Praise for Twisted Tales Events

'In the past few years Twisted Tales has become a major force in the promotion and appreciation of horror fiction. As well as putting on author readings and signings at bookshops it has expanded into organising larger events, bringing authors and critics together for discussions of the field. I've been involved in quite a few of both and have found them hugely enjoyable and stimulating - I believe the audiences did as well. May Twisted Tales continue to grow and prosper! If you love the field, support them! I do.' - Ramsey Campbell

‘Twisted Tales consistently produce well-organised events for writers and readers of horror. What really distinguishes Twisted Tales for me is the intelligent themes and investigations they pursue, and the high quality of the discussions they always stimulate. As an author I've been invited to three of their events and have been pleasantly startled, to near shocked, by the attendance levels - two out of three were even sold out. I salute anyone who contributes so much to the literary and cultural life of horror fiction.’- Adam Nevill

'Twisted Tales events are wonderful... a great way of promoting 21st century horror fiction. Supported by Waterstone's Liverpool One and really well organised, Twisted Tales brings together established names in the genre as well as new voices and of course readers. Looking forward to much more to come...' - Alison J. Littlewood

Monday 31 October 2011

Happy Halloween: Event Round-Up

Happy Halloween fellow Twisted Tale-ers, and happy birthday to us!

This weekend marks the 1st birthday of Twisted Tales and we sealed the deal in fine fashion with a double bill of events. The first at Halton Lea Library in Runcorn, the second in our more regular location of Waterstone's Liverpool One. Both events were cursed by my failure to bring my camera which means we've begged and borrowed the photos you see below, other than that they went superbly. Thanks to everyone who came to the events, and to everyone who has come to all our other events over the last year - don't worry, there are plenty more to come...

An Evening of Occult Horror
Halton Lea Library, Runcorn.

Part of the library's 10th annual Paranormal Week. Originally the billing included John Reppion but he had to pull out at the last minute, Adam Nevill and Ramsey Campbell were more than capable of taking up the slack however and entertained the substantial Runcorn crowd to brilliant readings from The Ritual and The Grin of the Dark respectively. There was then time for a panel discussion between Adam and Ramsey about the nature of the occult and its role in fiction, before being thrown open to audience questions.

The staff at the library were great and set everything up perfectly (shout out to Janette and Mike) and the audience were superb.

Adam Nevill reading from his novel The Ritual.

Adam and Ramsey discuss the occult,
Twisted Tale-ers David McWilliam and Glyn Morgan in the middle.

House of Fear
Waterstone's Liverpool One, Liverpool

An event tied to the release of the new haunted house anthology House of Fear published by Solaris. A good sized crowd took their seats to hear readings from three authors who feature in the collection: Nicholas Royle, Lisa Tuttle and Adam Nevill. Once again there was time for a panel discussion and the three authors swapped their tales of hauntings (or lack of) and spoke about their inspiration and writing process, we then took a few questions from the audience before signing some books.
(As is probably evident these photos are from a camera phone and not of great quality, but thanks to Anna Garnett for providing them. Hopefully some others are on their way to us soon and they'll be added into the post once they've been received).

Twisted Tale-er Glyn Morgan introducing the night's proceedings.

Adam Nevill reading from Apartment 16.
 
David McWilliam leads the panel discussion on haunted houses with Nick, Lisa and Adam.

Once again, thanks to everyone who came out for their pre-Halloween scares. We announced our next event this weekend too - expect full details in a midweek post.

If you have any pictures from the events please let us know, we'd love to see them and feature some on our blog (fully credited of course).

Once again: happy Halloween, but remember - horror lives on all year round!

Wednesday 26 October 2011

House of Fear Competition Winners

Many entered our competition to win a copy of Solaris's superb House of Fear anthology, but only five of you could win. Congratulations successful winners, your copies of the book are winging their way to you through the postal system even as we speak.

The winners, drawn at random, were:

Mags Dunne 
Dan Howarth 
Ross Warren
Claire Massey and
Neil Williams

We're hoping to be able to hold more competitions in the future so to ensure you don't miss out on an opportunity to win freebies be sure to follow this blog, like the facebook page, and follow our twitter feed!
If you didn't win and want to sate your hunger for haunted house horror then be sure to get down to Waterstone's Liverpool One this Friday 28th October, at 6pm, to experiences ghostly readings by Nicholas Royle, Lisa Tuttle and Adam Nevill!

Monday 24 October 2011

1408 reviewed by Laura Bettney


1408
Directed by: Mikael Håfström
Released in 2007
Certificate: 15

The haunted house is, arguably, one of the most successful tropes in the horror genre, perhaps due to an almost ubiquitous fear that our homes could shift from places of great safety to sites of our extreme vulnerability. The idea that what we most have to fear could be lurking in just the next room is one which has been exploited in horror literature and film for many years. We have seen the concept of the ‘evil house’, wherein the danger lurks in the very bricks and mortar surrounding us and the impact this has on the minds of those caught within, for example, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). 1408, based on a Stephen King short story, locates the terror in an even smaller geographical space; a single hotel room in the centre of New York City.

Accompanying the viewer into this little section of Hell is Mike Enslin (John Cusack); the jaded, cynical, albeit relatively successful author of such titles as 10 Haunted Graveyards and 10 Haunted Lighthouses. For a man who so fervently denies any belief in ghosts, what these titles tell us is that Mike has certainly dedicated a vast portion of his life to searching for them, but has as yet been unsuccessful in his quest. In his dogged determination to investigate alleged hauntings wherever he can find them we see that, like the maverick FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) from Chris Carter’s The X-Files (1993-2002), Mike truly does want to believe. As he says to his fans, ‘Nothing would make me happier than to witness a paranormal event’. Indeed, the reason for his desire to discover evidence of an after-life is slowly revealed as the film progresses and we witness the tragic events leading up to his acrimonious separation from his wife, Lily. While researching a new book, Mike hears about the legend of room 1408 in The Dolphin Hotel. To begin with the viewer cannot help but join him in his mild amusement when he first makes contact with the establishment to enquire about the room; only to be told, ‘That room is unavailable, sir’.  ‘Wait a minute’, says Mike, ‘I didn’t tell you which date’. Stony silence ensues from the surly receptionist, then, ‘It’s unavailable’.

On the face of it, this is mere myth-building on the part of hotel staff, and holds all the faux terror of the fairground ghost train, with the audience being challenged to ‘roll up’ for what will inevitably be a fairly dull, uneventful experience. Indeed, this is how Mike sees it, as he calls his agent to pull some strings and get him booked in. However, he must still overcome the misgivings of the hotel manager, Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson) who Mike must circumvent in order to secure one night in room 1408. Olin delivers his stock spooky lines with panache, “nobody’s ever lasted more than an hour [in that room]”; “I don’t want to clean up the mess”. At certain points Olin even seems to have slightly rattled Mike’s scepticism with his warnings.

