For issue 200 of STARBURST I asked a number of authors to list their influences in under 100 words ...
MICHAEL MOORCOCK
Fantasy novelist
My influences are clear because they consist of the small
library my father left behind when he fled the domestic hearth – Edgar Rice
Burroughs, Edwin Lester Arnold, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Anon (author
of Timothy Tatters) – and books I
enjoyed as a kid – Richmal Crompton, P. G. Wodehouse, the Sexton Blake Library
and Frank Richards’ school stories, Planet
Stories, The Tempest and most
important of all John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress. Visionary fiction, rather than science fiction or fantasy, has
always appealed to me (I’ve read very little genre sf) and I still find a lot
more pleasure in Milton and Melville than in the prosaic predictions of
Heinlein & Co.
STEPHEN LAWS
Horror novelist
Alright, I admit it. I have all of the Starburst magazines, going back to Issue No 1. Some of them are
even in (gasp) binders. Back then, in 1978, it seemed that high quality
magazines dealing with all aspects of ‘fantastic’ cinema and related matters
were very few and far between. As an avid fan, I eagerly awaited each issue and
its excellent interviews with genre luminaries, together with insightful
reviews. Many things ‘fanned the flame’ of my enthusiasm back then. My first
novel was published seven years later and when I look back on the various
aspects that helped keep the flame alive I’m quite convinced that Starburst magazine was one of them.
Thanks to you all.
STAN NICHOLLS
Science Fiction novelist and genre columnist
Reality is becoming science fiction. And it’s science
fiction that’s doing it.
Okay: inter alia.
But what started with garish paperbacks under the school desk now looks like
the best education for slamming into futurity. Bring on the visionaries,
romantics, utopians. Give me daydreams and nightmares, fantasy and fancies,
speculation and scaremongering. What if the critlit establishment’s sneers rise
in direct proportion to the level of imagination displayed? Who wanted to go to
their hard cheese and whine party anyway?
You can keep Virginia Woolf’s Collected Shopping Lists.
Just leave me the key to the FTL drive in my head.
LES EDWARDS
Horror and fantasy artist
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t draw and I’ve been
influenced by so many artists along the way that it seems invidious to choose
just one. However, if you tie me down and beat me, I will confess to being much
affected by a particular comic strip. It was drawn by Frank Bellamy and it
appeared in the centre pages of the Eagle.
It chronicled the adventures of a Roman centurion and is perhaps best described
as ‘proto-sword and sorcery’. The strip was called Heros the Spartan and I wish someone would reprint it.
RICHARD LAYMON
Horror novelist
My earliest warp in the direction of horror may have been a
bedtime reading of Ali Baba and the Seven
Thieves by Daisy, my great aunt Emma’s companion, who was babysitting for
my brother and I. A toddler at the time, I was so terrified by the story that I
cried. I’ve never fully recovered. The story creeped me out badly – especially
the beheading scene. (Oddly enough, decapitation rears its ugly head in nearly
all of my novels.)
Later, television gave me the old Universal monster movies.
Other major early influences were shows such as Outer Limits, Alfred
Hitchcock Presents, Thriller and Twilight Zone.
The Hardy Boys books introduced me to the thrills of
reading. My idol, in my early teens, was Robert Bloch. I liked the simplicity,
scares, humour and tricky plots of his stories.
NICHOLAS ROYLE
Dark Fantasy novelist and editor
The 1968 Huckleberry
Hound Annual contained a Pixie, Dixie and Mr Jinks picture story entitled The Frightful Night. Pixie and Dixie were
two mice, Mr Jinks the big cat which used to terrorise them. In this tale, Mr
Jinks puts a paper bag on his head, attaches bolts either side and comes on
like a monster to the mice. Unmoved, however, they retaliate with a
dressmaker’s dummy kitted out with similar bag and a fur-lined coat. Now this
was frightening, both for Mr Jinks and for the five-year-old boy sitting
reading it next to the central heating vent in the dining room of his parents’
house in Whitley Bay.
