THE FIRST HORROR BOOK I REMEMBER READING 

The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything by Linda Williams. It’s more of a Halloween story than a horror story, I suppose, but it was my first glint into the world of spooky and I loved it. This was a book I wanted read to me over and over again as a child and never got tired of it. As I grew older, I discovered the magic of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps and heartily enjoyed reading those.


THE FIRST HORROR FILM I REMEMBER WATCHING 

Jurassic Park, though it isn’t considered horror by most, is probably my first “horror film”. It shares enough traits with an eco-horror or creature feature and is definitely responsible for my love of atmospheric horror, Michael Crichton, and monster movies. If we’re going to be sticklers for actual horror, then it was probably Tremors.

THE GREATEST HORROR BOOK OF ALL TIME 

Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. I’ve always been a fan of reading about terror, of the psychological horror versus blood and guts horror. Haunted houses are also one of my favorite horror subjects and this is the mother of them all.


THE GREATEST HORROR FILM OF ALL TIME
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It’s Jaws. I’ll scream that from the rooftops every time. No matter how many times I watch it, I never get tired of it. It’s to the point that if I’m looking for a comfort movie to watch while I’m making dinner or working on a non-writerly project, I will throw it on as background noise.


THE GREATEST WRITER OF ALL TIME

I have a special place in my heart for Michael Crichton. While he’s not a horror author, he was extremely prolific and the variety of his projects inspired me to want to write not just one genre but a little of bit of everything. Everything is about branding yourself as a such and such author in order to sell now, but if you can craft a best-selling techo-thriller, and then a kick-ass historical heist novel, and then write for a medical television drama, you’re just diverse and epic. He was classy and brilliant and wrote wonderful books.

THE BEST BOOK COVER OF ALL TIME

I think I love too many different book covers to be able to pick just one as my favorite. If we’re speaking about most iconic, then I’m probably going to say Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

THE BEST FILM POSTER OFF ALL TIME

As much as I’m tempted to go straight for the obvious choices of Jurassic Park and Jaws, I’m actually going to stray and say that Blade Runner has one of the best film posters of all time. I’m a sucker for that noir/sci-fi crossover and the hand-painted art is stunning.

THE BEST BOOK / FILM I HAVE WRITTEN

The Wild Dark is my most current book, coming out October 12th. I started writing this book in 2013 and it has been the hardest and most rewarding project to work on. I put a lot of myself into this protagonist and into the book, pieces of me that I’ve been afraid to share with other people. I’ve always been kind of a loner and been pretty self-sufficient which plays into this book about an ex-cop who is grappling with the death of her partner and dissolution of her job and life in the midst of an apocalypse.


THE WORST BOOK / FILM I HAVE WRITTEN

My third book of The Monstrum Chronicles series, Memento Mori, was one that I worked so hard on. I love so many parts of that book and I had this clever/dumb idea that it could serve as the third book in the series as well as the prequel to the first book. That idea didn’t work out too well. I also released it too late after the first two books came out and no one read it. I tried to have this impromptu release party for it that no one came to and I remembered being so let down with myself. It was the first time in my career where I felt like I’d wasted time on something I loved and it nearly made me want to stop writing.

THE MOST UNDERRATED FILM OF ALL TIME

The Village. Yes, all of you probably know the double twist ending and how disappointed you were by the fact that it wasn’t scary enough. This movie was gorgeous. Its flaw was in how it was marketed. It’s a love story with a creepy backdrop; not a horror story. The other problem was that people wanted it to be the same as Shymalan’s other films and when it wasn’t, it let audiences down. Not me. Give me that spooky monster backdrop romance all day long.

THE MOST UNDERRATED BOOK OF ALL TIME

I think anyone who hasn’t read Dark Blood Comes From The Feet by Emma J. Gibbon needs to get that in their hands right now and do it. That is some damn fine New England horror.

THE MOST UNDERRATED AUTHOR OF ALL TIME

Where to begin, haha! Seriously, the horror community is filled with lots of wonderful talent, a lot of whom haven’t seen their fare share of reviews. All I can say is give someone that you’ve never heard of a chance. Odds are you’ll be pleasantly surprised. I am in various communities with extremely talented writers who have books that will have you cowering in the dark and begging for more. Do yourself a favor and try someone new.

THE BOOK / FILM THAT SACRED ME THE MOST
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I will not watch The Ring ever again. I didn’t really have a choice of whether I wanted to watch it or not and it seriously didn’t sit well with me. I’m not a fan of scary children in horror as a theme. While reading Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians last year, I had to put the book down a couple times and go seek out warmth and sunshine. Tremendous story but so scary!


