Ramsey Campbell interviewed by David McWilliam

Ramsey with wife Jenny

The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain and Ghosts Know. Forthcoming is The Kind Folk. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead and Just Behind You, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in Prism, All Hallows, Dead Reckonings and Video Watchdog. He is the President of the British Fantasy Society and of the Society of Fantastic Films. 

Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His web site is at www.ramseycampbell.com. 

DM: With the re-release of your early Cthulhu Mythos collection The Inhabitant of the Lake & Other Unwelcome Tenants (2012) from PS Publishing, how has the influence of H. P. Lovecraft on your work evolved over the course of your career?
RC: It’s been subsumed, I think. The earliest tales in Inhabitant are very close imitations, but the trouble is that they introduce elements from the later codification of the mythos, exactly what I don’t think Lovecraft would have wanted – the mythos as he conceived it was intended as a riposte to what he saw as the excessive systematisation of the occult by the Victorians, a way of suggesting more than was shown. Then amateurs like me came along and filled in the gaps, rendering the whole thing far too explicit and robbing it of too much of its mystery. Once I realised this I made some attempts to compensate for my original errors. 'The Voice of the Beach' tries to create a sense of cosmic terror without any of the paraphernalia of the mythos. (Fritz Leiber did something similar in 'A Bit of the Dark World', I believe). 'Cold Print' and 'The Other Names' try to locate the Lovecraftian in modern urban society. I also annotated Cameron Nash’s letters to Lovecraft, of course. And there’s The Darkest Part of the Woods, but we’ll come to that. More generally, I think Lovecraft’s influence – his sense of structure, the gradual accumulation of detail to suggest terror – permeates much of my stuff.

DM: In The Darkest Part of the Woods (2002) you explore Lovecraftian occult magic in the context of deteriorating relationships in a dysfunctional family. What was the appeal of this juxtaposition of the intimate and the numinous to you as a writer?

RC: I think these elements reflect each other – at least, I hope they do. I’ve been working along these lines almost as soon as I abandoned the overtly Lovecraftian – for instance, with my first Liverpool tale ('The Cellars' from 1965), where the supernatural elements express the relationship. In The Darkest Part of the Woods the depth of the association between the family and their haunted environment only gradually revealed itself to me in the writing. That’s the kind of experience that makes writing (novels especially) worth all the doubts and hesitations for me. I would also say that I think Woods is my most nearly successful Lovecraftian piece, partly because I took The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a model, a tale where the mythos is barely referred to but still looms over or under it. I finally appreciated how Lovecraftian elements are often best conveyed indirectly, as he often did himself. In my book, for instance, I like the lines from the masque (“Come man and maid, come dance and sing…”) which hint at something far darker than their bright lyrical surface. The whole book is an attempt to return to Lovecraft’s first principles, as The Blair Witch Project (consciously or otherwise) did.

DM: You have long fought against the censoring of horror and unsubstantiated claims from mainstream political and media figures as to the damaging effects on the individual psyche and society itself arising from the popularity of the genre. This is amusingly expressed in your article 'Turn Off' from the non-fiction collection Ramsey Campbell, Probably (2002), your account of a 'debate' at the Wirral Christian Centre featuring Mary Whitehouse in 1987. Your story 'Chucky Comes to Liverpool' (2010) in Haunted Legends (edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas), addresses the moral panic stirred up against the Child's Play films as the cause of the murder of Jamie Bulger. Looking back to that time, do you think that there is now a more accepting attitude to horror or does it still hold pariah status?

RC: I think the field constantly drifts in and out of favour. I often recall how it was when I originally encountered it in the 1950s. Just a couple of years after horror comics were banned in Britain, and only just before Hammer Films started getting pilloried in the press for being too graphic and sadistic, the august house of Faber & Faber brought out Best Horror Stories, edited by John Kier Cross and boasting a superbly lurid Felix Kelly cover. I suspect the book may have been an attempt to reclaim respectability for the field, though it contained some decidedly gruesome material ('Berenice', 'Raspberry Jam'). It’s surely significant that Hammer Films later received a Queen’s Award for Industry, while you can find in public libraries (Liverpool, for instance) deluxe bound volumes of the very comics that caused the ban in the first place. Right now horror seems to be on the tentatively ascendant, I think. Even the occasional source of controversy, most recently Human Centipede 2, doesn’t seem to be regarded as representative of the field. Still, I’m betting it may find itself scapegoated once again in the future – call me a pessimist if you like.

This is just a short extract from an ongoing interview, which will eventually appear on The Gothic Imagination.

