F PAUL WILSON

Since 1981, F Paul Wilson has chilled and terrified readers through a growing series of top-rate horror novels.

It started in 1981, when his novel The Keep was published. But the roots of Paul's addiction to writing go even further back.

"It started for me in Second Grade. I remember back when I was six or seven, there was an edition of Life magazine with dinosaurs on the cover. I was flipping through it and I came to a picture of tyrannosaurus rex standing there, fixing me with that beady little eye. Something just clicked inside me and I wanted to learn more about these things; these monsters. Dinosaurs and rocket ships, those were the two things that defined my youth.

"I have always tended to think of myself more as a story teller than a writer, in the sense that being able to capture the audience is important to me, and not just writing what I'm feeling."

As well as being a writer, Paul is a practising doctor. I wondered if he had ever considered taking up writing full-time.

"Writing is still my hobby, in a sense, although I'm earning more money from that than from being a physician. I'm a family practitioner so I'm at the bottom end of the doctor income level. For me, writing isn't 'working', but if I quit medicine it would become my job and I don't think I'd like that. I don't want to give up medicine completely as I think writing makes me a better doctor and doctoring makes me a better writer. Writing is a compulsion. I want to get up there and do it - I'm anxious to get to it. I can have been slaving away in the medical office all day but then really look forward to getting home so I can produce some more words in the evening."

Although the bulk of Paul's work is in the horror field, he initially started writing Science Fiction with Healer (1976) and Wheels Within Wheels (1978). It was with The Keep (1981), however, that Paul found his first major commercial success.

"That was my biggest seller. It sold over a million copies in America and it's been sold to almost every country you can think of. I wanted it to be horror; it's got a vampire red herring, it's set in the Transylvania Alps, features immortal beings (that's the Lovecraft influence that comes in with the cosmic horror). It came about because I read Chelsea Quinn Yarboro's Hotel Transylvania which has a sympathetic, good vampire and I said to myself that that's impossible, you can't have a good vampire. They are parasites by nature. So I started thinking about a vampire that seemed good but really wasn't, that was leading you on. Was he even a vampire? What if he wasn't afraid of the crucifix but something else that just looked like a cross? All of a sudden it hit me: the hilt of a sword!

"The novel just built from there. There were a lot of things I could play with. I liked the different levels of evil: human evil, the Nazis, all that kind of stuff."

The Keep was followed in 1984 by another horror book, this time taking a different approach, and introducing one of Paul's most endearing and memorable characters. Repairman Jack is, as the name suggests, a man who 'repairs' things, in the same way as Edward Woodwood's character 'equalised' things in the TV series of the same name. Jack is a brilliant character who shines from the pages as if he is real. The Tomb did not, however, find immediate favour with the publishers.

"My American publisher hated The Tomb and wouldn't publish it, but it was published in the UK by New English Library. It's a lot of people's favourite. I get letters all the time asking when I am going to write more about Repairman Jack. When he's ready, is the reply. I've got some short stories about him but he's not ready for another novel just yet."

Following The Tomb came The Touch which contained a dramatic change of pace from the previous two books.

"The Touch was developed out of my own frustrations in medicine. There are always things you come up against ... your whole job is supposed to be counteracting disease and so many times you can't. So much of it is tragic; the girl who comes in with bruises all over her back and she wants them cleared up in time for her prom. You do a blood count and realise that she's not actually going to live to see her prom. You're helpless. A sixteen year old girl is going to die from leukaemia and there is nothing you can do! That's where a lot of this kind of fiction comes from."

Although these three books are distinct from each other, Paul has cleverly pulled all the concepts and characters together, along with two novels which expand on the ideas laid out in The Keep - Reborn and Reprisal - into his most recent paperback horror novel, Nightworld. Paul explained that this was not intentional from the start, but that it developed towards the end of the series.

"Reborn was actually started between The Keep and The Tomb. It was quite a different book at that time but it still contained the ideas of cloning and the Antichrist story. I couldn't get it to work at that time and the Repairman Jack character was nibbling away at me and so I had to write The Tomb next.

