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Home to Roost

August 24, 2018 /

I don’t think it is any coincidence at all that we are living through a new golden age of horror fiction. In a recent review of Jac Jemc’s well-nigh perfect work of rural unease, The Grip of It, I recalled the horror boom of the seventies and eighties, kick-started by the publication of Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie in 1974, spluttering to a halt in the 1990s through massive grunge overload. The ultimate effect of this boom-and-bust on horror writers was pretty disastrous, leading as it did to an extended period – twenty years, more or less – during which it was practically impossible for even the best writers to sell a horror novel.

Looking back on that period now, we can observe how horror did not actually go away, but rather evolved. The Stephen King brand of horror – let’s call it baby boomer horror – focused closely and brilliantly on small town anxieties, childhood trauma, the undermining of common decency through unholy powers. It reflected the anxieties of its age, in other words – the violent overthrow of old certainties, the dawning of new perils in a post-Hiroshima, post-Vietnam world. We see this clearly in the American horror cinema of the time – John Carpenter’s Halloween, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, George A. Romero’s zombie movies – which closely parallels the themes and style of King’s fiction. Much has been written about how the 70s boom degenerated into splatterpunk and died – for more on this do read this excellent essay by Steffen Hantke on the Dell Abyss series (and please read Kathe Koja’s The Cipher if you haven’t already) – but what actually happened, eventually, was that 70s horror and its small-town ambience bifurcated into urban fantasy on the one hand (think Buffy, Twilight, Neverwhere) and the serial killer thriller on the other. While both these trends are still very much with us, they have done what trends do and become established, therefore comfortable. We know what to expect from them and – continue to enjoy them as we might – in terms of what is new now in horror fiction they have little to offer.

In the wake of the splatterpunk implosion, horror literature became a no-go zone for mainstream publishers. You could still buy King and Koontz, but everyone else interested in writing horror fiction was pushed back into small press imprints, most with poor distribution and close to zero visibility in the marketplace. Writers will keep writing though, and while many of the authors who enjoyed a precarious overnight success during the boom years disappeared from the field (thank God) with equal rapidity, in the pages of the Year’s Best horror anthologies, a new generation of writers were coming to prominence.

Perhaps inevitably, much of the new horror fiction of the early noughties chose to discard the shiny excesses of shopping mall horror, returning instead to older certainties and classic themes. The Elder Gods were much in evidence as writers such as Caitlin R. Kiernan and Laird Barron opened the eyes of a new generation to the vast and eerie possibilities of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. The literature of the ‘bad place’ – the haunted house novel, in other words – also began enjoying a renaissance, and it is here that we begin to see the first manifestations of the horror literature that is now enjoying its own boom in the 2010s and, we would hope, on into the 2020s.

What makes this time different from the last time? I would argue that this new horror is more adult, more serious in intent, and therefore more durable. In their stories of urban decay and alienation, horror writers now are not content merely to reflect social anxiety in their fiction, they want actively to engage with it. Horror archetypes, it seems, are among the most useful and flexible for the purposes of quantifying what is going so badly wrong with the way we live now. But what most differentiates this new horror from the pop horror of the 80s and 90s is, above all, its tenacious sense of place.

The very mention of sense of place lends an impression of solidity, fixedness. We speak also of ‘spirit of place’, a concept infused with the numinous, an identification with the ancient ineffable that writers of the first wave of weird fiction – Machen, Blackwood, Bierce, even M. R. James – would have us believe is somehow ‘in the blood’. Later writers such as Aickman, while masterfully reinforcing the notion that places are strange, also went some way to exploring how slippery and, yes, dangerous such concepts can be, how close to delusion and the kind of mythmaking that foregrounds exclusion and demonises difference. The ground beneath our feet, ironically, has never been as threatened as it is today. As ambient, ever-present anxieties over climate change, plastic pollution, the wholesale destruction of species and ecosystems become – as they should – ever more the substance and spirit of our horror fiction, we should equally remember that our nostalgia for place and time is not bound up with blood, but with personal memory. These places are special to us not because we ‘belong there’ so much as because we were born there, lived there, read stories from there, watched them concrete there over. Which is to say, we all belong wherever there might be, whether we possess an old daguerreotype of our great-great-great-grandparents posed carefully in the living room of the house down the road, or whether we moved in next door only yesterday.

How can we truly belong if we do not protect – which is to say, protect everyone, every species? Even as it is in our nature as writers, humans and chroniclers to cherish our relationship to a particular time and place, to maintain that the arbitrarily defined patch of land we like to call our own is any more ‘special’ than any other is a specious luxury we cannot afford. Even as we croon the old songs, our places are being destroyed. The Elder Gods are close and they are hungry. Horror writers know this. The new horror is a literature not so much of nostalgia as of exposure.

Which brings me, finally, to the point of this essay in drawing attention to a new anthology, which I believe may come to be seen as a landmark in the field. This Dreaming Isle, edited by Dan Coxon for Unsung Stories, brings together a group of writers whose work is intimately concerned not only with sense of place, but with the increasing pressures being brought to bear on our notion of self and belonging – the very concepts that form the core of contemporary horror fiction.

Ramsey Campbell has been writing about this stuff for forty years. A writer who pretty much defines what modern horror is, he was one of the worst affected, in publishing terms, by the collapse of the horror market in the 1990s, yet this has never deterred his output, or damaged his phenomenal ability to plumb the darkest recesses of our crumbling society.

Aliya Whiteley was also hit by shifts in publishing at the beginning of her career. Undaunted, she worked her way back up through the pages of the speculative fiction magazines and anthologies, before publishing two novellas – The Beauty and The Arrival of Missives – that have set a benchmark for quality in new horror fiction and ensured Whiteley’s place as one of the most original voices in the field today.

