honestly can’t wait to read it.
We’ve just returned from a weekend in the New Forest, where we attended the wedding of a good friend of ours (film director Gerald McMorrow, who’s been scripting The Glamour – more on this soon, watch this space) and then spent a morning wandering around Milford-on-Sea, the little town Chris got to know very well during the 1970s when it played host to the annual Milford SF Writers’ Workshop. It’s not the first time we’ve called in there, mainly because I love hearing Chris’s stories about the place. A lot of writers passed through Milford – Richard Cowper, John Brunner, Chip Delany, Lisa Tuttle, Neil Gaiman, Nicola Griffith, Rob Holdstock, Alastair Reynolds and Brian Aldiss to name but a few – and the workshop is undoubtedly a unique little slice of UK SF history.
We walked out along Hurst Spit towards the castle (where Charles 1 was imprisoned immediately prior to his execution – there’s something I never knew before now). The sunshine was so bright it turned the water to metal. Difficult to believe it was February.
Now back to working on the story I began writing last week – this is another of my SE12 stories, closely related to both ‘Wilkolak’ and ‘The Tiger’ and which I am hoping to submit to Tartarus Press for their Strange Tales 1v anthology. It’s good to be writing.
Watching: Benh Zeitlin’s remarkable film Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Reading: Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers. This man can write. Truly. It’s a privilege to read him.
Hurst Castle - photo by Ian Stannard
Milford mudflats from Hurst Spit - photo by Chris Priest