SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. 


Following the success of Comma’s award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject – Julia Kristeva’s theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille’s societal equivalent – with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or ‘the other’, atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn’t exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us.


Featuring Alan Beard, Bernardine Bishop, Ramsey Campbell, David Constantine, Margaret Drabble, Karen Featherstone, Saleem Haddad, Mark Haddon, Meave Haughey, Gaia Holmes, Matthew Holness, Adam Marek, Lucie McKnight Hardy, Mike Nelson, Christine Poulson, Sarah Schofield, Paul Theroux, Lara Williams & Gerard Woodward


The New Abject is released by Comma Press on 29th October, and to mark its launch Ginger Nuts of Horror is honoured to welcome some of the authors featured in the anthology to chat about their stories and some of the ideas behind the concept of Abject Theory. 

Today we welcome Christine Poulson and Lara Williams to the site 

​Lara Williams is the author of the short story collection Treats, which was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Edinburgh First Book Award and the Saboteur Awards and longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her debut novel Supper Club has been translated into five languages, won the Guardian 'Not the Booker' Prize and was listed as a Book of the Year 2019 by TIME, Vogue and other publications. Lara Williams lives in Manchester and is a contributor to the Guardian, Independent, Times Literary Supplement, Vice, Dazed and others.

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?

I think horror gets the same negative connotations as all genre fiction; it's seen as formulaic, prescriptive, cynically commercial. Horror seems to be having a moment in cinema, with the rise of the 'elevated' horror film - but even that suggests there's something fundamentally crass or simplistic about the genre in the first place. I do however think there are a raft of new authors, particularly female short story authors, such as Carmen Maria Machado, Kristen Roupenian, Daisy Johnson, who are proudly characterising their, often quite formally experimental, work as horror, which is perhaps changing those perceptions. 

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

I remember reading about a study that found people predisposed to anxiety are attracted to the horror genre because it allows you to experience anxiety in a safe, controlled way. Like how the Steven Soderbergh film Contagion became one of the most streamed films early on in the pandemic (I watched it again around that time too). We were living those exact same horrors on a daily basis, but there was something strangely comforting about seeing it in a fictionalised context.

What were your firsts thoughts on being asked to write a story based on Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject? 

I was very excited! Powers Of Horror is an essay I periodically come back to, and an element of abjection features in most of my writing. 

Did writing about this subject matter make you look at your own writing in a new light? 


This was the first time I consciously engaged with the idea of writing about abjection, usually it just creeps in.

BIO
Simon Bestwick was born in Wolverhampton, bred in Manchester, and now lives on the Wirral while pining for Wales. He is the author of six novels, four full-length short story collections and has been four times shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award. He is married to long-suffering fellow author Cate Gardner, his latest book is the short story collection And Cannot Come Again, and his new novella, Roth-Steyr, will be out in October from Black Shuck Books.

WEBSITE LINKS
Link to latest release:
https://blackshuckbooks.co.uk/roth-steyr/
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Simon-Bestwick/e/B00355JO22
Blog:
http://simon-bestwick.blogspot.com/
Twitter:
@GevaudanShoal
Facebook author page:
https://www.facebook.com/Simon-Bestwick-373730462654091

Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself?

I grew up in Manchester, and now I live on the Wirral. I’m married to an amazing and bonkers woman who’s also a superb writer. I’ve recently started back in my day job after a long spell off sick. I started writing properly in 1997, when I was twenty-three years old. That was twenty-three years ago, and I still don’t know what I’m doing half the time, but I write every day nonetheless. My family come from North Wales, and I’d love to live there one day.

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

There are so many I’d want to avoid – Arodias Thorne from The Feast Of All Souls, Gideon Dace from The Faceless and Tereus Winterborn from the Black Road novels all spring to mind – but I think the worst of the lot is from a novel I completed earlier this year: a truly reprehensible creature by the name of Septimus Jubb. Hopefully you’ll get to meet him in print one day soon – but hopefully only in print!

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

Movies, TV and theatre. I grew up on Tom Baker-era Dr Who, which combined SF and horror in many senses, as far as I was concerned (and despite the bad press Peter Davison gets, I enjoyed a lot of the stories from his era too – the killer androids and the Cybermen in Earthshock were bloody terrifying), and of course Blake’s 7. And there were limited series like The Nightmare Man, although I only saw scraps of it at the time; the impressions shows like that created helped shape me, and it turned out to be damned good when I finally got to see it!


In my teens I was more interested in movies, although most of what I saw was Hollywood and I didn’t get to acquaint myself with European and indie cinema till much later. I did aspire to be a screenwriter for a while. At University I became more focused on theatre, and influenced by writers like Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, Howard Barker and David Rudkin, who combined social commentary, an interest in finding a language that was both raw and poetic and unsparing, often horrifying imagery. Barker and Rudkin, whose focus became increasingly on finding an individual voice and going their own way, rather than being propounding an ideology, are particular heroes of mine. All of that came with me when I went back to writing fiction.


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?

I’m far more inclined to embrace it now than I was a few years ago. The problem is that what a lot of people understand by the term ‘horror’ has often been ‘gore and special effects and nothing else’. That may have changed in more recent years, at least in TV and film. There was also the whole thing of trying to build a writing career amid the realisation that ‘horror’ is largely seen as a pretty toxic brand. However, I don’t care anywhere near as much about that as I used to. I’m done making calculations about the ‘market’, not least because a) trying to do so is like trying to divine the future by reading chicken entrails and b) because it’s brought me neither financial success nor creative fulfillment. These days I’m about writing exactly what I want to write, then worrying where to find a home for it.


The thing is that a lot of people actually like horror without realising they do – that is, if you mention horror to them they might grimace and say it isn’t their thing, but show them the work of M.R. James or Shirley Jackson, for instance, and they’ll enjoy it. How to get people to look past the label and read the book, though, is the big question.

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?

I don’t know. My own impulse has been towards writing stuff with a more historical setting, or a near-future or non-realistic one, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of that creeping in. How do you capture a world falling apart in real time? If you describe things as they are around you at a given moment, it’ll already be a period piece by the time it’s published. I have a novella being released last year which is set in a Britain that’s recognisable but fragmenting under economic and climate chaos and civil unrest – it isn’t what the story’s about but it’s a constant backdrop to it. But it was pre-COVID and already seems dated.

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

Because it’s dark, violent and grotesque. We’re curious about those things. Part of us wants to do those things. We want to see them and know what they’d be like, without the consequences. In real life, we want to avoid the terrible things that can happen, but fiction lets us face them head-on. There’s a quote from Nieszche I read years ago: “The tragic artist is not a pessimist. He says yes to everything possible and terrible.” I think that applies to horror fiction too.

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

No idea. There is so much going on in the genre right now that I never feel I’ve read widely enough in it to comment on it!


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

There are so many just now, as I said, that it’s hard to know where to start! But I’d like to mention Laura Mauro, Georgina Bruce, Paul St. John Mackintosh, Andrew David Barker, Rich Hawkins, Nicole Cushing and Tom Johnstone, as authors I’ve recently read whose work’s left an impact on me. Mind you, a number of them have been writing for years now, so I don’t know if I can call them ‘new’ or ‘upcoming’ – they’re already here! Lynda E. Rucker’s also been on the scene for a number of years, but should be read and known by far many more people. And in the mainstream, although her work’s usually billed as crime or thriller, C.J. Tudor’s written superbly eerie novels like The Other People and The Taking Of Annie Thorne.

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

Yes, despite my best efforts! There was one review that was so unpleasant and gratuitous that its author has died a horrible death in a recent (so far unpublished) novel of mine. Of positive ones, there’s one for The Feast Of All Souls that praised how it handled the death of the main character’s child. The reviewer had lost a child herself, so I cherish that one particularly: that kind of praise means a great deal.

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

They’re all fun in their different ways, but it’s usually the rewrite that’s the tough part – finding and fixing everything that’s wrong with the first draft, and cutting it down to size because it’s sprawling and rambling.

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

No, although there are plenty of people who’d like to tell writers what they can and can’t write about. All of whom are cordially invited to insert a rusty bicycle frame up their rear exits. But I digress.


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

Well, I hope I’ve got better, for a start. I’ve become more inclined to wing it than to plan stuff out, to trust my instincts and surprise myself. Those are the main things that spring to mind.

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

Never give up.


Which of your characters is your favourite?

Biff and Emily from Angels of the Silences (you can’t have one without the other), closely followed by the Black Road series’ Gevaudan Shoal.

Which of your books best represents you?

Don’t ask me to choose between my children! They all do, in different ways. The inside of my head is a very weird place.

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

I have lots, but it wouldn’t be fair to stop people discovering them for themselves. :)


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

Well, my latest release is Roth-Steyr, out from Black Shuck Books on Halloween. Valerie Varden works in the mortuary of an inner-city hospital and lives with her girlfriend. She looks like an ordinary enough woman, but she isn’t. A hundred years ago, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart at the end of World War One, Valerie became immortal. She has a dark and violent past she’s still trying to atone for, but now it’s catching up with her. Her former comrades have started turning up dead, all shot with an antique Roth-Steyr pistol. To survive, Valerie will have to return to the violence of her past, but to do so may cost her everything she has.


At the moment I’m writing an unashamed straight-up horror novel set in the Peak District. The working title is Tatterskin.

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

I’ve just finished The Greatcoat, the late Helen Dunmore’s ghost story for Hammer Books from a few years ago. Dunmore was a brilliant writer whose stuff I love (The Siege, her novel about the defence of Leningrad in World War Two, and her short story collections Love Of Fat Men and Ice Cream are outstanding) and it’s got me reading any other novels of hers I can lay hands on.

As far as disappointment goes, I tend not to finish books that don’t do anything for me these days, so it wouldn’t be fair to comment on any of the ones I’ve abandoned. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, anyway.

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

“Mr Bestwick, will you accept the Nobel Prize for Literature?”
“Oh, go on, then.”

SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. 

Following the success of Comma’s award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject – Julia Kristeva’s theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille’s societal equivalent – with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or ‘the other’, atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn’t exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us.

Featuring Alan Beard, Bernardine Bishop, Ramsey Campbell, David Constantine, Margaret Drabble, Karen Featherstone, Saleem Haddad, Mark Haddon, Meave Haughey, Gaia Holmes, Matthew Holness, Adam Marek, Lucie McKnight Hardy, Mike Nelson, Christine Poulson, Sarah Schofield, Paul Theroux, Lara Williams & Gerard Woodward

The New Abject is released by Comma Press on 29th October, and to mark its launch Ginger Nuts of Horror is honoured to welcome some of the authors featured in the anthology to chat about their stories and some of the ideas behind the concept of Abject Theory. 

