Following the recent release of Under A Ravens Wing (to great critical acclaim), Stephen Volk has taken time out of his busy schedule to discuss the book with Ginger Nuts of Horror’s own Kit Power. In this first, spoiler-free part, they discuss taking on legendary fictional and historical figures, researching 1870’s Paris, and much, much more. Enjoy.

Ginger Nuts Of Horror: I think we’ve got to start with Sherlock, if that’s okay, because I have a lifelong obsession with the character; especially the Doyle short stories and Jeremy Brett’s screen personification of the character. What’s your own history with Holmes as a reader? And how did it feel to be taking on one of these fictional titans of British literature/storytelling?

Stephen Volk: Well, taking the second part of the question first, I think you are implying a certain amount of intimidation inherent in such a task! But, obviously, if I felt like that I wouldn’t do it! There are too many things in life to feel intimidated by, without adding to them by what you are writing! So, no, I’d have to do it without any nervousness beyond the usual nagging question of whether readers will give a hoot about the story, or characters. Which I guess is where the intimidation, if any, creeps in—will “my” Holmes be accepted or not? Well, the thing is, it is not canon, it is not the Holmes of the Doyle stories, it is my imagining of a Holmes before he becomes Holmes, and I’m as entitled to have ideas about that as anybody else. And in a way it’s not the Doyle universe. It’s a jigsaw or compendium of many influences, including Doyle and Holmes on the page and screen, as well as various other literary and cultural entities I grew up with—not least, of course, Poe.

My personal history with the great detective began with one of my formative memories: Listening to The Hound of the Baskervilles on a big wooden wireless with my cousin when we were children. Boy, it scared us witless! My uncle had to reassure us that the howls were made by a little bald man in glasses in a recording booth. Honestly! Then it was the Douglas Wilmer incarnation on BBC television. But when I was growing up, my father always talking about Basil Rathbone and I used to love watching the old black-and-white films when they popped up on TV. Old fashioned though they might be to modern eyes, you have to admit “Basil” absolutely nailed the character forever. Like the immaculate Peter Cushing (who donned the deerstalker after Wilmer for the BBC), Rathbone just completely convinced as Holmes and I always say the two of them were Holmes as opposed to acting him (as, forgive me, I consider both Jeremy Brett and Cumberbatch do—fine actors though they are). Around the same time—that is, the late ‘60s—we were experiencing Mr Spock on Star Trek and I think it’s no great revelation to say that we bookish, socially inept and even girl-phobic schoolboys identified with both, but were slightly saddened by the side of our nature reflected in them. It’s a theme that finds its way in Under a Raven’s Wing, I suppose. How cutting off from human passions can be a refuge, but also a prison. What we sacrifice by doing so is always the subtext, I think, of Holmes and Watson.

By the way, I didn’t know I was going to write this series of stories. They just evolved from my writing the first one, prodded into existence by that wonderful Canadian editor and fellow Sherlock freak, Charles Prepolec. But what came out of them, oozed out of them, really, was the thick gruel of those early enthusiasms, bunged in a pot and stirred up into a new, hopefully tasty concoction! I came back again and again because I absolutely loved the concept, the world, and the potential of this duo I’d set up. They took me back to a place in my head I wanted to be. In fact, once or twice on social media I think I said: “That’s it! I’m off back to the 1870s!”

GNoH: One thing I note from your reply, about ‘...cutting off from human passions can be a refuge, but also a prison…’ is that, in detective work, as in writing, there’s a paradox there; in that, without being able to understand and synthesize ‘human passions’ we’d be unable to do our work well - and yet the distance is also crucial. How do you strike that balance in your own life?

SV: Oh I don’t know how to analyse that in my own life, at all! That’s possibly why it is interesting to me in stories, because I can try and understand it in the abstract. Stories are always about the mystery of being human, aren’t they? I think in these stories in particular there is a thread about the “harm” of being too passionate, of letting yourself go without restraint, the idea of “falling in love” being the most universal example – because (my) Dupin believes that is the road to emotional pain (and he has good reason to think so). On some level being prepared to fall in love is to open yourself to the possibility of pain, but to deny it yourself is another kind of pain. If pushed, I might say the passionate side of our nature, without restraint, could be said to be Paris – the city of lovers – whereas London (particularly Victorian London) is more the repression and denial. That’s why I find Dupin and Holmes such lovely opposites. You always seek out opposites and clashes as a writer. The ends of a magnet. What brings people together and what pushes them apart.


