THE RETURN OF THE WAMPHYRI

Brian Lumley is one of the most prolific horror writers working in the field today. He has successfully updated the vampire myth into a terrifying series of books featuring the horrific and memorable Wamphryi.

Brian started writing while he was stationed in Cyprus with the Royal Military Police: 'I was doing a lot of swimming and I liked to make notes about the different things I saw: octopus, the various types of shells and so on. I sold a couple of articles to Diver magazine and I liked the idea of putting words on paper for money. We then moved to Berlin where we were stationed in the Olympic Stadium, the one where Jesse Owen almost gave Hitler a heart attack by winning all the events. In that place, back in 1967, at 2 o'clock in the morning, when the last drunk had been locked up and the last would©be refugee had been ripped to pieces on the wire or shot coming over the Wall, there was nothing to do. So I was reading all these books which I got at the local YMCA. 70 percent of them were terrible, 20 per cent were moderate and 10 per cent were good, and a lot of the good stuff was horror that appeared in books edited by August Derleth, published by Arkham House out of Wisconsin, America. I wrote some stories - I thought I could do at least as well as the bad stuff - and sent them to Derleth. He bought two of them straight away and suggested a revision for a third. Within a year he was suggesting that I put together a collection in hardback, and a year after that he was asking for a novel. So I was on my way.

'The first novel, if I'm right, because I was writing two at the same time, was Beneath the Moors, which was an Arkham House hardback, very Lovecraftian, and also The Burrowers Beneath, which was released in paperback. That was about 1973, 1974.'

Brian didn't start writing full time until he left the army at the end of 1980 after twenty-two years service.

'All of a sudden, the Lovecraft-influenced material had to fly out of the window because if I was going to make a living out of writing, it was going to have to be commercial. Not that Lovecraft isn't commercial but you can't make a big success out of a Cthulhu mythos story, it's all been done. So it had to be something new, different and hard-hitting. Modern horror is hard-hitting stuff, but I didn't want to lose the influence of the people I call the Masters: Ray Bradbury, August Derleth, H P Lovecraft, Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson. On the other hand, I did want to do it differently. Lovecraft, of course, was my main man because Arkham House was his publisher and that's what attracted me in the first place. Lovecraft did not write about the usual vampires, werewolves, zombies and monsters, his horror stories were different, the themes were different. So when I sat down to write the Necroscope books, I didn't want to have vampires that were the same as had been done before. I wanted vampires that did more than just suck.'

Brian's vampires, the Wamphyri, are a powerful and ancient race of creatures, which, unlike the popular film©inspired image of the vampire reproduce through a detailed and intricate process. 

'A human infected with vampirism can produce an egg and pass it on to another prospective vampire, to his egg 'son'; he can also pass on his vampirism through his blood or his semen, he can have sons which are vampires and given time they will become Wamphyri and produce eggs of their own, but that's a long process and each of the Wamphyri only produces one egg. But if you kill and bury one of these vampire 'Lords' and he rots down, he's liable to put up toadstools which will release spores. If you breathe one of them in, bingo! It will develop into a vampire egg which will produce a Wamphyr leech and you become a vampire.

'This idea was hinted at through the early Necroscope books. The reader always suspected there was more to it than met the eye but I didn't let out the full explanation until Deadspeak'

The eponymous Necroscope of the books is one Harry Keogh, a human with several extraordinary abilities.

'Harry's power of speaking to the dead comes from the time that my father died. I remember standing by his coffin before he was buried, looking down at him and thinking: well I've spent two thirds of my life in the army and I've very rarely been at home and I never really got the chance to sit down and talk to you. It seemed such a shame. I wished that I could stand there and that he could hear me and we could cover one or two points we never got round to. I knew as I looked at him that he'd just love to have a pint right now. Later, in a pub, I sat and enjoyed a pint and I tried to will the taste to him. I thought that if I'd been home all those years we could have enjoyed a few drinks together and maybe spun a few yarns between us, because my old man was very much like me.