We then begin to discover that room 1408 does indeed have a noteworthy history. Olin shows Mike a scrapbook documenting the room over the last 95 years. We learn that there have been 56 deaths in room 1408 since the hotel opened. 27 of these deaths were described as natural; the other’s... less so. If the first real tremors of trepidation begin to run through the viewer, Mike remains unimpressed, berating Olin for trying to scare him with tales of ‘ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties’. Not to be robbed of the final words in the exchange, however, Olin responds with utter seriousness, ‘I have never used the word “phantom”. It’s just an evil fucking room’.

It has to be said that Jackson and Cusack are unusually big names for 21st century horror cinema. Since so much of the film revolves around their performances, particularly around that of Cusack, that the investment in top actors was a wise decision on the part of the casting team. Too often in horror films we see good ideas ruined by frankly poor execution. For a horror film to work the actors need to make you empathize with their characters in order to make you care about the fact that they may at some point in the film face a grisly death. This is what we get in 1408. Cusack is phenomenal here; not only do we see the cynical, sarcastic side of Mike, which he portrays to the world as a kind of shield to keep people from getting too close, but over the course of the film we also see him as a man who has made a great many mistakes throughout his life and regrets them all deeply. He is also likeable, despite (or perhaps because of) all his flaws, and even more importantly, he is absolutely hilarious. Cusack delivers his lines with impeccable comic timing, and this is highlighted even more clearly in the scenes he shares with Jackson, who is similarly gifted at delivering this kind of deadpan humour. Even towards the end of the film, when things have spiralled well out of control, some of Cusack’s reactions and delivery had me laughing out loud. It is a testament to the actors’ abilities and the quality of the script that humour and horror are blended so well in this film, providing emotional contrast to the rather doom-laden plot.

Of course, when we finally see it, the room itself is actually rather... nice. A sentiment that is echoed by Mike as he stands in the doorway, peering in, ‘This is it? Where’s the bone chilling terror? Show me the rivers of blood’. It is spacious and well-lit; it has a mini-bar that Mike makes increasing use of throughout his time in the room; the pictures adorning the walls are bland, yet somehow comforting. All in all, somewhere I would not mind staying a night. I mean, sure, there are problems: a closer inspection with a UV light reveals some rather ominous bloodstains scattered throughout the room; the thermostat is broken making the space unbearably stuffy, which the hotel engineer refuses to enter the room in order to fix; and the radio alarm clock keeps switching itself on periodically (always, horrifically, playing The Carpenter’s ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’). Nevertheless, thinks Mike, ‘it does have its charms’. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this is where we spend the next horrendously uncomfortable hour or so of the film, trapped in a hotel room which grows less and less charming by the minute. Of course, by the time Mike has witnessed enough to persuade him that Olin might have been telling the truth it is too late and the room simply refuses to let him go. At this point, the clock radio portentously begins a slow 60 minute countdown. 

The haunted /’evil’ house trope is excellently equipped for pulling off this kind of scare. There are numerous examples of films in which characters find it just too difficult to believe that anything really bad could happen to them in their own home, or indeed in a plush hotel room. After all, the horrific is not supposed to happen behind the safety of our locked doors, in spaces comfortingly lit by electric lights, where the sounds of our loved ones can be heard in the next room. Perhaps these characters are simply not aware of the statistics about exactly how dangerous the home environment can be on an average day; and when the supernatural gets involved.... By the time characters in these films have figured out that they really could be in great peril while in a neighbourhood full of other people or a hotel packed with guests and staff, events have passed way beyond the point of no return. By this stage, inevitably, characters are running around with an axe trying to murder the entire family, the ghostly inhabitants of the burial site the house is positioned over have become really quite unhappy about the situation or one person has been possessed by a fairly nasty demon and has a penchant for standing over their partner in quite a creepy manner whilst they sleep. It is the very blending of the mundane with the horrific that makes this trope so effective, and it is the mundane elements that mean we can all believe what we are reading or seeing to an extent, and, consequently, we can all be scared by it.

One interesting point never fully elucidated by the film regards what exactly the room is. What is the source of its malevolence? As the film progresses, there are hints from an increasingly battered, inebriated and terrified Mike that he believes he is progressing through various circles of Hell as described by Dante in The Divine Comedy. For example, at one point when the room descends into a bone-chilling cold, with snow floating downwards and settling, he mutters, ‘This is level nine, deepest level of Hell, removed from all light and warmth’. However, there are other aspects of Mike’s experience of this Hell which are intensely personal to him. He is, for example, forced to relive certain painful experiences from his past involving his ex-wife, his child Katie and his behaviour towards his ageing, ill father. Arguably, it is the psychological trauma he undergoes that affects Mike more than any of the other, more corporal, terrors the room throws at him. Indeed, it is after a particularly cruel trick, in which the room gives Mike all he has wanted for many years and then tears it away again, that he decides to make one final stand against room 1408. 

To say any more would be giving too much away. All that remains to be said is that 1408 is one of the most compelling haunted house stories ever committed to film. 1408 is not as experimental or as ‘gritty’ as some of the others that have been covered in the Nightmare Visions section; in fact for a genre film it has rather high production values. It is amazingly well acted, beautifully shot and cleverly written, with an ending that manages to disturb while also hinting that Mike may have at last found peace.

-

Laura Bettney is an Assistant Psychologist with a degree in Psychology with Criminology. She is a lifelong fan of horror working on her first short story. Laura also reviews albums and gigs for the American Indie (in the original Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, and Dinosaur Jr sense) online magazine, Delusions of Adequacy.

Monday 17 October 2011

John Reppion interviewed by Glyn Morgan


John Reppion was born in Liverpool, England in 1978. His writing career began in 2003 when he collaborated with his wife Leah Moore on a six issue mini series entitled Wild Girl published by Wildstorm in 2004/05. Since then the duo have worked together on series such as Albion (with Alan Moore & Shane Oakley), Raise the Dead (with Hugo Petrus) and contributed to the likes of Self Made Hero’s H. P. Lovecraft anthology and Tori Amos’s Comic Book Tattoo.

John’s interests in fortean phenomena, esoterica, folklore, philosophy, theology and horror have led to his writing articles and reviews for numerous magazines and periodicals including Fortean Times, Strange Attractor, and Paranormal Magazine. 2008 saw the release of his first full length book 800 Years of Haunted Liverpool, published by The History Press. John's prose fiction has appeared in SteamPunk Magazine and his short story 'On the Banks of the River Jordan' is set to be published in PS Publishing's Haunted Histories: Stories of Spirit and Stone in 2012.

