CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

Christopher Fowler's highly acclaimed first novel, Roofworld hit the shelves in 1988 and since then he has gone to produce more unique and distinctive novels.

Chris's first books were not in the horror genre at all. 'I always wanted to be a writer,' he explained, 'and when I left school I annoyed my parents by not going to university to study English Literature and instead went into an advertising agency as a copywriter. I discovered that I hated advertising but loved working on films. Eventually I set up a film marketing company with a producer and we now have branches all over the world, twenty staff here, twenty staff in LA. Currently, our campaigns are behind five out of the top ten movies. Anyway, when we decided to open an LA office I went over there to head it up.

'There's something very lethargic about LA. Somebody once said that you go there when you're nineteen, you fall asleep in front of the pool, and you wake up when you're sixty-five. I didn't want that to happen to me, so I started writing. I was determined to write something that would be a surefire commercial hit, so I wrote a really stupid book called How to Impersonate Famous People. I got on all sorts of TV programmes and it was very successful both here and in the States. Following that I did another one called The Ultimate Party Book which was even sillier. By that time I had started to write short stories and I put together ten or so of them which became City Jitters. That was published by Sphere just after Clive Barker had had a major success with his The Books of Blood and the publisher was therefore keen on short stories.

'My stories were horror because I've always been a huge horror fan. I was influenced by Famous Monsters of Filmland as was everybody else; comics, massively comics; I think we all go through the same learning curve. Then I think probably Ira Levin, A Kiss Before Dying and Rosemary's Baby, and then, bless him, John Burke did all those lovely Pan adaptations of the old Hammer films. Meanwhile I was making the Aurora model kits - the Guillotine was my favourite - and just trying to see as many horror films as possible.

'The first story I wrote was Left Hand Drive which was about a guy who becomes trapped in a car park. I found the short story genre very comfortable to write in but it never occurred to me to try and get any of the stories published. Then, one day while I was working with the actor George Baker, he told me that he was giving up acting for a time to write. I asked if he had an agent and he introduced me and she is still my agent now. So armed with an agent who knew the people at Sphere, City Jitters was published. They then said that I should write a novel.

'At that time, my offices had moved to Greek Street, where we were getting burgled by people who were coming in across the roofs and that is really where the Roofworld idea came from. I really just wanted to see if I could do it and then made my life more complicated than I needed to by coming up with a multi-character, multi-level action idea.'

The strongest aspect of Roofworld is that the idea of rooftop gangs traversing London via thin cables strung between the buildings, could all be true. and Chris agrees. 'I think if you take a basic idea like that and work out all the possibilities involved and make it realistic, that's what you get. Ultimately we actually proved it when we shot the cinema commercial for Roofworld.'

To do a cinema commercial for a book was completely unheard of at the time, but Chris managed to get one agreed.

'I talked them into it, I couldn't believe I'd blagged them into doing it, I was astounded when they agreed. At the time we were doing The Making of Batman, so I got to know the Batman stunt double and he said he'd do it - he also said he'd do the movie! -so we made it on the cheap. We shot the commercial in the middle of the worst thunderstorm I have ever seen. We had a steel conning tower erected on a roof in Charing Cross Road opposite the Shaftesbury Theatre, and we had a man hanging from a steel cable in an electric storm at midnight. But he did it, he actually went across the road on a wire, building to building. One thing that shocked me was that he built up a much faster speed than I had imagined in the novel. He had to have four people to stop him at the other end.

'Another problem was that I couldn't gain access to any of the tall buildings that I needed to get into until after the book was published. When the <I>Sunday Times<D> did a piece on the book, I had one of their journalists with me and I finally got access to everywhere I wanted!'

Following the success of Roofworld, Chris next novels, Rune and Red Bride inhabited the same universe and featured some of the same characters.

'The books, together with the latest, Darkest Day, form a sort of quartet. Red Bride suddenly switches halfway through to feature Detective Hargreave from Roofworld and characters in Darkest Day are shared with Rune. Although the books all stand independently, I like to reward loyal readership as it were, and in my next collection of short stories there'll be a Hargreave story and there might also be a Bryant and May story as there was in Bureau of Lost Souls.'