With the phenomenal success of his debut novel The Loney – a novel of place if ever there was one – Andrew Michael Hurley could be deemed responsible for helping to kick off the new horror boom in the first place. Following closely in his footsteps and with seemingly effortless ease, Catriona Ward has written two back-to-back New Gothic novels rich in geographical specificity, and as good as any that have been published in the past two hundred years. (For more of my thoughts on Cat’s new novel Little Eve, see the next issue of Black Static.) Jenn Ashworth, recently and deservedly named as one of the Royal Society of Literature’s Forty Under Forty, is a phenomenal writer who has never been afraid to utilise horror in talking about class inequality, family, and of course place, while Jeanette Ng, with her 2017 novel Under the Pendulum Sun, has created one of the most imaginative dark fantasy debuts I have ever read, a bold questioning of aspects of faith and belief as well as a provocative and knowledgeable inquiry into the life and work of the Bronte sisters. Co-founder of Influx Press, Gary Budden has been directly instrumental in raising the profile of psychogeography, new weird and strange fiction within a distinctly British context. His own stories, recently showcased in his debut collection Hollow Shores, engage with place, class and memory at a gut level, seeming to morph into something else even as we encounter them.

I would like to reserve a special mention for Alison Moore. Well known in the horror and weird community for some years, Moore was brought to wider public attention in 2012 when her debut novel The Lighthouse was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her novel appeared on the shortlist alongside Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, which like The Lighthouse was notable for being published by an independent press. Deborah Levy has since entered the mainstream, a pioneer of the new autofiction and a regular subject of broadsheet author interviews and think pieces. Moore has continued in her own quiet way to produce novels of striking power, originality and literary achievement, but to far less fanfare. I have made no secret of how much it galls me, that Moore has thus far received only a fraction of the appreciation that is her due. To my mind, Moore’s novels are amongst the most assured and potentially durable in English fiction now. Moreover, they are distinctly less London-centric than Levy’s, portraying ordinary people living ordinary lives in a way that reveals how extraordinary we all are, how unstable and unnerving the times – and the places – we live in. Her most recent book, Missing, is her best yet.

These are just some of the writers who have contributed stories to This Dreaming Isle, which is kickstarting now. Fully funded in less than twenty-four hours, the anthology will be officially launched at this year’s FantasyCon in Chester. I’m looking forward to picking up my copy, and would encourage anyone, anywhere who is interested in new horror, folk horror, the strange and the weird to back it now – we want to see those stretch goals met, after all!

For anyone who might be wondering, Dan Coxon did invite me – several times – to contribute to This Dreaming Isle, but in the end I had to decline due to lack of time available. I do have a story half-written that may yet surface at some point in the future. In the meantime I have written this essay, to show how much I wanted to be a part of this project, and to encourage you to be a part of it too. This is going to be good.

 

On alien shores

August 13, 2018 /

From what I’ve read about her, Jane Rawson would seem to be one of those writers – like Aislinn Hunter, like Claudia Casper – who sometimes struggle to be heard amidst the tumult of overhyped debuts and routine praise for more established voices. Her novels are defiantly uncategorizable – her own debut was named Austrailia’s most underrated book – mixing and leapfrogging genres with scant regard for marketing categories. Well, the good news is that Picador have acquired UK rights to Rawson’s most recent book, the haunting and marvellous speculative novel From the Wreck, making her work available to a wider audience in 2019 and Clarke-eligible in 2020.

From the Wreck takes real historical events and bends them to its own ends in a manner I’ve not seen before, an imaginative leap that truly exemplifies the nature of radical speculation. On August 6th 1859, the steamship Admella (named for the ports she regularly sailed between, Adelaide, Melbourne and Launceston, Tasmania) was wrecked on Carpenter Rocks, South Australia. Although multiple efforts were made to reach the stranded survivors, foul weather made a rescue attempt impossible and of the 113 souls on board, only twenty-four ever made it back to shore. One of the survivors, cabin steward George Hills, was Rawson’s great-grandfather. The only woman survivor, Bridget Ledwith, disappeared from public view soon after the tragedy, making her identity a matter of mystery and speculation.

I was personally fascinated to discover that the Admella was built in 1857 by Lawrence Hills & Co, of Port Glasgow, on the Clyde. It is interesting to note that yet another Mr Hills – or more accurately Hill – has a part to play in this story: the painting Wreck of the Admella by Charles Hill hangs in the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

What Rawson does with these established facts – with her own family history – is really quite extraordinary. George Hills returns home after the wreck. Traumatised by his experiences, he finds himself unable to forget the woman who he believes saved his life in the days spent clinging to the remains of the stricken vessel:

“She was a sea creature. He knew that. She had come into the boat from the ocean and she looked and smelled and felt all over like a human woman, but he was damned sure she was not.” 

So begins George’s obsessive search for Bridget Ledwith. Yet ‘Bridget’ may be closer to home than he realises. In the shapeshifting alien’s symbiotic relationship with George’s son Henry, other human-alien relationships come swiftly to mind – I was reminded especially of John Wyndham’s Chocky – and yet there is something tender and fragile and edgy that sets Rawson’s work apart:

“And not right then but soon after, when this ocean floor is settled, when all of the fat is gone and the bigger of the things with teeth dispersed, when we’ve remembered that yes it is possible to be even lonelier than you are when you are feeding on wet, rotten fat with the cousins of some crazy lantern-heads, then. When we remember that it is one thing to be in a world all ocean when that world is your own and quite another to be in a world all ocean when no one down there gives a holy damn about you and the only one who does on the whole bereft and stinking planet is some skinnylegged filthy-fingered swollen-hearted little upright on some dusty island up there where the sun is hot and the air is dry, well, then. That’s when we go. Then.”

The three key players in the drama – George, Henry, and the alien – are caught in a strange sort of love triangle that comes close to destroying them all, but the key to this novel is surely its ending, wise and beautiful and blessed because it is earned, arrived at through genuine struggle and personal cost. This is the opposite of the kind of artificially opposed positions we have seen in certain recent works of escapist SF, where real pain and danger are largely absent through being contained within a strictly codified set of markers, and resolution is swiftly arrived at because the conflict was only ever there in the first place to provide the satisfaction of a risk-free resolution. The relationships in From the Wreck are messy and ambiguous, holding the potential for real damage. Rawson’s ending is won through grief, through tragedy, through humility. and love that is as imperfect as it is genuine. From the Wreck provides perhaps the most positive view of humanity in relation to the alien I’ve read in a while, hinting at the innate ability of all parties to transcend boundaries, to learn, to find a safe common ground in spite of mutual ignorance and fear.