Today we welcome Sarah Schofield to the site 

Sarah Schofield's prizes include the Writers Inc Short Story Competition and the Calderdale Short Story Competition. She was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2010 and was runner up in The Guardian Travel Writing Competition, and currently teaches Creative Writing at Edgehill University. Her stories have appeared in several Comma's anthologies: Lemistry, Bio-Punk, Beta-Life, Spindles, and the Thought X and The Mirror in the Mirror anthologies. She is currently working on her first collection.

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?

I love the horror genre and all that it encompasses. It is such a broad term, but at its very heart, it is about creating a safe space to explore the things that we are most afraid of. The things 'outside'- the monsters and zombies and all that kind of stuff - act as a side show; a way into ourselves where the really scary stuff exists. The human stuff. 

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

I think we are attracted to the dark, violent and grotesque! It is the internal conflict - we want to look and simultaneously look away. We are inherently curious - and our love of storytelling in general is because of this curiosity. Horror adds a layer of thrill to this - because it often explores the things that defy neat explanation or understanding. The best within this genre, I feel, are narratives where the ending is binary - both understood in a way that fits our accepted rules of the world and how it operates and yet at the same time it could be conceivably entirely supernatural. We love to dance in that grey area.

What were your first thoughts on being asked to write a story based on Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject? 

I was excited to get my teeth into something new... if you'll excuse the rather abject pun. I found Kristeva's writing a little impenetrable in places but worth persisting with. I had a vague notion about the theory, so it was good to explore it further and look for the thing that would spark for me and my creative response. Initially I thought Kristeva's theory dealt only with quite physical tangible agents - bodily matter, spit, faeces, etc. So when I began to unpick the detail and saw there was so much more to it, it was a bit of a gift to a writer - so many possibilities!

It’s a subject that takes in some of the darkest and nastier aspects of humanity, such as misogyny, homophobia and genocide, how do you think horror in general tackles these subjects?

Horror is a wonderful vehicle for tackling these ideas. It allows readers (and viewers) to step outside of the everyday and place a 'substitute' in - giving the opportunity to regard something from a different perspective, sometimes without fully realising what they are looking at. Sometimes it is a pure metaphor - the 'monster' is a substitute for something very particular. In other examples this might be a less straight forward equation. Films like Jennifer Kent's 'Babadook' or Anvari's 'Under the Shadow' and stories such as Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery', Henry James 'Turn of the Screw' and Joyce Carol Oates 'Where are you Going, Where have you Been?' dance this grey area rather brilliantly, in my opinion. 


I think we love the horror genre because this substitution is so common in our own lives. There are things we all find difficult to look at square on, but we simultaneously feel the pull towards them. Covid19 was, still is, this for me. During the first lockdown in Spring 2020, like many of us, I found it incredibly difficult to watch the news, read articles or journals about the pandemic or discuss it in any depth, but I simultaneously felt this pull towards it - the thrilling terror of empty shelves, vulnerable poorly equipped NHS staff and patients, the steep rise of data on graphs. I use the word thrilling here not in the sense of joy or delight, but in its physical manifestation - the bodily sensation you experience on a rollercoaster. Letting our brain bargain something else into the place of the thing we find simultaneously repellent and thrilling, displacing it with something we think is 'containable', somehow quantified, is, I believe, the appeal of horror.  In my story, this displacement was Thatcher, and the political turmoil of her era in power. Set in a near future where the characters live under the shadow of Covid, it acts, I hope, as a mirror to the current political climate, a hall of mirrors, where we see the past, present and future reflected back at us. Sometimes grotesquely distorted... but, more horrifyingly I feel, without much distortion. Nothing much has changed. 

And how have tackled the subject within your story in this collection?   

My story explores the nature of motherhood. The woman feels a growing sense of revulsion for her daughter and her mimicry of Thatcher. Some of the mimicry is real (handbag, copying her voice and quoting what she hears MT say on Youtube clips) some of it is perhaps projected from the mother herself. I wanted to explore that grey area. And the maternal shock that something which she'd felt was essentially her, her daughter who grew within her and came from her, could be something so other and contrary and repellent to herself. 

These two quotes from Kristeva helped me on my way into this story:

'It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.' (JK ch 1 page 4)


'The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this time within our personal archaeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before existing outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling.... The child can serve its mother as a token of her own authentication; there is however, hardly any reason for her to serve as go-between for it to become autonomous and authentic in its turn. In such close combat, the symbolic light that a third party, eventually the father, can contribute helps the future subject, the more so if it happens to be endowed with a rubost supply of energy, in pursuing a reluctant struggle against what, having been the mother, will turn into an abject. Repelling, rejecting; repelling itself, rejecting itself. Ab-jecting. (JK Ch. 1 p13) 

Did writing about this subject matter make you look at your own writing in a new light? 

Perhaps it has made me a little bolder? This story was cathartic to write. I am so angry about the way the UK government has responded to the pandemic. I am angry about so many aspects of the current political climate. It allowed me to focus on this suite of emotions and explore them within narrative, perhaps in a way I haven't done before. 

SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. 

Following the success of Comma’s award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject – Julia Kristeva’s theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille’s societal equivalent – with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or ‘the other’, atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn’t exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us.

Featuring Alan Beard, Bernardine Bishop, Ramsey Campbell, David Constantine, Margaret Drabble, Karen Featherstone, Saleem Haddad, Mark Haddon, Meave Haughey, Gaia Holmes, Matthew Holness, Adam Marek, Lucie McKnight Hardy, Mike Nelson, Christine Poulson, Sarah Schofield, Paul Theroux, Lara Williams & Gerard Woodward

The New Abject is released by Comma Press on 29th October, and to mark its launch Ginger Nuts of Horror is honoured to welcome some of the authors featured in the anthology to chat about their stories and some of the ideas behind the concept of Abject Theory. 

​Today we welcome Saleem Haddad to the site 

Saleem Haddad (born 1983) is a writer and aid worker, who has worked with Médecins Sans Frontières and other organisations in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon and Turkey. His debut novel, Guapa was published in 2016, won the 2017 Polari Prize and was awarded a Stonewall Honour. His essays have appeared in Slate, The Daily Beast, LitHub, and the LARB, among others. He was born in Kuwait City to an Iraqi-German mother and a Palestinian-Lebanese father, and currently based in Lisbon. 

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?

It’s funny because when I began writing my story, I did not want to write something that was ‘horror’. To me, Kristeva’s theory of the abject is much broader than the traditional confines of the genre. So when I was writing my story, I did not confine myself to thinking purely within the traditional ‘horror’ genre. 

The themes my story explores— the rage, uncertainty and fear of a social uprising or revolution, the disquiet and alienation brought on by exile and physical distance, and the powerful and animalistic dimensions of desire— the way desire can take over your body and your senses, and the way that erotic pain and pleasure can blur the lines of consent and power, all came together when I began to write a story around the idea of ’the abject’. I suppose, then, that through exploring these less traditional themes, one can break past traditional assumptions of horror and explore the ghosts and demons that exist within our contemporary conditions of revolt, exile, and the erotic (none of which have been explored in horror all that much).

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

I can only speak for myself, but as someone who suffers from anxiety, there is a certain comfort in being able to explore the dark side of humanity- the worst case scenario, so to speak- from the comfort of fiction. Horror allows us to explore our shadows and the dark side of life from a point of safety, and I think that’s why some people enjoy reading it.

What were your firsts thoughts on being asked to write a story based on Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject? 

I was familiar with Kristeva’s work because I drew on her ideas when writing Guapa, which is a queer story. And to me, Kristeva’s theory of the abject is more about queerness than it is about horror. Not that those two are mutually exclusive, and in fact I think so much of horror is queer. But upon trying to write a story based on Kristeva’s theory of the abject, I immediately thought of two things: the body, and our own alienation from our bodies, as well as ideas of social abjects. So in my story I had in mind to write about the body and to write about the idea of social abjection in the context of a rebellion as well as exile. And of course, I wanted it to be a queer story in many different ways.

It’s a subject that takes in some of the darkest and nastier aspects of humanity, such as misogyny, homophobia and genocide, how do you think horror in general tackles these subjects?

I think horror tackles these best when it doesn’t attempt to do so directly but lets the underlying horrors of our human condition seep through in the writing.

Did writing about this subject matter make you look at your own writing in a new light? 

In some ways yes, in that I have always had in mind to work on a collection of stories that can be categorised as ‘dark’. And producing this story which is dark but not traditionally horror, has made me think of the different dimensions of unease that exist in our present world.

Have you checked out our interview with Ramsey Campbell bout the New Abject?  You can read it here 

SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. 
 
Following the success of Comma’s award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject – Julia Kristeva’s theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille’s societal equivalent – with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or ‘the other’, atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn’t exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us.

Featuring Alan Beard, Bernardine Bishop, Ramsey Campbell, David Constantine, Margaret Drabble, Karen Featherstone, Saleem Haddad, Mark Haddon, Meave Haughey, Gaia Holmes, Matthew Holness, Adam Marek, Lucie McKnight Hardy, Mike Nelson, Christine Poulson, Sarah Schofield, Paul Theroux, Lara Williams & Gerard Woodward

The New Abject is released by Comma Press on 29th October, and to mark its launch Ginger Nuts of Horror is honoured to welcome some of the authors featured in the anthology to chat about their stories and some of the ideas behind the concept of Abject Theory. 

Today we welcome the legend that is Ramsey Campbell.  

Ramsey Campbell is described by the Oxford Companion to English Literature as ‘Britain’s most respected living horror writer’. His many award-winning novels include The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, and most recently The Overnight (PS Publishing). He reviews regularly for BBC Radio Merseyside.


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?


I write horror, and I’m proud to say so. It’s a branch of literature with an honourable tradition. Indeed, it emerged from literature, and for quite a time was regarded as an integral part of it. Few writers of adult short fiction didn’t write at least one example, which was rarely treated as separate from the rest of their work. On the other hand, horror fiction has also always been sniffed at by the snobbish, as far back as the field goes. Consider these comments: “…a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity… It cannot be denied that this book is nonsense… the greater the ability with which it may be executed the worse it is…” (The Quarterly Review, January 1818) and “we do not well see why it should have been written…” (Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, March 1818) from contemporary reviews of Frankenstein. What do we do to break past? Write as well as we can, I’d say, and hope that worth will be noticed. It often eventually is.

