THERE'S A BIG STORM COMING AND IT'S GONNA WASH US ALL AWAY, AN INTERVIEW WITH TIM LEBBON

4/7/2022

And it's an interesting observation that it's become more antagonistic –– I hadn't consciously noticed that, but I guess it's my simmering anger at what we've done to the world bleeding through and giving nature a route to fight back in my writing

Here at Ginger Nuts of Horror we are gearing up for the release of The Last Storm by Tim Lebbon, the near future horror thriller from one of the UK's leading authors. Described by Christopher Golden as "Grim, dusty Americana, family drama, near-future horror. The best thing he’s ever done!" Ginger Nuts of Horror we kind of have to agree. The Last Storm is brilliant. To celebrate the launch of The Last Strom, we have tried to do something special. Kicking off with an in depth interview with Tim with added help from the fabulous Kelly White, we have also created a little road trip for the launch of the book with help from some of the best genre review websites, so be sure to check in each day for directions on how to read the full interview. There will also be a review from yours truly on Friday and next Tuesday I will be posting a feature on my five favourite Tim Lebbon books.

Hello Tim, how are things with you?

Afternoon, mate! I'm OK thank you. Hot and sweaty (we're currently in Wales's traditional 3-day summer), busy, but good.

The Last Storm is published early July, it must feel good to have a book coming out after the mess of the pandemic?

Absolutely. This is actually my first original novel in two years (following on from Eden), so I'm very excited to see it out there. As usual Titan have come up with a glorious cover, and I'm lucky enough to have loads of very lovely blurbs from writers I respect and admire. In some ways Covid feels like just a momentary blip ... but in other ways it's been a ten-year-long 18 months of nothing. So yes, it'll be good to have a new book on the shelves.

How much do you think the pandemic affected book releases from authors such as yourselves, with so many events being cancelled during the lock down years?

Eden was launched in May of 2020 and ... it didn't perform well. I think it's a great book, but it came out just at the wrong time. Everywhere was closed (I was supposed to be going on book tour, and there was a London Underground poster campaign which, of course, no one saw), and it was also just into Covid. Later, people started buying lots of books when they realised they might be in the house for a good long while. But I think people who didn't normally buy books looked at the bestsellers on Amazon and bought one of them. And Eden was not on that list, of course! So it wasn't a particularly good time. I remain upbeat though, I've written a TV pilot for Eden and my manager is currently showing it around LA. So, who knows. If it gets optioned, and even made, the book might have a second life.

Nature and the climate feel like characters in their own right in your fiction, and they have become more antagonistic in your most recent novels. How does this reflect your view of our world and what drives you in these portrayals?

I've always written about nature in my novels, from my very earliest mass market novel The Nature of Balance. I'm a real lover of nature, always have been, and I love living in the countryside, so I guess it's only natural that it often creeps into my fiction. It is featuring more heavily now, probably because I'm more worried than I've ever been about what we've done to the world and how we continue to influence the climate. Isn't everyone? I hope so! And it's an interesting observation that it's become more antagonistic –– I hadn't consciously noticed that, but I guess it's my simmering anger at what we've done to the world bleeding through and giving nature a route to fight back in my writing. Even with The Nature of Balance, though, nature was giving humanity a bit of a kicking! So I guess that aspect has always been there too. I do think we'll adapt and change as nature changes, and hopefully we'll also do our best to stop how much we're changing nature. But in my darker moments, such optimism feels pretty naive.

You wrote this novel longhand. How did that affect your experience of crafting the story compared with typing it? Is this a method you’ll stick with?

It was a hell of a task, more in the typing-up process than anything else. I started just before lockdown (I blame Rio Yours, one of my best friends and our best writers, who writes everything longhand. So, I thought I'd give it a try). Unfortunately, rather than travelling away from home and writing in cafes or on the tops of our local mountains, due to lockdown I had to find a quiet corner in our own house (with my son finishing A levels, my wife working at home, and my daughter completing her degree) and scritch and scratch into a series of notebooks. I really enjoyed the process, and I think it made the story flow much more naturally. I'm not a great typist -- even though I've written almost 50 novels, they're all been written using 4 or 5 fingers! So usually when I type I'm often breaking the flow because I'm constantly going back, correcting mistakes, and inevitably editing the writing. Working by hand, there was very little editing going on ... this was all pure first draft, and I think that helped the flow immensely. Saying that ... I have yet to repeat the experience! I probably will one day. It's all storytelling, whichever method you use.

