 George Lea is an unfixed oddity that has a tendency to float around the UK Midlands (his precise location and plain of operation is somewhat difficult to determine beyond that, though certain institutions are working on various ways of defining his movements). An isolated soul by nature, he tends to spend more time with books than with people, consumes stories in the manner a starving man might the scattered debris of an incongruously exploded pie factory, whilst also attempting to churn out his own species of mythological absurdity (it's cheaper than a therapist, less trouble than an exorcist and seems to have the effect of anchoring him in fixed form and state, at least for the moment). Proclaims to spend most of his time "...feeling like some extra-dimensional alien on safari," which he very well might be (apprehension and autopsy will likely yield conclusive details). Following the publication of his first short story collection, Strange Playgrounds, is currently working in collusion with the entity known as "Nick Hardy" on the project Born in Blood. Current Projects Strange Playgrounds: https://smarturl.it/n6y1id Essential Atrocities: https://smarturl.it/ejm1i6 Born in Blood: Volume 1: https://smarturl.it/fphdyi Website: http://strangeplaygrounds.com/  THE FIRST HORROR BOOK I REMEMBER READING This is actually kind of tricky, as I started out VERY early with horror, thanks to my Mother's immense personal library, which I was generally allowed to pick and choose from as I wanted. Even the work I consumed as a boy that wasn't specifically labelled or categorised as “horror” always contained some abstruse, surreal or disturbing elements (it's always been what's attracted me). So, beyond the fairy stories, mythological traditions and various fantasies that obsessed me as a boy (many of those original stories certainly dark and disturbing enough to qualify as horror), the first horror stories I remember reading are: Stephen King's The Mist, whilst on holiday with my parents and brother as a VERY young boy (possibly no older than seven or eight) and John Saul's Darkness, again, lent to me by my Mother on one of our family holidays when I inevitably exhausted the books I took to read. As a result, despite their disturbing qualities, I have very pleasant associations with both of these stories: they remind me of a time when I was treated as an adult, when the grown ups in my life respected me enough and considered me sophisticated enough to handle such material. The Mist in particular has left a massively significant impession; I recall having very excited, agitated conversations with my Mother about the monsters, the mystery of it, wanting to know what it all meant and where it all came from. And, I those questions, I imagine the first motes of my own horror stories began to germinate. THE FIRST HORROR FILM I REMEMBER WATCHING This one's eve more difficult, as I was watching horror films on VHS long, long before I ever picked up a piece of written work. Once again, my Mother is and remains a horror fanatic: I always, always remember some species of horror being on the TV in our house. Some of my earliest memories are fleeting glimpses of The Evil Dead, Hellraiser, Alien, Poltergeist et al. Those images are so early in my development, so powerfully impressed into the stuff of my consciousness, I can't discern which was first or where they began. I do recall developing an absolute adoration of horror cinema as a result from the earliest possivle age (my brother and I used to fight over which film we should watch on rainy days: whilst he'd be set on Child's Play or Halloween, I'd be advocating for Hellraiser or Alien). The result was a fairly profound grounding in cinematic horror from an early age and associations with it that go far and beyond the sentimental; they are part of who I am, as sacred to my mythology of self as childhood cartoons might be to others. Amongst those that made the most lasting impact are the original Hellraiser, which I still find uniquely powerful and oddly beautiful, despite its occasional ropeiness, and Alien, which I still watch once a year, every year and regard as one of the most sublimely elegant, beautifully crafted works of horror every created. THE GREATEST HORROR BOOK OF ALL TIME An almost impossible question for me to answer, as there are so many species and varieties of horror that fulfil so many different criteria. When it comes to eliciting raw and pure sensations of dreadful inevitability, then the works of M.R. James are almost untouchable (Whistle and I'll Come to You being a particular favourite). However, that's barely the tip of the ice-berg: In terms of exploring the metaphoysical potential of horror, you'd have to go a long way to find anything, anything that even approaches the beauty of Clive Barker's various works (The Books of Blood, Weaveworld, The Damnation Game, The Books of the Art etc), which have the peculiar quality of taking horrific imagery and subjects and making them beautiful, even exploring their potential for self-transformation, revelation and transcendence. When it comes to the work that, historically, landed with the force of several atom bombs, that fundamentally changed the topography and DNA of horror, then Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is untouchable. Untouchable. Its genetic legacy within horror and genre fiction in general is impossible to overstate, as is the enduring universality of its themes, philosophies etc. On a personal note, Billy Martin/ Poppy Z. Brite's seminal work of serial-killer erotica, Exquisite Corpse, scintillates and arouses in a way few other works can, marrying erotica to hideous sadism and violence in a manner that is uniquely disturbing. This was also the first work that demonstrated to me LGBTQ themes can be legitimately explored through horrific material and subjects. THE GREATEST HORROR FILM OF ALL TIME I don't even know where to begin on this one. On a personal level? So many have had an impact on me in so many and various ways, from childhood favourites like Poltergeist, Hellraiser and Alien to those I discovered in my teenage years and twenties such as Suspiria, The Blair Witch Project, Don't Look Now, The Wicker Man etc. I find it all but impossible to pin down as so