 
### Ramsey Campbell (1998)

Ramsey Campbell has been publishing horror fiction for over thirty years. He is the most respected living horror writer, with more awards for his work than any other writer in the field. His dark, brooding, psychological tales depend far more on the use of atmosphere and suggestion - showing only what needs to be shown - than they do on the use of pages of blood and gore. Regarded as a serious artist, he has been called the Horror Writer's Horror Writer. His latest novels (The House on Nazareth Hill appeared in paperback in 1997) have received some of his best ever reviews.

The following interview took place at his home in Wallasey in England, where he lives with his wife and two children.

David Mathew: I'd like to start by throwing back at you a quote that you made twenty years ago. "The horror story is one of the few popular forms that has not been cheapened; the only one which has retained the force of a cumulative tradition." How far do you still go along with that statement?

Ramsey Campbell: I would almost contradict myself and say that for a while the field has been in danger of sinking under its own dross, basically. For instance, I used to co-edit Best New Horror with Steve Jones and the reason I gave it up was, fundamentally, I got dispirited with the amount of garbage that had been published and which I had to read in order to jettison it in favour of the stuff that we did choose. The positive implication is that there is still enough good stuff every year to make a good fat anthology. So it hasn't gone under. But I think there has been a new generation of writers who are trying to be more disgusting than one another, and it just seems pointless. The field has survived things like this before and I'm sure it will do so again. Probably what will happen is that there'll be a reaction against that... I'm not by any means saying that I'm opposed to graphic detail in horror fiction, or I wouldn't have done the introduction to Clive Barker's Books of Blood. The point is, to show as much as you need to show for the purposes of the story. On the other hand, I feel there is a whole slew of these people who feel the point is to be as disgusting as possible for as many paragraphs as possible. Then again, the Splatterpunk anthology The Book of the Dead has me in it, and I think it would be fair to say that M.R. James was trying to be more frightening than Sheridan Le Fanu.

DM: Do you feel that you ever try to go further, in that sense, with your own work?

RC: Not quite. In a particular story I might try to go further and see where it leads. The One Safe Place turned out to be that kind of novel, insofar as after a while I found myself thinking, How much worse can this family be? What worse can they do that I would believe in?

DM: What I found interesting about that novel was the clash of moralities, where both groups, at least to a certain extent, believe themselves to be in the right. The Fancy family can't believe they're actually doing anything wrong; when somebody in the family dies or goes to prison it's somebody else's fault.

RC: Even if I had set out to write Good versus Evil, it wouldn't have worked for me, and I would've ended up writing what you saw. In fact, it did start life slightly differently, as books often do, when I saw a straightforward report in our local newspaper. Somebody had been broken into twice in the course of a week, and there was this identikit portrait of a particularly evil-looking bugger! It occurred to me that all identikit pictures look extraordinarily malevolent, and one reason presumably is that that's how it looked to the victim. If you were forever passing people who looked like that on the street, then you wouldn't go out on the street, I suspect. And it occurred to me: what would happen if the subject of one of these portraits objected to being depicted in this fashion and came back to object. Instant, that was the genesis of the novel.

We were going to have the American family moving to Britain under the impression that it was the Britain of James Ivory, or the Beatles movies. Don, the hero, the father, was going to encounter the guy who takes against him and it would become apparent to the reader as it became apparent to the American Travis family how huge a clan they were up against. But the more I wrote that there was going to be a 12 year-old boy of the Fancy family just as there was a 12 year-old boy of the Travis family, the more it seemed to me that he was the focus of the novel. Where I wanted to go was his viewpoint, to show through his eyes the forces that were in the process of creating him. And so we had to sacrifice the surprise for a bit more insight. I'm always a great believer in showing people's viewpoints from their viewpoints and leaving it to the reader to sort out any irony that's implicit. So in The Face That Must Die [Campbell's second published book] I hoped that the reader would be sufficiently taken aback without my having to nudge and say, 'Look, this is supposed to be disturbing! It doesn't look that way to the character but that doesn't mean it can't look that way to us.'

DM: In terms of ironies implicit, it's interesting that in The One Safe Place, both boys - one from a loving family and one the child of domestic violence - end up being boys who perpetrate violence.

RC: I think that's the strongest irony. You can read the ending as being almost an upbeat positive eye-for-an-eye, Sally Fields-grabs-the-gun type of ending. But that's not the way I see it at all. In a way, the deepest irony is precisely that Marshall Travis picks up the gun.

People have asked whether I saw The One Safe Place as being a very conscious departure, and the answer is no. Certainly while I was writing it, it felt like a natural development from what I'd been doing previously. Ten years ago, however, I would have probably felt the need to make it more macabre.

DM: If you had written it that way, do you think you would have looked back on it in the way that you now look back on, for example, the eerie voices in The Nameless? In the new introduction you say that they were one ghostly voice too many.

RC: I think that's exactly right. It's overstating it.

DM: Is there any work that you look back on and wish that you hadn't done it quite as you did?

RC: All of it! Or nearly all, in different ways. The Parasite is the classic example, as far as I'm concerned, where it seems to me that the book simply gets more and more shrill - because there's nowhere else for it to go. The problem I'd set myself, which I don't think you can sustain for novel length, is that it's from the viewpoint of the character to whom it's all happening, and she's aware of what is happening to her. All I think you can do is convey her sense of mounting terror and panic, but there's a limit to how much you can do that.

The Nameless is another case in point, although I like individual scenes in that book. I just wish it could have been a bit more coherent and a bit better worked out. There's certainly a deus ex machina at the end and no mistake! The only thing I like about the very end is that it's quite bleak - I think we'd had too much false optimism by then.

DM: The original plotline for The Doll Who Ate His Mother [Campbell's first published novel] had black magicians deforming babies and then bringing them back to life, and you abandoned it...

RC: It was tasteless, especially given that it was around the time of Thalidomide, which was a coincidence. I don't know which came first.

DM: Have any other plotlines been abandoned or swerved away from their original course by real events.

RC: Not really, although I've always felt a bit unsure about referring to the Moors Murders in The Nameless. But in The Doll the plot eventually appears anyway; originally it would have been a short story, but in the novel I wanted a reason for the young chap Chris Kelly to be what he was. The word that comes to mind in terms of that old prototype for The Doll is 'trivialisation': that would have been my problem with it.

When I look back on the work I was doing before I wrote novels, even some of the stuff that gets itself reprinted, I wish I could take it apart and take another shot, but you can't spend your life doing that. And I'm not convinced you should, even though when I look at it, all I see is flaw upon flaw. Two examples of work of mine that is popular: 'The Companion' [which Stephen King described as 'maybe the best horror tale to be written in English in the last thirty years'] eventually gets there - I quite like it when it gets to the abandoned amusements park, but I think that some of the early writing is very clumsy. I should have re-written it. 'The End of a Summer's Day' was written in a single afternoon - and it shows.

DM: How often do you look back over your own work?

RC: Never for the hell of it. For a reprint collection such as Alone With the Horrors I'll proof-read or hideous things will happen. And also people do ask me to read the stuff aloud to audiences, and there's usually a request for some old thing, so I'll grit my teeth...

I'm fond of The Count of Eleven [1991] as it struck me as being a genuine change of direction, and not one that I reached for - one that found itself. Immediately before that we have Needing Ghosts [a novella, 1990] which I originally resisted because I didn't know what I could write at novella length. I didn't want to write a short story that has been pumped up, but I didn't want to write a novel that had been cut down too much either. Eventually, I remembered a piece of advice from Brian Aldiss, which was that the novella usually takes place in a compressed time scale. I thought about twenty-four hours in the life (if life it is) of the protagonist. And that was an extraordinary case of something which virtually wrote itself. I would go up to my room every morning and find out what happened next. It was always stranger than I thought it would be!

Midnight Sun I'm fond of as an honourable failure. It's so far short of what I wanted it to be that in some ways I can't even begin to consider that. It lacks a cosmic scope; a sense of awe that I was trying to achieve for once in my career - the sort of thing you find in H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space. But it's as good as I've been able to do in that area. Give me another twenty years and I'll have another shot! Midnight Sun was going back to Lovecraft's roots rather than my own: that cosmic vision was something that I found in Lovecraft. There was an American review which compared it favourably with Algernon Blackwood and I suppose you can't expect better than that.

DM: You're the horror writer with the greatest number of critical plaudits, right down to the Northern Echo calling you 'the nearest thing to God'. To what extent are you trying to please other people? Do you ever think of a plot and think, that's what someone will like to read?

RC: I've done a lot of commissioned pieces over the years, which is a useful discipline. You've got to write along this theme, and then I've got somebody else in mind - at least before I start the writing , and then the reader becomes much more hypothetical. More and more often, if people ask me to write for a specific market, I'm thinking they probably won't like it because it isn't quite what they're after. I'm always surprised when I get the acceptance.

DM: What's your average working day like?

RC: About seven in the morning I go up to my workroom at the top of the house. And I'm really working as I get up and go downstairs to make a cup of tea. I'm working on the opening paragraph. One trick I have learned (I haven't learned many in 35 years) is to have drafted the opening few lines in your head before you sit down to write them. The other one is to work out at the end of your session the next line for the next session, unless you're at the end of a chapter.

I write from seven to half nine or ten o'clock - solid. Then till noon, depending on whether I have a film to see for the purposes of a review. [He broadcasts a weekly film review for BBC Radio Merseyside.] You've got to write, even if you think it's no good. You can always rewrite, but also, the stuff that I've felt seemed anything but fluent is usually more fluent when I get round to re-reading it. The extra effort does pay off.

While I'm writing a first draft it's every day, even Christmas Day and my birthday. If I don't do a couple of hours on Christmas morning before everyone else is around I get ratty for the rest of the day. I can do a bit of fiction in the morning and non-fiction in the afternoon because they are wholly different. Fiction I always write longhand for the first draft, on the right-hand side of a spiral notebook, with the left-hand side for corrections. The second draft has been on the word processor since The Influence (1988). With a manual typewriter I would get halfway down a page for the third time and still not like the opening sentence, but I wouldn't bother to rip out the page and start yet again.

DM: For a long time you were known as Liverpool writer as opposed to a writer who lives in Liverpool. Your later work is not set in Liverpool half as much as your early work. Have you got to the end of chronicling what Liverpool is to you?

RC: There's still quite a bit to do yet! The Count of Eleven actually used the Merseyside phone directory as a structuring device. The irony is, that no longer exists. As soon as I write about something it disappears; a significant part of The One Safe Place is set in the Manchester Arndale Centre. It's unnerving.

I'm a great believer in always going to view a place before I write about it, because there's always something there you wouldn't imagine. I would have loved to have seen Lagos and Nigeria before writing The Claw, for example. The compliment I was paid by someone who had lived there was to ask how long I'd been there before I'd written it. But it's a dicey process. Liverpool is a cultural melting pot, with an abundance of verbal humour - the old Scouse wit. That spills over into my own writing, especially with Needing Ghosts and The Count of Eleven where it wanted to get out and make a big splashy exhibition of itself! I would have loved to have been a stand-up comedian, and I read The Count of Eleven to audiences when I can. The disaster which befalls the video library is always good for a few laughs. If I came up with a suitable idea I would even write a comedy, but the categorisation problem might come into play.

### Losing Our Amnesia: John Clute (2001)

While preparing for an interview with the incomparable John Clute -- a man renowned for the intellectual vigour, some would say thuggery, of the reviews he has published -- I swatted away many ideas of how to begin the piece when it was written. Given what Clute has donated, both professionally and to me, personally, (though he didn't know it at the time) nothing less than a striking image would suffice. For as sure as God made little apples, Clute has given us decade after decade of striking images in his non-fiction; and to his credit, he more or less singlehandedly raised the ante of genre reviewing and of essay-writing on genre-specific notions. Among his many publications are Strokes, Look at the Evidence, The Book of End Times... and of course he is the co-editor of the groundbreaking tomes, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. But it was as a reviewer for Interzone that I first, aged sixteen, came into contact with his work, and if in context it is not too trite to say it, I might add that it was there, at that impressionable age, that the seeds for my admiration were sown. And I have acknowledged my debt to his work on many an occasion; for even then I knew that what Clute was saying was in a different language than what the other writers were saying -- about books. His reviews are reprinted, and reprinted again sometimes, because they stand the test of time; they are works of art in themselves, and this is a topic that we would touch on during the interview.

However, my purpose in visiting London on this day was to interview Clute in connection with his first science fiction novel namely Appleseed. And I gave thought, long and hard, on how to introduce this man -- when it became suddenly obvious that the journey to his home would Appleseed by John Clutebe all the commensuratus that I needed. You expect him, if you've read him, maybe, to live in a garret or on a crag somewhere, devouring books, untouched by the pollution of everyday thought; but of course this is bullshit. Nevertheless, my very first visit to his English home (he also lives in America, and is Canadian by birth), was a bit of an eye-opener. John Clute lives in the teeming melting-pot of London's Camden Town, best known perhaps, for its ethnic diversity, its nice little unconventional bookshops, but above all for its apocalyptic noise. (On the day of my visit, someone had committed suicide on the tracks -- or at least that was the story at the time -- but I had long foreseen problems and had aimed to get to Camden an hour early. So I made it on time, via Swiss Cottage.) And Clute, as it were, is on the front line: in the din. So noise, we might say, is but one obstacle to get to John's place. On arrival at the Tube station, you are but a short walk to his flat, above a clothes shop; and a steep walk up a stairway crowded with a bike and a cat... to the Clute Brain HQ. All of which, and I'm certain that I need not labour the point, is metaphorically how some view his writing. The journey might be difficult, but the destination is a reward.

You make it in. You are offered good coffee and you marvel at the book collection, only a fraction of which is here in the flat. The rest is in storage nearby, or in America; but you feel the leaning stance of the brain with which you are about to become engaged, not for the first time, but for the first time in a professional capacity. But it's fine, of course. Because you know that John Clute is an interesting interlocutor, and a good deal funnier than you might expect. "It's a first novel of sorts," he tells me when I ask why Appleseed has been so long in the coming, "- it's a first science fiction novel. I of course wrote a novel outside the genre, called The Disinheriting Party (1977). But what can I say? I never really had that overwhelming impulse to publish a science fiction novel, although I've published some stories through the years. The other thing was, I didn't have an outline of a novel and I wasn't hugely keen on the idea of doing a book on spec. But then came the idea of the incipit. Are you aware of that term? It's a piece of music terminology, and it refers, principally, to composers like Handel, who, very typically, when they were about to do something very ambitious, would go to their back drawers, rummage around, and they would pick up a piece of music that they wrote - or someone else wrote - and they'll take that incipit, those few bars perhaps; and out of those unpromising beginnings would come a new piece of work." So, a catalyst of sorts; a prodding finger, if we want to be less ornate. "It's in Webster's Second (haven't checked elsewhere), though not as a musical term. There it is a sign used by medieval scribes to indicate: here it begins. But I do know I've seen it used to describe Handel's use of a pre-existing musical tag, which is where he begins..." And Clute had an incipit of his own. "Yes. I had 4 or 5000 words of story, and that struck me as enough to start thinking seriously about a novel. My agent sold it, which meant then I was not exactly in the rag and bone shop" (to which Clute will refer from time to time), "I had this line of story which I knew very well would I not honour, in terms of tone and so on. But I knew it was probably workable."

Appleseed is a remarkable novel. Not only is its timeframe unconventional -- "The book, really, takes place in a few hours. Once in a while things speed up to save time, but essentially the plot is only a few hours long. We have fifty pages of intense narrative to describe fifteen seconds in the real world. Do I mean 'real world'? Well, you know what I mean" -- but it also busts a gut with its attention to fiery syntax and some incredible flights of fancy. The complexity of language, I venture, might be seen by some as an obstacle. And Clute agrees. "I think it will be an obstacle," he says. "Indeed, I can't see how it can not be an obstacle. It will probably be an obstacle in the way that experimentation for the likes of Chip Delany and Gene Wolfe has been an obstacle -- neither of whom, as I'm sure I don't need to tell you, sell in the hundreds of thousands. Aficionados probably follow Chip, for example, because he's black and gay and an activist and a vast tragic figure who has triumphed in his life... and all that kind of stuff... as much as they do for his language. And Gene Wolfe a lot of people cannot get into. But you write the way that you write, and I am interested in copious registers of language; and the real thing that I try to do throughout is to make it seem absolutely truthful, absolutely real, no matter what I do, and no matter how inherently silly a space opera really is. A lot of it is very carefully done so that there is the thread of Story, like Ariadne's thread through the Labyrinth, and stuff is impacted around it -- and levels of language, levels of association, are mercilessly shoved in. Or allowed in. But there's still that thread. So the reader is going to have trouble if he thinks, I've got to understand every single allusion - for a person who is allusion-crazy - on first read. You can't do it. If six months pass between my writing a paragraph and then reading it again, I don't expect to get it, as it were, on a first read, or even a first re-read. Because it's a construction. It's an artefact, and in that artefact there are all sorts of lurches sideways and vertically."

I compare this book with Ulysses, or at least with James Joyce. "The punning parts are Joycean," Clute confirms, "but the connection for me is much more directly to the Elizabethan language. There's an absolute behemoth between you and anything prior to Joyce. Even if you pretend not to read him, or you work very hard not to be influenced by him or sound like him, he's there, and that act of language is there. But I think of myself, kind of, as a lesser sixteenth century writer. I'm not Shakespeare, of course, but a thing which characterizes not all minor Elizabethan writers or even major Elizabethan writers but certainly Shakespeare - and what characterizes at my own level what I do - is the verticality of language. That nothing can or should be taken at face value. That there is something other than the ordinary that is governing the condition of the story, governing the condition the review. The connections between one sentence and another may be a couple of layers down in terms of the metaphors implied, or stated. And that is not the way English tends to be written, but it is the way I tend instinctively to write. When it goes off it can get absurdly pretentious - it's all various lines of harmony and no music - but when it doesn't, it can be the way that somebody who is at the dawn of a language might feel. Somebody else is perhaps, down the line, going to embrace it. Who knows? If it feels as though it's been worked on again and again and again, then it's wrong. It shouldn't feel laboured. Certainly the parts that I spent the most time on are the parts that read the fastest. No matter how difficult any particular paragraph was, it was always within a context of Story. With a lot of books you don't have that. The whole lachrymose twentieth century modernist and post-modernist series of novels often had a real terror of telling a story. And I'm sure there are failures of rhythm here and there in it, but the main rhythm I followed, I think, was to ensure that the reader was convinced that nothing was happening simply for its own sake. It was all part of something else. I'm pretty happy."

After years of handing out reviews, is Clute ready for what might be a critical feeding frenzy? "Yeah, I'm ready." Because for John Clute, it is not a case of getting a good review or getting a bad review, and anyway: "Pure novelists may well disagree with me here, but I think that a novelist is far more aggressive than a critic. Part of their undue aversion to criticism is evidence of their wish to be at the top of the feeding tree. They want to be completely original via ingestion. And reviews should not be about scoring points against an author. You do get some sustained idea of how good reviews are written, and so one looks, not for positive reviews or negative reviews, but instead for a review that has been written in a particular way to do a particular job - to find something of interest in the book. Of course, in a commercial sense, I'm much more interested in having good reviews than bad reviews. That goes without saying, surely, but I'll say it anyway. I was once lambasted for eleven pages in a quarterly journal because of Strokes" -- the grounds of the attack being -- "intellectual incoherence and pretentiousness. On the other hand I've had very good long reviews, and the reviewer has found a bridge and that bridge might be complimentary, but that does not mean the bridge is true. Criticism is a way of making an aesthetic shape out of a piece. It's not really about saying, this book is good and here is my reason. There are plenty of reviewers who should be working a lot harder than that. Good reviewers, casting the various illuminati of Interzone aside, might be Gary Wolfe in Locus, Brian Stableford when he pays attention, Gwyneth Jones when she doesn't. Tom Disch will occasionally write a very good review once in a while."

So how long did it take to write?

"How long it took me to work on is a complicated question. The initial 5000 words, which I don't think I have now, would show you something very different, and something very straightforward. I don't exactly remember when I got the contract, to be honest. But I do know that I finished up on a book called The Book of End Times, which is not a good book, and then I set to work on seriously finishing Appleseed. I was delayed by about a year, but most of the writing took about nine months. I'm actually pretty fast, once I get my head around it, once I get started, once I get going. And of course the computer's marvellous. If I came up, while writing, with a structure of language that seemed to suit, repeating those structures is very fast on a computer. Even the reviews are written pretty quickly... But I absolutely don't remember when the idea of Johnny Appleseed came from. In the very early work towards the book I don't remember what I called him, or even if I had a name. However, there was clearly a series of puns. As soon as I thought of Appleseed I thought of Johnny Appleseed, I thought Seed, I thought this germinating thing, I thought the Tree of Life: and all of these things came together. And ultimately of course there's going to be more than one volume. There is some kind of quest for a godless Eden.

"I had a character that had this song and story, and I turned him into a Moses character. With emotions vaster than he can express. The reason the language is complicated is because I am always saying, it is always bigger than you think. In other words, there are more ways to describe it; there are more levels of description. And there's a kind of play in the novel -- every time there is a revelation, or every time the revelation is settled, everybody has known it forever, as it were. So on a science fiction level what I say, and what I undoubtedly will be saying in later volumes, is that we have characters who are gradually losing their amnesia. And that could be a way of describing the book." The very title of this piece will do just that, I tell him; and Clute goes on to remark upon how the novel has been received so far. He says: "It's beginning to get some interesting quotes. Neil rang -- Neil Gaiman rang -- yesterday and he'd read the book, and I'll quote him, because what the hell, this is an interview about me, although this is not the kind of thing I would normally talk about -- Neil said that it felt like the first book to express a twenty-first century paradigm. And he said it was the first significant shift in paradigms since William Gibson's Neuromancer. Now if he writes that down I'll be very happy. Very happy indeed. They can use that. How much I believe it I don't know."

Believe it, I venture. Clute smiles and nods. "Why not believe it? Why not puff yourself up for a moment? And thank you -- but I don't frankly think I'm going to make that kind of difference in the world, the same sort of difference that Gibson made. Gibson opened up a lot of doors, if you like, and Neuromancer is a really fine book, but it had its magic time, and of course that helped. That's very important. Paradigms open up when people are opening paradigms up. They don't open up in a vacuum. What's the sound of one paradigm clapping?"

I ask Clute to compare Appleseed with The Disinheriting Party, and to delineate his fictional future. "Well, The Disinheriting Party was terribly convoluted, it did not have a simple story -- but it had a story so the connection is there. But I wouldn't exactly call The Disinheriting Party a page-turner... I don't think one can identify much connection between, say, the protagonists. In the one, the protagonist is impotent, and in this one -- he isn't! The impotence was entirely artefactual: I didn't know then or now what it felt like to be impotent, a medical condition, but it certainly fit that book." The clear idea that one takes from Appleseed is that human beings are, in Clute's words, "engines of sex." Clute is now busying himself with two further novels, "and they're connected to this one. The second one in particular will refer to the whiffs of Eden, a godless Eden. It will probably turn out to be an analysis on what it means not to be with someone else. And as far as the story is concerned, I have to figure out how to get rid of God. The first volume will be set very much closer to the present, and on this planet. What fits in rather nicely is a story I wrote called 'Eden Sounding' -- but it will be used in a transformative way. Basically, the next book, Earth Bound, is a quest. Once and if they are all finished, completed, published and in the market place, then I will have no objection to their being called a trilogy, but at the moment it seems more sensible to think of Appleseed as essentially a standalone. There's not going to be any sequelitis here! You might want to think of the books in terms of thesis, antithesis, synthesis; there's this, and then the second volume will also end in a kind of slingshot."

### PS Publishing: Peter Crowther (2005)

As out of place and irregular of form as it might be, I would like to start with a PS of my own: a PS in the sense of a post-scriptum. And it is this.

The Longest Single Note by Peter CrowtherThere are certain genre truths. One is that everyone in genre fiction can do an impersonation of Ramsey Campbell's spoken voice; and another is that not only is Peter Crowther a brilliant short story writer (The Longest Single Note is a masterpiece), he is also a thoroughly nice person, and has a way with words that qualifies him as an interviewee extraordinaire. It is always nice when an interviewee answers in perfect paragraphs.