If any reader has a copy of the 1968 annual for sale that
would make me very happy.
JOE DONNELLY
Horror novelist
The first influence, as far as horror is concerned, was the
mentally generated creature, the Id of Dr Morbius in Forbidden Planet. I was six years old and the sudden appearance on
screen of this monster, visible only as pulses of electricity, absolutely
terrified me. I had nightmares for weeks. It scared me because I could not
comprehend its existence.
I’ve had the same occult unease ever since, the shiver at
what cannot easily be explained, the dread of the creature under the bed and
its relative who makes the floorboards creak in the dark. I write about them to
keep them at bay.
Also, in childhood, I discovered Celtic mythology, full of
supernatural and terrifying tales. Most of my stories have a hint of the old
weird ways.
ANDREW HARMAN
Fantasy novelist
Influences? Me? Definitely. Four people figure large: Gerry
Anderson – a man who proved spaceships, Martians and dramatic disasters are
real; Oliver Postgate – who showed that a small furry animal called Tog, a
saggy old cloth cat called Bagpuss and little knitted creatures whistling in
outer space are all very real; then there’s Mum and Dad who encouraged me to
build Lego Thunderbird 2s, Meccano iron chickens and to search for Pogles in
the wood.
Others include: Brian Aldiss, J. R. R. Tolkien, Messrs
Asimov, Clarke, Harrison and Bear, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, George
Lucas, Monty Python and, of course, a certain Mr P…
DAVID SUTTON
Horror and fantasy author and editor
When I watched, in terror and wonder, the original Quatermass and the Pit serial on BBC
Television (1958/9), little did I know by how much my future life would be
influenced. I was eleven years old. After Quatermass’ warning to the world in
the final episode, I was left stunned and deeply moved. Looking back, I can see
with clarity how Nigel Kneale’s blend of science fiction, ancient mysteries,
ghosts, magic and mind control would later merge me perfectly into the
interdisciplinary thinking that has shaped my life and interests. I am
essentially a Fortean and Kneale’s serial had those elements which suggest it
is at our peril that we narrowly pigeonhole life and our thought processes …
and since the renegade professor haunted the TV screens those many years ago, I
have gone on to work widely within the genre, editing and publishing magazines
and books, and writing fiction. But the doing of all that was largely given
impetus by that thrilling and wonderful serial.
PETER ATKINS
Horror novelist and screenwriter
Along with my generation’s usual suspects (Famous Monsters, TV screenings of
Universal movies, Moorcock’s New Worlds,
etc), the real guilty party in the corruption of eight-year old Pete was a
Liverpool newsagent. Mr Ford (I still don’t know his first name) was one of a
vanished breed of port-city entrepreneurs, relying for his stock on grey
marketeering, merchant seamen bearing back Treasures from the New World –
comics, monster movie mags, horror paperbacks. I was to be the first of my
family to go to University and my father no doubt had his own dreams for me.
But it was no use. From the moment I saw Dwight Frye’s painted nightmare face
staring out of the cover of FM 18, I
was lost to the world of realism and middle-management. Thanks, Mr Ford.
GRAHAM MASTERTON
Horror novelist
As a boy, I was strongly influenced by Jules Verne, H. G.
Wells and Edgar Allan Poe, but also by more whimsical writers like Lewis
Carroll. The idea of parallel and alternative worlds constantly fascinates me –
whether these worlds exist inside mirrors (as in my novel Mirror), or dreams (Night
Warriors) or even within solid walls (Walkers).
In my latest novel Spirit, much of
the action takes place inside storybooks. Horror is a difficult and challenging
medium because you are creating a ‘reality’ which can defy all the laws of
sanity and logic. Have you looked into your wallpaper lately?