'This thought developed and I realised that it would be something to have a person who could actually talk to dead people because there's a hell of a lot of knowledge gone from the world and buried in the earth. If the minds of the dead did go on living then how would they communicate to us, or with each other, and that is where the necroscope comes in. Harry Keogh is able to speak with the dead and, using their amassed knowledge together with his natural affinity for numbers, unravel the secrets of space and time.'

There are five weighty books in the Necroscope series, Necroscope, Wamphyr, The Source, Deadspeak and Deadspawn. Harry is the common thread and as he progresses through the books, he finds more and more out about his own talents, leading to an apocalyptic finale. The series is selling well at the moment, but this was not always the case.

'The first jacket on the first edition of Necroscope didn't sell. No one understood why, as the publishers knew the book was good. So they pulled it in, got George Underwood to do a new cover, and they started selling ... and selling. Second printing, third, fourth, fifth, sixth ... they're still flying off the bookshelves. It just goes to show that a good jacket may not sell a bad book but it damn well helps to sell a good one. I was recently told that in the last six months, all five of  the Necroscope books have sold more copies than in their first six months!'

When Brian reached the end of the final Necroscope book, Deadspawn, he took the fairly radical step of killing off his hero. This was met with howls of protest from the fans, but while Harry Keogh may be dead, his sons live on in a new trilogy collectively titled Vampire World.

'In The Source I introduced the reader to the world of the Wamphyri, where they come from, called Sunside/Starside. There is a range of barrier mountains. On one side, in the forests, woods and valleys, live human beings while on the other side, in the dark - because the sun only rises on Sunside - live the Wamphyri in huge cavernous eyries of weather-carved stone jutting from the barren plains. The Wamphyri inhabit these stacks and when the sun goes down on Sunside they fly across the mountains to take their prey. There is also a dimensional gate between their world and ours. The gate in our world opens in Romania which is why our vampire legends originate from there.

'It dawned on me that I'd created a world but I hadn't explored it, and I wanted to. Before Harry Keogh died he fathered two sons on Sunside. One of them's a straight guy, he just wants to be a gypsy like his daddy (as far as he knows his father was a gypsy). His brother, on the other hand, longs for the power which comes from being Wamphyri. The story develops from there.

'The first Vampire World, Blood Brothers, has just been published and I've just finished the second which is called The Last Eyrie and the third, which is next on my agenda, will be called Blood Wars. That makes eight books on a similar theme but there's an eight year period between the end of The Source and the start of Deadspeak during which Harry Keogh is searching for his lost wife and son. I intend to fill that gap with two more books called Necroscope: The Lost Years  Volumes I and II, which makes ten books in the series and that, I think, will satisfy me for the moment.'

Necroscope has also been picked up by Malibu Comics in America as a five©part graphic novel. The first issue should be available in June 1992, and Malibu have the rights to the first three Necroscope books. There is also a series of resin figures planned from Classic Plastics in America, depicting scenes and characters from the Necroscope series. With the aforementioned three books already planned, Brian is not looking much further ahead, although he does not rule out a return to Lovecraft's Dreamlands with Hero and Eldin at some point in the future. With over thirty books to his name already, Brian Lumley is still going strong.

THE FRIGHTENER

Stephen Laws should not be a new name to Starburst readers as we have been covering his rise to prominence in the horror genre ever since his first novel was published back in 1985.  

Now he sets The Frighteners on us.  Following demonic trains (Ghost Train), personalised killing forces (Spectre) and a timeless and ancient evil (The Wyrm), what are we up against this time?  What are the Frighteners?

"The Frighteners are revealed in the new novel.  It's about a small time crook, Eddie Brinkburn, who does little jobs like car licence changes, petty theft, that sort of thing.  He is set up by a large criminal organisation when a petrol station robbery goes wrong and he ends up in prison.  While he's locked up, some bad things happen to him including the fact that his family are murdered by the organised crime mob.  This gives him a rage and a keen desire for revenge.  But also while he's in prison, he comes into contact with something that gives him a supernatural power. He uses this power to gain an early parole and once he's back on the streets he sets about bringing down the whole criminal underworld in London.  The Frighteners are the essence of that power.  If you don't do what Eddie wants then he can put the Frighteners on you; he can send these things around to your house to convince you to do what he wants you to do.

