INTERVIEW WITH ANNE RICE

In 1976 a book appeared by an unknown author which purported to be a real-life interview with a vampire. Interview With The Vampire was hailed as a classic and it established its author as a name to be watched.

The author was Anne Rice, who has since gone on to expand the series with The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned and now The Tale of the Body Thief. She has also dabbled in Egyptian mythology with The Mummy, and witches in The Witching Hour. Despite all these links with the supernatural genre, Rice is reluctant to discuss vampires, or her use of these characters, and when asked claims a mainstream approach to her work.

"I can't claim to have a great deal of interest in the genre," she states. "I write what I write and it comes out being very weird and unclassified and always has done. So the word genre has sort of been an enemy word for me. I hope my work transcends the genre, I hope it does everything a serious book ought to do."

If Rice is not writing genre books, then what sort of books are they? How does she classify herself?

"They are philosophical novels. They concern supernatural heroes, but are very thoughtful philosophical novels. They are also meant to be sensuous and thrilling. If I look back and think of the novels that have influenced me, they are things like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Dickens' Great Expectations ... works like that. What is Macbeth? It's got three witches and a ghost, and Hamlet ...? I feel that you can take supernatural characters and use them in a complex psychological and philosophical novel. You can write about the deepest things you have to write about, you can say the things that are most pressing for you to say. There's no reason not to work with those characters in that way. It's only a modern prejudice that says if fiction is going to deal with supernatural characters it's going to be limited. Three hundred years ago no-one thought putting Mephistopheles in a play limited the scope of the play."

This point I wholeheartedly agreed with. Categorisation isn't fair, because if you only read in one restricted genre then you are going to miss out on good stories elsewhere. It's the story that's important, not the pigeonhole.

"Absolutely. I think In the last twenty years there's been a lot of strident marketing of books as genre books, because that's the only way that the people who read those books can get to them. Publishers have become so adamant that the definition of a serious novel is being a realistic novel that they have just jumped ship on literature. The science fiction world is a perfect example. It's filled with readers who want poetry and lyricism and heroic figures and depth and they have no time to read a novel about divorce in Connecticut. They do not want to waste their time reading something that no-one in the last seven thousand years would have considered a worthy subject for serious fiction, so they've gone off and made their own world. For a long time the mainstream fiction world ignored science fiction, but what finally happened was that SF developed so much financial momentum that it could no longer be ignored and the books started to pop up on the bestseller lists and everyone started to realize that the science fiction part of the bookstore was bigger than the rest. But does genre really apply? I don't think so. I think it's a negative word that people have used so that they don't have to deal intellectually with science fiction. I've done signings in science fiction stores and the readers who come to those signings are the among the most sophisticated people. I love all my readers; science fiction readers are fabulous, they include secretaries and file-clerks and insurance salesmen - all these people enjoy thinking about the meaning of life and infinity and whether there is a God and so forth, and science fiction is the fiction in which they find all those questions addressed."

These are also questions addressed in The Tale of the Body Thief. The book again concerns the vampire Lestat, but this time he is in a far more philosophical role. The opportunity arises for him to swap bodies with a human, and he wants so much to be human that he agrees to the exchange. And yet when he is human, he finds that this isn't perhaps quite what he remembered or expected.

"I was trying to do a lot in that novel, and one of them was to try and expose the vanity of the three works that preceded it. I was trying to say: alright, I've made vampirism seem very romantic and I've done that largely by having the vampires walk around saying, 'oh we wish we were human again'. Do they really, or is this not a crock? I wanted to expose that, because I think that's a device that was used in literature for centuries. We write about evil by making a regretful hero who wins our sympathy, but what we really enjoy are his antics as an evil person.

"In fiction the bad guys are often more interesting but I have a suspicion that in real life it's not that way. I think one of the things that was so disappointing and appalling about The Silence of the Lambs is that there's no Hannibal Lecter out there. That's such a literary idea: the intelligent serial killer. They really tend to be horribly mundane, unimaginative, clumsy and awful people."

In Lestat Rice has created a marvellous antihero, he sees himself outside everything, and questions whether he is evil or not to great philosophical lengths.

"I think the questions he's always asking are the questions I'm asking every day of my life. I'm using him as a colourful hero, but basically it's the same question. One of the things that intrigues me the most is this whole question of what we are willing to do to get what we want in life. What people are really willing to do. On a very simple level, we are obviously not willing to go to Somalia to feed people, we want to stay here even though we know they are starving. But there are different levels on which we make those choices, we are not going to do certain things because we want our comforts, we want our security, our ambition, the rewards of our particular career. When I was younger those things didn't seem to me to be so important but they do now, so to me The Tale of the Body Thief is a lot about that.