Other characters in the narrative are no less well drawn. The character of Bea in particular offers us a wonderful portrayal of a woman who simply will not fit the mould society has prepared for her. Her rebellion and personal victory are quiet yet determined, a refusal to be broken that does not exclude concern for others.

From the Wreck is informed by Rawson’s strong environmental concerns, her deeply sympathetic fascination with other life forms, and above all her sensitivity and skill as a writer, her fearlessness in seeking out new ways to tell stories and new stories to tell. From the Wreck is genuine ‘what if’ science fiction, exploring the possibility of first contact in a manner that does not give humans sole charge of the encounter. Rawson is fully aware that we are the strangers here, that the description of ‘alien’ is only ever a matter of perspective.

The far north

August 3, 2018 /

When I won the Kitschies Red Tentacle earlier this year, I decided I would spend the prize money on making some forays into the Scottish landscape, seeing places that were new to me and generally getting to know this country a little better. I spent some time in Edinburgh back in June. Other than one brief lunch hour between trains, this was my first visit to the capital and it was a memorable experience, not least because I was lucky enough to catch a screening of Alien at the Filmhouse while I was there – talk about excellent timing! In terms of its architecture, history, culture and overall vibe, Edinburgh is so very, very different from Glasgow, and I came away with the sense that my understanding of Scotland as a nation had been increased substantially.

In July, Chris and I visited Arran, our nearest island neighbour. We took the longer, three-ferry route via  Claonaig and Lochranza, a spectacular approach, especially under piercing blue skies. Arran is a marvellous place in every respect and we will certainly be back (I need to climb Goat Fell…) Then at the beginning of this week I undertook what turned out to be my most memorable rail journey since taking the sleeper train from Leningrad to Moscow in 1987., when I boarded the Far North Line to Thurso.

There is no better reminder than this of how big Scotland actually is. After travelling the three hours from Glasgow Queen Street to Inverness – a spectacular stretch of railway extending right through the Cairngorms – there are still another four hours of journey time to go, all accompanied by far-reaching views of the northern Highlands and the strange, vast interior of Caithness, the unique and environmentally important peat bog known as the Flow Country.

The journey will forever be characterised in my mind by the acreages of fireweed – rosebay willowherb – that daubed bright pink along the whole length of the line, in full and vivid bloom on my way up, just beginning to go over on my way back. Strangest of all though was the fact that I happened to be reading Michel Faber’s Under the Skin, a powerful and original work very different from Glazer’s film, and travelling through places – Dornoch, Tain – almost in the very moment that I was reading about them.

In the Caithness Horizons museum in Thurso, they have Pictish stones, whose elusive, unreachable mysteries move one to tears. They also have the original 1950s control room equipment from the Dounreay nuclear power station. You can sit in the seat where the controller would have sat – a cup of tea and a bourbon biscuit on the side lend a particularly grounding touch of realism – and lift the telephone they would have used in the event of an emergency. You can see and touch the SCRAM buttons. It really is quite something.

On my second day in Thurso I made the crossing to Orkney on the Hamnavoe, leaving from Scrabster and landing in the old port of Stromness, whose history has been shaped equally by the herring industry, Arctic exploration and WW2. Travel logistics made it impossible to stay on Orkney more than a few hours on this occasion, enough time at least for me to gain a sense of the place, to climb up to the heather moorland behind the town and look down towards Scapa Flow. The Hamnavoe ferry’s route takes her right past the Old Man of Hoy, and as we passed by on our return journey – our captain made an announcement that orcas had been sighted alongside us, but in spite of our rushing immediately on to the decks, none of us passengers were lucky enough to catch sight of them – it seemed inevitable that I would think of Peter Maxwell Davies, the life he made on Orkney and his perennially lovely and timeless Farewell to Stromness.

Holy Isle from Lamlash Bay, Arran

Piers, Stromness

Main street, Stromness

Above Stromness

You Butey!

July 24, 2018 /

Photo by Garry Charnock

Matt Hill joins us in celebration of Anne Charnock’s richly deserved Clarke Award win for the moving and accomplished Dreams Before the Start of Time (currently only 99 p!)

Into the Sharke tank

July 18, 2018 /

With just a few hours remaining before the winner of this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award is announced, here are my thoughts on the shortlist in a guest post I wrote for the Sharke blog at the ARU CSFF website. 

My initial reaction to this year’s Clarke Award shortlist was that it was one of the strongest in recent memory. After having read all six shortlisted titles that is an assertion I would stick by, even as my reasons for believing this have shifted, and my hunches as to the identity of the eventual winner have become much less certain.

I still find last year’s shortlist disappointing. In terms of the kinds of science fiction on offer it feels less diverse: dissimilar though the novels are in terms of subject matter and storyline, Occupy Me, After Atlas, A Closed and Common Orbit and Ninefox Gambit all occupy a similar territory, and one that is largely defined by its adherence to genre tropes and conventions. Although widely enjoyed and praised, the eventual winner The Underground Railroad still reads bland to me, both in terms of its literary styling and its use of science fiction. One year on, it seems clear that the most radical work on that list in terms of both literary ambition and engagement with the genre is Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station, although it could be argued that the form it takes – some will call it a fix-up, others will style it a story cycle – leaves it lacking the punch of a unitary novel.

The strength of this year’s shortlist lies in its showcasing of different approaches to science fiction, an aspect that only becomes clearer as you become better acquainted with the novels themselves. Whether intentionally or not, this year’s jury have managed to present a genuine snapshot of science fiction as it is being written and read in 2018, an achievement that would in itself be enough to merit applause. That the shortlist includes books of such quality as to make it difficult to call an obvious winner is the icing on the cake. As I write this in the run-up to the final announcement, I have absolutely no idea who is going to win.

