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.

Uncle Montague

When I first wrote these stories they stood on their own. But short stories in children's publishing are seen as problematic. They are perceived as being difficult things to market and to sell. The solution to this was to have a storyteller and sell the book as a novel rather than as a collection of stories.

Happily, this actually seemed very natural to me. Television often used the device of having a story introduced. Rod Serling did this with The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock hammed it up on Hitchcock Presents and Roald Dahl introduced his own Tales of the Unexpected in the 1980s. It was also a feature of horror comic books like Tales from the Crypt and House of Mystery.

And of course M R James had famously read his own stories as a Christmas treat. In fact the idea of reading creepy stories at Christmas became an established convention in Victorian times.

But the most telling inspiration for me was the portmanteau movie. There are several of these, but the one that sticks in my mind is the wonderful 1940s Ealing Studios movie, Dead of Night. I can't remember when I first saw this, but I can certainly remember the horrible effect it had on me. The two most famous stories are one about a ventriloquist dummy and another about an antique mirror, but the endlessly repeating framing story also sticks in my mind.

Cinema and television were both a big influence on these books. I discovered M R James through the 1970s BBC adaptations and I came to Poe via the wonderfully over-the-top Roger Corman movies (usually starring Vincent Price - pictured at the top of the post). It was Vincent Price (and the other greats of horror movies, like Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee) whom I had in mind when I pictured Uncle Montague.

As I've said, Uncle Montague was named in honour of M R James. Edgar was named after Edgar Allan Poe (though he regularly gets called Edward in reviews). Franz, Uncle Montague's unseen servant, is named for Franz Kafka and his noisy scuttling along the corridor is meant to suggest Kafka's Metamorphosis story, in which the main character awakes one morning to discover he has turned into a beetle. I like the idea that Franz is not necessarily human. Or not all the time anyway.

The whistle with which Uncle Montague summons the children is a reference to O Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad by M R James in which an antiquarian makes the mistake of blowing into a ancient whistle he unearths.

I heartily recommend both the original story and the 1960s Jonathan Miller adaptation (available on DVD as Whistle and I'll Come to You)

The path

I was very proud to see that Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror appeared on Charlie Higson's list of his top ten horror books. Mine was the only children's book on the list and I was in some very illustrious company - Stephen King, M R James, Richard Matheson and Daphne du Maurier all getting a mention.

I was also sent a link by Mary Hoffman to a lovely Bookbag review of The Dead of Winter

And then, yesterday, I was told by Ian Lamb at Bloomsbury that Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth had been awarded the Dracula Society's Children of the Night Award. This is not - as its title may suggest - a children's book award. It is an award given by the society for the best book (fiction or non-fiction) in the previous year with a Gothic horror theme. Robert Westhall, Sarah Waters and Terry Pratchett have all been past recipients. I'm off to an awards dinner in November and I'll tell you more about it then.

And so, back to the stories in Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror. . .

The Path was one of the stories I had sketched in decades before this book was published. It went through many forms, but the Cumbrian location was always the same and many of the essentials remained unchanged as it shifted from having an adult protagonist to having a teenager as the main character. I have walked the route that Matthew takes. I know those hills very well.

Partly it is another story that plays on my fear of heights (despite my love of hill-walking), but it is far more about the idea of a sinister double. Edgar Allan Poe's wonderful William Wilson is about a doppelganger, as is the creepy German silent movie The Student of Prague. But the creature in my story is actually more of a wraith - a double that presages death. The Path is one of my own personal favourites. I have a vivid image of the thing that follows Matthew up that track. It catches me by surprise every time I read it.

I am a huge fan of cyclical stories - stories that eat their own tails, so to speak, and go round and round in a dizzying circle. A fine example of this kind of storytelling is Roman Polanski's The Tenant.

Which reminds me - I have that on DVD and haven't watched it yet. I haven't seen it for ages. What a treat. . .

A ghost story

I'm not sure what the direct inspiration was for A Ghost Story, another story that I wrote especially for Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror, although I do remember that I played around with it for a while before I got all the pieces to fall into place. Partly, it evoked for me a childhood memory of the thrill of hiding and of hearing the muffled footsteps of the searcher.

I think that I had been told several stories - by mothers or fathers of daughters - of their child having a tough time at school. Girls are much more social animals than boys, but the dark side of that, of course, is that this social network can be taken away. Girls suffer by exclusion more than boys, because boys are simply less reliant on a social circle.

So I suppose a little of that might have been in the back of my mind when I wrote this story. Certainly the girls are fairly unpleasant. Victoria herself is not a wholly sympathetic character, but she certainly does not deserve her fate. I am reminded of those toys - do they still exist? - where there is a plastic figure with a suction cup at the bottom. Gradually it comes away from whatever it is attached to and suddenly springs up into the air. Even though you know its coming it makes you jump. That is the effect I wanted with A Ghost Story.

It is a story within a story - a device I am very fond of. It is a story about storytelling. Books - not even books for children - have to be read aloud, especially books for older children, but with Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror is was very important to me when I was writing the stories that they would work well when read aloud. I wanted parents or teachers - or children themselves - to be able to read them and make them work. A creepy short story has to have the satisfying structure of a good joke. Timing is everything.

I have always enjoyed listening to stories and I enjoy reading them to an audience. It seems a shame to me that once we get past a certain age we get self-conscious about this and are only comfortable reading aloud to children. The popularity of audio books and programmes like Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 show that adults do still enjoy the experience of being read to.