"Does everybody have a price in some way? Is it just that for many people it is very, very, very high? For example, the character of David Talbot intrigued me. Is there really a person who would turn away from eternal life like that, who would just absolutely refuse. I think there is, but I'm not that person. I wanted to show Lestat being given the choice of saving his soul, entering back into the human drama. As it happens he wound up saying 'Boring!' I think we work that way a lot in life."

It is interesting that this is the attitude that Lestat finally takes, because in the first book of the series, the vampires themselves were bored with their eternal life.

"I tried to put that in the first book, that they often died of boredom if they couldn't connect, but that was supposed to be those that were the least imaginative and the least brilliant. Lestat is ideally the hero that can last forever, can do anything."

Interview With The Vampire was Rice's first published novel and it caused quite a stir as she took it around various publishers.

"It wasn't a struggle to get it published, it was accepted fairly quickly about nine months after I wrote it, but the rejections it did get were just ghastly. People were telling me to throw the book out. They were outraged that someone would dare write a book like that. I remember one agent who turned it down said 'I don't know what it is, it's not black comedy and it's not tongue in cheek, I can't tell what it's supposed to be, so obviously I'm not the person to handle it.' And another person wrote back to say it should be published as a paperback with a sexy, lurid cover, focusing principally on the secrets about vampires. It was all very discouraging.

"After it was published it was a raging success in some respects, it got a lot of attention and a lot of wonderful reviews but it got other reviews that were so vicious they were just unbelievable. There was one which I didn't see at the time - I came across it in a reference book in the library years after - in which the reviewer said that the whole thing smacked of a computer. That every hot subject of the moment had been taken and thrown into a novel. They also said something about the stunning cynicism with which this has been published as serious fiction. I couldn't believe it! I'm glad I didn't see it at the time, I probably would have been crushed."

Following Interview With The Vampire, Rice's second book concentrated on the character of Lestat, this time through his own words.

"Lestat preyed on me the whole time I was writing the first book. He came to life spontaneously and rather than my creating him, he just developed. Immediately I wanted to write another book from his point of view, telling his side of the story. That's something that fascinates me in fiction anyway. I think one of the greatnesses of a book like Anna Karenina is that Tolstoy is so kind and compassionate to every character in it and you understand everybody's point of view: Anna's, her lover's, her husband's. I've never been particularly satisfied or happy with fiction that doesn't do that."

An interesting aspect of Rice's vampire fiction is that she maintains the pretence throughout that these characters are real, and that the books have been genuinely written by vampires. This works very well and I wondered how much pre-planning had gone into the titles.

"I don't plan very far. Right now I know there will be a fifth book and that it will grow out of the section in The Tale of the Body Thief where David and Lestat talk about David possibly having seen God and the Devil in a café. I know it will go in that direction but I don't know yet what will happen and I'm deliberately not planning it. I don't even know which characters will come to the fore. The one character I want to get back to over and over again is Armand, he gets neglected when I get carried away with something else. I wanted him to be in the most recent book but there turned out to be no place for him."

The book prior to The Tale of the Body Thief was The Queen of the Damned, a very densely populated novel, spanning centuries of time, and requiring a lot of concentration from the reader. At the start of The Tale of the Body Thief Lestat apologises that this new novel is not as populated as the last.

"Right after I finished The Queen of the Damned we went to Hawaii for a vacation and I found it impossible to relax. I couldn't stop thinking, writing, taking notes and I knew right away that I wanted to write another book that was far more intimate about Lestat because I felt completely too far away from him at the end of The Queen of the Damned, and the novel had left me unsatisfied. I had enjoyed working with that grand scheme and trying to pull off things that really shouldn't work but I really wanted to get back to a tale told by Lestat."

Rice's intention with the vampire chronicles is that they will eventually form a library documenting the vampires on Earth.

"It's important to me that they be like volumes on a shelf, you can pull down any one volume and read it at any point. You can start with any one volume and you can go to any other. That's the way I see them now. Each one is written to be independent of the others.

