AUTHOR INTERVIEW: EXPLORING THE DARK MASTERS WITH STEPHEN VOLK

Following the tremendous success and critical acclaim for Whitstable and Leytonstone, Stephen Volk has returned to the past for the final part of what he is calling his Dark Masters Trilogy with his new novel, Netherwood. Ahead of the launch of a new edition from PS Publishing containing all three books, Stephen Volk sits down with Ginger Nuts Of Horror to talk about the genesis of the final part, his writing process, and what the future holds.

Stephen Volk was previously interviewed for this site on the subject of the two novellas that also form this book - the interview on Whitstable is here, and Leytonstone here
 
Note: Some of the following contains spoilers for Leytonstone and Netherwood. Questions and answers containing spoilers are clearly flagged for ease of avoidance.
 
Stephen, great to be talking with you again. I’d like to start by asking if you’d always envisioned these tales forming a trilogy, and what made you decide to pick Crowley as the main subject for the third book?
 
First of all, no, it wasn’t a trilogy to begin with. I wrote the Peter Cushing one (Whitstable) as a stand-alone in 2013, and in fact wrote the Hitchcock one (Leytonstone) in 2015 the same way. As you might know, the latter was an embellishment and expansion of a short story I’d written called “Little H”. It was only when I’d finished it and was searching for a title did I realise they shared a certain amount thematically together – in both cases I was using real people as fictional characters and they were both practitioners in horror or terror. Of course I realised later I’d been using real people “like forever” in my stories. I’d written a screenplay about Poe thirty years ago, and my first produced screenplay, Gothic, was about Mary Shelley. And, as with the two novellas, they were always about characters facing horror and terror in the real world and about the relationship between genre fiction/film and real life. And so I called the Hitchcock novella Leytonstone, so that the two place names would unite them (I’ve loved place names as titles ever since Chinatown), not really thinking any more than that it might be a trilogy one day.
 
It’s funny. People have nagged me over the years: “Who is the next one going to be?” and suggested Boris Karloff or Lon Chaney Sr. – both of whom are very interesting people, but I was waiting for someone who was a bit different and not the obvious Number Three. The thing that I wanted to be common to them all was the question, “What put these people on the road to their involvement in the genre – was it randomness, some flaw, some psychology, or something else?” I didn’t want to write a thesis about it. I wanted to explore it in fictional terms, in dramatic terms, and see where it led me. I realised I could use people from horror history to examine what I do myself, which is, essentially, scaring people for a living. Also to ask: what is the relevance of this culture of horror and dark fiction that we are such fans of? Is it a bad or good thing? Where does the urge, the need, come from? What is it for?
 
At that point I started to wonder if there could be a trilogy here: something that could add up to more than the sum of its parts. I thought of The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert. But particularly The Hours by Michael Cunningham. I thought: “If you can do a trio of stories about Virginia Woolf, or about German history, why the hell can’t I do three stories about the horror genre?”
 
There were really two routes to my choosing Crowley. First of all, I read that he had died in Hastings in 1947 and I immediately saw the old black magician on the beach at Hastings and straight away that reminded me of the image of Peter Cushing at the beginning of Whitstable, so I started to read more about Crowley, sketching in a story about who he meets, etc. I soon discovered he lived his last few years at a guest house called “Netherwood” – which I thought was fantastic, because it sounds like the “Nether World” but also “Nether Regions” meaning the sexual organs. Perfect for Crowley! However, the more I read, I realised I couldn’t write from Crowley’s point of view. He is such a complex, unknowable trickster, and possibly very nasty, character, there was no way I could get inside his head intellectually, or really want to. So I briefly abandoned that idea.
 
Meanwhile I was pitching ideas to BBC Drama and one idea they liked very much was the idea of a series about Dennis Wheatley working for British Intelligence (as he did) during WW2, in a (made up) secret unit with Aleister Crowley and Dennis’s friend Ian Fleming, amongst other factual characters including Churchill’s astrologer and Maxwell Knight (the original for Bond’s “M”). The BBC commissioned a pilot script, so I had the benefit of being paid to do a lot of research, and even though the project eventually got the vet’s needle from people higher up than those I was working with, by then I had a real handle on how to write a relationship between Wheatley and Crowley. So it enabled me to discover I couldn’t write from a magician and predatory seducer’s point of view but I could write from a horror author’s point of view.
 