THE BOOK / FILM I AM WORKING ON NEXT

I am currently at work on the sequel for The Wild Dark as well as my sequel to my novella, The Collection. It’s very Downton Abbey meets Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

Coming OCTOBER 12th, 2021


Ghosts. Soul-eating wolves. World-consuming woods. A friendship that defies death.


Elizabeth 'Liz' Raleigh has lost everything: her job as a police detective, her partner, her fiancé, and her peace of mind. After a month of solitude at a cabin in the woods, she finally feels as though she's ready to move on.

But in one terrifying night, everything changes. Liz's partner, Brody, appears in the form of a ghost. He's one of millions that have returned to haunt their loved ones. Brody can't remember how he died and Liz is determined to keep the secret of it buried, for it means dredging up crushing memories. Along with him comes an unearthly forest purgatory that swallows up every sign of human civilization across the world. The woods are fraught with disturbing architecture and monstrous wolves hungry for human souls. Brody says he escaped from them and that the wolves are trying to drag him and others ghosts back.
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As winter closes in and chaos erupts across New England, Liz fights desolation, resurfacing guilt, and absolute terror as she tries to survive one of the most brutal winters she's ever seen.

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Katherine Silva is a Maine author of dark fiction, a connoisseur of coffee, and victim of cat shenanigans. She is a two-time Maine Literary Award finalist for speculative fiction and a member of the Horror Writers of Maine, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and New England Horror Writers Association. Her latest book, The Wild Dark, is due out October 12th.

CHILDHOOD FEARS


Being born in and growing up for part of my childhood in an old, gloomy Victorian house probably fuelled my early fears. There was a spooky attic; dark stairs, and mice scuttling around in the walls from time to time. No wonder I was frightened.
The first thing that I remember being actively scared of when I was a child was The Cybermen in Doctor Who. There was something eerie about the fact that they looked humanoid but were devoid of any humanity whatsoever, and I think that this disturbed me on some subconscious level.

There was also a couple of series on TV that creeped me out. Timeslip was one, and there was another series about a girl whose drawings manifested in dreams. The name of this


programme escapes me, now, but I remember that the girl drew a house surrounded by large rocks with eyes; and when this vision came true in a live-action nightmare, the rocks blinked one cyclopean eye open, much to my horror. I’m pretty sure that I yelped with fear and hid behind the sofa at that point.

I’ve talked about watching Hammer House of Horror movies, and of these, The Pit and The Pendulum and The Masque of The Red Death stand out as particularly terrifying for a young child. They were like fever-dreams in which everything was slightly off-kilter and evil lurked around every corner, waiting to pounce. They both gave me bad dreams.

Although TV and all the things exhibited on it were fascinating to me, going to the cinema, usually with my father and brothers, was always something to look forward to. I was twelve when Jaws came out, and this is still one of my favourite monster movies of all time. But the movie that gave me the biggest chill, and it does even to this day, came a few years earlier when dad took me to see a double feature of Planet of the Apes and Return to The Planet of the Apes.

At the end of the original, Charlton Heston rides off into the sunset with a mute female companion. Up to this point, he thinks that he’s on another planet, but when he finds the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand, he realises that he’s been home all along.

Watching this scene as a child made my heart leap from my chest into my throat as the camera panned through Lady Liberty’s crown and then her torch. This was huge and shocking to me on the big screen. I think now that it was the implication that all we know of our planet and civilization is fleeting, along with our mortality; that neither I or anything else, even iconic buildings and cities will last forever. At the time, though, I could not have explained these feelings; I just knew that the sight of that symbol of humanity buried and forgotten absolutely shook me to the core. It still does. Maybe that’s why I write horror-fiction. Maybe.

Accept The Power or The World Will Burn

Nine-year-old David Ryan is in mortal danger He has a deadly secret that is unknown even to himself. But there is someone that does know: a relentless killer born of hatred, who draws upon dark powers to destroy God’s chosen ones.

As David grows into a troubled teenager, he has to confront the truth about himself to have any hope of stopping the malignant spread of evil that is engulfing his small town.

He must accept his birth-rite, or the whole world will burn.

It’s April 21st 1999. I’ve been working in the fucking pub for five months. It sucks. I hate pretty much everything about it. Sure, it’s better than Barnstaple. I am, at least, in London. Granted, I can’t afford to do anything more than eat, sleep and work, but… it’s better. It’s alive, in a way Barnie wasn’t. There’s energy.