Bryant and May are two of Chris's most endearing and memorable characters. They are two ageing London police detectives who have a somewhat unusual method of working. They have differing viewpoints and occasionally get on each other's nerves, but, as they are fond of punning, are the perfect match. They appear together in Chris's latest novel, Darkest Day, which combines a modern-day murder hunt with a Victorian secret society and mysterious Indian resurrectionists.

'I wanted to do one more massively complex, charge around London, novel. I also had this single, monumentally important, event that I wanted to hinge it around - you'll have to read the book to discover what it is!'

One of the interesting aspects of the novel concerns the operation and inner workings of London's craftsmen's Guilds - exclusive 'Masonic'-like institutions which exist for the sole benefit of their members.

'A phenomenal amount of research went into it, of which I used a minuscule amount. I think there is a great danger of becoming a research bore, so I deliberately pared it right back.

'Alison Hatfield, one of the characters, really is the curator of the Goldsmith's Guild and she really did show me the inner sanctum of the Guild and how I describe it is exactly what it looks like. She took me round there one night and showed me all the secret places that the public are normally never allowed to see. There is a real third-century stone throne to Diana in the middle of this London building which the public is not allowed in to see, which I find heartbreaking. I was very lucky to gain access to that sort of stuff in advance.

'There's also a wonderful book called The Worm in the Bud about Victorian sexuality which contains a massive amount of description about the Victorian period. I would have liked to have included more detail about the Black Hole of Calcutta and the Indian revivifiers but that would have resulted in, firstly a much longer book, and secondly a danger that Darkest Day might have been branded as a voodoo book and I didn't want that.'

As well as the novels, Chris has continued to write short stories. His most recent collection is Sharper Knives.

'I'm more pleased with Sharper Knives than any of the other books of short stories I've done because I wanted to try a lot of different formats in one book resulting in a vast range of material. I've now done my Dracula story (The Legend Of Dracula Reconsidered As A Prime Time TV Special), I've done my chinese-style ghost story (Chang-Siu And The Blade Of Grass), I've done my living dead story (The Vintage Car Table-Mat Collection Of The Living Dead): in fact I've just written another for Steve Jones' forthcoming zombie collection called Night After Night of the Living Dead. The reaction to Sharper Knives has been fabulous so I'm definitely planning another volume along similar lines.'

Chris's novels and short stories are very 'filmic' in their style and content, and there is a lot of interest in them.

'Roofworld has been sold to Landmark Entertainment and they are developing it as a project at the moment. Rune belongs to Paul Hogan, who has an eighteen month renewable option. Red Bride hasn't come out in paperback yet and you never get the option offers until it does.

'Left Hand Drive has just been filmed from my own screenplay. It's a short film, made hopefully to go out with a main feature. We finished shooting it last Christmas in Leicester Square in a car park. We blew up a BMW which was fun!

'Another short story from Bureau of Lost Souls, The Master Builder, has just aired on CBS starring Tippi Hedren. I thought it was really good and that they'd done it really well.

'Currently I'm working on a screenplay called High Tension which is a nasty little story set in London's Docklands, in the top of the Canary Wharf building. It's loosely based on a story in Bureau of Lost Souls called Hot Air, where there's a dead body stuck in an air vent. Everyone's got Sick Building Syndrome because of germs from it, and this girl ends up getting stuck in the vent too; anyway, I've expanded the story to include a lot of other things.'

Chris's next novel is also underway. 'It's called Spanky and it's really really different. It's set in California and concerns a young man who works in his father's furniture store. At the local disco he meets a very charming, very urbane Englishman dressed in twenties clothes who announces himself as a Spancephelous Lachrymosa or Spanky for short. He insists that he is a minor demon, an occult figure, and that he can give him anything he wants. He sets about showing him how to be urbane, get women, be street-smart, and generally changes his life. Then he demands payment. It's sexier, tougher and darker than my previous novels.'

CHARTING NEW FRONTIERS

David Howe talks to co-author John Clute about the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Fantasy.

In 1993 a book was published which was, in many ways, one of the most important books on the science fiction genre ever to see print. This was the second – and much revised – edition of John Clute’s and Peter Nicholls’ The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The book, costing £45 in a hardback edition of 1370 pages and over 4300 entries, became an instant essential purchase for all fans and historians of science fiction, and went on to win just about every major genre award for that year.