Crowther became involved in genre writing via science fiction. 'My first love was science fiction,' he tells me: 'comicbooks, mostly, though my mum and dad bought me copies of Patrick Moore's Mars books, Angus MacVicar's Lost Planet series and E.C. Eliot's adventures of Kemlo. I suppose I was around six or seven years old (in other words, a precocious little so-and-so). At the same time, I was reading the Classics Illustrated versions of various stuff -- pretty much anything I could get my hands on, in fact: Homer's The Odyssey (great Cyclops on the cover), Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Oxbow Incident, et cetera -- and then I went on to the text versions of certain titles, such as The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde and so on. I was in love with space and planets, as well as with ghosts and monsters.

'My early experiences of the classic writers of such fare were Herbert Van Thal's Told In The Dark Pan Books anthology and Fred Pohl's Star Science Fiction Stories for Ballantine. After that came Edmund Crispin's Best SF Stories books for Faber, John Keir Cross's Best Black Magic Stories and Best Horror Stories (both Faber) and Anne Ridler's Best Ghost Stories (Faber again) -- all of which were usually presented to me as Christmas presents ... along with Superman and Batman annuals, Beano and Dandy books and all the Hannah Barbera character annuals (I adored Yogi Bear and Boo Boo. I still have all those books ... shelves and shelves of them). Then a couple of things happened.Constellations edited by Peter Crowther

'First off, in book form, I discovered Van Thal's Pan Books of Horror Stories, Cynthia Asquith's wonderful Ghost Books (Pan Books again) and Christine Campbell Thomson's Not At Night series, newly available at the time from Arrow Books; and secondly, in comicbooks, all the US titles started coming over to the UK ... so we had things like Strange Adventures and Mystery In Space in colour! And then my English Language tutor at Leeds Grammar School introduced me to Ray Bradbury via The Illustrated Man.'

It is well known that Crowther adores the work of Bradbury. He explains some of the fascination with the man's work that has endured to this day. 'I'd read Bradbury already in Star -- "A Scent of Sarsapilla" \-- but this was a whole other trip: a feast of words and style, of images and wonder. That was it. I'd been heavy on SF and its many related sub-genres my entire life (all 11 or 12 years of it) but this was something else ... It's difficult for me to explain fully the sheer magnitude of the inspiration that Bradbury's work gave to me. I was eleven or twelve when I read The Illustrated Man and it was an immediate thing -- whooomph! just like that: one minute it's not there, and you're going along dah de dah de dah, and then the next minute, ka-pow! you're laid low, shaking, forever changed, eyes wide open, out of breath, drool dribbling out of the corner of your mouth. It sounds cheesy but, hey -- what do I care. That's the way it was. And you know, that's the way it still is. I still get that feeling when I read Bradbury's stuff. Okay, sure, he's not the man he used to be; who among us is? But he still manages -- every now and again, maybe after ten or twenty pages instead of every few paragraphs -- to hit you with a phrase or a sentence or an image that's like a girder being swung into the solar plexus. And the guy is eighty-five years old!

'What is it about his work that so enchants me? Well, I've been asked that quite a few times, and I've attempted to answer it a hell of a lot more. Let's try it this way: writing is a magic act that's just one step -- albeit one Mighty Big Step -- on from spelling. I mean, with spelling, you shuffle up the twenty-six letters of the alphabet -- and sure, give yourself a few extra vowels ... a couple more es and os, they're always useful -- and then pick out a dozen or so. Then shuffle the dozen (let's say fourteen) letters around some more and ... whoah! what have we here! we have 'photosynthesis'! Neat. That's a great word. But we can all do it. Now spread out the few million or so words in the English language and try shuffling them around to make up this paragraph towards the end of "Dark They Were, And Golden-Eyed":

Summer burned the canals dry. Summer moved like a flame upon the meadows. In the empty Earth settlements, the painted houses flaked and peeled. Rubber tires upon which children had swung in back yards hung suspended like stopped clock pendulums in the blazing air. At the metal shop, the rocket frame began to rust.

'I mean ... come on! There isn't a word there that's strange or new to any of us: they're all there, in that metaphorical dictionary we just emptied over the desk-top, ready to be shuffled around and plunged into. But how long would most of us -- and I'm thinking here of pretty much all of us -- have to shuffle and plunge to come up with an image as whole and as evocative as that? I'm guessing a fair old while.

'And that's the magic of Bradbury. That's why, when I was wondering who we should get to Introduce the new PS editions of R Is For Rocket and S Is For Space, it took only a few phone-calls to line up Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Harryhausen, Tim Powers and Mike Marshall Smith ... all of them champing at the bit, each of them eager to say: This is what Bradbury does better than anyone else can do. This is what Bradbury means to me.

'Simple as that. That's what he meant when I started out on this 'growing-up' lark, and here I am, fifty-odd years on, still doing it ... and Bradbury still means exactly the same thing. From there on, I read voraciously: Bradbury, Clarke, Pohl, Silverberg, Wyndham and absolutely anything published by Ballantine or Ace (or Berkley, Pyramid, Belmont and umpteen other US publishing houses operating in the late 1950s and early '60s). Then, when I was 12 years old, I discovered F&SF, Astounding, Amazing, Fantastic, Galaxy, If, Worlds of Tomorrow, Venture and many other similar digest sized magazines... all of them piled high, three or four years' worth of them, all consecutive numbers, at one of the big department stores in Leeds. That same magical year, in Leeds market, I found piles of pulps stocked in similar depth -- Weird Tales, Fantastic, Amazing etc. This was a good year to be alive... and an even better year to be twelve years old. Unfortunately, of course, it was a decidedly bad year to be the parents of someone who had a fetish for reading: it must have nearly bankrupted them -- after all, one has to remember that I was also buying and devouring all of DC's comicbook titles plus all the ones put out by Archie, ACG, Dell/Gold Key, Harvey and the then fledgling Marvel Comics... plus novels by Ed McBain and John D. MacDonald (crime/mystery being my other weakness).

'All of which is kind of a long-winded way of saying I was a sponge... I read and I absorbed and pretty soon I decided I wanted to write this stuff myself. My early efforts were absolutely dreadful -- looking back at them now -- but I suppose my tutor saw some promise... though he would always beg me to stop writing stories for essay assignments. But I never learned. Thus my GCSE (GCE in those long-ago days) essay for the title 'Communication' involved a six-year-old battering his grandfather to death with a telephone receiver while the operator was asking what number he required. When I told my tutor, he just rested his head on his arms. But I passed -- Grade 2... which wasn't bad. I often wonder what the examiner must have thought when he or she encountered my story -- I like to think it would have been like a breath of fresh air.

'After that, I wrote more and more, pushing and pushing all the time. However, by the time I reached my twenties -- 1969 -- I was becoming more and more immersed in music. I'd already run the gauntlet of surf music (early teens); Tamla, Atlantic and Sue (mid- to late-teens, which involved DJ-ing at a club in Leeds and spending pretty much every other weekend at The Twisted Wheel Club in Manchester) but the new sounds on the streets involved moving my allegiances from Smokey Robinson et al to Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead (where they've remained ever since)... and didn't do much more writing until my late twenties. Then, just before Nicky and I got married (in October 1976), I was managing to place the odd story here and there in those gloriously amateurish fanzines that abounded at the time.

'I tend to write what I read -- thus I've written horror, fantasy, science fiction, crime/mystery and even the occasional pure mainstream tale. Sure, my primary interest is genre but you could just as easily find me reading a John Updike or an Anne Tyler novel as you could a King or a Campbell, a Powers or a Niven, an Elmore Leonard or a Robert B. Parker. I'd hate to spend the rest of my life restricting my reading to SF or to any one type of fiction. Same goes in spades when it comes down to writing.'

Another early influence on Peter Crowther was Julius Schwartz. 'Julie was the main man at DC Comics,' he explains, 'and, for those who don't know (and this is a good time for folks who are not interested in comicbooks to go wash the car or read a newspaper), he was singlehandedly responsible for ushering in what we all now refer to as the Silver Age of comics. (That was with the first appearance of the new Flash character in 1956, but you don't need this shtick.) The thing with Julie was he picked a team of writers and artists that treated kids as more than just ice-cream addicts with scuffed knees. This came home to me big time with a story called 'The Hand From Beyond' in the November 1959 issue (#110) of Strange Adventures. I was ten years old. It was in that story that I encountered 'adrenalin'. And I ask you this: how many comicbooks aimed at today's ten-year-olds have stories centering on a man's inability to produce adrenalin? For that matter, how many even have the word 'adrenalin' in them? Answers, please, to editor@pspublishing.co.uk -- I'll be genuinely interested to know.'

This brings us, of course, to PS Publishing, and to the question of why Crowther decided to start up the company. 'The glib answer is actually not far from the complete truth: it was something I hadn't done and it looked like fun. At the time, I was doing a lot of freelance communications work for an outfit called Editorial Services run by a fellow name of Simon Conway (a good friend of many years' standing), and I suggested to him that he might stump up a little capital (I didn't have any spare at all) and the necessary computer facilities and we start up a little imprint -- hence PS: Peter and Simon. We opened our company bank account in December 1998 and published our first two titles (James Lovegrove's How The Other Half Lives and Graham Joyce's Leningrad Nights) in the late spring of 1999... and we were we mighty proud of them. When I look back at them now, I cringe -- we thought we knew it all but boy, we had a lot to learn.

'Two more titles saw the light of day that year and then five more in 2000. This year, we've published nineteen titles plus two issues of Postscripts. We've got another issue of Postscripts due before Christmas (plus the Gene Wolfe novelette which will be going free of charge to subscribers). Next year looks likely to be around the same. After that, I'm looking to scale down the operation to ten or twelve books each year, with four issues of the magazine. That way I may be able to get a little of my own writing done.'

On the subject of his own writing, Crowther states: 'I don't think there are many of my own pieces I'm not proud of. I wrote a story for an outfit a few years back -- forgotten the name of the magazine -- and it was a pretty doomy and unpleasant piece that, frankly, I wish I hadn't written. And the mag itself was a debacle. So they probably deserved each other. One day, I'll re-jig the story and give it a slightly lighter feel... which, believe me, will take some doing.

'I'm proudest of the gentle pieces, particularly the story I wrote for the first issue of Bill Schafer's Subterranean magazine, "Thoughtful Breaths". I've had a lot of nice letters and phone-calls about that one. "Cankerman", an oldish story, always goes down extremely well at readings as does "The Main Event", a slightly irreverent murder mystery involving a very unusual poisoning. I read that one for the first time at a gig at the Waterstones in Manchester and I knew I'd done the right thing for two reasons: the first was that the entire audience -- a big one: around sixty or seventy people, as I recall \-- stayed silent throughout and laughed hysterically at all the bits they were supposed to laugh hysterically at; and secondly, when I passed Mike Marshall Smith, as I was moving away from the reading area and he was moving towards it, we nodded to each other and Mike muttered sotto voce, but loud enough for me to hear him over the applause, "Thanks... bastard!" Needless to say, he needn't have worried about having to follow me -- he brought the place down as usual -- but it was a nice feeling... being congratulated when you know you deserve it.

'I've had some interesting readings, in fact. One time at the Borders in Cheshire Oaks, at one of the regular appearances of our travelling "horror" caravan (Ramsey Campbell, Steve Gallagher, Mark Morris and me), we ended up in the children's section. It was a late night opening so the store was fairly packed, and we had a nice if select audience of around twenty or thirty people. When it was my turn to take the stage, I explained that I'd brought two stories: one was gentle and the other (which I'd just completed for John Pelan's The Darker Side anthology) was pretty in-your-face and nasty. Which did they want? Silly question. But when I started to read the tale I noticed two things: the first was that there seemed to be a lot of activity (and when I looked up occasionally, a lot of steely-eyed frowns and stares) from the folks wandering the children's book section with their assorted progeny and grand-progeny. That's when I noticed the second thing -- a high (very high, for me) incidence of some of the more colourful words in our national slang vocabulary. I spent the next ten or fifteen minutes scanning ahead -- while I was reading! \-- and changing all the offending fucks and shits into things less likely to offend. Great idea that, Borders -- organise a bunch of horror writers to do a late-night reading and place them in the kids' section. Sheesh!

'I'm also pleased with one tale that's maybe the darkest I've ever written -- "Bedfordshire", in Gathering The Bones edited by Ramsey, Jack Dann and Dennis Etchison. Once again, you know you've done okay when people go out of their way to praise you for something: Ramsey, on accepting the story, said "Pretty bloody dark, mate!" (which, from Ramsey, is praise indeed for a horror story) and Dennis Etchision emailed me from the US to say how much the story had moved him. Staying on the darker stuff, I still very much like "Eater" and "Rustle", two stories I wrote for Rich Chizmar's Cemetery Dance mag; "Cleaning Up", for Nick Royle's Darklands 2; "Dark Times", for Bill Schafer's Subterranean Gallery; "Night Terrors", for one of the Monteleones' Borderlands volumes and maybe a couple more.

'All my other faves are my softer and more optimistic yarns -- "All We Know Of Heaven" being perhaps extra special to me. I wound up adapting this story for Barrington Stoke's line of books aimed at "reluctant readers"... those teenagers with reading ages around seven or so. Now, just to give the background, this story runs from the viewpoint of a young boy whose parents were in a car accident: the father is okay, a little bruised and limping and so on but generally okay; but the mother is in a coma and not expected to recover. As it happens, the boy's class at school are reading and discussing the legend of King Arthur... in particular, the enchanted sword, Excalibur. ("If your heart is true, then you will prevail", goes the line about the young Arthur removing the sword from the stone.) Needless to say, the boy starts to think about the tube that goes down his mother's throat and seems to be keeping her alive -- alive but comatised. And, of course, his father is a wreck. So, pretty soon, the boy thinks about taking things into his own hands. (For the record, the story was written for Richard Gilliam's and Marty Greenberg's Excalibur anthology about fifteen years ago.) Anyway ...

'So Barrington Stoke is a very professional and thorough outfit -- quite demanding, too, particularly when it comes to the language you should use for the readership -- and so my story had to go by various people to check the accuracy and validity. Because my story was so controversial, it also went before a ward sister and a woman who had lost her little boy. There were some slight changes required, nothing too arduous, but these two wonderful women praised my story to the heavens and said -- with one of them actually in tears over the telephone -- how uplifting it was. Well, things don't come any better than that.'

Finally, Crowther discusses Songs of Leaving by Peter Crowtherhis plans to put together another collection and another collaboration. 'I'm on with the story notes to the follow-up collection to The Longest Single Note (follow-up inasmuch as it's another set of darkishly fantastical stories, unlike the more-or-less SF fare of my Songs Of Leaving collection or the pretty much straightforward crime/suspense of Cold Comforts, a CDRom-only collection I put out in the US a few years back). The collection is called Dark Times and it's pretty dark. The follow-up to this one will be Things I Didn't Know My Father Knew, and that will be much gentler in tone. Let's face it, I adore writing short stories... so I usually have enough at any time to put together a new collection.

'I also enjoy collaborating but the grim truth of the past couple of years is that the publishing business has pretty much kept me from doing much writing at all... of any kind. Thus the short novel I've been writing with Tim Lebbon (Into The Wild Green Yonder) ground to a halt on my desk... as did "Study The Rain", a collaboration with Paul Di Filippo. But I'm back on with Yonder and I'll turn to Rain as soon as my head clears. Meanwhile, of course, I'm trying to write my own mainstream novel and put together notes for the second part of Forever Twilight... and so it goes on ... Unfortunately, I've drifted dreadfully behind on a large number or projects, including those listed above. Plus I haven't managed to write many new stories for more than two years... bearing in mind that I used to write a dozen or more every year without any difficulty. I've made so many promises in the past -- promises mainly to myself -- that I'm now loath to commit myself any more in writing. So let's just say that there'll be some long-running projects that will be finished in 2006... and leave it at that. As I said earlier, the publishing business has played havoc with my creative juices (oo err!) but we now seem to be on a bit of an even keel. In closing, however, I have to say this: I would not have had it any other way... despite the fact that you may have heard me bleating to the contrary at some convention bar area or other this past few years. We've published some of the absolute best fiction -- and non-fiction -- that's available anywhere: Aldiss, Bradbury, Campbell, Dann, Erikson and so on all the way through to Zivkovic. We're blessed that authors trust us to do right by them, paying on time and doing nice production jobs with their work. It's all down to the best team in the business -- Nicky (my wife and now -- as of this past 15 months -- business partner), Ariel (website and tehnical support), Nick Gevers (assistant editor), Robert Wexler (design and layouts) and Derek Schultz (assistant designer). And, of course, we have the most wonderful and loyal audience, many of whom buy our titles irrespective of the genre or the author, simply because they believe they're going to get high quality work. And it's also worth mentioning the many speciality booksellers and bookstores who take our titles, plus my long-suffering printers (Theresa at Biddles) and mailing house (Aimee at Mercury International). My thanks go to all of them.'

And mine go to Peter Crowther.

### Arterial Motives: Dennis Etchison (1999)

"Rather dark, depressing, almost pathologically inward fiction about the individual in relation to the world..."

Chainsmoking his way through a packet of cigarettes, Dennis Etchison is explaining the distinctive features of his fiction. We're in East London, during one of Etchison's visits over from America. He continues:

"I was an only child and I grew up probably less well socialised than most people, with their brothers and sisters in the house. The first couple of years of my life, my father and all the men in the family were away in the war. I was raised by women - very spoiled. But at the same time I was more isolated from other children. You don't realise, when you're living through that, how not-normal it is. So my stories are about solitary individuals, trying to find a way to intersect with society. And I guess that's a metaphor for my life, for what I'm trying to do. The writing is just an encapsulated, melodramatized version of the conflicts I've had: trying to fit in. Any writer worth reading is going to talk about his own experience, even if he is writing fantasies...

"Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac wrote about themselves, but there are plenty of writers who would never give themselves away. You have no strong sense of who they are as people, and somehow they seem less interesting to me. The writers I feel the greatest love for in history, whether it's William Blake or Ray Bradbury, or Kenneth Patchen or Charles Bukowski, are writers who revealed the intense moments of their lives and the interior struggles they were going through. And offered it up in skilful fictional terms. I feel a closeness towards them; I don't know how else to put it. Even though you may never have met them, you feel a great loss when they die. It's not just that there won't be any more books or stories; it's because you have a sense that a beautiful soul has left the earth. Someone you felt kinship with, you know? The writers we have the highest regard for are the ones who revealed the most about themselves..."

Therefore, welcome to the Revelations According to Etchison. Few writers will reveal more about themselves than this man. After more than the obligatory few years of critical neglect, Dennis Etchison continued to be a whispered name for many years to follow. All the while he produced work that is now regarded as exemplary. He wins awards and high praise from other writers in the fields of the fantastique. Furthermore, I can verify that he is a wrestling fan, loves London, and can even interpret the map of the Underground with no problems. He once abandoned his car on the freeway when it died on him, and refused to drive anywhere for the following fifteen years. He spent time in the L.A. County Jail in the mid-1960s for failure to pay parking tickets, and out of boredom asked if anyone on the cell block had anything to read. For a small fee he was able to rent The Sterile Cuckoo, and was told by one of the other inmates: "It's got a lot of big words in it - but it's about fucking, I know."

But these are other stories...

Despite Etchison's reputation as a writer of horror fiction, there is clearly another line of fiction which converges with the first. It is fair to say that he has been influenced as well by some of the American Dirty Realist writers such as Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff...

"Yeah, that's fair. I began, for the first fifteen years of my career, with what little reputation I had in the science fiction field. I was in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy eight times; I was in Orbit; I was in New Writings in SF four times. I was in Fantastic Stories and other science fiction markets. Simultaneously I was publishing in slick magazines and some of the literary magazines. Eventually, with the horror boom that began with Stephen King, that field opened up many new markets and I found my work being accepted there. Since then my reputation has been in the horror field. My reading was always very wide. Probably my genre reading was in the minority. It seemed to me that there were literary values that were not being used by writers in the field. I try to bring those values to my writing. If you look at the anthologies I've edited, I think you'll see rather mainstream stories. It was always my intent to expand the boundaries of the genre rather than to define them more clearly. I wanted to break down the barriers between various kinds of literature. These distinctions are largely to serve the interests of publishers. Many people I know - intelligent, educated people - shudder when I offer them a book and say, 'Oh, I never read horror.' And I say, 'You don't know what you're missing. There're some really fine writers...' But in most cases they refuse to read it. If they were packaged simply as novels, as Peter Straub's The Hellfire Club is, you're going to reach a much broader audience; and many people who wouldn't have looked at the book if it had a peeled eyeball on the cover will now pick it up. I'm pleased that in the States Ramsey Campbell's last couple of books were printed without the word 'Horror' on the cover. As I said in the introduction to Cutting Edge, the genre offers a safe harbour for people who could not find acceptance elsewhere, but it also limits the number of readers you can have. I see no advantage for a writer of talent and skill to be published exclusively within the confines of a genre."

Dennis Etchison returns to science fiction themes on occasion: in 'The Dead Line', for example, and its notion of organ transplants, which has an opening line that Ramsey Campbell referred to as the most chilling line in horror fiction, to paraphrase... "That came from an article in Harper's Magazine in 1974 by Dr Willard Gaylin, who speculated that in a few years there might be organ farms and bio-emporiums, where people would go to buy replacement body parts. And that human beings might be kept alive in a vegatative state to provide material for transplants. It was such a powerful article, I acknowledged it in a footnote. I particularly wanted to say thank you for the use of the word 'bio-emporium', which I couldn't improve upon. It was such a powerful and disturbing notion that I thought about if for about eight years before I was able to face writing the story. It was so unpleasant to write about. It was dramatized on the stage in L.A. three or four years ago..." (Etchison did not adapt the piece himself.) "...I invited a number of friends to come and see it, including Ray Bradbury. It was an evening of short plays and that story was the first. They also did Kim Newman's 'The Man Who Collected Barker', Sturgeon's 'The Graveyard Reader' and a couple of other stories - a wonderful evening. But my friend Bradbury left after 'The Dead Line'. He said the script was fine, the acting was fine, but he had an aunt who was dying and he just couldn't take it. But it seemed important for me to confront it without blinking - and see where we're headed. That, after all, is the nature of science fiction: the cautionary look at the future. If this goes on, then this is where we might end up. For good or for bad."

Part of Etchison's reputation is for being able to sustain a novel with the energy of a short story. "I go at it as hard as I possibly can. I usually begin by reading the novel from line one again, every morning. Bradbury says not to do that. He always begins writing each morning without looking at what he did the day before. I have to go back and build up the momentum. It also gives me a consistency of tone so the whole thing has the same feeling. It has a skin around it... If you try to write a novel with the same intensity of language that a short story employs, it's exhausting for the reader. So there have to be passages where things relax a bit. Generally, these novels of mine are written with a great concentrated attention to language. And that comes from my training as a short story writer. A great many novels I pick up are written in an offhand style that seems to be no style at all. They're accessible, they're easy to get into - but that's not the way I write... I revise as I go along. If I go for three or four days and get practically nothing done and feel that I've hit a brick wall, I've learnt now that's my unconscious telling me I've taken a wrong turn. I may have to go back and throw out several pages. I have a notebook of discarded fragments and may one day write a brand new story based on work that I've thrown out."

Who are his current inspirations?

"I'm inspired by a British scientist and writer named Sheldrake, who wrote The Presence of the Past. He puts forward a theory of morphic resonance, which is essentially the idea that nature has memory. That is what is missing from Darwin's explanation of evolution. If Sheldrake is correct, his books will prove to be the most important non-fiction books of the twentieth century. He has redone Darwin. But the most interesting mind in the world that I'm aware of is the American Terence McKenna, who writes about ethno-botany, shamanology, philosophy, and is an all-round eclectic head. His focus of interest stems (if you like) from the psilocybin mushroom. Incidentally, there was an interview I did here when Shadowman was being released in the Raven edition, in which I said that after Shadowman was published I went back and reread it and was struck to find there was a recurring motif in the book that I had not been aware of, and it was mushroom imagery. It seemed to me later that the book had been about psilocybin mushrooms, although I wasn't aware of that at the time. When that interview came out in a magazine here the phrase 'psilocybin mushrooms' was written as 'suicide-by mushrooms'!