GNoH: At what point did it become clear to you that you were writing a series of connected stories? And how did that knowledge impact the writing of the later tales?


SV: I think around the third one, which was written for editor Simon Clark, I wondered, “Hello, if I do, say, six of these, it could be a book!” But it was only after one or two more that I started to think, hey, if this is a book, I want these characters to go somewhere, I want the book as a whole to amount to something. To become more than a linked collection, more of a “composite novel”, if you will. And that meant digging into what these two characters meant to each other and what was the “ending” that made sense of the series – that set up the eventual moving on of Holmes as the Holmes we know when we meet him in London. Or rather, when Watson meets him. And that was the most gratifying part of the whole process. Deciding where I wanted this to go – or rather, the stories telling me how this had to end.


GNoH: Did you ever find yourself missing Watson, as you wrote these stories, either narratively or in terms of his voice? The vast majority of the Holmes stories are told from his point of view, after all…

SV: Actually, no. It was liberating and I was grateful for that. But I’d already written a story from Watson’s point of view, called “Hounded”. Again, it wasn’t strictly canon, because Holmes is dead and Watson is suffering from grief at his loss. I enjoyed writing it, but doing a whole pile of Holmes/Watson stories didn’t interest me.

GNoH: Holmes is one half of the equation, but of course Poe, and Poe’s Dupin especially, is the other half. Given your Twitter avatar is a portrait of Poe, I feel safe assuming you’re a fan. What is the importance of Poe to you as a writer of genre fiction? What about his work endures, and deserves that endurance, do you think?

SV: Ha! Yes, I put the portrait of Poe on twitter when I’d written the first few tales. As well as reminding me every day of the high bar set by the original Master of Horror, of psychological crime, of detective fiction, of science fiction in many ways, and so much else; it was also a reminder to get on with the next one in the series!

To me, frankly, Poe is the Shakespeare of horror. Nobody comes close. In the small space available I couldn’t possibly do justice to the many ways in which Poe is important to literature and to genre fiction in particular. Any one of his stories could be dissected as an absolute fount of future storytelling and thinking, and the depth of their psychological insight has been widely and thoroughly documented. (I particularly like the Freudian analysis of Poe’s stories in relation to the phases of his life story, as documented by Marie Bonaparte.) But it is interesting. Rupert Everett recent made The Happy Prince, a truly superb film about the last days of Oscar Wilde, and I went to a screening, and somebody in the audience asked what drew the actor/director to Wilde’s work, and Everett said something astonishingly honest: he said it wasn’t so much Wilde’s work, which was not that remarkable (many writers were publishing similar work but have been forgotten), but to Wilde as a person. And this is part of what attracts me to Poe. His biography is so damned interesting. Not merely the successes, but the failures, the arrogance, the misbegotten attempts to start literary magazines, his hatred of John Allan, the death of his mother on stage, coughing up blood the way his child bride would do years later, the descent into drink and drugs, the high of “The Raven” and the low of the gutter. From his acerbic put downs and pompous reviews of other poets, I always sense Poe was one of those people you would love to see on a TV chat show: a mixture of the louche Robert Downey Jr, the witty Stephen Fry and the obnoxious Will Self. With a dash of Truman Capote thrown in. And dead at forty. My God!

If you were to force me to say what endures, and deserves to endure (as you in fact did), I would say the vivid symbolism at the core of his stories—sometimes a single chilling image. An ape wielding a straight razor. The walling up of a murdered wife. The terror of waking up in a coffin. The Red Death that no wall can be protection from. The punishment of the swinging pendulum—representing time, the ticking clock of a wasting disease, or the faceless judges representing guilt, possibly sexual guilt, and the descending blade of castration, or whatever you want it to be. These primal horror tropes have never been bettered because Poe dug deep into his psyche—perhaps by dint of certain substances, let’s be honest—but also because in most cases he approached stories with a certain perverse glee, definitely with an impish (sic) (and “sick”) sense of humour, but also, I’d say, a playful, deliberately shocking, and anarchic one. He showed his contemporaries, as he shows us still, that the gothic wasn’t born of landscape or ruins, but was the stuff of our minds, our secrets. And in terms of his detective stories, I think they were all about the absurdity of the rational. That life was not rational. An ape with a straight razor who stuffs a woman’s corpse up a chimney is not rational, it’s insane. Yet we persist in thinking we can catalogue and understand this madhouse. For Poe, that is the ultimate joke.


