Mud

There are certain places in the world that seem to be inherently creepy. The coast of New England in the USA is one, East Anglia in the UK is another.

Whether these places were already creepy, or whether they have become creepy over time through association, is harder to judge. New England has the connection with devil-obsessed Cotton Mather and the Salem Witch Trials, the writings of H P Lovecraft and latterly Stephen King, as well as countless movies. East Anglia has Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled Witchfinder General, and the writings of M R James.

Oddly enough, a quick glance at a map of New England will show you that many of the settlers there were from East Anglia and took the names of their towns and villages with them. They also, sadly, took their superstitions with them. I wrote a book about the Salem Witch trials and examined the court records and family history of those involved and the links with East Anglia and Norfolk are very clear. But I digress. . .

The wonderful thing about Norfolk is the feeling of openness. Certainly in the north-west, where my story is set, the view to the distant horizon is often unbroken. This effect is even more pronounced on the coast, with its tidal marshes and long beaches. Then there is the light of course, and the wild weather.

And the long stretches of deep, glutinous mud. . .

I was thinking of the area around Thornham when I was writing the scenes in Mud where the brothers come ashore. I think it is always a good idea to have an actual place in your mind as a guide whenever possible. If you have the location firmly in your head, then it will be easier to make the setting real to the reader, even if you are not actually setting the story in an identifiable place.

Mud is also about twins. Twins are fascinating as characters, and they give lots of scope for a writer of chillers. Once again, it brings up notions of the doppelganger and the demonic double. It can also cause confusion in the reader and the characters themselves. Controlled confusion can be very useful to a writer.

Nature

One of the things that excites me about writing these stories is the challenge of finding new ways to deliver a shiver.

There is something especially revolting about a monstrous threat that moves slowly. As terrifying as it would be to face a tiger or an axe-wielding maniac, at least the ordeal might not last too long.

But supposing there was a threat that moved painfully slowly; a threat that you knew was going to bring a horribly slow and painful death, but one which you were utterly powerless to stop. The crew on George's ship are trapped in the way that the crew of the ship in Alien are trapped. It's just that my monster moves at a snail's pace.

I often say that I am not really that interested in gore as a writer, but Nature is definitely at the gruesome end of my work. . .

The boy in the boat

The Boy in the Boat is a story I played around with for a long time before I was happy. It differs from many of the stories in the Tales of Terror collection, in featuring a child as the malevolent presence in the story.

All my stories for the Tales of Terror have a young protagonist - and The Boy in the Boat is no exception - but this story is one of the few where the supernatural threat is coming from another child.

Children and young people are commonly found in uncanny or macabre stories. Many Saki stories feature children: The Open Window, The Lumber Room, Sredni Vashtar to name but a few. Children also play a big part in M R James' The Lost Hearts and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (wonderfully filmed as The Innocents). Then there is John Wyndham's classic The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed as Village of the Damned).

The Midwich Cuckoos plays on the idea of children as an unlikely source of danger and this idea is a firm favourite of horror movies - The Orphanage is a recent one that comes to mind. The Japanese seem particularly obsessed with this notion - the movie Dark Water being an excellent example of the genre.

So why are children creepy? Well, it is something to do with what I was talking about a couple of posts back when I said that we are unnerved when our expectations are dramatically contradicted. A child is expected to be playful and lively. A poorly lit, persistently silent and sullen child staring at the camera is usually all it takes to set a scary tone to a scene.

I thought I would take this idea one step further, and have a child who was cute and lively and seemingly good-natured - and turn all those qualities into a nightmare.

Irezumi

I find something both revolting and compelling about bodies covered in tattoos. Maybe that is what is at the basis of this story about a sailor and his visit to a Japanese tattoo parlour.

As with Piroska, this story possibly came about as I went through various association with the sea - and sailors and their tattoos came naturally to mind. Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man may have drifted by in my imagination, but I'm not sure.

I think two things were at work as I wrote Irezumi: the idea of a living tattoo that could move on the body, and the fun of misdirecting the reader. The horror reader has been trained to expect twists and stings in the tail, of course: they know that you are taking them into a dark room to shout 'Boo!'

But a writer can play with that expectation. . .

Pitch

Pitch is perhaps the most deliberate homage to Poe in all the Tales of Terror. It has elements of both The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart.