"Reborn, Reprisal and Nightworld were all planned out at once, as one story, and I resurrected Reborn at that time. What happened was that I didn't really want to do an Antichrist story. I wanted some other evil entity for my heroine to give birth to. So I thought, what about Rasalom in The Keep? Why don't I use him?

"Then I wanted a small town near New York in which to set the book, because I could then have scenes in New York City. In The Touch, there's the close-to-New York town of Munro. Maybe, I thought, I can pull in the third book as well - and I could. There was this nice, complete little circle. So then in order to finish Reborn and tie it into Nightworld I needed a bridging book which is where Reprisal came from. So that's the way it happened and I was really amazed at the way it worked."

Nightworld, of all the six books, is unashamedly a horror novel. New York is afflicted with the opening of a bottomless pit as Rasalom engineers his re-birth. From the pit spew all manner of nasty creepy, crawly, slithery, flapping creatures which sting, bite and generally harass as many humans as they can sink their teeth, tentacles and stingers into.

"It's a nineteen fifties B movie," laughs Paul. "I had a lot of fun with it. But the underlying theme, the one that carried along all the way from The Keep is: who are you?

"That was the question Cuza had to answer in The Keep when he had his religion taken away from him. When he thought he could help against the Nazis, he became a different kind of person. Alan Bulmer becomes a different kind of person at the end of The Touch and Repairman Jack's always asking himself who he is in The Tomb.

"In Nightworld the question is posed again: in the situation of civil panic which erupts in the city, are you going to be the guy who kicks the old lady in the ribs to get to the last can of beans or are you going to be something else? Where do you stand? Which side do you fall on?"

Paul's most recent hardback, Sister Night also poses this question. The novel concerns the unusual death of a young woman, which is then investigated by her twin sister. It involves possession and uncertainty and features a startling twist in the tail.

"To me the biggest horror is being taken over, whether it be by an idea, a misconception or anything. Becoming totally out of control, someone you aren't, something less than you should and can and would be really terrifies me. Sister Night is all about loss of control. The book was actually written in the middle of my working on Reprisal; I suddenly got the last plot twist which I'd been thinking about for years, and I just had to write it.

"With regards to the twist, I'm amazed that I have apparently been able to fool a lot of other writers. Usually writers are one step ahead of each other, when you read someone else's book, you've generally tried the same tricks before, so it's so nice when someone can deliver a punchline which you don't see coming. A lot of writers have called me up and said they'd never spotted it coming. That's very rewarding."

Continuing with the theme of 'Who Am I', Paul's next novel is a medical thriller which is being published by Headline under a different name. "It's a medical school thriller called The Foundation. I submitted it under the name Colin Andrews because I was tired of my books being at the bottom of the bookcases in the shops. I also wanted it to stand on its own merits. This way I felt they would just judge the writing as they wouldn't know anything about Colin Andrews. As it happens they went crazy over it, which is great. In Britain it's going to be released as 'F Paul Wilson writing as Colin Andrews', and I can't figure out the rationale of that. Maybe they want to take me away from horror, because it's not a horror novel, it's a suspense novel. It contains a lot of threatened violence and again the theme of loss of control and an outside influence is present."

UNIQUE DREAMS - THE FANTASY WORLDS OF TIM WHITE

Tim White is one of the world's foremost fantasy illustrators. Ranking alongside Chris Foss, Jim Burns, Chris Achilleos and Rodney Matthews amongst others, his paintings have graced the covers of books by Arthur C Clarke, James Herbert, Clive Barker, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, H P Lovecraft, Bob Shaw and many, many others.  In a career that has spanned seventeen years of fantasy illustration his name is now synonymous with realistic paintings of the impossible. 

I spoke to Tim at his house near Maidstone where he lives and works with his wife Lyn (herself an author) and their ten year old daughter.  The obvious subject to talk on first was what had fascinated Tim in the world of fantasy painting.