"Watson and Crick, who discovered the twin helix of DNA, suggested there might be life forms on this earth that drifted here from elsewhere, and that the likely candidate would be fungi spores since they can live in a vacuum. The experience of ingesting these mushrooms seems to be that of encountering an entirely alien intelligence. Something that has its own geometry and vocabulary. We may be entering a consciousness that is not of this earth when we ingest them... Now, will you be writing 'Californian Writer Has Delusions of Communicating with Aliens?'"

I remark that Whitley Strieber did the same thing in Communion and ended up making money, so perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea.

Etchison replied, "I know Whitley and I think he's telling the truth as he knows it. The book Communion - whether you believe it's a fantasy or something that truly happened, a human being's encounter with aliens - has a peculiar gripping power to it. And he's talking about an archetypal experience. It goes back to the Old Hag story in Finnish mythology, perhaps thousands of years. The experience of waking up in the middle of the night in the dark in your bedroom and having a conviction that there's someone else there - someone who doesn't belong. If Whitley's book was a hoax, why would he have done that? He was making large amounts of money writing horror novels and when he began his Communion phase, he was criticized resoundingly and the price of his novels went down in the marketplace... I once stood on a street corner in New York and asked Whitley, 'If I had been standing next to you in the cabin when those things happened to you, would I have seen what you saw?' He did not give me a glib answer; he thought about it for about sixty seconds and then said, 'I don't know.' Not: 'Of course, Dennis...' Whitley claims that he has never been high, and he doesn't drink. He took and passed lie-detector tests... McKenna's view is that Whitley was so thrown by the event because he has never been loaded. Terence says he's seen the little green men hundreds of time, and every time they come into his room he has a conversation with them. But Whitley certainly doesn't look at it humorously. Phil Dick once said that there's no way to know in any ultimate sense if an hallucination is true or not. Your brainwaves are being stimulated, just as if you are looking at something. There's no external, objective way of establishing the matter. All you can say is that other people did not see the same things you did..."

The conversation turns to California. Etchison writes about California, where he lives, but he believes that he would have ended up writing regardless of where he lived.

"Every writer reflects his own life experiences; mine just happen to be there. The only differences would be in the specifics. I look out of the window and write about what I see. And I try to find some core of meaning in it that will apply beyond California. I've been gratified to find that British readers have nominated my stories several times over the years for the British Fantasy Award. To them, the Californian landscape that I'm describing must seem very alien. In fact, the stories that won were realistic stories - not fantasies. I wondered if the British readers thought I had a terrific imagination for creating this colourful world. Little did they know I was only describing things as they are, particularly in Mexico which is just below the border with California. To drive down over the border - suddenly you're in another country, a very colourful and bizarre country. Maybe the readers thought I was making it all up!"

What is it about California that he finds so fascinating?

"I'm in sync with its rhythms, and if there are magnetic fields around certain places in the world then I'm part of that, or the biosphere that surrounds the area. To me, it's the centre of the universe and the mark of normalcy - which will get laughs from readers elsewhere. Have you seen The Last Temptation of Christ? Here you have these Biblical figures, Judas and Jesus and the others, talking with distinctly New York accents. Judas is saying, 'Hey! Jesus! What the hell is all this? Wha' ya doin'?' I love the film, but that was jarring to me. But to Scorcese's ear I'm sure it sounded normal - he's a New Yorker from Little Italy in Manhattan. I'm sure he was unaware of how stylised it sounded to the rest of us. To my ears, I don't have any accent at all..."

Dennis Etchison has been asked several times to write something set in England, but it has never quite panned out. "I've been afraid to do it, because even though this is my eleventh trip, I don't really feel qualified to speak much about London except for tiny pockets of it that I know pretty well. The locals would read my descriptions and laugh because I'm so uninformed. If you were to go to L.A. for a couple of days and then fly out and try to write the definitive L.A. novel, readers who know L.A. would find it ludicrous. You don't understand the connections; the whys and wherefores of it. So I wouldn't presume to do it. There was a round-robin story in Time Out magazine where I had to write a piece picking up a route on a map, covering certain predetermined areas of London. And I wrote my piece to coincide with those streets. Then, when they published it, the editors decided to change the locations so that what I was writing didn't fit in with the rest of the geography of the other pieces, and it didn't make sense. That was the only foray I made into writing about London. I'd love to be able to write an intense novel about an American in London but I don't feel that I know it well enough."

In several of Etchison's books - in Darkside more than most - the religious cult is regarded as a dangerous force. Most people would agree with his verdict, but what draws him back to the subject of cults?

"Well, you see a lot of it because of this millennial fever that we're going through. There are fundamentalist religious organisations that believe the battle of Armageddon is imminent. According to McKenna's findings, the year 2012 will be the end of history as we know it. He doesn't necessarily see it as apocalyptic, but rather as moving on to another stage. So I'm determined to stay alive until that date to see what happens. The cult business? Every kook sets up his own religion or therapy group in California! That's not unusual. It's just that I see so much of it. In Darkside, and to an extent in Calfornia Gothic, I was concerned with what had happened to my generation. I have the feeling there are millions of people my age who were bright, college-educated, full of promise - now no longer visible on the landscape. Many of them are driving taxi-cabs and washing dishes and are completely out of sight. It's as if the skills they were prepared for with the idealism of the '60s were unable to be absorbed by our society. In those books I postulated that some of them had dropped out and created a cult of their own around psychedelic mushrooms. It's also a matter of homelessness. You see so many homeless in L.A. because the weather is so good. They can sleep on the beach in the wintertime; they don't have to worry about freezing to death. It's as far west as you can go in the old pioneer spirit of finding your destiny. One wonders what bright and promising people are among the homeless in L.A."

What is Etchison's average working day?

"I get up early and start to work. I write for several hours - before life intervenes. You have to go out to the market or the post office; take care of business. In terms of the length it takes to write a book, I did the movie novelisations in around six weeks each. Double Edge, which is published here by Pumpkin Books, was written in seven weeks. On the other hand, I've spent a year and a half or two years on books. Sometimes you set it aside and work on other things for a while... Barry Malzberg wrote some books in 72 hours. I'm a very fast one-finger typist. In the last couple of years I've been working on the computer, which has many advantages and disadvantages. It solves the mechanical difficulties of having to retype manuscripts: it's hugely labour-saving in that regard, but it affects the quality of the prose and mitigates against extensive revisions because what you write comes out looking so perfect on the page - or the screen - as it is. Peter Straub disagrees with me. He claims that the computer causes him to revise much more than he ever did before. I always revised hugely. If you look at the file folders for some of my short stories, they're a couple hundred pages long, full of typed drafts. I would mark up each draft every time I went through it so that there were so many marks on the page I couldn't read it anymore. Then I had to retype the page - to clarify it. The stories would go through at least four to six separate drafts on the typewriter. There's no way to measure how many times a short story or novel is revised now that I work on the computer, but they're revised constantly and fanatically. Combing it with a ever-finer-toothed comb until it looks perfect. To my eye."

We talk about his struggle for literary attention before the field opened its arms. Did he ever feel that it might be better to give it all up?

"I'm still thinking about it! I was a Theatre Arts major. Half the time English and half the time Theatre Arts. And when you work in front of an audience you can hear and feel the response immediately. You know when something is going over; you can adjust it for the next performance. But when you're writing, it's not even going to be published until months, or years, hence. And then what sort of reaction are you going to get? A few letters will filter through. And unless you actually go to conventions or book signings and meet the few people who read your books, you're not going to know how they're received. You have to distance yourself from the critics. If you believe either the good or the bad reviews you're in trouble. It's easy to dismiss ignorant reviews by people who didn't understand what you were doing. I don't mind if they disliked what I was doing, but I would like to feel they understood what I was trying to accomplish. But half the time you get reviews from people who don't have a clue what you were writing about. So you disregard them. You say, What an asshole. But if you do that, you have to be willing to disregard the favourable reviews. And it's hard for your ego to do that because anybody who praises your work, you think, Wow, they must really understand. But they may not have understood either...

"I know a short story or a book that I've written much better than anybody else in the world. I've read it a hundred times. And just because it's published doesn't mean I think it's perfect. You don't write in a vaccum. You write on a schedule, professionally, and something may be published that I know is flawed. I understand the weaknesses of the work better than anybody else. I could give you an annotated version of one of my stories that would point out not only the references and the origins of the lines and thoughts, but what I was trying to do - what I wished there were more of, what I now think there's too much of. After you've written it and set it aside, you can come back to it and you see it in a different light. So I now look back at any story of mine more than a couple of years old and it does not look good to me. I could go through it and make it better, but I don't do that. It represents the best I could do at that time, under those circumstances, and it's representative of the person I was. I am embarrassed by some of the early stories, which continue to come back in reprint anthologies around the world. It's nice to be paid for work I did in my teens! But I can look at it as if someone else had written them and say, 'My God! Is he aware of how these words look on the page?' I have a more acute sense of style than I did then; a better understanding of myself and human relationships. Two years from now I'll look back at the present stories and be appalled. But it's like life: what you do is the best you can do on that day. You have to finish your job at the end of the day and say, given the circumstances, this was the best that I could do. But tomorrow's a new day. I can try to do better."

Over the years he has won quite a few literary awards, but he is subdued on the subject of their worth.

"Awards are a wonderful reassurance, but you cannot take them too seriously. If you look back at the history of awards in this field, you will see quite a few writers and works which, in retrospect, you feel didn't really deserve the attention." He is understandably reluctant to name names at this point... "How could I look those people in the eye again? But how can you be sure that you as an artist are entitled to an award? All it means is, some people liked it, and you thank those people."

I ask him if he believes his work has changed since he got married.

"I used to be accused of being misogynistic in my fiction. I never saw it that way, but a number of people read my stories and thought I had a problem with women. I wasn't conscious of that. I'm more conscious now of trying not to sound misogynistic in my fiction, because I have a wife who's going to read them. To describe an unpleasant human being who happens to be female and to describe her type realistically is, I think, not misogynistic. It's simply realistic writing. I describe a number of unpleasant human males in my stories but I'm not anti-male. I don't think I have any more bad women than bad men in my stories. People who have a hyper-sensitivity for that subject point out my so-called bitterness towards women. I have the highest regard for women. They are superior to men: physically, mentally and emotionally. If I looked down on women, why would I want one to live in my house with me? You can't generalise or universalise about a gender, or any group. My wife is a distinct individual and she does not represent all women - and I certainly don't represent all men. I've tried to avoid writing about her in particular; I don't feel comfortable doing that. But other women I've known have appeared in my fiction in various guises. Not to get even with them, simply because since I have known them I have insight into the way they thought."

Earlier on in his career, Etchison wrote several novelisations, and I wondered how these came about.

"I did The Fog was because I was a fan of John Carpenter. When it was offered to me by Bantam Books, I really couldn't resist the opportunity to meet with him. I liked him immediately. I handed him a copy of a story of mine that had just been published called 'White Moon Rising'. His eyes got large and he said, 'I've just written a script called Black Moon Rising.' So we immediately hit it off. It was a good experience. He and his producer came back to me for Halloween II and Halloween III, which I wasn't as keen on since John wasn't directing, but at the time we were talking about my writing a script for Halloween IV, which I ended up doing - not the script that was filmed. John sold his interest in the title 'Halloween' to his partners, and they ended up using other screen writers... Then, when the opportunity came to work with David Cronenburg, I couldn't turn that down either: the novelisation of Videodrome. I had the highest regard for Cronenburg. I was able to go to Toronto to meet with him, to read different drafts of the script, watch the film at various stages of editing. It was fascinating - too much so to turn down. I'm a huge movie fan."

His latest novel, Double Edge, would make a good film, and indeed was inspired by one, at least in part. Double Edge explores the infamous Lizzie Borden case. (Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered with an axe near the end of the nineteenth century; although there is evidence to suggest that their youngest daughter, Lizzie, perpetrated the crime, it remains unsolved because there is other evidence to suggest that she could not have conducted these murders.)

"I had always been fascinated with that case. There was an American television film for ABC called The Legend of Lizzie Borden, starring Elizabeth Montgomery. It was written by William Bast and I had been familiar with the case before that, but the film (directed by Paul Wendkos) was so exceptional that I began to read whatever I could find. A few years ago, Robert Bloch, who was a good friend, loaned me a couple of books. I found that every author had a different solution to the murders. And all the theories were convincingly argued. I set out to write a new novel, and since it was something I already knew so much about, I didn't have to do any additional research. I decided to put forward a theory that, to my knowledge, no other author on the subject has suggested: that there were... Well, if I say it, that will give away the book! It's fascinating because it's an unsolvable case. I could make a convincing argument for any of several characters being the killer. You can now stay in that house as a Bed-and-Breakfast, by the way. They've restored the original wallpaper, the original furniture. I would love to go there and spend time in that house. I have a feeling I would get a sense there of what might have happened. I'm a very visually oriented person, and the idea of standing there seeing the yard - I think I would have a clearer idea of what happened." And then he could claim the trip as a business expense... "Well, absolutely! I know that the last questions I had about the JFK case, which I investigated for 13 years, remained unanswered until I actually went to Dallas, and then I saw the last piece of the puzzle. Because of the way the buildings were laid out, it was very clear to me."

What purposes does he think horror and fantasy serve?

"It does seem to be the appropriate form for contemporary fiction, since what we're living in seems increasingly irreal. Through my eyes, things look stranger every day. So if I describe these things realistically, it's going to look like magic realism. You have to hunt for the universal truth at the core of it that will be meaningful to others. The only thing I can write about is how things seem to me. And whether or not others will find it interesting is out of my control. Steve King, for example, happens to have a view that a lot of people can identify with. He has something in common with a large number of people so they understand exactly where he's coming from. But I don't think he set out calculatedly to write in a certain way. If I set out with a point of view calculated to appeal, you would detect the falseness. The reader can tell when you're not being honest."

In an attempt to reach the central truth of a story, Dennis Etchison has abandoned several tales because they have proved to be too difficult to finish. "Sometimes you put them aside for a while; more often what happens is that you end up exploding it outward from the centre. You turn it into something different. I could show you stories where originally they were going to go in an entirely different direction. When I was writing Shadowman I had it planned all along that the murderer was someone different. But when I got to that point, I realised there was a better, more interesting way to tell the story. Writing is all about trying to find the heart of the story and articulate it, and it may or may not be what I had originally planned. But you have to be open and conscious enough to see what it really is. If you hold it too close to your pre-planned notion, it may not end up reading true. That's the problem with writing for Hollywood. You have to do outlines which are discussed and torn apart endlessly by others. But when you get into the writing you may discover much more interesting scenes and directions, but you don't know that when you start. It's like trying to plan a date in advance. 'As I help her on with the coat, that's when I'll try to kiss her...' But it doesn't ever quite work out that way. You have to live the moment and respond to it honestly. That's very much what writing is."

Dennis Etchison and I took a bus from the house in which he was staying to the train station. He thought I was terribly generous to pay his 50 pence fare, which I assured him was on Interzone. He was off to the West End to meet his wife and some friends, and I was travelling home to Bedfordshire. I found Dennis to be a warm and giving individual, with no prissiness or falseness; more a feeling of gratitude to be working in a job he enjoys and a general contentment with the world. His work is bleak and raw, but his temperament on the day of our meeting was sunny, cheerful, and above all, truthful.

### All the Blue Apes: Phyllis Gotlieb (2000)

Author of the recent novel Violent Stars, a slippery, sexy, intricate piece about a long-running court case, prostitution and murder, set in a farflung existence, Phyllis Gotlieb is a poet of renown, and a resident of Toronto, Canada. Her work is beautifully written, and the short story collection Blue Apes is especially recommended as an introduction.

David Mathew: Please tell me something about your early life and how you became a writer.

Phyllis Gotlieb: I was born in 1926 and from around age ten or eleven I wrote poems and stories and decided to be a writer. I guess I didn't quite know at that time that there was any difference between "genre" and "literature". My family worked in the movie managing business. The movie house my father managed had a candy store next door (shades of Isaac Asimov) and its proprietor gave us the pulps and movie mags he couldn't sell; I was attracted to these because they had colour and action, and these qualities appeared in whatever I wrote up until I went to University, where I learned more about what literature really was, and developed the more literary style I had just been beginning to use.

By the time I graduated I found myself in a protracted dry spell; I married soon after and my husband, a physicist originally and later a professor of computer science, suggested my trying science fiction. I'm a slow learner, and it took me some years to write a saleable story. H.L. Gold kept saying my work wasn't original enough, and John. W. Campbell sneered because my story didn't have a thrillingly happy ending ("denies the whole premise of science fiction!").

While I was plugging away at sf my poetry mysteriously returned, around 1955, and I got to be a quite respected poet, even shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, but there was always in my audience a bit of reluctance to take my work seriously because I wrote science fiction, which has never been greatly respected as a form of art in Canada even to this day.

Still, I was lucky to be writing poetry in the late sixties and seventies when there was an outburst of interest in poetry here, and as a member of the League of Canadian Poets and with the generosity of the Canada Council, I and other poets were able to give poetry readings in all the provinces and half the small towns in Ontario. I really loved going around to these places, travelling by plane, train, bus, truck or whatever else had wheels, and reading in schools and libraries. During this time I wrote half a dozen verse plays that were commissioned by the CBC, and they were taken up by high school drama teachers, and their productions won several prizes--I consider these my greatest successes and was happiest as a poet then.

Popular literature had been creeping into poetry, fantasy, children's rhymes, song lyrics, and eventually it all got absorbed into my science fiction, and by the end of the seventies (just about the time the great outburst of interest in poetry began to shrink) I stopped being a productive poet simply from lack of poem-shaped ideas. Now my aliens write poems, and I produce them very occasionally. I miss them, but if I tried to force them I'd produce only empty stuff.

DM: Your first novel was Sunburst...

PG: Yes, my first published novel was Sunburst, which came out both as a magazine serial and a paperback book in 1964.

I guess at the time I was thinking about children with supernormal powers, because the theme was in the air: Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End, Sturgeon's More Than Human, Wilmar Shiras's Children of the Atom.

I started with a short story idea about a group of children born with psi powers after a nuclear reactor blowup in their town (after which the town is closed off from the world), only these children would be violent, brutal and without conscience (in the term popular then, juvenile delinquents) who were damaged in the first place by heredity or abuse (the theme being that psi is no good to humanity and it would emerge most likely in the damaged). These were to be caged within barbed wire and electrical fields that would make them harmless to the outside (the cage is called the Dump, and the children are the Dumplings.).

However, just one of them would be a young girl about twelve named Shandy Johnson who remains free and unknown because except for these powers she is normal and has never been in any trouble. But the Dumplings are calling to her telepathically, tormenting her with longing to be one with them. That was a not-bad story idea, except for being just like all the other stuff, until it occurred to me that it would be far more interesting if Shandy not only had no psi power but could not be reached or manipulated by anyone who had it. Then I started writing the novel. Shandy aged a year and became thirteen because Lolita had just been published and I didn't want twelve-year-old-girl connotations. Of course the Dumplings are not all evil, there are other good psis not in the Dump, the Dumplings are eventually going to escape and you-know-who helps sort it out. And Shandy learns that her moral spine makes her super in some ways. It should be clear that when I use telepathy in my writing now it is shorthand for understanding and communication, not because I believe it's any kind of good thing.

DM: How long did it take to write?

PG: Just over a year and a half. I wrote a mainstream novel after that which took four years (rave reviews, few sales) and the next four or five books took a couple of years each at least. Flesh and Gold took three years, all of 1987-89, plus six years to sell it, Violent Stars four years, 1990-94, sold 1998. I was writing those on spec, like most of my other novels. I'm too old to do that now.

DM: As you know, I rate Blue Apes extremely highly. Perhaps you could talk about that collection a little bit.

PG: Blue Apes, 1996, is my second collection (after Son of the Morning and Other Stories, 1983) and four of the stories in the first one are repeated in Apes along with seven other unreprinted pieces.

DM: You deal with the different approaches to forms very well. Not every novelist can be a good story-writer, and vice versa. But to write good stories, novels and poetry is by no means unique, but it is unusual.

PG: Some years ago the CBC put on a program called, "Running, Jumping and Standing Still". I never watched it, and I'm not even sure what it was about, but the title immediately struck me: novels run, stories jump, and poems stand still. Of course, Finnegans Wake sleeps and dreams, a modern New Yorker story stands still, and Byron's Mazeppa runs like blazes, but I still think it's a good general idea. It occurred to me this morning, while I was thinking about this question, that what shapes an idea into a particular form is the amount of clarification I need to communicate the vision I have. Not too deep a thought, but, for instance, the vision of an old crumpled alien begging in a market-place hung around in my mind for seven or eight years, and when a story finally formed around it, it was short and quickly written ("Among You" in Blue Apes - available elsewhere in infinity plus). But a vision of a woman sitting on a floor trying to soothe a baby, when a robot dog runs in and grabs the child in its mouth--well, that's a novella, took over a year. And when I started to think about Khagodi, a species I've used as characters for over thirty years, and realized I knew nothing about their world Khagodis and it would be interesting to explore, that became the novel Flesh and Gold.

DM: But your new novel is Violent Stars, and I was interested in the political and judicial cobwebs, the intrigue... not to mention the sexy blue aliens, as I even wrote in the review. The book made me wonder if you had ever read, or more specifically been influenced by, Bleak House by Charles Dickens.

PG: That's an interesting idea, but I can't even remember whether I ever read Bleak House.

DM: Oh well.

PG: Several of my earlier books seem to have a fair number of trials and enquiries in them, I'm not sure why, maybe watching too much Perry Mason on TV, maybe the Jewish education I scrabbled up for myself during the time my children were learning it. (I had little of it in childhood, though my parents did what they could, but my father had to work odd hours that made it impossible even to keep a Sabbath.) At any rate the Talmud is one long legal examination, you can dip in and find a trial anywhere, even in my small supply of books on it. Some years ago I read in a short article in Locus that the books of several sf writers were being used as teaching materials at the Duane University law school, including mine. I was gratified but wondering what I had contributed. Trying to capsulize me views is difficult. I can only say that my interests are omnivorously universal, as I hope my science fiction shows.

DM: Perhaps we can talk about a few of the subjects that appear in your work, or seem to at least. I'll probably get these wrong as well. But did the study of history play any part in the way you approach fiction?

PG: I can't say that the study of history had direct influence on my work. I took Latin for many years in school and university, and became interested in Greek and Roman history from that, but in high school I was always pestering and annoying my teacher for information on what kind of cooking utensils, underwear, handkerchiefs, socks and plumbing the Romans had and she just didn't know. I liked Horace and Catullus and enjoyed translating them into English verse, but except for an admiration of Julius Caesar's writing style I cared nothing for wars, treaties or epics.

After I married and had children I became more interested in Jewish history (my grandparents were Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants), but the kind of history I cared for was, again, the homely one of the villages where they lived. Now that I write science fiction I make sure I know what kinds of cookpots, underwear, etc. my characters use even if I don't mention them.

DM: What about surrealism?

PG: Well, I like surreal art, but I also think that surrealism is something you have to learn to write half-decent science fiction, the ability to look at the world sidewise, upside down or inside out! But my heart doesn't belong to Dada.

DM: Cartoons?

PG: As a theatre manager's daughter I was delighted to be nourished on Mickey Mouse, Popeye and Betty Boop but they didn't feed my work.

DM: Philosophy?

PG: A kid brought up on the contents of Hollywood, the Disney studios and pulp fiction is hardly likely to find it easy to develop an interest in the formal study of philosophy. What my basic Philosophy courses at university gave me was information on Kepler, Copernicus, Brahe, the scientists who may have contributed to my conviction that a scientist would be a good husband for me!

DM: What are you like when your work is criticized?

PG: My husband is my best critic because he's a good sharp reader who can tell me what's wrong, and if I agree (as I do most of the time, not all) I fix it. I'll also take criticism gladly from my agent and editor. I respect review critics if they're thoughtful even if they don't like my work, at least I can swallow their dislike more easily. But there are all kinds of critics, and I don't know many writers who haven't raged and frothed over a poor review. I throw out bad reviews so I can't tell you the worst, and only rarely look at the good ones, to give some reference somebody might ask for. When a book has been out for a year it's shucked off my consciousness.