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


Dark – very often, yes, though there’s stylistic lightness in some writers, from M. R. James to Shirley Jackson and Robert Aickman. Violent – by no means necessarily, unless we count psychological violence (which I suppose we should). Grotesque – pretty frequently. I should say the enjoyment comes from the engagement of imagination, the reader’s and crucially the writer’s too. There’s a dark place in everyone’s imagination, but horror aficionados embrace it even if it takes them to the emotional edge (as, in my case, the films of David Lynch often do).

What were your first thoughts on being asked to write a story based on Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject? 

I first encountered her ideas years ago, and felt she was defining an aspect of my tales I’ve addressed instinctively for decades. Often when my characters confront the supernatural or the monstrous, they come face to face with something they’ve suppressed or denied about themselves, although for me it’s important that this insight can’t be used to explain away the supernatural aspect of the tale. So being asked to write such a tale was rather like being asked to be myself, and the trick was rather to avoid self-consciousness or a sense that I was replicating what I do. I think the universality of the theme of my tale – how we tend to reject our past selves and believe we’ve outgrown them – carried me past those problems.

It’s a subject that takes in some of the darkest and nastier aspects of humanity, such as misogyny, homophobia and genocide, how do you think horror in general tackles these subjects?

Responsibly, we’d hope, but that isn’t always true. Some horror fiction sadly displays misogyny or homophobia or xenophobia. Increasingly, though, the field is tackling these themes critically. I should say most of the best examples don’t do so consciously – too determined an approach can stray too close to preaching – but arise naturally from the author’s attitudes or their exploration of the material.


And how have tackled the subject within your story in this collection?   How did you avoid some of the traps and pitfalls that may have marked your story as being insensitive?


By telling as much of the truth as I could, which is always my ambition.


Did writing about this subject matter make you look at your own writing in a new light? 


Only in the sense of reminding me how many of my stories touch on Kristeva’s formulation!

BIO
Dani has accepted the curse of a warped and deviant mind that bends reality, rending the fabric between the real and the unreal. Perhaps a form of schizophrenia, Dani prefers to think of it as wonderful inspiration for some deeply creepy but strangely intellectual horror stories that are pulled from those nightmarish visions. A student of the great horror writers (and filmmakers), Dani has turned a passion for twisted tales that unlock deep truths about humanity into a career focused on scaring the pants off readers.

WEBSITE LINKS
https://www.amazon.com/Dani-Lamia/e/B08B3HGJSS
https://www.level4press.com/dani-lamia-horror-collection
https://www.instagram.com/dani_lamia1/ @dani_lamia1

Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself?
 
I’m whoever I need to be for the book I’m currently working on. I don’t just write the book. I wrap the world of the book around me, like a cloak, and become the book. So if I’m writing a book about witches and covens, then that world is real and true and those covens are meeting in the attic of my house, at least until the book is done.

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


This question assumes that there is a real life and a pretend life. But there is no real life, it’s all an illusion. Solid matter isn’t solid, it’s just reflected electromagnetic waves from quantum fields. Reality itself is quantum probabilities at the most fundamental level. What you “see” is actually a story created by your brain, so we’re all creating stories every second that we’re alive. And since those stories can be anything we want, reality can be anything that we want. Or sometimes, things that we’re afraid of. So, at the risk of sounding glib, I truly meet all of my characters and often spend more time with them than you could imagine.

Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing?
 
Well, for me the best horror books aren’t really about horror. They’re about human psychology. So I enjoy anything that gets into the human psyche. Stephen King’s an obvious master of this. I also enjoy things that expand on this concept of how unreal our “reality” is, which takes me into quantum mechanics and astrophysics.
 
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?

The question assumes that we should break past the assumptions. I say embrace horror for what it is. Horror allows us to explore the darker side of who we are as a species. Some might even say the core of what makes us unique as a species. We’re not going to explore that in romance, comedy, or even action-adventure. We get it in the best of Science Fiction, but there’s a partnership and overlap between good horror and good science fiction.

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?
 
Horror allows us to explore the things we’re afraid of, so this is really asking me what we’ll be afraid of over the next few years. I think the dehumanizing aspects of technology are clear threats to us in both the short-term and long term. Similarly, the human hubris when playing with ever more powerful technologies (e.g., AI, genetic manipulation) creates lots of great opportunities to explore scary things. Then there are the horrors that are fundamental aspects of our existence; aging, loss, self-doubt. All keep me up at night and are begging for stories. I also think we’ll see more “comfort food” horror, by which I mean traditional, comfortable horror topics that reassure us in an almost nostalgic way.

Given the dark, violent and at times grotesque nature of the horror genre why do you think so many people enjoy reading it?
 
First, I think that a lot of horror is not dark, violent, or grotesque. So I’ll start by saying that there is a vast array of really great horror books that are much more subtle than this. Again, going back to Stephen King, even books like “It” and “Dr. Sleep” are as much psychological thrillers as anything else. But in terms of the books that are dark, violent, and at times grotesque in nature, I’d say that people long for the moment of release immediately after those dark, violent and/or grotesque scenes. We take someone to a very emotionally intense situation, with a lot of stress, a lot of pressure . . . and we hold it . . . just a little more . . . and then we let it all go. And that moment of release is the reward for withstanding the pressure.

What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre?
 
I’d have to say that we’re in a golden age of horror. I’m seeing very high quality, innovative and imaginative work coming out all the time. I’m particularly pleased with the amount of elevated horror that’s being released, and with the appetite for this material not just in books, but in movies and TV.

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


Well, I don’t know if I’d call him new and upcoming, but I recently enjoyed Joe Hill’s book, The Heart Shaped Box. And while it’s not clearly in the horror genre, Amy Tan’s book, A Hundred Secret Senses is a good example of an elevated ghost book that you can read over and over.

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

In addition to reviews in publications like Publisher’s Weekly, I do read every single review that gets published on Amazon. And I’d say that I consider those Amazon reviews as the most immediate and valuable feedback possible on my writing. I learn what’s working, what’s not working, and what people are taking away from the book. But no, I wouldn’t say that any single review has a large positive or negative impact. There will always be a few people that like anything, and there will always be a few people that will hate anything. What’s interesting to me are the trends among lots of people.

What aspects of writing do you find the most difficult?

Finding the time to work without interruptions. It’s so important to have long enough blocks of uninterrupted time to allow my mind to enter a state of flow, to get “into the zone.”

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


I won’t do torture books. I won’t do books where children are the victims of terrible violence or sexual assault. I guess I won’t do any book that would make me feel dirty or degraded just by being part of that world, even if only through the act of writing the book.
 
Writing is not a static process, so how have you developed as a writer over the years?


Well, I began with a focus on plot and structure as my primary driving force. Then I got more into the sound and rhythm of the words, painting pictures with words, and heavier use of metaphors and similes (the poetry, I suppose). Lately, I’ve been diving deeper into character.

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


Write every day.
 
And always strive to open your veins . . . so your readers don’t have to.
 
Which of your characters is your favorite?


I’d have to say Caitlyn Prescot from my first book, SCAVENGER HUNT. She’s so incredibly unlikable but driven and determined. She is the book’s protagonist, and a true embodiment of the central theme: the toxic nature of secrets. All great protagonists, in my opinion, are deeply flawed. Caitlyn’s flaws cut so deep and are tied to something so traumatic that she has alienated everyone who might want to be part of her life. And yet, somehow there is a glimmer of humanity that I hope readers cling to as they ride out this thriller and eventually experience the extraordinary, albeit painful, transformation that Caitlyn undergoes. But until that transformation finally happens, she is deliciously wry, cutting and dark. I love that when writing her dialog, I’d think to myself, “Did she really just say that?”
 
Which of your books best represents you?

I’d have to say that Hotel California, coming out this next year, is the book that’s the most personal to me. I really did run a bed and breakfast, and it really was haunted by ghosts, and I really did have a film crew film a horror movie in the bed and breakfast. So there’s a lot of unbelievable but real life true stuff in that book.

Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us?
 
I love 666 Gable Way, a terrifying, contemporary story about the very worst kind of witches, but if we’re isolating my favorite passage, I’d have to say it’s from Scavenger Hunt; the first few sentences of the book, in fact:
 
It is 1987. I have never been drunk before because I am an eleven-year-old girl. I haven’t yet done a line of cocaine off a glossy board game box top or screwed one of our summer interns just to watch them squirm when I make them get me coffee afterward.
 
My entire family is fucking terrible, and so am I.
 
 
Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next?


Scavenger Hunt was released last June. It’s essentially the story of family trauma wrapped in a dark thriller package. The patriarch of a family-owned and operated multi-billion-dollar gaming empire dies. His will, surprisingly, does not leave the company to his oldest daughter, despite the fact that she’s given up everything to make it a juggernaut in the industry. Instead it provides that the entire fortune will go to the family member that wins an elaborate scavenger hunt—one last game. But someone begins manipulating the game and at the end of each round the loser dies. So we have the ultimate prize for the winner, and death for everyone else. It turns into a shocking excavation of dark family secrets. It’s been getting good reviews and there’s a lot of interest on the film side.
 
My next book after 666 Gable Way is Hotel California, which is about an isolated bed and breakfast that’s haunted by benign, maybe even benevolent ghosts. But when a film crew uses the B&B to film a violent horror film, the violence in the film spills over and changes the character of the ghosts from Casper the friendly ghost to evil, demonic ghosts.
 
If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice?

Women that stand around wringing their hands while their boyfriend is in a fight to the death on their behalf. I’d love to see a scene where the boyfriend stands around wringing his hands while his girlfriend is in a fight to the death.

What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you?
 
Last great book would be Mythos, by Stephen Fry. Or more precisely, I listened to it as an audio book. It was a really fascinating telling of Greek mythology. Absolutely fascinating.
 
Latest disappointment was Ben-Hur, by Lew Wallace. I recently picked up the book because I have somewhat fond memories of the movie from when I was a kid. Well, I don’t know about the movie, but the book was pretty horrible. I think I’d prefer needing to get into the gladiator pits myself rather than read that book again. The only part about the movie that I remember after all of these years is the chariot race, and that was the only good part about the book. So if you want to read the book, just read those few pages, skip the rest, and you’ll be in good shape.

What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do? And what would be the answer?
 
Q: Would you mind if I started a fan club for your work, and we got up a petition to award you the Nobel Prize for Literature?
 
A: Why no. I wouldn’t mind at all.
 

Something evil hides within the House of Seven Gables...