The Last Storm feels like a logical successor to Eden, but where Eden felt somewhat upbeat in tone The Last Storm is a far angrier and more rural novel, where did this shift in tone come from?

Maybe because I was writing it during Covid? I don't know, it is a more brutal downbeat book in many ways, but there's always optimism in my work (although sometimes maybe you have to dig deep). It was a very strange time, writing the novel longhand in a pile of notebooks, trying to find a quiet spot in our small house with my wife working from home, my son finishing his A levels from home, and my daughter home from uni finishing her degree. Luckily we all get on great and lockdown never felt difficult for us, but being the writer I am, I did let the anxieties of Covid get to me sometimes. Maybe that bled through into the novel.

Are the two books set in the same version of our world?

I did think about that as I was writing The Last Storm, but I decided not to be overt about it. Simple answer ... yes, they could be. But there's no real connection in the stories.

In both novels the world is broken and on the brink of total shutdown, however The Last Storm to me has characters that are more akin to the world they live in, every single one of the main protagonists, is broken, was this a conscious decision on your part?

Hmmm, no I don't think that was conscious. In Eden my group of characters was a team from the beginning, supporting each other through their troubles. The Last Storm features a fractured family also confronting dangers from outside, so the set up is very different from the start. I don't think this was a conscious decision, just something that I think served the story best. It's as much a novel about the family coming together and discovering themselves again, as it is about the more supernatural elements and challenges from outside. And I think that's the sort of novel that works best for me.

Which of your characters did you get to know best in the process of writing The Last Storm?

All of them to different degrees. There are five POV characters in this novel, so that meant I had a great time getting into their heads, especially Ash who I wrote first person. Some people don't like novels that chop between first and third person perspectives, but I really like working like this, and it really suited how I wanted to tell this story. So while it doesn't suit every novel, I felt it worked well in The Last Storm. In a way Ash is the narrator of the whole story, and her sections are the actions that influence and drive everyone else. She is the star around which all the other characters orbit. I also really enjoyed writing Jimi, because he's the main antagonist, even though he has his reasons for doing the terrible things he does. Bad guys are fun to write, right?

It felt odd not having a traditional hero in the story, did having a cast of characters like this allow you more freedom with what you put them through?

I think it makes for a more realistic narrative, and also allows me to follow several points of view, which was essential to the story. I couldn't have told this tale from one point of view. They're each the hero of their own story, and I think writing about characters who are all driven and determined––whatever their faults, and however they start out in the novel––gives the story great forward momentum. It also allows me to explore the darker and lighter sides of each character. Even Jimi, the main antagonist, has his good side, though it's buried pretty fucking deep.

I was fascinated by the descriptions of the world in which The Last Storm is set in, particularly the world in balance where the world still has some of the features of ours like cars, mobile phones and a nationwide media, and yet it also had a Mad Max feel to it. Was there any reasons as to why you chose to do this?

From the very beginning I wanted this to read like an American road novel. It's built around journeys and pursuits. It's near future when the climate crisis is much, much worse than it is now, but while I wanted to ground it in a recognisible world, I wanted it to play out across that wonderfully epic American landscape––long dusty roads, little towns with one gas station, the wild. As it's called in the novel, the Desert. It could almost be a western. I think that makes the supernatural elements feel more settled and grounded, and also allows for the lawlessness that pervades the landscape of the book. It could be set the day after tomorrow. I worked hard on the US setting, always conscious that while I've been to the USA a dozen times or more, there's no way I really know the place that well. Luckily my agent said it doesn't read like someone who isn't American, so hopefully I got enough right to make it work. As for the Mad Max feel ... I honestly never really thought about that! But yes, I guess with the Soakers and the HotBloods, there's a hint of that sort of futuristic petrol-soaked endless highway landscape.

I’ve got to admit I was initially thrown by the prospect of rainmakers in the book, your depiction of them and they way in which they bring the rain, was totally left field, what was the inspiration for them?