'I've always been interested in fantasy.  I entered a Blue Peter competition to create a robot way back in the early '60s which I would have won only I was two months too old - they gave me a trip to the BBC for my entry instead.  I've always liked the Dan Dare comics with Frank Hampson's wonderful paintings.  I went to Medway Art College, painted nothing but fantasy and then when I left there, the first approach I made was to Pan Books.  They told me to go away as the book cover market was all sewn up by a handful of people and that I didn't stand a chance.  They also asked if I had ever thought of doing other sorts of illustration!

'Then, in 1974, in the third issue of a magazine called Science Fiction Monthly (published by New English Library), there was a science-fiction painting competition.   I got the magazine on a Friday evening and I remember I had to ring them because I was not sure of the rules or something, and this was about 7.30 in the evening.  So I rang them and amazingly there was someone there in the art department.  He asked me if I did SF paintings, I said that I did, so he told me to forget about the competition and to come in and show them my work.  I did this and they gave me a commission there and then for a book called The Not-Quite Rain which was about acid rain.  At that time it was science fiction but now it is fact!  I did a few bits and pieces for Science Fiction Monthly [Tim's first black and white piece appears in issue 7, and his first colour in issue 11] and eventually I was made redundant from my day job and so I went freelance.  My first commission as a freelance artist was from Corgi Books with the cover to Arthur C Clarke's The Other Side of the Sky in 1974.  Other publishers started to use me following that, and it all just carried on from there.'

Like most freelance artists, Tim finds that to make a living, he often has to take work that he would otherwise turn down.  It seems to be the bane of the artist that he is unable to paint what he wants to, more often than not painting to the requirements of a book or an editor's ideas.  'I believe I could be a commercial artist and paint what I wanted to,' asserts Tim, 'but the money really isn't there and when you have a family to support you have to go where you can earn a living.  That's where book companies can be life savers!

'I do paint for pleasure as well.  I loved painting unicorns, scenes and characters from C S Lewis' Narnia books long before I really knew the great scope that SF and fantasy offers.  This genre is just a marvelous carrier for the imagination.

'To my way of thinking, reality is all around us, but fantasy is something different.  Lots of painters have painted reality superbly - Monet, Rembrandt, Vermeer - who can do better than those guys?  So the only real area left to explore is the imagination.

'I remember the first piece of work I ever saw by Salvadore Dali was on a postcard when I was about fifteen years old.  It was called Metamorphosis of Narcissus.  There is a chess board on it, and the painting is full of pockets of image and interest.  I had never seen anything quite like that before.  It was quite a shock seeing it for the first time. 

'I think works of the imagination have so much going for them, so much more reward than in simply painting reality.  Each of us has unique dreams and that is what I try and capture as an artist. 

'I like to have a personal involvement in my pictures.  When I look at other artists' work I want to feel involved.  Does it pull my imagination and almost transport me?  That's what really turns me on about the genre.'

Far from being a shrine to his work, Tim's house is almost bare of its owner's occupation with the exception of a couple of small framed prints on the walls.  His work room too is of a functional rather than display nature and yet from cabinets around the room, three dimensional characters from Tim's paintings stare down with maniacal gleams in their eyes.  These effigies are incredibly detailed and painted and I wondered why Tim created them in three dimensions when the work he has been  commissioned to do is in two.

'What I'm after is realism in my pictures,'  he explained. 'Juxtaposition of images from reality (for example a field of poppies) with fantasy (for example a spacecraft landing in the field).

'I do preliminary work in three dimensions but I'm primarily interested in the final two dimensional image.  When you're trained as an artist you can perhaps anticipate the way light will behave on a textured shape but often it doesn't actually work out.  If you make a model then you can understand the lighting completely.  I'm interested in creating fantasy as reality and this approach helps me to do this.  The detail in the models has come about progressively.  At first, when I had a problem with lighting I would build the bit I was having problems with.  Then I took to building the complete thing - depending on the time available and whether or not I felt it was vital.  I use photographic references as well but it is always the final product that is important, getting the realism into it.'

I commented that some artists, like for example Patrick Woodroffe, actually use reality in their paintings, like photographs, marquetry for wood texture and so on.  What was Tim's view on this approach?