Once in a rare while someone will come up to me at a con and tell me that Sunburst meant a lot to her when she was young, and that's a really good review.

DM: Do you have a treasured book, of someone else's?

PG: I could say Browning's poems, Woolf's The Waves, Neuromancer, Lord of the Flies, Darkness at Noon, Huckleberry Finn, Ulysses, The Man in the High Castle -- but I think in the end it comes down to Kipling's Kim.

I know that too often Kipling comes on like a brass band played too loud, but just the same he is one writer who very well knows and best expresses the deeps of the mind and even better, also its joyfulness. In my opinion, of the others who know the territory, Dickens is too operatic, Woolf in too deep, Dick out of control. But Kim travelling down the Grand Trunk Road with fierce delight is the nearest you can come to Huck Finn on the Mississippi, and without the cruel satire and bitterness of Mark Twain. And Kim's relationship with the mysticism of the Lama is as good a map of the territory as I could wish for. (A thought just occurred to me--is it possible George Lucas got Yoda from Kim's lama?) You can see other examples of Kipling's delicacy in poems like "The way through the woods" and such stories as "They" and I admit they come too seldom even for me, but there is always Kim to encapsulate nearly all of the feelings I have about writing.

DM: And lastly, what is your opinion of the publishing industry at the moment?

PG: I've read about publishing finances wherever I could find information, and my conclusion is that there is not enough money to gobble up in the pub. business. Books like mine (euphemistically called the "mid-list" but really lower on the scale), that sell for U$22-25, and have print runs of 3-5000, probably don't yield a profit of more than $1 per volume, if that. The writer gets 10% (less on paperbacks), the retailer gets 40%, the distributor gets some percentage, there are all kinds of price-off deals, and the publishers must pay for staff, writers' advances, huge rents, advertising and publicity (tours, etc.). Multimedia and spin-offs help pay for books, that's why they try to grab all those rights, electronic, audio, translation. And best-sellers like Stephen King and Robert Jordan bring in the money that helps pay for my books, which get published because my agent and editor are devoted to them, as long as they can show half-decent sales. Huge publishing conglomerates may make big profits on multimedia, and that's why not many publishing establishments selling only books are around any more.

DM: Phyllis Gotlieb, thank you very much.

### M. John Harrison (2002)

"I hate describing my work, especially at what my girlfriend calls 'grown up' dinner parties," says M. John Harrison -- a man who has, most likely, been asked to do so on many occasions since 1971, and the Light by M John HarrisonBritish publications of The Committed Men and The Pastel City. "I make these tentative efforts and people say, 'Oh, horror fiction then,' or, 'Oh, science fiction,' and at that point I bow out of the conversation. At one of these affairs a Guardian journalist asked me how I'd describe what I wrote, and when I said I didn't really know how to do that, he said he thought he could probably help me. 'You do that thing Moorcock does, but more controlled.'"

The anecdote reveals a good deal about the (unnamed) Guardian journalist -- with his masked questions and tally-ho assumptions -- but it also tells us something about one of the most consistently brilliant writers at work today: M. John Harrison. His work is, as it should be, difficult to define, sui generis; it is unlassooable, and roams its pastures and prairies with a grin. "Controlled?" I understand what the journalist meant, I think -- he was referring to the poise and balance of the prose -- but Harrison's work leaves its mark; it is feral, it is fierce... To change the metaphor somewhat, very recently someone of my acquaintance described a piece by Harrison as being akin to necking a pint of neat scotch. It's a tidy analogy.

Harrison continues: "The problem with description anyway is that it's so close to explanation; and explaining something is so close to explaining it away. That's what he was doing: tidying me up, explaining me away. One of the points my stories make -- by being there, as much as by their content -- is that you not only shouldn't, but in the end you can't, explain things away.

"My stuff has changed massively across thirty years. The change is easier to describe than the work itself. You can see what's going on in The Pastel City. Somebody dissatisfied with fantasy of that kind is looking for a way to turn it against itself, but hasn't found a technical means. By Viriconium Nights he's found out how to do it, but now he sees that the problem with fantasy is fantasy itself, and it's more interesting to write about that. So he takes a thread he started in 'The Ice Monkey', which is a story about how far people will go to escape quotidian life, and he works it through Climbers and into The Course of the Heart, having to learn a whole new technical vocabulary on the way. Finally he sees that to write about people's fantasies is to write about desire, and after some testbedding in Signs of Life, he's looking 'Science and the Arts' in the face."

The process, however, was not quite so lean and simple. "I'm probably explaining myself away," Harrison admits. "If I could have written 'Black Houses' in 1971, I would have. That would have been a good starting point for a career. I just wasn't up to it, either as a writer or a human being. Also I was full of this pointless rage against the f/sf genre for not being a proper vehicle for that kind of fiction. I kept stealing the bread van and complaining it wouldn't corner like a BMW. You can do that once, but twice is stupid and three times is wilful. Recognising that was the biggest change for me. At the end of the 70s I believed I'd wasted ten years. I went back to the beginning and started out again, in the direction suggested by 'The Ice Monkey'."

These days M. John Harrison is continuing to reflect the status quo in his fiction. "Everything since 'Running Down'" -- with its things falling apart, its decay, and the picture fascism champing at the bit -- "has been designed to reflect the state of Britain," Harrison confirms. "From In Viriconium, through Climbers, to Travel Arrangements. But I'm less interested in the look of it now, the kind of pre-disaster landscapes I used to adore, than in the dreams Viriconium by M John Harrisonthat precipitate the disaster; and more interested in the place where the internal fantasies of people like Isobel, Choe and Mick (from Signs of Life) intersect -- and are seen to become -- the public dreams, the actual social and political drivers of globalism. The idea of 'choice' is what drives us to export all the risk, disorder and poverty out of the gated community of the West and into other parts of the world, so that we can enjoy shopping. We live in a fantasy culture, a culture of comfort. We must always have choice, even if someone else has to pay for it, even if it's not really real. We're so obsessed with this that it's an article of faith with us that 'you can be anything you want to be'. This is essentially a politics of masturbation, which in stories like 'Suicide Coast' is linked to the more obvious politics of consumption, the default politics of the West. But 'Running Down' was certainly the beginning of all that. It became the template for a lot in my fiction.

"But you don't want to read me for this. You want to read Joel Lane or Tim Etchells. Or get out to a Forced Entertainment show, especially if they ever do Goodbye Emmanuelle again."

This said, Harrison has some interesting comments on the events in New York and Washington, of September 11th, a date which immediately preceded the interview. "My gut instinct," he says, "is that we ought to talk less to each other. Some people think that religion is to blame here. I think it's something prior to that. I think it's language. You can't do religion until you have language. You can't promise someone 'freedom' (Bush) or 'paradise' (bin Laden) except with words; those items are labels without a referent. And if I have to read another article by Martin Amis or Ian McEwan -- middle class wankers who have never been in harm's way their whole lives, competing with one another to produce dully clever, middle-aged Britpap about real events; or if I have to hear another soundbite in which Slimy Tony, dressed up in a casual jacket to look 'hard', licks the arse of the biggest bully in the global playground by 'pledging' himself; or if I have to hear any more investment bankers presenting themselves as wounded martyrs in the ruins of the Church of Money; or if I have to hear another Islamic spokesman misappropriate the words 'caution' and 'evidence'; I think I might fly an aeroplane into something myself. Only so I don't have to hear words any more. Do you see? I'm fucking sick of words because I've spent nearly forty years manipulating people with them for a living, and they don't come near being the thing itself. All rhetoric, including mine, is empty rhetoric. Every death is a real one."

It comes as no real shock that Harrison chooses not to look too far ahead. "If you're going to get by, you need focus," he tells me. "I keep working to produce interesting fiction. I'm continually surprised to find myself 56 years old anyway. I work harder, perhaps as a result. The main thing is to change: life and fiction ought to work in tandem to develop you as a human being. While skill is useless unless you can bring it to new insights into your subject matter, the reverse is equally true, and in the end being able to write about things is an aid to engaging with them (that of course, is the paradox I was pointing out in answer to your question, above). I didn't understand my subject matter until recently. I was a late developer. Maybe I'll get a late flowering too." Nor does he harbour a burning desire to be judged a genius after he has died -- because "It's nice to be recognised. But the benchmark is what you can do, not the tick you get for it. In terms of writing I achieved enough to be happy when I finished Climbers. At the same time I'll never be happy. Writing is a constant nuisance. It's a constant failure, not just to do what you intended, but even to understand (except after the fact) what you intended. I wouldn't have it any other way, but it doesn't make you good at buying things and feeling ok about your life, like someone in that bloody awful Guardian lifestyle magazine. Even now I'm an intense and fairly self-dissatisfied person. Most climbers will tell you the same thing about achievement. (a) The benchmark is what you can do, not the tick you get for doing it. (b) If I can do it, it can't be very hard. (c) So what's next? There's no end to that except the obvious one.

"I doubt I'll be judged as anything after I'm dead: my stuff doesn't have the human reach to live on. I think f/sf/h writers will read the short stories for a few years -- more to find out what I was doing than how I did it." In which case, if someone had never read a word of Harrison's work, nor knew his name, what single piece would the author point that person towards, and what would he expect that person to get out of it? The answer is: "The short story 'The East', in Travel Arrangements. I would expect them to take away from it what they could. I would hope that they would continue to puzzle over it after they had finished reading it, think, 'Oh, that's what he meant,' go back and read it again and start puzzling over it again. I would expect them to bring their humanity to its humanity, their experience to the experiences it claims to depict. I'd hope they got a real chill from it, a sense that something disturbing had happened to them, not just to the central character of the story: that somehow, their view of the world had been for a moment lifted up at its edge. I'd hope that in the end their dialogue with the story's central conundrums would, by wrenching their emotional reactions, extend their emotional reach."

We sense a self-deprecating air, of course: my personal belief is that Harrison is well aware of his strengths and of how much his work is admired and adored. After all, he won the Richard Evans Award a few years ago, and his fanbase is strong and loyal. On receiving the Evans, he says, he felt "Old, for a moment. At risk of being left out, though what from I wasn't quite clear. It galvanised me, to tell the truth. I decided to have more fun." Which led in turn to the work that Harrison is now engaged in [editor's note: Light was published in the UK on 29 October 2002 by Gollancz; see below for links to an extract and review]: "Something that can only be described as a space opera, though part of it is set now and in typical Harrison territory, and it will have my characteristically unforgivable approach to the material... Honestly, it's rewarding to have really committed readers. I'd hope, if I wrote a western or a historical romance, it would be as wrenched, miscegenated and decon as my assaults on the other genres. (I'm fairly certain that typical readers and writers of westerns or historical romances would be as puzzled and provoked by it as science fiction readers & writers were by The Centauri Device.) I'd expect my typical reader to be looking forward to that.

"But the downside of a very loyal, longstanding readership is that sometimes they aren't happy for you to actually change. A lot of Viriconium readers hated Climbers. One described it as 'an episode of Coronation Street'. He meant it was 'only' about life as he actually recognised it. I was sad that he couldn't be as excited as I was about that. It will happen again, because -- just as I'd rather make a mistake than not try new things -- I'd rather alienate every last reader than not do exactly what I want. It's selfish, I know: but it's your guarantee as a reader that you're getting something intense (even if it's something you don't want). The risk here is that people will suffer lost-reader syndrome. If you change, you can't have been what they thought you were. They feel betrayed, they feel abandoned. In the murkier depths of that is a control thing: who decides who you are? You, or your colleagues and readers? I have to say that the last thing I'll accept is imprisonment in someone else's definition of who I am, or what my best work is. That can be a problem with people you knew thirty years ago."

Writing -- the very process of writing -- means the same to M. John Harrison as it ever did: "Three parts psychological necessity, two parts job, one part a hit as good as coke or sex (but not quite as good as adrenalin). I'd rather go climbing, I might as well say that now, because trying to keep yourself together while you're looking at the wrong end of a fall is just the most absorbing thing in the world. It's to do with self-awareness, but paradoxically it doesn't leave you any self to be aware of. That was the big thing in my life: but it wasn't necessarily the healthiest or the most mature thing. (What's brilliant about climbing is that you don't even have to be very good at it to bring about the basic situation. I was never more than a mediocre climber. Andy Pollitt, one of the two or three best rock-technicians in Britain at the time, once said to me, 'Think what I have to do get that scared, Mike.' I took the point.) And although some of the mechanics of composition have changed over the years -- "I used to keep my journal in longhand. Now I do everything on the machine. The machine is my friend. Without the machine I would be nothing" -- Harrison continues to filter his and others' life experiences onto the page. "Intentionally or not," he says, "every writer writes 'about' themselves. Once you know that, you stop trying to do it directly. That element is going to take care of itself better than you can. Given that, though, I try in limited ways to use my own experience, if only on the grounds that it's what I know. I still have this sad idea that good writing ought to be, at least partly, an attempt to come to terms with the major events of your life (and thus, by extension, other people's lives). You can do that at greater or lesser remove. 'The Ice Monkey' is a very direct piece. Its emotional truth lies in a very direct use of real people and events. The fantasy element, though important, is reduced to two or three sentences which serve to wrench the realistic material for emphasis. On the other hand, while there's a lot of real stuff in the short story 'Empty', that realism only acts as a scaffold. The emotional truth of the story is handled in what are the most obviously fictional, fantastic elements. And the rule with Climbers is that just when you think it's most autobiographical it's generally least; and vice versa. I have to say that no one should take any of this as an explanation of what I do. I look for the wrench, the paradox, the metaphor that seems to work in more directions than it should. I look to confuse, delight and irritate. Manipulating reader-expectations around the fiction/nonfiction interface is only a part of that. It's both technique and subject matter: I write about self-anecdotalisation too."

I am interested, I tell him, in Choe (one of Harrison's most memorable characters). I can't help thinking that Choe had a very interesting journey onto the page, via an initial spark. Where did he come from? "There are a couple of answers to this question. One is that he came from 'The Ice Monkey' via Climbers. He's the failure of that particular escape-trajectory: he's what you end up as when you've ramped up the body chemicals as far as they'll go and it doesn't get you high anymore.

"The other is that he's based on three or four real people, including a legendary steeplejack, a climbing journalist, and a couple of roped-access engineers. Most of his dialogue is directly reported from those sources. His driving behaviours, his favourite foods, his TV habits, the way he dresses, are direct reportage. All the anecdotal material in Chapter Two is true (and of the same person). His 'spiritual' side is fictional and bolted on, but the key to him -- which is that he's too intelligent to behave this way, and he knows it -- is absolutely accurate. Guys like these undercut their own behaviour ironically the whole time, but can't learn how to do anything else. They're fantastically attractive. They're fucked. They brought attention deficit disorder to the Thatcher boom and it worked for them.

"It's twenty two miles, I think, from Hathersage to Holmfirth, if you take a single-track back road called the Strines, which is nothing but blind hairpins in woods, with 100 and 200 foot drop-offs. Choe once spent a month trying to drive it in less than seventeen minutes in a standard Astravan. The Strines has a pub on it, and it can take a lot of traffic, so to make sure no one else was on the road he drove it after midnight. We were about three quarters along one night when it became plain he wasn't going to improve on his best time...

"'Job's fucked, Mike,' he said. 'But I'll show you something, shall I?'

"I said yes.

"He stopped suddenly and screamed, 'Out! Get out Mike, and look at the van! I got out.

"'See? See?'

"I couldn't see anything.

"'Are you fucking blind, or what? The brakes, Mike, the brakes!'

"They were bright red, cooling to cherry. We were ten miles from anywhere in the pitch dark and he had exported enough heat into the front discs to get them bright red. Three weeks later he was racing Jane Johnson down the same road. Jane is not a slow driver, and at that time she owned a Ford XR2. Choe was in a fifteen year old Datsun that had cost him a hundred quid. She held him off for eleven miles. Then he overtook her on a cattle grid and his front suspension fell off."

For M. John Harrison, stories arrive at strange times and via unconventional routes. They are not necessarily in the air for him to catch? "It really does depend," he tells me. "'Seven Guesses of the Heart' was based directly on a dream. More usually, a paragraph or two from my notebooks act as a seed, around which other bits and pieces fall into more and more organised relationships. You can see that clearly in 'The Gift'. At a certain point, fictional material begins to insert itself to provide connectivity. A story emerges, the whole thing goes through a convulsion in which a lot of stuff gets thrown out. Suddenly, bang, there it is. I spend the next nine months trying to get one sentence right so I can call it 'finished'. I begin a story anywhere along its length, including the final sentence; and I work anywhere in it, too. (The last thing I did on Signs of Life was to write chapter eight.) There's a huge and welcome unconscious input: I never refuse an intuition, the more inexplicable the better. I need to be surprised by a story or it goes back in the raw material file. The ones that survive are the ones that did something extreme, of their own accord, while I was trying to write them. Stories are certainly 'in the air for me to catch', but I throw most of them back again, as being too ordinary or too easy to write."

And he is pleased that reviewers are starting to get to grips with what he produces. "Recently, they have been getting things right. But they tend to get one aspect, select one theme or thread or suite of references and see that as the whole of the meaning. I can understand why, and sympathise. A lot more fish are being fried than they want to eat. Fiction traditionally processes the disorder out of life: but in something like 'Gifco', for instance, the whole point is to offer people almost as much depth or interpretive choice as they would have in reality. So the tendency of the reviewer is to simplify a text which otherwise would seem too unpackable, not to say wilfully incomplete and paradoxical.

"Generally, I've had very powerful, positive reactions, both inside and outside the genre, for the last four books. People are reading me in a way that wasn't possible even in the 80s. Mind you, I still get some pretty dull responses." And for a writer who seems to invest so much in each piece this really does seem like a crying shame. He might disagree with some of his interviewer's notions -- "I have to say that 'misused magic and pricy miracles' sounds a bit more like J K Rowling than me" he writes in response to one of my questions \-- but Harrison thinks hard about every answer, intent on providing, in interview as in tale, the perfect prose, the ideal response. So just for the record, as it were, I asked him about his views on a series of themes:

On magic.

"Magic is to do with desire. Every organism lives in the gap between the desired and the possible. Human beings, caught in the same biological anxiety as a brown rat, say: What if I had it? What if it was just on the table in front of me now? All that food, all that money, all that fame, all that beauty? All that (fill in the blank)? What if I could change things? Do you know that utterly stunning Lou Reed song, 'Dirty Boulevard'? I play it really loud if I forget what all this means. Magic is to guess at what you might have, and yearn for it, and then suddenly see it with a wrenching clarity, there but not there. Fiction is a medium for discussing those aspects of desire; but it's also, and much more importantly, a way of doing acts of symbolic magic, that old Burroughsian 'magical intervention' in the world.

"Fantasy fiction should be an especially good means of doing that, and until the arrival of commercial fantasy, it was. It was always rhetoric, dissembled ideology, dissembled ritual, the cranky voices of real individual magicians, Catweazels who could write a bit. For me it still is. Viriconium stories aren't just odd for the sake of it (well, not entirely). Signs of Life isn't just about the misused magic of genetech, or the pricy miracle of Isobel's transformation: it's about the politics of transformation in our age. I'm interested in desire, whether emotional or ideological: in fact I often make reciprocating metaphors out of those two."

On religion.

"Spirituality (along with politics, sex, art, science and probably language itself) lies in the gap between what we want and what we can have, what we know and what we don't, between the real and the constructed, between the quotidian and the awesome, between everything it might be and the one thing it is. That gap is an unhealed cut. My stories cluster around it like rentboys, pushers and clients in front of a King's Cross amusement arcade, getting off on the extreme tension and equivocality and challenge welling out into the night. People need to be more than they are. Actually, I think that's a kind of sprituality in itself, and to an extent that's the 'meaning' of stories like 'Black Houses'. But there should be some version of caveat emptor that warns the reader against the coldly-set traps of metaphor and self-reflexiveness. Does Choe Ashton, in 'Anima', meet and fuck and then deny a real earth-mother? Or is she only a Jungian figment? Or only a metaphor for his political and psychological 'fall from grace'? All these things at once? Something else altogether? Who is being teased here (other than, obviously, the author, who is clearly teasing himself)? Most of the ambiguously spiritual incidents in my stories are designed to represent something else, even if only ambiguity itself."

On feeling undervalued as a writer?

"I don't. I'd like to reach a wider audience, which means by definition a larger one. But given the nature of the project -- which has always been to frame questions, not provide answers -- I think I've been well received since the mid 80s. The best two or three books attracted serious reviews in broadsheet newspapers and literary magazines. I won a prize for non-fiction with a novel, which is a trick if you can do it. I was a bit disappointed that Climbers didn't get a nomination for the Booker, because I thought it was a good book. With hindsight I see that its human concerns were far too limited. It's that peripherality of concern or limitation of viewpoint which has sandbagged my stuff in the mainstream and literary marketplace. I doubt there's time to redress that now, although I'm always trying."

And lastly, on the long-known influence of Arthur Machen.

"This is a top question," says Harrison, "even if it is like asking me if I still beat my wife. I'm a bit chary of the uninterrogated, a priori definition of 'influence' here. On the other hand we don't have ten years or so to have the pre-meeting meetings in which we might debate some strategies for setting the ground rules of the meetings we would have if we accepted that the term 'influence' actually represented the same thing to both of us... But given that, I expect I'll always hear his voice, even though I haven't read him for twenty years. My swerve against him and all those other ecstatics and mystic Christians -- was to poison his reveries with the quotidian. Thus the weird urban magic of The Incalling or The Course of the Heart.

"What I've always tried to do with my influences is set them at one another like dogs. You can't avoid this anyway -- it's like Jumble Wood down there, it's bedlam, they're all growling and yapping at once 'and you can't quite hear them' -- so you might as well try and use it. Two of my favourite writers when I was young were C S Lewis and William Burroughs. See? Or you might collide Christopher Isherwood with Alfie Bester. You set Rosamund Lehmann at war with the pulp sensibility of Bukowski, under the broad umbrella of Edwardian metaphysical fiction. You try to use the structures from one genre that's 'influenced' you to scaffold the concerns of another. All this would happen anyway -- if you're lucky you can influence it a bit. That's the theory, anyway. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

"I love Arthur Machen: but I love a lot of similar writers too, including WB Yeats, Charles Williams and the vastly under-rated Robert Chambers. (Not to mention Stanley Spencer, even though he wrote with paint.) I think 'influence' is an old-fashioned word. These days we're too self-aware not to be influenced. Only ageing romantics -- locked in their death struggle with the strong precursor, terrified of losing their identity, racked with hypocrisy, jealous of their diminishing intellectual property -- claim to be 'original'. Another completely unexamined word.

"If your fiction is experientially based it will be true and real, whoever you co-opted as a tutor when you were young, whatever influences you swam in since."

### Vampires, Sand and Horses: Tom Holland (1999)

Cairo was much on my mind as I travelled to meet Tom Holland. Not only had I recently finished reading his new novel, The Sleeper in the Sands, which is set there, but I had spent the academic year 94-95 working there, and reading the book had brought back many memories. It had brought back many memories, even given the fact that the book starts in 1922 and moves backwards through time in a series of take-turns narratives as the search for the solution of the life-threatening puzzle is sought... Perhaps my heightened awareness of Egypt, therefore, was to blame for the fact that I even saw similarities between the country and the conurbation in which Holland lives: Brixton. The excruciating noise levels are certainly similar, or were, at least, on this day; the multi-ethnicity, too; not to mention the kerbside arguments (two black kids were rowing about the relative merits of their yo-yos, with one saying, memorably, "Your string looks like doo-doo, man...").

Although Holland has never lived in Egypt, he has visited the country several times ("a fascinating place, absolutely fascinating"). To my surprise, I found that he has also worked abroad as an English teacher, but in India: "a total culture shock." As it happens (and it doesn't happen often when I'm meeting someone for an interview) Holland and I have much in common. Give or take a year, we are approximately the same age. We have both travelled in Egypt a great deal; his real name sounds a little bit like my pseudonym (or the other way around.) But my disconcerting discovery of a Spice Girls CD should not go unmentioned ("it's not mine!" was swiftly offered.) We had brie, we had wine; and we started.

