 Roger Keen is a writer, filmmaker and film critic with a special interest in surrealism, counter-culture and psychedelia. He has contributed to many award-winning programmes for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, and his short stories, articles and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and online. He is the author of the novelistic memoir The Mad Artist: Psychonautic Adventures in the 1970s and the psychological horror/crime thriller Literary Stalker. Visit him on: http://www.rogerkeen.com/ Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself? I went to art college in the 1970s and was very involved in the counter-culture scene of that era. I particularly loved the Beat writers, Burroughs and Kerouac, and surrealist painters such as Dali and Magritte. I painted for a while and then took up photography and filmmaking, and after college I worked in TV, including the drama series Robin of Sherwood in the ’80s. I’ve always liked Gothic fiction and movies, and in the ’90s I started writing horror stories and got into the scene, as it was then. More recently I’ve been reviving those associations because Literary Stalker is a return to the horror/crime genre and also it’s ‘about’ the horror-writing world. What do you like to do when you're not writing? Watching films and TV and reading, naturally. I try to root out more obscure films and novels I’ve always meant to watch and read – and also classics – and when I finally get around to experiencing them it’s always rewarding. Also I like walking, sometimes in wild country such as the Lake District and the Alps, and occasionally I play golf and ski in winter. I’m a big fan of Indian food and West Country cider, usually in that order. Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing? I’m a particular fan of 20th century experimental writing. William Burroughs was a big early influence – because his work has elements of science fiction and horror as well as hard-boiled crime in the mix, and I liked that genre mash-up effect, imitated by many. Other similar writers would include Beckett, Borges and Nabokov. Also I’ve been a long-time fan of Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick in science fiction, and when it comes to crime, I like Patricia Highsmith, Thomas Harris and Ruth Rendell. 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’ve always looked at the term “horror” in fiction in a broad sense, because you can find it in many places, outside the traditional boundaries of the genre and classic “Gothic” work. Shakespeare, for example, contains loads of horror, which has been used in horror films such as Theatre of Blood (which I pastiched in Literary Stalker); and you can see those elements in “literary” writers such as Dostoevsky and Maupassant. Contemporary authors such as Irvine Welsh and Ian McEwan have written great “horror” stories that would fit seamlessly into anthologies alongside the works of genre writers. So I think we shouldn’t get stuck with labeling work too much – that can sometimes be an advantage but also a disadvantage. 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? New technology and media, and changing geopolitics have influenced horror a lot lately – reality TV, Facebook interaction, ubiquitous surveillance, found footage, you name it. I think we’ll get more horror that’s themed around the political polarization we’re seeing on social media, plus the threat of terrorism and breakdown in the social order. The rise of weaponised robots and similar tech will also figure. Whether this will spawn a whole new “movement” or not remains to be seen. What are the books and films that helped to define you as an author? In my youth I read novels like Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, and I loved them because they were both hip and of the moment, and also they messed around with traditional narrative rules in a postmodern way. I have tried to emulate that principle in my writing, though not in quite the same fashion. When it comes to film, I’ve always loved the dark and weird, and so I’m a particular fan of the two Davids – Lynch and Cronenberg. Two films I saw in childhood really came to define my approach to writing. The first is the 1940s portmanteau chiller Dead of Night, because it’s about nightmares leaking into reality and also dark psychology – the ventriloquist being taken over by his dummy is an especially good example. The other film is The Wizard of Oz, which I saw in a cinema at the age of eight – exactly the right age – and it’s juxtaposition of worlds: real and fantastical, sepia and Technicolor, really set my imagination going. The same is true of Ray Harryhausen’s films, which I also saw in the cinema at an early age. What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice off? I have to confess that I’m perhaps not as familiar with the latest in new authors as I should be! When it comes to writers who’ve been around a few years now, then Joe Hill is an obvious one to mention. His early stories, such as ‘Best New Horror’, were both edgy and excellent, and he’s followed up that promise with his novels. Sarah Pinborough, who again is hardly new, has recently broken through to the bestseller lists with Behind Her Eyes, which is a clever newer kind of thriller, mixing crime with the borderline paranormal – I think we’ll see more of such subtle genre fusions in the future. How would you describe your writing style? Sort of ‘dark literary’ and also ‘metafictional’. I’ve been banging on lately about ‘metacrime’ and ‘metahorror’ in relation to Literary Stalker, because it’s that kind of a work – having novels-within-novels and narrator self-consciousness. I don’t know if that puts some people off, because they think it will be too obscurantist. Whatever tricks I use, I try to keep the pace and interest in the story going, otherwise there’s no point. Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative that have stayed with you? Oh indeed – good reviews are lifeblood to the ‘struggling writer’! The Digital Fix critic Noel Megahey has reviewed both of my books very positively, showing a deep understanding and insight into what I’m trying to do, which is most heartening. I’ve also had positive reviews from established authors like Simon Clark, and upcoming crime writer Michael Mackenzie. It’s always good when people (especially writers) ‘get’ your work. A few don’t quite get it, of course, and I’ve had lukewarm reviews, but no real stinkers thankfully! What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult? Staying focused and following through to finishing points, though I’m getting better in older age! In the past, my worst fault has been writing never-ending novels – in the sense of never finding a final form. I keep getting new ideas and moving the goalposts, though on the plus side the changes are doubtless improvements. I’d find it very difficult to be one of those book-a-year types of writers! Is there one subject you would never write about as an author? I can’t think of one in particular at the moment. In the past, I might have said ‘romance’, but there’s a kind of romance going on in Literary Stalker – though it’s a twisted, perverse, obsessional (and one-sided) romance, so I suppose that’s okay! 