'My paintings are just that, paintings.  I try to achieve photo-realism but I wouldn't consider using actual photographs and re-touching them.  I can spend weeks and weeks on the preparation of a piece only to have it not work out.  It is important to me that the picture is plausible and not to have it spoilt, for example, by bad lighting.'

Tim has had two collections of his work published by Paper Tiger/Dragon's World;  The Science Fiction and Fantasy World of Tim White (covering his work from 1973 to 1981) and Chiaroscuro (covering 1982 to 1988).  His talents have also been on display on some video jackets ('A more restrictive market as you are tied to actors' images and the visuals of the film.  You also lose all rights in your artwork as they are signed over in totality to the film company') as well as numerous American books ('They pay more than British companies, but again are more restrictive in what you can paint').

In a new venture, a small company, Lightning Man, are producing four 432 x 286mm art prints of Tim's work.  The prints are beautifully reproduced on quality 170gsm art paper.

'The one thing that all the paintings being released as posters have in common is that they are all pictures that were originally done for myself.  Some have subsequently been used on book jackets - the robot fly was used on Terry Pratchett's The Dark Side of the Sun in 1978 and the lion on The Lion Game by James H Schmitz in 1979 - but originally they were done for no-one but me.  I  always paint such that they could be used as covers because there is always that possibility, but they were all ideas and concepts that I did because I wanted to.  

Tim White seems to only have one ambition left.  To do his own thing. 'I am a painter who is being an illustrator because I have to be,' he asserts. 'I get a lot of satisfaction from everything I do, but I love to work to create my own dreams and worlds.'

TAD WILLIAMS - THE STORYTELLER

Tad Williams is one of the most popular and best-selling fantasy writers working in the genre today, and he has built this impressive reputation on only four novels and a co-written novella. David Howe spoke to Tad about his career and about the creative urge which accompanied it.

“When I look at my High School year book, there are lots of references like ‘keep writing’ and stuff like that,” explained Tad when asked about the genesis of his career as a writer. “But I didn't actually start writing seriously until my mid twenties when I had exhausted numerous other modes of creative expression.”

Tad’s life has been punctuated with creative explosions. “I have always been doing at least one major creative thing on top of whatever I was having to do to make a living,” he revealed. “There’s been theatre, music, art and broadcasting. One thing I have always been is a story teller and I think that's the common thread. I wrote songs which told stories; my art always tended to be more pictorial than abstract ... I think I am a story teller by nature.”

The first piece of ‘serious’ writing that Tad completed was a screenplay which is still sitting in a drawer. “It’s got some good bits in it and I always liked the title: The Sad Machines. It was a post-apocalyptic military science fiction film idea, but dreadfully, dreadfully derivative. I look at it now and it’s effectively A Boy And His Dog in the halls of government.”

Tad decided to write a novel simply because he had always enjoyed reading fantastic literature. “Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, Mervyn Peake and Michael Moorcock were among those writers whose work had the greatest influence on me. My first novel, Tailchaser’s Song, started out as an idea about the nature of cats. My ex-wife had cats, and I had never lived with cats before and they seemed to me to be these bizarre alien parasites - and I now have cats of my own, and I still think of them as bizarre alien parasites. Their attitudes and personalities intrigued me and so I started to think about what the world would be like from their point of view and then about a year later I decided to try writing a novel and used that as my basis.”

Having completed the book, Tad’s next task was to try and get it published, and in this respect he landed on his feet. “I was hideously lucky. I actually only sent the manuscript to two publishers. I sent it to Del Rey first of all because they were the ones currently having the most success with fantasy novels and they sent it back almost immediately. It was probably returned to me on the same day it arrived at their offices, and that's not an exaggeration. I actually wrote a letter saying ‘are you sure anybody actually read this’ and Judy Del Rey wrote back to me saying ‘this has got to be the first time an author has ever complained we've kept their manuscript for too short a time’.

“They basically told me that if this was going to be a best seller then they’d know and they didn’t think it was, so thank you very much for your time. Then I sent it to another publishers, DAW, who kept it for quite a while but eventually bought it. I have been with DAW ever since.

