Uncanny

Jon Mayhew, writer of Mortlock, The Demon Collector and The Bonehill Curse and all round good guy, popped in to see me on his way from Norwich to The Wirral in Cheshire where he lives

We went for what was meant to be a hour long chat but which actually became three hours somewhere along the way.  Jon bought me a coffee and I was only when we left that I realised I had never even offered to buy him another in all that time.  We were too busy talking.

We were meant to be talking about the possibility of us doing some joint events but we actually spent the time talking about just about everything but.

Writing is a solitary business in the main and so most chats between writers will inevitably feature the business of writing itself as well as all the peripheral baubles and pitfalls.  Only another writer truly understands what it is to be a writer.  Or at least that's how it feels.  We share our grievance and we may even test the odd idea or admit to a hope or two.

I share a publisher with Jon - Bloomsbury - and  publicist - Ian Lamb.  We have both done our share of events - Jon was returning home after a couple of school events in Norfolk - and we have spoken before about the possibility of doing something together that was a bit more exciting both for us and, hopefully, the audience.

Jon shares a lot of my interests as a writer and we read a lot of the same stuff when we were younger, including comics.  We are both children of the television age and unashamedly so.  A lot of our inspiration comes from sources other than books - television, cinema and in Jon's case, traditional English ballads.  A lot of our enthusiasms are similar and we share a kind of sensibility.

We don't have a firm structure in mind for this joint show, but in looking for a word that sums up what we are about, we agreed that 'Uncanny' hits the mark.  It is a word I am very fond of.  I like it because it covers a lot of the fiction I loved as a teenager as well as a lot of the comics I read and movies and TV I watched.  I also like it because it is not restrictive in terms of genre.

More about this when we have more to say. . .

Kafka

Getting all of my books out of storage means that I get to see a record of my reading habits over the last how ever many years.  It is not complete, of course.  Many of the books I read at college I simply left behind or gave away.  Others have been borrowed and never returned or damaged and discarded or incorporated into the collections of other people I have shared a house and life with.

I have a very imperfect memory of the plot of these books, but an almost perfect recall about where I was and who I was with when I read them.  They are like little memory triggers.  I look at a spine and a whole world opens up.

There are books for which this is the main appeal, in that the book itself means little to me in terms of quality or the effect it had on me when I read it.  Other books - other authors - are very different.

When did I first read Franz Kafka?  I don't know, although I'm fairly sure that Metamorphosis was the first thing I read - maybe at school.  I know that that story did something to me.  It was unlike anything I had ever read before and yet it seemed to speak very clearly to me.  It was bizarre and yet it also seemed to get to grips with something a more literal book could never have hoped to.

I became fascinated by Kafka and read books about his life and critical essays about his writing.  The iconic black and white photographs of him became a fixture in my consciousness - as they have for so many others of course.

Many more have no interest in Kafka of course and though they know about Metamorphosis and its famous opening line, they might not actually have read it and certainly haven't read anything else by this patron saint of the misfit.

Kafka is a reference point for me and this can be difficult.  I have said before how children's fiction is very plot-based - proudly so, in fact.  Writing supernatural fiction, a writer will occasionally hear an editor say that a story must have an 'internal logic'.  That is to say that however odd the goings on in the tale, they must make sense within the narrative.

And for a certain type of story this is undeniably true and it is the satisfying aspect - to learn why the main character was behaving so oddly, to discover the reason behind the curse, to know why the haunting is occurring at that time and place and so on.  But not all stories have this form.

There is no logic behind Gregor Samsa awaking one morning to discover that he has been transformed into a giant insect.  He did not incur the wrath of an insect god.  He is not being tested.  He does not revert to human at the kiss of a beautiful woman.  It just happens.

This lack of logic is what some people find unsatisfying about Kafka - or other writers of this type - but it is exactly what I like about it.  All that is required of a writer is that he holds the reader's attention and makes the story work, in his or her terms.  To make a reader accept a fantastical premise like the one in Metamorphosis you have to be a very good writer as well, of course.

But it simply is not true that a story has to make 'sense'.  There does not have to be a reason for everything.  In fact for some stories, that kind of tying off of loose ends is the kiss of death.

Movie nibbles

Someone who contacted us a while back about the possibility of turning The Dead of Winter into a TV drama was back in touch asking about the rights to Mister Creecher.

The whole business of movie rights, as I've said before, is a strange one.  I suppose we have had three or four people interested in Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror now, for both TV and cinema.  The latest of these I have still yet to meet but may do so in the near future.

So far none of the people involved has wanted to actually take out an option - that is, to buy the rights for a set period of time.  It is frustrating because it is hard not to be excited by the possibility of a movie, however much you tell yourself that it will probably never happen.

Even having an option taken out does not mean that anything will happen.  You get some money - not a life-changing amount sadly - and the wait.  And wait.  And wait.