Joe R. Lansdale interviewed by Glyn Morgan

Joe R. Lansdale was born in Gladewater, Texas, now lives in Nacogdoches and is the writer in residence at Stephen F. Austin State University. He also teaches at his own Shen Chuan martial arts school and is a member of the Martial Arts Hall of Fame. He is the author of numerous novels and short stories which can be described as being horror, westerns, science fiction, mystery and suspense, or more commonly a mixture of those genres. He has also written for comics and cartoons such as Batman: The Animated Series. Over his career he has won eight Bram Stoker Awards, a British Fantasy Award, and had several novels listed as New York Times notable books of the year, not least his novel The Bottoms which is by far his most acclaimed, picking up the Edgar Award for best novel amongst other accolades.

You can find out more about Joe and his writings on his website: www.joerlansdale.com/

GM: Let's start at the beginning, which authors and books did you read that made you want to write, and in particular make you want to write the kind of material which you produce today?

JRL: There are so many. Early on it was comics, comics, comics. I loved DC comics the best, and almost as much, Classics Illustrated, which were comics based on classic literature. They led me to reading so many books I might not have read, though later. There was not a library handy when I was really young in Mt. Enterprise. That came a little later. There was a book mobile, and I read what I could get there, including classics. Kipling, Stevenson, Twain, London, all of those great writers. I loved Homer’s The Iliad and Odyssey, and anything associated with Greek and Roman mythology, Norse was also interesting to me. Later I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and I went from wanting to be a writer to having to be a writer. He hooked me through the gills. I also loved Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen. Later I found many other writes of horror, but before that, these were the guys. Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, first through The Twilight Zone, and then the stories. Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, a little later. Robert E. Howard, and then when I had the small amount of college I had, I was introduced to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and many others. Later it was Flannery O’Conner, Carson McCullers, well, the list goes on and on.

GM: This interview is a tie-in to our Weird West event based on the Gutshot collection. How did you find yourself writing weird westerns and did you even imagine you would find yourself considered one of the primary figures in the genre?

JRL: I’m surprised by it, and pleased by it, but Weird Westerns are not new. Robert E. Howard wrote them, and others, and when I was growing up there was a horror western trend. My favorite of those was Curse of the Undead, which was a vampire western, and one of the influences for my novel Dead in the West.

GM: The publication of Gutshot is just one example of the weird west that's surfaced in recent years. With films like Cowboys and Aliens, the Jonah Hex adaptation, and video games like Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare receiving massive mainstream publicity do you think Weird West is finally coming to the fore of the popular zeitgeist?

JRL: I think it’ll have a moment here and there, but I doubt there will be a big trend. It’s just more common than before, in comics, film, stories and books. I think it’ll always be a sub-genre of a sub-genre, but a healthy one from time to time.

GM: A lot of the Weird West material I've encountered has mixed horror with the western, but there's also been a healthy amount of humour - either tongue-in-cheek genre self-consciousness, or something a little darker. This is also certainly true of your own work which has never been afraid of injecting some humour. How do the two to ideas of horror and humour play together? Do you find they are opposing forces that need to be balanced or are they more complementary than we might first think?

JRL: Humor comes to me naturally, but certainly it was Mark Twain and Robert Bloch that gave me permission to do it by reading this approach in their work. Others like Fred Brown also influenced me. But mostly I sort of see the universe that way, as sadly humorous. The older I get, the more satirical that humor has become. I was influenced heavily by genre writing, but by the time I began to write, I was also influenced by more mainstream literature, much of which used irony and satire more securely. I think it all just ran together, like spilt paints. And I do find one balances out the other, but it’s harder to do than some might think. Just having a humorous moment or a humorous line is not the same as blending the two ideas. If you just put in a funny moment without consideration of how it weighs with the rest of the work, you can tilt the entire thing over.

"Two Gun Mojo" one of the
Jonah Hex titles Joe worked on.

GM: You expressed your early love of comics and years later you would find yourself writing some, particularly relevant here DC's cowboy Jonah Hex, how different do you find writing comics to writing novels and short stories, does your process differ depending which you're working on?

JRL: It’s a different mindset. I find it easier, but saying that doesn’t mean I find it easy. It’s just an easier form for me than writing stories and books, but each of those things requires a certain knack and mindset. I know a lot of writers who have tried comics and failed miserably because the mindset is so different, and the same could be said for film. It’s a different way of thinking.

GM: Sticking with comics. If you could have absolute free reign with any established character in the vast pantheons of comic book characters, who would you want to write stories for and what might they entail?

JRL: Jonah Hex again. Batman. Hawkman. Tarzan. John Carter of Mars. The last two are not thought of as comic properties, but they have been so many times, I’d love a crack at them. Also, David Innes of Pellucidar.