His writing life began, as many do, during the years of education: "When I was at university I wrote several plays, which did quite well. I wrote a ridiculous first novel, around 200,000 words long and I eventually sold it for about £3500. I thought: this is ridiculous; it's miles below the minimum wage." This first-written piece was Attis: a scandalously forgotten and much underrated novel. "Attis was my first novel - and my attempt to write the great novel of the late twentieth century. I put my heart and soul into it," Holland states, "as most first-time novelists do, I'm sure. I wrote it, sort of, with the frame of mind that this might be the only stab at writing that I might ever get. I'm not sure why. So there were all sorts of elements in it: it was a love story, a thriller, a political thriller, a murder mystery...

"If you read it, and then read some of my other work, there are clearly a number of themes that I've followed up on, later." He has a strong opinion of why this might be. "It's possible there's such a thing as creative DNA; that no matter what you write it might always have certain themes and interests with which you've become associated, somewhere in there. They're trade marks; they're give-aways: call them what you want. Do you see? Certain things are always going to turn up - with a particular novelist, or even short story-writer. In one way or another. Attis was about an ancient Rome that was really modern London. It's about Catullus, the love poet."

While finishing up discussing Attis, Holland spoke a sentence that actually defines his entire oeuvre to date: "I'm very interested in historical anachronism." All of Holland's work takes a period of the past, and then removes its bones as though he was filleting fish. What he puts back in place of the bones is a new set of bones: and they fit the frame but they are carrying some sort of disease, maybe, that will leak into the historical present around them. At the very least they will make the historical period that he describes have a strange limp. By way of illustration of this point, Holland describes the process that led to The Vampyre: Being the True Pilgrimage of George Gordon, Sixth Lord Byron (1995) - usually called simply The Vampyre.

"At the same time I'd been doing a PhD on Byron and had been very struck by Byron's profound influence on the vampire myth; and the more I looked at Byron's biography the more it struck me that maybe Byron had been a vampire. So that was the idea behind the first book that got published, The Vampyre. And having written that, of course, I was expected to write something - no pun intended - in a similar vein. The publishers wanted another vampire book." While acknowledging his publisher's requests, Holland was not content to repeat The Vampyre simply under another name and character list. Instead, he looked at some of his early influences and interests: "Well, some of my great childhood enthusiasms had been Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Gray. Cobblestones and Hansom cabs: that sort of thing." And he started work on (in my opinion) his finest novel: Supping With Panthers - and I do not just love it because of its great title!

"What interests me in the supernatural," Holland said, "is its cultural specifics. What I don't like about a lot of vampire fiction, or a lot of horror fiction in general, I suppose, is the idea that you can just transpose the myths of one period onto another, without it being hopeless. Have you seen Ultraviolet? (An ITV show, bringing such issues under a modern spotlight, in the form of fiction, of course.) It's really good! But the problem with vampires in the contemporary is... well, it's like updating Shakespeare. The first matter is: why bother? But the second, and more important, matter is, if you do bother: What do you do with the religious angle? What do you do with the crucifixes, which aren't taken so seriously now? We can't pretend that the past never happened, obviously, or a lot of writers would be out of work. Personally, I've always been interested in seeing what myths mean to specific periods."

By common consensus, the novel that Tom Holland arrived with next was his darkest to date. "Deliver Us From Evil (1997) is set in a period before the word 'vampire' even existed." When I reviewed the book at the beginning of 1998, I used phrases such as "a grim Marlovian parable." The book has old and evil forces arriving at the same historical time as a time of problems with the Commonwealth. A man named Faustus is present, who presents England with a blood-sucking army of the dead...

"Over those three vampire books I was interested in seeing how the myth has evolved. I regard them more as historical novels than horror novels, really. Deliver Us From Evil is set in the 17th Century; there's an awful lot of novels set around the same period, but which suffer from an omniscient 20th Century perspective: that witchcraft didn't actually exist. Which I think is unfair. It's hard to get into the minds of characters if you don't take what they take seriously. So I wanted to take characters and take their fears both seriously and literally."

Tom Holland believes, I think it's fair to say, in the idea of a writer taking responsibility - not only for the work that he has penned (which is fair enough), but also for the way that that same piece of work will make another person feel. For example, he said the following: "When you're writing horror, it's worms and guts, but then of course you have to read it back..." The implication being that an author should be able to deal with his own material in a level-headed manner: but what about those readers who cannot do so? Truly and personally, I don't think this is something that Holland need worry about too much. The sadistic thrill of voyeurism is not something that one might take from his books; few children, for instance, would be able to read and understand his work - they might as well stick to Richard Laymon. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that Holland, having defended his work by saying, "I don't write schlock; I've never written schlock," confessed the squeamish side to his nature. I know of one other notable horror writer who cannot stand the sight of blood, but the idea of writing about what cannot endure in this sense seemed amusing.

"I went to ante-natal class yesterday," Holland said. "We were shown a cutaway of the insides of the woman's body. Ugh! Disgusting! And would I like to cut the umbilical chord? No, thank you. I always go slightly faint at the sight of blood. That's why I think that of the first three books I find Deliver Us From Evil the darkest; it's the most upsetting one to read. It's the cruellest; the most remorseless." It does not cover pregnancy as a big issue, but I take his point: it's a gloomy read.

"The new book - The Sleeper in the Sands - is a logical development from my previous novels." It is also a notable departure from these. "There are some vampiric elements, but the vampire is very specifically a 19th Century literary invention. There are obviously analogies in other cultures, and I was interested in looking at those. There are blood-drinking demons in Arabic mythology... It's about how different cultures see the same raw material and interpret it in different ways. For my first three novels, there was no doubt that within the context of the work, vampires do exist, whereas with The Sleeper in the Sands there is doubt.

"Howard Carter (the real-life explorer and archaeologist whose name Holland has used in a fictional setting) is a rationalist, and although most people would think that any book about Tut-ankh-Amen would be about the curse, that was not my primary concern. In the world of Howard Carter the curse doesn't exist; in the world of the Arabian Nights of medieval Cairo it does exist. In the world of Ancient Egypt it does exist as well. In those worlds, things like that were needed. So, what I hoped to do with Sleeper in the Sands was generate tensions between those three periods - so you're always seeing one period in the context of the other two. You're never absolutely certain, because I'm never saying: this is true, or this is true, or this is true. Most horror novels tend to say: this is what's happened; this is what's happening. I don't want to do that."

The novel, in fact, is analogous to walking on the sand that it describes, or has in the background: every now and then the reader sinks through to another level. I've said before that the structure is close to Charles Nodier's Smarra (and others, of course - but Nodier's the best). We are walking on sand; how dare we assume that every step will support our weight? Every now and then we are bound to be whisked through, down onto another stratum, if you like. As it goes, the reader's possible experience - in this sense - chimes in with that of the man who inspired the entire tale.

"Howard Carter was riding on his horse and the horse's hoof went through the roof of a tomb; and there is the occasional story of a tourist wandering off and sinking into a tomb," Holland said. And he had other plans for The Sleeper in the Sands: "Also I wanted the structure of the book to mirror the structure on an Egyptian tomb. The idea of stories within stories is justified by the setting, because not only is Cairo the home of the Arabian nights, it's also where most of the stories were written....

"We can't have a realistic novel set in Ancient Egypt because we just don't know enough about it. If you try to write a realistic Egyptian novel, you'll have a set of people in Egyptian drag. But what we do know about Egyptian literature is, it was very interested in short stories." It still is, I mentioned; although there are some great and good exceptions (Naguib Mahfouz springs to mind: the Cairo Trilogy and Wedding Song, all highly recommended), many contemporary Arabic writers continue to work in the shorter form. And short means a page or a few pages, not 40. Holland's opinion of his technique was: "It was a justified way of trying to get into the Egyptian mind. The main section in The Sleeper in the Sands, about Akh-en-Aten, is narrated by an Arab who doesn't necessarily know as much about ancient Egypt as we do, so mistakes things in a way that we, the modern reader, particularly given the perspective we've received from Howard Carter, won't do. It's all about perceptions." The same is true of much of his output. "There are adaptations of history and even of the great myths, which are translated into Arabic. In The Sleeper in the Sands, Akh-en-Aten is recast as the hero of a medieval tale. In the end, the important fact I'd like to stress is that Sleeper in the Sands displays a similar relationship of the individual to a moment of time as, for example, Attis does. So I suppose I'm reinforcing my own theory about creative DNA. I wonder what any other writers would think..."

We talked some more about genre. It was the first time that Tom Holland had looked a little uncomfortable. "I think genre is very important," he began \- but slowly. "Genre shouldn't be simply transparent; genre reflects the period it was written in." But what I'd been getting at, really, was how did he see himself as a horror writer; did he think of himself as occupying a particular spot in the marketplace. And this was better; this was something he could grasp on to. He said, "It's not so much that I'm not a horror writer; it's more that I don't believe 'horror' defines it. Which is not to say I'm above it, or anything like that, although I do think a lot of horror is - I'll say it again - rather schlocky. What I'm interested in, to a great extent, is people's attitudes to horror, and how those attitudes are influenced by the times through which the people are living. Horror, I think in my books, is a means to an end, rather than the end itself."

More as a general question as I was preparing to leave than part of the interview, I asked him how things were going. "Fine. Fine," he replied, and then added: "Please put in here that I said 'not big-headedly, not conceitedly' - something like that... I feel good about a number of things at the moment. I have high hopes for The Sleeper in the Sands, and I really want to promote it well. There'll be a book launch in the British Museum (in fact, it was on November 19, 1998) - in the Egyptian Room. I think it will be the first time that the room will be used to launch a non-Museum Press publication. That's quite exciting. And then I've got the next one to work on: a book set in America. I'm taking horse-riding lessons at the moment so that when I go over to do my research I don't end up looking like a complete tinderfoot, a complete novice. Learning to ride properly is a bit scary, though...

### Foreign Hopes and Day-Long Gaps: James Lovegrove (2001)

James Lovegrove has recently published his third and best (so far) solo novel under his own name. It is called The Foreigners - and it is a joy to read.

"The Foreigners took just over a year to write," says the author. "Originally I wrote a short story back in 1995, published in Interzone as 'Giving and Taking', but I didn't get a chance to work the idea up into a novel, as I always intended to do, until 1999. The writing took from January 1999 to February 2000, and I won't lie, it was a bugger of a book to write. I had a hell of a time with it, particularly with the reconciling of its police-procedural plot with the larger ideas I was trying to convey. But it all came together eventually, and I'm pleased with the outcome. I also managed to turn out several short stories during that time, using them as a way of clearing my head whenever I got bogged down in the novel. Short stories can be good that way, like palate-cleansers between courses of a long banquet."

The novel would seem to have strict analogues with the contemporary situation in England - at the very least in England: with the immigrants, the refugees. Says Lovegrove: "I'm not sure The Foreigners is so much about the refugee situation as it is about the interaction between a dominant culture and a subservient one. That's why there are the Xenophobes in the book, a political movement dedicated to reminding everyone that human interests should come before those of the Foreigners. All the Xenophobes are people whose races have at one time or other been enslaved or culturally crushed by an imperial power. The lead Xenophobe, for instance, is a Maori, and into his mouth I put all the arguments against humankind allowing itself to be overtaken by the Foreigners. The fact that he's a bad man doesn't invalidate what he has to say. Sometimes in fiction it's only the villains who tell the truth. The heroes tend to be deluded types, if not downright liars. The good guy in The Foreigners, Parry, is patently such a person. He's unequivocally on the side of good, but he lives in a sort of la-la land and that's why he's a bit crap and doesn't really know what's going on around him - because he doesn't want to know. I suppose that's the horrible truth about life: good people tend to be losers, and the bad guys get away with murder (literally so, in The Foreigners) because they know this. I'm a cheery, optimistic bastard, aren't I?"

Actually, he is. Or he seems so. One is always careful, during the process of interviewing to dissociate throwaway comments from life philosophies. It would seem that Lovegrove is not only on the brink of the sf bigtime, but more importantly, close to outside recognition. "I was at pains to show," Lovegrove points out, "in the shape of the Xenophobes (from The Foreigners), that racism can come even from people who have themselves been racially oppressed. You listen to some of the black extremist leaders in America, Louis Farrakhan for instance, and what they're saying about whites and Jews are in essence the same things that have been said down the years to them about their own race. That kind of tit-for-tat attitude, while understandable, is desperately counterproductive and undermines the advances that other, more progressive and enlightened minority leaders have achieved.

"This is, of course, a thorny and emotionally charged issue, and I was careful to try and present it in such a way that I myself would not be accused, by knee-jerk zombies, of the very defect I am criticising, and if I've managed that successfully, then 'Thank God' is all I can say. In the character of the chief Xenophobe, Toroa MacLeod, I was trying to show up a specific contradiction: that someone can be charming and charismatic and even honest most of the time, and yet still be a bastard. He's the kind of guy who'll happily kick you in but is intelligent enough to need an excuse first, the kind of guy who'll force you to spill his pint so that he can start in on you. In a broader sense the book is also about, as Mr Bowie would have it, loving the alien. The point of every main character coming from a different country is, in part, to demonstrate the obstacles to mutual understanding that need to be surmounted if humankind is ever to achieve any kind of peace with itself. To a certain degree this can be done, but I doubt whether we'll ever really overcome the more fundamental cultural divergences - of language, of philosophy, of outlook - that divide races.

"To give you a personal example, while travelling in Morocco a few years back I was approached time and again by locals who claimed to want to be my friend and just have a chat, but I knew - and they knew I knew - that ultimately all they wanted to do was sell me something. That's just how they are, that's one aspect of their cultural makeup, and I understood that, but at the same time it didn't prevent me from getting increasingly pissed off because I began to feel - as a tourist, a guest in their country - besieged, badgered, bothered. So I was failing to empathise with them, and they, by the same token, were failing to empathise with me. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about, this grinding of interracial cogs at the most basic level, and it's one of the reasons I'm mostly pessimistic about the human race's survival chances. Unless we can all pull together I don't think we're going to make it to the twenty-second century ... and I don't think we can all pull together."

The scribblings for The Foreigners go back to a visit to Thailand. "I did a round-the-world trip back in 1990, blowing my advance from The Hope in one fell swoop, and the final destination on my itinerary was Thailand, and of course there I witnessed the Bangkok sex-industry \- strictly from a safe distance, I assure you - and also the extraordinary financial disparity between the locals and the tourists like me. I'm not by any stretch of the imagination rich, but compared with the average Thai I'm loaded, and to many of them we visiting Westerners are like human cashpoints, there to dispense money. And that was the germ of The Foreigners right there: Earth as a tourist haven for an alien race, us economically dependent on them. The concept then evolved from that, and the dependence became not so much financial as emotional. In the book, the arrival of an alien race on Earth, the Foreigners, has brought global peace and stability, and many people, especially the central character Jack Parry, believe that the Foreigners are essential to maintaining this state of peace and stability. The Foreigners have to be indulged, kept sweet, coddled, protected. Parry believes this so strongly that it has blinkered him to certain uglier truths about humankind. That's the crux of the novel: Parry's blinkeredness. It's his (if I may lapse into Eng. Lit. pomposity for a moment) tragic flaw..."

I mention Kingsley Amis's comment about a good piece of art's simultaneous immediacy and distance, to which Lovegrove reacts favourably. "'Immediate and distant' - I like the paradox of that. Good old 'Kingers'! Yes, I think, in order to succeed, any kind of fantastic fiction has to have that combination of the familiar and the exotic: the reader needs to be taken by the author to somewhere strange in the company of recognisable, realistic characters. When the characters in an SF or fantasy novel starting behaving in a completely unnatural manner, well, that's either very good writing or very bad, mostly likely the latter.

"I think - I would hope - that 'immediate and distant' also applies to The Foreigners in the sense that there are two distinct perspectives to it. On the one hand, heavily foregrounded, we have Parry, who I hope is an acceptably realistic protagonist, in that he is beset by frailties and yet still strives to maintain a positive outlook, which is a state of being I suspect most people can empathise with. On the other hand, there's the book's setting, New Venice, which at one point I liken to Shangri-La and which is also implicitly a kind of Eden, a Camelot, and there are the Foreigners themselves, who are the very epitome of aloofness and unknowability. So you have that contrast between Parry and his surroundings, and it's a physical parallel to the thematic contrast at the heart of the book, which is between human fallibility and the ideal of perfection. I think what the book's trying to say is that we all would like the world to be a better place, maybe even a perfect place, but human nature is fucked up and gets in the way. That was pretty much the argument of The Hope, and to a lesser extent Days, and I suppose it's the loudest-buzzing bee in my authorial bonnet."

The Foreigners is of course the author's continuing artistic pursuance of the solitary, lonely male. This - shall we say? - obsession, or more mildly, interest - also permeates his shorter work. "Maybe it's because I myself am a lonely male. Well, I'm not any more, of course, seeing as how I'm shacked up with a gorgeous and clever and perhaps best of all tolerant woman, but I am by nature a solitary person and I know, like Larkin says, 'how hard it is to be alone'. The odd thing about the job I do is that it demands solitude and outsiderdom, demands shutting yourself away for long periods of time in order to work - but of course at the same time it demands interaction and gregariousness, because if you don't get out and meet people from time to time you'll find yourself pretty quickly disappearing, pen in hand, up your own backside.

"Men are more prone to being lonely individuals. Some of us claim to prefer it, but few I think actually do. I think we like to be unbothered for long periods of time, we like to be left to tend our thoughts (such thoughts as we have), or just do nothing and not get criticised for it. It's necessary for us. But in the end, company is more important. Parry in The Foreigners does get stuck on his own a lot, isolated like Frank in Days, but whereas Frank's isolation is at least partly deliberate, in that his job requires it, Parry is a victim of the choice he made to move to New Venice and become a Foreign Policy Police officer. His isolation is emphasised by the fact that there are so many foreigners - and Foreigners - around him in New Venice. That makes him, of necessity, an introvert, and that's handy from a literary point of view because a lot of the exposition in the novel takes place inside his head. Parry is one of the first characters I've written whom I've got inside of to such an extent. Thinking about it now, that was probably another reason why the book was hard to write - because inside Parry's skin was not always a comfortable place to be. Perhaps I recognised just a little bit too much of myself in him. Though I'm much taller than him, and have more hair (for now). You describe him as 'heartbreaking', and that's true; all I can say is I never intended to be so unfair on him in the book. That was just how the story panned out. He's basically a good man way out of his depth, and instead of him swimming, the story traces his slow, inexorable drowning. Poor bugger."

The Foreigners is science fiction but it is certainly not hard science fiction: and there is no reason at all why it should be, but I ask if Lovegrove is interested in science at all. He answers thus: "I am, have always been and will always be rubbish at science. My brain is just not wired that way. I try to read New Scientist and it all just goes blurp, in-out, nothing sticking. I read popular-science books: the same. I tried Paul Davies's The Mind of God: I finished it and had absolutely no idea what I'd just been reading about. But I do not think science is integral to sf. The term 'science fiction' is a bit of a misnomer, in fact, something we're stuck with just because no one can come up with anything better. And I think some sf authors use science - big weighty concepts, the latest theories, projections of current scientific thought - to cover up a lack of ability with character and dialogue and mood. 'Never mind the fiction, marvel at the wonderful jargonised SCIENCE I'm using.'

"Hard sf is for me exactly that - hard - and so I don't really like it. I certainly don't write it. Can't. For me, using sf-ish techniques presents me with another way of telling a story about what's happening now (and saves me from having to do a lot of research, which I hate). I can skew the world slightly, introduce some mildly futuristic or ectopic element, and use that marginally changed reality to make general points about humanity and the world without having to be answerable to the strictures and dictates of 'real' reality. The world is a big subject. It helps to be able to cordon off a bit of it, create a microcosm, and tell a story set there. That's the main sf technique I use: creating a microcosm and distilling my argument within that microcosm...

"Besides, I don't want to write in any one genre because I don't want to become restricted to any one genre. I just do what I like to do, and if someone else then says, 'Oh, that's sf' or 'Oh, that's horror,' then fine, maybe it is, but ultimately it's just whatever appealed to me at the time and whatever suggested itself to me as suitable material for a story, novel, whatever. The book I'm working on at the moment is nowhere near as science-fictional as The Foreigners, which is probably the closest I'm ever going to get to a 'straight' sf novel. And my next book, if all goes according to plan, won't have any sf elements in it at all, or at least there may be an aspect of it that is about science fiction, but over-all it's going to be mainstream stuff ... although I haven't mentioned this to my editor yet, so let's hope, if he's reading this, he's skipped this section and hasn't noticed. I've no great plan to 'go mainstream', but I think The Foreigners took me as far into one particular genre, sf, as I want to go for the time being. In an earlier interview I described myself as being 'an eccentric cousin' to the genre, and that's something I believe still; I believe also that no author should be confined to writing one sort of fiction if he or she doesn't want to. There is a need among booksellers, and among publishers, and among readers too, I think, the more conservative ones, for an author to be one type of thing and nothing else. Easy to get a fix on. Easy to bracket. But you have to go where you want to go, you have to at least attempt something different, even if only to discover that you don't like it or you're no good at it."

Nor does he have much of a good word to say for himself as an erstwhile book reviewer and critic. "No. I'm a useless critic. When I reviewed for Interzone, I was cantankerous and subjective and irritable and not at all impartial. (The same does not apply to the reviews I did for the Literary Review, and I felt less myself when doing them, forcing myself to take a balanced view and not give vent to my full feelings. But maybe that made for better criticism, I don't know. I certainly think David Pringle, editor of Interzone, was remarkably tolerant of my intolerance.)

"I don't think I'm really made for criticism, and I feel bad whenever I see a book getting a slagging-off in print because I know from experience that a critic's judgement can be coloured by almost anything, from the design of a book's cover to what he or she ate for breakfast that morning. It's a bizarre process, when you think about it: publishers submitting their product for trial-by-opinion. I don't know who came up with the idea, but I'm sure there must be a better one!

"As for criticising my own work, there is no one who could be a harsher judge of what I write than me. I rate myself constantly against some highly volatile notion of what constitutes good writing and invariably I find myself wanting. I'm a relentless re-drafter. Even once a book of mine has been through all the stations of editing and copy-editing and galley-proofing and is in print, I can look at any page of it and see a hundred things I could have done better and would like to rewrite if that were possible. That's probably not a bad attribute to have. It means I'll probably never become complacent."

James Lovegrove is a down-to-earth, hard-working young man with his eye, enthusiastically, on the till. He wants, as any writer would want, to be more successful than the status he currently inhabits would imply. For example, his first novel, or short-story collection (depending on who you are talking to) was simpler to quantify. Lovegrove: "I was preparing The Hope recently for its reissue by Orion Books next spring, and I found that the story I liked the most when I wrote the book - eleven years ago! - was not the one I most like now. I thought 'No Man's Land' kicked butt when I wrote it, but now I see it as mere King pastiche, with a bit of Lovecraft thrown in. Good enough, but all its effects are borrowed, someone else's. I also liked 'Reading Habits' back then, mainly because I was so pleased with the quasi-Philip Larkin librarian narrator, with his bilious, dyspeptic views. I gave the book a bit of a polish-up for its new edition, and while doing so I found 'Carnal Appetite', where the girl eats her boyfriend's fingernail clippings, and then her boyfriend, to be a punchy, efficient little shocker, and I also thought 'Perfect Cadence' had stood up well, shot through as it is with Bradburyisms."

And which are the good stories and which are not so?

"A couple of the later stories aren't so hot," Lovegrove replies. "Despite its episodic format, I wrote the book as a novel, all the stories in the order in which they appear, and towards the end I was concentrating as much on unifying all the disparate themes I had come up with as telling good, solid tales. Therefore the later stories don't stand up on their own as well as the earlier ones. They sacrifice inventiveness for the sake of explication. They're integral to the book, but they're its grubby engine-room rather than its glamorous superstructure. They get us to the finish."