Of course some people do have movies made and those movies do well and the books get a huge new lease of life and everyone is happy.  And that is why writers - who pretend to be pessimists but are usually dreamers - are always going to be excited by that email headed 'Movie interest!'

Notebooks

Our new shelves meant that we finally went through all the boxes that have been stacked up in our conservatory since we moved in five months ago.  As well as books I found a little stash of notebooks.

Some of these were from my days working a The Independent newspaper.  They are strange mix of ideas for cartoons and illustrations I knew I would have to do, and of short stories and ideas as well as diary notes and observations.

Some were earlier though, going back to the early 1980s.  One of them contains a very early version of the story The Path from Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror.  None of these stories were ever intended for children.  I don't think it had occurred to me to write for children when I was that age.

I had tried to write novels before.  I wrote a large part of a fantasy novel when I was about sixteen or seventeen.  I started to write another more autobiographical novel at college but I burned that one in a saucepan in a Woody Allenesque grand gesture.

I intended to write another autobiographical novel based on my time working in a steelworks in the summer of 1979 but it did not get further than a few notes.  Other than that almost all my output was in short story form.

I read a huge amount of short stories and always had done - sci-fi and horror stories in my teens and then later, everything from Kafka to Carver.  My own short story ideas are equally diverse.  Although my recent output for children has been entirely in the genre of horror, at this time I was also writing stories that were more influenced by reading modern American writers and which did not have any fantastical or uncanny element at all.

Sometimes I worry about this.  I am the same as a visual artist.  I do not have one clear single vision for my work as a painter or an illustrator.  I wish I did.  It must make life easier.  But I don't.

Neither do I run on a single set of lines when I write.  My head is buzzing with ideas at the moment, but only some of those ideas are in any way connected with my previous work.  It is understandably thought desirable, career-wise, if you can successfully brand yourself in some way, in terms of genre.

It is harder, though much more desirable, to brand yourself as a good writer, regardless of genre.

Shelves

There is much excitement in the Priestley household, because we are having shelves built.  That's right - bookshelves!  This may not seem very exciting, but we have had our books in boxes in storage for over five years and it is ridiculously exciting to think that we will finally be reunited with them.

14

I've been thinking a lot about being fourteen lately.

I suppose it's because my son is fourteen - at least for another few weeks - and its a period in my life that I remember quite well, in parts.

Of course I was fourteen so long ago to write about that period - something I think of doing more and more - amounts to historical fiction.  I recognise much of myself in my son, but our lives could not have been more different.

I will regularly bore my son with an evocation of a world in which there was no video recording, no DVDs, no iPlayer or in fact any way to watch a programme again or see one that you had missed or in fact watch anything other than what happened to be on one of the three television channels at the time - BBC1, BBC2 or ITV.

There were no computer games - or personal computers of any kind, other than pocket calculators.  There were no iPods or iPads or mobile phones.  Music was only available through the medium of the radio or via vinyl records.

It sounds like hell, doesn't it?

Well, I can't build up much of a case for the early 70s being a golden age, but I don't feel like I missed out.  We had more freedom for one thing.  The dangers were perceived to be less - with good cause - and so we were allowed to simply wander off into a world of our own making.

That world - the world of the child-becoming-an-adult is a really interesting one, I think.  It manages to bring with it a lot of the wonder of childhood, but that wonder is combined with new forces, many dark and confusing.  It is a time when you are trying on the you of the future and seeing how it fits.

Increasingly this time is being branded 'young adult' when in fact it is 'pre-adult'.  Children of this age are still children, regardless of whether they engage in activities that are considered adults.  These not-quite-adults are starting to get a sense of what the world is really like.  They do not fully understand that they will never fully understand it.

Bosch

It seems perfectly natural to talk about the influence of literature and movies when talking about writing, but, for me anyway, the visual arts have also played a huge part - and continue to do so.

I have no idea when I first saw the work of Hieronymous Bosch - it would have been at school and in reproduction - but I have never ever tired of it.  Looking through the prism of painters like Dali it is easy to see him as a kind of pro to-Surrealist.  But he wasn't anything of the sort, of course.

Bosch gives us a baffling glimpse into another world where even the everyday objects are confused by historical distance.  These tools and musical instruments are taken by Bosch and put to the service of demons and strange creatures who engage in meticulously rendered but utterly perplexing dramas.  It is a world of magic - a mix of pagan and Christian mythology.

I am fascinated by the worlds he creates.  They are like a painterly form of Tourette's - Bosch just seems incapable of stopping himself painting yet another bare bottom with a flute or a flower sticking out of it.  They are vulgar and violent and very, very weird.  Like Brueghel, the painter with whom he is always linked in my mind, I go from detail to detail, always finding things I had not spotted before.

For a long time I have wanted to write something in Bosch's painted world.  I just have never come up with the right story.  One day maybe. . .

And incidentally I discovered when I was in Amsterdam that his name is not pronounced - as I've always heard it - Hi-RON-i-mus Bosh.  It is pronounced HY-ro-NAY-mus Bosk.