“DAW published it as a hardcover, which they had just started doing, and it came out in the autumn of 1985 as their second hardcover release.”

After selling Tailchaser’s Song, Tad had started work on another novel which he describes as an “Egyptian historical novel”, but when he told DAW that this was what he was working on they recoiled in horror. “‘No, no, no,’ they said. ‘You’re going to write a fantasy novel because that's what's you’re known for now’. I didn't want to write another cat-related book and so I mentioned that I had always wanted to write a big epic fantasy. They said okay, so that’s what I did.

“I had no idea at the time that it would take me eight years to complete. My original schedule was to deliver the final volume in 1988, so I missed that deadline by about four years! Again DAW was splendid because they saw right away that it was much bigger than I thought it was going to be and they encouraged me to do what I had to do - to write it as I wanted. 

“Once I realised how big it was going to be - my outline was a hundred and twenty five pages long - my single epic fantasy novel became a trilogy.”

In any epic fantasy, it is hard to single out any particular themes, but Tad felt that his trilogy developed as it was being written. “There are things near and dear to my heart and others that I often talk about like the unreliability of history, the way that cultures absorb each other and the vestigial traces that get left behind. Things about conflict in general both personal and global and about how we are all our own universes and how you can't tell from outside what's going on inside.

“Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, which is the overall title of the trilogy, is very much character-led. There are certain things you have to do in genre fiction. Readers expect a certain amount of excitement, a certain amount of surprise, and to have to do some mental work too. I think genre fiction offers you these particular things. Now that said, I write very character-driven fiction. My ideas tend to be fairly colourful and idiosyncratic but I bolt them into a very firm structure where everything ties together and makes sense. The trick is to find places to let the characters develop and become real within that structure.”

When the first volume of Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair, was published, it generated a lot of interest in the UK, something which Tailchaser’s Song had not. The trilogy was finally bought by Century Hutchinson after a hotly contested auction against Penguin. The faith shown by the publishers seems to have paid off with each volume of the trilogy selling more than its predecessor, and the final volume, To Green Angel Tower, making it onto both the New York Times and the Sunday Times best-seller lists.

Tad was not surprised by this steady build in interest. “I always said that I thought these books would sell better as time goes on. I think there are a lot of people like me who love fantasy and have a soft spot for epic fantasy but are frankly tired and depressed by the turgid formula stuff they keep seeing. I figured there will be people who would start the first volume and then put it down because they thought it was a little slow. Six months later a friend would say ‘Oh you didn't finish it? No, no, you just have to get past the first part and then it just really takes off!’ I recently did a signing in Dublin and this guy came up with a new paperback of The Dragonbone Chair - the first book, an old and somewhat battered copy of The Stone of Farewell - the second one, and a hardcover of To Green Angel Tower. And I told him that I could tell exactly how he had come to have all those books. He looked at me and I said that he had borrowed the first one from a friend, liked it enough to go out and buy the second one in paperback and then, realising that he would have to wait forever for the third one, he went back and bought the paperback of the first one himself, re-read them both and, still waiting for the third volume, decided that he couldn't wait and so bought it in hardcover or convinced someone to give it to him as a present.  He smiled, leaned over, and opened the cover of To Green Angel Tower. Inside was written: ‘Dear Patrick, love Mom, Merry Christmas’.”

When Memory, Sorrow and Thorn was finally complete, Tad’s next project was a novella called Caliban’s Hour.

“That was a labour of love,” sighs Tad. “Caliban’s Hour was originally commissioned by Century Hutchinson when I was over here touring in 1990.  Legend were doing a series of Novellas and I talked with them about this and mentioned that The Tempest was probably my favourite Shakespeare play. I commented that I had always wondered what happened to Caliban as he really got a raw deal in The Tempest and the idea for a Novella was born. I put it aside while I finished the trilogy and by the time I came to write it, the Legend Novellas series had been stopped and my editor had left the company.

“I went ahead and wrote it anyway, and luckily, the new editor still wanted to go with it. I even ended up doing some illustrations for it as well.”

Random House are currently due to publish Caliban’s Hour in October 1994. For the future, Tad is working on another mammoth project.