Find out more about both John Reppion and Leah Moore at www.moorereppion.com/


GM: It's always interesting to know what writers are reading. Who would you say influenced the way you write today and who were the writers that you couldn't get enough of as you were developing your craft?
JR: At the moment I’m reading The Space Vampires by Colin Wilson which is fun in its own way but not exactly a masterpiece. Before that I was reading Ramsey Campbell’s The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants which is a great favourite of mine. My favourite authors are Phillip Jose Farmer, H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James… all the usual suspects, I suppose.  So far as developing my craft goes, I really feel like I’m just getting started, especially with my prose fiction work. With comics, because it’s a visual medium first and foremost, a lot of my influences actually come from film or television but they’re then filtered through my wife Leah’s uber comics literate brain.

GM: You have done work across multiple literary mediums: fiction, non-fiction, and graphic novels. How, as an author, do you approach each of these mediums? Do you have to put your head in a different place, or alter your writing process, in order to move from one to the next?
JR: With the comics work – which is what I consider the day job – Leah and I always say that we’re half a writer each. The whole thing is done in stages and takes lots of planning, discussion, and sometimes arguing before we get to the actual typing. The funny thing about writing comics is that 90% of your writing is direction for the artist, colourist, and letterer. So, although you might write 1000 words to describe a page, only 100 or so of them will be actual dialogue or captions. This means that the “visible” writing is nearly always written from a character’s point of view so it’s hard to have a distinct “voice” of your own – you want the reader to believe in the character more than be aware of who’s writing that character.

My non-fiction article writing grew partly out of the fact that although I’m very interested in folklore, and history, and forteana, I’m terrible at remembering names, and dates, and  such. Writing articles seemed like a good way of collating data and creating a permanent record that I could refer back to. I really enjoy the act of researching – tracking down books and articles and then joining the dots and I’m often surprised where the information takes me. So far as my article writing “voice” goes, I tend to pick subjects that I have some personal connection with or interest in so there’s a lot of the real me in there but it’s a rather more academic and composed me. Essentially, it’s me if I could actually store all this data in my head and recall it at will; it’s my phantom scholar.

With my prose fiction (which, as I said, I’m really only just getting into), I feel like I’m still finding my voice and style, and I suppose I’m trying to find the right headspace too. My non-fiction work has often fed into my fiction in the past and I’m trying to get more of a definite handle on that – trying to nail the parameters of that down a bit more. I want to move away from my current little niche of epistolary stories and attempt something a bit different.

GM: It's interesting that you mention your non-fiction feeding into your fiction, in the story 'On the Banks of the River Jordan' that is clearly the case with a meta-fictional approach which is both unusual and engaging, adding a new layer to the ghost story. Is this approach one you see yourself continuing with into the future?
JR: I can see my self continuing with it all too easily to be honest which is why I'm currently trying to define the parameters of my meta-fictional world a bit more clearly. I'm very pleased with "River Jordan" but, by putting (a fictional version of) myself at the centre of the story, I almost feel like I've hit the nail on the head a bit too explicitly. I'd like to have a crack at creating something like [Ramsey] Campbell's Brichester, or [M.R.] James' Suffolk; somewhere familiar and believable where folklore and history are just that bit more interchangeable than they are in the real world. 

GM: Following on from your graphic novel adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, a greatly praised Dracula, and Alice in Wonderland, you also adapted H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth" for SelfMadeHero's The Lovecraft Anthology (volume 1). As a writer, what are the challenges and rewards of adapting such loved prose classics into graphic novels?
JR: When adapting Leah and I always try to be as faithful to the original work as is possible - for us it's all about making the stories accessible to a new audience by converting them into a different format. With both Dracula and Alice we went so far as re-introducing "lost" or excised portions of the texts to create a kind of Director's Cut or Complete Edition.

Dracula was all about condensing - crunching words down to their absolute meaning - while preserving the integrity of the characters and the story. It's such a fascinating novel despite its inconsistencies; far more strange and complex than most people give Stoker credit for. Because it's an epistolary novel, the story is constantly switching between many characters' different points of view. That allowed us to contrast visually what one person was experiencing with what another character was recording in their letters. So we might see Renfield eagerly anticipating the coming of The Master whist Lucy writes how happy she is that Arthur is coming to visit. It's nothing that Stoker wasn't doing himself but if Dracula lacks anything its punchiness - it can quite slow going at times. The comic book medium gives the reader two simultaneous streams of information where prose only gives them one so you can communicate a lot in a small space and really add drama to things that might appear quite dry on the normal printed page.

Adapting the Alice books was no less of a challenge but was more about maintaining the original tone and intent of the stories and not allowing yourself to be influenced by the other adaptations and interpretations that have gone before (not to mention the supposed Freudian symbolism and/or drug references that everyone "knows" about). They're beautiful and truly strange stories written with such effortlessness that somehow you, like Alice, come to accept their strange dream logic.

With Innsmouth we were forced to abridge the story slightly because we only had so many pages to tell it in but I'm very pleased with the way it came out. As with all comics work, our artist (Leigh Gallagher in this case) was key to getting the look and feel of the story right. We've been very lucky with our adaptations that we'd had such wonderful, talented people bringing the stories to life.

The Trial of Sherlock Holmes was actually a project we embarked upon in order to give our selves a break from adaptation. We were asked if we'd be interested in writing a Holmes series and we decided it would be better to come up with something new rather than adapting a Conan Doyle mystery. It was one of the most difficult series we've ever worked on and we were flattered and amazed when people like comic author Mark Miller and Holmes expert Les Klinger started saying how impressed with it they were. It's a book we're both very, very proud of. 

GM: From adaptation of plots to adapting established tropes. In Albion, you utilise the familiar idea of British cartoon-strip characters for new, and often disturbing, purposes. Ironically, in your series Raise the Dead, you're on even more familiar territory trope wise - that of zombies. How do you approach established ideas such as the cartoon-strip characters, or zombies, and add a fresh twist to them?
JR: I've been a massive fan of the zombie genre since my early teens so Raise the Dead was a real treat to work on. Rather than trying to bring anything new to the series we primarily focused on getting it right. There was a bit of a zombie boom happening at the time and there were so many sub-par zombie comics (and films) coming out, we just wanted to write something that showed zombie stories didn't have to be plodding and boring or conversely just wall to wall gore.