So that was the key, and soon the story began to take form, with Wheatley as the main character and Crowley in a co-starring role, thus enabling me to keep him intangible, unknowable, mysterious. The two characters for me were much more interesting than Crowley alone.
 
Above, you ask ‘what is the relevance of this culture of horror and dark fiction that we are such fans of? Is it a bad or good thing?’ . . . 
 
Well, people who don’t like horror think of it being born of nasty urges and being the fodder of sadistic people, and I don’t think it is. I think horror is how we voice and face our fears in a symbolic form.
 
Nevertheless, I can’t help but reflect on the duality of Crowley and Wheatley in this regard; Wheatley, who writes about fictional dark forces as metaphors for real ones (Fascism and Stalinism, for example) and Crowley, who at least acts as a sincere believer in magic as a real force. Do you feel that your versions of Crowley and Wheatley represent the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sides of horror culture, in some ways?
 
I didn’t want to be as simplistic as that. I didn’t want a hero and villain, black hat and white hat. Dennis isn’t the perfect hero. He’s not an innocent and he’s deeply insecure about almost everything. Crowley is vile, sick, repulsive but I think he has sympathetic elements too: he’s clever, witty, he’s an outcast of society, and he has lost a child he loved.
 
I do believe that Wheatley represents a more benevolent spirituality than Crowley did. As I wrote, albeit through Dennis’s eyes, towards the end of the story, Crowley’s driving force was in a large part based on ego and power and selfishness and pleasures of the flesh. Is that a bad or good thing? The reader can decide. They might think “Do What Thou Wilt” is a desirable creed to live by. Wheatley’s was more Christ’s philosophy of “Do Unto Others...”
 
Regarding horror culture though, I don’t think Crowley represents “horror gone wrong”. As a personality he became an archetypal villain, and I suppose he wrote occult fiction, but it was Wheatley who interested me most. The black magic writer who wrote about what he feared. All three protagonists in the trilogy turn what they fear into something creative. When I say “Is that a bad or good thing?” partly I mean, the cost. Yes, the genre does us good, the fans, but it is sometimes made by damaged individuals. Flawed people. Hurt people. And the turning of that hurt and fear into something valuable is what interests me. Because I know it’s what I do, all day, every day.   
 
 
***The next two questions contain spoilers for the end of Netherwood and Leytonstone. If you don’t wish to be spoiled, please scroll down to the section headed ‘spoiler questions end’***
 
Regarding that central mystery, what do you find to be the challenges of preserving this kind of narrative tension throughout a novel length work, where the opacity of the pro/antagonist’s motivations make it impossible for Wheatley (and by extension, the reader) to be entirely sure of what’s really going on? How do you keep that pressure escalating without giving too much away?
 
Well, Crowley isn’t the protagonist or point of view (except for a short interval, the authenticity of which one might question later on). Wheatley is 100% the protagonist, and his being unsure what is really going on is vitally important. I always think a sense of doubt is important in a supernatural story (I always say that “doubt” and “belief” are the twin engines of a supernatural story) – if you plunge right in with everyone believing the supernatural you have fantasy. You have Harry Potter. In this, and most of my kind of fiction, I strive for psychological realism as best I can, so I’m constantly thinking: “How would I react if this was me?” And most people in such situations would react with scepticism and hesitation. Even though Wheatley was knowledgeable about the occult – I couldn’t portray him as a total ignoramus – I did want him to have a certain naivety about what he was getting mixed up in. As for how to keep that escalating, I suppose it’s a push-me pull-you approach. You pull the reader a nudge towards acceptance, then counterbalance with a dose of disbelief. I think that keeps the story lively, and believable. But it’s really in the plotting out, and writing from inside the head of someone on shifting sands.
 