Much of what might appear on the surface as a fear of the supernatural, is actually a fear of madness. Or at least it is a fear that we have lost the ability to be sure of what we are seeing. We rely on our interpretation of what we see to guard us against danger, but if what if we are confronted by something that we 'know' can't possibly exist? What do we do then? Where do we run? Where do we hide? Is there even any point in running, or any point in hiding?

Madness is a great theme in some of Poe's best stories, both in the weird obsessive nature of many of the characters (the murderer in The Tell-Tale Heart kills his victim because he does not like the old man's pale cataract-clouded eye), but also in the way those characters implode, mentally. They are no longer sure of what they are seeing or hearing. And neither, as readers, are we.

I wanted Tom to have the deranged arrogance of many of Poe's characters. I wanted us to see that he was unhinged, but have him be cockily oblivious to his own mental state.

Piroska

I was making the point at the YLG conference that stories - good ones anyway - are rarely about one thing. Being boxed into a genre can give the impression that the work is just 'romance' or 'thriller' - or 'horror'. But horror, like crime, is a genre that actually allows the writer to talk about anything they like. In fact, the more compelling the situation, the scarier the denouement will be.

Piroska is as much about romance and longing as it is about horror. I'm not sure where it came from. I suppose I may have just brainstormed on the theme of the sea and the idea of emigrants just popped into my head. I know that I wanted to create an atmosphere of lethargy and melancholy. Most stories pick up speed towards their conclusion. This story does the opposite.

Right up until the end.

Thinking of ideas for stories can be a strange business. If you try too hard the ideas feel forced, but with a deadline ahead, waiting for an idea to appear isn't really an option. I tend to just hit an image or a situation (like emigrants on a ship bound for a new life) and move sideways through that seam until I (hopefully) hit gold.

Tales of terror from the black ship

I had not really intended to write a series of Tales of Terror. I just found that I had lots of stories that needed a bit more work. Some of the stories I had planned for Uncle Montague just would not fall into place in time. I had a Tales of Terror 2 folder in my computer where these stories were stored whilst I worked out endings or beginnings or just tweaked them into shape. A Tales of Terror 3 folder duly appeared later on and I already have a Tales of Terror 4 folder.

I wrote the story The Black Ship for the Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror collection, but at the last minute I took it out because I had the idea that it might make a good wraparound story for a set of marine ghost stories. And so Tales of Terror 2 became Tales of Terror from the Black Ship.

I had been reading Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and really liked the idea of writing some stories about ships and sailors and the sea. If M R James and Saki were my guides on Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror, then Poe was foremost in my mind when I sat down to write the stories in this collection.

I wanted these stories to be a little more bloodthirsty - a little more grisly. I also wanted them to be bit more. . . grotesque. Like the 'Here be monsters' warning on an ancient map, I wanted these stories to widen the spectrum of possible (or impossible) dangers for my characters.

A confined space is a standard device in horror fiction - from the creepy old house to the spaceship in the movie Alien. But it's not just the fact that you can have your characters face a threat and give them very limited options for escape, the world of seafaring suggests all sorts of possible story lines, from smugglers to pirates, storms to shipwrecks.

In the end, it turned out that The Black Ship did not make the perfect wraparound I'd thought it would. It would have meant that each of the stories would have had to have been first person narratives (and I did not want that limitation) and it seemed to spoil the balance of a story that I was very happy with as it was. But more of The Black Ship later.

With that realisation came the need for an alternative setting and narrator for the stories. The story of Cathy and Ethan, and the sailor, Thackeray, who comes in from the storm to tell them tales.

The framing stories have to do more than the stories they frame. They are far more about the characters involved. I want the reader to be interested in the characters and intrigued by their situation. These episodes must not turn into unwanted interruptions to the stories - they have to be a big part of the reason why the pages keep getting turned.

Thai tales

I received copies of the Thai editions of Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror and Tales of Terror from the Black Ship through the post the other day. They are published by Tawan.

Most foreign editions of the Tales of Terror book have gone with David Roberts' illustrations - both on the cover and inside. The Thai editions are unusual - to say the least - because they have gone with the same images, but have redrawn the illustrations throughout. I was not involved in this process, so I have no idea how or why this happened, but it is certainly very odd.

