 Today at Ginger Nuts of Horror Benjamin Langley takes over the site with this brilliant interview, an excerpt from his latest novel Dead Branches, and the chance to win a copy of Dead Branches. (Details on how to win a copy of the book can be found at the end of this interview and at the end of the excerpt shares and comments on both articles and the pinned tweet count as multiple entries in the prize draw) Benjamin Langley has been writing since he could hold a pen and has always been drawn to dark tales. His debut novel, Dead Branches, was released by Bloodshot Books in June. He has had short stories published in over a dozen publications including Crescendo of Darkness, Deadman’s Tome, and The Manchester Review. He has also written Sherlock Holmes adventures that have featured in Adventures in the Realm of H.G. Wells, Adventures Beyond the Canon, and Adventures in the Realm of Steampunk. Benjamin has also written comedy sketches that have been performed on stage, radio and television. He lives, writes, and teaches in Cambridgeshire, UK. WEBSITE LINKS https://twitter.com/B_J_Langley https://www.facebook.com/BenjaminLangleyWriter/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B07C3Q1LT3 Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself? I’m a fiction writer and teacher from Cambridgeshire. I’ve always lived in the area and that’s probably why it ended up as the setting for my first novel, Dead Branches. With the release of my novel I’ve started considering myself a writer who teaches rather than a teacher who writes. I reckon that’s a significant step forward. I’ve been writing as long as I can remember. I’ve always been a storyteller. One of my earliest memories is writing a story in an exercise book about a group of people who flew the Earth and crash landed on another planet. None of the characters had names, so they were referred to by things like, ‘the man with the ladder’. Why one would decide to take a ladder when fleeing the Earth, I don’t quite remember… 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. The older Andy Carter. Dead Branches has a modern day timeline and one from 1990. In 1990 Andy’s only young; he’s obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (he dresses as Michaelangelo) and he’s full of enthusiasm. He doesn’t appear in the present sections of the novel, but he is mentioned, and I think he’d be pretty upset about how the events in 1990 affected him, and what it turned him into. Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing? When I was a kid, I used to read a lot of Fighting Fantasy books, and some of the early stories I wrote (in the latter years of primary school) were sword and sorcery epics with enormous casts of characters. I invented a new Fighting Fantasy gamebook for Dead Branches called The Secret of the Scythe which influences some of the decisions the protagonist, Thomas Tilbrook, makes. I was also really into transgressive fiction in my 20s and early 30s – Chuck Palahniuk, Craig Clevenger, Irvine Welsh – a favorite was Will Christopher Baer’s Phineas Poe trilogy. Other than that, music. I’m a bit stuck in my ways, the bands I loved in my teens in the mind 90s are still some of my favourites. 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? This is a really interesting point, and something which I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. It came up in some of the interviews at Edge-Lit – Neil Spring and Stephen Volk were discussing how ‘horror’ is almost a dirty word in publishing. If you look at something like The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor, you’ll see that it’s got a cover quote by Stephen King, and most of the reviews compare the work to King’s, but the word ‘horror’ is never used in its publicity. I’ve been guilty of avoiding the term horror in some of the publicity I’ve done for my novel to avoid putting people off, sometimes calling it a mystery, a thriller, or saying that it’s full of suspense. And I’ve had people come up to me asking if the novel will scare them, if it’s gory and things like that. What can we do to break it? I think we need to embrace the term (and I’ve already said that I’m guilty of eschewing it). Stop treating horror novels as guilty pleasures. Horror films now seem to be getting a little more respect and are able to carry that label, so it’s only a matter of time before the horror novel is accepted in the same way, hopefully. With my next novel there will be no hiding. It’s straight up supernatural and much more obviously belonging to the horror genre. 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 we could see the rise of the dictator character, or horrors that crossover into dystopian worlds. We also seem to be thinking more about what happens after – post-horror, maybe. Look at the recent adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House. Much of the TV series took place in the present, and it wasn’t about a new horror emerging, but about how the horrors of the past had affected the characters. Kealan Patrick Burke’s Kin was largely about recovery from a horror and a return to it. The novel I’m currently working on is about the aftermath of an event, and I’m pondering whether the event needs to be fully realised in the novel at all if the actual story is in what happens afterwards. Given the dark, violent and at times grotesque nature of the horror genre why do you think so many people enjoy reading it? I’d like to think it was more to do with escapism than any repressed desire to commit horror. Coming back to the previous question about the state of the world, maybe if we can escape to a fictional world which is truly horrific helps us to either put the reality into perspective, or to see characters overcome greater horrors, making ours seem surmountable. What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre? As a genre, horror has more than its fair share of tropes, but we’re seeing more and more authors either subvert those ideas or reject them altogether. It would be great if some of these tales broke through into the mainstream. What else is missing? Really good TV adaptations of some of the recent great horror novels we’ve seen. You get the movie adaptations which sometimes hurry through the plot and miss huge chunks, but there’s so much out there which would make a great one-season TV series (I don’t want to see my favourite tale dragged out over as many seasons as they can thin it out to.) 