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
Horror novelist
While the influences of Lovecraft and M. R. James are easily
found in my stuff, the writer who showed me the route I was to follow was Fritz
Leiber. For me he’s still the greatest master of the tale of the urban
supernatural, in which the terror doesn’t invade the big city but is part of
it. It was an honour for me to know him and once to read alongside him in New
York, and his criticisms in Fantastic
showed me how to improve. He believed that the best horror fiction involved
both wonder and terror, and so it should. Read him and see.
STEPHEN GALLAGHER
Horror and thriller novelist
I think I’m part of a generation of British writers who,
whether they realise it or not, owe a lot to Nigel Kneale. One of my earliest
memories is of being at a big family party and seeing everything stop while the
TV set – this being the time when most people didn’t have one, but everyone
knew someone who did – was trundled out so that the grownups could watch Quatermass and the Pit.
Can’t remember a damn thing about what I saw, but the room’s
awed atmosphere is with me still. I’ve a suspicion that I’ve been
subconsciously trying to recreate it for others ever since.
Kneale’s great achievement was to stake out a territory that
was confident, contemporary, and ours. Suddenly the call of the Weird was
coming from somewhere much closer to home.
STEVE BOWKETT (aka BEN LEECH)
Horror novelist
One summer Saturday afternoon, as a boy of ten living in a
Welsh mining village, I walked to the local coal tip to go fossil hunting. In
my dufflebag; sandwiches, hammer, chisel and a copy of the first ever Doctor Who annual. Having dug a haul of
fossil ferns and leaves, I sat to eat my tea and read of The Lair of the Zarbi Supremo and The Sons of the Crab until evening.
The twilight deepened. Lights came on in the valley below
and the stars appeared above. Horizons of time, space and possibility were
opened up for me then. I’ve been exploring ever since.
STORM CONSTANTINE
Fantasy novelist
As a child I was influenced by the myths of ancient cultures
– Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece – and wrote lots of rambling stories about gods
and pharaohs. Later, I discovered those writers who redefined fantastic
literature in the ‘70s – mainly, for me, Mike Moorcock, Tanith Lee and Jane
Gaskell. Reading their work inspired me to invent my own strange worlds and
cultures. My most recent source of inspiration is the work of animators like
the Brothers Quay and Jan Svenkmajer. Watching one of their weirdly,
discomfortingly beautiful films ensures the removal of writer’s block! My
ambition is to have one of my stories animated by the Brothers Quay, so if
they’re reading this …
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
Horror novelist
London at night, Pan
Books of Horror, The Exorcist,
Evelyn Waugh, Dickens, Joe Orton, Witchfinder
General, J. G. Ballard, Barbarella,
Ray Bradbury, grotesque Victorian children’s books, my mother, Mervyn Peake, M.
R. James, Michael Nyman, Hammer, Greek myths, Peter Cushing, John Barry, Conan
Doyle, the Thames, Lucifer, Edmund Crispin, Tony Hancock, Ray Harryhausen, The Beano, Aurora model kits, Greenwich
library, E. M. Forster, Gilbert and Sullivan, Stephen Sondheim, Monty Python,
Shakespeare, Marvel Comics, Quatermass,
Famous Monsters of Filmland,
pre-Raphaelites, Woolwich Odeon, Playboy,
Boileau and Narcejec, St Trinians,
Norman Wisdom, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, Carry
On films, the Bible, Soho, sex and … death.
JESSICA PALMER
Science Fiction and fantasy novelist
Writing is a hereditary disease for which there is no cure.
However, one cannot refute the influence of environment. I learned about
graphic violence and horror where one should … in the home. Working as a
psychiatric nurse completed my education. Experience taught me that truth, even
more than beauty, is in the eye of the beholder and the murky depths of
subconscious, a much safer place to be than reality. Hence, I set about to
create my own verity. Since sadism is the inevitable twin of masochism, I chose
to inflict this truth on others while the genre generally reflects my mood.
Since I’ve switched from horror to sf and fantasy, I must deduce my mental
health is improving.