Phoebe Pyncheon hasn't had an easy life. Alone and out of work, she does her best to make ends meet while she finishes her debut novel. But when even the monthly rent becomes too much for the struggling young writer to afford, she is forced to move in to her Great Aunt Hester's boarding house. Known as the House of Seven Gables, this Victorian mansion is a maze of decrepit halls, musty old furniture, and faded glamour.

At first, Phoebe feels at home in the strange, quirky old house. But soon she senses a presence lurking in the shadows, just out of sight.

She hears it breathing in the darkness, feels its cold touch on her skin at night.

Then the police knock on her door with news of a dead body found nearby. And Phoebe discovers the terrifying truth...

The House of Seven Gables is a temple to an ancient evil, a terrifying power unleashed by Hester and her coven of friends. This dark entity haunts the stones of the old mansion, plotting its revenge upon the living. But a secret power hides within Phoebe as well.

And releasing it may be her only chance to survive the terror that awaits her...

Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself?
 
I’m from Iowa, which is the state that is more or less the dead center of the US. It’s almost entirely rural and its economy is mostly driven by agriculture. There’s literally more pigs in Iowa than people. My parents, and most of my extended family, were raised in the country, but I grew up in a city. So I kind of lived in both worlds. 

To get the ball rolling and get everyone relaxed, here is a hopefully lighthearted question to break the ice, which one of your characters would you least like to meet in real life and have them complain at you about they way you treated them in your work.

I don’t want to spoil anything by going into too much detail, but most of the characters that don’t survive my book, after their remains are scooped up off the ground and scrubbed off the walls, would all probably like to have a word with me about how they ended up.

Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing?
 
Outside of the genre, probably the biggest influence on my writing is music. I listen to music while I write and I often get a lot of my most workable ideas when I’ve got my headphones on or the volume cranked in my car during commutes. I actually got the idea for my current novel from listening to The Cramps during a gloomy drive home.
 
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?

I think most genres aren’t really as monolithic as they first appear, and that’s definitely the case for Horror. It can mean a lot of different things and on top of that all readers and viewers have different responses to different types of imagery and situations. There are definitely plenty of preconceived ideas about what is and isn’t “horror” and I think the only way past that is to “invite more people in.” That is to say, the more variety of horror stories there are, the better chance someone will open themselves up to experiencing other kind of stories.

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?
 
I think (and hope) that we’ll see more and more diverse and underrepresented voices getting attention for telling stories about the very real horrors our culture is struggling with. There have been, and will continue to be, great non-fiction books, documentaries and prestige dramas about systemic racism, rape and sexual harassment, unchecked political power, environmental cataclysms…everything that’s out there creating anxiety. But those books and films, as well regarded as they may be, realistically have a very small audience, and one that’s already predisposed to agree with the work’s message. Genre has an incredible ability to reach a broad audience and get them to consider and internalize ideas they may not normally chose too. That includes fun, speculative fantasies but also complicated and uncomfortable topics. It may sound a little overly optimistic, or even naive, but I really believe that our best shot at actually solving these problems is to increase the general level of empathy and understanding of the population. And stories can do that in a way little else can.

Given the dark, violent and at times grotesque nature of the horror genre why do you think so many people enjoy reading it?
 
I’ve always thought of the appeal of the horror genre to be that it allows you to experience and explore fear in a controlled environment. I think a big reason why the horror genre is having such a resurgence right now is because there’s so much general anxiety and this aura of doom surrounding everything that people are turning to stories to help them make some sense of it. 

What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre?
 
I think that we’re honestly living through a real golden age of horror right now. There’s so much available in every conceivable medium, format, sub-genre that maybe the only thing that’s “missing” would be a little better curation of it all.

In the past authors were able to write about almost anything with a far lesser degree of the fear of backlash, but this has all changed in recent years.  These days authors must be more aware of representation and the depiction of things such as race and gender in their works, how aware are you of these things and what steps have you taken to ensure that your writing can’t be viewed as being offensive to a minority group? 


I think you could also say that in the past, very few points of view were ever considered legitimate, if they were even considered at all. We’ve come a long way as a culture, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. Representation matters and I believe that as a member of a traditionally well represented demographic, it’s my responsibility to do everything I can to make work with understanding and empathy. I’m not afraid of backlash, I’m afraid of not doing a good enough job.
 
That said, I’m writing horror stories, and that means the work is going to confront aspects of humanity that are offensive. An example of that in my latest book is the objectification of women and the sexualization of violence towards women, both common points of criticism in the genre and in horror and exploitation movies in particular. Since the book is about the attraction and repulsion of these kinds of films, I felt that I needed to include scenes that were explicit in their depictions, but ambiguous in their tone. That’s a pretty fine line to walk, so throughout the process I relied heavily on feedback from a diverse group of beta readers and editors.

Does horror fiction perpetuate it’s own ghettoization?
 
I think this is a really interesting question and I’m not sure I have a great answer. Horror has a really dedicated fan community, and I think there’s a real appeal to the kind of “outsider” aspect of it. If you’re a horror fan, its not just something you like, its part of your identity. When something is that intense, its only natural for it to concentrate down into pockets that are less accessible to broad audiences.
 
That said, one of the most watched television series in history was a high budget serialized version of Dawn of the Dead. Arguably, one of, if not the most popular novelist of the last 40 some years is Stephen King. Horror has always been disreputable in public, but in private it’s a totally different matter. 

What are the books and films that helped to define you as an author?


Stephen King and Clive Barker both made a big impression on me early on, particularly for how they both meld the human and the mundane to the very weird. Style wise, I’ve always been attracted to pulp and hard-boiled writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Chester Himes. I’m also very influenced by David Lynch’s work, particularly the way he captures the charm and the menace of small town life.

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

I wish I had a great scoop on some undiscovered talent, but I think I tend to find out about great writers kind of late. Keith Rosson has written several stellar books over the past few years, but I feel like he’s maybe not as widely known as he should be. His stuff doesn’t fit neatly into genre categories but there’s a lot there for horror fans to love.  

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

My debut novel hasn’t had much of a chance to be widely reviewed yet, but when I reached out cold to Clay McLeod Chapman, an author I really liked but had never met, to beg for a blurb, he wrote back comparing it to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. I’m still riding high on that one.

What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult?
 
The hardest part of writing for me is to maintain the discipline to actually do the work. Writing is not my full-time job, and I’ve also got two young children. So, once I get all my responsibilities taken care of for the day, it’s really easy to just sink into the couch and zone out during those precious free hours when I could be writing.

Is there one subject you would never write about as an author?
 
I can’t think of a subject that I would never write about, but there are plenty of things that would be harder for me write about well. Mostly, it kind of goes back to the earlier question about representation. I don’t think any subject is taboo, but it’s important to handle delicate things delicately. There are subjects and perspectives and experiences that I don’t know much about or have first-hand experience with. If I’m going to write about them, it’s on me to listen and learn before I do.

How important are names to you in your books? Do you choose the names based on liking the way it sounds or the meaning?


I think it can be interesting to use names for their meaning, but I think the sound is important. For example, in this novel, the setting is a fictional town called Dubois (rhymes with “noise”). The name literally means “The Woods,” and that ties into the plot and themes of the story. But it’s also an ode to real places in that region like Des Moines, Iowa and Milan, Illinois that were named by French settlers but are now pronounced in a markedly un-French way.
 
Likewise, the book features a horror host whose stage name is “Boris Orlof.” The first name is in honor of Karloff, Badinov, and Bobby Picket. The last name is part homage to an old movie called The Awful Dr. Orlof and the vampire, Graf Orlok, from Nosferatu.
 
Writing, is not a static process, how have you developed as a writer over the years?


I think I’m definitely more willing to listen to criticism these days than, say, when I was in my twenties. About writing and about everything else, honestly. It’s not that I’ve lost self-confidence or anything, more that I’ve learned to trust people and have a better sense of my limitations.


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

A good friend read a very early draft where I had a scene with my main character and the mayor of the town that was pretty over the top. The mayor was an obviously selfish, hypocritical, uncouth buffoon. I thought the scene was pretty funny and had fun writing this guy chew scenery. My friend, who does not mince words, told me it was like the mayor from Jaws, and everybody’s already seen that a hundred times already. He was completely right, and I had been thinking in terms of tropes from the movies instead of realistic characters. That small comment really changed my whole approach, and I think all the characters are much richer for it.

To many writers, the characters they write become like children, who is your favorite child, and who is your least favorite to write for and why?


Just like with children, it’s not something you can really rank in the same way. In this novel, there’s a young man named James West who’s a lot like me at nineteen, and being now in my early forties I have a much different perspective on his life and what he’s going through.

For those who haven’t read any of your books, which of your books do you think best represents your work and why?
 
Midnight Horror Show is my debut novel, but I do think that it represents me very well. It’s a mashup of some of my greatest obsessions.


Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us?
 
By way of introducing a description of one of those characters I mentioned early on in this interview, one who didn’t make it to the end of the book, my main character and narrator, Detective Sargent David Carlson says:
 
“I’ve seen thresher accidents. LP gas explosions. I’ve pulled bodies from underneath semis. Once there was a biker who hit a patch of black ice on 218 and spread three-quarters of his skin across a quarter mile of road. I’d never seen anything like this.”
 
Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next?
 
I’m currently working on a novel that aims to do for 1980’s action figures what Midnight Horror Show does for horror hosts and spook shows.


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


There’s a kind of recent phenomenon that’s becoming a cliché in horror where filmmakers try to replicate the feeling of watching some cheap forgotten exploitation movie, but in a cheeky, self-referential way. Sometimes this works, but I feel like it usually misses the mark and comes off hollow.

What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you?
 
I just recently finished The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, and it was amazing. Spooky, tragic, and lonesome in all the best ways. I’m having a hard time placing the last book that let me down though. I usually give everything about fifty pages or so, and if it doesn’t have me by then I move onto something else.

What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do?  And what would be the answer?
 
“Can we pay you a vast sum of money to option your work and make into a television series?”
 
“Yes. Yes you can.”

Today Jonathon Thornton interviews Maryse Meijer, author of the excellent The Seventh Mansion (click here for Jonathan;s review) 

Maryse Meijer is the author of the story collections Heartbreaker, which was one of Electric Literature’s 25 Best Short Story Collections of 2016, and Rag, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Pick and a finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, as well as the novella Northwood.  The Seventh Mansion is out now from FSG Books She lives in Chicago.

Your debut novel The Seventh Mansion is out this month from FSG. Would you be able to tell us a little bit about it?