GM: A lot of your novels feature homosexuality, or homosexual characters, not least the character Leonard Pine who along with Hap Collins is a principle character in many of your novels. It goes without saying that this is a big issue in the USA at the moment, and the push for improved rights and recognition for homosexual couples in the States has been likened to the African-American or Feminist Civil Rights movements. Is this an issue which you would say is particularly important for you?

JRL: Fairness and common sense are always important. I have gay characters in my work because I meet and know gay characters in life. Same as blacks and hispanics and so on. I’m trying to represent the people I know. I also think that even if I am writing entertaining books, that it’s fine if I have social and political views in them. Some readers and writers disagree, and I say, that’s fine. I don’t always think a work has to have that, but it’s a natural outgrowth for me. I’m a professional writer, and I’m serious about it. I was born in the fifties and grew up in the sixties, which was a time of change as far as Civil Rights went, so it’s imbedded in me.

Bubba Ho-Tep

GM: The only film adaptation of one of your books or screenplays that I've seen is Bubba Ho-Tep [a retired Elvis and "JFK" fight off an Ancient Egyptian mummy who attacks their retirement home] but from what I can tell a number of your other works have been optioned, are we going to see any other full-length films based on your work in the near future?

JRL: A number of films look possible. A film of my short story, with screenplay by my son Keith, was filmed this summer, and should be out by next summer. It’s called Christmas with the Dead. Not sure when it will actually go into main distribution. It’s very low budget, but its fun. I’ve been working on a film with Bill Paxton and Brad Wyman of my novel, The Bottoms. Still hoping. The Drive In is possible right now, as is Cold in July. There are others optioned, but those look the most likely right now, but in film, that can change overnight.

GM: And to finish off, what upcoming projects have you got that you'd be willing to tell us about?

JRL: My novel Edge of Dark Water, which may be my best work, is coming out in March from Mulholland Press, and I think it’s a humdinger. I have a young adult book out now, All the Earth Thrown to the Sky, and am currently writing another one, along with a few short stories.

Ghoultown's Count Lyle interviewed by David McWilliam

The devilishly eclectic Ghoultown have thrilled, marauded, and rocked their way across the musical badlands for nearly 13 years. Born in Texas circa 1998, Ghoultown has been described by Synergy Magazine as "the ultimate embodiment of tequila drinking hillbilly rock". The band's sixth studio effort, Life after Sundown, proves to be their most ambitious material to date. The album is a unique mix of horror rock, punk‐twang and spaghetti western flair. Think of it this way ‐‐ if Rob Zombie and Johnny Cash were tossed into a meat packer, Ghoultown is what would come out the other side.

In addition to the success of Life after Sundown and Skeleton Cowboys ‐ their latest single on Zoviet Records ‐ Ghoultown was invited to write and perform a new theme song for iconic horror maven, Elvira. The star‐studded tribute was released as the Mistress of the Dark ultra-single, complete with a DVD featuring the music video by director Gris Grimly and an audio CD of new songs including “Mistress of the Dark” and remixes. The video was also featured on Elvira’s nationally syndicated show, Movie Macabre, in 2011. Hailed as pioneers of hellbilly rock, Ghoultown continues to make hearts race and skin crawl on their pursuit to turn the music world upside down ‐‐ one soul at a time.

Ghoultown are:

Count Lyle ‐ vocals/guitar
Jake Middlefinger - lead guitar

Santi - bass/vocals

Lizard Lazario ‐ acoustic guitar/vocals

Dalton Black ‐ drums

Randy Grimm ‐ trumpet

Related websites:

www.ghoultown.com

www.myspace.com/ghoultown

www.facebook.com/pages/Ghoultown/108338542010

www.monstrobizarro.com

DM: How and why did you put Ghoultown together?

CL: While doing a horrorpunk band back in the 1990’s, called The Killcreeps, we started writing some dark western type material, which had a cool feel to it and a lot of unique personality. When I disbanded The Killcreeps, I thought it would be cool to explore the dark western angle by combining that with punk, rockabilly, and gothic sounds. I had always wanted to create something musically that was very unique, so when I came up with the name Ghoultown, it seemed to be a great concept and had the potential to stand-out from the crowd. 

In 1998, I started writing songs and putting together the members. It started out with a few of the ex-Killcreeps and an old friend of mine, Lizard Lazario, who came in on acoustic guitar. I found a few of the other players by placing an ad in the local music paper. Over the years we’ve evolved a bit from a more spooky, gothic country sound to a more hellbilly cowpunk-rock sound, but it’s still the same basic idea of dark western music that has continued.

DM: When I first heard Ghoultown described as 'Weird West psychobilly', I thought that it sounded like the most niche band in the history of music. However, working my way through your back catalogue, I found that you cover a wide range of styles. Who are your main musical influences?