The way it appears to me, the Clarke judges have presented us with six works that each occupy a distinct and readily identifiable category of science fiction, each of which is worthy of study and further analysis. Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters represents a category that for want of a better title I will name the debut crossover. Recent years have shown a distinct upsurge in this category, which consists of novels published by mainstream imprints and aimed very much at a literary market, whose premise nonetheless makes use of solidly science fictional materials. These novels appear from nowhere and we often have no idea at the time of publication whether their (often young and hitherto unknown) authors will continue to interest themselves in speculative fiction as their careers progress. Recent examples in this category might also include Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles (2012), The Godless Boys by Naomi Wood (2011), The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (2012) and Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water (2014). Novels in the crossover debut category will often display a poetic literary sensibility and focus on character that makes them immediately accessible across genre divides, yet it could also be said that in terms of their use of science fiction they tend to be conservative, offering variations on a set of usually dystopian tropes that in science fictional terms at least have long ceased to be new. The most significant thing about this category is its popularity, among both readers and writers, and what such popularity tells us about how science fictional ideas are increasingly coming to be accepted as suitable subjects for mainstream literature.

While being a perfectly competent novel in many respects, Gather the Daughters did not win me over, mainly because – as outlined in my earlier review – I found the premise itself to be so unbelievable. I did enjoy Melamed’s character work, and I hope she chooses to dig deeper into speculative fiction in future novels. I am somewhat at a loss as to why the Clarke judges decided to shortlist this particular book however, and as a representative of the debut crossover category, I would have preferred to see Naomi Booth’s Sealed, a shorter but much more affecting essay in catastrophe, with a genuine sense of urgency as well as great sense of place.

C. Robert Cargill’s Sea of Rust could best be described as IMAX SF. Novels that fit this designation are those that can most easily trace their ancestry back to American ‘Golden Age’ traditions and that occupy most of the shelf space in the science fiction section of your local bookshop. Other Clarke Award winners and shortlistees that fall into this group are Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three (2011), Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space (2001) Richard Morgan’s Black Man (2007) Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013) and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time (2016). A propulsive, plot-heavy approach is usually central to these novels, which abide solidly by genre conventions and are happy within their confines. IMAX SF is unashamedly uninflected, not seeking to subvert genre conventions so much as joyfully endorse them. Language here is utilised as a tool for driving the story rather than an end in itself. These are the books that have done most – for good or for ill – to shape the landscape of popular media SF and be shaped by it in their turn.

As the largest sub-segment of science fiction, it is no surprise that IMAX SF shows the widest variation in quality, and I think it’s a shame that the Clarke jury selected Sea of Rust as their exemplar. As an adventure story pure and simple, it’s readable and entertaining, the kind of novel you might devour whole on a rainy Sunday afternoon before passing it on to your younger brother as an extra birthday present. As a serious contribution to the field, it has no significance whatsoever. Even from the first paragraphs I found I couldn’t help chuckling to myself over the implausibility of the point of view character, Brittle, as the narrative voice of an artificial intelligence. It’s so, so human – the human voice of a Hollywood screenwriter overdosing on exposition, to be precise. And as a citizen of the robot universe, just why would Brittle bother robo-splaining all this shit to me in any case? Come on, we can do better than this. If the jury wanted IMAX SF to be represented on the Clarke Award shortlist, why couldn’t they have gone for The Stars Are Legion, or Raven Stratagem, or New York 2130? Of all the novels on this year’s shortlist, Sea of Rust is the biggest mystery, and not in a good way. And to think the place could have gone to Gnomon instead…

Jaroslav Kalfar’s Spaceman of Bohemia falls into that slippery category that I am going to term ‘of speculative interest’. Novels in this category are often referred to in genre circles as ‘literary SF’, a term I have come to distrust and dislike as being too catch-all and therefore inaccurate. What they have in common is that they are targeted firmly at the literary readership, contain little or no mention of science fiction in their marketing, and generally make use of speculative materials in a symbolic capacity rather than being a more hands-on exploration of science fictional ideas. Recent examples might include Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things (2014), Richard Powers’s Generosity (2010), Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (2013) and Jan Morris’s Hav (2006). Their writers usually originate from outside the science fiction conversation, but may – like Kazuo Ishiguro and David Mitchell – end up joining it as their knowledge of and interest in science fiction becomes more central to their work.

Like Gary Wolfe in his review for the Sharke roundtable, I would argue that Spaceman of Bohemia is a strongly written, compelling novel that makes use of genre materials more as a binding agent for its true narrative and to little effect. In Spaceman’s witty and ironical protagonist Jakub we encounter a point of view – the son of a State-sponsored torturer – that is rarely encountered in post-Soviet literature or indeed anywhere. The chief problem with this novel is that the realworld segments – Jakub’s memories of his childhood and his grandparents, the difficulty of growing up in a world where the systems that supported him are suddenly withdrawn – are so well rendered, so compelling that the science fictional elements – Jakub’s mission to the Chopra cloud and his relationship with the spider-like alien – feel thin by comparison. We believe totally in Jakub, in his obsessing over his broken relationship with his girlfriend Lenka, in the home he is forced to leave in the aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. We do not truly believe in or care about his space mission, and often find ourselves wondering if the book might have been better without it. I’m happy to see this novel on the Clarke Award shortlist because it reflects an open and flexible approach on the part of the jury, and of course because it is a good novel, but I don’t think it will win.

Omar El Akkad’s American War belongs to a category that is, if anything, even more slippery than ‘of speculative interest’ – indeed, some may claim it as an offshoot of that category and it’s so slippery I haven’t managed to come up with a name for it yet other than contemporary parable. American War is a novel that makes strong and overt use of speculative materials, yet is not truly interested in questions around the materials themselves. Other notable examples of science fiction as parable would include Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and James Smythe’s The Testimony (2011), novels in which a science fictional element functions primarily as a gimmick to enable a particular premise. American War is more overtly science fictional than any of these, yet I found it disappointing for similar reasons. In his eagerness to showcase his thesis, El Akkad is overly wedded to his parable template, not fluid enough in his approach to genre to allow his characters proper freedom of movement within its confines. In some ways, American War reads more like an essay than a novel. Though well written, it lacks something in personality, and could date very quickly. As regards the Clarke Award, American War does provide plenty of material for discussion and I still think it’s a contender.