“I made it clear to my publishers very early on that I am not a series writer in the same way that David Eddings or Terry Brooks are. The fact that my first two books - I tend to view Memory, Sorrow and Thorn as one book - were fantasy was coincidental. They could equally have been written for another genre. As a result I am not going to write another cat book, and now I am not going to write another epic fantasy. What I have in mind is still epic and I'm hoping that my readers who like that quality will come with me. There will be lots of characters, numerous wild ideas, extremely complicated plot strands and some truly bizarre things happening. It takes place within numerous virtual worlds within a computer. The characters are on these various pilgrimages and they can be travelling through literally anything from an exact recreation of the Battle of Nicopolis in the late 14th century to the Cretaceous era or to a cartoon world where the characters sing at you or a place where the kitchen comes to life at night after the family goes to sleep, or anything really. It will be quite fantastical and I think it will have a lot of things in common with my other work.. I'm hoping that people who have not picked up my work before  will give this a try. If they like what they see they will then hopefully go back and try my fantasy books as well.”

The new series has the overall title of OTHERLAND and at the moment comprises four novels, tentatively titled City of Amber Light, River of Blue Fire, Mountain of Black Glass and Ocean of White Forever. Tad is looking forward to working on the books mainly because “the story came to me and I had to write it”, and that is the mark of a true story teller.

With thanks to Tad Williams, Kate Farquhar-Thomson, Deborah Beale and Nicki Bidecant.

CALIBAN’S HOUR

For the forthcoming release of Caliban’s Hour, as well as writing the Novella, Tad has also completed eight pencil drawings to illustrate the book. “For a long time, I thought I was going to be a comic artist and then in my late teens and twenties I did some illustration, cartoon and technical art. I worked at a place that made film strips for the military and I was famous as being the only person who could draw hands. People would come running to me with these beautifully designed helicopter rotor assemblies for me to add a hand holding a wrench.

“Although I have done quite a lot of different kinds of art, I haven’t done anything really seriously. In fact I hadn’t drawn anything for ages, and it was real interesting doing the illustrations for Caliban’s Hour.

“I did them in pencil and they’re quite representational. I tried not to show  in too much detail what the characters look like and I also tried to allow the reader to project their own impressions on them as well - like, for example, drawing Caliban with his head turned away so that you can’t see his features.  For most of them I tried to capture an emotional moment; not necessarily something specific to the plot, but more of Caliban’s feelings and character, as this is one of the central themes of the book.”

Tad Williams Biography

Tad Williams was born in 1957 in the San Francisco Bay area of California. At the time, his mother was a single parent and she married his step-father when Tad was between two and three years old. After finishing High School aged eighteen, Tad decided not to go to college and instead started on a succession of diverse jobs: he sold shoes, worked in a Taco bar, worked for a financial company and handled real estate loans and insurance for people all over the area. Following this he went briefly to the University of California at Berkeley and dropped out almost immediately because he was more interested in following his creative urges. At the time he was playing in a band, and he and some friends were running a no-ID discotheque in Palo Alto. Over the next few years, Tad attended some classes at the junior college at the same time as holding down around fifteen other jobs, including working as a disc-jockey at a local radio station which covered the whole of the San Francisco area. He ended up doing a radio talk show that ran for about twelve years. He then decided to go back to University and study History and possibly Literature as these were his two great loves, and applied to the prestigious Stanford University on the basis that it was geographically closest to him. He told them this and they turned him down. However, by the time that rejection came, Tad had sold his first book, Tailchaser’s Song, which he had been writing at night while working and going to junior college during the day. He decided to try and make a career out of writing and took a number of part-time jobs until he was able to earn a living from writing full time. He separated from, and eventually divorced, his wife and moved to England at the end of 1992. He is currently planning a part-time move back to America at the end of 1994 and is engaged to Deborah Beale, former editorial director at both Random Century and Orion Books. They plan to marry in the autumn.