The big reveal towards the end (SPOILER) where Wheatley realises he has been lied to by Crowley (...or has he?...) was really vital in the writing process. I was worried that Dennis being now largely unknown and unloved as a novelist could be a severe problem. It gave me a lot of anxiety, like: who cares, never heard of him, who is he? Then it suddenly occurred to me to turn that to my advantage as a plot point and have the cost of the ritual being Wheatley’s literary immortality. This is why he is now forgotten. You expect the demon’s price to be a life or soul, and it isn’t. Like the evil policeman’s “price” in Leytonstone – the rape of Fred’s mother – it suddenly made the story about a bit more than it was. It hiked the story up a few notches, for me. It was about the value of a writer’s work against the value of a life, or lives. And that rhymed with Wheatley’s war work, where he wrote literally to save lives. The idea fell out of the sky and I grabbed it!
 
As we’re talking spoilers (and I’ll clearly mark this portion of the interview as such so it can be avoided as needed), I thought the plot point of Wheatley’s relative obscurity was such an astonishing payoff, I’d assumed that’s why you’d picked him! Did you make this discovery in the plotting process, or during the draft? And did it cause much disruption for the rest of the story?
 
No. It actually happened quite late. About three years into working on Netherwood in fact! Dennis is one of Christopher Fowler’s “Forgotten Authors” isn’t he? So that bugged me. Younger horror fans don’t know him, so the challenge was to turn that to a plus. I don’t know where it came from. Possibly thinking that there has to be a price paid to the Devil, so to speak. There has to be a price paid for doing the right thing. Otherwise it’s too easy. Is anything worth achieving in life without some sort of sacrifice? (In working in the film industry, I certainly feel I’ve given part of my soul away in dealings with the Devil.) But I never want empty heroics in a story: that action movie type stuff. There’s no drama or interest in that for me. There has to be pain, doubt, hurt, struggle, for it to matter.  And it was important to me that Dennis doesn’t simply do good and come through unscathed. In order to do good he has to do something awful, something that churns him up. Then he has to recover as best he can. That’s part of the price, too.
 
 
***Spoiler questions end***
 
With all three books, the time period feels such an integral part of the story; almost a character in its own right. Can you talk a bit about how you go about researching a specific period for a piece like this; and also what stylistic choices you make to convey a sense of time and place?
 
It begins with an awful lot of reading! Of course it would take decades to be any sort of expert on either Crowley or Wheatley, let alone both, but I did as much reading as I could to take me to the point of “not faking it”. I had to know their life stories in a lot of detail as a base line – even though loads of it wouldn’t be used – I had to know their relationships with women, their attitude to children, even what cigarettes they smoked or the medications they took: most important of all, what would motivate them? It was really similar to the process I underwent with Cushing and Hitchcock. I love it, because the knowledge starts to become second nature and you start to intuit what they would do, what they would say under such and such a circumstance and that is a great deal of fun. For me, anyway!
 
So getting into the period begins with researching the characters, book after book after book. making a massive document of about 500 pages long, and you get gold nuggets along the way, in small, telling details of language, or about restaurants or – one example is Crowley calling the white rabbits at Netherwood “the chrysanthemums” – which is true, and you could never make up! I also looked at the photographs of Wolf Suchitsky from 1946. I grew up in the late fifties and the war was still, even then, part of the national consciousness. There were US marines and “Japs” in Commando comics. There were postwar things I remember, like the “Chad” graffiti. My mum told me about the library that was bombed up in Merthyr, with books all over the street – so I used that image in the story. Then there is also the fiction of the time, which is always worth dipping into – Graham Greene (Brighton Rock), Patrick Hamilton (Hangover Square): those give terrific pointers – and films such as Brief Encounter, The Third Man. From the latter I purloined the conversation in the lift to the beach in Hastings, where Lamont talks about small, irrelevant people, which is straight from Harry Lime up in the big wheel in Vienna. Night of the Demon, though it came in the 1950s, had a character based on Crowley, so I gave a nod to that with the magician scene – justified, I think, since Crowley did, in fact, entertain the children whilst staying at Netherwood.
 