The category into which Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time most naturally fits is arguably the most interesting, being as it is the intellectual engine room of science fiction, the category in which new ideas and new approaches most frequently spark to life. I’m going to call it the New New Wave, in honour of the British tradition of science fiction not as a pulp commodity but as a literature of ideas, as pioneered by Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells. Recent and notable New New Wave novels would include Dave Hutchinson’s ‘Europe’ sequence (2015-2018), Adam Roberts’s The Thing Itself (2015), Tricia Sullivan’s Maul (2003), Matthew de Abaitua’s If Then (2015), Nicola Griffiths’s Ammonite (1993), Paul McAuley’s Fairyland (1995) and Christopher Priest’s The Adjacent (2013). I would stress that there is no requirement on New New Wave authors to be British, and one could point equally to Nick Wood’s Azanian Bridges (2016), Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2013), Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station (2016) Jennifer Marie Brissett’s Elysium (2014) or anything by Ted Chiang as valuable exemplars of this strand of SF. New New Wave books are characterised above all by their interrogative nature, their knowledge of the speculative genres and willingness to be engaged with them – in a word, they are inside jobs. Another adjective that might be applied is progressive, and many New New Wave writers adopt radical approaches in terms of form, language, subject matter, social and political commentary and sometimes all four. I have always been of the opinion that this is the kind of science fiction that the Clarke Award should be seeking out and promoting, and I was delighted to see Dreams Before the Start of Time turn up on the shortlist for this reason.

With her three fine novels to date, Anne Charnock has embedded herself firmly at the heart of the New New Wave tradition. Using clear, declarative language and a character-based approach, Charnock engages directly and with a palpable sense of curiosity with those ideas that form the building blocks of contemporary SF: human reproduction, gender and sexuality, artificial intelligence (anyone curious about how an AI might actually think and speak should give Sea of Rust a miss and skip straight to Charnock’s PKD-Award-shortlisted A Calculated Life), genetics, robotic technology and climate change. Her novels are understated but deeply felt, and she is not afraid to ask the reader to step into the shoes of her characters: if this happened, what would you do? Rather in the manner of James Bradley’s Clade, Dreams Before the Start of Time follows the stories of one family over a number of decades, unravelling the relationships that bind them even as it asks searching questions about the possible futures we might be facing. As a novel it is astute, sensitive and thought provoking and one senses that Charnock’s best work is still very much in the making.

My final category is the modern classic. These are novels that stand a realistic chance of still being read generations from now, written from the heart of SF and yet not slaves to it, identifying a major trend or theme and exemplifying it with literary flair. A modern classic is not necessarily immediately identifiable. Some books – especially complex books – take time to be recognised and it may sometimes be years before we see them for the masterpieces they are. Modern classics associated with the Clarke – note that not all of them won it – would have to include China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993), Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993),Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Chip Delany’s Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1986), Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden (1989), Ian MacDonald’s The Dervish House (2010), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), M. John Harrison’s Light (2002), and Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). Perhaps the most interesting thing about this category is that a modern classic may originate from any of the other five categories.

Of all the novels on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist, Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne seems the most likely to earn its place as a modern classic. There is a beauty and simplicity in its manner of storytelling that makes it seem as if the book has always existed. That it will be read and enjoyed for many years to come is not in question. Undaunted by orthodoxies and unbothered by rules, VanderMeer’s approach to science fiction is as wayward as it is inventive, the mark of the true original. Yet VanderMeer is also telling us something important about our world, about the dangers and repercussions of human impact on the natural environment, about technology’s unpredictable impact on humans. As well as being superbly achieved and notable as literature, VanderMeer’s work is also important as science fiction. In its immediacy, its accessibility and its aesthetic beauty, Borne acts as a kind of summary statement of the author’s work to date and it is perhaps fitting that this is the novel that has finally won Jeff VanderMeer a place on the Clarke Award shortlist.

Better late than never, I say.

This is the first time for some years that I am not able to be present at the Clarke Award ceremony. I’ll be following the announcement online though, rest assured. I know which book I think should win, I know which book I want to win. I await the outcome of the judges’ deliberations with eagerness and great curiosity.

British Fantasy Awards 2018

July 6, 2018 /

I’m delighted to learn that my short story ‘Four Abstracts’ has been shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award.

This came as a complete surprise – and a welcome one. ‘Four Abstracts’ picks up the story of Beck, a character who first appeared as a baby in my novella A Thread of Truth more than a decade ago. I’m particularly fond of this piece – I found it very interesting to dig deeper into the personal history of the Hathaway family – and it’s wonderful to have it acknowledged in this way by the BFS electorate.

Congratulations to the other BFA nominees, and in particular to Mark Morris, shortlisted in the Best Anthology category for New Fears (Titan), the anthology in which ‘Four Abstracts’ originally appeared, and also to Malcolm Devlin, shortlisted in the Best Collection category for his debut You Will Grown Into Them (Unsung Stories), one of the most original and assured new collections of 2017.

The Dollmaker – revealed!

June 19, 2018 /

As announced in The Bookseller today, I’m thrilled to finally reveal that my third novel, The Dollmaker, will be published by riverrun/Quercus in March of next year.

To say I’m delighted would be a massive understatement. My editor Jon Riley has been championing the book from the moment he read the manuscript, and the entire team at riverrun have been fantastically supportive right through the editorial process. I feel very lucky indeed to have landed among such enthusiastic and knowledgeable people. Their love for books has been evident in every meeting I’ve had with them. As I said in my statement for The Bookseller, I honestly cannot think of a better home for The Dollmaker than riverrun.

I’ll have more – much more – to tell you about the novel as we get closer to publication, but for the moment I just want to say that The Dollmaker is particularly close to my heart, perhaps because it’s been with me for such a long time. The dollmaker himself (well, one of them…) first appeared in my mind more than ten years ago, while I was still living and working in Exeter. I wrote an outline for what was always and immediately ‘his’ novel. Other things happened, other stories intervened – but I never forgot Andrew Garvie, and when I finally came back to work on the manuscript properly towards the end of 2016 I found his character and his story more compelling than ever. The Dollmaker has always been a book I needed to write, and here it is. I hope readers will fall for Andrew, just as I did.

Is it just me??