All of Rice's books have been hefty tomes, the biggest being The Witching Hour which weighs in at 1207 paperback pages. "I have a hard time writing anything small!" she admits. "By the time I've put in everything that I want to put in they are enormous. The Vampire Lestat, for instance, is a book which doesn't really finish, it just stops! I was really swept away just by the ideas of The Witching Hour. Was this family evil, maybe they weren't. Was the ghost that haunted them evil? Was he really a ghost? I really wanted to get into that, and of course the thing that made the book so long was that right in the middle I got totally carried away writing a history of the family! Of course people were saying cut, cut, cut! And I said no, no, no! None of my readers ever said cut, but when publishers see a book that thick they groan because it's so hard to publish it. Every step is so difficult.

"In fact, I slightly miscalculated with The Witching Hour because I didn't print it out until the end, so I had no idea how long it was. When I cam to print it, it took about two days to come off as I had a dot-matrix printer at that time. I remember going in and seeing page one thousand roll out and thinking that this book was a little long. But it really was the length I thought it should be.

"The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that endings are the most artificial part of fiction writing. There are few really great endings and I'm really bad at endings. The books always mutate and take off in a different direction at the end, every time.

"I thought The Witching Hour had the best ending I'd ever written until people began to ask 'what happened?' I thought that was a wonderful ending, that was the most complete ending I'd ever done. But readers were furious!

"I've completed a sequel to The Witching Hour called Lasher, which will be published in the fall. I'm not sure that it is a book you can read without reading the other first. It's very closely dependent. I just finished doing the corrections on it and I found myself wondering if it stands as well on its own as the others did? My suspicion is that a lot of people will read it and then go back and read The Witching Hour but I really don't know."

TURTLE TATTLE

Somewhere on Earth there may be someone who has not come across the work of Terry Pratchett. His books regularly grace the upper reaches of the bestseller lists and each new title is received with even more acclaim than the last.

For Terry, however, writing has always been in his blood. "I started writing," he explains, "because when I was about twelve, a teacher at school asked us to write a short story as a project. I got twenty out of twenty for mine and it was printed in the school magazine."

Inspired by this success, Terry polished the story up a bit, got his aunt to type it out, and sent it off to a magazine called Science Fantasy who bought it. "I got paid fourteen pounds for it and bought myself a typewriter with the money. My mother was so impressed that she paid for me to have touch typing lessons, leaving me with a typewriter and the ability to use it quickly."

Terry's first novel was The Carpet People which he started when he was about seventeen and finished when he turned twenty. By this time Terry had started working for his local newspaper as a journalist and became friendly with a small press publisher called Colin Smythe. Colin saw the manuscript for The Carpet People and published it in 1971, followed by four other books: The Dark Side of the Sun (1976), Strata (1981), The Colour of Magic (1983) and The Light Fantastic (1986).

With this last title, it became apparent to both Terry and Colin that there was a bit of a problem. "It was a bit embarrassing with the publication of The Light Fantastic," Terry reveals, "because we realised that Colin had got hold of something which a small press publisher dreads: a best selling book. Colin was not set up to cater for a national demand and it was clear to both of us that sooner or later things would have to change and so we decided to do something while we were still friends. We reached an arrangement whereby he became my agent and he arranged for Gollancz to publish hardcovers of the next three books; Equal Rites (1987), Mort (1987) and Sourcery (1988)."

Corgi had previously published paperback editions of The Colour of Magic (1985) and The Light Fantastic (1986), using an artist called Josh Kirby to provide the covers. Kirby was contracted by Gollancz to do the hardcover jackets as well, while Corgi continued publishing the paperbacks. "And the rest," Terry smiles, "is geography!"

The books in question are now known generically as the Discworld novels, and they feature a world, not totally dissimilar to our own, in which magic works and people go about their business in their own way, and cope with all that life throws at them.

One major difference is that the Discworld is flat and is held up by four giant elephants which are in turn standing on the back of Great A'Tuin, a giant turtle which swims eternally through space.

"Ludicrous though that concept may be," Terry admits, "the idea that the world is flat and goes through space on the back of an enormous turtle is one of the great commonplace myths of mankind. The four elephants were a kind of Indo-European subset of that myth. I embroidered it an awful lot, but the basic shape of the Discworld is straight out of mythology."

While the world they inhabit may be somewhat fanciful, the characters are anything but. Terry delights in creating recognisable people. His popular band of players include Rincewind the wizard, his faithful Luggage (a packing case on legs which is devoted to Rincewind and follows him everywhere, barging into people and things with no regard for decorum), Granny Weatherwax, a warts-and-all witch who deals with the rigours of the modern world in the only way she knows how (rudeness and bluster mainly) and the Librarian of the magical Unseen University who has been accidentally transformed into a large orangutan.