Now John Clute is back, this time collaborating with John Grant – an author whose latest book, Strider’s Galaxy, written as Paul Barnett, was published by Legend in March – on a companion volume entitled The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Once again published by Little Brown, the book contains around the same number of words (1,100,000) and entries as the previous volume, and attempts to chronicle the Fantasy genre with the same degree of enthusiasm and illumination.

John Clute is a tall, genial, Canadian with a grasp of the English language that others can only wonder at. His regular book reviews for Interzone often had even the most eloquent of readers reaching for their dictionaries as Clute brought more unusual words into play in his discussion and dissection of the genre.

‘I think Peter Nicholls always wanted to do a Fantasy/Horror encyclopedia that would complement The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction, which he began conceiving around 1975,’ explains Clute when asked about the origins of this new project. ‘In the mid 1980s, Peter (and I) proposed a fantasy encyclopedia, based pretty strictly on the lines and proportions of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction; at the same time, Maxim Jakubowski [an editor and writer] developed a quite similar project. The actual Encyclopedia of Fantasy was proposed to Colin Murray, the editor at Little Brown, in September 1992, on principles substantially different from those which ended up governing the previous entry structure. Although it looked superficially the same as the Science Fiction book – being divided into alphabetical entries on authors, magazines, films, TV, individual countries, and so forth – it was radically different underneath. Instead of one hundred or so theme entries, we promulgated a list of around one thousand theme/motif entries. They tended to be considerably less abstract than those which thematised science fiction; and the one thousand motifs, which grew to over two thousand tentative motifs, names and themes before being savagely trimmed when we actually began to write the book, ended up, on the whole, working as terms for describable elements of ‘Story’, rather than parcels of ‘Thought’. This distinction was not made to downgrade the previous entry structure, but to adapt it to the very different, and – in encyclopedia terms – unmapped regions of fantasy. The writing itself did not begin in earnest until well into 1994; there was too much to think about before plunging into words. The original guess that we’d be able to do the book in 500,000 words proved modest. By the time the last words of the Introduction had been written, in September 1996, we’d gone to over 1,100,000 words.

‘The publishers and John Grant and I agreed to ideal limits to the inexorable growth of the text on various occasions. Each time the limits were higher. We started at about 500,000 words, and ended, willy-nilly, at 1,100,000, from which total a lot of text had actually been cut. If we’d had another six months – and if Little Brown had had the paper mills ready to pour out free paper – we could have gone to 1,500,000 easy.’

One of the entries in the book is for ‘Fantasy’ itself, and in this, a definition of a fantasy story is offered: ‘A fantasy text is a self-coherent narrative. When set in this world, it tells a story which is impossible in the world as we perceive it; when set in an otherworld, that otherworld will be impossible, though stories set there may be possible in its terms.’

The entry goes on to define the terms used, for example: a ‘text’ is any format in which a fantasy story can be told: the written word, comics and graphic novels, illustration and fantasy art, cinema and television and music (notably opera and song). This gives some idea as to the scope of the project.

According to Clute, this definition was arrived at pragmatically. ‘We eliminated great regions of the Fantastic from our primary run of entries, ending with a core definition of Fantasy, for the purposes of the book, which centres on High Fantasy (a term I don’t much like) and shallows out gradually through Sword and Sorcery, Contemporary/Urban Fantasy, and Supernatural Fiction, with Horror at the edge, or Water Margin: a term given to two entries in the book, one for the television show, and one to describe the infinitely regressive peripheries that surround central empires (like fantasy).

‘Peter Nicholls characterised the central “move” of science fiction as that outward, extrovert passage into the new that he called Conceptual Breakthrough. The central move of Fantasy, on the other hand, could be described as an inward, retroactive passage we called Recognition, borrowing the term from

Aristotle’s Poetics, and using it very freely indeed. Genres in this century may be deemed counter-myths: if the counter-myth of science fiction is that – despite the contaminating evidence of history – the dream of the 20th century can be made to work, then the counter-myth of fantasy is that the 20th century is simply wrong.’