CL: My musical taste is all over the place, so it’s hard to pinpoint any specific bands that influenced Ghoultown. I love old country, hardcore punk, all kinds of metal, and spaghetti western soundtracks, so any music that fits into those categories is subject to being thrown about in my song compositions. The cool thing about Ghoultown is that I can get away with incorporating a wider range of stuff and it all seems to work since Ghoultown is pretty much its own niche. There’s no rules except the ones I make up.

There are drawbacks to being your own niche, though. After years of battling the music industry and trying to advance Ghoultown beyond cult status, I’ve discovered that people mostly like music that fits into definable genres. Nobody seems to know what to do with us. But I’d rather be fronting Ghoultown than some other run-of-the-mill type project, even though admittedly it would probably be an easier road.

DM: People mean lots of different things by the term 'Weird West', but in Ghoultown's case you combine gritty Westerns with undead horror. Do you consciously draw on the films and fiction from both genres? If so, what are your favourite examples from each?

CL: Yes. In fact, when it comes down to it, I am more influenced by spaghetti western and horror movies than anything. When I watch a cool film, it seems to inspire me to write music. Some of my favorite spaghetti westerns are The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, For a Few Dollars More, Fistful of Lead, Django, and Keoma. As far as horror films, I like so many that it’s hard to list. Movies like The Shining, Return of the Living Dead, original Halloween, The Legend of Boggy Creek, the classic Universal and Hammer films, and on and on.

I also love the old Weird Western comics like Jonah Hex, so that gets thrown into the mix as well.

DM: I found your collaboration with American horror icon Elvira interesting. For those who are unfamiliar with Elvira, could you explain her significance to the American horror landscape? How did you come to work with her and what was it like?

CL: Elvira first started back in the 1980s as a horror host for a television station in Los Angeles.  She did a show called Movie Macabre where she played old horror movies and commented on them during breaks.  Later, she did two feature films which were pretty successful. Anyone familiar with Halloween should recognize her costumes and products; she’s got countless action figures, model kits and other stuff that’s been made in her likeness too. She appears at most major horror conventions these days, and for the last couple of years, she’s been doing a revamped version of her Movie Macabre show which airs on syndicated television stations. Our “Mistress of the Dark” video has been featured on the show and is also available as bonus content on her new Movie Macabre DVDs.

This story behind this is that a few years ago we were playing a horror convention VIP party where Elvira’s manager happened to see us. He loved the band, so he told Elvira - Cassandra - about us. The next day I was hanging out with some friends of mine at the convention and someone ran up and said ‘Elvira wants to meet you, get to your booth’. So I headed back to our guest booth and sure enough, Cassandra came by with her entourage and talked for a few minutes. During that time she suggested I write a new song for her. I had a short meeting with her manager later on and came up with a plan to write a song and maybe shoot a video if it worked out. Two weeks later, I sent them a demo of the song, which they liked. From there we recorded it and decided to do a video. I called up our friend, artist/director Gris Grimly, out in Los Angeles and asked if he wanted to direct. He was excited about the opportunity, so once he was on board we headed out to Hollywood and shot the video. Cassandra was able to hook us up with the Magic Castle out there, so that’s where most of the video was shot.

She was great to work with and she worked really hard on the project, even though obviously it wasn’t a high paying gig. I’ve been a long-time fan, so I’m really honored to have had the opportunity to work with her.

The final product, our Mistress of the Dark DVD, includes the video, a making-of documentary, and some other crazy stuff that Grimly had us shoot. It’s sort of like a bizarre take on the old Hee Haw variety show from the 1970s.  It’s pretty campy, just like you would expect from Elivra.

DM: Possibly my favourite Ghoultown song, 'Drink With the Living Dead', tells a tale of a revenant forced to challenge strangers to drinking contests each night as penance for killing a man to steal his last beer. The way it condenses information and creates atmosphere reminds me of Nick Cave songs such as 'Red Right Hand' and 'Stagger Lee'. How do you set about writing a song driven by narrative?

CL: I’m a fan of Nick Cave and certainly “Drink With the Living Dead” is reflective of his work on the Murder Ballads album. It’s also similar to what Marty Robbins was doing with gunfighter ballads in his classic country songs like “El Paso” and “Big Iron”. The approach I took on “Drink With the Living Dead” was similar to these type songs, but even more-so, modeled after Charlie Daniel’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”. I really wanted to create a song that had a cool narrative story, and being Ghoultown, of course this should obviously involve some kind of undead gunslinger! I first came up with the basic storyline, then started writing the lyric verses. Once I had the meter of the lyrics I was able to strum out some chords that went along with them. After I had the verse melody, I just let the progression guide me into a chorus riff. Once I had those two main elements, I just kept tweaking the lyrics until I got the story like I wanted it. It turned out to be a really long song - over six minutes - which I thought would be a drawback. We almost didn’t include it on the album because we thought nobody would want to listen to a six minute tale about a dead gunfighter in a drinking contest, but we were wrong! The response was huge on that song. Fans loved it.

