ROBERT DUNBAR is the author of several novels, a collection
of short fiction, and a nonfiction book about the horror genre. His stories and
essays have appeared in numerous publications. For more information, visit
www.UninvitedBooks.com.
1. Tell us three things
about yourself.
No.
Too many people know too much already.
2. What was the first
thing you had published?
Oddly enough, a novel – THE PINES. Everything else just sort
of fell into place afterwards.
3. Which piece of
writing are you proudest of?
WILLY. That book has touched so many people. Me it almost
killed, of course.
4. …and which makes
you cringe?
While quite young, I wrote several godawful plays, and kept
sending them out for some obscure reason. Even more mysteriously, they were
forever getting performed as workshops and showcases and studio productions.
All over the damn place. What were artistic directors thinking? Understand I’m
not being modest here – these scripts were horrible. Incoherent. Deranged. I
sometimes think directors just wanted to get a look at me.
5. What’s a normal
writing day like?
What’s normal about a writing day? It’s like induced
psychosis channeled through a work ritual. I even have special/ritual clothes.
Galoshes, a jockstrap, propeller beanie. Scared the hell out of the poor
mailman the other day.
6. Which piece of
writing should someone who’s never read you before pick up first?
I usually say MARTYRS & MONSTERS, if only because people
who get my work have responded so strongly to it. And people who froth at the
mouth about it? They’re likely to hate everything I do, so we should just break
up now and save time.
7. What are you working on now?
While trying to promote THE STREETS, which came out just a
couple of weeks ago, I’m also building momentum on a novel tentatively titled
SHUDDER. Umm… I suppose I have to tell you something about it, don’t I? Okay.
Don’t hate me. It’s a vampire-zombie-apocalypse epic, because – hell – I’m a
whore. (Damn, I wasn’t going to tell things about myself.) The difference with this
book is that the heroes are all the sort of trash characters (my people!) who
usually get killed off first in a typical horror-by-the-numbers saga. Oh, and
happy endings are extra.
This week marked the official beginning of autumn in the UK.
I love all the different seasons of the year, although if I had to do without
one of them, it would probably be winter. But then, I wouldn’t love the spring
as much, as there’s something even more wonderful about warmth and colour and
light returning to the world after those long cold months of darkness.
And I love the summer too. But if I had to pick one
favourite, out of all the seasons of the year, it would be autumn. It’s the
beauty of the leaves turning and falling, even lovelier for its transience;
it’s the slow cooling of the year, that hearty feeling of walking in air that
isn’t freezing, but holds some slight hint of chill, that necessitates a thick
jumper or a coat. It’s those rich autumn evenings where the night comes slow but
deep. It’s those mists you sometimes get; there’s something quintessentially English about autumn here, something
that brings back memories of my childhood in the ‘70s and ‘80s and something,
above all, about ghosts.
October, of course, is the heart of autumn; it’s the month
that sums it all up. And of course it’s the
month of Halloween, as well, which
has changed a lot since my childhood. When I was little, trick-or-treating was
unknown; I’ve seen the American version of Halloween become more and more
emulated over here. When I were a lad (said the grumpy old bore) Halloween
would consist of bobbing for apples, or maybe a game of murder in the dark.
And, of course, you’d turn off the lights and watch a horror
movie – on TV, or if you had such luxuries, a VCR. That’s still pretty much how
we spend Halloween at Castle Bestwick, albeit now the VHS cassettes have given
way to DVDs.
But the best thing of all, at Halloween, is to read, or listen
to, a ghost story.
My late friend Joel Lane once said that horror is a very difficult genre to leave
behind. I think his exact words were: “Horror has a habit of turning up on your
doorstep, pregnant and crying, five months after you thought you’d finished
with it for good.” A slight exaggeration, but there’s a grain of truth in it.
While I’m not repudiating Horror wholesale, my thoughts have
turned increasingly over the last couple of years to writing outside the genre;
Hell’s Ditch is SF/Fantasy, the novel
I wrote on spec earlier this year is crime, and Redman’s Hill owes more to the – again, very English – brand of
fantasy produced by the late Graham Joyce and Robert Holdstock, or by Alan
Garner, than to M.R. James or Stephen King.
And yet I can’t deny the hold that Horror has on me, and on
my work. There’s a decidedly Lovecraftian element woven into Hell’s Ditch and the other, forthcoming
novels in The Black Road; my crime
novel revolves around the activities of a cult that wouldn’t be out of place in
any tale of supernatural terror. And there are ghosts in Redman’s Hill, writing about whom creeped me out. So hopefully they’ll do the same to you.
Maybe that’s because Horror exists at something of a
crossroads: it overlaps into crime, into science fiction, in fantasy and into
mainstream literature – because, again and again, Horror tells us how
things fall apart.
Thomas Ligotti uses the metaphor of a car accident to
explicate his concept of the field: one moment you’re travelling along in your
vehicle, secure in the illusion that your life is basically safe and that you
are in control. In fact, none of these things have been true: the whole time,
there have been any number of things that could go horribly wrong, but it’s not
until your car goes out of control and slews wildly across the lanes of
oncoming traffic that the illusion is shattered and you become aware of all the
terrifying possibilities that exist.