much of horror fulfils so many different needs and qualities for me. If I'm going for the pared down, pure sense of dread, then I find the best of “found footage” or documentary horrors do it almost better than anything else (The Blair Witch Project and Norori are perennial favourites). However, when it comes to beautiful design, insanely dense atmosphere and subtle storytelling, then the likes of Alien do it for me every time. What about the works of Lynch or Cronenberg? The metaphysical and culturally reflective horror that they represent? What about Neil Jordan's Angela Carter adaptation, The Company of Wolves, which marries mythological and folk-lore horror to Carter's feminist principles? What about sheer, bravura special-effects guts and carnage, the almost pantomimic horror to be found in Sam Raimi's work or the likes of Poltergeist? I find myself flailing out into the void on this one, finding so many subjects of so many and varied anatomies, I can't possibly settle on just one. THE GREATEST WRITER OF ALL TIME I know you're probably getting sick of this answer by now, but, how long have you got? There are so, so many who have influenced the way I think, the shape of my imagination and even my personality, but also far more who have had influences far beyond the personal. As previously mentioned, Clive Barker and Billy Martin/Poppy Z. Brite are probably the writers that have had the greatest personal influence on me, but they rub shoulders with a thousand more, from Gaiman to Pratchett, from Tolkien to Lewis, from Garner to Peake, from Poe to Lovecraft. When it comes to determining the influence of any single writer on fiction as a whole, on culture as it stands, then I have to refer back to Shelley once again. It's functionally impossible to read any work, certainly within genre fiction but also far, far beyond those bounds, published in the centuries since its introduction, that hasn't been influenced by it in a genetic level. The same is true of the likes of Lovecraft, whose ideas and imagery are so culturally pervasive, even people who have never read a single word of his know what the term “Lovecraftian” refers to. I suppose the best way to answer the question is with another question: where do you want to draw the lines? THE BEST BOOK COVER OF ALL TIME For me, the book cover that excites me the most, that has such powerful assocations and significance, is that of a hardback edition of Clive Barker's Weaveworld, published in the late 1980s, which displays the various patterns sewn into the eponymous carpet around its border and symbollically lays out the entire story and mythology, though the reader will only learn that the more they read. THE BEST FILM POSTER OF ALL TIME Oh, this one's easy: the poster for the original Alien. Subtle, elegant, disturbing; symbolically referring to the hideous themes of the film without revealing too much about it's details, it's a uniquely sophisticated image for the era, and one that carries over to the general promotion of the film: if you go and find the trailer for the original film, it is entirely unique for the era, in that it bombards the audience with clipped, almost subliminal images and hideous, distressing sounds but reveals almost nothing about the plot, the characters, the film itself. This is the kind of promotion I respond to, as it treats the audience with some measure of sophistication, relying on their ability to interpret and become excited by symbolism rather than ladling details of the film into their laps. THE BEST BOOK I HAVE WRITTEN I'm a very, very bad judge of my own work, and even worse at attempting to promote it. I find it difficult to discuss without feeling as though I'm being pretentious or presumptuous; a species of imposter syndrome that I seriously need to get over. I suppose the work I'm most proud of would be the very first; my short story collection Strange Playgrounds, originally published by Dark Moon Books way back in 2013. Up to that point, I had no idea that my work was even publishable, that it might garner anything like an audience. I'm well aware that what I write is extremely abstract and not to everyone's tastes: there are very particular readers whom it will resonate with and others it will alienate entirely. This is quite deliberate: I don't like compromised art in any form, and art that attempts to cater to the widest possible audience is always compromised to some degree. What I wanted with Strange Playgrounds is more or less what I feel I succeeded in: establishing a kind of manifesto for my work, for what I want it to achieve, which is: dissolving boundaries, assumptions and parameters. I am sincerely disinterested in producing work that is redolent of what has gone before. I don't see the point. I want my work to blow people's minds wide open, to open them up to new contexts and ideas and assumptions they may not have considered before. I feel that Strange Playgrounds accomplishes this fairly successfully. THE WORST BOOK I HAVE WRITTEN I'm fairly proud of all the stuff I've put out there into the wider world; I'm not prolific by any degree; I tend to second guess and hum and hah over my work until someone reads it and points out they like it or that it's worthy of being out there then I just hurl it out and pray. As I mentioned in the previous answer, I enjoy work that deliberately alienates, that caters to very specific demographics, and, in that regard, I suppose the work that most exemplifies that is the recently published Born in Blood: Volume One, from Perpetual Motion Machine Publications. It's not that I feel the work is any less worthy than the others (it simply wouldn't be out there otherwise), but it's definitely the one that I designed to provoke very strong reactions in the reader (one way or another). In that, it seems to have succeeded rather well: the people who it resonates with it does so profoundly, those it doesn't absolutely loathe it, which is a paradigm of extremes I am VERY happy to operate in. THE MOST UNDERRATED FILM OF ALL TIME There are some phenomenally obscure projects out there these days thanks to the proliferation of the internet and the voices it has allowed to express themselves. For my money, some of the most underrated works of horror are those that are