Still. It sucks, for all the reasons outlined in the previous three essays on the subject, and I am miserable. I’ve been banished to the public bar by this point, away from the hard work of the sports bar, true, but the tradeoff is that I’m serving half a dozen (at most) hardcore alcoholics, and enduring seemingly endless conversations about what they’d like to do to Carol Vorderman, and whatever you’re imagining, I can almost guarantee it’s worse.


Boredom doesn’t even begin to cover it. Things are so bad that, well, how’s his? The brewery/chain that owns the pub made a deal sometime in the new year with The Express “newspaper”, as a result of which, and no doubt in exchange for vastly inflating the purported circulation of said paper, part of my morning job involved placing a copy of that godforsaken rag on every single table in the bar before opening.


And I was so fucking bored that I read it. Cover to cover. Well, okay, no, not the sport, I have my standards.


Still.


And this particular day, I read it with far more care and attention than normal.


Because it was the day after the Columbine massacre.


I can’t remember now how I first heard the news. I do remember the state of numbness, of shock. My flatmate and I. She was a few years older, working at a Uni. And, I mean, the bald, core facts are as simple and as dark as they come; two teenage boys murder a bunch of fellow teenagers before turning the guns on themselves. It’s just one of those indigestible things, a happening you can neither unsee nor really reconcile yourself to. Or at least, I couldn’t. Can’t. It feels like a negation. A black pit where reason should be. An impossible horror.


But, of course, I did try to make some kind of sense out of it; alongside the millions of people who saw it on telly, and the thousands of families directly affected, and the circling news crews with hour after hour of airtime to fill, column inches to fill, and literally everybody screaming the same useless question; Why?


Never mind how. Everybody knew how. In 1996, a gunman had walked into a classroom in the UK, shot thirty one children, sixteen fatally, murdered the teacher, and then took his own life. I remember that day, too; the same sick numbness, sitting with my fellow invincible teenagers in the smoking cafeteria at College, totally unable to process. But we knew something would be done, and it was. Within a very small number of months, it was functionally close to impossible to own a handgun of any real deadly power in the UK. And though there have been murders, and the odd shooting, there’s not been this kind of mass killing since.


And, I mean, fuck having the gun control debate again, who the hell am I going to win over, but I think even back then I knew US “culture” was different and gun ownership far more normal, so when I say I knew how, well, that’s what I mean. As soon as it happened, shocking to the core as it was, it also felt… inevitable. Something that should never happen, and yet was absolutely definitely going to happen at some point.


Because of the how.


But, why?


The answers were not long in coming. A picture was quickly emerging of a deeply toxic environment. Jocks that picked on goths and suspected queers. A bullied underclass of Marilyn Manson fans who sometimes wore black nail varnish, bullied beyond endurance, self describing as The Trenchcoat Mafia, adopting a hateful, mocking nickname as their own.


The headline in The Express from that day was a pull quote from the Trenchcoat Mafia yearbook page (and really, that there was a yearbook page should surely have given some pause as to exactly how out there this group really was): ‘Insanity Is Healthy’.


And, like, I’d seen Heathers, but more importantly, I’d somehow survived secondary school myself, and…


Well, not to repeat myself, but school was a fairly hellish experience for me, for the usual banal reasons; short, over enthusiastic, bright and not good at hiding it, lonely and socially awkward, you know how this tune goes. The music I loved the most - Manson came later, but not too late for me to connect - was full of spit and fury, and I honestly think it was a big part of how I stayed sane, in an environment that felt engineered to try and break me. And I realise how pathetically hyperbolic that may look, on the page, coming from the fingertips of a 40something year old man; but we’ve come way too far for bulshit, now, haven’t we? And I tell you it’s the stone cold truth of how I felt back then. Hell, I still think it’s true. I still think it was. And I’m still pissed off about it.


Anyway.


The point is, sure, by the time Columbine happened I was out of school; hell, out of Devon, entirely, thank fuck; yes, sure, working a shitty job without the slightest clue what happened next, or how, but having faith, expectation, that there was a next, once I learned how to breathe and figured it out. On the other hand, I was still not out, in many important respects. I’d discovered the freedom to be not-a-lot in the place of my choosing, and of course that’s not nothing… but nor is it to be anything approaching whole. The scars were there, and they ran deep, especially when a typical workday involved bullying co-workers who’d periodically threaten violence, indifferent bosses, and regulars who hated me for Existing While Male, Young, and Long Haired. I definitely felt stronger, and more confident… but not actually in any way strong or confident, if you can dig it. The hole had been very, very deep, and though progress was being made, I was a long way from daylight.