DM: As main songwriter for the band, at what point do you present your ideas to the other members of Ghoultown? How do they add to the process of fleshing the songs out?

CL: I write all of the songs on an acoustic guitar and then create a rough acoustic demo using my 4-track.  I give this to the guys so they can get familiar with the song before we practice.  Once we get together, we jam the song with everyone adding in the real drums, lead parts, backing vocals, and all that.  The song sounds better when it’s played by the actual band, of course, but essentially there’s not much change between the demo version and the final song. If you listen to my demo for “Drink With the Living Dead,” for example, it’s nearly the same as the final song except the production is not as good and I use a drum machine instead of real drums and an acoustic guitar all the way. Oh, and I hum out the trumpet melodies on the demos, so that’s pretty funny to hear. We always get a big laugh out of that.

DM: Have you created a mythology or alternate Wild West in which to set your songs, or do you prefer to treat each one as a separate take on the core idea of undead in the Wild West?

CL: I don’t have any kind of universal setting or mythology that I think of when writing Ghoultown material. I just sort of stick with a general dark western theme, but that can have a wide range of possibilities from Johnny Cash to horror to hillbillies. And since we’re from Texas, we often fly the flag of our heritage which seems appropriate to the band as well.

DM: I've seen you mention Rob Zombie as a key influence in another interview: the recent video for 'Drink With the Living Dead' uses a similar animated style to the one for Rob's 'Lords of Salem'. Do you see your videos as a way of establishing the visual identity of the band?

CL: Certainly. The image and artwork of Ghoultown are very important elements, so visuals like videos help to complete the package. As a big fan of visuals – like movies, comic book art, etc. – I place a lot of importance on having kick ass artwork and a cool stage presence to go with the music. I think the concept of Ghoultown translates well to artwork. Fans always love our CD covers and posters, and now with the animated type video we’ve been able to translate the band members into something like animated characters. We rarely play live shows anymore due to various circumstances beyond our control, so I’ve made an effort to expand Ghoultown into the realms of virtual characters. Given the nature of the band, it seems like a natural progression.

DM: You have contributed music to several film soundtracks- is this something you’d like to do more of in the future?
CL: It’s been fun to write songs for horror soundtracks. It gives me the chance to write a song based on someone else’s concept or guidelines which is a cool change. I’ve been approached several times about doing actual soundtracks for westerns too, but nothing has come of it so far. So I’m open to the idea, if it comes along.

DM: Furthermore, would you like to create original Weird West stories, either for the page or screen?

CL: I’ve done some of that already. About 10 years ago, I developed a horror western comic series that got picked up by a small comic publisher here in Texas. The comic was also called Ghoultown, but it focused on a cast of completely different characters, not the band members. We appeared occasionally in the background, but it was a stand-alone story on its own. The outlaws were sort of like twisted vampire cowboys, set in a post-apocalyptic old west. The company published two issues of a four-issue mini series and then stopped doing comics. Since I no longer had a publisher, it just sort of died there. I just didn’t have time to pursue comics without a publisher helping me. I had my hands full running our label and doing all the band business, so we sold up the issues we had and that was that.

I’ve thought about trying to bring the Ghoultown concept to the screen by writing a script or something, but so far I haven’t gone down that path. I have a lot of cool ideas about weird west concepts, so maybe at some point I will pursue this further. I know a few guys that do movies, but making any kind of western, especially one that will require a spooky slant to it, is something that will require a substantial budget. If I do something along these lines, I just want to make sure it’s done right, not just some lame, low-budget horror western, ya know.

DM: It’s a shame that you don’t play live much anymore- from the clips I’ve seen on YouTube it looks as though you put on a great show. What are your plans for taking Ghoultown forward?

CL: The live show is definitely a strongpoint of Ghoultown, so it sucks that we can’t bring it to more places. But after 13 years of doing this, it’s become increasingly more difficult to keep pounding the pavement at our own expense. Now that some of the guys have families and can’t just quit jobs at the drop of a cowboy hat, we’ve had to be more selective in our gigs. We can obviously play locally in Texas, and we’ve done short runs to Europe, and one-off gigs that we can fly to, but really those are a drop in a piss bucket compared to all the potential places we’d like to play. We had hoped that having a record company would help boost us to real tours, but that didn’t happen. Now we’re back to doing things on our own again, so the touring opportunities are very limited. When it comes down to it, we don’t make any money at this, so it requires a lot of time, effort and our own cash to keep it going. Nothing that any other band at our level wouldn’t also tell you, so I don’t think we’re any kind of exception. It’s just that it’s really gotten to us in the last few years because we feel that the band is so good and had such great potential, that it’s a shame we can’t bring the show to more fans. But that’s the reality we’ve had to face regardless of our love for the music. At this point, we’re shifting the focus on being a recording band, not so much a performing band.