TOM HOLT
Fantasy novelist
Holt aged twelve was stunted, sullen and fat; accordingly,
much kicked by his peers; tried kicking back – mug’s game, legs too short;
adopted pose of intellectual superiority (even wrote poetry; book of same
published at age twelve) led to further, now thoroughly-deserved mayhem.
By-product; at age twelve, read plays of Aristophanes (earliest surviving
intentionally funny Western literature), which are what’s now termed comic
fantasy – dazzling leaps of imagination undercut at every turn by awareness of
own ludicrousness; late seventies (still stunted, fat; less sullen), recognises
Hitch-Hikers’ Guide is basically the
same thing and people seem to like it, decides to have a go. The rest is –
well, scarcely history; let’s call it bibliography.
BRIAN STABLEFORD
Science Fiction novelist
What if Dorian Gray had paused for reflection after picking
up the knife? What if he had put it down again, realising that the
monstrousness of the painting changed nothing except for its genre? What if he
had understood that by virtue of his magnificent excesses Basil Hallward’s
exercise in old-fashioned representative realism had metamorphosed into a
masterpiece of modern impressionism? What if he had said to himself: “This is
not the end, but the beginning”…?
What if Oscar Wilde, inspired by his character’s great leap
of the imagination, had challenged the Marquess of Queensberry to a duel
instead of a lawsuit, and had shot the foul-mouthed bully dead, thus avoiding
crucifixion by the moronic moralists of his day and extending his glittering
career…?
The possibilities are endless – but then, they always are.
That’s the whole point, isn’t it?
LISA TUTTLE
Horror novelist
As a child, clambering like a monkey on my father’s floor to
ceiling bookshelves, I read whatever appealed to me, which was mostly the weird
or fantastic. Omnibus collections of great supernatural and ghost stories, the
collected works of Edgar Allen Poe and Ambrose Bierce mingled strangely in my
mind with gleanings from the selected works of Sigmund Freud. Also there was a
book called Bikey the Skycycle about
a bicycle capable of interplanetary journeys. Ray Bradbury was my greatest
discovery at the public library; for a long time he and E. Nesbit were my chief
literary idols.
MARK MORRIS
Horror novelist
Compressing my influences into one hundred words is almost
impossible, but Rupert Bear, Doctor Who,
the Pan/Fontana Horror/Ghost collections, and punk rock comes pretty close. I
still recall the frisson of fear I
felt reading the story Rupert and Ragetty,
in which a spiny, root-like creature crawls from beneath a felled tree during a
storm, my awe and terror as the Autons – living mannequins – jerked to life and
crashed through shop windows in Doctor
Who. I recall reading horror stories under the bedclothes, then lying
awake, convinced that every sound was a horrible something coming to get
me. And punk rock? Well, that made a rebel of me, gave me the pig-headedness to
stick with what I wanted to do, no matter how discouraging people were.
DAVID GARNETT
Science fiction novelist and editor
My biggest influence? Short stories.
The first sf book I ever read was More Penguin Science Fiction, edited by Brian Aldiss. That was what
hooked me on science fiction. I read every anthology I could find, then went
onto the magazines. New Worlds was
always my favourite. When I began writing short stories, that was where I sent
them. Michael Moorcock was the editor – and he sent them all back!
That was all a long time ago, and I’m still hooked on short
sf. Reading it, writing it. But I still haven’t had a story in New Worlds. Instead, I’m the editor.
Which is nearly as good.
GUY N. SMITH
Horror novelist
My earliest influence into writing came from my mother (E.
M. Weale), a pre-war historical writer who encourage me to write. At the age of
twelve I was having short stories published in the children’s page of a local
newspaper. Many of these were horror and sf. I read Weird Tales as soon as I was old enough but my greatest influence
in the genre was Badger Books (Spencer) and particularly R. Lionel Fanthorpe
who wrote most of these novels under a variety of pseudonyms. Much later I was
to form a close friendship with Fanthorpe. I have always liked pulp fiction and
I think that the best of this was to be found in the New English Library horror
list of the early seventies. The covers were superb, the stories basic but very
readable. I have always been an advocate of simplicity; I think that
today there is too much emphasis on length and complicated psychological plots.