It’s about a 15 year old boy named Xie, who moves to North Carolina with his dad to get away from LA. There he hooks up with two girls, Jo and Leni, vegans and animal rights activists like him. They get together and try to free some mink from a farm, and Xie is the only one who gets caught; he gets kicked out of school and he becomes more isolated, spending a lot of time in the woods by his house. One night he finds the relic of a Catholic saint named Pancratius, and he steals the relic and keeps it in his house. Stuff happens after that.

The animal rights activists stuff is a big part of the book, in particular Xie’s quest to live a life where he causes no harm…
​
I’m a vegan of sorts, maybe not as pure as some people, and was and am involved in animal rights and environmental activism. I wanted to write about a character who is always looking for the perfect way to live. What is the most ethical way of life that you can have, under capitalism? And what happens when you believe that everything is alive? So it goes beyond even veganism for Xie, it’s not just about him and animals, but it’s about trees, it’s about plants. Even things that we don’t see as living, bones, streams, rocks, whatever. If you start to see life everywhere, then you also see death everywhere, and that can be really overwhelming. I know in my own life sometimes it’s easy for me to get overwhelmed by these questions of how to live well and how to justify my own existence when it seems to cause more suffering than good. And what do you do about that? And how does love and kinship with humans and  other forms of nature create a community that makes it possible for us to survive on an emotional level but also on a literal level?

There’s an interesting link between the novel and your short story Francis in the collection Rag, which is about a guy who euthanises dogs, and there’s also that connection with the saints cause his boss calls him Saint Francis. Was that a conscious connection?

No it wasn’t but it’s interesting that you thought that up. I’m always interested in reversals, and the Francis story is about this guy who kills dogs, but he really loves them and he cares about them at the same time. And he figures out that maybe euthanising them is actually the best thing that he can do for them. I’m interested in animals and in nonhuman creatures and the way that we interact with these other beings and have to deal with the bioethics that comes out of these relationships. Why is our Western conception of human/animal, human/nature so antagonistic? I think most people feel a great desire to be connected to animals and to nature in various ways. So there’s this conscious tension between our way of life ,which is so destructive and which requires us to think of ourselves as superior to everything else. But then I think inside all of us there is the knowledge that that’s just not true ,and it doesn’t make us feel good. The farther away we get from the sense of kinship, I think the lonelier and the sadder and the deader we get. And it’s causing our destruction right now. Because most of us don’t feel or honour our relationship with nature, we’re probably all gonna die in a hundred years. And that hard line of extinction made me want to write about this character and these “extreme” ideals and actions. iS there some hope within this limit, within this reality? Is connection still possible? I think so. I hope so!

The novel has this balance between optimism and pessimism. Xie, Jo and Leni are all trying to find a way of living that’s less destructive and that works for them.

Right, yeah. And I think one thing that being involved with any type of activism does is that it can force you to separate yourself from your actual human community. So I wanted to work hard to make sure that Xie didn’t come from a terrible family. His dad is so ridiculously supportive of him, he’s not alone, he has two really great friends, then he becomes friends with his tutor. So he’s surrounded by people who care about him and who love him and who are willing to at least go some ways to meet him in his world. But he gets so focused on purity, nothing is good enough, and he ends up not being the best friend sometimes and he doesn’t always reach out to the people who are there to help him, because he’s just trapped in his head and his own anxieties. And I think when you try to live a certain way that’s outside of the way that everyone around you is living, it can be really isolating and it can feel really lonely. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are alone. But you read about all these saints and these martyrs throughout history, and there’s a similar isolation that happens. This idea that to get to this pure state you have to close yourself off from the world.

There’s a tension in the book between Xie’s quest for purity but also that he gets frustrated with the saints for isolating themselves from the real world…

There’s a quote that I love “The Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the earth, but men do not see it.” And supposedly Jesus said this to somebody, and to me that is what Christianity should be about. Jesus is saying it’s not about the world to come. Heaven is here, it’s invisible, and it’s up to us as a community to work together to make heaven appear on earth. And as we know from history, Christianity did not adopt that ideal at all. It has really seen the world as again a resource, it’s just put here for humans to use up. And it’s going to be destroyed – with the second coming and the rapture, everything gets destroyed and the good people go to heaven and fuck everyone and everything else. And that encourages us to see the world as if what we do to it doesn’t matter. And so Xie gets frustrated with that side of Christianity. And the sensual side of it, the erotic side of it, of all of these martyrs who were writing these mystic texts about their relationship with Christ. It’s very passionate, it’s very sensual, it’s very physical, and you get sort of lost in that. And he worries that he’s getting lost in his relationship with P. He feels like there’s these two things, there’s the world of the flesh and there’s the spiritual path. And for him it’s inverted for the way that it is for religious martyrs but he doesn’t see that maybe you can have both, and maybe again Christians, if they had listened to that quote from Jesus, maybe human history would have gone differently in the Western world. If we destroy what we have here then we destroy the possibility of that perfect future world. I’m an atheist now but I did grow up with a fascination with the Catholic church. And for a while I was Catholic and I was going to mass every day and all of this stuff. And there’s something about the rituals and the beauty of the Catholic mass, the adoration of the saints, it’s so extreme and so like aesthetic and it’s very involving. And even now, that I’m not a believer, I still miss that that magic. I think in some ways it replaced the sense of spirituality or whatever connection that people experience when they live close to the earth. The church tries to replicate that in this mystical way but if you think about the woods as a church or nature as a church, it provides that sense of mystery and magic and the ineffable. Cause those feelings that you have when you’re really put yourself in a place that’s not so human-centric is to me very similar to what you feel when you’re in a church and you’re contemplating god.

Has a lot of the stuff around Catholicism and the saints in the book come from your own experiences with Catholicism and your ambiguities to it?

I didn’t set to write out a book that had these religious overtones, but writing about this particular body that’s connected to Catholicism definitely reminded me of those feelings. And I went back to church a bit when I started writing the book, just to see if those feelings, that feeling of magic and mystery, were still there, and they were. I don’t think you have to believe in a god or in the bible to still feel moved by people coming together to contemplate something that’s bigger than themselves and trying to make community. It’s fraught with all kinds of crap that’s not useful, but at the core of it is just that desire for connection to something. And Xie definitely has that in him, really intensely, and he’s looking for it in all of these places, and I think he’s on the right track. I think a life without any of that is not a great life, so you gotta find it somewhere.

One of the interesting things you do with the actual writing, it’s told largely in the third person but in these moments of great intensity it switches to second person. How did you go about writing that on a structural level?

Oh I’m so glad you asked that. I think that when it slips into the second person, it’s almost like speaking in tongues, or when you get like a sort of rapturous rhythm with thinking and with feeling. And it’s really direct and it’s like a voice speaking to you, it’s like the voice of god or whatever. I think it was like breaking down this barrier between the reader and the character and me. I wanted it to be really anarchic in a way, cause I am an anarchist. So there’s not line breaks when people speak, there’s no quotations, there’s a lot of speech with no dialogue tags so you often have to figure out who’s speaking and is something spoken being spoken aloud at all? And who’s saying it, and is P. really talking, and who’s head are you in? And the way the text looks on the page, I had some great designers from FSG who made the text look narrow. It looks like a coffin. So even in the moments when the diction is really choppy and there are all these periods everywhere, the text as a whole still has a stream of consciousness feeling and this sort of rapturous sound. It’s difficult cause not everyone’s going to read it that way. Some people have said they just can’t read the book cause they can’t hear it, it’s just gibberish to them. Which is the danger when you do things like that, when you take out the markers for people. But if you do give it a few pages to get into it, hopefully that part comes through and then it becomes like a preacher speaking to you, or listening to an inner voice, and it starts to make sense.

There’s this question in the book, whether Xie is crazy or not. A skeleton is following him around and talking to him, and there’s hints that there’s some mental illness in his family. And so the text reflects that as well, this space where you’re just not sure what’s real and what’s not. Does that question even matter, does it matter what’s real? It’s real because you’re experiencing it. Just like, is it real to believe that climate change is a thing if governments don’t acknowledge it and they make you feel crazy? So there’s his tension f you believe in something, whatever that is, if you have faith, but that faith doesn’t reflect the larger cultural beliefs, then you’re crazy no matter what. Whether or not what you feel or hear or think or see is true, if you’re isolated in your beliefs and your faith then there’s a part of you that is by definition insane. And so the text is struggling with that as well. To me everything is literal in the book. He’s not crazy, and everything’s really happening, but in the end that question doesn’t really matter, because Xie’s experience is so outside the realm of “everyday” experience that regardless of his perspective, to be in a headspace that he’s in is insane, it’s a form of madness. So maybe hopefully when the reader is reading it they feel a little bit crazy too.

Your short stories in Rag also don’t use quotation marks. Is that a very conscious choice that you want to avoid them in your writing?

Yeah, I don’t know how old I was, I read some shitty book by Louis Begley, in the back of it there was an interview with him, and he said quotation marks look like bugs on the page, and that’s why he didn’t use them. And I had always felt the same, just aesthetically they’re really ugly. But for me the quotation mark is telling the reader, “this is true, I’m quoting a person and this is like what really was said and this is what really happened,” and I never want to like commit to that thing. Because I just disagree with that, I think that notion is just awful on a philosophical level. Like who am I quoting? What am I quoting when I’m writing a book? I’m not here to say this is the truth, this happened like this, this really happened. Obviously I just made it up! But I also like the confusion of not always knowing when you read something for the first time, is it the narrative speaking, is it a character speaking, is it a thought, and where does it end? And I like sometimes the little musicality or the rhythms or the sounds of the sentence when you’re unsure of who is speaking. Where it’s like, who knows where it ends? The line gets sort of fuzzy and the boundaries aren’t as clear, and I’m always interested in messing with the boundaries in the work. So the quotations are part of that. The lack of quotations do a lot of work for me. I think it’s more interesting as well as just aesthetically cleaner.