With any work of this scale, problems were bound to be faced. I wondered what the biggest problem for Clute was: ‘The biggest single problem for me – the biggest single problem John Grant had was getting me to finish writing my copy – was that of attempting to construct a pragmatic matrix or “raft” of entries by virtue of which it would be possible to write compact, cross-reference-full entries on individual topics (like authors), while at the same time writing those individual entries. It was a balancing act. I think we got safely to shore, though.

‘Another difficulty was attempting to co-ordinate the languages of the various relevant scholarships as the fields of the Fantastic are variously well-plumbed, as individual fields, but by writers with very different voices.’

When discussing the impending publication of this new work, Clute is anticipating the reaction of critics with some resignation. ‘I think that some of the comments are inevitable, i.e. those which make it clear that we can’t get away with it twice. But I (at least) console myself with a couple of considerations: 1) The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction was a second edition (the first appeared in 1979, the second, completely rewritten and twice as long, in 1993), which means it was a fully matured book whose predecessor had been tested and shaken down by over a decade’s use; 2) The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction was inherently easier to conceive: because science fiction can be understood as a field with boundaries, but fantasy is a fuzzy set of overlapping quasi-fields which we had to try to cast light into.’

It is certainly true that pioneering projects, by their very nature, are likely to attract adverse comment, and that, with a subject as vague as ‘Fantasy’, certain definitions are likely to be challenged and apparently major omissions questioned. However, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction showed that such a project is both worthwhile and hugely entertaining, and, hopefully, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy will do the same all over again. Certainly, on the strength of the material seen so far, and on the standard set by the previous book, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy looks like being this year’s must-buy.

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Edited by John Clute and John Grant. Contributing Editors: Mike Ashley, Roz Kaveney, David Langford and Ron Tiner. Consultant Editors: David G Hartwell and Gary Westfahl. Published 3 April 1997 by Little Brown, price £45 hardback.

THE REAL RIPPER?

Michael Slade is the author of a series of hard-hitting horror novels which include the best-sellers Headhunter and Cutthroat. His latest novel is Ripper, in which Slade reveals who Jack the Ripper really was. David Howe met up with Slade recently to talk about the new book.

The first surprise is that Michael Slade doesn’t actually exist, and the person sitting opposite me is a genial and chatty Canadian criminal lawyer named Jay Clark who is part of a changing trio of criminal lawyers and their families who write as Michael Slade.

Their latest book, Ripper, is based on London’s most famous murderer. Someone is killing women in Vancouver in a manner reminiscent of Jack the Ripper. In solving the murders, the police must work out the motivation and rationale behind the killings, which research also explains who the ‘real’ Jack the Ripper was.

I asked Jay how Ripper came about. ‘After Cutthroat I was looking for a subject for a new book,’ he explained. ‘And a friend said look, you’re a lawyer, now imagine the Director of Public Prosecutions wants to charge someone for the Ripper murders. Take all the suspects who have been offered forward and come up with a case that would stand up in front of a jury. When the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] do a drug sweep, what they do is they put up a board called a hit board, and they get photographs of all the various people in the Skid Row area and they put pictures up of everyone who they think might be the main traffickers. Then they go out and get evidence and they fill it all in on the hit list. So what we did was we took a board and we got pictures of all the Ripper suspects and put them along the top and then isolated the evidence against each person. We then took the Ripper crimes and isolated all the objective evidence. We know there are five certain Ripper cases so what is there? The chalk thing: “The Juwes are the men who will not be blamed for nothing”. What does it mean? You have to have an explanation for it. Your suspect has to have been in London at the time and has to have been known to have been in London at the time. You’ve got to have a motive.

‘So what we did then was we worked out in the evidence against each person something which answered each one of the questions and when we worked it all through, the only person who answered every single one of the questions was Aleister Crowley’s suspect: Stephenson. Crowley believed that the Ripper was forming the sign of the cross with the locations of his killings. The head of the Order of the New Dawn, to which Crowley belonged at the time, S. L. MacGregor Mathers, wrote a book called Astral Projection, Ritual Magic and Alchemy, which was published in 1888, the year of the Ripper. And the idea was that if you ritualistically form a cross, then you will open the way to the astral realm. The occult belief was that the “now” we’re living is a reflection of the astral realm. If you can project yourself into the astral realm through ritual magic, you can change things there which will have an effect in the “now”. And that’s how you conjure demons.