Thursday

As I mentioned in the previous post, I had tried to incorporate a month at the end of my writing time to finely tune Mister Creecher, my latest book. I am not the most organised of writers. I have a definite sense that over-planning is not a good thing. I think meticulous planning is OK for non-fiction, but not for fiction. A book needs to be a bit wild. Or the books I want to write (or read) need to be anyway.

But in any case, my dreams of finally producing a book at a calm and measured pace were scuppered by completely unforeseen distractions. . .

The first of these distractions were the additional stories to the reissues of the Tales of Terror books. They are being published in March with new jackets and I agreed to write an additional story for each. Each story needed its own little scene-setter and before I knew where I was I was writing another 13,000 words or so. The cover for the new Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror is at the top of the post with the inside cover showing the other two beneath.

And no - it wasn't a Guardian Top 100 Book (I don't even think such a list exists - though there is one for authors) - it is a mistake I hope will be rectified by the time the book actually goes to print.

As if that was not enough, I then discovered - at a rather late date, for reasons I shall not go into - that I was to do a World Book Day flipbook with Philip Reeve. I have sung the praises of Philip Reeve many times in this blog, and so it will come as no surprise to hear that I was delighted, not only by the honour of being asked to provide a book for World Book Day, but also to be sharing that book with an author I admire.

But, delighted though I was, that book still had to be written and written at great speed. It made sense to do another Tales of Terror compilation and so I wrote three more stories with a linking thread. The conceit is that the stories are being told to a group of school children on a Victorian dressing up event for World Book Day - hence, The Teacher's Tales of Terror. A strange supply/substitute teacher arrives and tells them three creepy stories. But the creepiness doesn't end there of course. . .

I was very pleased with all these stories and it was especially nice to return to the original Tales of Terror and to those characters. But I realised when I totted it all up that after writing those additional tales and the World Book Day stories (again about 13000 words), I had effectively written another book - an unplanned 53,000 word book - completely additional to my schedule. So instead of writing one book between April and July, I actually wrote two. The additional stories alone add up to the wordage of any one of the Tales of Terror books.

I do thrive on pressure, though I never used to. At school I hated exams - or even being asked to read. I hated being put on the spot. But after years of working as a newspaper illustrator and cartoonist, I do get a perverse - and it is perverse - pleasure at showing that I can take whatever is thrown at me.

But this was all probably too much. There is an episode of the wonderful Police Squad featuring a boxer who gets pummeled. The ref holds his hand in front of his face and says, 'How many fingers do you see?'. 'Thursday,' says the boxer. That was me I think, by the end of July.

But that wasn't the end of the distractions of course. As I have already mentioned I also had the cover for Mister Creecher to resolve. But I think that needs a post of its own.

Vlag & Wimpels van de Griffeljury

I had some nice news on Monday. My Dutch publishers, Pimento, got in touch via Bloomsbury to tell me that the Dutch translation of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship has won a special mention - called the Vlag & Wimpels (Flag and Pennants) - in the Gouden Griffel awards. The translator clearly did a fantastic job and I am really honoured to get this. I am also very pleased to have been invited over for the ceremony in October. More about that nearer the time.

Robot rampage

I came back to lots of mail and emails. I have to say that I hate it when I go away and come back to no mail, but it does seem to take an age to go through it all.

I received disappointing news from the Royal Academy Summer Show: my two paintings did not get in. I rang John hoping that at least he would have got in, but sadly his painting wasn't accepted either. It's a shame, but open exhibitions are a lottery. Or at least that's what we say when we don't get in.

My son rushed excitedly to retrieve a parcel from our neighbors across the road, thinking it was a birthday present for him, but it turned out to be a set of the OUP books I did a while back. I did two books in their Project X series. They are for the Oxford Reading Tree scheme and look a little bizarre on my shelves to be honest - they are so different from everything I have been doing for the last few years. But they were fun to do. The characters already existed and so did the major plot movers, so it was more as I imagine it must be like writing for an existing TV programme or for a comic with established characters.

I had an email from Bloomsbury telling me that Tudem, my Turkish publisher for Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror and Tales of Terror from the Black Ship, has also decided to take Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. Which is great news.


And speaking of Tunnel's Mouth, I had the paperback covers through the post before I went away. It has a great quote from my erstwhile employer, The Independent -

'...it's genuinely, thrillingly horrible. And I mean that in a good way.'

The paperback is out in October this year.