"Frighteners can be created from any raw material available, they can take a myriad of forms, but basically they're the worst thing in the world that you would ever want to see and they're very, very brutal.  They'll go and they'll get whatever Eddie wants and by God you'd better do what he wants or ...

"The novel is, at its most basic, a revenge thriller, but the plot is a springboard for bigger things.  The power that Eddie inherits has its own ambitions and ultimately the whole fabric of reality starts coming apart at the seams."

Ghost Train begins with the words 'It was another day in hell' and this would seem to sum up Steve's approach to the horror genre - put the hero through hell.  "In Ghost Train, the fun fair barker says at one point 'You paid to come in, didn't you?  You wanted to be scared?'  So my characters often face the consequences of their dealing with the supernatural.  That's one aspect of it.  Perhaps more importantly, I have always been interested in dealing with people who face up to their worst fears made real - and actually overcome them.  I'm being a little optimistic here, because the little, insignificant people can sometimes call upon hidden reserves and face up to the threat - they may get completely flattened by it, but I like to think that they have won as well.  There is a sense of elation about their defiant stance.  This is another theme of my books in that often the external threat is a distorted reflection of the inner turmoil in the characters up against it.  This is probably most evident in The Wyrm"

In The Wyrm, Steve set out to create 'a new monster', something that would have its own history and weaknesses.  "I was pleased with the way that turned out.  I wanted a completely new entity with its own modus operandi and the creature in The Wyrm was something I was able to play around with.  In The Wyrm, the hero ultimately defeats the monster with words and the implication, which is not fully stated, is that if he goes back on his word then bad things could start happening again.  

"It was a reaction against accepted lore.  We all know that silver bullets kill werewolves and that vampires abhor crucifixes.  These are well defined rules that writers go to great pains to break and bend, so I thought hell - the Wyrm is going to be something new.  The human characters are going to be well acquainted with the standard supernatural cliches which won't work.  They will be faced with having to confront the Wyrm to find out what the rules that govern it are."

Hailing from Newcastle, it is understandable that Steve would set his novels in and around that industrial town - Ghost Train concerns the railway connection between London and Newcastle, Spectre is set in the Byker district of the town and The Wyrm takes place in a fictional northern village called Shillingham. Steve has coined a new term for his style of writing: Industrial

Gothic.

"It's all about back alleys and streetlights and deserted factories rather than castles and cobwebs and things that go bump in the night.  It's a new kind of gothic.  The Frighteners is industrial gothic as well, although I moved all the action down to London seeing as it's the crime mecca of the country.  Let's face it, it's where the roots of organised criminal activity are. 

"I'm also looking at Good and Evil (with a capital G and a capital E) in a different way.  In the past my books have tended to take a view that evil is an external force.  The Frighteners says that Evil is indigenous to Man, it's generated within, it's not an entity that comes from beyond, it's something  that's in all of us.

"The Frighteners is, so far, the book that I'm happiest with, that I feel most strongly about.  It's taken me longer to write and I think it's probably the most powerful and uncompromising thing I've written.  It's basically a 'head-on-collision' novel. Some people have been upset by this head-on aspect but that's the way the book is and I make no apologies for it."

As well as the novels, Steve has also turned his hand to short fiction.  'Guilty Party' - a werewolf story - appeared in issue number 2 of Fear and 'Junk' - a tale of terror set in a Junkyard - appeared in Scare Care, Graham Masterton's anthology for children's charities published in 1989.  (This collection has yet to be published in Britain but the US hardback edition was published by Tor and can be found in some specialist bookshops). I asked Steve why he hadn't had more short fiction published. "Because I haven't written it!  I just don't have time as what little I have is taken up with writing the novels.  I have only written short fiction when someone has asked me specifically. Graham asked me for Scare Care and I was pleased to hear recently that 'Junk' is on a short list for a best horror collection of 1989.  I have a day job as well, and working part time it takes

me about a year to complete each novel.