The novel and the short stories put you right in the characters’ heads, and these are frequently uncomfortable points of view…

Yeah I always say that for me if I’m not scared of what I’m writing then I know I’m not doing my job and I’m not properly enjoying myself! And it’s an interesting trick to try and get the reader in the character’s head. But when I’m writing the work I feel a lot of distance between me and the character. Because I don’t write from my life, I don’t write about my life, I don’t write about people I know. I’m not one of those writers who keeps a notebook, and after I hear someone say something on the train I’m writing it down. I don’t do that. I like to be an observer and I like to write about people that I don’t understand and write about situations that are totally mysterious to me and just watch them unfold. These characters aren’t me and I’m not in their head, I don’t know that much about them. The work is kind of thin in details, not a lot of backstory in my work. I just know what is on the page and that’s it, I just know what the reader knows. So I don’t have this intimate connection with the characters, it’s more me watching them, and the intimacy comes from me just caring about them. I care about what happens to them. I worry about them, and I want them to make the right decisions, which they hardly ever do! So I want the work to feel intimate in that way, that you’re uncomfortably close to people who are in these very fragile, vulnerable, maybe violent places, but there should also be a sense of authorial distance,  I’m not right there, telling the reader what to think about what’s going on, or explaining things. I think that the mystery should be preserved as much as possible so that the work itself and the stories have a little bit more room to interact with the reader in a certain way or interact with these blank spaces. But I hope that the immediacy comes through all that distance, all that lack of knowing. Because it’s just about the pure sensation, the pure atmosphere of being in these situations that are really tense and unknowable. I’m always trying to get both a lot of distance and through that distance the feeling of really kind of scary and uncomfortable intimacy with what’s going on. So if I’m making you uncomfortable then I know that I’m happy and I’m doing my job. Cause I’m uncomfortable when I write.

When you’re coming up with ideas for stories, do the characters come first?

No, not necessarily. I just sit down, and I usually start writing after I’ve seen a movie that I really like, or listened to music, or seen an amazing painting. And I will get really jealous of how good this other piece of art is. I basically want to copy the atmosphere, not necessarily the content, not necessarily the narrative, but whatever the thing is in that piece of art that I liked. So I just start typing and out of that atmosphere that somebody else created the characters appear. I don’t usually have an idea that I develop before I start writing, it usually comes out in that first draft and then you just follow it and figure out where it’s going and what it is. Or I’ll see something that I like, and then the artists will make a choice I really disagree with, and I’ll get really mad, like why didn’t you do this other thing, you know. And then I almost work to correct it, this is what I would have done, if I had had this narrative and I was in charge of it. That’s why I started writing as a young person, I wanted to write books that I wanted to read. And my twin was the same, we’d read a book and we’d get half way through and we’d be like, oh they fucked it up, why? So it was borne out of this frustration and also jealousy and admiration for what other people are doing.

There’s quite often a transgressive element in the stories. Is there ever a moment when you’re writing something and you feel, this is too much, you have to reel it back a bit?

Yeah all the time. Especially when I was writing Rag. When I published Heartbreaker, which took me ten years to write, when it came out I felt like I had held back in a certain way. I’d get uncomfortable in a story, not necessarily just about the subject matter but just the conventions of narrative, I would just feel like nobody’s going to understand it if I don’t do this, or it’s too weird if I don’t give this type of context or whatever. And I went to an MFA programme which made me very paranoid about my work. Cause it wasn’t very well received there. But when I wrote the second collection I was like, I’m just going to go as far as I want and I don’t care how uncomfortable or weird it is. So I did that, and I remember sometimes I would just feel awful. I was a little afraid of what’s going to come out. But I guess I just like being scared and uncomfortable! But there are times when I feel like some things are just too much. And that line for me is always, when I’m depicting a violent situation, am I doing too much violence to the reader, to put them in that space? So I think there’s always this ethical charge to take care of your reader, and to take care of your characters too and just take care of yourself when you’re writing. And to never exploit a situation, cause I always think even though I’m making all these people up, they represent real people in the world in some way. There’s someone out there who’s like Xie. And so you can’t use them for shock value, you can’t exploit them. I hate that. I never sit down and think, I’m just going to write something that’s really shocking, I’m gonna shock people. I think that’s the worst that you can do. So many artists say, well, art’s immoral, you can just do whatever you want because, you’re the artist and you’re so great and blah blah blah. I don’t think that’s true. I think there are boundaries and I think there are limits. And the limit is the intention of like, do I care about the worlds that I’m creating, do I care about the people that I’m creating, or am I using them as tools to speak for me or to impress someone? And I think once you go into the latter route the work isn’t as good, and you’re actually doing something bad. You’re actually doing harm to your reader and you’re doing harm in the world because we have to care for each other, and you have to care about each other in the work, even when it’s getting uncomfortable and it’s vulnerable and you’re exposing people in a certain way. If you think about your characters as always being mirrors for other people and potentially someone coming to your work and reading it and saying, that’s me, you don’t want them to feel like, oh that’s me and I’m a terrible person or I’m shameful. I never want to shame anybody or anything in the work. When I was writing this novel, the piece about Xie being attracted to bones and dead bodies, that all came from my interaction with a group on a website who identified as necrophiles,.

None of these people were out having sex with dead bodies, they didn’t want to kill someone so they could like rape the body. It wasn’t anything violent. It was all very romantic and was a lot about loneliness and that longing for connection and wanting to care for a being that they didn’t see as dead. I just really wanted to understand what that was like. I remember somebody on there saying, there’s never been a book that describes how I feel about this girl who is buried in some church somewhere. And I thought well it would be just great if someday I could write a book for this person that described their emotions in some way. I don’t use the word necrophilia in the book, I don’t think it really applies to Xie, but yeah that was in the back of my mind for many years. Like how could I write about this thing that people see as so extreme and so disgusting and make it seem natural? I spent a lot of time looking at skeletons and imagining like, ok, what would it be like to be with this body that’s so fragile that you can’t be violent with it or else you’ll destroy it? There’s something about the idea that these bones are so fragile. A skeleton would just be destroyed if you were mean to it in any way. So there’s something beautiful about that idea. And I really wanted to take something that just seemed so out there and so gross and so weird and stupid and crazy and relate it to the way that we all feel about romance and about love and about intimacy. We all really want to be cared for, and what better way to frame that desire than to think of a body that requires you to think about its physical integrity at every moment, so even your passion and your desire, you have to control it, you have to shape it in this way that it honours the Other. An Other that most people don’t even think exists. And that to me was almost the extreme form of romance, to think about really serving this Other body. How can we look at Xie and his relationship and sort of be inspired by it? I How can I make it relatable in this weird way?

I think that runs through the short stories as well, this idea of finding empathy in these unusual viewpoints…

Yeah. And I think, we just mess it up. Our culture is just totally fucked up about sex and romance and love. I think in some ways all romance under patriarchy is necrophiliac. It’s all about objectifying the other and reducing the Other to parts. I mean I hate when you go around and you hear people saying I’m a leg man, or I only want to date someone who’s tall. People are projecting desire through this filter of pieces of other people. Do these pieces add up to the thing that I want? How is that really different than saying someone just give me a body that has no will, that’s dead, that I can just use and that will satisfy me and there’s no sense of what do I have to give to this other person? How do we come together in terms of acknowledging the actual being of another human? So I think it’s all deeply deeply messed up for us. I don’t know many adults who have healthy truly satisfying relationships, and pornography is so gross and so prevalent, etc. We don’t exist in a community that really encourages us to think of the Other at all. But even within an imperfect system those moments of connection might still exist and they’re still important. I wanted to write about someone that was successful in some ways in having a good relationship, a romantic relationship that might sound fucked up but that ends up being positive in some ways. Which is how I think the novel is really different from my other work. It’s much more optimistic on some levels I guess, in the conclusions it comes to about the possibility of connection.

What’s next for Maryse Meijer?

I’m finishing off another collection of short stories, I’m working on several novels. I’m working on my non-fiction project about bullfighting. I’m always looking for the next thing that will surprise me and make me really uncomfortable
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Thank you Maryse Meijer for speaking with us

One of The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of the Second-Half of 2020, one of Library Journal's 35 Standout Summer/Fall 2020 Debut Novels, and one of Shondaland's 11 New Books That Will Change How You Think About the Climate Crisis

From the author of the story collections Heartbreaker and Rag comes a powerful and propulsive debut novel that examines activism, love, and purpose
When fifteen-year-old Xie moves from California to a rural Southern town to live with his father he makes just two friends, Jo and Leni, both budding environmental and animal activists. One night, the three friends decide to free captive mink from a local farm. But when Xie is the only one caught his small world gets smaller: Kicked out of high school, he becomes increasingly connected with nature, spending his time in the birch woods behind his house, attending extremist activist meetings, and serving as a custodian for what others ignore, abuse, and discard.
Exploring the woods alone one night, Xie discovers the relic of a Catholic saint--the martyred Pancratius--in a nearby church. Regal and dressed in ornate armor, the skeleton captivates him. After weeks of visits, Xie steals the skeleton, hides it in his attic bedroom, and develops a complex and passionate relationship with the bones and spirit of the saint, whom he calls P. As Xie's relationship deepens with P., so too does his relationship with the woods--private property that will soon be overrun with loggers. As Xie enacts a plan to save his beloved woods, he must also find a way to balance his conflicting--and increasingly extreme--ideals of purity, sacrifice, and responsibility in order to live in this world.
Maryse Meijer's The Seventh Mansion is a deeply moving and profoundly original debut novel--both an urgent literary call to arms and an unforgettable coming-of-age story about finding love and selfhood in the face of mass extinction and environmental destruction.

Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself?

I’m a programmer, technical author, and failed musician who lives in Hampshire with my wife, my daughter, and a cat who hates me and stabbed me through the eyeball to make sure I know how much.

Which one of your characters would you least like to meet in real life and have them complain at you about they way you treated them in your work.
 
Robert Mercier is a charming businessman. He’s confident, dominates the conversation, and is just the kind of personality I struggle to deal with. If he confronted me to challenge my portrayal of his character, I would crumble in an instant. He’s the kind of person that you voluntarily apologize to when they let a door slam in your face. Why am I saying sorry to this guy? Because he shines like a sparkling beacon of success.

Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing?
 
Outside of the horror genre (ghostly tales, and Gothic novels mainly), I read piles of crime fiction. Ellis Peters, Agatha Christie, M. W. Craven, and Arthur Conan-Doyle, with more planned once I have swept out the very last cobwebs of these collections. I’m a sucker for the contrasting-duo formula. Holmes/Watson, Poirot/Hastings, Andre/Price. Well, perhaps not the last one.

I’m also deeply obsessed with the lyrics that you swim in when you listen to great lyrical bands. Imagine a song based on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, well that’s Crooked Timber, by Therapy – or a song about the glamourous life and the grisly death of an actress, that’s Kiss Them For Me by Siouxie and the Banshees. It all merges and blends onto the page.
 
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?

A great deal of my time is spent feeling like I’m “not horror enough” to claim the epithet. When I look at other writers, I think “they’re doing horror, that’s what it is, they do it so well.” But that’s what is so great about this community. It can be the ghostly visitation of The Turn of the Screw, or the sexually charged vampirism of Carmilla, or the religious devilry of The Monk,  or it can be that chest-pounding fear of Jaws, the flesh-ripping of Cannibal Nuns from Outer Space, or even the utterly haunting tragedy of Frankenstein.