And then, this. This story of bullied kids and a bloody, pointless, destructive revenge. Like Rage or Heathers, but real.


I tried to imagine it. Tried to imagine being so overwhelmed by the despair and the fury and the shit that I just.. Gave up. Just decided, fuck it, full nhilist, No Nothing, write my suicide note in the blood of other people and ride out into the black.


And, well, if you’ve come this far, if you’ve read my other essays in this series or spent any length of time with my fiction, you know what I’m going to say next; I found to my crawling horror that I really, really could.


Dig it; I’d had this daydream since I was twelve. And the daydream was blowing up the school.


I knew just how I’d do it, too; break in at night, get to the science block, turn on every bunsen burner gas tap in every lab, close the outside doors, wait for the building to fill with flammable fumes, light fuse, retire to a safe distance… boom! Or the other version; newly minted millionaire Kit Power (millionaire movie star? Oh, probably; back then, acting was still the thing) buys outright the entire school building complex, then has it wired with dynamite and raises it to the ground.


The more astute among you will have already spotted, I hope, the pretty important difference between these daydreams and what happened at Columbine (beyond the fact of them only ever being daydreams, of course, let’s not lose sight of that); though my dreams ran destructive, they never ran homicidal. I wanted to destroy the site of my humiliation, and I wanted that destruction to be a spectacle, a statement… but I didn’t want to hurt anyone, let alone everyone.


Not that I didn’t also have violent fantasies, to be clear. Again, if you’ve read my fiction, you’ll know I have a certain fascination, and maybe flare, for depictions of violence. Of this fact, I am neither proud nor ashamed, but I’m pretty sure I know where it comes from.


I’d rehearse fights. A lot. Almost certainly inspired by Ender’s Game, I’d imagine myself delivering absolutely brutal beatings to particular bulles that had either threatened me or harmed me. The fantasy would always start with them throwing the first punch, me, moving instinctively, avoiding the blow, countering with a fist to the nose, throat, or gut, aiming the punch for several inches behind the target area to ensure my fist was still accelerating when it hit home (we can thank The Ghost for that little bit of dark wisdom), following up immediately with one of the other spots, causing the target to drop, after which a short speech about never, ever fucking with me again, liberally itnterpsersed with kicks to the chest and gut, would complete the scene.


I’d run scenarios like this over and over and over and over. Picturing different settings, different opponents. I’m not going to say it made me feel good, because it didn’t… exactly. But it didn’t not, either. The rationale was preparation, of course; to secure peace is to prepare for war, and all of that shit, and of course bullying wasn’t an abstract threat, so, you know, I came by it honestly in that sense, but still… still…


Ah, hell. It is what it is, and it was what it was. And while none of the fights I got into ended up anywhere near that apocalyptic, I think the exercise did gift me a certain elevated sense of calm when the shit hit the fan; and perhaps more importantly, gave me a certain confidence that couldn’t help but project, a bit. Most bullies don’t want a fight; they want to hand out a beating, and I think the little extra swagger these constant imaginings gave me, earned or not, sent just enough of a signal that this sheep might have some bite after all to see me passed over for a softer target.


So, as I read the coverage in the papers, this story of the bullied kids who snapped, and took their homemade bombs and firearms on a rampage, I felt those two vivid fantasies of my own collide in my head, and felt an awful, soul sickness. Jesus. It could have been me. Just a little less love at home, a little less support, a little less conscience, a little less self belief… if I’d actually believed that school was forever, rather than a jail term my job was to outlast…


Mat and/or Trey of South Park: ‘I remember just thinking, if only I could have told those kids… man, Highschool is a funhouse mirror, it’s the opposite of real life. All those kids making your lives hell, they’ll end up working in their daddy’s garage, it’s the weirdos and freaks who will become the kings of creation…’


And that empathy wrecked me, for weeks afterwards, felt like, especially as the regulars in the bar offered their considered verdict on what had happened (‘they’re just gone! In the ‘ead!’, okay, yeah, cheers for that insight, Otis). Again, to be crystal clear, not out of sorrow for the killers, but out of horror at what they’d done, the hideous abominations they’d felt, wrongly, they’d been pushed to. The idea that the pain could get big enough to obliterate all sense, all reason; that consciousness, life itself, might start to feel like a joke; worse, a trap… and that feeling could lead to the ultimate damnation, destruction and death as a last, desperate bid to scratch your name of the face of the world.


And it wasn’t until decades later that I learned what perhaps you already know; almost everything I knew about Columbine, and the killers, was bullshit.