STEPHEN JONES
Horror and fantasy editor and columnist
100 words to list my influences? If I had ten times that
many, I couldn’t do justice to all those people, publications and pictures that
helped meld my malleable young mind: Walt Disney’s The Shaggy Dog, which was the first movie I ever saw in the cinema
… Stan Lee’s new age of Marvel Comics … anything illustrated by Murphy
Anderson, Carmine Infantino or Neal Adams for DC Comics … Willis O’Brien’s
mighty King Kong … the Weird Tales circle of writers such as H.
P. Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, Clark Ashton Smith … and of course, Forrest J.
Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland
magazine … Without any of the above, I would not be having such fun writing and
editing today!
KIM NEWMAN
Horror novelist and genre critic
In the horror field, fear is overrated. I’m often asked if
I’m scared by what I write (sometimes, but not in the way they mean) or what
scares me (the usual things). Actually, I’m far more likely to write about what
angers me than what frightens me. The central nugget of many of my stories and
novels is something momentous or trivial that prompts me to foaming fury:
resurgent fascism, the tabloid press, queue-jumpers, colorisation of old
movies, the Government. A graphologist once examined my handwriting and told me
I had a wild temper. As a child, I was a tantrum freak, but in my personal life
it’s been a long time since I screamed and shouted and hit someone with a
chair. It doesn’t all go into the work, but a great deal of it does. There you
have it: why I write – rage.
COLIN GREENLAND
Science Fiction novelist
When I was at school I bought a battered American paperback
called Sorcerer’s Amulet by Michael
Moorcock. The exotic hybrid of sword and sorcery in a dizzyingly decadent far
future looked irresistible in a remainder shop in Folkestone. It wasn’t until I
got the book home that I realised it was volume two of four. After a mighty
quest for the other three mystic tomes, I read the whole story over and over
again, mesmerised. The horned horses of the Kamarg! The Silver Bridge at
Deau-Vere! The brazen ornithopters!
I see that in April 1988, in some access of nostalgia, I got
Mike to autograph Sorcerer’s Amulet
for me. ‘To Colin,’ he wrote. ‘How long can this last then?’
25 years so far, Mike.
PETER JAMES
Horror novelist
Back in 1970 when I was 22 and writing a series on computers
for Channel 19 TV in Toronto, I went to MIT in Boston and met Marvyn Minsky.
During an informal conversation he told me he believed that by the year 2000
man would have successfully replicated human consciousness in a computer – and
proved by definition that God does not exist.
This one statement fired my imagination more than any other
single remark I have ever heard in my life and it made me realise what I really
wanted to do, which was to explore through writing the (sometimes very blurred)
boundaries between science, medicine and the supernatural.
What I find enormously exciting as we move towards the end
of this century is that we are beginning to see a new openness in scientists
prepared to admit that in many cases the more they learn, the more they realise
how little they know, together with a growing consensus among scientists that
it is highly improbable that we are alone in universe.
Horror and science fiction gives writers a genre in which
they can probe the unknown in all its forms, and if we look back in history, it
is startling and enormously exciting to see how many immovable tenets of the
scientific establishment have been ultimately disproved by writers as visionary
as Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke. And we are seeing some of our own
generation's tenets beginning to look less solid: Darwinism, The Big Bang
Theory and the Speed of Light are all under challenge right now, in ways that
could eventually lead to us having to rewrite not only the past, but the
future. I can't think of a more exciting field for a writer to work in than
this genre and I feel very lucky to be a part of it.