For the next release, I’m putting together a collection of rare and unreleased tracks that have built up over the years. Newer fans have a hard time getting a hold of the old material, so I thought it would be great to put this on one release with all the tracks remastered. It’s gonna have a few live tracks, and maybe even a new song as well, so probably about 18 to 20 tracks total. I’m even gonna throw in some of my original concept demo recordings from 1998.

DM: Outside of Ghoultown you also write for the horror magazine, Rue Morgue. How did this come about and do you see yourself pursuing a writing career alongside the band?
CL: That started over a year ago when some of the Rue Morgue staff was down here for Texas Frightmare Weekend. I’d met several of the guys before, and they had featured Ghoultown a few times, so we were already friends. Around the time they were in Texas, I had been inspired to write a few articles on horror movies that featured Bigfoot-like monsters, so I just happened to mention that to the guys and showed them an article. They really loved it and so we talked about me contributing to the magazine on a regular basis.  After discovering a mutual fascination with cryptozoo creatures, we came up with the idea for my Monstro Bizarro blog which is featured on their website. I also write for the print magazine doing features, movie reviews, and stuff like that.

I also have a non-fiction book coming out next spring on Anomalist Books, called “The Beast of Boggy Creek: True Story of the Fouke Monster”. The book covers the complete history of the Fouke Monster, a creature said to inhabit the swamplands of southern Arkansas just three hours north of my home in Texas. It was made famous by the Charles B. Pierce classic horror film, The Legend of Boggy Creek, so I cover both the monster and the making of the movie which is really fascinating. It’s a long story as to how I got interested in this subject, but basically I met some people who had been part of the movie and also several credible people who claimed to have seen the creature at one time or another. Once I started looking into the whole subject, I was inspired to write a book on it. If people want to know more about my various writing projects and about the Boggy Creek mystery, just visit my website.

So back to the question about me pursuing a writing career. This is definitely the case. I’m starting work on a second book now, so I hope to continue expanding my professional writing career as I move forward. I will continue to push Ghoultown as much as I can, but I think at this point the future is in the hands of the fans. We’ve created the ultimate weird west monster, so I guess we’ll see if the townsfolk burn it or sustain it.

Stephen Volk interviewed by David McWilliam

Stephen Volk is the creator of the award-winning paranormal drama series Afterlife and the notorious BBCTV "Halloween hoax" Ghostwatch. His latest feature film (co-written by director Nick Murphy) is The Awakening, a supernatural mystery starring Rebecca Hall, while his other movie credits include Ken Russell's Gothic and The Guardian, co-written with its director William Friedkin. His short stories and novellas, a selection of which are collected in Dark Corners (Gray Friar Press, 2006), have earned him nominations for the British Fantasy Award, HWA Bram Stoker Award, and Shirley Jackson Award.  www.stephenvolk.net .

The Awakening is will hit cinemas across the UK from 11^th November. View the trailer here:

DM: How did you come to write horror professionally?

SV: I grew up loving horror books and films and for some peculiar reason I fell for the idea of writing scripts. In school for my own pleasure I wrote a film script of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot stories - it just struck me they were very cinematic - but I was also writing horror stories in prose at the time, much like the stories in the books I was reading like the Pan and Fontana books, or Poe. I went to art school, then film school, then got a job in advertising as a copywriter and wrote screenplays at home burning the midnight oil. Through advertising I met a director, Richard Loncraine, who put me on to his agent (this after I'd been writing scripts for about ten years and trying, sometimes succeeding in, getting meetings with the likes of John Boorman or Ridley Scott). I gave this agent, Linda Seifert, three of my spec screenplays (Gothic, Horror Movie and Telepathy) and she sold all three within six months. Which was astonishing, though of the three as yet only Gothic has been made (I now know all too well that simply selling a script is a far cry from it hitting the screen). After Gothic came out I'd begun to get commissions from the likes of TriStar in the States and they were sufficiently time-consuming that I couldn't meet the deadlines and maintain a day job, so I quit the day job. I was worried I might have to go back to advertising in lean times but Sandy Leiberson, Head of Production at Goldcrest at the time gave me an enormous vote of confidence when he said, quite casually, "Oh, you won't need to do that." And, touch wood, I haven't.

DM: What are the different challenges and pleasure of writing for television, film and the page?