GNoH: We’ve discussed research before, but it strikes me that 1870’s Paris is a next level challenge, in that it exists entirely outside of living memory, very little photographic material… What was your research process for these stories? And how did that research impact on the stories?


SV: That decade wasn’t chosen other than the fact that I had to pre-date it from Holmes meeting Watson. Retro-fit the timeline, in effect. And, as I mentioned, I didn’t plan the stories all in one fell swoop: the series took about ten years to write, on and off. Plus, as detective mysteries, each one needed a heck of a lot of working out (by which I mean, mulling over stuff while I work on other things, jotting down ideas, snippets, filling a file with jottings, references, ten pages, twenty, forty pages... long before I plot them or start writing!). But the research I guess came on a subject-by-subject basis. The first concerns the Paris Morgue. (Snippet: let’s coincide it with the first Impressionist exhibition!) The second concerns the Paris Opera, so let’s dive into that. The third, Charcot’s famous hysteria patients. (Which does have a lot of photographic evidence, in point of fact—which happens to be fascinating.) It is no great pain to grub around in these areas. In fact, I’d say it’s possibly the most enjoyable part of writing historical crime or horror. You learn stuff you never knew, and find connections, and challenges—what would Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin say to one of the founding fathers of psychiatry, for example? Or to Jules Verne?—I didn’t know, but it was fun to find out.

Naturally, over time, I built up ideas about the era, the politics (the Franco-Prussian War, for instance—which Dupin, naturally, had a hand in), and other random things which I’ve been interested in over the years, such as so-called “spirit” photography. It all became rather rich and I loved the idea of my Paris being rather sleazy and rather decadent compared to the Victorian London which has come to be inseparable from Doyle’s Holmes.

GNoH: I’d like to revisit the subject of politics more fully in the spoiler part of our interview, but it strikes me that there’s a delicate balance to be struck between faithfully portraying the politics of the time (as abhorrent as some of that will be to modern sensibilities) and writing for a modern audience where, in some respects, we have a better and fuller understanding of some matters than even the finest minds of the times were able to muster (Charcot’s patients being an excellent case in point). How do you approach navigating those tensions when writing a period piece?


SV: Very good question. In a period setting, attitudes that are problematic are a tricky issue I was fully aware of throughout. To be honest, I try to tackle it instinctively when I get to that kind of knot in the wood. By which I mean, you don’t want to be wilfully untruthful of the past, which at worst is rewriting it, but on the other hand I have no interest in replicating old prejudices and outdated ideas in my fiction without authorial comment. The benefit I have is that “Dupin” is smarter than the age he lives in, so he can express a more enlightened view than those around him, therefore I can have my cake and eat it. He’s way ahead of Charcot’s ideas on madness, and “female” madness, for instance, and isn’t afraid to say so. Overall, I’d say, I can’t be anything but a modern author working in 2021, and my concerns are of today, not of back then. So I can use my stories and characters to comment on that era, if I want, while hopefully maintaining a sense of authenticity. That’s the balance, really.

GNoH: Did the research itself lead directly to any of the story ideas, or story elements? Had you always intended Verne to be a character in one of the stories, for example?

SV: I can’t recall what order it came in. I wanted to do one about hysteria and Charcot, because that fitted the timeline. I probably had a note elsewhere about Verne having penned a version of Poe’s Ice Sphinx (from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym).  Mesmerism was probably another note to myself: having Dupin hypnotise the patient as a nod to The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. So I’d tend to collect lots of fragmentary ideas and see how they fitted together. The moon-men seemed to link nicely with Poe’s moon hoax and I was intrigued, mainly, to write a kind of “UFO abductee” experience in Paris in the 1870s. But all the stories were sporadic – there was no “always intended” about them! You can tell this because of the liberal sprinkling of “cases yet to be told” – which are literally my scribbled notes for possible future stories! I wonder if Doyle ever know what the Giant Rat of Sumatra was? Anyway, he gave us plenty to play with.

GNoH: Can I take it from that reply that you’re still collecting notes? Do you still feel the pull of 1870’s Paris?

SV: I have taken my foot off the accelerator. In fact I have pulled the handbrake. For now. It feels as if I took it to completion, but I can’t completely rule out a story idea coming to me in the future. You never know. I’m in no hurry, though. There are many other fish to fry.