June 16, 2018 /

Following on from my post on scary movies last week, do take the time, if you possibly can, to listen in to this lively discussion of horror movies on Radio 4’s Front Row and featuring the ever-wonderful Kim Newman. Hearing Kim talk about horror never fails to reinvigorate my enthusiasm for the genre. It’s not just that he’s incredibly knowledgeable – he’s clearly still just as passionate about the subject as when he first started writing and given the quality of many of the movies he’s had to sit through over the years, that’s no mean achievement.

The discussion focused closely on Polanski’s classic horror movie Rosemary’s Baby, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary this week. I could scarcely believe it. I’ve seen Rosemary’s Baby about five times and it never seems to age. Krzysztof Komeda’s fabulously eerie score, playing out over sweeping footage of New York rooftops must rank with the opening of Kubrick’s The Shining as one of my favourite opening sequences ever. Much of Rosemary’s Baby takes place in confined interiors, the old-world grandeur of those brownstone apartments contributing much to the mounting sense of paranoia and entrapment that permeates the movie.

I love the film. I am also in what I suspect is now a minority position of having read the novel before I saw the movie. I first discovered Ira Levin’s suspense thrillers when I was about fourteen, picking up his relatively unknown dystopia This Perfect Day at my local library and subsequently devouring everything by him I could lay my hands on. In my memory at least he remains one of the best pure plotters in the business. Neither of the two screen adaptations of his A Kiss Before Dying matches up to the edge-of-seat thrill of that novel when I read it in the 1980s. Other films have served him better – The Boys from Brazil and The (original) Stepford Wives are both classics – but it is Rosemary’s Baby that comes closest to recapturing the gut-churning suspense of Levin’s original.

They don’t make ’em like that any more. As the Front Row discussion passed from Rosemary’s Baby to Ari Aster’s new film Hereditary, with which it has been enthusiastically compared, my hackles began to rise, the question on my lips: is it just me?

I saw Hereditary on Thursday, at a preview screening in Glasgow. I know by now that I am going to be more or less alone here, so I’m just going to say it: Hereditary is not scary. Not even a little bit. Everything you see in this movie you will already have seen in at least ten other movies. I was honestly more scared by As Above, So Below and that similarly ridiculous film about people chasing demons under a church on Dartmoor. (I was also about to say that I was more scared by The Hollow but that would probably be a lie.)

It makes me angry when respected film critics like Peter Bradshaw give films like Hereditary five stars, because they are clearly not judging them according to the rigorous standards they apply to non-genre movies. Bradshaw’s reviews of European cinema, film classics and US and UK arthouse movies are knowledgeable, entertaining and generally enlightening. But for me at least his record on horror and SF is terrible, giving a free pass to clonker after derivative clonker, waving aside poor scripting and over-used tropes as if they don’t matter in this case because it’s a horror film, and horror films are meant to have that stuff.

Other mainstream critics are just as lax, and it makes me mad.

[Light spoilers ahead] As in almost every other case of Hollywood horror over-hype, the central problem with Hereditary is with the script, or rather the complete and utter lack of one. There is nothing the brilliant Toni Collette can do about that. She works what she has with gusto – but there is fuck all for her to work with. The problem is not so much that the material used in the construction of Hereditary is derivative – it is, but so is more or less everything in horror cinema – it is in the screenwriter/director’s inability to make anything of that material. I mean, things are pretty strange here: the death of Annie’s mother at the beginning of the film marks the culmination of a long cycle of abuse and repressed emotion – yet we learn very little about Annie or Annie’s (potentially interesting) work as an artist or her mother, how Annie felt bound to her in spite of everything and the deleterious effect this has had upon her marriage to Steve. Steve? What does he even do apart from act long-suffering? (And how come every Hollywood horror family is rich enough to live in a magnificently isolated house sparkling with old wood and gorgeous antique furniture?) Steve and Annie’s youngest child, Charlie, is clearly disturbed – and that’s before stuff starts happening. She’s supposed to be thirteen, but acts about nine. There’s terror in this house, with all real feelings and natural behaviour pushed underground. What has been going on before the action begins, and why, why, why the fuck does nobody talk to each other? Even after ‘the event’ (which I’m not going to spoil), a sequence that has the potential for genuine horror and traumatic aftershock, no one says a word to anyone about anything, until Toni Collette’s dinner-time rant, that is, but by then our suspension of disbelief has been thoroughly shaken.

I would suspect that the director, if faced with these questions, would reply that he wanted to portray deep trauma, that the silence between family members is meant to suggest a complete breakdown in the ability to communicate. I suspect that the real reason has more to do with his inability to write dialogue, to imagine properly realised scenes between real human beings, as opposed to actors in a horror movie. Beyond the broadest brushstrokes, there is zero characterisation, and therefore zero reason for us to care about the outcome. (I would suggest to any aspiring screenwriters that having your characters act like zombies right from the first scene is not going to do you any favours. Unless they are zombies of course, in which case, best go with it.) The outcome is also pathetic. It’s been done to death. If I had time on my hands I might begin to make a checklist of films with variants of this particular ending – of which Rosemary’s Baby is the only valid example worth a damn BECAUSE THAT FILM WAS PROPERLY SCRIPTED, and OK, The Omen was fine, a masterpiece in fact when compared with the current iteration  – but I have work to do.

I do not exaggerate when I say that every single avenue of interest in Hereditary is systematically bypassed in favour of – well, nothing, apart from people wandering around darkened interiors in typical horror film fashion (the house is wired for electricity, you fuckers, TURN ON THE LIGHTS!) waiting to be set on fire by demons.

Ari Aster can’t write. Therein lies the problem. Aside from that, I had a good week! Go see Hereditary if you have to, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Or better still, re-watch Rosemary’s Baby instead.

Scariest films ever

June 8, 2018 /

To celebrate the imminent release of Ari Aster’s much-heralded movie Hereditary (which I cannot wait to see), Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw posted a list of his Top 25 scariest horror films ever. I very much enjoyed looking over his list. But as so often with these kind of rankings it offered more questions than it answered. What exactly is a scary movie, and will the criteria for scariness be different depending on who is watching, how many horror films they’ve seen previously, what they prefer more generally both in terms of cinema and horror literature. Of course they will be – and that only makes the question more interesting.