They weren't bullied. They weren't goths. They weren't Marilyn Manson fans. They didn’t snap - they’d planned the massacre for months.  Columbine itself was not some Heathers style dystopia - at least, no more than any high school is. Dylan was a kid with deep seated psychological problems, impressionable, unable to regulate his emotions, prone to depression, but not bullied, nor unloved or abused. And Eric was a one-in-a-million psychopath - a kid Dave Cullen, journalist, in his excellent book about the truth of what happened that day, describes as ‘like studying a virus’ - someone impossible to relate to or empathise with, so alien was his interior.


Shock fucking horror, the press had lied to me - to us. Again.


To themselves, too? Oh, hell, probably, in some cases - though, given what their job is supposed to be, ask me if I give a shit. The point is, I  - we - were sold a bill of goods that was completely false, and, speaking personally, I went through a wholly unnecessary bout of self doubt and loathing as a result, agonising over what now seem, at the blessed distance of a couple of decades, as nothing more or less than the utterly banal, typical thought processes of a bullied teen.


And, yeah, sure, boo fucking hoo me, people actually fucking died. True. But, also true; we were all collectively gaslit in an absolutely gigantic way by people whose actual job it was to know and do better. And, check it; I am nothing approaching unique or special, especially as regard my experiences as a school child of the 90s. I strongly suspect many, many young people put themselves through the kind of mill I did; tried to process not only the trauma of the fact of what happened, but also a sickening sense of culpability, complicity, there but for the grace of… well, whoever.


Like most of us, I suspect, I've got enough guilt I earned honestly to work through. I didn’t fucking need this, and if you’re nodding along as you read this, neither did you.


In fiction, we don‘t have to tell the truth about monsters. We can, of course. Or, we can try to; try and reach across the empathy chasm, see inside the heart of the heartless, the mind of the mindless. Sure, we can. I think we’ll almost always fail; I think we’ll inevitably take too much of our own minds and hearts with us, and that what we come out with, whilst valuable, and ‘entertaining’ (for a given value of etc) will bear as much relation to the reality as… well, as a portrait of a person does to a virus. But, try or not, it’s fundamentally not our job, I don’t think.


Journalists, on the other hand? Yeah. Yeah, I think it is their fucking job. And with a few honorable exceptions, it’s a job they're failing at. Miserably. It hurt me then, in 1999, and here and now, in 2021, it’s fucking killing us.


The Columbine massacre is a scar on the minds of everyone who lived through it, whether in person, or vicariously via the global coverage. It’s trauma.


The lies we were told about that day, and the way those lies have perpetuated, normalised, become history in the minds of so, so many… that piles obscenity upon obscenity, degradation upon tragedy. It victimises the dead all over again, and by telling us a false story of what happened, stereotypes are perpetuated, misunderstandings are repeated as fact, and, as the wrong lessons are learned, further such killings gain a sick inevitability.


It’s 2021. The planet is burning. 71% of global carbon emissions are made by just 100 companies.


And the papers are telling you that paper straws and electric cars are the only solution, and if you don’t buy them, it’s you that’s killing the planet. Or, at least, us. Not them.


Us.


What do these stories have in common? The refusal of those with the platform, and the responsibility, the fucking obligation, to accurately name the problem. Whether through distaste, vested interest, or investment in the false narrative we’ve built for centuries around the power of individual action (but never collective action, god forbid The Baying Mob ever manifest) to somehow resist the awesome forces of human-shaped viruses with effectively limitless resources, we are fed a line of plausible sounding, emotionally resonant bullshit. And, because we care, because of our empathy, we absorb it, we internalise it, and we try to reckon with the distorted image these false stories give us of ourselves.


It’s 2021. The planet is burning. We need better stories. Truer stories. And people with the courage to write those stories, in the face of all the social and financial incentives that push towards the status quo.


Good luck to us all.


KP
23/7/21


Dedicated with respect and affection to the memory of Dawn Foster - A Real One who Got It. May she inspire us all to Do Better and Be Better.

Warning: This book is almost impossible to put down.” - Tracy Fahey, Author: The Unheimlich Manoeuvre

Just how much are we shaped by the entertainment that scares us?

Author, blogger, podcaster and lifelong fan of genre Kit Power sets out to answer that question, with a collection of essays that take on the works - and events - that scarred him as a child and young adult. Stephen King’s IT. Hellraiser. The Thing. The Wasp Factory. Jeff Wayne’s War Of  The Worlds. Hillsborough. Welding childhood recollection with adult insight and analysis, Power digs deep into his personal reactions and feelings as he attempts to understand his continued fascination with the genre - and the emotion - of Horror. 