And would The Hope be the author's dark moments made print? He replies: "The Hope is as dark and as bleak as I could make it, and if there were any more irony in the title (and the ship's name) then it would have to carry some sort of government irony warning. I banged the book out in six weeks, with the intention of creating the sickest, most depressing, angriest, nastiest vision of humankind that I could. You might well infer from this that I was not a happy camper at the time, and you would be right. I still have that anger, that despairing outrage, in me now, but it's not as intense as it was when I was 22-going-on-23. How could it be? I'd be in the loony-bin by now if it was. The state of the world still rankles with me, but I've learned to modulate my response to it, to be more analytical and not so aimlessly aggrieved. Having a cooler head means you can hit your targets better, that's what I say. It's either that or I'm just getting old."

The Hope says much about contemporary concerns and conundrums. My beief is that it also referes to hubris, but... "I don't feel The Hope is about hubris so much as about human stupidity (of which hubris is, of course, one manifestation). The Philanthropist who built the Hope had this naïve vision of a better society. Society then proceeds to prove him wrong, by being ignorant and wasteful and vicious and venal. I'm beginning to discover that this is the theme underlying most of what I write: the dream of utopia set against the pigshit-thickness of people which prevents utopia from ever being achievable. It's not a new theme by any means, but it's one that experience time and time again validates. If there's a chance we humans can fuck something up, we will. Whatever we come across - a scientific discovery, a landscape, a work of art, a noble ideal, a good person - you can bet your arse we'll find some way of ruining it. That's just how we are, and perhaps I'm as blinkered a utopian as The Hope's Philanthropist if I think that that'll ever change (or, moreover, that I with my little fictions can change it). Yet you've got to have - here comes that word again - hope, haven't you?"

The Hope represents the disintegration of moral fibre. It describes an existence - however contemporary - in which nothing from the real world matters much. To wit: "The deterioration of the moral fabric of the passengers (not to mention the physical fabric of the ship) was inevitable the moment the Hope was conceived." This is James Lovegrove. "That's why the Philanthropist topped himself. He realised this. At the moment of his triumph, he understood, like Alexander the Great seeing that he had no more worlds to conquer, that it was downhill all the way from here. So he committed suicide, while his creation was still perfect. He saw it was "no good" because, thanks to its passengers and to entropy, it would never be that perfect again. This is what God really should have done after the Creation, if He had had any guts. He should have tied a rope around some celestial light-fitting and kicked the chair away. Maybe the Bible lies. Maybe He did. But, to get back to the question, what went wrong with the Hope is not that it left civilisation behind but rather that it took civilisation on board with it...

"Incidentally, I wrote a thirteenth Hope story called 'The Finite Heart', which never made it into the anthology it was commissioned for, basically because the editor thought it wasn't independent enough of the novel, it didn't stand on its own, but I couldn't see a way of revising it so that it did, not without virtually starting again from scratch, so the whole thing sort of lapsed. It's a good story and I had plans to insert it into the reissue, and I tried and tried to shoehorn it in but it just wouldn't fit. It upset certain symmetries that I (inadvertently, I have to say) installed in the book. So it still awaits publication somewhere. Other than that, I have had, and have, no intention of revisiting The Hope. I'm not hugely into sequels, or for that matter author's universes. When they work, it can be fun. I think King has pulled the concept off well, and I like the way Kim Newman's done it with his short stories, but it's not for me. I'd rather keep doing different things and have them thematically rather than explicitly linked."

The second novel was published in 1997 and is called Days. Concerning a vast - the vastest - shop, it is a novel memorable for many reasons and aspects - not least of which being that it shows an emotional bouyancy not always evident in The Hope: the stratified depths of the leading male, Frank, a security guard therein - but what clings to the memory as much as Frank is the plot-pin of the recurring Days motif. Lovegrove explains:

"The recurring-logo motif throughout Days would seem to indicate that the novel has something to say about homogenisation - the McDonalding, the Disneyfication of the world. But to me that's a side-product, an inevitable one, of the principal theme of the book, which is commerce and the way commercial pressures have taken over almost every aspect of everyday life. It's startling to me how quickly the brand-naming of places and events has become commonplace, how prevalent it is and how little we notice it any more. It's all 'Carling this' and 'Vodaphone that', and those annoying little 'comedy' skits or mini-adverts that bookend TV programmes like Friends and Frasier ... I hate those! Commercial interests have insinuated themselves deeply into everything and we just don't register it any more and that to me is insidious. What next? Will it soon be Virgin London? Microsoft Manchester? 'The Houses of Parliament, brought to you in association with HP Sauce'?

"Here, and more so in America (where I lived for a year and a half), everyone is constantly trying to fuck everyone else over for a profit, and it was this rather obvious but nonetheless pertinent truth that I was attempting to satirise in Days. Not just our obsession with money (and I freely admit, I'm as obsessed with it as the next person) but our utter irrationality where money is concerned; money, and of course its ultimate purpose, which is the buying of stuff. Hence the 'shopping mauls' in Days, where customers go crazy over bargains, fighting tooth-and-nail over some essentially useless item simply because it's there and it can be purchased. When you step back and look at it, yes, we need to obtain certain products to eat, wear, live in and entertain ourselves with, but around these basic necessities a huge quasi-religion has developed, ghastly gargantuan temples have been built, and a whole ugly ethos of customer/retailer has arisen whereby the person of each side of the equation is reduced to nothing more than a vector for money, giver or receiver, as though money is just some virus we infect and re-infect one another with. So that's what Days is really: the foregoing rant, spread out over four hundred pages, with guns and jokes."

But back to Frank, a hollowed rather than hollow man, who is on his last day for the company in the book. "Frank sets out at the beginning of the book with the avowed intention that today is going to be his final day as a store detective at Days, a decision he has arrived at after thirty-three years of working at the place. He stands to lose the prestige and the material wealth his job has brought him. He stands to gain his freedom. But as the day goes on, Frank learns that the armour of anonymity that makes him so good at his job cannot shield him from the incursion of emotions such as loyalty and love. He has spent most of his life in a self-imposed cocoon, and the freedom he is looking for entails the shedding of this cocoon, a willingness to open himself up to the outside world and all the pain it can potentially bring.

"All the names in Days, except perhaps those of the walk-on characters, are significant. There's the Day brothers, of course, all named after the days of the week, and their father Septimus, whose name reflects (and is perhaps one of the many contributing factors to) his obsession with the number seven. Frank, as his name would suggest, is sincere, yes, inwardly, but he's also, in his speech, anything but frank - he has trouble communicating and often says everything except what he means. The three what I call B-list characters have names that constitute a little literary in-joke. The action of Days takes place over the course of a single day, and Bloom, Shukhov and Dalloway are the surnames of the main protagonists of three classic novels that also take place over the course of a single day: respectively Ulysses, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Mrs Dalloway. I like little games like that. In The Foreigners, which has a musical leitmotif, every surname I use is the surname of a composer. (And, to underscore the book's central idea of foreignness, every character hails from a different country.) I don't think that it makes any difference whether the reader is aware of these references, but I put them in so as to add another layer to the cake, another level of texture. It helps keep me amused through the writing, too."

James Lovegrove has also worked on several projects with Peter Crowther. The longest and most fully-formed is undoubtedly their collaboration, Escardy Gap: a Bradburyesque, kind-of Twilight Zone-y tale of a muscle of America rarely flexed.

Is the Bradbury connection valid?

"Well, yes, absolutely. Bradbury I first encountered when I was 11, when a teacher read us 'The Veldt' in class one day. This was amazing to me for two reasons: 1) we were being read science fiction at school, and 2) the teacher was, by implication, putting sf on the same level as 'straight' literature. Up until then I'd always been conscious that there were two strata of fiction, literature and 'trash', and sf was definitely in the latter category. And 'The Veldt' is a stonkingly good story, of course. So all at once I had to shift my worldview, pretty seismically. Then, during my teens, I hit a real Bradbury phase, where I charged through every one of his books I could find, then went out and found some more. I knew that the stories are sentimental, sometimes cloyingly so. I knew that, content-wise, some of them are gossamer-thin. It was the language that hooked me. The dance of the words. The ache that Bradbury can conjure up with just a few light simple brushstrokes.

"As with all adolescent passions, it's a past thing now, a burned-out pleasure. I read his new stuff and I like it lots, but, through no fault of Bradbury's and lots of fault of mine, it doesn't sing to me any more. Back then, Bradbury's work seemed almost my exclusive secret, something I owned that no one else could understand or share in. But I also knew that Bradbury was the key to making my liking for sf somehow more acceptable, not just to myself but to other people; to making it not so much of a furtive pleasure. So that's why I wrote a thesis about him, which formed part of my Oxbridge entrance exam (back then you had to sit special exams when applying to Oxford or Cambridge). It was something of a risk, I have to admit. I can't think many dons at Oxford had read Bradbury, or even knew who he was. But I had the encouragement of a schoolteacher who was a Bradbury fan and, for probably quite selfish reasons, I wanted to proselytise about Bradbury. Bradbury had convinced me that sf could be better than 'trash', could aspire to great art. And that's pretty much my take on all genre fiction now. Much of it's crap, but there are jewels amid the junk, opals among the ordure, that are as beautiful and as lasting any of the best that mainstream literature has to offer."

And the aims of the Escardy Gap project were what?

"To make vast sums of money, retire on the proceeds and live the rest of our lives without ever having to work again! But as that didn't work out, I'll have to say that our aim, to begin with, was simply to collaborate on a Bradburyesque short story, since it was through discovering a shared admiration for Bradbury that Pete and I got to know each other and became friends. So we started, and eighteen months and 180,000 words later we had a bloody great novel which we eventually, mainly through Pete's persistence, found a home for at Tor Books in the US and, subsequently, Earthlight here in the UK. During the writing, the book evolved from a tribute to Bradbury, with its explicit echoes of Something Wicked This Way Comes, to more of an exploration of the act of writing fiction and the effects on the writer of his or her imagined creations. Plus it's a big, splurgey horror novel containing some of the nastiest imagery and purplest prose that I certainly - I can't speak for Pete - have ever committed to paper. And, above all, it's meant to be fun. It's not meant to be taken too seriously. The horror is undercut by humour throughout, and I think humour in any genre work, in fact in any kind of fiction, is essential. I've just finished reading Moorcock's Wizardry and Wild Romance, which is an excellent survey of the fantasy genre, and in one chapter he inveighs against the po-facedness of much fantasy fiction, saying, in effect, that it's wit that distinguishes decent writing from dull and that, in his view, it tends to be the most serious and humourless authors who do well during their lifetimes. I don't know if that last bit is true, but as far as I'm concerned it's important for my enjoyment of a book to be amused by it, and that's what I try to do when writing: keep my tongue at least within the vicinity of my cheek. So, while far from bring frivolous, Escardy Gap does have its lighter moments. And some people really love that book. It made SFX's recent reader-voted list of the top fifty sf/fantasy books of all time, which surprised a lot of people, not least me. I'm pleased to have been involved with a book that has had such an effect on people. Perhaps there are a lot more Bradbury fans out there than I realised."

And as for the mooted sequel? "Well," says Lovegrove, "we've written about 20,000 words of one, but there are several reasons why it might not see the light of day for a while. First off, I'm not sure how Pete feels about this, but I wonder whether Escardy Gap actually needs a sequel. Secondly, we're both of us pretty busy with our own projects. Pete's a prolific short-story writer, as I'm sure you're aware, and has had two collections out recently, The Longest Single Note and Lonesome Roads, both of which I don't need to recommend to anyone who loves well-written scary stuff, plus there's a third collection on its way and he's been commissioned to write two novels (at least two - it may be three) so he's going to be a busy bunny for a while.

"As for me, well, I'm always thinking at least one novel ahead, so I've got the one I'm working on now, Untied Kingdom, plus the one after that, which I think is going to be called Play, and that'll take me to the end of 2001 if things go according to plan. And thirdly, Pete and I collaborated on a chapbook called The Hand That Feeds which was nominated for a Stoker Award, although didn't make the short-list, and we have plans for the characters from that - an occult group known as the Six who live and operate in post-WW2 San Francisco - to feature in at least another five stories that will together constitute a full-length novel. So if anything's going to happen any time soon, it won't be an Escardy Gap sequel, it'll be a Six novel. And I doubt I can be any vaguer than that, but I can try if you want."

Now that we have discussed the various projects to which James Lovegrove has given his name - and time, and effort, and expertise - it seems time to ask him to judge a beauty contest and beauty context winner.

"I hope you're not asking me to rank my novels in order of preference," he says, "since that's a bit like asking a father to say which of his children he likes best and which least. All the books I've done so far have different and distinct resonances for me. The Hope I wrote without really having a clue what I was doing. It's my least self-conscious, most unpremeditated work, and therefore probably the purest piece of right-brain creativity I can lay claim to. Like most first-time novelists I didn't know the rules and the boundaries, and what came out was as much a surprise to me as to anyone else. It's a strange, stunted little fellow, but in spite of its many peculiarities, and in fact because of them, I have great affection for it.

"Escardy Gap is a curious chimera, and I'm still not sure whether many of the parts of it that I like, or any of them, are by me or by Pete. I do know that writing it was the most fun I've had on paper, although some of it was arse-achingly tough to get right, especially the ending. Pete has a much better handle than I do on writing stuff that is aimed squarely at reader-enjoyment. He's also got a much darker sensibility than me, but then I do have this tendency to get a little sententious and moralistic in my fiction - a bit of the old Victorian 'this can't just be fun, this has to be educative and improving too' - and in Escardy Gap, thanks to Pete's influence, there's very little of that.

"Days came at a crucial time for me, since I was close to giving up on writing as a career. I was at the point where I felt that if I didn't get something right, and get it right soon, then I ought to give thought to opportunities in, I don't know, taxidermy or investment banking or something. I wrote the book while I was living in Chicago, away from all that was familiar, and I think that sense of dislocation helped. It jump-started the old creative juices. Certainly I felt that with Days it was shit or get off the pot, and I'm glad - and relieved! - that it worked. If it hadn't, I wouldn't be talking to you now.

"As for The Foreigners, it was an act of consolidation for me. I felt the pressure was on after Days was so well-received, and I decided I wanted to do something a bit different, both more conventional and at the same time tampering with convention. I also wanted to do something very like Bester and Dick. I think its one drawback is that it's quite lengthy. I have this desire to produce concise, pithy little novels, 250 pages at most, but it seems - probably the influence of King rearing its head here - that I can't do that. The Foreigners is far from being a Stand-like bloater, but it's way longer than I anticipated.

"I'm finding the same with the book I'm currently working on, Untied Kingdom. At the outset I swore to God I would make it 300 pages tops, but now I'm a quarter of the way in and it looks like I'm going to overshoot that target considerably. Still, that's what editors were put on this Earth for, eh?"

Fair comment.

### Bad Dreams: Kim Newman (1998)

The prolific Kim Newman has published over twenty books, including novels, short story collections, critical volumes about film, and a good deal of pseudonymous work under the name of Jack Yeovil. His latest, and most unpredictable, work will appear later in 1998 and will be called Life's Lottery. In the following interview Kim Newman speaks first:

'Like many kids, when I was about three or four, I wanted to be a fireman, and that was quite obsessive. Then when I was seven or eight, I decided to be an actor. I've no idea why. When I was about eleven (this is one of those big influential moments) I saw the old Bela Lugosi version of Dracula on television, and that impressed me. I wanted to be an actor like Bela Lugosi, but I then wrote a rudimentary and thank-God-I've-lost-it play version of Dracula, with the idea that I would star in it. It was a page long. Over the next two years, my ambitions to act were channelled into writing about it instead. I attempted a novel about vampires when I was about fourteen...

'Living in a very small village in Somerset, with all of my friends living in the town nine miles away where I went to school, I was on my own quite a lot. Which is a common thread in the childhoods of writers. I was one of those kids who always had a book on the go, and had the time to write while the other kids used to go out and play. That time allowed me, as a teenager, to write all the really dreadful stuff out of my system, which all writers have to do. By the time I was at University and having to think about a career, I'd been writing so much, and it was so much a part of my life, that I didn't consider it a career option. I spent a few years not doing much, although I was still writing for amateur theatre.

'The rock group I was in, which started as an R&B group, then became a sort of comedy group. The things that influenced us were things from a long time before - Spike Jones, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, Monty Python. We thought we were funny. This may be the great problem of my generation: we thought we were funny. Some of the theatrical pieces were interesting, although very different from the studied avant garde work that Clive Barker was doing. Typical was a musical I wrote called The Gold-Diggers of 1981, which was knockabout with a few stabs at contemporary politics. But it was much more informed by Hope and Crosby. A few scenes emerged, distantly, in my pseudonymous novel Drachenfels.'

Kim's first published short story was 'Dreamers'. '"Dreamers" was a spin off from what became my first novel, The Night Mayor, which I drafted as a novella in 1982. The novella was rejected by Interzone magazine but my fourth submission was accepted. It's a tiny idea that came up when I was writing The Night Mayor, which I realised wouldn't fit in. So I wrote that and didn't get round to finishing The Night Mayor for another five or six years!'

When he did, however, the book was well received. It drew heavily on Kim's love and knowledge of films, being set, in part, in a 1940s film noir dreamscape, which has been created as a hiding place by a 21st century criminal, and partly in the future itself. 'The Night Mayor relates to a morass of popular and high culture that I'm assuming my readership shares.' The book was often described as being part of the then-new cyberpunk school of science fiction, which had been popularised by William Gibson's Neuromancer.

'My first stories just caught the beginnings of what they called cyberpunk. And looking at them, they share the concerns of cyberpunk, but very few of the mannerisms. Maybe if I'd been writing two or three years later, I would have been influenced by William Gibson. As it was, I was influenced by the people who influenced William Gibson: Philip K Dick and Alfred Bester, as well as Raymond Chandler. The problem with trends and movements is you have a few very good writers and a lot of not-very-good ones following around. As a critic I'm interested in genres; as a writer I wait on the outside.'

From science fiction Kim next moved to horror. 'Bad Dreams was originally written as a film outline. There were elements of the novel that I probably wouldn't have done if it hadn't been for that, but I'm not unhappy with them. For instance, when the original brief was given to a group of us, one of the rules was the leading woman had to be an American. Bad Dreams was a fast, nasty horror novel that became as much about the American woman's relationship with her family... Isn't that always the way with writers? "It's a story about werewolves, but really it's about relationships!" When it was first commissioned, it was a Nightmare on Elm Street rip-off: that's what they wanted. A woman, a monster... a kind of dreamlike reality where strange things happen to her. What I tried to do that Elm Street didn't do was make it one big dream, rather than every ten minutes go to sleep, get into another scary thing, wake up...'

Although Kim states, 'The main purpose of horror fiction is to be frightening and I'm not sure how frightening my horror stories are,' The Quorum is his best and scariest book. 'The problem with genre fiction is it's always characterised by the median, the average; by which I'm not referring to quality but to expectation. Your average horror novel relies on an incursion of the supernatural into the lives of ordinary people. The Quorum is not quite like that. It's a book in which nobody dies. It's the only novel of mine in which magic is a major theme. I'm not sure it's comfortable being a horror novel.'

It uses the Faust legend, but with a relevant contemporary twist. 'Because I have no particular religious background, the whole idea of selling your soul was complicated for me. The Quorum is one of those very few ideas I've had where I've woken up in the middle of the night with the title and exactly what the book is about. I knew one day I would write a book in which three people sell somebody else's soul to the Devil, which is a very 1980s idea. But most people would do what they do.'

The Quorum, in this sense and in others, has connections with Kim's next project. 'The book I've got coming out this year is called Life's Lottery and it's an experimental novel. It's structurally modelled on those Choose Your Own Adventure novels that were popular in the early '80s. "You meet a monster in a corridor, and if you decide to fight it you turn to page 100, and if you decide to run away you turn to page 98." I've applied that structure to a literary novel. So it's written in the second person; you are the lead character who is an ordinary bloke. I noticed that my earlier books were about people who were somehow notable, famous. They're doing important things. So I decided to write a story about a guy who's the son of a bank manager and who later will probably work in a bank. At various points in his life he has choices to make and you get to make the choice and follow up the scenes. Of course you're supposed to try both, and read both alternatives. So the book has one beginning and a multitude of endings. It's very complicated as you travel down the branches. Sometimes you're faced with what-girl-will-you- marry? choices, or what-job-will-you-take? choices. Sometimes it's: will you take tea or coffee? So very trivial things can lead to great changes. And sometimes apparently huge things can be dead ends.

'It's a very difficult book to do; it has a lot of technical challenges that I hope people will appreciate. It's particularly difficult to write neutrally, to write in the second person. The reader has to supply a great deal of the character for the male lead. If you give someone a choice between doing the right thing and the wrong thing and that person chooses the wrong thing, that makes the chooser a bad person, not the character. And it means in the next section the character is unpleasant, because he chose to do the unpleasant thing. But the whole moral issue is quicksandy. What is the right thing to do? That's a question I asked in The Quorum. Of all my books, Life's Lottery is closest in tone to The Quorum. In fact, the narrative voice - the person talking to you - is Derek Leech, the devil character from The Quorum. And it intersects a bit with the plot of The Quorum. The lead character is at school with the people from The Quorum. There are even a few of the same settings... It's due out around November, but there's still some work to be done on it...'

Busy as ever, Kim is already working on the project that will follow Life's Lottery. 'I've done a draft of another in the Anno Dracula series, which is called Dracula Cha-Cha-Cha. It's set in Italy in 1959 and it's kind of like La Dolce Vita. There's an element of those Italian murder mysteries, like an early Dario Argento. Complicated crimes. But because the last book, The Bloody Red Baron, was quite a grim book, about the war with lots of people dying - it was very male - I've decided this is funnier, looser, a more romantic book. The three lead viewpoint characters are women, and there's a bit of Three Coins in a Fountain in there as well. And as in the other books, there are characters who have been borrowed from other literature. In this book I'll be doing something I don't usually do, and that's describe the clothes they're wearing. In the second draft that's something I'll deal with a little bit; I'll do some research into what was fashionable in 1959... At the moment I'm pleased with it, but it's only in first draft. Since I work on the word processor, it's hard to say how many drafts I would do. I think in terms of first draft and revisions, so that's essentially two drafts. I probably print out twice.'

Lastly, Kim Newman offered a few comments on one of the genres he works in: horror. 'The question horror is best suited to address is: What is Evil? That's what some of my books address over and over. But implied in that is: What is Good? Horror, as a genre, has to deal with the fact that a lot of people don't like it. Nobody says, "Oh, I don't read comedy. I don't watch comedy films." They accept the fact that there are some things they find funny and some things they don't. Maybe you like Ealing comedies; maybe you like Benny Hill. Doesn't matter: you'll watch what you want. But people do say, 'I wouldn't read anything that's frightening; I don't watch horror films.' And someone saying that is saying, "No, I don't like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I also don't like Algernon Blackwood's ghost stories." When people say they don't read horror, I don't tend to believe them. Because everybody read The Silence of the Lambs; everybody has read A Christmas Carol. Everybody saw Psycho. So what they're saying is the equivalent of saying, 'I don't like comedy.' Everybody likes some kind of comedy, and I think if you get down to it, everybody likes some kind of horror.

An early version of this interview appeared in the October 1996 issue of Writers' Monthly. The updated version, with additional material, appears for the first time here.

An Interview with David Pringle (1998)

by David Mathew

[Editor's note: this interview took place in 1997; David Pringle subsequently moved on from editing Interzone in 2004.]

The editor of Britain's most successful and long-lasting magazine of science fiction, Interzone, lives in Brighton and works hard to maintain the magazine's credibility and appeal.

For fifteen years Interzone has been the magazine to aspire to for new British SF writers, but this does not mean that David Pringle has been able to rest on his laurels, as he explained while also describing the magazine's origins.

"I woke up eventually at about the age of thirty, realising that you have to do things to make your dreams come true, rather than just waiting for it to come and land in your lap. So, together with a bunch of friends in the SF world (I was active in going to SF conventions, contributing to fanzines and so on) we laid plans to start our own magazine. There were actually eight editors in the beginning, in 1982."

How did the magazine manage financially in the early days? "I helped run a science fiction convention in Leeds in 1982 which made a profit - it wasn't mean to, it was a non-profit exercise - but we budgeted in such a way that we ended up with about £1,300. It seemed more money in those days than it would today. And the committee voted to use this money for a science fiction magazine.