Albion was much more about trying to recapture the strangeness of old British characters like Captain Hurricane, Robot Archie and Cursitor Doom. There were effectively four of us writing the book at once: Alan [Moore] doing the plotting, Shane [Oakley - penciller on the comic] coming up with loads of ideas, and Leah and myself trying to filter their ideas and still cram own stuff in there. It was an amazing project to work on but also very, very high pressure because, as well as trying to please ourselves, we were very conscious of the audience for whom these characters were childhood heroes. I think we pushed things as far as we could without being disrespectful to the characters - rather than re-inventing them we tried to imagine what it would be like if they were alive and well and living in the real world with all their same quirks and powers.

GM: What projects are you working on that the moment that you can tell us about? 
JR: Our new online enhanced comic The Thrill Electric (www.thethrillelectric.com) is just about to launch online at the end of October. It's a free to read, weekly, historical drama based in the Manchester office of the Electric and International Telegraph Company and is all about the technological revolution that took place in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The thing that really interested us about the telegraph was, for a couple of decades, it was essentially a Victorian Internet.

We've written a second Sherlock Holmes series called The Liverpool Demon which should see print early next year and we're just about to begin work on about half a dozen new projects including a Graphic Novel adaptation of some classic supernatural tales.

Monday 10 October 2011

Lisa Tuttle interviewed by Allyson Bird


Lisa Tuttle was born in the United States, but has been resident in Britain for almost thirty years. She began writing while still at school, sold her first stories at university, and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer of the year in 1974. She is the author of eight novels, most recently the contemporary fantasy The Silver Bough (2006) and many short stories, in addition to several books for children, and editor of Skin of the Soul: New Horror Stories by Women (1990), a work inspired by the feeling that women did write horror stories, but were overlooked as a few male authors tended to dominate and define the field.    

Ghost stories were her first love, and short fiction of the strange and supernatural variety continues to be her favourite form. Many of her stories have appeared in various “best of the year” collections, and ‘Closet Dreams’ won the 2007 International Horror Guild Award. Her first collection, A Nest of Nightmares, published in 1986, was included as one of Stephen Jones and Kim Newman’s Horror: 100 Best Books (1988). Others followed: A Spaceship Built of Stone and Other Stories (1987); Memories of the Body (1992); Ghosts and Other Lovers (2001); and My Pathology (2001). In 2010 a small Canadian publisher, Ash-Tree Press, which specializes in fine limited editions, published Stranger in the House: The Collected Short Supernatural Fiction Volume One. Two or three more volumes are expected to follow.


AB: Whose work have you been most influenced by?
LT: That's always a hard question because I can't really know for certain in many cases... and there's a difference between the writers I would LIKE to be my influences and some possibly indelible works that were imprinted upon my burgeoning writerly consciousness at the age of seven or eight—authors now long forgotten.

But there are a few writers that I consciously imitated when I was younger and trying to teach myself how to write a story that worked. Ray Bradbury was possibly the major one—I even remember in my teens and early twenties on more than one occasion deliberately setting out to write "a Bradbury story". Theodore Sturgeon was also a huge influence. E. Nesbit, maybe not so obviously, but I would often hear her written "voice" in my head. Ditto a children's author called Edward Eager. The short stories of Ernest Hemingway and Willa Cather, Edith Wharton and Walter de la Mare. Harlan Ellison—although I never tried to copy his more pyrotechnic style, he taught me a lot. He was one of my instructors at the Clarion Writers Workshop, and went over at least two or three of my stories making pencilled editorial amendments, just showing me where improvements could be made, or where I'd fallen into obscurity or cliché. Although he's obviously had a deeper influence even than I thought; I wrote a children's book called Mad House which has a moment in it that's straight out of ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’—but suitable for younger children, I hasten to add. It's my own take on the idea, yet I must admit I probably never would have written it if I hadn't been profoundly affected by Harlan's story so many years ago. 

I read my first Robert Aickman story when I was 18, and he instantly became a model I aspired to, for a certain type of story. There was a thrilling moment when I was in my twenties when Ed Ferman, the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, who published Robert Aickman (it was in the pages of F&SF that I first read his stories) and who also published some of mine, told me he thought one of my stories was EVEN BETTER than Aickman. Wow. Success!!

AB: I think that authors return to many themes that haunt them throughout their lives. Are there any themes you explore time and time again?
LT: Oh, absolutely! Every time I have put together a collection of my short stories, meaning that I've sat down and reread a lot of my work in one go, it is made abundantly clear to me that I keep going back to the same ideas again and again. And I think my novel, The Pillow Friend, is like a compilation of all my big obsessions—so much so that when I finished it, I even felt: right—now I'm DONE with all that; now I never need write about any of those particular tropes/themes/incidents/ideas ever again! And yet I'm afraid I probably have revisited more than one or two of them. 

As to what they are....well, some are so major I probably never will get over exploring them, e.g. relationships between men and women, between parents and children. The fantasies women have about true love, about sex, about being a mother. Fear of abandonment. Fear of NOT being abandoned, but being held too close; of being lost in another person. Thoughts about death. Ideas about consciousness. Ideas about how gender is established, and about power struggles in intimate relationships as well as in society. Is that enough?

And wanting to be even more specific....breakdown and changes in the body—sexual transformation and sexual confusion. People who turn into animals. Sinister inanimate objects. Unhappy love affairs. Strange children.

AB: Which of your stories are you most proud of and why?
LT: I can't help feeling that none of my novels are entirely successful. None of them are entirely what I set out to write, they all fail or go wrong somewhere, and I don't feel completely happy with them. The Pillow Friend seems to me to be the nearest I've written to being satisfactory on its own terms—but those terms are pretty damn weird!! When I reread it (to proofread it for a paperback edition) a few years ago it struck me as being an utterly INSANE book, reflecting the persona of a madwoman. I don't think I have ever been insane, and I can't quite understand how I produced such a thing—yet it is undeniably mine, stamped throughout with my deepest fears and dreams. 
 
If I am to be remembered, I think it would be for my short stories—and probably just a handful of those. OK, time to put my cards on the table and say that, personally, I think my best stories (and novellas) are the following:

‘My Death’
‘My Pathology’
‘The Wound’
‘Replacements’

…and for the fifth (five is a handful of stories, right?) you can chose from among these: ‘Turning Thirty’, ‘Bug House’, ‘Riding the Nightmare’, ‘The Nest’ and ‘No Regrets’.

AB: Ramsey Campbell has put forward a question about narrative control—do you feel that the story is directed by the author or do you think that the subconscious takes over at any point?
LT: Very often I find I've written things I did not intend to write or didn't realize the implications of until afterwards... like a lot of writers when they comment that a character "took over"—it happens to me sometimes. I presume that is my subconscious (or whatever we call it nowadays) but maybe there is a great story-pool in the collective unconscious that works through writers, or there is some other force at work. I don't really know where some stories come from.

