Someone asked me the other day: ‘Why do you dabble in the darkness so much? Why, in your writing, are you so obsessed with the frightening and the horrific?’ It was a fair enough question, and it got me wondering if maybe it sometimes seems a little odd, even worrying, that my interests, (outside of sport!), lie almost entirely within the realms of dark fiction (and sometimes dark nonfiction like folklore or true crime). So, clearly, it’s a question I need to answer. And in today’s entirely self-indulgent blogpost, I’m going to attempt to do just that.
I should also mention that I’m penning this missive in eager anticipation of THE LODGE, my next novel and without doubt my darkest crime thriller to date, which is published on January 15 (yep, in only nine days’ time, though alternatively you can pre-order it right now!). Early reviews include terms like ‘captivating’ and ‘suspenseful’, and mention characters who are ‘a great mix of dynamic personalities and sarcastic wit’.
And now …
What took me to the Dark Side?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a happy chap. My interest in the scary and grotesque does not stem from some deep-rooted inner depression or soul-destroying spiritual horror. So, never fear – I’m not going to spend the next few paragraphs baring my innermost sorrows. Far from it. My interest in dark fiction is an interest of the exhilarating kind. It thrills me, inspires me. It’s not a curse, it’s a gift. But it must have come from somewhere, right?
Now, I don’t mean this in a “heh heh heh … secretly I’ve always been evil!” kind of way. No, not at all. I’ve always rooted for the good guys, but one thing I learned very early on was that, in fiction, it’s not the hero or heroine’s inherent right to win. Victory has to be earned. The good guys must first overcome immense odds. And the key to this often means surviving colossal hardship and getting the better of opponents who, quite simply, are devastatingly bad.
In some ways, of course, even that’s a cheat. Because the troubles that bedevil us in the real world are often onerous, intractable, heartbreakingly complex, and cannot just be condensed into the form of a dragon or giant, which, scary though they are, can still be dispatched with a judicious sword-stroke. Nevertheless, the opponents encountered in our longest-lasting stories and most profound lessons for life always reflect this if they can, confronting us with marquee villains, top-drawer enemies whom it costs our heroes dearly to defeat.
You see this even in theology. Jesus Christ was pitted against none other than Satan himself and in order to achieve total victory, needed not just to perish, but to perish in horrible fashion. Perhaps in my case, that’s Ground Zero ... where it all really started. I was raised in a devout but non-oppressive Catholic household, where there was always a focus on doing the right thing but also an understanding that sometimes we fail, even though that latter should never be a source of despair to us because the ultimate price for sin had already been paid by Jesus himself.
So, there you have it, possibly. Ingrained into me from my earliest awareness was the notion that triumphing over evil may – in fact must – exact a very high price.
The same message is found throughout folklore and legend, and in all great fiction, and so again – and please pardon me for making this thing so personal – I’m going back to my beginnings.
My father, Brian, no mean playwright himself, was undoubtedly the spark.
He too had a deep fascination for the strange and uncanny and would assail me with stories drawn from our eeriest fables. The Greek myths were a particular favourite, containing, as they did, some of the most fiendish villains in all of human imagination: Medusa, the gorgon; the multi-headed Hydra; the bull-headed Minotaur; and Telos, the unstoppable bronze giant.
But the tale that stuck with me the longest was not Greek, but Norse.
The story of Beowulf, which comes to us in the form of an Old English poem dated to somewhere between the eighth and tenth centuries, made such a deep impact on my young self because it had an air of the real. Now … please let me explain that outlandish statement.
To start with, the most memorable antagonist in the story, Grendel (depicted right on the cover of John Gardner’s marvelous novel), has an actual personality. He isn’t just evil for the sake of it. He’s been provoked, though when his dark and barbarous nature overtakes him, he decides that if he can’t have men’s friendship, he’ll have their fear. And what an opponent he makes. His first attack alone sees him slaughter thirty victims and then drink and smear himself with their blood. After that, he doesn’t just continually ransack the wreckage of King Hrothgar’s golden hall, Heorot, he prowls the fens and the lonely roads, killing everyone he encounters. In so many ways, he is the prototype serial murderer: a reviled outsider who lost his soul under a tide of uncontrollable hatred.