JONATHAN WYLIE
Fantasy novelist
In everyone’s life there is a moment, an incident, that
sparks a major change. In the case of Jonathan Wylie, this was when ‘he’ fell
in love with his other half. Jonathan Wylie is in fact the pseudonym of Mark
and Julia Smith, who met while working in publishing.
Having sparked each other into creative life, it seemed
natural to work in the fantasy genre – a genre we had both loved since
childhood (formative influences being Mervyn Peake, Zenna Henderson and John
Wyndham), and had been involved with professionally.
Thirteen books later, we can’t imagine a more fulfilling way
of life.
MARK CHADBOURN
Horror novelist
In the sun-filled 1960s when my days were packed with
American comic books and bubblegum cards, a little darkness entered my life – a
film with the cheesy but irresistible title Night
of the Demon. From the eerie opening shots of Jacques Tourneur’s classy
little world of shadows and light to the terrifying final scene of demonic
retribution, I sat frozen with my first experience of fear. Ancient evil, runes
and curses, a heart-pounding chase through night-dark woods and one of the most
unnerving scores ever. I was hooked. Call me perverse, but from that first
viewing I knew that creepy world was the one I wanted to inhabit.
JOSH KIRBY
Fantasy artist
H. G. Wells and Jules Verne (such a kind man!) were early
influences. Film makers plundered their books for subject matter and Saturday
morning pictures acted like a magnet to me. I jostled amongst crowds of excited
kids, eagerly waiting to see what happened to Flash Gordon in this week’s
episode.
A boys’ paper, Modern
World, combined a bit of science, some technical future-gazing and short
stories – one about a valley of giant insects after a botched experiment.
Science fiction played with ideas and possibilities in a way
that allowed the imagination time and space in which to roam.
It seemed to me a way of thinking that set in motion
atrophied areas of the brain, long neglected in benighted times.
PIERS ANTHONY
Fantasy novelist
In the course of a less than happy youth, I discovered an
escape in escape literature, which I suspect helped save my sanity. I later
fled my less than ideal working environment by writing fiction about familiar
things: space travel, weird alien worlds, monsters, and magic. When I managed
to sell some, so much the better. I love being paid for having fun! Now I am
returning to the real world to explore a subject of some ambition: the entire
evolution and geography of humankind, with warnings for the future, presented
as historical fiction. What better pursuit can there be?
STEVE HARRIS
Horror novelist
The blame for my presence in this field falls squarely on
the shoulders of two guys named Philip and one named Stephen. The first is Phil
Painting, like myself, a left-handed Libran. One day long ago, when everyone
had long hair and an interest in mind-expanding substances, Phil comes over to
me in a bar, thrusts a book into my hand and demands I read it. The book is
called Eye in the Sky and is written
by the second Phil: Philip K. Dick. I fall in love. Times passes. I pick up a
Stephen King and fall in love again. Time passes. I finally realise that when I
grow up I want to be a writer.
IAN MILLER
Fantasy artist
Some of the people, books and films which have influenced
me: James Ensor, Rupert Bear, Albrecht Dürer, the original Flash Gordon, The Wizard of
Oz, Goya, Bosch, Mr Sharp, Moebius, Kubin, Tiger Tiger, The Demolished
Man, Blade Runner, Night of the Hunter, The Gormenghast trilogy,
Treasure Island, The Green Child, Small Creeps
Day, Lord of the Rings,
Kandinsky, Bonnard, The Railway Accident
& Other Stories, the Eagle &
Lion comic, Ralph Bakshi, The Times,
cinema and deck chairs and brass bands in St James Park.
F. PAUL WILSON
Horror novelist
Somehow I was hardwired for the weird and fantastic. Can't
explain how or why. Nothing ever even remotely monsterish in my staid,
middle-class, church-going, three-child, two-parent, one-dog, Scotch-Irish,
Roman Catholic American household.
Until TV brought The
Beast from 20,000 Fathoms into my living room in June of 1953.
Remember the face-hugger in Alien, the way it came out of the egg and into John Hurt's visor?