"I like to know exactly what I'm doing when I'm writing.  There has to be a strong sense of logic.  I develop that when I outline the book and consequently that takes a long time.  The outline is written in the present tense and basically describes what happens.  The completed outline is perhaps a quarter of the length of the finished novel, and the transition from outline to final novel is a case of putting all the meat and description onto the bones. 

"My next novel, Darkfall, which I am writing at the moment, involves the police and I've been researching it with the Northumbria constabulary for the last year or so.  I want to present the police professionals with an overtly supernatural situation and see how they would react.  It's working well and I'm pleased with it so far.  It should be ready for the publishers in about three months time and after that I have plans to start on a novel which will be looking at vampires in a new light.  I can't tell you any more than that, but it will be completely different from anything about vampires that you've

seen before.

"I think that when you write in the horror genre, there is a danger of going down a dead end.  There are some people who are experimenting in the field but I don't think that there is enough pioneering going on.  I'm particularly interesting in cross-fertilisation which is about taking standard themes and doing something different with them.  A writer like Steve Gallagher is a prime example.  He can take a police procedural novel and, using its rules and its readership, write it from a supernatural point of view.  I believe that cross-fertilisation is going to inject a new breath of life into the genre and that  writers and readers should embrace the concept and simply enjoy the results. 

"Some other good examples are Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs and Peter Straub's Koko.  Koko is a brilliant non-horror, horror novel.  Is Silence of the Lambs a horror novel or not?  It won the 1989 Bram Stoker award from the Horror Writers of America, but I argue that it's not actually a horror novel in the accepted sense.  Some people in the genre have been offended that it won a major horror award, but I think they should welcome it as it will only serve to refresh the horror genre.

"At the end of the day the writer's job is to entertain the reader.  You have to make them feel as though they've been through something, that it counts for something - that's certainly what I want when I read a book.  "I have a basic creed:  'People like to be frightened because they don't like to be frightened' and as long as that is the case, I'll be writing to frighten them."

GRAHAM JOYCE

In 1991 a paperback called Dreamside was published by Pan Books. It received plaudits from all who read it, and the author, Graham Joyce, has cemented that success with two further novels.

Graham's fiction is real-life, dealing with believable characters in everyday situations and it is his skill at handling the interplay, as well as the underlying themes, that make the books so enjoyable.

Before writing Dreamside, Graham worked as a trainer of youth workers for a national youth organisation. "I'd been doing that for about eight years and I started to hear myself running on autopilot," he explained. "I'd been writing semi-seriously since I was about eighteen. Whichever job I was in at the time determined whether I had the stamina to write anything in the evenings. If you have a creative and demanding job it's difficult to do the things you enjoy in your free time. Part of the problem was that it was a damn good job and I enjoyed it so it was taking all of my energy.

"So, having realised I was going nowhere, I suddenly asked my wife, Sue, if she fancied going to Greece for a year. She agreed and we planned to go in to work the next day, pick arguments with our bosses and hand our notices in. It was like when you agree with someone to jump in a swimming pool together and you're worried that the other person's not going to jump when you do. As it happened we both jumped. It was drastic, but it was a drastic time for us.

"So off we went. We rented out our house in England and ended up on the Greek island of Lesbos where we had a wonderful year. We found a very cheap place to rent on the beach. It had no electricity and no running water, we had to get the water from a pump."

Anyone who has read Joyce's most recent novel, The House of Lost Dreams will instantly recognise this location from the book. I wondered how much of the book was real.