One of the more popular characters is Death. Death is an entity who speaks in hollow capitals, who everyone meets at least once, and who has made an appearance in every book so far.

"Death came about because I needed to get a particular gag in The Colour of Magic and he had to be a mobile creature. So I introduced him, and subsequently realised that there was a lot of mileage in the character as well as being fun to write for. After a while I realised that the readers were more or less waiting for him to turn up somewhere in the proceedings too, so he tends to have a walk-on part in most of the books."

Terry reveals that he tends to think of his characters as "film stars under contract" and he uses them as and when the idea is right for them to appear. As he dryly comments, "If I listened to feedback I would have written thirteen books about Rincewind and the Luggage. I occasionally aim to go in new directions so that maybe the reader can't be one hundred per cent certain about what Terry's going to write next.

"Rincewind hasn't appeared since Eric, and he will not appear again until I have a book which I know will be a suitable vehicle for him. Rather than re-use old characters, I prefer to invent new ones to do different things with.

"Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler [a salesman who appears whenever there is a large crowd of people, with a tray around his neck, laden with inedible pies, suspect sausages and various other partially cooked animal parts on sticks] very clearly turns up in Small Gods, although his name in that book is Cut-Me-Own-Hand-Off Dhblah. His appearance was like Sidney James turning up in a film and basically playing Sidney James - as he did. It's a signal to the readers that this is a character we know and love."

Moving onto the subject of humour, I commented that it seemed apparent that while Terry took writing very seriously, he was not necessarily serious about what he was actually writing about. Terry is quick to point out that I am completely wrong in my assessment.

"I am quoting almost verbatim G K Chesterton," he admonished, "who said that it is quite wrong to think that 'serious' is the opposite of 'funny'. The opposite of 'serious' is 'not serious'. The opposite of 'funny' is 'not funny'. Now there are some people who are both 'funny' and 'serious'. Ben Elton might be considered to be one of those. And there are some people who are both 'funny' and 'not serious' and we might put Benny Hill in that category. There are even some people who are 'not funny' and 'not serious' and we might put John Major there ... the point is that these things are no more opposites than 'black' is the opposite of 'triangular'. So there are some things in the books that I take very seriously indeed but you have to work out which bits they are!"

Terry revealed that he was happier with the later Discworld books. "For example, the subject of Moving Pictures always fascinated me. One of the things that has happened in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is that people have been given opportunities where there were previously none. The central myth of Hollywood is that some good-looking waitress can go off to Hollywood and become the most famous woman in the world. We know it didn't work for nine hundred and ninety nine thousand of them but it did for one or two and that's all you need to build up the myth. Moving Pictures makes that point. It was about fame and dreams; I don't like Hollywood but you can't help but recognise the incredible pull it has."

So far, the Discworld novels have been appearing at the rate of two a year but the rate is going to slow down to one a year following publication of the next book, Lords and Ladies in November. "There will not be a Discworld novel published in the spring although there will be another young adult novel (Johnny and the Dead) which isn't finished yet."

Terry went on to say that the reason behind this was in no way due to a lack of ideas. "It's simply that two things are happening. One is that for five years I've been writing an average of close to three successful books a year, and I thought it might be nice to spend six months just enjoying myself; and the other thing is that the business of being Terry Pratchett is beginning to occupy more and more time. There is the mail, of course, there are talks, and requests for signings and to attend conventions all over the world. All this takes up time and I need to have the time to manage it all."

As Terry is relatively prolific, I asked whether writing came easily to him, or whether he really had to work at it. "Yes," he replied with a smile. "Both the statements you have just made are correct. I find it easy to write and I have to work at it. Sometimes thousands of words will come spilling out effortlessly onto the page, but there are other times when you sit there and you just cannot work. But yes, I enjoy doing it. It seems a natural thing to do, because throughout my life, by and large, I have had to assemble words in a certain pleasing way in order to make a living."

Lords and Ladies, "bears the same relationship to A Midsummer Night's Dream as Wyrd Sisters bore to Macbeth," hints Terry. "It has the witches in again. The one after that won't appear until November 1993, and that will probably be set in Ankh Morpork and feature the guards [from Guards! Guards!] and the Fresh Start Club for the Newly Undead [from Reaper Man], and possibly even Gaspode [from Moving Pictures]. It's going to be what you might call an Ankh Morpork-intensive one.