TAD WILLIAMS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1985 Tailchaser’s Song

1988 The Dragonbone Chair

1990 Stone of Farewell

1991 Child of an Ancient City (with Nina Kiriki Hoffman)

1993 To Green Angel Tower

1994 Caliban’s Hour (forthcoming)

CHILD OF AN ANCIENT CITY

“Child of an Ancient City started life as a long short story that I had written for Weird Tales. The publishers came back to me after it had appeared and said that they had a deal with an American publisher and wondered if I would turn the story into a novel. I was already two years behind on my trilogy and so I told them that there was no way I could do that. They then suggested bringing in a collaborator to expand the story for me. They eventually suggested Nina Kiriki Hoffman who I thought was an excellent writer, and I agreed to a collaboration. Nina and I sat down together and decided how we wanted to add to the story, because it really had its own arc and we didn't want to change it dramatically. We picked areas that were terse in the short story but would stand some expansion and Nina wrote the new material which amounted to about as much as the story had been in the first place, and then we editing it, passing it back and forth between us.”

PETER STRAUB - HOUSES OF MYSTERY

I have long been an admirer of Peter Straub's work. From the early days of Julia (1976) and If You Could See Me Now (1977), through the epic visions of Ghost Story (1979) and Shadowland (1980), to his epic collaboration with Stephen King - The Talisman (1984) - he has maintained a clarity and vision almost unsurpassed by his contemporaries. He currently lives in America but was in England earlier this year to promote his new novel Mystery and collection Houses Without Doors.

Like all of Peter Straub's work, Mystery is a multi-layered, multi-faceted book.  It concerns a boy, Tom Pasmore, who grows up in a world of exclusion, where the 'families' enjoy all the benefits and luxuries while others rot in slum dwellings. The scenario is all too familiar to anyone that has visited almost any large city, but Tom's life and background is part of the mystery he is to uncover. I asked Peter how Mystery came about.

"The mystery was originally going to be about a boy in a cave and his connection with the hero of the novel. In a way, the novel retained the same basic plot, that is a family with an immense secret, but revealed it in a wholly different way. There was also an aspect of 'Family Romance', which is a Freudian term referring to the fantasy that many children have that your real parents are actually far better, more noble, more handsome, more generous than the evil trolls in whose care you've been left. In Mystery, Tom Pasmore is raised by evil trolls and he does have a real, far more enlightened parent."

Mystery is arguably not a fantasy book in any sense and the same can be said of Koko (despite the fact that it won the 1989 World Fantasy Award). All of Peter's earlier work is quite definitely in the horror/supernatural genre - this genre can perhaps more accurately be described as 'Straub' as the books can defy attempts to categorise them. I wondered why the supernatural element had disappeared.

"It is still there in Koko, I think, but you are right. Only after I began to see a few reviews that discussed this aspect did I realise that a lot of the basic content of my more recent books is the same as it always has been, but the top layer of imagery has been changed. The simple reason is that I became tired of the old imagery. I'd exhausted myself and felt that if I continued with it, then it would be more like writing as a mechanical exercise than for pleasure.

"There is some supernatural stuff at the start of Mystery, but as one friend told me, there's a huge jolt once the detective plot takes over. There is a sort of shifting of gears. However the book isn't a supernatural novel, it's a far more generalised fiction about the growing up of a young man. I wanted all of the background about Tom to be included because it helps explain his character and what happens to him - it sets up his destiny in a way - and all that is tied into the plot.

"There is a process of trust that happened with Mystery. I'm very pleased with all my early books but there's no doubt that I really came into my own with Ghost Story.  That was when I realised what I could do by learning to trust myself. To fly blind and to know that somehow I'd land. It used to really bother me if I didn't know where my book was going and eventually I learned to trust my own instincts. I build a lot of material: imagery, characters, events, into my books early on and these will, if I pay enough attention to them, tell me where I have to go.

"With Mystery, I noticed that there was one character who really demanded the centre of the stage - the old man, Lamont von Heilitz. When I couldn't balance his power with the emotional power of the other aspects of the book - the boy in the cave - the novel changed. Once Lamont von Heilitz started talking I realised that he was at the centre of the novel, there were old murders that he had solved incorrectly and that these murders were going to travel beneath the surface of the book until the very end. Despite this I wanted a tone to be there at the beginning to say that it is not a detective novel but that it is a book about a detective."