SV: Well, everyone who loves film and TV knows the thrill of watching a great story and great acting, a really wonderful gripping narrative. I suppose I'd say: imagine creating that stuff yourself. What could be more exciting? If you love movies you live and breathe them. Having said that, the way they are made, for the writer, is shit. You have no respect and others with far less intellect or talent or even common sense torture your work into becoming a pallid and often idiotic version of what you wrote. It is almost unbearable most of the time... and for the rest of the time it is literally unbearable! Suicidally so. I can't exaggerate how gruelling and unpleasant the process is 99% of the time. The difference with writing fiction for the page is that you are 100% in charge, except for perhaps minor comments or alterations by editors - but these are more like nettle rash compared to the attack of a Bengal tiger in the film world. Really. It's really quite a deeply masochistic profession being a screenwriter. As they said in Sh*t My Dad Says: screenwriting is like riding a merry go round where the horse is fucking you!

DM: Have you ever worked with a director or producer who has contributed positively to your scripts? Has any collaboration illuminated an aspect that had hitherto not been apparent to you?

SV: Yes, sometimes that has happened, definitely, but sad to say it is outweighed by the number of times a script is railroaded and transformed for the worse. It’s not as if it isn’t clear to me when it’s happening: it’s simply not in my power to do anything about it. The system is against the writer, the person who created the thing, which is hugely illogical when you think about it. In films it is often about the director finding their “vision” – which we all know is crap but they have to find something if they’re going to make the bloody thing!  But occasionally producers or directors can be very perceptive indeed. I can think of one who said we should lose a central character, and she was right. And the director of my BAFTA-winning short The Deadness of Dad took what was really a nasty horror-type idea and encouraged me to find in it something strange and tender – something I’ve been trying to recognise and excavate in my work ever since, in fact. I could probably roll off lots of examples of good ideas I’ve got from other people. Case in point: I’ve written a screenplay with another writer, the fantasy novelist Tim Lebbon, and that was a wonderful collaboration because we know each other really well and we weren’t scared of looking stupid, we essentially trust each other – and that’s different from collaborating with non-writers: it’s not a level playing field because they have all the power. Every relationship is different, though. I worked for some time with Richard Loncraine on Gothic and he persuaded me that the creature shouldn’t be a patchwork of scare figures from the stories Byron et al had read, but their actual fears made form. Lesley Manning elevated Ghostwatch simply by pulling it off on a practical level and not imposing any directorial “stamp” at all. Similarly Charles Beeson directed the last episode of series one of Afterlife brilliantly, I thought, and the series wouldn’t have been nearly what it was without the talent of Murray Ferguson, a fantastic producer who’s wonderful on a story and character and pushed me in all the right ways. On the other hand with The Awakening, to be honest, the director Nick Murphy took away my script – which had already moved away somewhat from the Freudian/Victorian sexual ghost story I intended – and rewrote it in the way he wanted. I wasn’t part of that process but I’ve seen the film and I love it, and the “ghost” of everything I wrote is there on the screen. It’s changed, but the same. Weird.  

DM: Ghosts have been a recurring trope within your work. What is their appeal to you as a writer?

SV: I think ghosts as a device are interesting because they afford you the opportunity to externalize character. John Carpenter says all Horror is about an internal emotion, externalized - and a ghost is always absolutely that thing. To me, it always represents something missing or lacking in the character who sees it. A fatal flaw, in other words. Then it's about how the character deals with what he or she sees. I often say that, to me anyway, ghost stories are more about the seer of the ghost than the ghost itself. The audience in Ghostwatch wants to see the ghost because it is a wish-based experience of vicarious pleasure which backfires on them. In Afterlife, the ghosts in the individual stories represent different things but Robert's son Josh is symbolic of his grief and being unable to move on - that's what his relationship with Alison is all about. One person can see it and the other cannot: I find that hugely poignant in human terms and I like ghost stories especially, I suppose, because they illuminate human emotions in a very basic, primal way. In The Awakening the psychical researcher played by Rebecca Hall grapples with denial for a long time before "awakening" to the truth, and I think it's true that drama is not about conflict, but only conflict in as far as it causes something to be revealed about the characters. That's why two people shouting in EastEnders isn't dramatic, though it is conflict: You see, nothing is revealed. A lot happens, but it's empty.

DM: What are your favourite ghost stories, in any medium, of the 21^st century thus far?

SV: I wasn’t expecting to, but I rather liked the new BBC version of Whistle and I’ll Come to You, written by Neil Cross. I’m not a bit fan of his cop show, Luther, but I thought this drama with John Hurt was genuinely eerie and had a sense of the uncanny I hadn’t seen on television for a long while. I actually read David Ambrose’s Superstition recently and it’s superb, multi-layered and challenging, even edging into ideas about reality. Amazing stuff. We were going to do it for TV and I was thrilled, then it turned out the movie rights were snaffled up years ago. I liked The Orphanage, despite terrible plot holes, and I enjoyed Graham Joyce’s novel Silent Land, because everything he writes is top notch, full of great ideas but completely absent of showy language.