‘So when I linked that to the Tarot, which is a means of reading the astral plane, lo and behold, there is an upside down cross on the Hanged Man, and there is also the triangle, because the fellow who was Crowley’s suspect, also wrote about the Ripper using the pen-name Tautridelta, which means Cross Three Triangles. In this tarot card is the cross and the triangle. Triple the triangle and you can form a pentagram and then in order to get into the astral realm, you use a live woman as an altar, and the female sign is also present on the tarot card.

‘Whoa! I thought. Just a second here. Because I’d worked on a hundred murder cases; and after you deal with these people for eighteen months biweekly you begin to realise how the mind works. When you see people going psychotic there are common themes and this linking of symbolism with ritual murder is a classic symptom. One other thing I did was get a mathematician to work out the probability of the Ripper’s murders taking place at the points of a perfect cross and it came out as one in fifteen million two hundred and forty-nine sevenths. That’s the point at which I rested my case.’

Jack the Ripper was back in the news last year with the publication of a manuscript that was claimed to be his diary. ‘Luckily for me it was proved to be a fake,’ says Jay. ‘They put it through tests and determined that the paper was okay for the period but the ink was about thirty years out and there just isn’t that large a margin of error. Before they proved it … Jeez! … I just couldn’t sleep. What if my publishers said, “Oh Jay, we don’t need your novel anymore you’re going to have to go away and write another one to match the diary!”

‘There was my professional reputation to consider as well. If I’d picked the wrong man! They ended up marketing the diary in Canada and England with a sticker that asks the reader to make their own mind up as to its validity. You match wits with the professionals and weigh the evidence, which makes you into a juror. It gives you all of the counting down of the Ripper at the beginning of it, so it’s a good edition even if it isn’t genuine. And of course their suspect couldn’t be the Ripper, because the real Ripper was the fellow who’s identified in Ripper!’

Author Influences

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.

HORROR COMPANION - Kim Newman

David Howe talks to editor Kim Newman about an impressive new guide to the horror genre

There have been many books written about horror films. The first appears to have been a general overview of the genre by Michael Laclos called Le fantastique au cinema in 1958 but since then a countless number of works have been produced. The quality of these ‘guides’ has varied from photo-packed works which barely scratch the surface of the subject to Stephen Jones’ exhaustively compiled and beautifully presented Illustrated Movie Guides.

What has been missing, however, has been a good encyclopaedic view of the genre. Something that takes in not only the films – which tend to form the backbone of the genre – but also the film makers: directors, producers, stars, visual effects designers, make-up artistes; authors: of films and screenplays through to horror fiction; and also the themes: everything from ‘the old dark house’ to ‘witchcraft’ and ‘serial killers’.

The BFI Companion to Horror (Cassell, £19.99 lfp/b) sets out to redress the balance by providing just this sort of genre overview. Overseeing this massive task of chronicling over a century of horror is journalist, novelist and broadcaster Kim Newman. Newman has been influential in the genre for many years and has several previous works of non-fiction to his credit (including the seminal Nightmare Movies, first published in 1985 and re-issued in a substantially revised edition in 1988).

The story of the Companion to Horror started several years ago, when Newman was contributing material to The BFI Companion to the Western. ‘At the time,’ he explained, ‘I told the editor that if they were ever in the market for a horror volume, I’d like to throw my hat in the ring as a possible editor. We had lunch, agreed that it was a good idea, and then everything went quiet for several years while the deal was put together. I wanted to create a reference book that would give me a chance to encompass the whole genre rather than just pick at segments of it. This sort of book tends to be known by their editor rather than by title, and I quite liked the idea of there being a big book out there known as “Newman’s” alongside “Maltin’s” or “Halliwell’s”.

Once the green light was given for the project, Newman started defining what the book would cover.

‘The initial outlining was probably the most conceptually difficult bit of the book,’ said Newman. ‘I had to decide what the entries should be, how long they should run, and who should write them. Philip Strick and Phil Hardy were working in parallel on BFI Companions to Science Fiction and Crime, so I tried to avoid too much overlap with their areas.