I do sometimes feel some authors are a bit disingenuous when they try to distance themselves from something readers find in their writing—I'm thinking about, for example, works in which there's a lot of violence, or women characters are victimized, and there might be more than a hint of misogyny, which the (male) author quite understandably might wish to deny having done with conscious intent. I remember—vaguely—an argument years ago with a fantasy writer, where I said rather mildly that I didn't care for the way the women were treated in his novel...he argued that in a society such as he was writing about, this was inevitable—women were downtrodden and subjugated—I could not argue against that, but would only make two points: 1) he CHOSE to write about such a society (and it was his own INVENTED society, even if based on real-world models) and 2) women's experiences, even when they are at the very bottom of the social scale, can be represented in different ways and they don't always have to be depicted as victims, or as existing only in relation to the men around them—as those men perceive them to be. But I did not mean, or feel, that the author was himself egregiously sexist or anything. 

I realize the above really has nothing whatever to do with what Ramsey is talking about, but possibly has something to do with the notion of "narrative control". We make choices, as writers—but even the conscious choices may be directed by subconscious or other forces, and reveal things we may not have intended...whether what is revealed is something like the writer's own unconscious (or simply unexamined!) sexism or racism, or some ambiguity which means a story can be read, and appreciated, in more than one way. I was enormously affected by a book I read when I was at school (or Uni? Can't even remember now), Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson—I loved the way he unpicked lines of poetry, showing all the subtle shades of meaning or suggestion hidden in a single phrase. I think that must have been the first time I realized that different people could take different meanings from the same piece of writing....and that writers could be saying more than they even knew themselves.

AB: Are there any stories that you find too painful to return to—that perhaps you poured your heart into at the time of writing and don’t want to go there again?
LT: I feel that way about my old diaries, but stories are different. Whatever the personal investment in them or painful incident that may have inspired a few, the act of writing them, turning my emotions into a piece of fiction,  becomes a distancing mechanism for me—and the story, if it works, has achieved its own separate existence. So I don't have a problem reading them again. (Unfinished fragments are somewhat different, as I discovered recently when I was going through some old files .... wince, wince, wince! More like reading old diary entries; not a pleasant experience.) 

AB: Is there a theme you'd never touch?
LT: I can't think of a "theme" that I feel compelled to avoid. There are things I am less interested in writing about, and some subjects I feel I'm too ignorant about to treat as they deserve. There are also some subjects (e.g. child abuse, torture) that I would only approach with great caution.

AB: Joel Lane asks…Why did you choose to use the medium of speculative fiction to explore issues of politics and identity? What kind of power or freedom did speculative fiction offer you that realistic fiction did not?
LT: I could answer this in several different ways—I think I have at some point in the past written about how SF offers imaginative possibilities for constructing plots and characters etc that simply aren't there in "realist" contemporary (or historical) fiction; basically, it's because the writer gets to make up the rules. I recall Joanna Russ writing somewhere—this was probably back in the '70s—about the appeal of science fiction/fantasy for anyone who wanted to write about a female hero, for example.  Strong, clever, ambitious, powerful women could be presented as the norm, and not (as almost any mainstream writer of the 1950s-1960s would have been obliged to do) depicted either as some sort of freak who comes to a bad end, or hedged around with all sorts of excuses and back story (she was raised by her father like the son he never had BUT she's really tender-hearted and definitely heterosexual and will stop having adventures as soon as she's a wife and mother) to make her both believable and sympathetic to readers of the day.

Of course, things have changed in the decades since, and female heroines and female villains are found in contemporary thrillers and novels without a speck of speculative-ness to them.

But there are other aspects to the appeal of SF—the thought-experiment aspect of it is one thing I've always liked. Also, I like the way you can take something like a figure of speech or a joke and just by pushing it as far as you can, turn it into a story. That was the origin of my story ‘Lizard Lust’—I always thought of it as a "fantasia on a remark by Freud"—although I can't now remember exactly what the line from Freud was, the story grew out of my speculating on the idea of the phallus as SYMBOL rather than bodily organ...and what if it was detachable? And people who had them were quite reasonably terrified of "penis envy"—because people who didn't have them WERE actually literally likely to try to steal them, for the power that was invested in the idea of having one... Anyway, that story was me making fun of both "penis envy" and the notion that there are enormous, innate differences between men and women that make certain types of relationship "natural."

Another example: the idea for ‘The Wound’ started simply with an image, or scene, of a man waking up in the morning to discover a smear of blood in his bed. He knows then that he is going to turn into a woman, and there's nothing he can do about it, and he is miserable and terrified by the prospect. So then I had to figure out how to write this story about a man who is turning into a woman. I thought it would be a horror story, but I knew that if I set it in the present day, in the real world, that I'd immediately have to deal with the question of whether or not what was happening to this man was real, or simply in his head. I wanted it to be unambiguously real. But if something like that happened in OUR world, it would be a freak show. It would have to involve doctors and the media...and I wasn't interested in all that. I knew I didn't want to go down that route; therefore, the story was going to take place in a world where people did regularly change sex, and the change was not under their conscious control. That meant it was science fiction....and of course I was well aware of other writers (especially Ursula Le Guin) who had written about such a society. 

Part of what I was doing when I wrote ‘The Wound’ was questioning my own beliefs that most (if not all) aspects of gender are imposed or learned rather than inborn; also the belief (popular with many of my generation of feminists) that if boys and girls were raised in the identical way and treated from birth as equals that we wouldn't have the problem of sexism. 

I could go on...but I think you probably get the general idea.

AB: Can you tell us a little about how you came to write one of the most fascinating stories I have ever read…‘The Nest’—from Nest of Nightmares?
LT: ‘The Nest’—or at least a draft of it—was the first story I wrote after leaving the US to settle in the UK. For reasons I don't now recall, a whole year passed before I rewrote it and then sold it. I was living in London with Christopher Priest in a rather tumultuous relationship, swinging between plans to marry, and thoughts of splitting up. We actually hardly knew each other, but we shared a fantasy about this life we wanted. We would drive off into the country to look at houses, which we would fantasize about buying and settling down to domestic bliss together. The story was inspired by this situation, and also by my first sight of rooks' nests—I think they're called colonies—enormous shaggy things hanging in the high branches of winter-bare trees. They looked eerie and sinister to me. By the time I rewrote the story, Chris and I were married and living in a little cottage on the edge of Dartmoor. I'd also had a visit from my sister (two years younger than me) and we'd gone to Paris together; the experience had made me think about how certain aspects of close relationships can get stuck in time—elements that are no longer appropriate, because you should have outgrown them, can still shape the way you respond to each other— I'm probably not expressing this very well; what I mean is, I'd find myself playing "big sister" and sort of bossing her around—or she'd defer to me—or we'd bicker about something— and this wasn't to do with our present situation, but rather the relationship we'd had as children. I realized that as we had grown up, our relationship needed to grow up, too. (Does that make sense? We lived in different cities and hadn't spent much time together since we were grown up). Anyway, that experience kind of opened my eyes to something and it fed into the story.