The key is, though, to find your own Wheatley and Crowley. Those who work as fictional characters in the story. It’s not a work of biography, after all. So, while I want them to feel authentic, very much so, I also make a lot of choices about what to leave out, what to pull out and what to push back. (For instance the circumstances surrounding Victor Neuberg are terribly simplified. Then again, I liked that the reader can only just believe what they are being told by Crowley at any one time. That seemed fitting.) Dennis has a sweet tooth – I didn’t need that. Crowley had a dental plate – useful. But his exploits as a mountaineer or with the Golden Dawn are reduced to almost irrelevant. Even Cefalu is a margin note, really. I had to pick and choose or I’d be overrun with enough material for a fifty hour TV series!
 
Stylistically, my main choice was that I did not want to emulate the prose of Dennis Wheatley. He isn’t writing it. And I thought if I attempted that, I might fail. Or, worse, I might succeed and write something really turgid and boring! So I wanted something that wasn’t modern or post-modern, that would inevitably reflect my present day sensibility, but not so ridiculously as to make the narrative implausible. They still had to be 1940s people who had been through the war. Like Cushing and Hitch they were both, for my purposes, traumatized. I think, in retrospect, during the writing the story became about Britain at a certain time – beaten, rebuilding, wounded. Recovering from trauma itself. And of course at the end of the book Wheatley is very definitely recovering from his trauma too.
 
There are also key things that come from research outside of books. I found the “Devel Sasabonsam” in the Boscastle Museum of Magic and Witchcraft. Staying with friends in Hastings, I was taken to the bonfire parade and thought: “I have to include this! It is just too good!” Luckily I found out 1947 was the first Hastings bonfire after the war. It’s silly, but I probably couldn’t have included it if I found out there wasn’t one. That’s how research affects you!
 
It sounds like a daunting and potentially bottomless task! At what point during the process do you feel ready to start writing? Is it when you start to gain that intuition about  the characters?
 
It’s totally intuition. As I say, It’s not about becoming an expert, it is totally about finding your Dennis Wheatley, your Aleister Crowley. I said the same about Peter Cushing and, way back, I said the same about Byron and Shelley and Mary Shelley in Gothic. I’m not writing a rounded, all-encompassing biographical portrait. It’s casting these people in a fictional story and how your fictional Wheatley or Crowley enable the story to work – when you feel secure with that, you can get going.
 
And how much of the research goes into the first draft - do you find that you can use a polish to add in detail, or is most of it there from the start?
 
On this one I did a very long, bulky draft in one document with all my factual notes and sporadic ideas allocated to specific scenes. It was hundreds of pages long. A gruelling and in some ways arduous process, and I jettisoned some ideas and research along the way (e.g. Wheatley liked joss sticks on his writing desk – that seemed too “Crowley”), but essentially just kept forging forward. There’s always the moment when you get to the end and you lay it aside and think phew and then, “Oh shit. When I read it back will it be rubbish? I think it’s okay, but what if it isn’t?” But I didn’t do too much revising until I put it out to a half a dozen trusted readers and got some feedback. All immensely reassuring and remarkably positive, thank God – most said it was the best of the trilogy – but with a few really good, sharp pointers to improvements.
 
Similarly, the detail of the occult rituals within this book ring with authenticity. How much of that was research and how much intuition? And did anything you came across in your research for that aspect disturb you?
 
