THE CURSE OF NOSTALGIA? BY STEVEN SAVILE
22/10/2021
The Curse of Nostalgia? When I talked to Jim the other day and said I’d love to write a little something about The Sufferer’s Song for Gingernuts I had all these grand ideas about what I’d love to tackle, I mean, how often is it that I’ll get to let something out of the dusty recesses of the trunk and into the light of day after thirty years? The answer is, of course, only once. And here I am. Tomorrow I turn 52 and it will be 30 years since I wrote the first line of The Sufferer’s Song. Thirty years. Motherf#%&er. It’s not even a where did the time go thing, it’s gone, could have had kids that themselves would be drinking and screwing around. I mean… bloody hell. There’s part of me that still feels like a new kid on the block, and this thing was written when New Kids on the Block were still a thing and Mark hadn’t dropped the Markey and Donnie was the most famous of the Wahlberg’s. I don’t even know how I am supposed to react to that. It’s quite funny, over the last few years the only time I’ve written horror has been to dip back into a very unreliable memory and revisit summer holidays and funfairs in Shiftling and Scavenger Summer, and lace stuff with memories of what it was like to be a teenager in the 80s, but here’s this thing I wrote that isn’t a nostalgia piece, but rather a product of its time. It’s pure Newcastle, 1992-3. The sense of crumbling identity is all through it, of course it is, it was a time when the pits had closed, the shipyards were closing, the steel mills were closing, and hope was being extinguished one layoff at a time. Back then I’d graduated and was trying to work out what to do with my life. I’d not yet hit upon the idea I wanted to pursue about my PhD, which would be about the impact of region upon horror and why cities like Liverpool and Newcastle were hotbeds for horror talent, and so little was coming out of rural England. It was again all about the hope and despair of Enterprise Zones, of Income Support, of poverty being punished and how hard it was for an angry young man to escape. There’s a couple of characters in The Sufferer’s Song, Johnny Lisker and Alex Slater, that represent both sides of my life back then. There’s Alex, who would appear to have hope, he’s smart, he’s falling in love, he’s not doomed by the poverty all around him and might have another life outside of the papermill that employs most of the village, and there’s Johnny, who has none of those prospects and is angry to the point of trying to fight his way out with his damned fists if he has to. Looking back, it’s interesting to see how different parts of me filtered into this story, and how recognisable they are to me even now, thirty years removed. But then, don’t they always tell us to write what we know? When I say I came from a place of poverty, I’m not exaggerating, but I was shielded from it. My mum tells a story of it now where her and my step dad had a choice of a bowl of French onion soup in a cheap café in Durham or the last bit of petrol needed to get home from my sister’s uni interview because there was no more money. My uni diet consisted of pasties and cheese on toast. There was a time when the bailiffs were looking at court for unpaid council tax because it was that or food and I decided eating was priority one. So, out of all of this, writing became my escape, the route one to a better life. And this was the book that was going to do it for me. How did I know this? Well, for one, it was back at a time when I was lucky in so many other ways. I had good friends and mentors helping steer me in the likes of Richard Laymon, who had been something of a pen friend for a few years, and who offered all sorts of encouragement during the writing process, my agent, who had sold a book of mine written when I was 19, before Sting had gone on his Rainforest Crusade and crushed that hope right along with the collapse of the Net Book Agreement. But looking back it’s hard to really grasp the hell that was my life back then. I jokingly say this is the book that cost me my first agent, but it’s no joke. I delivered it, she expected another Secret Life of Colours, all fabulist and strange. What she got was a fusion of Shaun Hutson/Richard Laymon and a small scale The Stand, all things that I was obsessed with during that time. In one of his letters, Dick had suggested that big was better, and encouraged me to write a long novel, really long, not the 60k-80k of my first, but something twice, maybe even three times that, and do what King does so well, let the characters breath and grow into their story – hold back the inciting incident and instead focus on bringing the little Northumbrian town of my story to life. In so many ways this book owes its finished form to him, and his gentle advice from four thousand miles away. Tanya, my agent, hated it with a passion. I mean a truth loathing. I put it on her desk thinking it would change my life, but had no idea how it would. She returned the manuscript along with a curt four line note saying it was too nasty and a great disappointment, because she’d believed I was going to be the next Clive Barker, but had given in to baser instincts and created something I guess they would have called torture-porn a couple of decades later. I was dumped. Just like that. There’s an inherent anger in this book, I see now, that is me, the young man reacting to the world around him, sure, but there’s a huge heart in it, too, and hope. Thinking about it now I can remember one of the major contributing factors to the story—we called them the Child Riots, this would be late 91, early 92, I guess, between Meadowell Estate and the fighting that broke out in the West End of the city, up from Benwell and Scotswood, up the Great North Road. I was in a nightclub with my best mate, Karl, and stepped out into a full blown riot. I don’t mind admitting it was the one time in my life I’d been truly terrified. There were hundreds of kids, teens mostly but some as young as ten and eleven, up to their early 20s, hurling petrol bombs, smashing car windows and house windows, burning flats and stuff, and we quite literally stepped out into the middle of it. The image I vividly remember was the fire in the sky turning 2am to bright day, but the wrong kind of light. We lived 12 miles from the riot and somehow had to get out of the city in the middle of it. That event, and those few nights that followed, absolutely shaped the course of The Sufferer’s Song. How could it not? I wanted to write a book about the lack of hope, about the anger inherent in poverty and something about the explosive release. It’s a theme I returned to a couple of years later in Laughing Boy’s Shadow, and this kind of mass violence has always been something that has both fascinated and terrified me. That’s what The Sufferer’s Song is about in so many ways, a catharsis for me, the kid trapped in the riot, me the kid trapped in the city, me the kid trapped in poverty and that one avenue of hope being the words I was writing. That dogged belief they were going to be my way out. It’s weird, thirty years on, to read back through it and make the decision to actually do this, to let the story out into the world finally, but there’s part of me that feels like I owe it to the kid I was who lost his agent because of it, who sat on a chair in tears genuinely contemplating suicide because the depression that had swollen up inside me was unbearable, and hope had just been snatched away by a few lines from an agent who didn’t want me anymore. That same part of me sold my computer back then to pay for food, and gave up the dream of ever writing. The fact this is even possible does my head in to a degree – several years later, finally in a good job, I was able to get the credit to buy a new computer, but the 3.5” Archimedes discs were useless, doubly so because half the book was written on WordPerfect in a Dos Emulation mode within Risc-OS, meaning it was a double layer of operating system embedded on the floppy, and the disc itself had degraded to such a point half of the files on it, when I finally got an emulator for a modern computer capable of reading them, that massive amounts of random symbols and other crap had filtered in, and the file itself now ran over 5,000 pages because of it. I made a decision, because I owed it to that kid, to go through those pages and weed out the gibberish, and rebuild the book, but not to change anything. So what you’re getting here is what I wrote in that period between 1991-93, unvarnished. It’s a time capsule. A glimpse of the writer that I was before I became the writer I am. And I’ll be honest, part of it is because I finally wanted a copy on my shelf, thirty years on, just for me. But it struck me that it might be of interest to folks who have read me, or who loved Steve Harris, Richard Laymon, Shaun Hutson etc, those writers of that era who helped shape this, to discover something ripped straight out of the past and given life. It won’t be there forever. I’m letting it out in the world for a month, in celebration of my birthday tomorrow (possibly today as you read this) as a belated present to the younger me. I really hope some people who have a hankering for 90s horror, those old Steve Crisp covers of Headline, and remember Britain as it was back then, enjoy this, because, in a way, it’s all of our lives. We lived these days. We remember. Steven Savile The Sufferer's Song: |
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