The story is dedicated to my sister, Megan.

AB: Have you been tempted to revise any of your stories for Ash-Tree Press? 
LT: Oh, the temptation!! It is hard to hold back sometimes, when I see an unnecessary (or just plain wrong!) word or phrase.... but I have been very strict with myself. NO REVISIONS. I love Henry James, but I think his project of rewriting all his novels for a new, uniform edition was just WRONG, and there's no way I was going down that route.

Although, having said that, I think there's more point in revising a novel—if you feel you got it wrong, were unreasonably obscure, maybe because you were too young, or overly influenced by others. (As for example John Fowles revising The Magus). But this many years later... if I've got something new or better to say in the short story form, I will just write a new short story on the same subject. I'm not going to second-guess my younger self and mess with stories that were found worthy of publication in their original form. 

AB: Are there any projects in the pipeline that you can tell us about?
LT: I currently have three unfinished novels in hand. One, I wrote the whole draft of but was not happy with it, so I've set it aside. I know I will go back to it, but possibly just to take the main idea and do something completely different with it. Two, a new novel, it was going well until summer holidays and various deadlines for shorter projects interrupted me... this has the working title of Blood of the Host and is a dark fantasy, set in contemporary Scotland and drawing on old Celtic legends— this puts it in a similar category to my last novel, The Silver Bough, except I think this one will be much darker...and at the moment I'm thinking it needs to be more erotic. Three, a YA novel, about 1/3 written but put aside because I can't seem to work on two books at the same time, alas.

Also, I seem to have more ideas for short stories than I have in years, and that includes an idea for a series of supernatural detective stories set in the 1890s... I'm writing the second one at the moment. I should have at least three new stories coming out later this year—or early next—as well.

This interview was originally published in the Fantasycon 2010 Programme.

Wednesday 5 October 2011

COMPETITION: Win One of Five Copies of the House of Fear Anthology

We're offering you a chance to win one of five copies of the new Solaris House of Fear anthology of haunted house stories, signed by the Editor, Jonathan Oliver.

The book forms the basis of our Halloween event on October 28th at Waterstone's Liverpool One. It features stories from all three of the authors who will be reading at that event:

Adam Nevill

Lisa Tuttle

Nicholas Royle

It also features 16 other stories from authors such as Robert Shearman, Sarah Pinborough, Christopher Priest, and Joe R. Lansdale.

So if you'd like to win a copy of this brilliant collection then send us an e-mail at twistedtalesevents@gmail.com with the subject line HOUSE OF FEAR COMPETITION. Please also include your name and address.

Closing date is Monday 24th October.

We'll select the winners at random and pass your details to Solaris, who will then post the book out to you directly.

Jonathan Oliver interviewed by David McWilliam


Jonathan Oliver is the editor-in-chief of Solaris and Abaddon Books. He is the author of two fantasy novels set in the world of Twilight of Kerberos, The Call of Kerberos and The Wrath of Kerberos, and has edited two anthologies of horror fiction, The End of the Line and House of Fear. Jonathan lives in Abingdon, Oxfordshire with his wife and daughter and their cat, Fudge.
Jonathan Oliver
DM: What attracts you to the ghost story?
JO: Partly the attraction is that 'ghost train' thrill you get from a good ghost story; the feeling of the 'other', the sense of the numinous and something just beyond our understanding. But I also think that ghost stories are essentially 'human' stories; they tell us a great deal about ourselves and the kinds of lives we want to live, and our fears of what will be left behind

DM: How do you differentiate between a ghost story and a haunted house tale? Do you think that there are key differences?
JO: The two really go hand-in-hand, don't they? Usually for a house to haunted, it needs a ghost (though in House of Fear you'll see that's not always the case). I think that haunted house stories are just as concerned with location as they are with the ghosts themselves. Think about that knock-out first paragraph of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House: the first thing you meet is not a ghost, but the house itself. Again, in King's The Shining, the Overlook is as much a character as the spirits that inhabit it. The ghost and the location of the haunting are inextricably linked.

DM: Then you have books like Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, in which the uncanny spaces in the house are the source of fear- the creature within never being encountered directly. What are your top five haunted house stories, in any medium, and why?
JO: Thing with Top Fives is that they always keep changing. But, in no particular order and pretty much off the top of my head:

- The Haunting of Hill House
– Shirley Jackson – A true masterpiece. Beautifully written, terrifying and a character study like no other.

- The Shining – Stephen King – Probably one of King’s darkest novels. I’d seen the film first but that didn’t detract from this power-house of a horror novel. There are moments that literally froze me with fear.

- The House on Nazareth Hill – Ramsey Campbell is pretty much my favourite writer and he’s a master of supernatural fiction. A stunning novel.

- The Haunting – The film of Jackson’s book is one of my all time favourite movies. I never can tire of this movie and it’s always a delight to introduce it to those who haven’t seen it.

-The Innocents – This is perhaps the darkest and most powerful of all haunted house movies. The themes are deeply disturbing and the haunting utterly convincing.

DM: What do you think House of Fear will add to the horror literature already on the market?
JO: I think that it will show that the genre of supernatural fiction is as diverse and as important and as rich as it's ever been. The ghost and the haunted house aren't the preserves of quaint old stories by scholarly gents of the past or our Victorian forbears. They can be used in modern literature to great effect. I hope that House of Fear will introduce people to the great range and breadth of horror fiction that is being written today.

DM: Indeed, as with The End of the Line, you have secured a very strong lineup of authors to contribute to House of Fear. In the process of putting together the anthology, did you discover any great writers previously unknown to you?
JO: I hadn’t read Nina Allan until my account manager, Ben, mentioned her to me. When I looked into her writing it was clear that here was a kindred-spirit. Nina is a massive fan of Robert Aickman, whose work I greatly admire, and a brilliant writer to boot, so it was a thrill to be able to welcome her to the anthology. It was also great to finally get to work with Joe Lansdale, whose fiction I’ve been a huge fan of for years. But I’m genuinely proud of each of the stories in this anthology and it’s great to be able to gather together some of my favourite writers in a themed work.