‘The brief was to deliver around 200,000 words. Of course, this wasn’t long enough – it would have been easier to produce a book twice the size, and there are a great many pieces contained within the book I wish could have been longer. However, I worked very hard at the editing stage to keep it to length (it came in about 4000 words over).

‘In choosing the contributors, I decided who I wanted to work with – both established names in the field and newer, underexposed folks – and tried to give out batches of entries to people who were especially qualified – Tom Hutchinson did all the horror stars, for example. Steve Jones handled the character actors, Tony Mechele the TV series, Christopher Frayling the major themes, David McGillivray the animal entries, Mark Ashworth the starlets and so on. Some people – Alan Jones, David Prothero – were useful all-rounders. I personally tried to stay away from writing about people or themes I’d written about before, and I also did a lot of sweep-up work on those entries which were so brief that it was not worth commissioning them out.

‘In choosing what to cover, I decided that at least half of the entries would be mandatory – those on certain characters, actors, sub-genres, directors, writers. On top of all the people known for their horror work, I wanted to spotlight areas that impinged on the genre, and include entries on Ingmar Bergman and Franz Kafka as well as Wes Craven and Stephen King.

‘The main surprise once the book started to take shape was how complex and inter-connected everything turned out to be. There’s a difference between knowing a lot of facts and seeing them all assembled together, so you can cross-reference them.’

What marks the Companion to Horror out is the attention to detail that is contained within its pages. There are lengthy pieces, as you might expect, on Dracula and Frankenstein, but there are also significant articles on numerous directors including George A Romero, Roman Polanski and David Cronenberg. Horror authors are well catered for with entries on popular wordsmiths like James Herbert, Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe as well as many lesser known talents like Ray Russell, Gary Brandner and Harry Adam Knight. Horror on television is also covered, with entries including Doctor Who, Ace of Wands and Chiller as well as Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?

The book is wonderful to dip into, with articles on over 500 films, 500 figures associated with the industry and 100 television series as well as numerous thematic entries. The entries range from a few lines to a couple of pages in length. Perhaps the only disappointment is that the book does not claim to be ‘complete’. Films have, on the whole, been omitted in favour of presenting previously unknown information on the genre, but this was a deliberate policy and allows the lesser known information to shine.

At a penny short of twenty pounds, the book is not cheap, but it is by far the best chronicle of the horror genre available. Newman, however, smiles when asked if he is pleased with the end result. ‘I’m just pleased that it got finished! Seriously, I hope it functions genuinely as a companion to the genre, and also that it fits in with the BFI’s publishing program. I assumed all along that people who buy it will already have a couple of books on the subject, and so I deliberately didn’t duplicate the efforts of previous authoritative works by including hundreds of capsule reviews of specific films. What this book does is try to make out the patterns that are larger than specific films – the themes, careers, ideas and recurrences that tie the genre together.’

The BFI Companion to Horror is arguably the most important genre book to be published so far this decade. Newman is already hopeful of being able to expand any future editions and with the groundwork already set, this can only cement this publication’s place as one of the most interesting, readable and accessible guides to the genre yet published.

SHADOWMAN by Dennis Etchison

Although Dennis Etchison has been writing professionally for thirty-four years, his name is not well known in England. That is to soon change as Raven Books, an imprint of Robinson Publishing, bring out some of his new novels, starting with Shadowman.

‘Shadowman is essentially a prequel to my short story The Dark Country, which won both the British and World Fantasy Awards back in 1981,’ explains Etchison. ‘Over the years I found myself wondering what happened to the Jack Martin character to lead into The Dark Country. Because these people that I write about seem very real to me, they don’t seem like characters in a book. What happens in Shadowman causes him to want to get away from it all and to recover from the events of the novel. Unfortunately what happens in The Dark Country is the same sort of touble again. The point is that there are some archetypal problems that we have to work out in our lives. We don’t necessarily know what the cause is but they keep following us around. We’ve all had that experience in life. As you look back you see certain familiar patterns, certain sorts of trouble repeating themselves. Martin is very much a passive victim in these two tales but that is the nature of this sort of problem. You think your life is going along perfectly, you’re not worried about anything, and all of a sudden from nowhere something presents itself and you have to try to solve it and survive.’