A short story I wrote maybe 18 years ago called Hell Came Down. I've always been fascinated by stories of creatures falling from the sky––fish, frogs, all that Charles Fort/Arthur C Clark's Mysterious World sort of stuff––and I wrote the first story with that in mind. I adapted that into a screenplay which never went anywhere, and I guess the story just stayed with me, begging to be expored in more detail. I did research rainmaking efforts, both scientific methods and otherwise, and I wanted to come up with a way that felt more science-based than just purely magic. Hence the apparatus, and the way the rainmakers have to sort of plug into our world, and other worlds, to make it work.

And I’m probably grasping at straws but have we seen the rain world before? It’s been a while since I last read them but that wasn’t Noreela was it?

Not consciously. But now you say that ... maybe!

I remember chatting to Christopher Golden about the book, and he mentioned that i should buckle in for the final act, oh boy was he right, that has to be one of the most balls to the wall, final acts i have read in a long time, did you always plan to go to the max?

I tend not to plan in great detail, but I knew the climax would be the drawing together of these different characters, and that Ash's rainmaking would have been getting more and more intense and dangerous throughout the novel. There's a lot of stuff in there that actually surprised even me, to be honest. This doesn't always happen to me, but the climax of this book was one of those that told me the way it needed to be, not the other way around. It's good when I finsih a writing day surprised at how things went.*

(*who died that I wasn't expecting to die).

And I have got to ask, why Jimi, everyone knows apart from Hendrix, it’s Jimmy?

Er, I can't remember to be honest. I should change his name to honour you! Quick, Titan, can I do that?

Let’s talk drinks and nibbles. If you could choose a glass of whiskey, or two, to go well with The Last Storm, what would that be? And perhaps more importantly, if readers were to enjoy the book with a slice of cake, what would you recommend?

Now you're talking my language! I don't claim to be a whiskey connoisseur, but my favourite regular tipple is probably Jamesons, so smooth and lovely. I'm also fond of a nice Glenmorangie. As for cake ... how long have we got? I guess for The Last Storm a nice chocolate cake would be good, heavy and tasty, and a decent amount of calories to see you through the Desert. There ... now I want cake. Thanks!

What would you like the readers to take away from reading The Last Storm?

The memory of an exciting, action-packed story that has family at its heart.

Rather than asking what you are working on next, what’s the one book of yours that you wish you could go back and write a sequel to?

Aha ... great question. Well, it's The Silence. After the movie was released on Netflix, for several months there was talk of a sequel happening, and I was heavily involved in developing ideas. I went through a dozen drafts of different ideas. First it was happening, then it wasn't, then Tucci was coming back, then he wasn't ... and eventually of course it never did. So rather than waste all that effort, I put together all the ideas I thought worked as a sequel (and honestly, some of those we'd come up with didn't), and wrote a second novel proposal. I also wrote the first three chapters, and I think it's a really great sequel that honours the first book while moving the story on. But unfortunately it wasn't to be right then, and instead I wrote The Last Storm, which I actually see as a good thing. But maybe one day. I know I'm not the only one who wants to know what became of that family.

The Last Storm
by Tim Lebbon

A gripping, terrifying road trip through the heat of the post-apocalyptic American desert from the author of Netflix’s The Silence. This action-packed and thought-provoking eco-nightmare will appeal to fans of Benjamin Percy, Christopher Golden and Josh Malerman.

With global warming out of control, large swathes of North America have been struck by famine and drought and are now known as the Desert. A young woman sets out across this dry, hostile landscape, gradually building an arcane apparatus she believes will bring rain to the parched earth.

Jesse lives alone, far from civilization. Once, he too made rain, but he stopped when his abilities caused fatalities, bringing down not just rain but scorpions, strange snakes and spiders. When his daughter Ash inherited this tainted gift, Jesse did his best to stop her. His attempt went tragically wrong, and he believes himself responsible for her death.

But now his estranged wife Karina brings news that Ash is still alive. And she’s rainmaking again. Terrified of what she might bring down upon the desperate communities of the Desert, they set out to find her. But Jesse and Karina are not the only ones looking for Ash. As the storms she conjures become more violent and deadly, some follow her seeking hope. And one is hungry for revenge.