produced with and for next to nothing, that have no interest or intention of making money for themselves, but end up garnering cult status owing to their sheer quality and cleverness. In that, internet projects such as Marble Hornets, TribeTwelve, EveryManHybrid, No Through Road, Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared, Ghost Cat and numerous others are certainly worthy of being hoisted from obscurity and given far more kudos. Curios such as Stephen Volk's 1992 Halloween prank, Ghostwatch, The Stone Tapes etc also deserve a lot more attention than they generally do; far from being merely works of nostalgia or sentiment, they are phenomenally sophisticated and effective in their own rights, and deserve far more in the way of attention. When it comes to mainstream works, I've always had a penchant for Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which removes the series from the, by this point, already tried and tested “masked serial killer stalks young people” format and creates a vaguely comic yet entirely disturbing story of corporate corruption, witchcraft, occultism and marries it to some genuinely disturbing imagery. Then there are any number of foreign films that have simply never translated successfully into western markets. One of my all time favourites in that regard is the fairly obscure Japanese “documentary horror,” Noroi, a black-as-pitch mystery involving cults, possession, ancient Japanese demons and numerous other subjects that come together to make a work of sublime and hideous misanthropy. THE MOST UNDERRATED FILM OF ALL TIME There are so many candidates for this, from the works of the various small and independent press writers that are currently demonstrating the true breadth and variety of horror to more mainstream names that have simply failed to spark popular acclaim. But the work that perpetually springs to mind for me is Clive Barker's Sacrament. Weighed against the likes of Imajica, The Books of Blood etc, this tends to be the one that most people haven't read or don't even know exists. This is probably due to its primary subject, which is exploring the experience of being a gay man through a highly unconventional lens of non-proscribed metaphysics and shamanism. It's a very strange, very disturbing book, which, unlike many of Barker's more popular works, maintains a significant misanthropy. This isn't necessarily the most humanist work out there. If anything, it has a tendency to demonise and desair of humanity, though not in any exaggerated or illegitimate way. For those of us that the book talks to directly (i.e. men who identify as LGBTQ), it's kind of manifesto or gospel, but not politically, which is what makes it unique. THE MOST UNDERRATED AUTHOR OF ALL TIME: As previously mentioned, there are so many working in the relative obscurity or closed communities of independent or small press horror right now that are doing things with the genre that the mainstream can't even conceive of. My advice would be: go onto Amazon or whatever outlet you prefer, find an anthology of independent or small press horror stories and you will experience any number of names and works you've never come across before that explore ideas, themes and subjects far and beyond anything currently occurring in mainstream publications. THER BOOK AND FILM THAT SCARED ME THE MOST In terms of books, the one that probably elicits the most visceral dread and despair is Raymond Briggs's When The Wind Blows, an illustrated work ostensibly aimed at children, but which explores the slow horror of nuclear disaster and the nature of apocalypse when it comes to every day life. In terms of horror films, the one that most consistently elicits a pure and unadulterated sense of dreadful inevitability is The Blair Witch Project. I find this to be generally true of “found footage” or “documentary horror” works when they exhibit the very best of the format: they break down the parameters of disconnection by undoing to language of cinematic storytelling itself. This results in a level of engagement that is far and beyond what most more traditionally narrative works exhibit or can achieve. There are plenty that I find more disturbing, more profound, more resonant, more symbollically intreresting (Suspiria, Don't Look Now, Perfume, Alien, The Wicker Man), but when it comes to the purity of dread, The Blair Witch Project does it every time. As an adjunct, there are also the various internet projects that the film ostensibly spawned: the likes of Marble Hornets, EveryManHybrid, TriveTwelve etc), all of which not so much break the rules of cinematic horror as simply acknowledge and throw them out. Truly, truly terrifying pieces of work. THE BOOK I AM WORKING ON NEXT There are currently quite a few projects rolling down the pipeline, from a very small budget film based on some promotional material for Born in Blood to the second volume of that short story collection, which will be published later this year. Right now, I'm working on the second draft of a novel tentatively titled Coming Home, a work that explores memory, nostalgia, how our past is a kind of haunted abyss that always aches to drag us back into old and familiar states of misery. I'm also putting the finishing touches on a short story collection entitled For Sanity's Sake, which, if I can't find a publisher for it, I'll probably publish independently. Born in Blood: Volume One by George Daniel Lea SOMEWHERE BETWEEN HIGH HEAVEN AND LOW HELL Born in blood . . . the first breath and all that follow, tainted by original trauma, echoing throughout every thought, every heartbeat; blossoming into more profound pain, until breath and thought both cease . . . What we grow accustomed to...what we can endure: The days bleed into one another, as we do; hurt defining every moment. No more. Now, all instants are one; pulsing brilliant, ecstasy and agony, rendered down; experienced in a heartbeat. Every shame. Every sorrow. Humanity, history. This is what we are; the God we gave birth to. Better? Yes. Yes. Now, we all suffer the same; no more division; no privilege or powerlessness. We are the same; sexless, skinless, ex sanguine. And we celebrate, content in our disgrace.    Comments are closed.
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