"Some people might like me to kill off all the Discworld characters and run the turtle into a black hole, but I like them too much. It's obviously going to end one day - they'll probably put the last manuscript on my coffin - but it is going to slow down for the moment because there are other things I want to do."

With thanks to Helen Connolly at Transworld Publishers, and, of course, to Terry Pratchett.

PIKE FISHING

The market for a fantasy or horror novel is very broad.  It can extend from the younger readers, still in their teens, to the proverbial old grannies in their cardigans sitting by the fire.  However, in this day and age, a teenager is just as likely, if not more so, to be reading comics or sitting glued to the television set than enjoying a novel.  How then, do you turn this potential market back to the written word?

This is something that author, Christopher Pike, has been doing in America since 1984.  Pike's books are defined as 'young adult' which conjures up visions of the mass of teen-fiction in this country.  Pike, however, is not quite like that.  His stories, although aimed at the teen market, are often tales which stem from one basic fantastic assumption. 'I don't see myself as writing books for young adults' he explains, 'I just write books which happen to be about them.  The standard young fiction market in this country, doesn't treat the readers as if they are intelligent.  Most of the books are consequentially just dull.'

Pike has no illusions about his writing.  He writes for himself as much as anyone else, and his only concession to the market that he has made his own is that you won't find buckets of blood or graphic sex in his novels.  As with most teen-aimed fiction, the staples of young love and adolescent problems are touched upon, but Pike has the knack of knowing where to stop and the books are the better for it.  'You obviously have to include things that relate to the kids, like first love or  problems at school and the like.  And I deal with that, but you have to remember that the reader is intelligent and not to try too hard to write for a teenage market.'

The first two titles to be published in the UK, Spellbound and Chain Letter met with good critical acclaim, and, aided by an effective advertising campaign, got the books into the adult sections of most bookstores. In Chain Letter, Pike takes the premise of a gang of kids who accidentally knock down an anonymous man one night while they are driving.  They bury him, but later a chain letter is sent to one of the gang with an instruction of a task to be performed.  Slowly the demands of the letter become more and more bizarre, centering on the individual fears and phobias of the kids.  To break the chain means that something bad will happen to you, but how does the mysterious 'caretaker' of the letter know so much about the kids? Indeed, who is the caretaker?  Pike builds this scenario up well, and the final denouement is well handled.  Spellbound is not quite as good, dealing with the fairly unlikely premise that a human can exchange bodies with an animal though projection of mental power. 

 
Before turning to writing Pike (whose real name is Kevin McFadden - 'My middle name is Christopher and Pike was a nice short last name and the combination was just a spur of the moment thing.') was a computer programmer who also dabbled in painting.  He turned to writing simply to try and satisfy a desire to tell a good story.

Soon to see publication are Last Act in November while Gimme a Kiss is scheduled for January 1990.  With further books to come, as well as a large horror novel for the adult market, Christopher Pike is definitely going places, and with luck he will bring his young audience with him.

KIM NEWMAN

Alternate dream universes peopled with Humphrey Bogart, Edward G Robinson and Peter Lorre, ancient vampiric creatures with the power to shape dreams into a pseudo-reality and a modern day messiah, whose aspirations become his followers' reality. Hardly your run-of-the-mill subjects for fiction, but then Kim Newman is not a run-of-the-mill author.

Born in 1959, Newman is today perhaps best known for his early morning slots on Channel 4, reviewing the latest film releases, but the sheer volume of research and work that has seen print mark him as an acknowledged expert in film subjects ranging from the macabre to the western. This love of film and literature spills over into his books, perhaps most evidently in his first novel, The Night Mayor, a whirlwind race through a film noir inspired nightmare. Jago is his most recent novel, with Bad Dreams being published between the two. 

If you thought that Newman had just written three novels, you would think wrong, as there are more to discover lurking under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil. 'I acknowledge all my illegitimate children,' Kim, alias Jack, laughs. 'I make no attempt to conceal the fact that I write as Jack Yeovil as well.

'The reason I write as Jack is not to disassociate myself from that work, I'm just trying to say that these are different types of books. A good example is Ed McBain and Evan Hunter neither of whom are real people. They're really a guy called Sal Lombino, but I tend to see Jack Yeovil as the Ed  McBain and Kim Newman as the Evan Hunter.