GNoH: And with that, Part 1 of our interview concludes. Join us shortly for part 2, where we will delve into spoiler territory, covering twists, the art and science of mystery, and much more.

UNDER A RAVEN’S WING​ BY STEPHEN VOLK ​​

A COLLECTION by Stephen Volk
CATEGORY Horror
PUBLICATION DATE  March 2021
COVER & INTERIOR ART Pedro Marques
INTRODUCTION Charles Prepolec
PAGES  327
EDITIONS 
Jacketed Hardcover — ISBN  978-1-786367-06-8  [£25]
JHC signed by Stephen Volk and limited to 100 numbered copies  — ISBN 978-1-786367-07-5  [£35]


SYNOPSIS
The Apprenticeship of Sherlock Holmes
In 1870s Paris, long before meeting his Dr Watson, the young man who will one day become the world’s greatest detective finds himself plunged into a mystery that will change his life forever.
​
A brilliant man—C. Auguste Dupin—steps from the shadows. Destined to become his mentor. Soon to introduce him to a world of ghastly crime and seemingly inexplicable horrors.

• The spectral tormentor that is being called, in hushed tones, The Phantom of the Opera . . .
• The sinister old man who visits corpses in the Paris morgue . . .
• An incarcerated lunatic who insists she is visited by creatures from the Moon . . .
• A hunchback discovered in the bell tower of Notre Dame . . .
• And—perhaps most shocking of all—the awful secret Dupin himself hides from the world.
  
  Purchase a copy here 

Mental Health has always been a subject that is close to my heart, as a suffer of extreme depression and anxiety, as well as number of other disorders, I have always wanted to use the Ginger Nuts of Horror Website as a force of good in promoting awareness of these issue.  When director Josh Armstrong contacted the site asking for help to promote his new film Apocryphal, a film which is  a tribute to those we have lost to drug addiction, and its purpose is to shed light on the importance of mental health, I jumped at the chance.  

Today we welcome Josh to the site with a powerful and in-depth interview about his films, mental health representation, and why Peppa Pig appears in his IMDB credits.  

Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself?

My name is Steve Toase. I'm originally from North Yorkshire in England, but now live in Munich, Germany. I'm a trained archaeologist and spent several years working in commercial archaeology. As well as fiction I write for Fortean Times (I'm the regular comics and graphic novels reviewer). In my spare time I ride motorbikes and make cocktails at home (though not at the same time).

Which one of your characters would you least like to meet in real life?

The nurse in Not All the Coal That Is Dug Warms the World. There's no supernatural horror, drooling beast of hell or unlimited power. Just the banality of evil that leads to genocide.

Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing?

Art. We first came to Munich because of my wife's love for Franz Marc's art and art has a huge influence on my fiction. I also grew up in the late seventies. The culture that now gets grouped together under Hauntology (Public Information Films, Chocky TV series, Bagpuss, Tales of the Unexpected etc) seeped into my worldview very early.

The term horror, especially when applied to fiction always carries such heavy connotations.  What’s your feeling on the term “horror” and what do you think we can do to break past these assumptions?

Someone at Worldcon described horror as the only genre defined by an emotion, and for that reason can manifest in any setting. I think part of the role of writers is showing the vast range of places horror can occur, whether that's romance, family drama, crime, or comedy. I would argue that both Thomas Ligotti and Robert Shearman are masters of locating horror in comedy which makes it far more unnerving.  For me personally the writers who excel at horror are the ones who create an overwhelming sense of discomfort that intensifies until you feel like you can't escape it rather than a short lived jump scare.

A lot of good horror movements have arisen as a direct result of the socio/political climate, considering the current state of the world where do you see horror going in the next few years?

During a recent conversation with my writing group we were talking about the reaction in writing to the pandemic, and the relative invisibility of the Spanish Flu in the literature of the time.

I think that we will see it appear for example in ideas of isolation or anxiety about not being able to save people, but I think those will be embedded in other settings rather than say a glut of zombie or pandemic fiction.

Given the dark, violent and at times grotesque nature of the horror genre why do you think so many people enjoy reading it?

Horror is the safety cabinet of genres. We can slide our hands into the gloves, watch the visceral reaction within, then step away and breathe in the fresh air. Horror lets us have the cathartic experience of being able to close the cover and know that these were just words.