"That was all the capital we had to begin with. It was a struggle. But more importantly than money was that jointly between us we had credibility, and various contacts, one of whom was Malcolm Edwards, who is now top editor of HarperCollins; at that time he was already working as an editor at Gollancz, one of the big SF publishers. His expertise was very useful. I had been reviews editor of Foundation magazine and I became editor of Foundation as well for a while. Between us we had all this experience of one thing or another - mostly low-scale voluntary sort of things."

Interzone started to grow. "The circulation went from a few hundred to - eventually - a few thousand, but it took ten years to get there. It has never, in commercial terms, been a success. We applied for an Arts Council grant, and got it, which helps us survive. But in terms of having survived for fifteen years and having launched the careers of many writers we have been a resounding success. I'm boasting a bit, but we did get a Hugo Award..."

Having launched from ground zero the careers of many authors in the science fiction field, does David Pringle regard the same authors' later works with an extra interest or with pride? "It's not proper to feel too proprietorial! They've made their own success; everybody has to be published somewhere first!

"We started in the first place as a showcase for new, mainly British - but not exclusively British - writers to get published and start building up a bit of a reputation. And I'm delighted to be able to make the claim that we've done just that - for several dozen writers. Geoff Ryman and Scott Bradfield in the early days, to Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan and Nicola Griffith. But I can't claim that the novels these people are writing would not have been written without Interzone: that would be going too far."

With reference to possible writers of the future, what does Pringle hope to receive from a new unsolicited manuscript?

"The editor ideally wants everything. He wants it to be beautifully written, moving and profound, full of original ideas. But we settle for the fact that we can't get everything. We sometimes get things that approach the ideal, but not as often as we'd like. Any editor of any magazine wants people who can write; people who have some command of language. We want knowledge.

"Theodore Sturgeon defined science fiction as 'knowledge fiction', taking the root of the word 'science' which comes from the Latin. Which is not to say that everybody who writes science fiction has got to be a physicist or a biologist, although some are. It just helps to know something. History, for example, if you're not into the hard sciences.

"One of our writers, Eugene Byrne, is an historian, and that shows. It could be stamp collecting. Train spotting! It may be possible in some mainstream fiction to not know much about anything, but the sort of fiction that science fiction is does rather depend on the writer knowing something and using it imaginatively...

"The most frustrating are the bog-standard science fiction stories that people send in. People who have obviously read a fair amount of science fiction, but the more obvious types: Isaac Asimov or Arthur C Clarke. And they don't show any particular knowledge thereafter. They're just repeating ideas, situations."

Has his criteria for choosing stories changed at all over the years? "Editors don't change. Or maybe I'm not experienced enough to know... Intellectually, my view of what science fiction is might have changed a bit; I used to be more snobbish about it. But that wouldn't affect what stories we picked for Interzone."

David Pringle is only one of a quorum of story-readers. He receives about fifty manuscripts a week ("amazingly steady since 1988") and although he makes the final decision, he depends on the opinions of his colleagues to make some choices on his behalf.

"We have some assistant editors who read the slush-piles and might say, 'This new writer has really got something.' Not very often, I'm afraid to say!"

Being a futuristic magazine, are submissions in a technically advanced format encouraged? "Not at all! E-mail submissions are not welcome, I'm afraid; it takes money to download them. And if we want to pass it around among ourselves, how do we do it? One of our assistant editors doesn't even possess a computer, never mind being online. So it's got to be on paper."

Does Pringle have an average working day? "The big advantage about being self-employed is you dictate your own practices. I have to do a lot because I'm running Interzone with help, but with nobody else working anything like full time or drawing a salary, or anything like that. So the onus is on me, right from opening the post in the morning to making phone calls in the evening. I work any and all times, really. I don't have a set routine; I'm sometimes at my word processor at one o'clock in the morning."

Does this create a lot of pressure? "Not in itself, but the fact that Interzone doesn't make much money, and therefore I'm doing freelance editing jobs on the side - that's where the pressures come from: trying to juggle these commitments, such as The St James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers with Interzone, which is a full-time job in itself..."

David Pringle talks a little bit about the St James book. "I did a previous book on the same lines, The St James Guide to Fantasy Writers, so I learned - about half of the contributors to that gave me trouble. I dropped a lot of them. This time I went to people who performed well on the first one."

It is clear that despite David Pringle's forays into other editorial sidelines, science fiction is his true love. "SF is very important. Most people think it's Doctor Who and Star Trek, though even Doctor Who and Star Trek have lots to be said for them. I'm not knocking them; it's just that some people think it's no more than that - that it's semi-kids' stuff. But in fact it can be George Orwell's 1984 or it can be the sort of writing that modern-day serious writers like Ursula Le Guin or J G Ballard produce. They're all writing about the future, but of course they can't get away from today, however much they may be pretending to be getting away from today. That said, I don't like stories which are obviously allegories - nobody does! Who's got a good word to say for allegory?"

Is it fair to say then that he approves of genres, whether or not they are a fact of publishing life? Many people, for example, believe that books should be published as books and not further sub-divided. Pringle is unsure.

"Writers tend to be more agin genres than critics, and I'm more of a critic than a writer. I've got mixed feelings. There's genre in the publishing sense, ie dictated by booksellers, publishers, reviewers, even the readers to a certain extent. But there's also genre in the literary sense - the idea that goes back to Aristotle at least. So I've got every respect for genre in the literary sense.

"In the marketplace, it's obviously a more crass and irritating thing, but some writers work well within those parameters. They work well as a thriller writer, or a science fiction writer... But writers should be able to stretch their wings. I do believe it's terribly unfair that some are kept down by the fact they're perceived as merely a science fiction writer, or merely anything else."

Favourite writers? "Steve Baxter and Greg Egan I've mentioned already; Paul McAuley, Kim Newman, J G Ballard is a favourite, but my tastes are fairly catholic, I hope. When I'm not reading for Interzone or for another project, I tend to read non-fiction. I'm not reading many modern novels. One day I hope to catch up... Sometimes you think it would be great to have a six-month holiday and not have to read a word of SF, but most of the time it doesn't feel like that. I'm getting paid for a hobby. When I get fed up and frustrated it's usually to do with the other things. Deadlines, et cetera."

Are there any writers that he would still love to publish that he has been unable to snag? "It's nice to find the new ones! I tend to rely on my assistant editors to help me towards that end. They often find new ones for me. As for established writers, it would be nice from a commercial point of view - or a prestige point of view - to get names like Doris Lessing or Martin Amis, or whoever else. But people like Amis are very conscious of: would it be right to be seen in this venue? Maybe not Doris Lessing, who has a lot less to lose at her age!"

The last great subdivision within science fiction - cyberpunk, as characterised by movies such as Blade Runner and the books of William Gibson, among many others - is still going strong. What might the editor guess to be the next big movement? "Well, you only get one these big waves through SF every fifteen or twenty years. Maybe slightly more often than that. There was the feminist wave in the 70s, and you had the New Wave in the 60s, with Michael Moorcock, and so on. Then cyberpunk (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling). Maybe we're due for another one, but I don't know what it will be. No one ever does.

"There always have been sub-genres. Alternative world stories are quite big at the moment, with people like Kim Newman, and indeed by outsiders - Robert Harris' Fatherland. That's a sort of science fiction that's been around since the nineteenth century. Setting your imaginative world in a place where history has gone differently is just as valid an exercise as doing it in the future, or on another planet. You could even make a scientific case if you believe in the existence of alternative universes..."

And what are his opinions of fantasy? "Their days are not over! Look at the groaning shelves of them! Sub-Tolkein stuff; people like Robert Jordan and Tad Williams sell hugely. Outsell most SF writers by a mile...

"Fantasy is good for your psyche. You can see the timeless appeal that was probably as valid ten thousand years ago as it is now. Possibly because we do live in a heavily urbanised world, it works as a pastoral almost. Everything about fantasy is ancient; it's a paradox. In terms of the mass-market paperback in the Western World, it's only since the 1960s that there has been a label called fantasy, following Tolkein's paperbacks.

"In that sense it's a young genre, but in a literary sense it's as old as the hills. Most genres tend toward fantasy romance, even SF. But what makes SF SF is something else: satire. A comment on society, as Northrop Frye has it in Anatomy of Criticism."

David Pringle's major venture into the world of commercial fiction appreciation (as opposed to fiction itself) was the now-defunct magazine, Million, which unfortunately folded after fourteen issues. With the benefit of hindsight, why might that have been?

"Million was my other pet hobby. I made mistakes; I was feeling a bit cocky. Interzone had been successful, and with Million I invested too much money too quickly. I shouldn't have started with a bi-monthly; I should have started with a quarterly. And the colour covers: I really should have started it as a fanzine. But the main reason it didn't succeed is we're talking about a very different kettle of fish. Interzone is primarily a fiction magazine, and Million was a magazine that commented on popular culture, popular fiction. And I suppose I discovered that the world didn't need such a magazine...

"Funnily enough, someone else started a magazine up during the period when Million was going - with a big glossy splash, lots of publicity. Bestseller: I don't know if anyone remembers that. Produced about three issues.

"Now they must have spent tens of thousands of pounds - and they failed, even with all that promotion behind them. And they were doing essentially the same thing. Personally, I think Million did it better! At least we achieved fourteen issues."

One day, might the magazine be revived? David Pringle laughs. "Only if I get rich \- ie if I win the Lottery. Very unlikely."

For now we will all have to be content with the finest science fiction magazine on the market.

### Phil Rickman (1998)

One piece of advice often given to first-time novelists and writers in general is 'know of which you write'. Speak from experience. Phil Rickman is one writer who followed this suggestion to the letter for his first book, Candlenight, in 1991, and who continues to do so to this day. Phil Rickman worked for many years as a journalist for Radio Wales and Radio 4, one of his documentaries, Aliens, earning him the award for Wales Current Affairs Reporter of the Year in 1987. This documentary formed the factual backbone for Candlenight (1991).

'Aliens related to a period in the mid-eighties when a lot of people in England were buying up land very quickly in certain parts of Wales. The land was cheap and it was assumed that you could make a killing. But there were two major factors that were not foreseen. The first was, the land was of poor quality which meant that the six acres that you thought you were getting for a bargain turned out to be a bad investment; you needed one hundred acres to make the move profitable. And the second thing, which inspired the documentary and then the book, was not all of these English people were welcomed by the Welsh. There was a strong feeling of invasion, of being invaded. And the English felt unaccepted, unwanted. Unloved, I suppose. An odd statistic I uncovered at the time was that 60% of the calls the Samaritans were receiving were from English people in Wales who simply couldn't handle it anymore. Personally, we moved to Wales as journalists and I didn't encounter that lack of acceptance; that's never really been a problem.'

When did Phil Rickman start writing, and how did he make the leap from journalism to fiction? 'These things always go back to childhood, I think; that won't be any great surprise to anybody. I was re-writing episodes of The Famous Five at the age of six. Moving from non-fiction to fiction was more complicated. Carol, my wife, and I were driving one day and Carol has the advantage of not being copiously carsick whenever we drive anywhere. Always a bonus. She wanted something to read for the journey, so I gave her the first fifty or so pages of Candlenight. I also gave the manuscript to Alice Thomas Ellis to read and she liked it a lot.' (Alice Thomas Ellis is the pseudonym of Anna Haycraft, the widow of Colin Haycraft, who was at the time the Managing Director of Duckworth. Mrs Haycraft was the fiction editor.) That was a real boost to my confidence in one way but in another I felt, oh, she's just being nice; she's just being kind. But I've got her to thank because a year later, Candlenight still did not have a taker. One publisher sent it back saying, with apparent disdain: but its got funny bits in it. You can't have a horror novel with funny bits in it. Well, go back and read Stephen King! It was Alice Thomas Ellis who suggested Duckworth. I was suddenly that old cliché: the one year overnight success.

'The journalism helped, no doubt about that; if nothing else it gave me the taste for certain topics and subject matters that I would later re-visit in the fiction. Plus, I suppose writing journalism I interviewed - God! - hundreds of people. Hundreds. Now that's been left in my blood: the compulsion to go out and research - and I mean research \- a novel. To talk to people. To get a feel.'

Although Phil Rickman in his fiction leans more toward the macabre than to bloody pyrotechnics, and to the weird rather than the scary, until very recently he has been marketed as a down-the-line horror writer. Has he been content with this? 'It's not so much that I feel that my previous novel-covers misrepresented the work inside as I feel that I'm very difficult to market. I don't fit into a genre, but I got horror covers. That's categorisation for you. Categorisation has now got so bad that publishers will actually publish a writer as being like another writer. Insidious! "In the style of Patricia Cornwell" - and you get these very dark covers with forensic details on them... I don't feel like a horror writer; I don't feel I fit into any category particularly - not even "supernatural suspense", which is apparently the latest sub-genre.' Rickman is pleased with the way that his most recent novel was promoted. 'The Chalice (1997) was the first of my novels whose packaging I was entirely happy with. Macmillan (his publishers) and I really worked on that one.'

Subtitled 'a Glastonbury ghost story' and described as 'an absolutely awesome supernatural thriller of the pre-millennial decade', The Chalice - like all of the author's work - dabbles in the occult and mixes non-fictional current affairs with a complex, rewarding plot. The Chalice is a huge tome set in the West Country town rumoured to be where the Holy Grail is now located. It is a novel held together by inter-character tensions (be they sinister or romantic) and the plot takes on the themes of corruption and invasion (a popular one with Rickman) as well as examining the modern-day clashes between Christianity and paganism; it then goes on to examine the inevitability (in a Yin-Yang universe) of there being an anti-Grail \- the Dark Chalice of the title.

True to form, the novel came as a result of some earlier journalistic work: in this case a two-year quest for the Holy Grail, a search that ended six years ago with Rickman holding 'a fragment of a wooden cup, partly blackened and obviously ancient. Its guardian let me touch if only for a moment before snatching it away'. For a radio programme Rickman started the project 'in a decaying mansion near the West Wales coast' but is unable to say where, geographically, he touched the relic: 'Before my wife and I were allowed in to see the cup, we and the producer of the programme signed a solicitor's document guaranteeing that the location would remain secret.' Of course, Rickman cannot but deny the possibility (some might say likelihood) that the relic might not have been the actual Holy Grail; as he puts it, 'Whether the cup is the actual vessel used at the Last Supper and allegedly brought to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea - is anybody's guess.'

The research that Rickman did for the novel obviously involved some time in Glastonbury itself; here he was told that a common misconception among believers of mysticism is that Glastonbury will be an easy place to live because of the aura that purportedly emanates from it. The truth is that the city has a high rate of business-, marriage-, relationship- and health- breakdowns. Phil Rickman also tells the story of how his printer would not print out a particular section of the manuscript; anything else was fine, but he had to try again and again with this one section as the only print to emerge was in the form of symbols and nonsense...

Before exploring the more mystical qualities of places like Wales and Glastonbury, and the Pennines in The Man in the Moss (1994), Rickman wrote some non-fiction. Mysterious Lancashire, Mysterious Derbyshire and Mysterious Cheshire is a trio of 'thin volumes' which looked at (inter alia) guides to ley lines and 'that sort of thing'. These books are not mentioned on his 'by the same author' pages. 'Mysterious Cheshire and the others are not listed simply because not they are not fiction; I didn't want people to be misled... Oh, and I suppose there's another reason. You have to remember - these books (written in the late seventies) ... well, I was very young. That's all I can say really! Don't read them!'

Does he have any advice for writers just starting out or still trying to make their way? 'All I can say is that the following works for me. Never write a book without a contract. In fact, I might as well tell the truth here: I never write a word without a contract.' And once he has that contract? Does he plan his extremely large and detailed books meticulously? 'No, not really. I work with a theme rather than an outline. I don't particularly have a plan; I sell an idea.'

Are there any rules he follows while writing? 'The most important thing for me and my novels is character. Good characters are crucial. Characters of complexity; characters with depth. Nasty and funny is a good combination: in fact, you can't beat it.' This description might fit a host of modern horror movie villains - but it also fits one of Phil Rickman's more unusual characters. Ma Wagstaff in The Man in the Moss is - if not psychopathically nasty and funny exactly - then certainly eerily nasty and funny; a woman who takes belligerence to new levels. She makes herbal remedies and knows more about the occult and the supernatural in her small area of the world - the village of Bridelow in the Pennines - than anyone else does around her. One interesting point to note is that many people around her know that she knows more than they do; that the supernatural exists is hardly held to question.

'Ma Wagstaff was based on my grandmother. Affectionately, I hasten to add. My grandmother taught me a lot and was an early inspiration. And no, not all of the herbal remedies worked; but some did. My grandmother was into the supernatural and believed in reincarnation. She could leave her body, she saw ghosts and had these extremely lucid dreams. Come to think of it, she was a very weird one, was my grandmother. I'm not sure that people were always comfortable when I was left alone with her, but I loved it.'

Given that Phil Rickman presents Radio Wales' And Now Read On, what does he personally enjoy reading? Does he read within the horror genre at all? 'To be honest, I'm not particularly fond of modern horror. I'm not sure that there are really that many good horror writers around at the moment. Even Ramsey Campbell's lost his way. I like Peter James. I like Barbara Erskine, although unfortunately and inexplicably, she's published as a romantic writer. There isn't a romantic page in all her books!' In that case, what were his early influences (not counting the Famous Five stories mentioned above)? 'As for what I used to read... well, Henry James I found boring. With M.R. James I liked the stories but not the style.' (Rickman's work has been compared with the classic ghost stories of M.R. James, and there is possibly an argument to suggest that he was influenced by them a great deal.) 'And I used to read Dennis Wheatley - good stories, bad dialogue, and so-right wing. Quite often you have to wade through pages of right wing propaganda in search of the story. Start on page fifty and dodge all the stuff about trade unions! Now I read something of everything for the Radio Wales programme. In terms of my early influences, really there weren't that many supernatural books about.'

The next volume available from Phil Rickman will be The Wine of Angels, available in the summer of 1998 from Macmillan. This book 'is slightly different from what came before. There are elements of the supernatural, but really it's a psychological mystery. It involves a female vicar, apples and cider and the folklore connected with these things, the seventeenth century and witchcraft!' There will also be a reappearance of the digger driver from Crybbe, the sharing of characters from one book to another being one of Phil Rickman's other trademarks.

Phil Rickman emerged as a strong author and a name to watch when he arrived in 1991. Since then his popularity has grown and grown, to the point where his novels are extremely well received by luminaries both inside the horror genre and outside of it. The genre he works in (for argument's sake) is that of horror. Occasionally he borders on the surreal, the comic, the erotic - which highlights the problem of categorisation. With the possible exception of the western, genres are now too spacious and nebulous to be described with the sort of accuracy that will exclude some authors who might not have all the correct criteria for a place. Even war stories can be subdivided into romantic war stories and, say, horrific war stories. Rickman is a horror writer, but the genre is vast, and if you are not usually a fan of the genre, give him a try anyway; you will find no messy mutilations or eviscerated corpses - what you will find are sturdy, well-researched, well-crafted novels about human and not-so-human behaviour, that dwell in the dreamland between the here-and-now and the never-and-maybe.

This interview first appeared in the September 1997 issue of

The New Writer

### Dancing Architecture: Peter Straub (1998)

Every page has the imprimatur, the stamp; has a seal of approval - a guarantee of literary quality. And every paragraph is solid and stately, for Peter Straub, once described (accurately, by Clive Barker) as a "classicist" builds up architecture. Or more specifically, architecture that lives and breathes; architecture that has learnt how to dance. From the beginning of his career in fiction, which was Marriages in 1973 (though he had published poetry earlier), Straub spoke in a clear, commanding voice; and from his first foray into the horror genre, which was Julia (1975) he displayed a clear understanding of tradition, pace, belief and feeling: important factors if one wishes to be appreciated by one's peers. When I ask the author how he feels he fits in among his contemporaries (and the question is deliberately vague!), Straub replies with the sort of humour that one does not necessarily expect, and with a roster of fellow artists that suggests that Straub is still content to be regarded as a horror writer:

"Well, you call it vague, but I call it obdurate unto total mystery," he says. "I call it caille en sarcophage. How should I know? I've managed to hang around long enough to be given a degree of reflexive, pro forma respect, which is okay, and if I make it through another fifteen to twenty years, I might get a Life Achievement Award, depending on the jury. My contemporaries are Stephen King, Thomas Tessier, Ramsey Campbell, Charles Grant, Dennis Etchison, James Herbert, Jack Ketchum/Dallas Mayr, Anne Rice, Les Daniels, John Saul, Whitley Strieber, Brian Lumley, Graham Masterton, Dean Koontz and few others. Good Michael McDowell used to be a contemporary, but he died this year, and Robert McCammon was a kind of younger contemporary but claims to have resigned. John Coyne, whom I always liked, vanished from our field, I hope into a more fruitful one. Amongst all these people, I fit in as the second-or-third-tallest and the most bald. I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do. Almost all of my contemporaries have seen far more horror movies than I have, especially Ramsey Campbell and Les Daniels. After having listed all these names, what most strikes me is that they make up an extremely entertaining group, and I'm grateful to fit in amongst them at all."

We might argue that Straub stopped writing Horror (capital H, marketing pigeonhole) directly after finishing The Talisman, which he co-wrote with Stephen King and was published in 1984; and we might say this because the book that followed was Koko (1988). Despite the fact that it won the World Fantasy Award, Koko contains only minimal nods towards the fantastic, and was not published as a Horror novel either. But nevertheless, this tour de force - this thriller about Vietnam veterans and a serial killer is a horror novel if we use the word to mean the emotion that stows aboard books of any genre, and even aboard mainstream fiction, rather than the definition of "books with blood and guts". Do we see the distinction? Despite the perception of too many people - really, too many - horror does not have to mean fiction about gore or ghosts per se. (Nor does there have to be a shock at the end of the story, or at the end of every chapter.) No more than science fiction is that about spaceships. What Straub has managed to do, as Horror has gone through its cycles of deterioration and analepsis, is remain true to a personal vision; and has had the savvy to work on novels that can be appreciated by people who only read either inside or outside the genres. Because genres slough their skin from time to time: it's only natural. It's a way of warding off the disease of indifference; or to leap the barricades put up by readers - to offer up something new. And genres, above all, should address and provoke the reader's mood, which Straub also achieves. A thriller, for example, that does nothing for the reader's blood has failed, categorically; but Straub has kept his work sharp and engaging by addressing two key themes: the loss of innocence, and the irritability of a past that wants to be spoken about. He agrees with my assessment, although adds: "I might replace 'irritability' with 'implacability'."

Furthermore, and interestingly, it is possible to add that Straub works in multiples of ten, or thereabouts. Although the figures are not spot-on accurate, some interesting patterns have developed, notwithstanding certain overlaps. Just look at the evidence. With his wife he spent a decade in England and Ireland, mainly writing poetry (such as Ishmael (1972), Open Air (also 1972), and the subsequent round-up, Leeson Park and Belsize Square: Poems 1970-1975, which was published later in 1983), but also some early novels. "We went back to an almost unrecognizable America after a decade in Dublin and London for a couple of reasons. Our son, Benjamin, had just turned two, and we would soon have had to place him in a school, probably one of the Comprehensives in our general area of North London. Doing so would have meant his quick assimilation into the world of English - or at least North London - schoolchildren, with the consequent loss of his identity as an American. (Many would find this an excellent reason for staying in good old Crouch End.)

"We could have delayed our return for another two or three years, but for a matter of timing. My first real breakthrough collided with the last months of Callaghan's Labour government, which had every intention of enjoying my success as much as I did. For years, I had uncomplainingly paid my taxes to Inland Revenue with the feeling of fulfilling my share of a decent bargain between private income and social welfare. The bargain no longer seemed so decent when I was faced with the obligation of surrendering something like ninety per cent of the revenue from Ghost Story in taxes. I had no idea if I could ever duplicate the book's success; on the whole, it seemed more than a little unlikely. My accountant entered a string of figures on a strip of adding machine tape about a yard long, ripped it out and showed it to me. 'This is what you're going to owe if you stay,' he said. 'I suggest that you put your house on the market last month and leave England yesterday.' We left a few months later.