I also had an email from the Eagle House School near Sandhurst where I am doing an event the week after next. They are having a Celebration of Children's Literature Festival and I'm very much looking forward to meeting everyone there.

I have some other news, but I am not allowed to tell you until tomorrow. . .

Spring jacket

I finally finished all three of the additional stories for the Tales of Terror re-issues and I was very excited to receive this early viewing of the new jacket treatment for Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror for the spring 2011 reissue. I think it's great. It is deliberately older in feel and, as lovely as they are, it will not feature the David Roberts illustrations. The idea is to present the book in a completely fresh way and hopefully pick up some readers who might have been put off by the younger look of the previous covers.

I was very keen that the additional stories were not simply tacked on to the end in some way or shoe-horned into the main body of the book. It was important to me that they genuinely added something. And I am happy that they do. . .

I have written a story for Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror that see Edgar return to hear another tale - one that concerns a mysterious snow globe. The story for Tales of Terror from the Black Ship sees the return of Cathy and Ethan's father who tries to explain the source of his madness. In Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth, Robert is recuperating and hears a strange tale from his stepmother.

These new stories link the books together, adding new connections between the characters and their tales. The books still stand alone, but reading all three in order will now be a more satisfying experience, I think.

It has been a lot of fun for me to return to those characters and I trust that will come across when you (hopefully) read them next spring.

Every day, in every way, I'm getting worse at keeping this blog

I've completely lost my discipline with the blog these days. I used to at least try and write it every day. Now it is getting to be more like once a week. I will be trying to do a little better in the coming weeks, but that said, the next month is looking a bit disrupted.

I thought I'd fill you in on what I'm doing and planning to do in the near future. Some time ago I mentioned that I was putting some paintings into open exhibitions. I still haven't heard about the Royal Academy Summer Show - we hear next week actually - but I did get a painting into the Eastern Open in King's Lynn. My studio mate John Clark got two in. The paintings come back this Friday (having failed to lure the good people of King's Lynn into making a purchase).

John and I have signed up for the Cambridge Open Studios as well. I already wish I hadn't as I simply do not have the time to spare on painting. John has been working away every day and producing lots of paintings, some of which I hope to show you when he decides he is happy for them to be seen.

I, on the other hand, have been writing my new book - Mister Creecher. I have a July delivery date on the manuscript and I had really wanted a clear month to work on the rough draft, but that is now looking less likely. I have been doing so many other things.

One of these things - for those of you who visit the blog regularly - was a graphic novel sample. This has proved the biggest distraction of all. I have wanted to do a graphic novel since I was a teenager and leapt at the opportunity. But I am not getting paid to do that and I am contracted to do my book, so I feel as though I have to get on with that. The graphic novel will have to wait. For the moment.

But I have also been distracted by writing other things. Bloomsbury have had the idea that when they repackage the Tales of Terror books next year (more of that another time) it would be nice to have an extra story at the end. That has proved more difficult that I'd imagined but it has been a lot of fun returning to those books and to those characters. I have written the first two - in rough - and am about to write the Tunnel's Mouth story.

More later. . .

Manchester

I paid a flying visit to Manchester yesterday. I had been invited to talk to Chorlton High School by Rachel Hockey, their energetic librarian.

I really liked Chorlton High School. There was clearly a real appreciation of books there and the school puts a lot of effort and resources into encouraging that appreciation. The students were well-behaved but in a lively and interested way. They asked good questions and seemed to enjoy themselves.

I had a chat to them about who I was and how I became a writer, how I write and what I write. I tried to offer a few things to think about in their own writing. Their questions threw up some more issues to talk about as always. The time whizzed by.

Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror and Tales of Terror from the Black Ship had both been longlisted for the Manchester Book Award, but neither had made it onto the shortlist. It was great to hear such enthusiasm for the books from students and staff and it makes me hopeful that Tunnel's Mouth might be more successful. I hope so.

I gave the talk in the school's theatre. I didn't have time to do a reading, which was a shame because the space was windowless and therefore we could control the amount of light. It can be very difficult to get the audience into the creepy state of mind when the sun is streaming in through the window at 9.30 in the morning, but here it would have been easy. It was also a very good place to wheel out a PowerPoint show.

Next time perhaps.