Collecting the first three years of his work for the 12-time BFS nominated review site Gingernuts Of Horror, with each essay revised and expanded, My Life In Horror Volume One represents one fan’s journey through genre  - an autobiography via the medium of pop culture.

“If you want to mainline someone’s utter love and immersion in books, movies and music, with beautifully honest reflections on life, the world, and everything, look no further.” Stephen Volk, Screenwriter and Author
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“My Life In Horror is a loving, enthusiastic, insightful and compulsive read for any fan of the genre. I fully recommend it.” - Brian Keene, Horror Grandmaster

When I was a kid I was obsessed with special effects movie makeup. The best horror magazine at the time (and still currently, in my opinion) was Fangoria, and as an 11-year-old I had a subscription that I couldn’t wait to receive each month. The gory and bizarre stills from Friday the 13th, Halloween, Alien, The Beast Within and so many others excited my imagination and made me want to see all of these movies (which I eventually did).


The pictures that most captured my attention were from An American Werewolf in London. The issue that featured Rick Baker’s groundbreaking werewolf transformation makeup were so provocative, so damn cool, that I absolutely couldn’t wait to see it. After what seemed like an eternity, the movie finally came to my city, and in 1982, at age 12, I went to see it with my father and younger brother (who was only 8 at the time!)


I was not disappointed. To this day, the transformation scene reigns as one of the all-time best Hollywood special effects. And the movie was riveting: funny, gory, and wildly scary in parts. I had expected the gore and scares, but what I didn’t expect was the humor. It’s a horror film, yes, but it’s equal parts comedy. David (the main character) and his friend Jack are attacked by a werewolf, killing Jack and leaving David wounded – and now cursed to be a werewolf.


Except Jack isn’t dead, not entirely. He and all of the werewolf victims are now the “undead,” spirits roaming some purgatorial realm and unable to move on until the werewolf’s bloodline is broken. Jack appears to David in visions, warning David that he will change during the next full moon, but the visits aren’t played up for horror; they’re done for comedy. When Jack appears, he’s a ghastly green, decomposing corpse (“a walking meatloaf,” as David calls him), but he’s chipper and happy. He sneaks bites of David’s food and implores him to commit suicide before he makes more undead victims like himself. Each time Jack shows up, he’s more desiccated and rotten, and he’s literally falling to pieces, but he’s cheerfully making jokes (“Have you ever talked with a corpse? It’s boring!”)


That’s just a few examples of the humor in American Werewolf. This was my first encounter with horror-comedy, and the two elements blended beautifully. Of course, more movies like this soon began turning up: Gremlins, Re-Animator, Evil Dead II, Dead Alive, Parents, and so on. More recent movies like Shawn of the Dead, Tucker and Dale Versus Evil, Krampus, The Cabin in the Woods, and many others have continued and deepened the tradition. I’m talking about movies that want to scare you and make you laugh in equal parts. It’s hard to do, but well worth it.


An American Werewolf in London was an enormous influence on my writing. However, it’s not until my upcoming book that I really paid homage. My novel The Beast in Aisle 34 is also a werewolf story. Like American Werewolf, the protagonist of my novel is the monster. And like American Werewolf, my story goes for a balance of laughs and gore. The humor disarms the audience, setting the stage for even more impact when the horror elements appear. I can only hope that my novel is a fitting and entertaining descendant of the film that made me.

It’s sometime in the summer of 2011, and I am a 41-year-old hard-drinking, mightily disappointed and practically unknown writer living in an ex-council flat on the outskirts of Norwich’s Golden Triangle area. Unable to sleep, as I often am, I find myself on the quiet side of midnight channel-hopping again when I should be tucked up and dreaming uneasily. I am dogged by a recurring feeling. Something still might happen tonight. I might receive a call, an email, a message that might, if not change everything, at least lessen the weight of it all, the last fifteen years of trying to make it as a working fiction writer when I could have easily become a lawyer or a journalist and not had to nail my demons to the screen every day for zero pence a year. It is in this semi-alive state of mind that I stumble upon an episode of the new Discovery Channel series, Finding Bigfoot. 