If so, you've got some idea of the sudden intimacy between my face and the
family TV when I first saw the Beast
trailer.
I think it was love. I was only six, but something in me
responded to Harryhausen's monster stomping through Manhattan's financial
district with all these screaming, terrified New Yorkers tripping and falling
over each other in their panicked flight from it.
Like coming home … and I hadn't even known I'd been away.
FREDA WARRINGTON
Fantasy novelist
If I had to name one major influence on my work it would
have to be the Charnwood Forest area of Leicestershire where I was brought up.
I love the bracken-covered slopes, gnarled oaks and ancient rocks of Bradgate
Park; the sweeping views and mysterious rhododendron groves of Beacon Hill; the
cathedral vaults and bluebell carpets of Swithland Woods; the lovely villages
of granite and thatch. Their influence on me can be summed up in one word: atmosphere. Charnwood has an
other-worldly feel in which anything seems possible; you feel you might have
stepped into another world in which characters from fantasy could come to life.
It’s this atmosphere, a unique eerie ambience, that also attracts me to my favourite
books, and which I try to recreate in my own writing.
MAGGIE FUREY
Fantasy novelist
I always wanted to write, because I’ve always loved reading.
A childhood illness stopped me leading an active life, so I got my adventures
from books instead. Having discovered C. S. Lewis, I took off into the realms
of the fantastic with Tolkien, Bradbury, Sturgeon, McCaffrey and many others. I
then found myself mentally rewriting plots - this started because there were no
good female roles in Lord of the Rings
- and decided to write Aurian after
losing my job. I owe a great debt to Miss Dixon my English teacher, who always
encouraged me, and to my erstwhile employers, for obvious reasons!
RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON
Horror novelist, film scriptwriter and television
produced/scriptwriter
Irony.
The facts of backwards; the chill illogic of paradox. In the
upside-down terrain of irony, the cruel-hearted find joy and giggling children
murder. Significance is empty. The apparent elusive. Words play tricks, faces
mislead, things fall upward. As a rudiment of fantasy, irony has few rivals.
The subversion of overt definitions has always appealed to
me, in my writing. What could be better? Meanings within meanings; the quiet,
vile truth masquerading as mannerly and safe. Or the benign cloaked in cruelty.
Yet, however expected, it’s not simply the reverse of something which makes it
interesting to me.
There’s a secondary dimension I’m fascinated by: the hidden
core so totally undermining the surface that a kind of macabre poetry arises.
When it works, nothing remains trustworthy; the reader loses control.
And the fun really begins.
PHIL RICKMAN
Author
Well, there was M.R. James and P.M. Hubbard and Enid Blyton,
of course, but the real inspiration was a seminal work of non-fiction. The View Over Atlantis by Earth
Mysteries guru John Michell, opened up a new Britain for me. OK, some of the book’s
ideas have been knocked down over the years, but it still brings me out in a
warm, mystical glow. And I still can’t look at an unfamiliar slice of
countryside without zooming in on anomalous bumps and mounds and linear
patterns, indicating the presence of … er … unknown energies
DAVID HOWE
Author and genre columnist
What got me into this field? Discovering that my local
newsagent for whom I delivered papers had copies of MonsterMag on the top shelves … watching my first horror film, Taste the Blood of Dracula, on
television … being scared witless by the Cybermen and the Ice Warriors on Doctor Who … discovering horror novels
through Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot
and The Shining … attending special
screenings of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre and thinking it was rubbish, and Alfred Soles’ Communion and quite enjoying it …
‘variety bags’ with trading cards from The
Outer Limits inside … building Aurora glow-in-the-dark model kits but using
the non-glowing parts as they could be painted to look more realistic … seeing
penny-arcades for the first time at London Zoo and being fascinated by the
mechanics behind the little horror scenarios that were played out in miniature
… late night horror double bills on BBC 2 … all these and more affected and
shaped the young Howe. And I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