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 think we have to (and always should have been) respectful in regard to whatever or whoever we’re writing about. Do your research. If you need to, get someone who knows more than you to have a read-through to make sure that you’re not about to make a fool of yourself. What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice off? As a newbie myself, I feel a little on the outside of things, so I don’t tend to pick up on what’s new and upcoming until it’s here, but I can tell you about a couple of books I’m looking forward to. As Bloodshot Books took a chance on me, I always keep an eye on their releases. Adam Millard’s The October Boys is due out in August. It’s promise of a sinister ice-cream man has me intrigued. Jeremy Helper’s The Boulevard Monster was great, and he’s got a new one out later this year called Cricket Hunters which I’m really looking forward to. Also, I recently met Phil Sloman at at horror reading event in Norwich – Midsummer Macabre, and his reading of a short story from his collection Broken on the Inside in which a man swallowed a fly was an amazing bit of visceral body horror that has me excited to see what he does next. What are the books and films that helped to define you as an author? I grew up reading a lot of Stephen King, but before that, Robert Westall’s stories used to scare me. I think through both of those I started to write using young narrators as they tend to see the world in a different way. Stephen King does the small community horror so well, and I think that was on my mind when I tried to create the village of Little Mosswick for Dead Branches. Film-wise, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, made me think about humans as the cause of the horror, and I get a touch of black humour from Sam Raimi’s work. Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative that have stayed with you? Not yet. Not official reviews. I remember writing stories as a kid though, and having them read out to the whole class, and being complimented on them. That was nice. That kind of thing sticks with you – might explain why I’m still writing now. What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult? Time. I enjoy all aspects of the writing process. I love writing a first draft, and seeing the ideas come alive. I’m not much of a plotter, outside of the general skeleton of the work, so sometimes it can surprise me. I like editing, taking something I’ve written and trimming some parts out and polishing others. I guess the parts that are most difficult are the bits external to that process. Writing can be an introverted process, so going to events and networking, meeting people, can be really tough for me. Promotion too. How do you know if what you’re doing is the right thing? When is it too much? Am I pissing everyone off by tweeting another quote from a review? 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 tend to think about how they and try to get them to reflect the character to some degree. I’m a fan of the unusual forename, common surname combo. I wrote a story once featuring a guy called Lexington Fox, for example. Writing, is not a static process, how have you developed as a writer over the years? Reading outside of your genre and your comfort zone is massively important for this, and being made to do so by studying a BA in Writing and English and then an MA in Creative Writing forced me to do an awful lot of that. So much of what I’ve done over the last 10 years has helped me to grow as a writer, whether that be going to university, attending writers’ groups, or even going into teaching where I had to think about some of the fundamentals of what makes great writing, and condense it into something meaningful and useable by secondary school students. Ideas have never been a problem for me, but the real development has come in how those ideas are crafted. What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing? Get it written; then get it right. You know, allowing yourself to have that crappy first draft which you can then shape into what you really want. For those who haven’t read any of your books, which of your books do you think best represents your work and why? Due to lack of choice, it’ll have to be Dead Branches. That said, I’ve got lots of short stories out there, some in anthologies, some which can be found online, but it’s my first novel which really showcases what I can do as a writer. I suppose I’ve been working on it for so long, that it feels like it represents a part of me. Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us? I have a story in the horroraddicts.net anthology Crescendo of Darkness. I still chuckle at its ridiculous title, ‘While my Guitar Gently Bleeds’. Here’s a line from it to give you a taste: “The guitar caught enough of his head to slice off a chunk of hairy flesh from his scalp and send it flying to the studio floor with a wet plop.” Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next? My debut novel, Dead Branches, was released by Bloodshot Books in June. It’s a coming-of-age horror set in the Cambridgeshire Fens. The protagonist, Thomas Tilbrook receives a letter revealing that his estranged father is dying. He decides that he needs to see him for one last time, which forces him to return to the place he grew up, and forces him to remember the summer of 1990. Everything was going great: the days were long, the sun was shining and the World Cup was on TV. But then his best friend, John, went missing. Adults in the community refuse to tell the kids what was going on, so they decide to investigate for themselves, using a deck of horror Top Trumps to guide them as they search for clues. Later this year I’ve got a short story in a forthcoming H.G. Wells tribute anthology, which is a take on The Invisible Man. I recently finished a supernatural novel with the working title Is She Dead in Your Dreams? which I’d like to see released next year, and I’m currently writing a novel called Normal which is about the aftermath of a disappearance. I suppose the three novels make up a thematic missing kids trilogy. If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice? The twist – and it turns out the killer is not the person that all the clues led you to believe, but this irrelevant character who was mentioned briefly in chapter 2, and subsequently absent from the plot. Your reader might be surprised, but it’s not satisfying unless the writer has gone to the trouble of foreshadowing it and making it logical. What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you? Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World is the novel that’s stuck with me most over those I’ve read recently. I hate to say it, but I was left a little disappointed by NOS4R2. I’ve loved the other Joe Hill novels I’ve read (Horns and Heart-Shaped Box) but this one left me a little cold. I read it at a terrible time when I was down to about 20 minutes reading a night when I was absolutely exhausted, so that didn’t help, but it felt a little like he was being pressured to write like his father rather than being allowed to do his own thing. What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do? And what would be the answer? Q: “Would you like to write a story for our horror anthology?” A: “Yes.” DEAD BRANCHES BY BENJAMIN LANGLEY  COMPETITION1. Share this post using the share button at the side of the article 2. Dead Branches is set in 1990. Leave a comment below telling us your most horrific memory of the 1990's. 3. Like and Retweet our pinned tweet - https://twitter.com/GNHorror/status/1161524142308548609 1 copy, UK only. Entries on both articles count and the pinned tweet as multiple entries in the prize draw, so share and comment on both articles and the tweet    Comments are closed.
|
Archives
May 2023
|
RSS Feed
|
|