While some people mistakenly think horror is a thin genre, I can only see the vast richness of work and the immense variety on offer. On top of this, other categories delve into horror when they need to reach for that darkly emotional connection with the reader. I welcome these incursions. We need to constantly challenge the edges to prevent them solidifying.

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?
 
Well, let us brace ourselves for a run of isolation-inspired works of fiction. Half the world is on lock down, there is a virus with no current vaccine, and we’re all sat watching hockey-stick line charts that trigger our anxiety. For many of us, we our getting our first taste of that chest-crushing unexplainable lethargy that comes from unacknowledged stress.

When the virus/quarantine flood arrives, let’s not dismiss it. This is a healthy way for all of us to explore this strange feeling and it will document something more human and more vital than raw statistics. We uncover vastly different perspectives on the pandemic that may challenge us and shake us from our metaphorical comfortable armchairs.

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

My ego demands that I mention how fiction is a healthy way to exorcise the darkness that lurks deep within our souls. However, this feels like a cheap rationalization. There is something deeply interesting about a writer being inspired to render accounts of ghastly terror; and it’s wonderful that we can read it and enjoy it without the American Psychological Association trying to diagnose us with a mental illness.

Speaking personally, there is something magic in the descriptive challenge of horror fiction. Many authors manage to make picturesque the obscene. This is one of the attractions for me as a reader.

What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre?
 
We’re a good few-hundred years into this journey and we’re beyond the benefits afforded to the early writers. They did a great job and I’m obsessed with reading old horror books, but they could pick a couple of random traits and invent something groundbreaking. The weight of all these past works makes it hard to create something entirely new, but I’m excited when author’s reinvent and twist ideas into new shapes. When I read Class Three by Duncan P. Bradshaw, the treatment of a zombie as a fully rounded character with a perspective and thoughts blew my socks off.

In the past authors were able to write about almost anything with a far lesser degree of the fear of backlash, but this has all changed in recent years.  These days authors must be more aware of representation an the depiction of things such as race and gender in their works, how aware are you of these things and what steps have you taken to ensure that your writing can’t be viewed as being offensive to a minority group? 


We are all still participants in this broad discussion and every day we learn and progress. We often stumble blindly into silly mistakes, so we need to be empathic on both sides of the conversation. When we become to emotionally myopic, we only move apart from one another when we should be seeking to come together. If you want to tackle this issue, you need to make your own bias visible. If your book is set in the UK and has no particular reason to be otherwise skewed, around 8% of your characters should be Asian. If it’s less than this, you’ve uncovered a bias. When you are undertaking this self-exploration, be honest about your character treatment. Achieving a balance of female characters is not an achievement if they are all doe-eyed, two-dimensional, tripping-up-while-running-away types. I would love to say I’m a trailblazer on this, but I’m as flawed as the next privileged westerner.

Does horror fiction perpetuate it’s own ghettoization?
 
I don’t believe there is some self-harming agenda in horror. The community suffers from the beatings it gets from the very people that borrow its devices. Just remember there is an unrivalled history of this wonderful corner in fiction and draw strength from those great fore-runners. There is no such thing as “proper writing”. If there were, we would all tire of it.

What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice of?
 
M. W. Craven is producing excellent crime with a horror twist starting with The Puppet Show, and Gareth Powell’s Ragged Alice is one of my favorite books of recent times with its supernatural theme. Autumn Christian has been going from strength to strength, and I’m always wondering what Bradshaw is going to come up with next.

What are the books and films that helped to define you as an author?


In a Glass Darkly is the lightning rod that energized me to write. It is probably the most influential work in my writing. From the world of movies, I watched Nightmare on Elm Street and Scanners when I was far too young and they scared the heck out of me. When I get over-tired, Robert Englund chases me up the stairs and into my bed.

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

It’s early days for my writing output, but having been an active member of several bands, I have learned there is value in all reviews. One small but prominent magazine published an article that focused heavily on my lack of talent as a singer. They dwelled on this for several paragraphs, entirely missing the opportunity to mention my guitar skills were little better than the singing. I still loved the review because I had made it into the magazine! Every time someone spends time with my work, I’m grateful.

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

There are two giant pits filled with spikes that I find myself impaled upon regularly. The first is research. Two people sit down on a bench next to a rose bush, which should be simple enough. Six hours later, I’ve made sure that the rose grows in that region, flowers at the appropriate time of year, is the correct colour, can tolerate the soil, and myriad tangential facts that end up supporting one or two brief references.

The second bear trap that I willingly step into is making “just one more pass-through”. Each time my heart believes I have finished, my brain starts eating away at me. Before I know it, I’ve opened up the manuscript and I’m making another edit.

Both of these issues seem to point towards some terrible insecurity that I haven’t yet faced up to. Thanks for helping me work through it.

Is there one subject you would never write about as an author?
 
This will surprise many people that know me, but there is no latent Fanny Hill coming from my pen. Erotic scenes are not on the cards. Ever. Asides from this, I dare not dismiss anything else as my current work in process surprised me a great deal when it started to pop out of my fingers.

How important are names to you in your books? Do you choose the names based on liking the way it sounds or the meaning?

Names fall directly within the category of “research” for me. Many hours are spent getting the name geographically sound and I’m always looking for subtle connections to wind around my story elements. Without giving too much away, there is not a name in anything I write that doesn’t hint at something. Many of these connections will only ever exist in my brain and I don’t expect people to try and work them all out.
 
Writing, is not a static process, how have you developed as a writer over the years?

My first published book was a technical book with a company called Apress. I have since moved from non-fiction into fiction. This was a tremendously difficult transition to make and it taught me just how challenging it is to maintain all the lies you create during a story. My current writing feels more fluid, and I seem to have more control than I did while writing The Vanishing Room, which thrashed and fought against me like a wilful horse in the hands of a new stable boy.

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

Though I cannot attribute this advice to whichever great friend passed it on to me, I was told that when the writing won’t happen to change my location. Finding somewhere new to write always sparks new ideas and takes the work in new directions.

To many writers, the characters they write become like children, who is your favorite child, and who is your least favorite to write for and why?


Richard Beckett is something of an adopted child. He needs looking after because he’s young, cocky, and naïve. Sophie Harlock is difficult to write, because she is so different to me in every way. While I feel guilty when I may have upset someone, she literally doesn’t care. Perhaps I wish I were more like her.

For those who haven’t read any of your books, which of your books do you think best represents your work and why?

The Vanishing Room captures the soul of what I’m trying to do with my work. Essentially, I want to take genre fiction and present it with a literary style. This discordant union will appeal to those who enjoy some grand descriptive writing, even though it may feel out of place in a modern setting.

Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us?
 
There is a passage in The Vanishing Room that tingles several old emotional scars, which are painful and enjoyable at the same time. This paragraph sums up my awkward teenage years in a slightly elaborate way. Richard is at a party and they are playing a game where someone tucks a red ribbon into their clothes to be torn out. It’s a symbolic slaughter of summer to bring on the autumn:

Pulled into the swirl, I realised Hannah was our next mock-sacrifice, taking her spot in the centre of the maelstrom. She pointed towards me and made a gesture that told me I was to be the one to rip out her silk heart. A nauseous wave of nervousness made my muscles stiffen as I was bumped and cajoled into place before her. The music became muddled and formless, mere noise, as I reached out my hand. The smallest thread of the scarlet strip danced before me and I reached to take it. My anxious disposition and propensity for imaginative notions when under stress made me feel as if I were about to reach into her ribcage and search her core by touch to find the beating heart within; a strangely petrifying thought.
 
Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next?

The Vanishing Room was my debut. It was like the first bike race I had as a kid. I went fantastically fast, hit the front brake on the finishing line, and spent a good amount of time flat on the floor, dazed, and wondering what happened.
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My current work in process will be stylistically similar, although it came as a total surprise to me and has a different pace to its predecessor.
 
If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice?

The problem with a cliché is that it starts off amazing, which is why everyone wants to use it. The travesty is that we turn the brilliant into the mundane through our very love of it. As a tortured writer, which is banality itself, I ought to secure the glasshouse before I proceed further. Nevertheless, the “it’s all over, no wait it’s not” ending to horror films has become very tired.

What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you?
 
Having already mentioned both Ragged Alice and The Puppet Show, these are the two titles that enter the ring to punch it out for the title of “last great book”. They are such different styles that I find it impossible to eliminate either. The last book that disappointed me was Beckford’s Vathek. It failed to live up to my pre-conceptions and seemed rather pale compared to The Monk, which has many parallels and flawless execution.

What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do?  And what would be the answer?
 
I’d love to tell you who will supply the soundtrack when they turn my book into a film, thanks for asking. We’ll be opening with the rich tones of The Delays, swimming past some doom-pop with The Cure, raising the volume with the dark post-grunge of Bushbaby, and rolling credits with Rapture-era Siouxie and the Banshees.

Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself?

I’ve authored over two dozen books, which are apparently popular enough that they’ve won several awards. The subjects range from artificial intelligence and mythical creatures on to weird science and music. BEHEMOTH, my new book, is my first horror novel. The reception to it has been overwhelmingly positive, and I’m very grateful for that. Outside of writing, I created The National GUITAR Museum, live in New York with my family, and travel as much as time permits.

To get the ball rolling and get everyone relaxed, here is a hopefully lighthearted question to break the ice, which one of your characters would you least like to meet in real life and have them complain at you about they way you treated them in your work.

That’s a great intro question—kind of like being nudged unwillingly out onto a skyscraper ledge. There is a woman in BEHEMOTH named Mrs. Loretta Bower. Early in the novel, she is charged with keeping an eye on a sick neighbor, and she tries to straddle the line between doing what she’s told by her boss, and attending to the welfare of her neighbor. It’s an unwinnable situation. I purposely pushed her to the breaking point, so much so that she became shrill, irrational, and homicidal—a thoroughly unlikable human being. Not her fault, completely mine. I can’t say as I blame her, but I would hate to have her come at me in a knife fight.

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

Good writers are distillations of everything they’ve ever read, so it’s hard to narrow down specific influences. I would say that, for me, science fiction is a close second to horror. I appreciate that sci-fi often incorporates well-thought out histories that help support the plot. In sci-fi you can’t just throw up a few interesting words and themes and hope they stick. You’ve got to really address the suspension of disbelief to make it work. Bradbury was a master of that. Mysteries have been important to me in the same way, whether it’s the entire Sherlock Holmes canon or tales like Capote’s In Cold Blood. I want a story that keeps me turning pages long after I know I should have been asleep.
 