'There are other, more practical, aspects like, for example, that no-one really wants to publish more than one book by an author a year and I felt that I could write more than one book a year, more than one type of fiction © I could keep two careers going at the same time.'

The first of the Jack Yeovil titles to see print was Drachenfels (Games Workshop 1989). This is an adventure novel with a difference - a play is staged to celebrate the death of the evil Drachenfels, but the players stir up more than cobwebs and dust as the staging of the drama progresses.

I asked Kim what the chronology of his books was. 'I first wrote The Night Mayor in late 1982 as a novella but it became too long so I left it. Then in 1984 or 1985, I completed an initial draft of Bad Dreams which didn't sell and just hung around. Then, getting depressed, I sat down in early 1987 and wrote in a week a book called Bloody Students, which was, I suppose the first Jack Yeovil novel, although it wasn't a Jack Yeovil novel at the time! And from about 1979 onwards I was vaguely working on Jago.Then, in 1988, I decided to write The Night Mayor properly and that sold to Simon and Schuster! On the back of that everything else I had written sold as well. 

'The Night Mayor wasn't the first book published though, I think Drachenfels came out first - by about two weeks!'

Jack Yeovil has so far written seven books. Five (Drachenfels, Demon Download, Krokodil Tears, Come Back Tour and Beasts in Velvet) have been published by Games Workshop. A sixth title (Genevieve Undead) is still with them and it should see publication at some future date, and a seventh book is just available from Grafton Books. This is Bloody Students. 'That was written at a time when I'd been writing quite a while and I was just a bit depressed as nobody had bought my stuff,' recalled Kim. 'I reasoned that if I wrote a book in a week then, even if it sold for something pathetic, even if it sold for five hundred pounds, that would still be more than I'd earned in

a week before. And if it didn't sell - what was a week! I didn't actually give up anything - and I even took the weekend off as well.'

Bloody Students concerns a college©full of guys and gals doing what students do - talking, mixing, partying and so on. Then a virus is released and the kids start to succumb to its effects - mainly a feeling of well-being and a hugely enhanced sexual drive. Unfortunately this is followed by aggression and blood-lust - hence the title.

'It is a typical student novel in many ways, but I think I can exclusively reveal that the next Jack Yeovil that I want to do is a teenage slasher novel to be called Judy's Turn to Cry from the Lesley Gore song. It's about teenagers being horrible to each other in a Carrie sort of way.'

Poles apart from slasher novels is Kim's new book (under his own name this time) Jago. I wondered where that fitted into the wider picture. 'It started with various people sitting around the commonroom at Sussex University and talking about what we were going to do when we grew up. I knew I was destined for long term misery and unemployment - this was the first recession, Margaret Thatcher had just been elected, graduate unemployment was at an all time high, and I knew I had no future whatsoever, so it was suggested that I write a big thick bestselling novel.

'All I can say is that Jago is big and thick, and that the original intention was to write a commercial book. I always wanted to produce something that was broader in its appeal than just to genre fans - those people who liked The Night Mayor and Bad Dreams. I also thought it would be nice to have something that didn't need as much explanation as for example The Night Mayor.

'The biggest influence, as with most people of my generation, was Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot. It's interesting, but I believe King got most of 'Salem's Lot from Grace Metalious who wrote Peyton Place. If you compare the two there are a lot of parallels that I think King added deliberately. He took the plot of Dracula and the setting of Peyton Place and combined them to superb effect. 

'I wanted to do something with that structure: lots of characters, a small community, with a good sense of the history of the community. A lot of feel about the past in it. I also wanted to set it in England, and I grew up close to a village that inspired the one in the book. Once I had the setting, I knew that it had to have a big idea to it and you can't get much bigger than religion. I'm interested in religion, and at the time I was outlining it there was a lot of talk about the Moonies, and subsequently the Scientologists, and that whole cult idea intrigued me a lot. 

'The book grew organically rather than being a pot pourri of ideas. It's taken a long time to write, but the central elements and characters have been there since the early '80s when I first outlined it. A lot of the images from the latter half of the book date from that period as well.'

The eponymous Jago is a self-styled messiah with the power to make others believe what he wishes them to believe and is a powerful and dangerous force in the novel. I commented that the reader is never allowed into Jago's head - you never know exactly who or what he is (or thinks he is). 