The question I asked myself most frequently while reading Bradshaw’s list was: OK, but is that really scary? Is American Psycho, for example, actually scary? There’s blood and there are bodies – or at least body parts (a lot of body parts) – but the mood of the movie is so blatantly satirical (it might be contentious to say so, but it’s played more for laughs than for terror) I can’t remember being scared even once while I was watching it. Disgusted? That was the whole point. Horrified? Sometimes. But scared? I honestly don’t think so.

Zombie movies (with one or two honourable exceptions – see below) don’t scare me, period. Neither do slasher movies, surely horror cinema’s most boring subgenre and yes I include Hallloween in that judgement. Torture porn I choose not to watch because it’s cheap and lazy and – once you get over the vileness of it – also really boring. Carrie isn’t scary, the overwrought, trope-laden The Babadook certainly isn’t scary, and The Silence of the Lambs isn’t a horror movie, it’s a crime drama – like David Fincher’s Se7en, the emphasis is very much on the solving of a mystery, the unravelling of clues, not the evocation of dread that is essential to a true horror movie (anyway, Zodiac is scarier just by virtue of the opening scenes).

Any brand of scary that depends on jump-scares gets an automatic red card from me. And am I the only person on the planet who didn’t find The Exorcist frightening?  Maybe I would have done if I’d seen it when I was younger but by the time I finally caught up with it – sometime in the 90s – the Catholic psychodrama felt very old fashioned and I’d seen the set pieces so many times they’d become part of the lexicon. I much prefer Daniel Stamm’s 2010 The Last Exorcism. Masquerading as a documentary, The Last Exorcism is bleak and brilliant and underappreciated. I had my hands over my face for multiple scenes. I think it’s due a revival.

Three of the films on Bradshaw’s list – The Wicker Man, The Shining and Don’t Look Now – would count among my favourite pieces of cinema, but as scary movies, The Wicker Man and Don’t Look Now are too reliant on their devastating final scenes, The Shining is magisterial rather than terrifying, just a great film.  And again with Get Out, one of the most original additions to the canon in recent years, it is the social satire that does most of the work, with the horror movie elements more as knowing nods than outright scares.

By now, most of you are probably thinking I’m a spoilsport who’s seen too many horror movies and there may well be something in that. After a while, you get inured to the tropes. For some, it is a badge of honour not to be scared, to sit there with your arms folded going yeah right – I have definitely been guilty of that, on numerous occasions! And yet, as I began trying to decide what my own Top Ten would be, I did see a pattern beginning to emerge. The elements that scare me most in horror cinema have to do with a gradual slide into abnormality, a mounting sense that something is wrong here and there is no way out. Claustrophobia and loss of autonomy rather than savagery. The threat of violence, rather than blood and hacked off body parts. This is probably why I often enjoy the set-up in horror films so much more than the denouement – a variant on the rule ‘don’t show the monster’.

So, after much internal argument, are my Top Ten Scary Movies. Some people will say I have cheated – there are actually seventeen films listed here – but Peter Bradshaw had twenty-five, so what the hell…

10) Suspiria (Dario Argento 1976) The Beyond (Lucio Fulci 1981) I recorded Suspiria off the TV sometime in the late 1990s and had it stashed away on a VHS tape for months because I was too scared to watch it! I hadn’t seen nearly as many horror films back then and was more susceptible to hype. Suspiria was considered ‘most scary’ by so many critics I wasn’t sure if I could take it. I finally watched the ‘making of’ documentary to acclimatise myself and immediately became so interested in the film I saw Suspiria itself the following evening. And of course it wasn’t scary in the way I’d been expecting – it’s way too over the top for that – but it was scary in a different way, and also like nothing else I had seen up to that point. The opening sequence by itself would be notable, and brilliant, and it’s always this scene of confusion and torrential rain – not the barbed wire one – that remains most potent in my memories of Suspiria.  The soundtrack (by Goblin) is famous and justifiably so as it presents a defiantly original approach to scoring a horror film. The gradual slide into madness, the increasing extravagance of the imagery make Suspiria one of the most convincing evocations of nightmare seen on screen, and it is this – its defining illogic – that makes Suspiria worthy of a place in the most scary canon.

I’m including Fulci’s The Beyond in this spot too – my giallo double bill – because it reminds me of Suspiria in so many ways. Again, this was a film I’d heard so much about I was nervous of watching it. More than a few trusted horror comrades pronounced it terrifying, so it would perhaps seem churlish of me to say that I really enjoyed it! Like Suspiria, it is essentially a haunted house movie, but the sheer lunacy of it – the gradual stripping away of reality itself – makes it a genuinely horrible thrill ride and also rather daring.

9) [Rec] (Jaume Balaguero 2007) Here’s that zombie movie I mentioned earlier. Regular readers of this blog will know I’m fond of found footage movies, and this remains one of my favourites. A young TV reporter and her cameraman embed themselves with a team of Barcelona firefighters working the night shift. The evening starts off pretty boring, but then a call comes in from an apartment building suggesting that one of the residents may be trapped… [Rec] is scary because it unwinds in real-time – the film is just 78 minutes long but what a 78 minutes – and the sense it gives to the viewer of actually being there is brilliantly sustained. I spent most of the final ten minutes of this film with my hands over my eyes and that does not happen often. Result! (Honourable mention in this category: Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night, from 2017. More than just a zombie movie, and full of dread. I loved it.)

8) Wolf Creek (Greg Mclean 2005) What raises Wolf Creek above run-of-the-mill torture porn for me is the director’s audacity with regard to the set-up. The best thing about this movie is that for the first half of the run-time, nothing happens. We get to know the characters – your usual bunch of gap-year students – their relationship to one another, their minor feuds, the escalating tensions between them. What happens next is appalling precisely because it irrupts without warning into ordinary lives – lives we feel we’ve come to know intimately. I saw this film shortly after I moved to London in 2005, an afternoon screening, and still remember the sense of dislocation I felt on re-emerging into the light. I remember hurrying to the station, anxious to get home, even though I was safely shielded by hundreds of shoppers on Tottenham Court Road! I remember one of the characters’ final words – ‘So long, Wolf Creek’ – before everything begins to go wrong. An engine that won’t start – that’s all it takes. Still chills me, even now.

7) Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol 1970) And Soon the Darkness (Robert Fuest 1970) If I were to see either of these films for the first time now, I would probably not include them in this list. Their importance to me stems from the impact they had on me when I did see them – when I was about sixteen, I reckon, certainly before I left home. I hadn’t realised until I checked the dates for this post that they were both released in the same year, but it makes total sense. Both films are set in small French rural communities, each with something disturbing and hidden at its heart. The sense of creeping dread – something is wrong here – is paramount, and the seminal moments (the spinning bicycle wheel in And Soon the Darkness, the bloody hand hanging over the cliff edge in Le Boucher) leave you with your pulse racing. These films offer a fascinating snapshot of the original 1970s brand of folk horror.

6) A Field in England (Ben Wheatley 2013) I loved this film. I also found it horribly disturbing, frightening in ways I cannot adequately explain. One of those rare films that makes you feel changed in the act of watching it. Wheatley’s debut feature Kill List has rightly become a horror classic but for me, A Field in England is scarier. (Spiritual father to A Field in England? Jerzy Skolimowski’s truly great 1978 movie The Shout, based upon a short story by Robert Graves. This film is terrifying because the viewer feels co-opted into the abuse of power that is going on, almost coming to believe in the shout themselves.)

5) The Thing (John Carpenter 1982) The Fly (David Cronenberg 1986) I’m listing these together under ‘body horror’. The Thing, ridiculous though it may seem, took me three goes before I could actually bring myself to watch it through to the end, mainly because of the opening half hour, which I still find unbearably tense, one of the most frightening sequences in horror cinema, again, because nothing happens but you know it’s going to. This movie is so much better than Halloween. The Fly counts as one of those films I had to psych myself up to watch, I’ve now seen it three times and it is still hideously unnerving, the ultimate loss-of-control movie. My scariest moment? When Brundle is looking at the data readouts after the first teleportation and begins to appreciate the full horror of what is happening to him.

4) The Blair Witch Project (Myrick/Sanchez 1999) Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli 2007) My found footage faves! Anyone interested in horror cinema needs to watch these, basically. They’re both ultra-slow burn, both contain moments of genuine terror. When Heather realises they’ve been walking in circles. When the timer on the digital camera reveals that Katie has been standing motionless by the bed for three hours. Brrr. Brilliant.

3) Audition (Takashi Miike 1999) Ringu (Hideo Nakata 1998) How can you sum up Audition? Most people remember the needle scene, but for me the most terrifying moment in Miike’s film involves a woman sitting alone in an empty room with a telephone that doesn’t ring and a folded-over burlap sack. It was only on my third viewing of Audition that I began to properly understand its timeline, which appears to be linear when you first watch the film but is so…not. Ultimately, Audition is a tragedy, about loneliness, grief and abuse. It is also a brilliantly executed piece of cinema. Much the same could be said of Ringu, which actually came out a year earlier and kick-started the ‘haunted video’ trope. Of course Nakata’s original is the best – elegiac, queasy and deeply strange – but Gore Verbinski’s 2002 US remake isn’t at all bad, either – the opening sequence is cover-your-face scary.

2) The Vanishing (George Sluizer 1988) Maybe it’s just that this film pushes all my buttons – loss of freedom, entrapment, deception, obsession, huge mistakes made for no reason – but my God it’s brilliant. And horrifying. I don’t watch it all that often because it still gets to me. Please do not watch the Jeff Bridges remake. The word ‘travesty’ does not begin to cover it.

1) Alien (Ridley Scott 1979) The word that covers this one is simply ‘iconic’. Alien has everything: narrative economy, groundbreaking aesthetic, superb characterisation, shit-your-pants tension. It also has Ellen Ripley. Still hard to believe that we’re coming up on Alien‘s fortieth anniversary because to my mind it hasn’t dated a day – you could put this out as a new movie and it would still be better than ninety-nine percent of everything you see at the multiplex. Alien defined an era and it would always be in my Top Ten, regardless of genre.

Missing by Alison Moore

May 22, 2018 /

When, at the end of the story, the woman is on the verge of accepting that there will not be a relationship between them, when she is poised to leave the hospital room for the final time, abandoning the man to his coma, it is not at all clear whether she really will walk away or whether, pausing and looking back, she will give in and return. Jessie had put the question to the author, who might eventually reply and who would no doubt say that not knowing was the whole point… In each of the stories…there was a failure to connect, and the endings seemed to hang in the air; they were barely endings at all. 

I was skyping with a friend the other day and in the course of conversation we discovered we both happened to be reading the same book, Alison Moore’s newly released fourth novel, Missing. We agreed that Alison Moore was one of those authors whose books we acquire sight unseen the moment they come out. I devoured this latest in just two days. I could say that Missing is Moore’s best novel so far, but I am not entirely sure that would be accurate. One of the hallmarks of Moore’s writing is its consistency. Everything I have ever read by her is of a similarly high quality. I am convinced that Alison Moore is incapable of writing a bad sentence.

Missing tells the story of Jessie, a freelance translator in her late forties, living in the Scottish border town of Hawick. Her husband Will walked out on her some months ago and we don’t know why. Her cottage might be haunted, and there are ghosts from the past that keep rising up, ghosts that have largely defined the life Jessie is leading now.

To describe this novel as heartbreaking would seem to hint at drama, histrionics, yet much of the beauty and resilience of Moore’s novels lies in their avoidance of overt confrontation. Her characters’ worlds are focused inwards, their suffering, while not exactly secret, remains largely unspoken of, their tragedies translated into the thousand unceasing banalities of everyday life: a packet of frozen peas that will never now be retrieved from a neighbour’s freezer, a lost watch, an unmarked calendar. We cannot know the ending, and that, indeed, is the whole point.

There are books which, when you finish reading them, force you to stop everything for a moment to acknowledge their excellence, to mark a personal encounter with something special. Missing is one of those books, and it gives me great joy to say that it hit me hard. Alison Moore was famously shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012 for her debut novel The Lighthouse. Missing deserves equal attention. More than that though, Moore deserves considerably more attention as a writer than she is currently getting.

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