Top-drawer enemies
In some ways, of course, even that’s a cheat. Because the troubles that bedevil us in the real world are often onerous, intractable, heartbreakingly complex, and cannot just be condensed into the form of a dragon or giant, which, scary though they are, can still be dispatched with a judicious sword-stroke. Nevertheless, the opponents encountered in our longest-lasting stories and most profound lessons for life always reflect this if they can, confronting us with marquee villains, top-drawer enemies whom it costs our heroes dearly to defeat.
So, there you have it, possibly. Ingrained into me from my earliest awareness was the notion that triumphing over evil may – in fact must – exact a very high price.
The same message is found throughout folklore and legend, and in all great fiction, and so again – and please pardon me for making this thing so personal – I’m going back to my beginnings.
The spark
He too had a deep fascination for the strange and uncanny and would assail me with stories drawn from our eeriest fables. The Greek myths were a particular favourite, containing, as they did, some of the most fiendish villains in all of human imagination: Medusa, the gorgon; the multi-headed Hydra; the bull-headed Minotaur; and Telos, the unstoppable bronze giant.
But the tale that stuck with me the longest was not Greek, but Norse.
The story of Beowulf, which comes to us in the form of an Old English poem dated to somewhere between the eighth and tenth centuries, made such a deep impact on my young self because it had an air of the real. Now … please let me explain that outlandish statement.
Even Beowulf, an archetypical Viking hero, brawny and fearless, underestimates him, or at least underestimates the threat that Grendel embodies, because though he inflicts a mortal wound on Grendel in their first battle, he never imagines the monster might actually be part of a family, that he might have a mother – the Water Hag – who then comes creeping through the darkness herself and tears off the head of Aescher, King Hrothgar’s closest companion.
Beowulf ultimately kills the Water Hag too, though this encounter is far more terrifying, the hero having to track her through a network of dank caves heaped with the rotted corpses of the multiple victims she and her son have murdered.
But for me, it doesn’t end with Jesus Christ or Beowulf. Not at all.
A pleasing terror
Those were only my earliest years, and yet my head was already filled with stories in which heroes squared off against an evil so massive that it might be the death of them, against monsters that would turn you to stone with a glance or wrench off your head while you were sleeping. Not much there in the way of fluffy bunnies or cute little fairies.
The real question though, is why did I enjoy it so much? Why, even as a very young child, did I find pleasure in the terror imposed by these fearsome adversaries? Okay, it was a safe kind of terror. No matter how scary the story got, you always knew that no real gorgon or cyclops was going to come into your bedroom at night. It was a ‘pleasing terror’, a term that scholars would in due course use to describe the ultra-frightening ghost stories of MR James.
It also landed at the subliminal level, as I’ve already mentioned. It didn’t just make the good guys all the more admirable, it worked nicely if you were looking for a truly dramatic tale with thrills and chills but wrapped around a positive message.
Brave hero = good; carnivorous brute = bad
But this was during my infancy. What about my teenage years, when I commenced that seemingly endless ascent towards adulthood? Would I grow out of all this, or would the opposite happen?
Generation X
These formative years, or so psychoanalysts tell me, are the most important period of our ‘growing up’ process. A time when all our intimate hopes and fears finally crystalise, when the attitudes we’ll hold for ever more are formed. And mine occurred during what in social terms was truly one of the strangest, most dramatic periods in recent British history.
The 1960s and 1970s were not, as is commonly believed, the dawn of a new age, they were the end of an old one.
In some ways, when I was a boy almost nothing had changed for decades. Bomb damage was still in evidence from World War Two. The town I grew up in, Wigan, was still forested with tall chimneys, all smoking, while most men worked in factories, coal mines and textile mills, and married women tended to stay at home with the kids. In other ways, though, things were changing and changing fast – perhaps too fast.