"The setting is real; that house, everything around that place and the geography of that island is real, it's only the events that are fictional. Lesbos is a strange, volcanic island and we did have certain peculiar feelings around the house we were living in and we actually experienced this business of saying something and it coming true, it happened too often to be able to discard it with the word coincidence. I tend to be a sceptic but how many times can you use the word coincidence in one day before you start to realise that the word is inadequate to describe the kind of experience you're having?

"For example, the passage in the book about finding scorpions on the wall actually happened. Sue and I hadn't even discussed scorpions but I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night and by doing that I woke Sue up. She asked me what was wrong and I said 'There are scorpions in the room'. She said, 'That's funny, I've just been dreaming about scorpions'. So I said 'Okay, I'm going to have a look'. I didn't like the idea of them getting into bed with us, you see. So I lit an oil lamp and went around the room. Sure enough, right above the bedstead were these three very large scorpions on the wall. I don't know what it was, but there must have been something, maybe it's a sense of smell or danger, some sense of alarm, that woke me up and made Sue dream. As it happened - I'm ashamed to say - as in the book, I had to kill the bloody things with the back of a frying pan. It was a very odd experience.

"We were out on Lesbos for a year; the best year of my life, without doubt. We drove there, lived there, learnt the language, it was terrific. And I also wrote Dreamside there.

"I'd gone there intending to write and I'd had this idea banging around in my mind for ages. I'd drafted a synopsis before we left and sent it to an agent. So when we arrived I got my head down and did the work. We supplemented our savings by picking oranges and olives and that sort of stuff, and by the time the year was up we were pretty much skint.

"It was about then that I got the phone call. There was only one phone in the nearby village, and that was in the Kafenion where the shepherds and locals drink, a little spidery coffee bar. A shepherd came running up the pathway, and to see a Greek running anywhere is always impressive, so we knew something was up, and he was shouting: 'Elate kai na pame sto Kafenion' that's 'Come, we must go to the Kafenion'. 'There's a madman on the phone' he says. When I got there, there were all these Greek shepherds clustered round the phone and they were taking turns to grab the handset and go 'Eh?' into the mouthpiece before passing it on for someone else to have a go. So I grabbed the phone off them and said 'Hello, can I help you?' And this voice said, 'I'm trying to get through to Graham Joyce but it's been a nightmare'. 'It's just the guys from the Kafenion,' I explained, and he asked, 'What sort of people are they?' 'Well they're Greeks,' I said, and he goes, 'Oh dear!' It turned out that they'd been shouting at him for about two days while he'd been trying to get through to me, this was my agent, and he had sold Dreamside to Kathy Gale at Pan books.

"It was a fairy tale ending; if it hadn't have happened, we would have had a great year. But this news really made it all worthwhile. It's how it happens in the movies, you give up your job, go down to Greece, write a book, get it published. Of course, it doesn't normally happen like that.

"Then two years went by before Dreamside was actually published. I thought I'd be able to buy Christmas presents for everyone that year. Wrong. I had to wait two years. Then my editor at Pan left the company and everything was up in the air. Nobody seemed to know who I was at Pan and there was this vagueness about the next book and so my agent started to look for another publisher. I had my next novel, Dark Sister, ready and so I ended up at Headline."

Dreamside concerns lucid dreaming and the experiments of a group of college students in that area. Where did the idea for this novel come from?

"Lucid dreaming was a subject that I discovered because there was some genuine research into the subject at Hull University in the seventies. There was money available for that kind of research and people would be paid for lying on their backs in darkened tanks of water! So I read up on that and I also remembered a TV programme in which a woman described some side effects that she had experienced as a lucid dreamer. One was that she would wake up and go about her daily business, then she would wake up again, then she would go about her daily business, then she would wake up again! Each time she was breaking out of a shell only to find that she was still dreaming. I thought that this was terrifying, a real nightmare, not knowing if you were dreaming or not. As well as the multiple layers, the other thing about lucid dreams was that they are so banal, totally unlike the weirdness of normal dreams, there was nothing in the dream to signal that it was a dream. An image came to me of this man lying in bed on his own and waking up repeatedly. Then the phone rings and somebody else tells him that they've had the same experience and he still doesn't know if he is dreaming or not. The book came from that idea.