I made lots of notes from all over the place but it’s not based on any one ritual. I actually wanted it to feel shifting and uncertain, and I thought if I put in loads on incantations the effect would be in danger of becoming ludicrous. Hey, it might well be ludicrous now, but that is a risk I’m prepared to take, and I don’t mind if you find it all a bit silly – as Wheatley does – or it sounds mad, or that it’s beyond your grasp, as long as you believe that Crowley would be saying and doing it. I took the plunge in thinking that you have to deliver a fair bit of detail in the area of magic, and gods, and mythic names, just as Le Carre has to convince the reader of his absolute knowledge in terms of espionage, I had to convince of Crowley’s heft as a magician. I don’t see it as any different. Plus, of course, that was one of the hallmarks of Dennis Wheatley’s novels: “He makes the impossible seem absolutely real.” Not much was pure imagination on my part, except for the cutting of the skin; somehow I felt there had to be a physical hurt as part of what you offered the demon in return for what you are asking. Regarding the demon himself/herself – I took what I needed and abandoned what I didn’t. If I offended some dark being in doing so, I expect I shall pay for it one way or another!
 
As far as disturbing me, there was something about the malignant narcissism of Crowley that got to me the more intensely I was reading about him over the four years I was researching this, but not in a supernatural sense, more a weird malaise. I came down with a cold, sore throat, red eyes. My wife said at one point: “Is reading about him getting to you?” I said, “No, it’s just eye strain from reading all these damned books!” – but maybe there was a psychosomatic element. The funny thing is, while I was reading about Crowley living in Jermyn Street whilst it was being bombed during WW2, the whole house shook. I felt that the floor was going to collapse under me. I rushed outside to see what the heck was going on. Were builders using a pile driver or something? No. Nothing. The street was empty. Later on I found out there had been an earthquake with its epicentre in Bristol and that is what it had been. (That was 17th February 2018, if anyone wants to fact check!)
 
Wheatley always warned his readers about getting involved too deeply in black magic, and it’s strange that there is something unique about working on stories about the Devil, above and beyond general supernatural subjects. I don’t know why. When I was working on Midwinter of the Spirit for TV, with its mixture of sexual abuse, exorcism and Satanism, there was something uniquely upsetting about the mix. It puts people on edge. It’s weird. I suppose you touch on the sordid depths to which human beings can sink, in a way. The contradiction in Crowley of course being that he, presumably, wanted to scale transcendental heights.
 
To what degree do you think Crowley believed in his own hype? It strikes me that one of the trickiest things about such charismatic, malignant personalities is pinning down what is sincerely held delusion, and what is calculated ‘showmanship’. Or does it not matter?
 
The short answer is that I think it’s unanswerable. Everyone will have their own opinion on the grey scale between charlatan and messiah. He was certainly manipulative. Some say he was harmless. I didn’t really want to come down completely on one side of the argument. Not through any inherent love of Crowley, or anything he stood for, but because the story works better that way. I tried to stick to portraying him as best I could and letting the individual reader decide. I think in modern nomenclature we would have to say he was an attention seeker, though. But you could list a dozen nouns and adjectives, as I did when I pitched my original idea to the BBC!
 
Wheatley is also a huge part of this narrative. Do you feel he’s a writer that is now undervalued? What of his work would you recommend those unfamiliar with his output should seek out?
 
I do think he is undervalued. De-valued, you could say. Listen, I’m not an apologist for any perceived (or actual) racism or right-wing views on his part – but he is the hero of my story so naturally I am here to defend him to some extent, and I think he did his patriotic duty and was, in essence, a “good man”. I think he was terrified of communism and terrified of forces that threatened to undermine the British values he held dear. I do think his prose has not weathered well, but heck, we should remember he was once called “The Prince of Thriller Writers”, his books were never out of print, The Devil Rides Out was called “the best novel of its kind since Dracula” and, to me, he was, without doubt, the Stephen King of his era. I will go out on a limb and say – since I grew up on those Arrow paperbacks with their yellow spines all through the sixties – his ideas are far more imaginative than those of, say, James Herbert, who I have to say was a terrible writer yet horror fans still revere him – perhaps because of his working class credentials and settings they can easily identify with. From King onwards nobody was interested in what happened in English country houses after the champagne was quaffed. The world moved on. But it has moved on for many great literary figures we go on holding in high esteem, so I think that is unfortunate. I think we should cut Dennis some slack. His plots are enormously thrilling and inventive, and his black magic stories are terrific feats of the imagination.
 