I actually came up the day before so that I could get to the school first thing. I came up a little bit earlier than I needed just so that I could have a quick wander around the city in daylight to get reacquainted with the place. I went to art college here from 1976 to 1980.

A lot has changed since then. For one thing, the city has trams. They look great too. They suit the heroic scale of those Victorian buildings and long, wide streets. The architecture looked fantastic in the low light, with shining windows and glittering glazed tiles and long shadows sending whole streets into twilight.

The brutalist concrete crescents of Hume have gone - and presumably the Russell Club along with them. When I was a student here, I can remember walking round drawing or taking photos and I didn't have to walk too far from All Saints to find picturesque scenes of urban decay. It all seemed a lot smarter now. Old warehouses have been turned into apartments. People live in the centre of Manchester now.

The most startling change was perhaps the fact that I was staying in the Radisson Hotel on the site of the Free Trade Hall, one of the many venues for bands in Manchester. I don't remember going to the Free Trade Hall that often - the sort of bands I liked tended to play smaller venues - but it was still odd - sad even - to see the facade of the building still there, with a modern hotel hiding behind it.

Japanese ship

An advance copy of the Japanese edition of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship turned up today. It looks great. I really like the design of the title. It came out at the end of last year, published by Rironsha.

CDs of terror

This arrived in the post today. It is the BBC Audio version of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship. Bill Wallis did a very nice job of reading Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror, so I look forward to hearing this.

After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life

Tales of Terror from the Black Ship up for Salford Children's Book Award and the awards ceremony is on Friday at the Lowry Centre in Salford. Sadly I'm not going to be able to be there to applaud the winner. I'm head to head with Sally Nicholls again, as I was with the North-East Book Award. The other shortlisted authors are Michelle Magorian, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Emma Clayton and Elizabeth laird.

So - back to Frankenstein. Everybody knows how the creature was brought to life don't they. Frankenstein uses electricity. That's what those bolts in the monster's neck are for. Well - perhaps. . .

Except that Mary Shelley does not say how the creature was brought to life. She neatly sidesteps this issue by explaining - as Victor Frankenstein - that this knowledge is too dangerous to pass on. We all assume it must be electricity because of the great 'It's alive!' scene in James Whale's movie. Mary's monster does not look like Karloff's monster - there are no bolts.

Whales did not completely invent this notion. Although the novel does not mention electricity, the introduction to the 1831 edition does. Perhaps, writes Mary, a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things; perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.

A little later, when she is talking about the nightmare that triggered the novel, she says that in her dream she saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.

So there is some foundation for Whales' lightning bolt and strange machinery. Luigi Galvani had made a dead frog's leg jump as though alive. In 1805, Giovanni Aldini wowed London with 're-animation' experiments as public performances, running electricity through the corpses or hanged men until they twitched and jerked and grimaced.

But Whales also had the example of Fritz Lang's 1927 silent movie, Metropolis. The scene where Maria is transformed into the robot is very similar to the scene in Frankenstein. Although there had always been a fear of science, the twentieth century is when the idea of the 'mad scientist' really seems to strike a chord.

But what about the business of how the creature is made - before it is 'endued with vital warmth'. Again ask almost anyone and they will tell you that it was made from pieces of corpses stitched together.

But was he?

The dead of winter

Yet more news of foreign editions today as Bloomsbury got in touch to tell me that Taiwan is to publish Tales of Terror from the Black Ship and Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. They have already published Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror.

And I found this when I was doing a Google trawl to see if I could come up with any new foreign edition cover artwork. It is the Bloomsbury Children's Book catalogue for the Frankfurt book fair last year.

This is the image that I did for the cover of my new novel The Dead of Winter (out in October).

Spanish ships

I had some more good news today on the foreign editions front. Uli Rushby-Smith at the rights department is obviously working overtime. There is to be a Spanish edition of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship, published by Ediciones SM (who also published Uncle Montague in Spain).

I should also have said that the Czech publisher for Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror is Argo.

De verschrikkelijke verhalen van het zwarte schip

A big parcel of books arrived the other day containing the Dutch editions of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship. I have been so busy blogging about Cumbria that I haven't had a chance to acknowledge their arrival.

It is always a thrill when another country decides to take your book, and always a little disappointing if they do not take the next in the series - so I'm very pleased that Pimento has taken The Black Ship.

And I love all those jagged Vs and Ks in that title.