'The literary precedent for that is Dracula, where you never really know Dracula. You see him in different forms but you don't get inside his head. Another influence that I wanted to get in the book was Wells' The Invisible Man. That has a great narrative structure, it has lots and lots of viewpoints but Griffin - the invisible man - isn't one of them, so he is invisible to you, the reader. Wells disguises it brilliantly by having a long section narrated by Griffin where he is telling you something direct - in fact he's telling someone else in the story - which means that you don't have to trust him. I thought that was a great pun on him being invisible, and what being invisible really means.'

With Jago available in hardback, and Bloody Students published in paperback in November, I wondered what we could expect next from Kim/Jack.

'Certainly I think I'll be staying in the horror genre: the next three Kim Newman books I have  outlined have horror as their basis, but my whole outlook is that I don't want to write the same novel again. Many authors do, and in some cases I really like the original novel, but I don't want people to say "Oh, it's another Kim Newman book." I want them all to be different, to do something different with each book.

'What I would like to do next is a hardback collection of my short fiction, of which there is a substantial amount now, and I would like another novel out at the same time as Jago is published in paperback. At the moment that is what I am describing as a Steampunk Vampire novel. Victorian set,

alternate world novel with vampires in it. At the moment it's provisionally titled Anno Dracula and a novella, Red Reign, which will form the core of the book, will appear in Steve Jones' Mammoth Book of Vampires.'

Until then, we wish Kim Newman and Jack Yeovil good luck with their respective books ... and may the best man win!

GRAHAM MASTERTON

If you look at the books which can be can be considered as being foundation of modern horror, then you come up with perhaps a handful of titles and authors. One of which has to be The Manitou by Graham Masterton.

Graham Masterton is one of the greatest writers of horror fiction alive today. His work epitomises the genre, with good, interesting characters faced with horrific and plausable horrors all set in the real world. The Manitou was Graham Masterton's first horror novel and involved demonic possession in downtown New York.

'In the space of literally a week I wrote The Manitou, which was based partly on an old legend I'd read in a Buffalo Bill Annual of 1955 and partly on the fact that my wife was pregnant with our first child. So that's where the idea of an Indian medicine man being reborn in the modern day to take his revenge on the Paleface came from. The book actually had two endings. In the original version, which was published in hardback by Lindel and Spearman in America, the medicine man - Misquamacus - was killed by Vietnam Rose - a particularly nasty form of venereal disease - passed on to him by his 'mother'. When the American paperback came to be published by Pinnacle, the editor asked if the ending could be changed and so I changed it.'

The Manitou established a loose theme for Masterton's work; that of ancient evils revisited on the modern day. 'You find that so many of these old myths and legends very succinctly sum up some very basic fears. I was up in Glasgow doing a promotional tour a couple of years ago and I was talking to some old ladies at Ibrox Park Library and they told me about some horrible witches - the Glaistigs. These creatures always used to have a little companion with them, called Little Plug. They'd visit your house at night, suck your cows dry, and then kill your youngest born child and bathe their Little Plug in the blood. When you actually look at what that myth is about, first of all there's the very basic fear of losing your livelihood by them coming and draining your cow; then there's a Fatal Attraction kind of fear where another woman takes over the household and finally there's the fear of injury happening to your child. A lot of these old legends personify people's fundamental fears. On top of that you then have the fun of visiting them on the present day. It also makes the book work on several levels. For instance in Mirror I was able to use Alice Through the Looking Glass as a springboard, and in Family Portrait it was The Picture of Dorian Grey. These literary reference points give the books a kind of spurious authenticity which people enjoy.'

Shortly after publication, The Manitou was made into a film starring Tony Curtis and Susan Strasberg. 'Bill Girdler, the exploitation movie maker, had picked the book up at an airport. He rang me up and said 'We've written a screenplay of your book, do you mind if we buy it?' So I said 'No, I don't mind.' They made the film virtually within six months.

'I felt that the film was quite good of its type. It was just at the time that Star Wars came out so it had a sort of Star Wars-y type ending. I was pleased that the dry humour was retained and I thought the casting wasn't bad. We were sketching out the plans for making The Djinn into a movie when Bill was killed in a helicopter accident. That really stopped any further film projects at that time.'

After completing The Manitou, Masterton carried straight on writing. 'I just write all the time. Having been used to working on magazines where I was writing continuously, I write continuously now. If I'm not doing horror novels I'm working on something else. I'm still writing sex instruction How To... books for Penguin USA. They apparently sell in their millions. The incredible thing is that new generations of people are still growing up more sexually ignorant than they ought to be and the problem pages in newspapers and magazines are full. People still find it difficult to communicate on sexual matters so if you can reassure them, you're doing something worthwhile and, because of the sales, it's certainly profitable for a writer.'