DM: House of Fear is the second Solaris horror anthology for consecutive Halloweens. Is this going to become a tradition?
JO: That very much depends on how successful the books are. So far they’re doing nicely, so I do hope to be able to produce more anthologies yes. I like the idea of it becoming a tradition but we’ll have to convince the market of that.

DM: You seem to be building an impressive portfolio of horror authors at Solaris, with novels by Nicholas Royle and Conrad Williams this year and more planned for 2012. Do you see Solaris becoming one of the major publishers of horror in the UK?

JO: Well personally I love horror, so that would be fantastic. I do try to keep our list as diverse as possible, and yes there is some more dark stuff coming from us in 2012. In January we welcome the brilliant Chris Fowler to Solaris with the publication of Hell Train, a novel that reads like the film Hammer never made. In February we have a chilling novel from Simon Bestwick called The Faceless. Simon’s a very interesting writer and someone who it’s great to be giving a wider audience to. Then in April we have the second book in the Concrete Grove trilogy, Silent Voices, from Gary McMahon, who is very much pushing the boundaries of the genre. May sees the publication of Deadfall Hotel by Steve Rasnic Tem, which is genuinely one of the most beautiful and powerful novels I have read. A real work of art. In August we’re welcoming a debut author to the list with the publication of Blood and Feathers by Louise Morgan, a brilliant urban fantasy that involves a journey into Hell. September we have the last book in the Concrete Grove trilogy, Beyond Here Lies Nothing. And beyond that, well watch this space…

Monday 3 October 2011

Adam Nevill interviewed by David McWilliam


Adam Nevill, photo by Tania Glyde
Adam Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969 and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is the author of the supernatural horror novels Banquet for the Damned (2004), Apartment 16 (2010) and The Ritual (2011). He lives in London and can be contacted through www.adamlgnevill.com


DM: How did you come to write horror professionally?
AN: Ramsey Campbell published my short story ‘Mother’s Milk’ in Gathering the Bones. Couple of years later, PS Publishing published my first novel, Banquet for the Damned. ‘Mother’s Milk’ made its way to Ramsey through two intermediaries, from what I remember – James Marriott and John Coulthard. You could honestly say I was of absolutely no interest to major publishers or agents for ten years; I was saved from the abyss, into which so many fall screaming, by Ramsey Campbell and Peter Crowther. A few years later, my agent John Jarrold―the only agent who’s ever had any interest in my work―continued to pull me out of the shadows in which I crouched, muttering and swatting at small black angels.

DM: Who are your greatest influences, and why?
AN: If I answered this question with absolute precision, we’d run into pages. I’ve been in receipt of major influences from so many writers and poets, as well as painters and film makers, and still am as I go along. I think I have my own voice now, which still changes timbre on every book, but I am constantly under the influence of the many writers I read. Some at a craft level, some at an imaginative level, some at every level. Chiefly, I’d say M R James, H P Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Walter de la Mare, William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, Clive Barker, Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell from horror. But Robert Marasco, Shirley Jackson, Edith Wharton, W F Harvey and H R Wakefield all made me realise how much they made me want to write during recent rereads of their work. Maupassant and the other James ditto.

Outside of the genre weird tale, Cormac McCarthy, James Ellroy, James Joyce, Alan Warner, all dropped major pennies for me too, as did Nathaniel West, Bernard Malamud, Knut Hamsun and Dostoyevsky.

Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel and Francis Bacon have a guiding hand in my work too.

DM: All three of your novels to date feature a supernatural threat. What is the continuing appeal of the otherworldly in your writing? Do you ever see yourself writing a mundane horror novel, in which danger stems from the world we know?
AN: The first question is a big one. Much of why I write what I write still remains unexamined. Will I ever truly know? But I’d say I’ve had an innate receptivity to the idea of the supernatural and unworldly since my first memories. I still write about what frightened me when I was younger – in fact, much of my horror still comes from that time. The unseen or barely glimpsed other world was very much a possibility to me then. Even as an adult I still have a strong sensitivity to the uncanny, and have never stopped, at least in my imagination, working out a kind of poetry of the grotesque that lends itself to horror. If I have any kind of artistic vision, then supernatural horror is it.

There are few more liberating and terrifying and dreadful and awe inspiring experiences than realising you are close to something so immense that a glimpse is nearly too much, but a full revelation would be unbearable. Lovecraft’s wonder and awe. That’s the force I want underwriting my horror fiction. I am still overwhelmed in this way. Quite recently while lying on a couch, in the early hours of the morning, outside a farmhouse in Catalonia (where I was a guest writer), I looked at the largest and clearest night sky I had ever seen―just dense with stars and debris disintegrating as it hit the atmosphere―while a violent electrical storm set fire to trees in the forest around the farm (in which boars could also be heard crashing around from time to time). I’d watched the storm get closer as it came in from the sea, and it looked like the end of the world. It could have been for all I knew in an unfamiliar place while alone at night. And for a few minutes I realised with the fullest comprehension possible, that I was on a planet for a miniscule fragment of time in a universe so vast I couldn’t even understand it. I nearly screamed. For a few moments I completely lost my mind and expected to be yanked up and into the sky. Is there anything more significant than our crushing insignificance within this wondrous and utterly dreadful universe and its infinite possibilities? So why would you write about anything else? There is nothing bigger than the mystery of life and the unmapped vastness of existence. Much derided, but horror is the best vehicle, in my humble opinion, for exploring this.

[NO DRUGS WERE INVOLVED IN THE ACTUAL EXPERIENCE IN SPAIN BESIDE NICOTINE]

As for the second question: if not in physique, but in temperament, I’ve always shared an affinity with Conan, who only feared the supernatural and not men. But Lovecraft’s more atheistic sci fi horror really appeals to me, so I wouldn’t rule out that in the future. But I haven’t felt a significant enough pull yet, toward realism without mystical embellishments. I’ve tinkered but end up in the usual place. I once tried to write in a social realist style and before I knew it, the characters I attempted to draw from life were grotesque puppets and hyper real … perhaps I was on to something. But I think my reading of more social realist writers has taught me to prepare the ground for the uncanny in a believable world, which inevitably amplifies the supernatural when it appears. Or when, as M R James wrote, it “put out its head”.

DM: The atmospheres you evoke in your novels have a distinctly cinematic quality to them. Do you draw inspiration from horror films? If so, can you name some favourites and explain why they are important to you?
AN: Yes, lots of inspiration. In fact I imagined The Ritual as a film as I wrote it. It’s a cinematic novel. I wanted to get as close to an amalgam of the two mediums as I could, without eschewing the inner life and the lyricism you need in prose, while also not losing the immediacy of cinema with too much exposition or description. Lots of popular fiction novels do this, but I rarely feel transported by the books, even if the plots are engaging. The Ritual also had to be a transporting book for me, or it would have been a failure.

