 Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself? I’m a writer and filmmaker from Merseyside, now living in London. I have a PhD in Music from Goldsmiths University and I spend most of my time these days writing film journalism and novels. When time and funding permits, I sometimes make short films on super-8 and I run the website Celluloid Wicker Man. What do you like to do when you're not writing? My life currently is a bit like that train sequence from the Wallace & Gromit film The Wrong Trousers where Gromit has to lay the line of the toy train at breakneck speed whilst actually on the train so he can catch the penguin. My writing life is currently a bit like that so almost everything I do has to be geared towards the writing in some way so I can pay my rent and continue getting work. That said, I’m lucky that my work so often involves having to read a lot, watch a lot (films and older television) and even visiting a lot places connected to literature or film: so reading, watching and visiting unusual places breaks up the writing. Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing? I think the most influential thing on what I do has been a childhood immersed in Doctor Who. When you’re watching what is essentially surreal archive television at a very young age, and I mean almost every day where it was possible thanks to VHS, its openness to the sheer absurdity of all sorts of fiction, ideas and genres, totally leaves you open later in life for things that others would probably find absurd to seek inspiration from. There’s no better opening for genre basically. The other big influence was discovering aesthetic philosophy at university and how the writing opened up and challenged everything, creatively, morally and politically. Theodor Adorno got to me for a while, not just in his style of writing but how his theories sat in contrary with my obvious leaning towards pop culture. Also Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze were and still are surprisingly big influences on what I do. So yes, Doctor Who and post-war twentieth-century philosophy… 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 not quite sure to be honest, especially because I don’t consider my fiction work to be purely of the horror genre. It deliberately blurs the lines stylistically, in the same way that Magic Realism has done with fantasy, drawing on techniques from European Literary fiction in particular, but sometimes sneaking in imagery or ideas more associated with what people would consider “horror.” Quite a lot of the writers I admire do this. However, I think it’s worth noting that negative reactions to genre connotations are often derived from very little experience of what the genre can do and when people have problems with such connotations it’s usually from a bias, perhaps even a snobbishness, born solely and purely from ignorance. 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 in film has always done this, more so I think than traditional drama, so it’s no surprise to find the genre in cinema in such a healthy place when the world is so dizzyingly chaotic. I wish I could share an opinion on the literature equivalent but when I do dip into horror literature, it’s usually from older works. The last horror book I read was Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider, and even then, that’s more of a theological parable from 1842 that just happens to feature a black spider growing out of someone’s face. What are the books and films that helped to define you as an author? The Rings of Saturn and The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald The Television plays of Nigel Kneale Extinction and Correction by Thomas Bernhard The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James The Waves and Orlando by Virginia Woolf The films of Andrei Tarkovsky The Caretaker and The Homecoming by Harold Pinter What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice off? Édouard Louis for biting but beautiful political writing and Benjamin Myers who, though not new, is finally getting the recognition he deserves. How would you describe your writing style? Plagued by memories and photographs. Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative that have stayed with you? Most of the negative ones grate for a few days before I realise that even my favourite authors have it far worse off online. With my last book, (Folk Horror) that was to be expected as it was a semi-academic book that became unusually popular because of the subject matter and academic writing is not readily accessible. The writing process for it was also chaotic so some negative reviews were bound to crop up. I wish I could re-write the last book in a more accessible writing style but its subject is of less interest to me these days and there are more pressing books that need attention. What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult? The public speaking that inevitably is now be part and parcel of writing and publishing a book is the most difficult part for me. I’m not too bad at public speaking admittedly but the anxiety I suffer in the run up to it is far worse than anything in the writing process itself. You’d think I was being sent to the gallows or something. Is there one subject you would never write about as an author? I don’t think I’d ever write anything purely historical. I’m much more interested in the present. The past plays a huge part in everything I write but is only interesting to me in my fiction when it’s connected with hindsight to the present and the vast cacophony of changes in between. How important are names to you in your books? Do you choose the names based on liking the way it sounds or the meaning? Thomas of Mothlight is actually a nod to the character from Antonioni’s adaptation of Blowup; another protagonist whose life is haunted by photographs. The narrator of my next book is named Isabelle after Isabelle Huppert… For those who haven’t read any of your books, which of your books do you think best represents your work and why? Mothlight is most representative of what I want to be doing at least as it is fiction. I won’t be writing another nonfiction book for quite some time yet though when I do it’ll be about Polaroid photographs. Can you tell us about what you are working on next? The initial draft was finished a while ago for my next fiction How Pale The Winter Has Made Us which is going to also published by Influx Press in 2020. It’s about a woman away in the French city of Strasbourg who hears of the suicide of her father in London and opts to stay there over winter. She goes rather mad in the process, deciding to research and obsess over the history of the town and its various occupants such as Goethe, Gutenberg and Jean-Hans Arp, to the point where reality and history begins to dissolve. I’m currently working on the pitching draft for the fiction after that which is currently under the title of Nettles and reframes some unhappy memories from my own past on Merseyside as something weirder. Dealing with such memories is only possible for the narrator by building a strange, eerie world around the spirits of the Wirral marshland and a local stone called Grannies Rock. If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice? Perhaps reliance on jump scares which have become a handy shorthand for “We’ve ran out of ideas.” We’re far from The Exorcist III shall we say… What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you? Great: History of Violence by Édouard Louis Disappointed: Candide by Voltaire about Adam Scovell Adam Scovell is a writer and filmmaker from Merseyside now based in London. His writing has featured in The Times, BFI, Sight & Sound, Little White Lies and The Quietus. He runs the website, Celluloid Wicker Man, and his film work has been screened at a variety of festivals and events. In 2015, he worked with Robert Macfarlane on an adaptation of his Sunday Times best-seller, Holloway, and has worked on films alongside Stanley Donwood, Iain Sinclair and BAFTA-nominated director, Paul Wright. His first book, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, was published by Auteur in 2017 and he has recently completed his PhD at Goldsmiths University. Twitter: @adamscovell Website: http://www.celluloidwickerman.com Book link: https://www.influxpress.com/mothlight/ Amazon link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mothlight-Adam-Scovell/dp/1910312371/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1546505642&sr=8-1&keywords=mothlight+adam+scovell mothlight "The idea was lost but the memory was here." Phyllis Ewans, a prominent researcher in lepidoptera and a keen walker, has died of old age. Thomas, a much younger fellow researcher of moths first met Phyllis when he was a child. He became her carer and companion, having rekindled her acquaintance in later life. Increasingly possessed by thoughts that he somehow actually is Phyllis Ewans, and unable to rid himself of the feeling that she is haunting him, Thomas must discover her secrets through her many possessions and photographs, before he is lost permanently in a labyrinth of memories long past. Steeped in dusty melancholy and analogue shadows, MOTHLIGHT is an uncanny story of grief, memory and the price of obsession. Read our review of Mothlight here
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