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 very important, and I constantly study names with a view to using them in future – and I try out different combinations of Christian and surname. Names say so much about a character even before we get any description. Dickens was the master in that department. I tend to use shorter, more common names for narrators and viewpoint characters, and longer ones for other characters with some distinct quality I want to highlight. Liking the way it sounds and the meaning both figure in that. Writing, is not a static process, how have you developed as a writer over the years? I started off writing very autobiographically, which again came from the Beat authors. Burroughs’s early novels were autobiographical, as were Kerouac’s, and the two influenced each other. Then I tried to embroider my own life stories into ‘adventures’ – and my ‘novelistic memoir’ The Mad Artist revisits these two trends: firstly the real life facts and then the fictional artifice built on top. In the ’90s I got into the horror scene, partly because I was attracted to the dark, Gothic aspects, but also because it had a vibrant indie-press scene which was a gateway to publication. I did get a handful of stories published, but I moved away from that as ideas got scarcer. I also wrote a lot of non-fiction – reviews and feature articles, and in the 2000s I concentrated mainly on film criticism. More recently I’ve come back to narrative fiction, picking up on the experiments I tried decades ago and having more success at achieving results. What tools do you feel are must-haves for writers? Well, having the time to write and freedom from distraction are most important. That said, there is the obvious combination of patience, energy, a good focus on goals and the ability not to be put off by difficulty. It’s also important to satisfy yourself first and find a unique niche, and then hope your work gels with other people. What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing? I think it’s the simple line: “keep going”. When you finish something, start the next thing and don’t to be too preoccupied with either success or rejection. Getting your worked noticed is one of the hardest things for a writer to achieve, how have you tried to approach this subject? Like most of us, I’ve joined the circus of posting promotional stuff on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., but the underlying drawback here is you’re always sending the same messages to much the same people; though the upside is you occasionally get a re-tweet from someone important which starts a whole new ballgame. I also write articles of broader interest that mention my work, which bring more people to my blog and website. Earlier in the year, I commissioned a blog tour for Literary Stalker, which was very useful and put me in touch with a lot of new people. To many writers, the characters they write become like children, who is your favourite child, and who is your least favourite to write for and why? I’ve come to particularly like Jago Farrar, my ‘Facebook murderer’, partly because he’s such a mean, nasty unforgiving type, totally beyond redemption; but also because he’s a character in a novel-within-a-novel, so he’s twice removed from real life and is therefore more schematic, more heightened in his behavior, and also less ‘human’ with foreshortened affect , much like an android type. What piece of your own work are you most proud of? I do like my twist endings, which I put a lot of work into fashioning. Both The Mad Artist and Literary Stalker have Mobius strip-style endings, which is another concept I’ve picked up mainly from film – David Lynch and Charlie Kaufmann, to be precise. I like to ‘pull the rug out’ from under narratives, cast doubt on certainties and offer other possibilities, perhaps cryptic ones. The success of Mulholland Drive, and the endless debating over what’s really going on, makes for a new frontier in twenty-first century narrative, in my opinion. And are there any that you would like to forget about? I wrote a story about necrophilia a long time ago, when I was in a phase of trying to shock. Thankfully it was rejected, and notwithstanding the subject matter it wasn’t very good anyway. I will have to forget it all over again now! For those who haven’t read any of your books, which of your books do you think best represents your work and why? I suppose Literary Stalker, because it is in the horror/crime genre and it encompasses trends and ideas going back to my past short stories, so it is pretty representative. Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us? I don’t know if it will come across well out of context, but this is a description of the climax of a letters-of-the-alphabet hallucination underwent on an LSD trip from The Mad Artist: “Gargantuan floribundant lettered planets zoomed in from space, travelling light years to reach me, glowing brightly as multifarious patterned life populated their surfaces, only then for it dim, fade and die, only then for it to be replaced by still more glorious versions, the whole process racking up exponentially with unstoppable energy till whole lettered galaxies, whole lettered universes were living and dying within the intervals of my heartbeats…” Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next? My last book was Literary Stalker, which is about an obsessed horror author taking revenge on his enemies by “killing” them off within a novel he’s writing – The Facebook Murders. But what happens is that fiction and real life begin to crossover. The novel I’m currently working on, The Empty Chair, is more a literary work with similar nested fictions, involving a TV director trying to develop a film based on his own life, as it is happening. I also have another horror/crime piece in development, which is kind of borderline supernatural and involves chaos magic. If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice? I think it would have be “the killer isn’t really dead (or else has returned from the grave)”. It has been done well in the past but is now such a cliché we’re always anticipating it. What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you? My last really good, page-turning read was Michael Connelly’s Two Kinds of Truth, and I can’t think of a disappointing one. What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do? And what would be the answer? Why aren’t you famous when you have such a brilliant mind, and so many people who are actually famous are also really thick (based on celeb quiz show appearances)? My answer: Ha! Ha! If only it worked that way…but it doesn’t! Thanks for the opportunity, Jim! Social Media: http://www.rogerkeen.com/ https://www.facebook.com/MadArtistRogerKeen/ https://twitter.com/The_Mad_Artist https://musingsofthemadartist.wordpress.com/ https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4613921.Roger_Keen  
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