DM: With Ghostwatch and some of your stories in Dark Corners, you have worked within the subgenre of haunted house stories. As a writer, do you perceive this to offer a different angle on the ghost story? Do haunted houses still focus on illuminating aspects of the characters or does the emphasis shift more towards the ghost’s own history?

SV: I do think it is still about the characters. Maybe the focus being the house you have a wider net, by which I mean the house has existed longer, there are more possibilities, but there’s also the restriction of it being a haunted place – the action is constrained, which is often a good thing. The additional thing, I think in longform storytelling anyway, is that the house almost becomes a character. You saw it in Mark Gatiss’s Crooked House, which was a spoof of The House That Dripped Blood, and you see it in Marchlands, which wasn’t really a ghost story because there was no threat and nothing at stake – the little girl ghost was merely window dressing for a mystery story. I hinted at it in Ghostwatch when the paranormalist talks about “the onion skin” – that Nigel Kneale idea in The Stone Tape, that if you go further and further back who knows what primal evil might be there?

DM: Have you seen the final cut of The Awakening? If so, are you happy with the results?

SV: I’m really happy. I think it’s superb film-making. It’s brilliantly shot and acted and I realised more than ever that my story was about trauma and pain. I’ve honestly never seen a film that communicated pain so effectively. I think in the end it is quite haunting for that reason. Rebecca Hall is superb. They all are, and I hope they get the plaudits they deserve – but of course it’s often the way that a genre film gets treated rather snootily by the critics. But in this case it isn’t out-and-out Horror as such. It’s spooky and scary, but it’s got a level of psychological depth (I hope!) that makes it a bit more unusual. I think it’s a class bit of work, and I don’t say that immodestly, I say it trying to be objective because I wasn’t really involved in the making of it.

DM: What projects are you working on at the moment and have lined up for the near future?

SV: I have a few new spec screenplays out there raising eyebrows I hope, and I am talking to the BBC about a couple of TV series ideas, genre and non-genre. It’s always a long haul to present precisely what they’re after. I also have a few TV projects sniffing around in the USA and Canada (producers have to be very nimble on their feet these days about where they find the finance – everyone has to think outside the box more and more). On the prose side, I have a new novella under consideration which is very special to me, and have some exciting new short stories coming up in The Unspoken (Generation Next), House of Fear (Solaris), Exotic Gothic 4 (PS) and Gutshot (PS). Oh, and a play. Strangely, a play.

DM: Our next event, Twisted Tales of the Weird West (on Friday 25^th November), will feature readings from other contributors to Gutshot. Your story in the anthology, ‘White Butterflies’, relocates the Western to the arid landscape of Kazakhstan. Do you agree with Conrad Williams’s claim that, in order for the Western to survive, it needs to be revitalized by shifting away from straightforward tales of the Old West, and that its future lies in generic hybridity?
SV: Is “generic hybridity” just a posh way of saying “mash-up”? I don’t know. I don’t know if Cowboys and Aliens did anything new for the Western except add space ships, but then, I have only seen the trailer: it looks pretty much like Bonanza with added CGI to me. And there have always been comedy-Westerns, so is that “generic hybridity”? The future of a genre is usually “our generation will make it more real”: that is usually the promise in any supposed reinvention of the crime story or cop show or horror, or comedy even, the implicit accusation that previously it has been formulaic. “Till now!” In fact the challenge of genre is usually keeping the things people love and you love yourself as a fan and giving them a new spin. And you do that on instinct. I find I’m always writing ghost stories and always wanting the “new spin” to be psychological depth. Whether I succeed or not, I can’t say, but that’s what I attempt, at least. I’d like to think that rather than putting Jack the Ripper at the OK Corral, the future of the Western is in thinking about what makes something a Western on a deeper, mythic level – a level of landscape and survival and moral law, or lack of it. The TV series Deadwood did that brilliantly, by being both true to history and iconoclastic. Basically in “White Butterflies” I wanted to explore what the Western is if you take away the West. Is it a state of mind or a set or circumstances? I’d wanted to write about the world of these bizarre rocket salvage people for a long time but it was Conrad’s call to arms that focused my mind, and I’m so grateful because without it the story may never have been written and it’s one of my favourites. The question is not how much but how little do you have to add to a story to make it a Western. Maybe only a horse. Maybe only a gun. Once I added a horse and a gun I was halfway there.  

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.

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.