It’s rubbish, obviously. The bigfoot they investigate is a dark figure filmed as it shambles behind some kids playing in a river or canoeing or something. Caught on a camera phone, it’s a smudge, a hazy blur. To use language that I’ll later become very familiar with, it’s ‘shot with a potato’, it’s ‘blobsquatch’. If it’s not someone mucking about in a bear suit, it could easily be a moderately tall man in a black parka merely out of focus. But, boy, are the team arguing the toss over this. Every disturbance in the mud, every broken twig or nick on the bark is unquestionable evidence that changes the whole course of science. How serious are these people? How earnest and needy? 

It’s here the writer’s question ambushes me. 

What if? 

What if this phenomenon happened not only in backwoods America, in North Carolina, Oregon and Alaska, etc., but in my home town of Sutton, Surrey?

I didn’t know then that this was the beginning of a ten-year race and chase, a contest with a hairy beast that would run me ragged, lure me into the woods, have me lost in the brambles and stinging nettles – but, in the end, I would emerge blinking into the light with some sort of novel about the perils of living in your own head, as well as the more important issue of whether a gigantopithecus lives in north Surrey. It will also connect me to vast imaginative spaces, open up all sorts of storytelling possibilities that lead me back to what originally thrilled me in fiction. I will retrace my steps back to weird horror, and, though it might seem perverse, a much happier state of mind. I will recover my lost sense of self and direction.

The next day I scribble out some character sketches and ideas in my notebook. Four characters – Kevin (my true believer), Gorgo, Maxine and Derek Funnel – come to me very easily, along with the name of the legendary beast, The North Surrey Gigantopithecus. But I soon feel an idiot and shelve the idea. It’s not serious and I am supposed to be a serious writer. My last book, The Syllabus of Errors, had been laced with images of a fascism that lurks in the English suburbs ready to pounce and purge us of our better natures and instincts. It had things to say.

I give up on the Gigantopithecus idea. 

Most ideas wither.

It’s good that they wither.

Fools rush in… 

A few months later, The Sun and the Daily Telegraph are reporting a bigfoot sighting in Tunbridge Wells, complete with an artist’s impression that looks like a child’s drawing of Chewbacca, and supported by loads of stories of bigfoots in Kent that go back to the war. 

I may be on to something after all. 

The beast is amok.

A year passes and I commit to writing the story. I start it as a short story using a text-and-footnotes format I’ve used a couple of times already (in A Short Story about a Short Film, in The Syllabus of Errors collection, for example). I borrow a field report template from America’s Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization and have Maxine, the scientist and sceptic of the team, write up a new sighting. In footnotes, Kevin vigorously refutes her conclusions, using shonky reasoning, magic thinking and conspiracy logic, plus a lot of shouting and haranguing. Bigfoot guys are angry, and they don’t like being contradicted. This makes them sad in both senses of the word. I work this out early. 

As Kevin’s voice starts to overwhelm the short story and push it into first novella then novel territory, three things occur to me. 

Firstly, the legend of a bigfoot-style creature living in the grey suburbs where I grew up is intrinsically funny and does make me laugh (a lot), though kind of hysterically, like I’m trying not to admit something. This might sound self-congratulatory or self-indulgent, laughing at your own jokes, but if the writing doesn’t make me laugh I assume it won’t entertain anyone else.

Secondly, the idea of some ancient, reclusive, powerful and inscrutable beast living unseen and unstudied in the forests of the Earth is, at heart, both frightening and mythic. I can sense how the pursuit of it might drive someone mad. The madness of pursuit is the horror element, not the existence of the monster itself.

Then, as I design North Surrey Gigantopithecus lore for Kevin, I start to have flashbacks to my late childhood, to the sense I had of a more exciting ‘mysterious world’ being just out of reach (in my teens, I often felt I’d be much happier and involved living in the distant past or far future; satisfying this longing determined pretty much everything I read or watched until I was about sixteen).

I grew up on 2000AD, Tom Baker’s Doctor Who and Target Doctor Who novelisations, the Claremont-Byrne Uncanny X-Men run, the Armada Ghost Book series, the John Mills Quatermass, and a lot of other fantastical stuff as well. I also liked non-fiction books about ghosts, mysteries, cryptids and UFOs that presented the paranormal as certain, not contested. It strikes me, looking back at that time now, a time, of course, with relatively little TV and no internet, how the weird and strange mingled with the real and – to me, just about able to read a newspaper – boring news. 