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?

As a species, humans love to categorize things—regardless of whether those things need categories or not. “Horror” is a great word, but it has such a variety of interpretations that it gets overwhelmed by individual perspectives. Too many people think of horror as slash and gore, or zombie fiction. I can’t even begin to count the number of friends I have that say “I can’t read horror” or “I don’t like scary books.” So I find that calling horror pieces “suspense” or “thrillers” or “dark mysteries” often makes people much more comfortable with the content. Think of how much more palatable the term becomes by positing Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery as horror, or Poe’s The Raven, and then adding new work like Jordan Peele’s Us. Suddenly, horror is the obviously cool stuff (but only when you don’t call it horror). If the reading public was able to view horror as an emotion—or a reaction—derived from a written work, rather than thinking of it as a blood-soaked genre populated by rictus grin corpses, we might get more “popular” acclaim.

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?

We’ve been told since the 1940s that the popularity of horror and sci-fi is regularly pegged to specific global events or crises. World War II, the Cold War, the Space Race, September 11. Whether that’s always true is a matter of ongoing debate. I think that notion ascribes motives and perspicacity to horror writers that we only wish we had. That said, themes for the next “movement” are hammering down on us as I write this. Pandemics, income inequality, healthcare breakdown, and widespread homelessness are their own horror stories. You need horror inspiration? Watch the nightly news.

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

I am a firm believer that the two greatest and most evocative forms of writing are horror and humor. They are built on the two extreme emotions that can be conjured up instantaneously: laughter and fear. Intriguingly, they are also polar opposites of each other. Everyone likes to laugh and feel joy, which is experienced in our advanced human brain, while most people don’t want to be afraid or feel fear, but the visceral response to it is encoded deep in our reptilian brain. Reading good horror shocks that part of our brain into reacting, which puts our primitive selves on high alert. It’s comparable to an adrenaline rush, but at a more primal, subconscious level.

I also think horror and humor are the two most difficult forms of story telling to write well. When you write biography, say, or a western, you’re not asking the reader to have an emotional reaction to the story. You want the reader engaged, but horror and humor ask for—indeed, demand—more than that. Horror sets the bar quite high for reader engagement.

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

Originality. Seriously. New monsters, new villains, new creepy crawlies, new worlds are all desperately needed. There are some tremendous zombie stories out there, but how about if we give the post-apocalyptic undead a temporary rest? They could really use it. So could the rest of us.

In the past authors were able to write about almost anything with a far lesser degree of the fear of backlash, but this has all changed in recent years.  These days authors must be more aware of representation an the depiction of things such as race and gender in their works, how aware are you of these things and what steps have you taken to ensure that your writing can’t be viewed as being offensive to a minority group?

I have two kids—daughters—and after they were born I became aware of how things in life were not balanced in their favor. Scholastic recognition, sports resources, career expectations—as recently as a decade ago these still seemed to be automatically geared towards males, and that doesn’t even factor ethnicity into it. Writers who are true to their characters can avoid giving offense in their writing. That happens by creating characters upon whom readers can imprint their own formats, beliefs, and imagery. Look at Poe, Mary Shelley, or M.R. James: their characters transcend or circumscribe ethnicity. There are other great horror writers who failed miserably at this—we are all aware these days of who they are—by delineating unfair differences between people.

Shakespeare might be the finest example of how to transcend this. Almost any of his characters can be played by any gender, ethnicity, or disability. The best King Lear I ever saw was played by a woman. That’s what we should be shooting for—characters that allow us to see how they deal with the human condition, regardless of gender or race. Not only is it inclusive, but it has the value of making the writing more attractive to more people. And we all want to get our work in the hands of more people, don’t we?

Does horror fiction perpetuate it’s own ghettoization?

No. Believe it or not, every genre is its own ghetto. The best-selling books in the world are romance novels, but you’d have a hard time convincing the general public or any literary reviewers that those books represent of what society wants to read above all else. Same with horror, sci-fi, westerns, historical fiction, or any other labelled form. Each genre has its own adherents, and each gets its turn on the popularity pedestal in due time. Taken out of the ghetto, as it were. This typically happens when Hollywood goes all in on a particular script trend. Horror’s had it for a good chunk of the last few years (thanks to Jordan Peele, Karyn Kusama, Guillermo del Toro, and others), with deep space disasters prevailing just before that, and westerns in vogue prior to that. The trend lasts until something else is determined to be better fodder for making movies. It’s generally about a decade and a half, on average, for each genre to cycle back to the fore.
 

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

I am guilty—over the last five years—of committing myself to reading horror classics to the exclusion of all else. I decided that I wanted to find the crucial elements that initially drew me into the horror genre and unravel why they worked—and why they continue to work today. Specifically: What is it they have that makes them stand the test of time? So I’ve been reading the obvious, the not-so-obvious, and perhaps the not-as-well-known: M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Nikolai Gogol, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Reading their collectively brilliant work from the last two hundred years has helped me dissect my own work and attempt to make it better. I do, however, look forward to emerging from the depths to begin searching for new writers who are picking up the gauntlet.

What are the books and films that helped to define you as an author?

The books I read as a kid were mostly short story collections by classic horror writers. Edgar Allan Poe, HP Lovecraft, August Derleth, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, amongst many others. As far as films, the Universal movie monsters started me off--The Wolf-Man, the Creature From The Black Lagoon, et al. Then movies like War Of The Worlds, Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark, The Omen, Hellraiser, and Alien cemented my love of the genre. Equally important were The Twilight Zone episodes written by Richard Matheson that left me in shock (which Black Mirror does today). Anything that leaves you with your mouth wide open and your mind grinding into overdrive is worth spending the time with.


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

When you start getting published, every review matters, positive or negative. They fill you with pride, or they slice your ego to the sidewalk. They become like little scars on various parts of your skin that you eventually wonder where they came from. You can’t even remember them after a while. Over time, you realize that all that matters is if your work has connected with people. If it hasn’t, there’s nothing you can do. But if people get something out of your writing—a moment of escape, release, emotional overload, entertainment, anything—theirs are the only reviews that matter.

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

I’ve enjoyed writing since I was in grade school, so I’ve never found anything about it difficult. Never had writer’s block, never had a moment where I wanted to give it up. That said, the element of time might be the most inherently difficult thing to deal with as a writer: finding the time to write out everything that is in your head, taking the time to make it work on paper, and the time it takes waiting for it all to get published.

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

If you’re asking about subjects in horror, the answer is no. Everything is on the table, because horror comes in more flavors than a Baskin Robbins ice cream cone. And you’ve got to be ready to sample them all.

How important are names to you in your books? Do you choose the names based on liking the way it sounds or the meaning?

Names are extraordinarily important. I change them often during the course of writing, even up to publication. The names have to sound natural coming out of other character’s mouths, and yet look good on the page. They also have to give the reader a comfortable attachment to the character, because the name is the one thing that marches through every page of the book. I’ve read excellent books that were nearly ruined for me by the introduction of characters with outlandishly silly or cartoonish names. My one tip: avoid alliterative names. It’s a kiss of death.
 
Writing, is not a static process, how have you developed as a writer over the years?

I have been writing for more years than I’d like to admit. The one thing I’ve learned, and still try to apply every day, is that you constantly need to slice away any fleshiness in your wordsmithing. Do it until your writing is made up solely of strong, shiny bone . . . with a sheen of blood. Cut, cut, cut. Cut some more. Till it stops bleeding.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing?
Never release any of your work to the world without having first put it aside. Give it a rest, even if it’s just overnight. Then take a fresh look at it. Resist the impulse to get it out of your system and make it available to everyone. Edit it first, because once it’s out in the world, you can never truly get it back. And, trust me, you will most assuredly regret that. Read what you’ve written. Read it again. And again. If you’ve given it an honest assessment, it just might be ready for public consumption.

To many writers, the characters they write become like children, who is your favorite child, and who is your least favorite to write for and why?

I think of them more as old girlfriends instead of children. You have kaleidoscopic memories of all of them—some great, some not so good—but they’re a part of your past so you can now view them a bit more objectively. And you can—in your own mind—give them some sort of preferential and prioritized treatment. That said, I look forward to writing despicable characters because there are no constraints. You can get as twisted, loathsome, and evil as you want. In BEHEMOTH, Leonard Smeak fits that profile. I savored every moment of slithering into Leonard’s psyche.

For those who haven’t read any of your books, which of your books do you think best represents your work and why?

As far as horror fiction, BEHEMOTH is my first effort. It certainly represents my interest in clawing at the margins of the unseen world. Outside of that, my nonfiction book, “This Will Kill You,” mixes horror and humor with real science to describe how humans actually die. It’s a blend of the two extremes I talked about earlier, because reading about death can actually be engaging. Readers learn about the lethality of everything from shark attacks and lightning strikes to drowning and being burned at the stake. These methods of human departure are then ranked on a horror-meter of why you don’t want to die that way.

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

I won’t go quite so far as to say this is my favorite line in BEHEMOTH, but it’s one that encapsulates the sinister underpinnings of the story. One character views the results of a night gone horrifically wrong, and tells his adversary: “I’m guessing that even God won’t forgive you.”
We always expect redemption. Maybe sometimes there isn’t any.
 
Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next?

BEHEMOTH is my most recent horror work, which is a story about the hidden evil in a small town. I’ve been asked to do a sequel (and even a prequel), which I’ve already plotted out. I also have a short story collection waiting in the wings, as well as a history of crime and forensics that will be published by Viking next year.


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

Zombies. Zombies. Zombies. And then, for good measure, zombies.

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

The last great book I read was Bill Bryson’s A Short History Of Everything, which will corkscrew the inside of your head for days—no matter what genre you’re a fan of. There is so much incredible and bizarre information about our world in those pages that it’s almost impossible to believe. As for disappointment, I learned long ago to never go near writers that I know will be overhyped, yet fail to deliver. I do my homework before I pick up any book. Once you set your level of expectations, you won’t be disappointed.

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

One question I think should be asked of every horror writer and fan is “What is the definitive horror moment in popular culture?” I have two answers, and they’re mine alone. In movies, the definitive horror moment is when the xenomorph bursts out of John Hurt’s chest in the first Alien film. No matter how steely you imagine yourself to be, the first time you saw that on a screen, it kicked your skull back against the chair. Hard.

As far as a literary moment, it’s this from the ending of The Lottery:

“Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.”

That’s the moment the story about a group of neighbors doing their civic duty transforms into a story about children and adults preparing to kill their friend—and their mother. She flicks that horror switch in one sentence and all of a sudden you know that things are going to turn wicked.