Etchison confirms that his books are very much character led, and that in the case of Shadowman, he actually had a different ending in mind from the one he eventually wrote. ‘When I started writing the novel I thought the ending was going to be different and I was rather surprised to find out what the real explanations were. It’s not because I’m mindless when I write, but it’s because the people in the books become very real to me and it’s a question of being honest and letting them go and do whatever they would do. If you can’t predict what’s going to happen in the novel when reading it, it’s because I didn’t know either.

‘As I look back over my short stories I see that they tend to come in threes and sometimes the three are spread out over several years because I keep returning to subjects because I haven’t worked them out yet. Usually by the third time that’s the end of it. Shadowman features Jack Martin for the second time, so although I may think I’ve finished with him for the moment, I expect that another story will come along at some point.’

Etchison’s next two novels to be published by Raven are California Gothic and Double Edge, and he is currently developing an original Evil Dead novel with Sam Raimi, the director of the cult horror films.

‘It’s like a film that never was and the only way I would do it was if I had complete freedom to create a new story. I met with Sam and his people and they’ve pretty much given me carte blanche although I’m continuing to tell them my ideas to be sure I’m not going off in the wrong direction. Are you aware that The Evil Dead had a different ending in America than it did in the rest of the world? I saw both versions and they are entirely different, and I have to somehow reconcile both of those endings, I feel responsible. The end of the third film, or at least the American ending, makes it very clear to me that these adventures that Ash has been having are fantasies in his mind. In the American ending he returns, not to a bleak, post-Apocalypse world of the future, but to the store where he works and you see that he’s just a nerdy clerk who tells these stories to the people around him. He shifts between two realities: what’s in his mind and what’s going on around him, and that’s the tack that I’m taking.’

Chasing the Wulf - Steve Harris

CHASING THE WULF
STEVE HARRIS
Interview by David Howe

I cited Steve Harris as ‘a name to watch for the ‘90s’ following the release of his debut novel, Adventureland, and he has consolidated that position with his second novel, Wulf, now available in paperback.

Steve hails from Basingstoke in the south of England, and I met up with him recently for lunch and a chat about his current and future plans. No sooner had we settled down with a large plate of sandwiches and a bottle of fizzy wine than Steve proclaimed: ‘I love interviews! I love the way you can find out stuff for books by going up to complete strangers and asking them the most absurd questions. When I was writing Wulf, I wanted to find out what would happen if you tried to kill someone with a combine harvester, so I wrote to a manufacturing company and asked if anyone there could tell me what would happen and in what sequence. I ended up talking to one of their sales directors and he was really helpful, told me what would happen and gave me lots of leaflets.

‘I also went to a police station and asked what would happen if someone sawed down a tree and blocked off a village, sat up on the tree with a high-powered deer rifle and took shots at people, maybe a village bobby was killed as well - with a chainsaw! They looked at me a bit suspiciously at first but eventually they told me all sorts of things; I thought they’d politely ask me to leave, but they explained that if someone did do what I had outlined, they’d probably send out an Instant Response Unit, which is a couple of guys in a car and in the boot they’ve got a locked safe containing a rifle, which they can use if they think the situation needs it. They even went and asked the Chief Constable what size bullets they used for these rifles, detail like that was really helpful.’

Steve had to pause to munch on his chicken, grape and lemon mayonnaise sandwich so I took the opportunity to ask if he had done much research for his next novel, The Hoodoo Man.

‘Not really. I did do quite a lot for Wulf, but I didn’t really do any for The Hoodoo Man as far as going and actually talking to people. I had read a lot previously about out of body experiences and so on and also some of those quasi-religious books which purport to explain life, the universe and everything else you can possibly think of. I liked the way that their explanations and advice all hang together: basic common sense really.

‘That’s part of the basis for The Hoodoo Man and another aspect is to do with changing the future,  but not in a time-travel sense. If you can see into the future, and you’re seeing say one future out of three, then perhaps if you’re clever enough you can make one of the other two futures happen. You may be able to manipulate what happens in the future by something you do now, simply by having that knowledge. For example, if you look into the future and see that you’re going to fall under a bus the next day, then you obviously wouldn’t go anywhere near a bus and the future you saw would not happen. I wanted to look quite closely at how things like that might happen and what the consequences might be. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, nothing’s simple or easy.