What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre?

Bring more writers in. More voices. Fear is universal, but the way we experience it is unique. Having that explored in the horror genre only makes it more powerful.

What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice off?

I finally got around to reading Sing Your Sadness Deep by Laura Mauro and am really looking forward to seeing where Laura goes next. Kylie Whitehead has a new novel called Absorbed coming out from New Ruins which was very good. Premee Mohamed is writing some fantastic cosmic horror at the moment. Tracey Fahey and Penny Jones both have new books out. Also Chip Houser and G.V. Anderson are definitely new writers to watch.

Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative that have stayed with you?


Two from friends. One said that my story Not All the Coal That Is Dug Warms the World (a short story inspired by the punitive disability benefits system in England) made them feel physically sick… Someone else said that Green Grows the Grief brought them to tears, so I think both those were successful.

Des Lewis has been reviewing my collection To Drown in Dark Water Des's reviews are a work of art in their own right, and he often makes connections that I've not seen. I get to see how the stories relate to each other through someone else's eyes.

What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult?

Names. Everyone starts off as Sarah and Simon (because there easy to run a find/replace on without messing up the rest of the manuscript when I finally come up with a name).

I also struggle with writing novel length stories. Most of my work is short fiction (I tend toward flash fiction and my sweet spot is between 250-750 words). When I come to work on something 40,000 to 80,000 words everything feels a bit baggy when I'm writing it. It's all a learning process.

Is there one subject you would never write about as an author?

I don't think anything is completely off limits, but there are several subjects I won't write about, because I don't feel like they're mine to write. Of course all fiction comes from imagination but it's good to leave space for people to tell stories inspired by their own experiences.

Writing, is not a static process, how have you developed as a writer over the years?

I think I have a better idea of how to build that intensity so that the reader feels the inevitability of the outcome in such a way that the reader carries on to the end.


What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing?

Turn up. It's a cliché to say write everyday, because people have different pressures. They might be family, work, health, or all three. Write a paragraph or a sentence every day and the story will come.

I was a stay at home dad and still have a day job. The best way I've found to deal with the lack of writing opportunity was to spend the time when I'm doing other stuff thinking about the story so when I sit down I can crack straight on with the writing.

Which of your characters is your favourite?

Papa Yaga without a doubt. I mean I wouldn't want to spend too much time with him, but from a writing perspective he's a lot of fun. He has a moral centre, but it's nowhere near ours. In the first story he appeared in (The Jaws of Ouroboros) he's dealing a very rare drug, has his base in a converted dragline quarrying machine and is utterly ruthless. He also appears in another story in the collection, but I won't give too much away about that.

Which of your books best represents you?

As this is my first book, I'll go with best story, if that's OK. I think Streuobstwiese. The structure is episodic, based essentially around short flash fiction length sections. The story is about family relationships, it's got Fortean elements, and is also visceral.

Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us?

From Ruby Red and Snowflake Cold

The sisters had no heart of their own. They asked the flowers for advice and the flowers took the sisters’ eyes in payment, enwrapping each in skin thin petals.

“To make a heart,” the flowers said, “consume the winter. Eat it like a banquet. Suspend days of snowfall in the air and let them drop against your tongue until your mouth is full of ice and pine needles.”

Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next?

To Drown in Dark Water is my new collection from Undertow. There are twenty six stories. Three of them have previously been reprinted in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year series, and six are brand new to the collection.

The last book I finished writing was a novella. It draws on archaeology, German cities, lost postal systems and body horror. My next project has a slightly different tone to it. More like Tom Holt in feel. I'm also playing with ideas for my next Art Albion story. I think the next novel in that world will have a horror feel.

If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice?

The mad homeless victim. Having been homeless I think we should work toward portraying people experiencing homelessness as complex people rather than one dimensional fodder. As someone who has experienced homelessness as a teenager this is a subject very close to my heart.


What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you?

I've read a lot of good fiction recently, but the one that's had a huge impact on me is The Other Side by Alfred Kubin. Kubin was mainly a printmaker and only wrote the one book. The Other Side was written in the wake of his father's death. Because it's a subject that features a lot in my work, how we deal with loss, I find it really interesting how he tackles his own grief through the portrayal of the city of Perle.


What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do?  And what would be the answer?

I've got this old motorbike in the barn. No idea if it runs. Want to take it off my hands?
My answer would be yes :)