Like it or not, the sexual revolution had unintended consequences. It certainly liberated a lot of young folks from constraints that many considered Victorian in origin, but at the same time, in other cases, concepts like restraint and decency also waved adieu. Prostitution and pornography didn’t just come out into the open, everyday sex and explicit nudity were suddenly all over the place: on our cinemas, on our mid-evening TV schedules, on the shelves in our local newsagents. And this was the shocking new world than a latchkey kid like me suddenly found himself trying to navigate, having been completely unprepared for it of course (aside from hearing repeated assurances that indulging in ‘filth’ would not only get me a good hiding, but also was a guaranteed ticket to Hell).
Such new slap-in-the-face entertainment was even reflected on television. It wasn’t just late-night horror shows like Thriller, Beasts, or Dead of Night; it emerged in more prosaic TV series like Play for Today – Robin Redbreast, anyone?, Penda’s Fen? – on public information films warning about household hazards, and even in children’s television.
Fatal infection, mindless murder, atrocities on a scale the Nazis would have been proud of … all served up as fun for the kids.
It didn’t end with TV. Comics also adopted the do-or-die mantle. Luke Cage came on the scene in 1972, The Punisher in 1974, both of whom responded to the violence of the underworld with extreme violence of their own, while here in the UK we had Action!
This cavalier approach to the grimmer aspects of life extended into everyday routine. In a town like Wigan, our outdoor playgrounds were sweeps of colliery spoil-land and the hazardous ruins of gutted factories, and no adults ever really objected to us hanging out there.
By the way, I should add at this point that I don’t mean to imply our parents and guardians were neglectful. But the old tradition of parental trust was still in force. Kids who endured corporal punishment both at home and school and could even expect a good hard crack from a patrolling copper if he caught you up to no good, were considered tough enough to roam wherever they would without supervision, and to deal with most situations they might encounter.
But at what point does toughness become recklessness?
Real world menace
Our independent spirit overrode concern for many kinds of dangers.
The 1960s and 1970s, both in Britain and the US, were the beginning of what is these days, somewhat distastefully, known as ‘the golden age of the serial killer’.
In this period, America’s worst ne’er-do-wells – brutal mass-slayers like Charles Manson, Richard Speck and Ted Bundy – hogged all the headlines.
And yet despite the shadowy presence of madmen like these on the peripheries of our world, we’d been through the mill so much by then that it didn’t seem to worry us in the least. There were too many games to be played in the autumn-darkened woods, too many ruined factories to explore. If anything, the fact there were real killers on the prowl inspired us. I’ll never forget the exhilaration we felt during one Halloween party when we all gathered in someone’s shed, clad in homemade costumes (so crude they probably looked more frightening than the real thing!), and told each other horror stories, including one that had come straight from the previous week’s newspaper about a young lad who’d been slashed to death with a pair of scissors only a few miles from where we were sitting. We even rechristened those regular nighttime games we played: ‘Hide and Seek’ became ‘Murder in the Dark’ or ‘Werewolf by Night’, ‘What Time is it, Mr Wolf’ became ‘Rip His Head Off, Mr Wolf!’
Embraced by the Dark Side
What was the upshot of all this close familiarity with the darkness?
Well … no, we didn’t become killers ourselves. Or at least, I didn’t. And, at the end of the day, I can only talk for myself.
It’s perhaps worth remembering that on entering adulthood, I joined the Greater Manchester Police (and that’s a whole other bunch of hair-raising stories), so I never really left that darker world behind. And in due course, when I finally started to write, I didn’t really think I could go back to anything else. All the other aspects of life seemed so tame. Deep down, I might even have been traumatised. Were those of us who’d come through all that now like war veterans, unable to adjust to normality because normality just seemed flat, boring and empty?
That’s a bit melodramatic, but who knows, maybe.
I’m now in late middle age. Still happily married, my children all grown up and moved away. Even my police career (such as it was) is far behind me, and yet I still find fear, terror and horror the most potent human emotions to weave stories around.
I understand the appeal of romantic fiction, of cosy crime, of whimsical fantasy and laugh-out-loud comedy (especially the latter, seeing as we get so little of that in modern times), but I’m sorry … for me, it’s always going to be the thriller or the chiller. Or preferably both.
A devil’s brew that is definitely best served dark and cold.
And by the way, THE LODGE ticks all of these boxes. It’s one of the grimmest, scariest books I’ve ever written, and just to remind you, it’s published in nine days’ time on January 15.