Those possibilities are infinite: there’s a wide gamut in
crime fiction, for instance. Sometimes they exist in one’s own psyche and the
flaws and weaknesses there, or in that of another human being, wounded or
twisted by nature or nurture. Or the nature of the crime can be a conspiracy,
criminal or otherwise, to profit from misery or hide an unwanted truth, or the
kind of petty, meaningless, barely motivated violence behind which we see the
fundamentally random and absurd nature of a Universe ruled by blind chance. Any
number of ways to shatter the illusion and show us, in Montague Summers’ words,
“the monstrous things that lie only just beneath the surface of our cracking
civilisation.” It’s certainly no accident that a number of skilled writers of
the macabre, such as Paul Finch, Graham Masterton and most recently Tim Lebbon,
have found commercial success writing dark, unflinching, often brutal novels of
crime.
Science fiction is another, because we do not know where the
future will take us, be it technology (as in the fiction of – for instance –
Pat Cadigan) or social trends (1984,
or the strange dark literary dreams of J.G. Ballard.)
And in fantasy, we can encounter the very stuff of our
nightmares: they may be our own very personal ghosts and demons – our moral
failings, our psychological scars – given physical form (as was the case in
much of Joel’s fiction) or they may be horrendous things that exist simply
because they do. As for literary fiction (however we define that), Horror – if
it’s at its best – tackles the same themes and concerns, but with other
(perhaps even a wider range of?) tools.
The traditional ghost story, though, has a particular
something to it. The ghost story is one very particular branch of Horror, but
it’s one of the finest, most subtle – many have described as the most difficult
kind of story to write well. It begins with the world we know, or think we
know, and ends by showing us that world is much more than we think. Which can
be a frightening prospect, but can also be far more. It’s been argued, for
instance, that the ghost story is inherently optimistic, as it implies that
death is not the end. Then again, some stories – I’m thinking, once more, of several of
Joel Lane’s, among others – proffer posthumous existence to which
oblivion would be entirely preferable.
I’ve only named a few authors, and I’m painfully aware that
all but one of them is male, and all of them are white. But there are many
more.
But to go back to the beginning of this: Autumn is coming
upon us, and with that the appeal of the ghost story is stronger than ever.
It’s a good time, as the nights draw in and the air is full of rustling from
the trees with their falling leaves, for what M.R. James called ‘a pleasing
terror.’ And it’s a rare year when I don’t write at least one tale of the
spectral and supernatural over the course of the dark season. If I can do so,
and if I can get the hang of the requisite technology, I might record a reading
and post it on the blog as a treat to the loyal readers (both of you!) We shall see.
In the meantime, here’s one of my favourite actors reading
one of my favourite stories: Tom Baker, with Saki’s ‘Sredni Vashtar’. Enjoy.
Keris McDonald
has a secret life: by day a mild-mannered writer of dark fantasy erotica, by
night a ravening horror author. Or possibly the other way round.
Her horror short
stories have been published in All
Hallows and anthologies by Ash Tree Press; Weird Tales, Supernatural Tales, and the anthologies Impossible Spaces and Hauntings (ed. Hannah Kate); and Terror Tales of Yorkshire (ed. Paul Finch). Her scenario ‘Master
of Hounds’ appeared in Worlds of Cthulhu.
In 2015 she has stories out in Best
Horror of the Year vol. 7 (ed Ellen Datlow) and Genius Loci (ed Jaym
Gates).
She
lives in the North of England with two rescued greyhounds and a bemused
husband. She has a degree in philosophy and a diploma in forestry, and once
worked as a Viking for five years.
1. Tell
us three things about yourself.
1)I started playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was thirteen. That’s
thirty-five years ago and no, I don’t know where the time went! I’ve just started
a character for 5th edition…
2)Most of my published work appears under the name “Janine Ashbless” and it is DIRTY. I
mean, really really. But still
fantasy / horror /spec-fic in most cases.
3)I had a Marmite conversion experience, and went from hating to
loving it in a day.
2. What
was the first thing you had published?
I’m not sure now! Probably a short story
called The Spirit Mirror, which appeared in Shadows and Silence (eds. Barbara & Christopher Roden). It’s
set in the contemporary American West, which is pretty hubristic considering I’m
not American and haven’t been there. It features some vengeful Native American
ghosts.
3. Which
piece of writing are you proudest of?
I’m writing a dark romance/ religious
conspiracy thriller trilogy about fallen angels. The first volume, Cover
Him with Darkness, was published last year and well … I genuinely think
it’s pretty good. I even let my mum read it, because it’s not too rude.She got riled at the blasphemous bits, mind.
4. …and
which makes you cringe?
When my short story All the Company of Heaven
appeared, the editor had, without asking me, made some textual changes (like
the date it was set), and managed to introduce the most incredible double
entendre. Then in the next edition of the magazine he printed a letter from a reader pointing out the mistakes and
saying how they brought the story down. I was mortified.
Can you tell that I still haven’t got over it?
5. What’s
a normal writing day like?
A never-ending battle to stop surfing
Facebook/the Net/playing Spider, and get down to some actual bloody work. It’s
like Ragnarok, only with fewer swords and more amusing yet ultimately
depressing Cracked posts.
6. Which
piece of writing should someone who’s never read you before pick up first?
Cover
Him with Darkness is the best place to start if you are wary of all the sex
stuff. But if you can stomach the idea of full-on erotica, try one of my three
collections of short stories – Dark
Enchantment, say. The various stories feature M R James-style ghosts, a
modern-day Hades, the Devil in Salem, and the ghoul-god/Death … among other
things.
7. What
are you working on now?
I’m
collaborating with fantasy author Adrian
Tchaikovsky and scenario writer Adam
Gauntlett to create a collection of Lovecraftian tales. I’m really excited
about this!
Oddly enough, a novel – THE PINES. Everything else just sort
of fell into place afterwards.