For the beginner I would recommend Strange Conflict (a weird drama about astral projection I have a very soft spot for) or The Devil Rides Out, his masterpiece, with the greatest coup de theatre in all horror. Of course, I have a hard time separating it from my love of the film of the same name, from Hammer, starring Christopher Lee as the Duke – still my favourite of all their output. And in many ways, those scenes in the magic circle are the inspiration for Netherwood. I wanted to return to those books that excited me so much as a young reader of horror. Actually, I just remembered that one of the first positive things that was ever said about my creative writing was in Secondary School when I wrote a haunted house composition and my teacher wrote in red ink at the end: “You obviously want to be the next Dennis Wheatley!” – and I did!
 
Picking up on your point about fear of undermining values informing Wheatley’s work, do you think that has a deeper resonance in 2018, what with similar fears underpinning Brexit and much else in British (and indeed US) politics? I’m struck by your observation of Wheatley as ‘a good man’ who nonetheless held some clearly reactionary positions...
 
It’s funny reading back all three stories in the trilogy, back to back. In Whitstable Peter Cushing asks Les Gledhill to “do what is good, for once”. In Leytonstone, the young Fred Hitchcock asks himself constantly, “Am I good?” And Netherwood begins with a request from Crowley to Wheatley because he is a “good man”. I like this unconscious theme – who is good? What does it mean to be “good”?
 
During the thinking/planning process for Netherwood I did a lot of ruminating about Wheatley’s inner motivation for writing his black magic stories, but not for the sake of indulgence. I had to find out why his fictional confrontation with Crowley would be so important to him. And – strangely reflecting those Arrow book covers - I found it was to do with sexual abuse and fear of it. A terror of it happening to those he loved – even to himself. So now I put him in the thrall of the arch sexual predator, and suddenly it all came into focus. It was about masculinity under threat – and that made it modern. “Of now.” At least to my mind. And this lit a fire under me. “My” Wheatley was a man who feared, deeply, the loss of morality, a man hanging onto a sense of doing good and what was right (the exact opposite of Crowley: who is motivated by ego and self).
 
But look, his hatred of Nazis aside, I don’t share Wheatley’s politics. Far from it! However, who amongst us isn’t aware of, and afraid of, threats to our values? In my case, not from communists or foreigners, but the scumbags of the far right, lying politicians, and small-minded Little Englanders who preach hysterical isolationism. To some people the threat is terrorists, or those of a faith they don’t agree with. Wheatley was born of a certain time, and I couldn’t distort his opinions into my own left wing, Humanistic value system: that would have been abhorrent, and wrong. Instead, I wanted to, hopefully, posit the question to the reader: okay, what “values” do you have? What would you die for? Risk your soul for? – Anything? The enemy is, possibly, not having any values at all, other than callous self-interest. That is almost what Wheatley accuses Satanism of being towards the end of my story – a kind of uncaring “anti-humanity” – and boy, do you see that in British politics at the moment. I didn’t want to be blatant about it, but that was there for a reason.   
 
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us again, Stephen, and the very best of luck with the Dark Masters Trilogy, it’s a superb set of tales. I understand it’s launching at FCon in October? And what does the rest of 2018 hold for you?
 
Yes. PS Publishing is launching it at at FantasyCon in late October, all being well. I’ve a few things on the go. One is a novella called The Squeamish, about a woman working for the British film censor in Soho in 1968, who comes into conflict with a belligerent and headstrong director of horror films. That’s part of another PS project called Studio of Screams which will feature books by Mark Morris, Tim Lebbon and Christopher Golden, as well as material by Steve Bissette. On top of that, right now I am on the foothills of developing a new TV series, a reboot of a horror classic for a non-terrestrial channel. I can’t say any more than that, because it’s very early days, but if it comes off it will be very exciting!  

Be sure to check in next Tuesday for our review of Netherwood, but in the meantime you can read  read our reviews of Whitstable and Leytonstone, and i you can purchase The Dark Masters Trilogy from PS Publishing by clicking here