Often with films, it’s a scene, or an image, or an aesthetic that stays with me and can inspire me years later. For instance, in recent years, the last fifteen minutes of REC (2007) are as good as anything I have ever seen in a horror film; the photographs and the cult in Martyrs (2008) made me shiver; the interview with the Dachau survivor in The Nameless (1999) took me out of myself; the teeth in the rags in Blair Witch (1999), preceded by the cries of the victim in the dark of that wood, have never left me; the peep over the door in House of Blood (2011) made my head spin. Even before I’d seen the original Nosferatu (1922), as a child I’d seen a clip of Max Schreck walking up the stairs with those long fingers and probably came as close to paralysis through fear as I have ever done since. The clown under the bed in Poltergeist (1982), the jackals bones in the grave of Damien’s mother in The Omen (1976), the Venice of Don’t Look Now (1973) … these are a few of my favourite things. One day I will edit them all into one long loop and play them on a huge screen in a dark room, and listen to ‘A Dying God Coming into Human Flesh’ by Celtic Frost at full volume, and just wait for the men in white coats to be called … Perhaps I’m a supernatural terror junkie.

DM: There is a recurrent theme of ancient beings with whom we should not meddle via rituals and occult magics. Do you have a personal fascination with/fear of the arcane?
AN: Both a fascination, and the fear of the sensibly cautious. I’ve never dabbled myself, and won’t even go near a Ouija board, but I tend to consider occult magic as complicated and sophisticated a system of belief and ritual and discipline, as so much of philosophy or psychiatry is. It also brings a great deal of comfort and insight into many of its practitioners, who I do not mock, and has little to do with evil. It’s almost a therapy and system for outsiders too, which I like. I just prefer to consider the occult at an imaginative level, or as apocryphal. It creates a discourse through its symbols and metaphors and reputation that facilitates supernatural horror, if used sparingly. I think I also tend to use it in fiction as part of a process in which reader receptivity is cultivated to accepting something beyond natural law. In Banquet I used it as a medium that prepared the characters to make contact with something in a process, rather than it wielding great power alone through spells and ceremonies etc. I believe the bane of horror is the magic amulet, the cursed skull, the trinkets, lotions and potions, the spells and incantations. They’re too often risible. I think M R James and H R Wakefield hit the right note that I also try and catch. The occult is a wonderful aesthetic if used economically, same with folklore in antiquated dialect. But I fall short of the Reverend Montague Summers’s fear/reverence of satanic evil within magic and the world, if that’s what you’re getting at!


DM: With Apartment 16 and now your story 'Florrie' in Jonathan Oliver's House of Fear anthology, you have demonstrated your love for the haunted house subgenre. At Alt.Fiction you stated that we are currently enjoying something of a Renaissance of the haunted house story. Can you list some of your highlights from recent years, with a little explanation as to what you think they are adding to the subgenre?
AN: The haunted house has never gone out of fashion. The commissioning process may have considered it old hat in film and in book publishing, but I doubt readers and cinema fans ever have done. Paranormal Activity (2007) was made outside of the Hollywood system, but grossed $150 million at the box office (I think that’s as fair a comment on what gets made within the system). The director shot it in his own house with his own equipment. I struggle to think of anything else in recent years that so vividly and vicariously captured the public imagination in a theatrical release, besides maybe Avatar (2009), though for different reasons. Avatar had a huge push behind it, but Paranormal Activity seem to find most of its success from word of mouth, from a communal expectation and desire to be frightened by a haunted house. The Birthing House (2009) by Christopher Ransom was a first novel from an author with no profile that sold into six figures on the UK high street. I liked it a lot and wanted it for the Virgin Books horror list. His second novel I enjoyed even more and it features another haunted house, and then an entire housing estate abandoned during the downturn – The Haunting of James Hastings (2010). It perplexes me why critics are so unkind about his books. His writing reminds me of Stephen King. I had very little profile as a writer, but my own Apartment 16 was popular within this vogue too, and it’s a strange and idiosyncratic book, not one I’d say is overtly commercial, but the idea of a haunted apartment block seemed, again, to ring bells. On that note, I’d like to see Burnt Offerings (1973) by Robert Marasco brought back into mainstream print (another shattered dream from my time at Virgin Books); I often struggle to find anyone my age or younger who has read it. It’s one of the very best haunted house novels.

It’s a popular subgenre because we’re all frightened in houses at one time or another, and particularly at night when we’re young. The haunted house story probably has more universal appeal than any other horror story because most of us spend at least half of our lives at home, in places older than us where others dwelled before us. Buildings are the places (and the older they are the better) where presences are probably more likely to be sensed. The places we live and visit are loaded with history and atmosphere and the curious things that get left behind.

At my current address, I still receive mail for an elderly woman who used to live here. I have a horrible feeling she either died here alone, or was transferred from here to a hospice. She may have lived here since the war, had children here, loved, lost, and suffered here – it’s an old place. Who has more right to the house now? I’d probably say she still does, or my family with her blessing. It’s probably the safest way to think of houses. That’s what the story ‘Florrie’ came from. Few would say we are not influenced by or affected by our environments, but who can really define what is influencing us, or at least watching us … just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there …

In terms of adding to the genre, it’s probably up to each new generation of writers to reinterpret the classic genres for which there is an established and enduring curiosity and fascination. Paranormal Activity and REC did this via more democratised means of film making, (even in its production in the case of Paranormal Activity) through improvements in digital filmmaking technology (that also seems to account for most current affairs visuals these days too). The haunted house/building story moved effectively with the times and wasn’t dispelled by technology – isn’t that beautiful and satisfying? The portability of ready-to-use cameras is perfect for haunted building stories, eschewing the quasi-paranormal science of the past. And I think reinterpreting the haunted house for your own time, in this way, while staying within the tradition of the ghost story, is probably more valid that trying to reinvent the wheel, which often, though not always, leads to silliness. I’m most often criticised for being “unoriginal”, but surely, how you interpret a theme or subgenre in your own time and voice is what counts? From Hill House to Burnt Offerings, to Hell House (1971) and The Shining (1977), the haunted building has a great modern tradition and isn’t only the preserve of horror fans, as other subgenres of horror might be; it tends to attract the general reader too. And many younger readers are introduced to a field or genre for the first time by writers in their own time.


DM: What are your writing plans for the next 12 months?
AN: I’m writing the final drafts of my fourth supernatural horror novel, Last Days ― my most ambitious work yet ― which is out in May 2012 through Pan Macmillan. I’ve worked on it every day, more or less for a year. Never had that luxury before. I’m also doing research and development for the novel after, which is taking me to some strange places.