Graham Masterton has always wanted diversity in his work. 'I like writing about anything that interests me, I don't like to feel confined. If you look at other writers who have been really prominent, they always seem to write virtually the same book over and over again. In some ways they are right to do it and I envy them that ability because a lot of readers do want to be back in familiar territory with each successive book. I don't knock them at all, they are obviously being very business-wise and very sensible and have done very well, but if you're not happy doing that, you can't do it.'

More recently, Masterton has returned to the success of his debut horror novel with Burial, the third of his books to pit our hero Harry Erskine against Misquamacus. 'Revenge of the Manitou was the second book, and I just liked the idea of looking back at the same characters in a different setting and reworking them. Burial is set twenty years later. Interestingly enough, there was a French edition of Burial and the publisher pointed out that there were two people in the novel who were killed in The Manitou: the girl who runs the occult shop, Amelia Crusoe, and her boyfriend MacArthur. In The Manitou they were burned alive in their apartment. Whoops! Of course it was twenty years since I'd written it and in the film they don't die, so my memory of it was always that they hadn't died. So I wrote a little introduction for the French edition explaining that people who live in novels are different from the rest of us and I'd decided that I still liked them so they could come alive again. In any case, if you read The Manitou carefully, you find that their bodies were burnt beyond recognition so the police could have made a mistake.'

One of the more refreshing aspects of Masterton's writing is that his characters are always very well defined. 'I think a book is useless without that and I think that's where a lot of horror books fall down. They might have a very, very good idea as far as the plot goes but if the characters don't live and you don't really care what happens to them or how they deal with it, then the whole thing is pointless. I also think it's important to realize the fundamental absurdity of these books and to try and come to terms with that in your story. The reaction, for instance, for most people if something really horrific and monstrous appeared at the window would be to go 'oh shit!' and then burst out laughing.

'I write very conversationally. When I'm writing, I'm in the book. You can read an awful lot of books where it's obviously just happening in front of the writer on the page or on the screen, whereas I'm aware of the wind blowing on my back and the noises coming from over there and the smell coming from the fire lit beyond the trees and so on. That's why a lot of things happen in my books behind people or in the distance, there's a sort of stereophonic or quadraphonic effect. Although it's absurd in principle to postulate, the ideal book would be one where when you stop reading it, you're still in it. To give that feeling of actually being there. There are a lot of normal, day to day techniques that I use. If people are having a big, expressive argument in a book I'll have the argument on my own, think about the gestures they'd make and try to minimize the language. An awful lot of people's feelings are put over in endless tracts of conversation and dialogue and I try to keep these to a minimum because people don't normally speak like that. An awful lot is done through gesture and the trick is to put that in a book instead.'

Recently published in the UK was Night Plague (Warner p/b), the third book in a trilogy concerning a group of people who take on the persona of the Night Warriors in their dreams and do battle against evil. 'I liked the idea of something happening in your dreams, that idea that you could be somebody else, somebody far beyond your normal capabilities. It turned out to be more of a fantasy than I thought it would be when I first started writing it. It was going to merely be just people living another, quite ordinary, life in their dreams but it got a bit bombastic and out of control, everybody started getting these wonderful uniforms and things like that. But I enjoyed doing that. The second novel in the trilogy was Death Dream.'

The next novel to be published is called Flesh & Blood (Heinmann, h/b, July). 'This is a book which concerns the insertion of human genes into a very large and malevolent pig. At the same time it's also tied up with the ancient European legends of the mummers and Jack in the Green and that sort of thing. It's a very long book and it starts off with three poor little children having their heads cut off by their father. That's a fairly up to date theme and there's a lot of moralizing about genetics. You don't realize that in almost all the food we eat there are distorted animal genes, even vegetables have been converted by genetics. If we are what we eat, what the hell are we?

'I've just finished a book called Spirit, which is a horror ghost story, and I'm about to start another one and I'm also due to write another sex book. On top of all that, there's two magazine columns monthly for Men Only. I write the restaurant column for Men Only! Not many people know that.'

With several horror novels coming up, together with a collection of short stories called Fortnight of Fear due from Severn House shortly it seems that Graham Masterton is, for the moment at least, concentrating on chilling our bones.