"We should have anticipated having to suffer culture shock, but because we were returning to our own country we did not, and it hit us like a tidal wave. Our neighbours in beautiful little Westport, Connecticut, might as well have been Martians. They spoke in flat, uninflected voices about banalities, endlessly. No one had anything like a sense of irony, irony was a foreign language, an unhealthy affection. Sincerity was the real deal - you were supposed to grip the other fellow's hand, look him in the eye and be as sincere as you could damn well pretend to be, because that's how you got him to like you, and being liked was important. In a world where everyone likes everyone else, or puts up a good show of liking everyone else, an immediate, false intimacy prevails. Boundaries dissolve, discretion becomes a form of snobbery. One day while I was regarding the extravagant cornucopia displayed along the meat counter of our local supermarket, Waldbaum's, a woman I had never seen before pushed her cart next to mine and without preamble said, 'I have to tell you, my first three abortions were really awful.' My wife and I adjusted, but it took a couple of years."

Straub's overtly supernatural and/or fantastical fiction was written, also, over a period of approximately ten years, though as I say, the periods were not successive; there were overlaps (and the timescales are flukes anyway, given the publication schedules of most publishing houses, but nevertheless). The supernatural work - including Julia, If You Could See Me Now (1977), Ghost Story (1979), Shadowland (1980), and Floating Dragon (1982) - saw Peter Straub make a big name for himself among the hard-hitters of commercial fiction. But he rarely reads his very early work. "It would be like walking through a house I'd moved out of years before, sort of interesting but not really, like an exercise in premeditated nostalgia. There have been times when I reread - or at least leafed through - something because I'd sent a copy to a friend, and what usually happened was that I noticed dozens and dozens of clumsy phrases I wished I could rewrite." Some writers can remember every first line they have ever penned. Can he? "Oh, certainly. Two of them are 'Call me Ishmael' and 'There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.' Pretty good, huh? I am also very fond of the first line of Floating Dragon: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.' Man, that was a really good day \- I can still remember the way I felt when I wrote that line..." And asked to sketch out his novels briefly for the benefit of someone who hasn't read any of his work (a bastard of a question, I don't mind admitting), Straub responds in a humorous tone - as of someone engaged in mickey-taking oneupmanship - that one can imagine served him well in our green and pleasant land, where sarcasm and irony are voices we all use well. "I'll pass on the invitation to write novel-haikus," Straub replies, "and just say that anyone wishing to look into my work might well start with Ghost Story and go on to Shadowland and Koko."

It was Koko (1988) which began the third stage (if you like) of Straub's career, after the poetry and the Horror - and this has lasted longer than ten years, admittedly: the more reality-based, horror-flavoured, devilishly intricate thriller. He informs me that "it would be impossible to pick out any single 'favourite'" of his own novels, because: "if I did, the other children would get jealous. However, I think I managed to reach a new level with Koko, and I will always be grateful for the experience." It might be argued that the work leading up to Koko and the work following it are changes of vehicle rather than changes of gear. Straub says: "Something happened with Koko, all right, a kind of expansion and deepening. To me, it feels less like a switch to a new automobile than getting a better performance out of the old engine by cleaning it from top to bottom and replacing everything needed to be replaced."

In an interview a long time ago, Straub said that he had been half-expecting some angry comeback from people who fought in Vietnam when he published Koko. Twelve years after the book's publication, I wondered what the reactions, in fact, had been like. At the time Straub expressed concerns along these lines - that some people might think: Well, who does he think he is, writing about Vietnam when he didn't even fight there. "Yes, exactly. After all, I was trespassing on sacred ground. That I imagined I had some authentic insight into the experience of combat veterans did not mean they would agree with me. In the end, the response turned out to be very gratifying, on the whole. I got a lot of letters from vets, also from the wives of Vietnam vets, thanking me for getting things right, for making it possible for them to talk about the things that had happened to them. I can hardly express what these letters meant to me... On the other hand, Philip Caputo dismissed the book as yet another objectionable portrayal of Vietnam veterans as psychotics and losers. A guy living in a section of some Californian city called "Little Saigon" who had served in Vietnam and wrote action-adventure novels sent me a photograph of himself seated at his desk holding an automatic rifle while a pretty Vietnamese woman draped herself over his shoulders. The photograph was folded within a letter informing me it was pretty clear, on the evidence of Koko, that I preferred little boys to Asian females. The last line of the letter said, "If you weren't there, shut the fuck up." I wrote back that he ought to give up the pose, writing was writing and there were no rules, all you could do was step up to the plate and take your best swing. -Nuts to you, I said to myself as I dropped the letter into the mailbox, and for the next two weeks, every time the doorbell rang I wondered if he and his rifle were paying me a visit."

In some of the novels and novellas since Koko, Peter Straub has begun to create a universe, based on his own characters. Stories are continued, and there are frequent cross-references; the completist has lots to feed on whenever he publishes new material. Here, we'd be referring to Mystery (1990), The Throat (1993), and others. "Of course. Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity. Certain particular themes run through it; an individual point of view can be seen emerging, developing, finding different forms of expression. It is tempting to reinforce this sense of commonality by literalizing it through the use of characters who appear in a number of different books. I have done that, though only to a very limited degree. Where I seem to be creating deliberate cross-links between books, in the "Blue Rose" novels and stories, my ultimate intention was quite different from that of emphasizing the "shared world" nature of the novels. Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question. Stories attributed to me turn out to have been written by a recurring character who is also a novelist; specific events in the earlier life of one character are later claimed by another; I, the author, become a character, a minor one who has collaborated on the earlier novels with my more perceptive fictional alter ego; the common setting, a medium-sized Midwestern city, changes its name as it migrates from Wisconsin to the Caribbean, then to Illinois...

"The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth. One of the victims is actually unconnected to the case. When, in the third book, we do learn the identity of the Blue Rose murderer, the information comes in a muted, nearly off-hand manner, and the man has died long before. Despite all theories to the contrary, he has no relevance to the crimes presently under investigation. Previous depictions of reality expressed in newspaper stories and fictional accounts have been discredited, and the surest, most accurate tool for the apprehension of the ever-shifting, multi-layered enigma called 'truth' seems to be imagination - the creation of more fiction."

Also among the later work is The Hellfire Club (1996), which boasts (if the word does not seem too ironic in context) the despicable creature named Dick Dart. It is considerably to Peter Straub's credit that a new variation on the theme of the psychopathic smartarse can be found: but find one Mr Straub did. Dart is horrendous. "Dick Dart emerged from the ether during a flight from New York with my wife and children to Puerto Rico. I had been working on The Hellfire Club for about a year of ever-increasing despair, unable to find anything like a centre, a mainspring, as the pages piled up. I thought I was all through, finished, and the only reason I was going to Puerto Rico was that we had already booked the holiday and I thought we might as well enjoy ourselves before the arrival of actual ruin. On the flight, Mr. Richard Dart, my favourite lawyer, until then a mere spear-carrier restricted to an appearance in the background of a single scene, leaned forward and whispered into my ear that if I paid attention to him for a couple of minutes he could save my ass, how about it?

"I pulled my notebook out of the carry-on bag and listened to Mr. Dart's ideas. And you know what? Mr. Dart was a really repulsive guy, but he expressed himself in a surprisingly pungent, funny way. I wrote down everything he said. He wanted to take over the novel, naturally, but in the absence of any better ideas, I gave him his head. Every day for the following week, I reported to the hotel pool with my notebook and a supply of pens and took dictation. One thing about Dick Dart, he always had a lot to say."

And then there are the shorter pieces: the award-winning "Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff", at the conclusion of which Straub felt "more satisfied than I should admit. I began more or less blind, knowing only that I wanted to write a revenge story that used "Bartleby" as its foundation. I had just reread the Melville novella and been bowled over by it. The voice appeared the moment I started to write, and the story rolled along under its own steam, getting longer and longer every day. When it was done, everything seemed to fall into place. I thought it was one of the best things I'd ever written, and I still do." And of course, the latest offering, Pork Pie Hat - which, to nail my colours to the mast, as it were, I will here and loudly declare a bloody masterpiece. What I loved about Pork Pie Hat is that it can be read as having a wealth of possible interpretations. It's incredibly dense - but flows beautifully. Did Straub have to structure and re-structure it in order to make all the connections and possibilities work? "No, I just wrote it from beginning to end. The revisions were all stylistic in nature. I'm glad you liked it." It, and others, show signs, perhaps, of the author's fondness for reading mysteries, too. "I do read a lot of mystery novels - those by Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Sue Grafton, Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, plus many others. Whenever one or more of my characters get into a car and drive all over town talking to people, I know I'm imitating Ross Macdonald."

Pork Pie Hat is the story of a story, which is also true of The Hellfire Club. A jazz fan asks his hero for an interview, but gets much more than he bargained for. Said hero, the eponymous saxophone player (who is nobody's idea of a hero if we consider him as a person) is knocking at death's door, a prey to drink, depression and malnutrition. I asked Peter Straub how the novella had come about. "The inspiration for Pork Pie Hat came from a long moment in a videotape of 'The Sound of Jazz,' a live television broadcast in 1957 or 1958 that assembled a lot of great jazz musicians in a studio and let them play whatever they felt like for the space of an entire hour. Just before its conclusion, Billie Holiday sat perched on a stool to sing a blues she had written called "Fine and Mellow" at the centre of a circle made up of heroic figures like Ben Webster, Vic Dickenson, Jo Jones, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, Rex Stewart, and - above all - the tenor saxophonist Lester Young, then only months from the end of his life and in terrible shape. Billie sang a chorus, two musicians played a chorus apiece, Billie sang another chorus, and so on...

"Lester Young wandered into view at the beginning of the second go-round. Someone had to give him a push in the back to get him on his feet and moving toward the microphone. You can see him lick his reed and settle the horn in his mouth. What he plays is one uncomplicated chorus of the blues that moves from phrase to phrase with a kind of otherworldly majesty. Sorrow, heartbreak, and what I can only call wisdom take place through the mechanism of following one note, usually a whole note, with another one, slowly. There he is, this stupendous musician who had once transformed everything about him by the grace of his genius, this present shambles, this human wreckage, hardly able to play at all, delivering a statement that becomes more and more perfect, more and more profound as it advances from step to step. I cried every time I watched it, and I watched it over and over. I played it for my friends and made them watch it. Eventually, I wondered: what could lead a person to a place like that, what brought him there? That was the origin of Pork Pie Hat."

Straub's enthusiasm for jazz is well-known (and I'd love to see his collection); there are references to jazz that run like veins through his body of work - even in The Talisman. (Koko, for example, is the name of a tune by Charlie Parker.) When I ask Straub what his favourite is of someone else's work, he answers: "How about the Paul Desmond solo on 'These Foolish Things' described in Mr. X? Or Richard Strauss's 'Metamorphosen'? But I suppose you mean a favourite book. The only valid way to answer that would be by saying, 'My favourite Irish Murdoch novel is The Nice and the Good, my favourite Tolstoy novel is Anna Karenina, my favourite Dickens novel is Bleak House, my favourite John Ashbery poem is 'The Skaters,' and so on." A different writer altogether, Anthony Burgess, used to say that the future of the novel depended on its fusion with classical music, but died before he could bring anything of the kind off. Would Peter Straub be able to see anything like that as being within the realms of possibility, replacing the word "classical" with "jazz"? "Maybe Burgess was just trying to be outrageous," is the answer, "though of course he was deeply involved with music. But what could he have had in mind? 'Ah, we have just received the manuscript of Mr. Burgess' new novel. Let me give the first chapter to the violin section, so we can hear what it sounds like.' I don't think anything I've ever written could be played on the tenor saxophone, but I have listened to so much jazz that I suppose a little must have rubbed off. I pay attention to cadences and rhythms, to musical effects, but prose-music is very different from actual music. Long ago, some reviewer said that a couple of paragraphs I'd written 'danced', but he did not say that you could dance to them." For what it's worth, I agree: the architecture dances, not the reader.

For the author, next up, as you might have missed if you've been vacationing on another planet, Peter Straub will be working once more with Stephen King - on the sequel to The Talisman - which might just usher in another movement in the former's career direction. As presumptuous as it might be to say so, I think we can reliably assume that a return to a more heavily-handed horror is on the cards. The idea of the sequel "seemed too interesting to pass up," Straub says. "I had noticed that King's concerns and mine were converging in an unexpected way: Bag of Bones made use of Rebecca and Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," both of which had been much on my mind, the former in Mr. X and the latter as the basis for "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff." When he asked about doing a sequel, we compared notes on how we saw the story going and discovered that our ideas matched perfectly. After that, the decision was an easy one. Besides that, I should say that King is a pleasure to work with and very agreeable company, extremely smart and very funny." It was "King (who) initially proposed that we do a sequel, and the first hints of the story were mutually suggested. It will not be called Talisman 2, because it'll be a novel, not a movie. We are working on a kind of Bible for the book right now. Once we start writing, I suppose we will send e-mail attachments back and forth. We're both looking forward to this with a great deal of pleasure."

His opinion of the publishing scene at the moment is "no doubt pretty much that of most other writers - do you have anything to drink, could we maybe go to a movie, is there any aspirin around here? Hey, all of a sudden I have this terrible headache, I think I'd better lie down for a while. We used to enjoy very pleasant weather in this part of the country, but now the only breaks we get from the blizzards are the occasional ice storms. When I tried to take a shower this morning, the pipes were frozen, and when I opened the New York Times, the big headline on the front page of the Business section read, 'AOL/Warner/ Putnam/Nike-Reebok/RJ Reynolds/Citibank/Burger King Publishing Conglomerate Signs Di Caprio-Pitt-Paltrow Trio For 2-Book, $550 Million Advance, Believed Largest Ever.' Twenty-one years ago, in the interim between their acceptance and publication of my book Ghost Story, I went to the then-annual Christmas party held by the then-notable English publishing house of Jonathan Cape. A Cape editor I had not previously met came up to me and said, 'Good for you, young man, you broke through with your fourth novel. That's rather unusual. We never expect that kind of thing to happen until the fifth novel.' Try to imagine someone saying that today."

But Peter Straub (thankfully, from the point of view of his readers) continues to produce excellent work, with the copyright credit going to something called the Seafront Corporation. The structure of which is as follows: "The mighty Seafront Corporation somehow manages to sustain itself through the efforts of a single essential employee, who is proud to call himself its President and CEO. Should that guy ever resign and walk away, I don't know what would happen to the organization. We drudges, the little people, would have to scramble, I can tell you that for sure."

And is it possible to describe an average working day? I ask - too unspecifically. "Yes, of course! An average working day begins at 8 or 9 am, includes an hour for lunch, and ends at 5 or 6 pm. Actual work takes up approximately a third of the day, not counting the lunch hour, and the remaining two-thirds are spent in meetings, gossip, flirtations, and checking out e-mail, favourite news groups and porn sites on the Internet. My working day is nothing like that at all. On non-gym days, I arise at noon; attire myself in one of my legendary Savile Row chalk-stripe suits; go downstairs to feed the cats their Super Vitamin Enhanced Cod & Shrimp Gourmet Feast; enjoy a glass of skim milk and try to figure out if I am supposed to eat breakfast or lunch; pull something nondescript out of the refrigerator and eat it while fending off the cats, who have decided that although yesterday they thought the Cod & Shrimp Gourmet Feast was just the ticket, today they think it's crap, and what I am eating looks much, much tastier; trudge all the way upstairs to my office; turn on all the equipment; sit down at my desk; look at the computer; and bend over, clutching my head in my hands, and groan. The next few hours are spent in the coal mine. I may or may not go back downstairs to eat another nondescript something, depending on hunger. Around six, I report again to the kitchen, not for a meal but a nice big glass filled with ice and a transparent liquid narcotic, which I greedily take back upstairs so that I can get in some more groaning. At 8 or thereabouts, I go down for dinner, and a couple of hours later remount the stairs, pick up my lantern and my pickaxe, and go back into the coalmine until after 3 in the morning, when I climb into bed. On gym days, I don't get to my desk until 4 in the afternoon, and everything except bedtime and the appointment with the liquid narcotic is pushed back a bit."

On The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: Haruki Murakami(2000)

Even though he was born in 1949, Haruki Murakami is perceived in his native Japan as a 'young' author.

Elsewhere, and certainly in Western civilization, an author is generally regarded as 'young' until he or she hits the forty mark, and 'mature' thereafter. But Murakami, quite possibly, will be seen as a whippersnapper - a rebel, of sorts, or a changer - if he lives to be writing at the age of ninety.

The perception has less to do with years spent on the planet than with his attitude to his own work, and to the rich formalities of the Japanese literature from which he emerged. There is nothing juvenile about his prose; but his unwillingness to kow-tow to tradition has made him seem petulant to various Japanese critics. Put bluntly, Murakami has less in common with Yukio Mishima or Osamu Dazai (or any of his other direct predecessors) than he has with Raymonds Carver and Chandler (both of whom he has translated into Japanese), or with John Irving, Algis Budrys, or Philip K Dick.

From an early age he read American fiction, and soon grew to love it. Yet he writes about Japan; whatever thrill the reader would ordinarily get from reading fiction soaked in foreign attitudes and translated from foreign tongues (think early Kundera, think Marquez) is thus further skewed by the realisation that the Japan presented in his work is not quite accurate either.

Regardless of what the critics think, however, in Japan Murakami is popular with the book-buying public; he is popular to an almost mythical extent; he is rock-star popular. His career began auspiciously when his first novel, Hear The Wind Sings, was published in 1979, winning the author the Gunzou Literature Prize for budding writers. (In essence, the novel was a reminiscence on the years of being a twenty-something.) And in 1987, on returning to Japan from Italy, he discovered that Norwegian Wood (named after the Beatles song) had transformed him into a superstar, in a fashion that would not seem out of place in one of his weird-and-wonderful short stories; there were ecstatic crowds awaiting his safe arrival at Tokyo Airport. Norwegian Wood alone has sold four million copies in his country... Murakami is a best-selling author, and he has used the money that his success has given him to 'buy peace. I don't want a Mercedes,' he once said in interview. 'I don't want Armani. Money buys time to write.'

cover scan Well, now - as a multimillionaire - he has written The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Or rather, it has appeared in English, having been published in Japan in 1995 as three separate volumes, because the Japanese do not like big books - they want something that can be easily carried on the commuter train.

The English version (translated by Jay Rubin) is over 600 pages long, frequently meandering, occasionally baffling, repetitive or overwritten; but for sheer scale and mental muscle, it may be regarded as a masterpiece. Along with some of his previous novels - such as A Wild Sheep Chase (1982) and Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle takes a little bit of Americana, a little bit of science fiction (less than usual), a little bit of philosophy, and a good dash of detective fiction - to make a mixture peculiarly the author's own.

All comparisons to other authors are rendered useless; perhaps even offensive. The record shows, on the other hand, that Murakami was not displeased on hearing A Wild Sheep Chase, which he calls a 'fantasy/adventure,' referred to as 'The Big Sheep,' after the Chandler novel, so maybe offence does not come into it. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, again, has a man searching for truths, both personal and universal. Whereas in A Wild Sheep Chase, for example, the protagonist must look for a war criminal, a woman with gorgeous ears, and a supernatural sheep with a star on its back, in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the quest begins as something simpler: a missing cat.

Toru is our Everyman; for want of a better word, our thirty year-old hero. A graduate who has left his job in law (voluntarily) and is wondering what to do next while his wife goes out to work to support them both. He idles away his days (now free, but consequently undefined in his own and in society's eyes) by cooking pasta and listening to the radio, listening to anonymous sex-talk on phone calls that he receives - and listening to the cries of the curious bird which gives the volume its title. The family cat disappears, and Toru's wife insists that Toru should spend his time wisely by looking for it. While searching near a neighbour's land, he meets May, a precocious sixteen year-old, who says what she likes and likes what she says, and who regards her visitor as something of an interesting specimen. She calls him Mr Wind-Up Bird. And at approximately the same time, Toru also meets two psychic sisters, Malta and Creta Kano (names amusing in Japanese, too), who visit him in his dreams as well as in reality. One of them even has cerebral- or brain-sex with him, many pages before indulging, as it were, in the real thing. Creta reveals to Toru that while she was a prostitute, paying off loans, she was raped by his wife's brother, who is a powerful politician whom Toru has always detested.

Then Kumiko, Toru's wife, also disappears, much to the delight of the politician character, who detests Toru right back again. Because the reader has already seen some of the telltale signs of her adultery (the long hours at work, the unreliability of her phone calls, the gifts of perfume), it is all the more heartbreaking when Toru learns that she has left him for a man who is better in bed. Needless to say, he does not take the news very well; Toru lowers himself to the bottom of a well, the better, in the dark, to get in touch with his true feelings and to introspect. Then May takes away the ladder that will lead him back up to his freedom and leaves him there, hungry and thirsty, for three days...

Before he is rescued from the well by Creta (who then also disappears, only to re-emerge shortly afterwards, minus clothes, in Toru's bed - she cannot remember where she left her clothes), Toru dips into a trance. In a dreamlike state, he passes through a subterranean stone wall into a darkened hotel room, where a woman seduces him. The seduction leaves behind a blue-black mark on his face that gives him healing powers. These powers, in turn, lead Toru to work with Nutmeg and Cinnamon, a mother-and-son partnership that occupies a haunted house and operates a healing parlour for rich women under the guise of a chic boutique. Creta also thinks it will be a good idea to have a long mulling session at the bottom of the neighbour's well...

Things become more complicated.

Characters involve themselves with the narrative and tell their stories - stories of darkness and brutality. Here is Lieutenant Mamiya, who as a prisoner of Mongolian forces during World War II, was made to watch a comrade being skinned alive. He was then left to die at the bottom of a well. (Is the reader to surmise that history might well repeat itself?) And there is a soldier in Hsin-ching, the capital city of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, who orders his troops to kill animals in the local zoo to prevent them from escaping...

One might argue that some of the passages which take the reader away from the main thrust of the narrative are superfluous, and possibly they could have been more diligently edited. Some readers will object to the flabbiness of this novel, and will suggest that it should have been put on a diet. Certainly there is no need for a sentence to be used as a character's thought process, and then as a sentence spoken to another character immediately afterwards; and this is a device that Murakami uses much too often.

But on the other hand, the author is well known to prefer freefalling through his novels, rather than planning, and a certain cumulative force is felt during the reading, possibly as a result of this technique (or lack of technique). After all, Toru is not supposed to be a writer, or any other sort of artist; he's a white-collar schmuck, half-heartedly playing a game of mental footsie with the neighbour's teenage girl and trying to come to terms with life. For quite a while, the two strands of his existence seem to be of equal importance, even when they are not impossibly tangled.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is, by and large, a walk around the lead character's brain; and some of it is disorganized, some of it is unwanted ephemera. But many readers like to know it all, right down to descriptions of how best to cook a decent spaghetti; and the 'short stories' - the side-tracking vignettes - within this novel have the same deadpan dislocation as Murakami evidenced in his collection, The Elephant Vanishes (1993), in which a man is obsessed with the disappearance of an elephant from a local zoo, and also with the disappearance of a young mother, whose insomnia teaches her about death. So, as might be seen by the example, Murakami even repeats his themes, from time to time...

There is no equivalent in Japanese for the English word 'identity'. When a Japanese author wishes to discuss the subject directly, he must use the English word, which suggests a great deal.

Early on in his career, Haruki Murakami decided that he did not want to be an 'international' novelist, but rather a Japanese novelist whose books have about them an American feel - or the slow-burning background of a boring, nowhere town. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the protagonist's life moves from 'supernormal' to 'unnormal' and his identity is altered by what he sees, hears and feels - rather, to an extent, than what he does. Although he acts and participates in the plot, Toru has a tendency to attract his own destiny - in the shape of unusual people - rather than reach for it. This is a novel which endeavours to explain what it is to be a young man with a flexible approach to his own life: will life break him or merely bend him? What happens when routine is abolished? What does it mean: to be alone?

The questions that The Wind-Up Bird poses are a lot more serious than: What happened to the missing cat and the adulterous wife? Toru, by turns, is both childish in his innocence (one oft-repeated word and theme in Murakami's oeuvre is 'childishness') and cynical in his understanding of modern existence. Many facets of human life are represented in this book, which was tentatively entitled 'The Chronicle of the "Screw-Turning" Bird' before the choice of English nomer had been confirmed; and even with its faults it is an incredible achievement. The prose shows much of the simultaneous cool and agitation of dormant fear.