"Dreamside seemed to arouse a lot of interest because it certainly wasn't mainstream science fiction, it wasn't mainstream fantasy, it wasn't exactly a horror novel and I think that's probably why people were interested in it. If you're on the edge people are often more interested than if you're writing straight down the track. As has happened, the two books that have followed are not straight down the track of fantasy and horror, they use clear genre devices but they are floating around the genre areas. That doesn't bother me but I think it bothers the publishers. One consequence appears to be that Dark Sister was put with the horror titles while Dreamside was with the fantasy in the bookshops.

"Dark Sister is about herbalism, New Age concepts, finding yourself and witchcraft. I'm interested in anything about latent powers. In Dreamside the latent powers concerned lucid dreaming, in Dark Sister I looked at feminine powers that past generations associated with witchcraft. House of Lost Dreams was about people projecting forms of fantastic reality onto the landscape. If there's a pattern to my work, it's people finding what's inside themselves, lifting the lid, finding out what's bubbling away beneath."

Another recurring theme is the break-up of couples through a reluctance to communicate with each other.

"That's true, I hadn't thought of that. That's interesting, but I've been with my wife for about fourteen years. That's odd, isn't it?

"I think a lot of fantasy and science fiction fails to concentrate on character and the relationships between people. I focus as much on what is happening to the people as on what is happening around them. If I were to write a ghost story then I would look as much at the people who are seeing the ghost as at the ghost itself."

Graham is currently at work on his fourth novel, about which he will say nothing other than it seems to be as different from his previous work as each of those has been different from the others. It takes him about a year to complete each book. "That's not first draft, but it'll take about a year to get a book ready for publication. That seems to be the natural pace for me."

HEART-SHAPED BOX: JOE HILL INTERVIEWED

David J Howe meets up with debut horror novelist Joe Hill.

Meeting Joe Hill, you cannot help but be reminded of another author in his younger days … photographs from the seventies reveal Stephen King to be of similar build with similar eyes … and indeed, Joe Hill was born Joseph Hillstrom King, son of Stephen. However this fact only really came out in the last year, after his first collection of short stories, 20^th Century Ghosts, was published.

We meet in a London coffee bar, where Joe has a cappuccino and slice of cake. Coming from a literary family, with both mother and father being published authors, Joe has been writing ever since he can remember.

‘I’ve been writing since I was 12,’ he explains, adding sugar to his coffee. ‘My first professional submission was to Marvel Comics and they turned it down . Tragically. I don’t know why …’ He smiles broadly. ‘But then I finished a book in my senior year in college and that’s what won me my agent. That was loosely based on, or took it’s inspiration from a Nirvana song. The book was called Paper Angels and it was very Cormac McCarthy … and used all these long words with 48 letters in and so on.  I liked to work in words like “antediluvian” if I could – any sentence could be improved by that.’

Joe pauses to munch on his cake, and I ask how growing up in a house filled with books and writers at work affected him.

‘I dunno, I can’t compare it to anyone else’s childhood but I do think it’s fair to say that I would come home from school and my mum would be in her office, writing, my dad would be in his office, writing, and by the time I was 12 or 13 I thought that making stuff up for a living was a totally rational thing to do. I would get home from school and think, Oh, it must be time for me to go write. I had the daily practice of writing, and now it’s been such a part of my life for so long that not to write would be like … losing a few fingers or something.’

Talking with Joe, you realise that although he takes writing very seriously, he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He is enthusiastic and articulate, talking about his writing with interest and animation, hands gesticulating.

I ask about his first published book, a collection of short stories: ‘I wrote four novels before Heart-Shaped Box that I couldn’t sell,’ he explains. ‘My first book was called 20^th Century Ghosts and it sold to the last place it was sent: it had been turned down everywhere else. But Peter Crowther from the small press publisher PS in the UK saw it, liked it, and then published it.’