Koko and Mystery followed a fairly lengthy break after the publication of the epic fantasy novel The Talisman, co-authored with Stephen King. What was the reason for the break?

"It was both exhilarating and bruising writing The Talisman. Not because Steve was insensitive, rude or tactless - he's not - he's an absolutely generous, sensitive, smart, kind ... he's a real boy scout in a way. But on the other hand he's no weakling, especially as a writer. So I felt a little mauled, and I was also exhausted, so I announced to anybody who cared - mainly my wife - that I was going to take some time off. I took a year, and I just read, I took trips, I stayed up late, I had some fun and I generally took things easy as well as starting to formulate some ideas for Koko. Right at the end of that period I was reading a book called The Freudian Fallacy that was about Freud, cocaine and brain neurology (it's not a very good book because the writer hated Freud). Something about the connection between hypnotism and epilepsy really stung me and I realised I could write a story about a guy who makes murder look like epilepsy through hypnotism. Then I realised that it was a small boy who did it to an even smaller boy, and I couldn't not write it. My little vacation had ended! The story was called 'Blue Rose' and it took about three or four months to write. This led me further into Koko and eventually, over the course of three years, that developed into the completed novel."

Another short story completed in that period was 'The Juniper Tree' - where did that fit in?

"'The Juniper Tree' was written in the first summer I was doing Koko. I had bought a brownstone in New York, and I had to spend a couple of months there, by myself. There was such a  wrench between that and my normal life, that I didn't trust myself to write Koko because I thought I'd botch it up, but I thought I could write a short story. It was after I read a book called The Lover by Marguerite Duras that I had this irresistible notion, just like with 'Blue Rose', of a little boy being seduced. Again this idea seemed really powerful, and I took the whole summer to do it. I really enjoyed writing that, I thought it really worked."

Both 'Blue Rose' and 'The Juniper Tree' appear in the first collection of Peter's short stories, Houses Without Doors, just published by Grafton. I wondered if Peter found it easier to write short fiction.

"I actually think it's harder to do short pieces and I hardly ever do it. Both 'Blue Rose' and 'The Juniper Tree' worked, they were both related to Koko, they were part of the emotional landscape of Koko and they have the same emotional colour as Koko - really dark, bleak and hard. Generally I can't write short pieces and when I do, they all turn out to be two hundred pages long.

"I was thrilled by Robert Aickman's collection The Wine Dark Sea, especially a story called 'Into The Woods' which really moved me. I finished a short novel called Mrs God right after I read the Aickman collection. I wanted it to be open to all kinds of interpretation, not rounded off, really  enigmatic in the way that much of Aickman's stuff is."

Mrs God also appears in Houses Without Doors as well as another short novel (The Buffalo Hunter, inspired by a show of sculpture in New York) and several other short stories. Finally I  wondered what plans Peter had following Houses Without Doors?

"The next thing is a book which follows a direction similar to the material in Houses Without Doors. My 'genre' has a lot to do with looking at violence in a way that is peculiar to me. I'm looking for the conjunctions between what could be called the sacred and the violent. It seems to me that they have some powerful territory in common which can only be found in that conjunction. I think the next book, which will culminate the themes I began in Koko and continued through Mystery - all the Blue Rose business, will be in that spot where violence meets the sacred. This means that it has to be seen from an extremely individual, slightly crazed, viewpoint, enabling me to do what I like to do best; examine the world in a detailed way that is full of feeling and has a kind of surreal alertness. I think that is the fantastic. That viewpoint incorporates everything you can find in any supernatural novel, anything goes, and it's seen in a way that justifies it. I'm not at all interested in fantasy novels per se, I'm not excited by unicorns, misty maidens, that sort of stuff, but you can incorporate that in this viewpoint so that it has twice the emotional power. Everything is on a razor edge and it can tip either way into really appalling territory. Now that's fun!"

My thanks to Peter Straub, and also to Andy Lane and Debbie Collings for their help with the interview.