At a time when TV and newspapers had more authority, the mysterious could become the profound, the revelatory rather than the dismissably crankish. Nationwide, the current affairs programme that followed the six o’clock news regularly broadcast items on, say, the increased frequency of sightings of Satan in the south-east of England immediately after something about new traffic lights being trialled in Weybridge, as if these items were of equal resonance. You would be wise to prepare yourself for both slightly longer waiting times at junctions and a sudden manifestation of the Goat of Mendes, especially if you own an outdoor shed. The Daily Express, which my parents bought, always had reports of cigar-shaped UFOs swooping across the South Downs, or square-headed aliens winking in and out of existence in Reigate or Dorking. In the more restricted 1970s, we emerged into a world of dread and fear, where strange things lurked behind the mock-Tudor houses and in the hedgerows and coppices. I vividly remembered the 1980 ITV series, Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, with its monumental-sounding theme tune and serious discussions about unexplained phenomena. Memories of its episode ‘The Missing Apemen’ would feed directly into Kevin lore and eventually add another layer to the story. It’s not just, what if there is a bigfoot in Sutton? It’s also, what if that lost world of seventies exotica is the real world after all? The thing is: I soon work out that this lost world is not just the real world to Kevin. We are not alone.

If I thought I had invented the idea of bigfoot research teams in England, I couldn’t have been more wrong. There have been reports and sightings across the UK. There are groups and teams everywhere. There are people who not only swear blind that they’ve seen a relict hominid in England, but also that the sighting was the defining moment of their lives. There are folkloric and ancient accounts of wildmen and woodwose and the odd hairy scamperer carved on a panel in a church somewhere in the sticks, but modern sightings also proliferate. Bolam Lake in Northumbria is supposedly haunted by an eight-foot yeti with red eyes that in 2003 spooked several anglers, dog walkers and a couple having al fresco sex during a camping trip. These accounts attracted the attention of the British Hominid Research Organisation and the Centre for Fortean Zoology in Exeter. The latter reckon they saw it and it was massive and possibly made out of shadows. 

Even closer to home for Kevin and me, the Surrey Hills are home to the Box Hill Ape, a sighting of which made the Daily Star in 2020. In 2012, a driver reported a ‘dark figure with no features’ that ran across the dual carriageway opposite North East Surrey College of Technology, which is where Kevin took a computer course in the late eighties and was traumatized by the girls nicknaming him the Skunky Gibbon. 

The beast is real, as Kevin would say. We’ve seen it loads of times.

Some of these reported encounters have a proper comedy vibe to them, if you believe that the soul of comedy is found in truth and pain. A woman who reported seeing the Sherwood Forest Thing on the Worksop-to-Nottingham road – massive, hairy, naked and holding the hand of an infant Sherwood Forest Thing – was most offended that she’d seen its furry willy and that it was allowed to display its privates in broad daylight. She posted this anonymously, of course. She was worried about what people would think of her, that she’d lost her marbles. A more chilling undercurrent can be sensed in many reports. Someone doesn’t want to admit what they saw in case no one believes them. People can believe they’ll be sectioned, exiled, written off as demented or deluded.

There seems to me to be an essential tension between what we want to believe and what happens to us when we believe. 

The idea of bigfoot must be rooted in the (overactive) imagination (a vivid fantasy life is nourishing for some people, less so for others) yet bigfoot also speaks to some lost part of us. It stands for epic freedom, of living unhindered, escaping capture, existing as part of nature rather than as an abuser and consumer of the natural world. In going all out to hunt and observe it, you are owned too by its freedom, you belong at last. 

On the other hand, most accounts of sightings, from across the world, not just from the south-east of England, have the logic of a weird horror story. Something outside of nature is glimpsed. No one believes or will believe us. We are increasingly threatened and fray at our edges. There is no resolution for us, only reverberations of the eeriness that initially threw us out of kilter. We may be enlightened. We may be doomed. We may be unable to tell the difference between doom and enlightenment. This is what we should be trying to describe, even though describing it is impossible.

The modern bigfoot phenomenon in America was kickstarted in 1958 when outsized apish footprints were discovered alongside a road near to Bluff Creek, California (site of the later Paterson-Gimlin encounter that featured prominently in Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World). When the discoverer of the tracks, Ray Wallace, died in 2002, his children announced that he had faked the tracks. It was, after all, ‘just a joke’. 
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This has me wondering still. What is more terrifying: realising that you believed and dedicated yourself to this prank, followed the prankster until his end, until the squandering of your time and life is revealed as the punchline, that the joke was on you. Or that even when the joke is over and how it works has been explained to you, you still insist that it wasn’t a joke. You still find yourself alone in the dark, in the trees, night-vision goggles on, camera ready, alert and waiting, waiting for the return of that one last great thing that made sense to you, that offered out to you an understanding paw.


Gigantic by Ashley Stokes is out now from Unsung Stories.