‘There are situations in The Hoodoo Man that are not terribly pleasant for the main character. I won’t tell you too much about it, but he finds himself faced with an impossible dilemma at one point, by being able to see into the future, and what he has to do to deal with it.’

While Steve ploughed into the tuna mayonnaise sandwiches, I asked what made him start writing in the first place.

‘Basically I was after a free lunch! I’d only ever written a couple of very short, one page, silly pieces of fiction, rather influenced by Spike Milligan I suppose, that kind of daftness, which I admire. And I’d also been playing in a band from my late teens to mid-twenties and writing some of the songs, which is very very difficult to do. I wanted to do something creative, something that might end up in me not having to go to work. This was because when I left school I was on the dole for six months or so, because there weren’t any jobs, and I eventually started working in an ammunition depot taking apart shells and stuff. The week after I started the job, I decided that the sooner I could do something I liked doing and not have to go to work, the better. This was why I took up with the band as it looked like a way out of having to go to work but it was dreadful, it was worse than having two jobs!

‘Anyway, the band eventually fell apart and I decided to write a book as I thought it would probably be easier! So I sat down with a large exercise book and a biro and wrote my first novel. I didn’t write it seriously at first, I just wrote when I could and built it up gradually. Then I was off sick for nearly two months with glandular fever, and towards the end of that I started feeling a bit better so I got the book out again and finished the manuscript. It was a real hand-written manuscript, not a typescript, so I asked people how much they would charge to type it, and after I found out how much they wanted, I bought myself an electric typewriter and taught myself to type. This wasn’t Adventureland and I won’t embarrass myself by telling you the title of it. I thought it was a fairly good kind of horror thriller thing, and in fact I think I’ve read worse since, but nobody was the faintest bit interested. Headline didn’t exist then, nobody was doing horror, there was nothing about - this was around 1979. There was the odd Guy N Smith book, but nobody was interested in publishing any fresh horror at all. I even tried some American publishers and they weren’t interested either. So, unperturbed, I  started on another book.

‘Three novels and a volume of short stories later, I  wrote Adventureland. By this time I knew the names of some of the people who had thought favourably of my previous stuff, and I sent Adventureland to them. One of them was Richard Evans, who was then at Futura. What I didn’t know was that he had left, and that someone else was there. I eventually got a note from Richard who was now at Headline saying that they would buy the book. He invited me up to talk about it and when I arrived he said ‘I’ve got some news for you which you’re not going to like very much’, so I said ‘What’s that then?’ and he said ‘I’m leaving!’. Luckily he was able to get the book through before he left.

‘Adventureland seemed to be very well received, and by then I was well into the next one, Wulf. Wulf started when I was driving along one day and there was this thing about BSE - mad cow disease - on the radio. There was a woman who had worked with people who had died from a brain disease called kuru, prevalent in the natives of New Guinea who ate the brains of their dead. No-one knew what it was, how it got there, where it came from or how to get rid of it. They were saying that it was closely related to scrapies, which is a brain disease in sheep, and that cow feed is made from dead sheep, the cows contracted BSE and then the meat from them went into meat pies for human consumption. All the experts on the radio said that humans could not get it, except for this one woman who said they could, citing the New Guinea natives as an example.

‘So I thought it would be good fun to give a whole village BSE. One of the symptoms in cows is that they become terrified - not that it takes much to frighten a cow anyway - and I wondered what they were frightened of. If they were hallucinating, what were they seeing? I thought it might be some sort of race memory of wolves, so that’s where the wolf idea came in. I basically decided to do a werewolf novel that didn’t involve any werewolves and progressed from there. I think I must be lucky as the whole process of writing seems to come really easily to me, it’s hardly ever a chore.

‘The greatest love of my life is sleeping, sex is next and third is writing. Those are the only things that I’d rather be doing than writing - except talking to you of course!’

And with that, the remaining sandwiches were devoured, the wine quaffed and Steve and I made our respective ways home. It was back to work for me, but I suspect that Steve had some serious sleeping to catch up on.