Joe is a great supporter of and believer in the small presses, and his passion is apparent. ‘The small presses are such an important part of the literary ecosystem. It’s a place where anyone can come forward. There have been so many writers who have had that chance to explore and experiment and invent in the small presses when the larger publishing houses would rather have something a little more safe. They’re not looking for “generic” … but it’s a tough business and it’s hard to make any money in it and so they’re looking for the titles where they think they can sell a few thousand copies.

Heart-Shaped Box is certainly set to sell that. Published in the UK at the end of March, it’s about a rock musician called Jude, who buys a ghost on the internet and comes to regret that purchase when it transpires that the sale was fixed, and that the ghost is out for revenge.

This collision between the fantastic – ghosts – and the technological – the internet – is fascinating, however Joe doesn’t see it like that. ‘It’s not really that fantastic, you know. First of all, all ghost stories are really about people buying stuff.  The family buys the house in Amityville. They get the six bedroomed place, and then they get the blood leaking through the walls at 2am … When I think about most stories of hauntings, they begin with people buying something they shouldn’t. From another standpoint it should be noted that buying a ghost off the internet is not a totally original idea. It’s been done! People have sold their souls online. It’s all out there. People have sold haunted hat racks and haunted bracelets … The one that sticks in my head is something that my mum sent me … there was one woman on eBay selling a bracelet which the seller claimed was possessed by the ghost of an angry witch. I remember thinking, who the hell’s going to buy that?  My question on all this sort of stuff is not who would sell it, but who would buy it?  And my answer to that was Jude.

‘But I think that the concept is incidental. For me as a writer I need a great concept to get started, that will carry me along for about two days and then I need a great character or the story is headed for the shredder. And, again, I found Jude. Jude is a really decent guy, he’s just been having a bad day … and he’s been having that bad day for about six years.’

I wonder how Joe classifies his own work. ‘Heart-Shaped Box is horror,’ he says. ‘I always used to get annoyed when I was younger … I’d get Fangoria magazine and open it and there’d be this interview with a guy who had directed Sorority Dwarf Massacre 4 or whatever, and he’d be like, “I don’t really see myself as a horror director,” and I’d just want to scream! You’re not Fellini! Look at the movie you just made! But that said, I see myself as a guy who’s written one horror novel and some ghost stories, but not necessarily a horror writer. I love fantasy and I love surrealism.  20^th Century Ghosts is a good representation of my work. There’s some literary fiction in there, there’s a crime story … I like genre fiction, but I like all the genres, from science fiction to horror to crime …’

With Heart-Shaped Box picked up both by Gollancz in the UK and Morrow in the US, it was only a matter of time before interest was shown by Hollywood, and now a film version is underway, with Neil Jordan slated to direct. Jordan’s previous work includes the halluciagenically beautiful werewolf tale The Company of Wolves (1984), the controversial The Crying Game (1992) and an adaptation of Anne Rice’s vampire novel Interview with A Vampire. Production on the film will start for Warner Bros as soon as Jordan finishes writing the script. Joe is understandably pleased with this latest development. ‘I’m delighted Neil Jordan is going to take a whack at the book. He’s a careful, literate director with a great aptitude for examining fear and regret and love, and he should do a great job with it.’

With Heart-Shaped Box already selling strongly – it hit number 8 in the New York Times bestseller lists at the start of April – what’s next for Joe Hill? ‘I don’t know,’ he says with a smile. ‘Some of that depends on my publishers.  The next thing is a new edition of 20^th Century Ghosts. Gollancz in England and William Morrow in the US are doing it. There was one story missed out, called ‘Bobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead’, and so that will be included.

‘I’ve also written a young adult fantasy novel called The Bright Circle and I’ve also got a thriller underway – not supernatural – called Dirty Deeds … so there’s a bunch of projects that could come next.’

Heart-Shaped Box is published in the UK by Gollancz in hardback.

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!’