BLACK STATIC #41 (14 page)

Horror and dark fantasy writers have a very strong influence on me, possibly more than any other genre. As a child I loved escaping into the strange, beguiling worlds of Poe, Stoker and Lovecraft and wandered round the school playground imagining tentacles emerging from the algae-happy pond. I also fell for Stephen King, James Herbert and Shirley Jackson and developed an enduring obsession for ghost stories, particularly by M.R. James. They are all influences still, although Lovecraft has the main impact on my interior design – I have Cthulhu Christmas decorations and a Miskatonic University shower curtain. I’d love a tentacular chandelier one day.

What made you set your novel in Cambridge? More specifically, why Cambridge in the present day and in the seventeenth century? What was it about the latter period that appealed so strongly to you?

I studied English at Cambridge and found it a strange, wonderful and bewildering place. Parts of the city and colleges remain unchanged for hundreds of years and there are streets where I have the unnerving feeling that I could be walking in any century in the last seven. It seemed the perfect place to set a time travel novel, particularly as for me it switches in character, like a charming villain, throughout the year – from a friendly, picturesque city with its sun-dappled Cam and swathes of green in summer, to a cold, eerily beautiful, snow-prone, harsh-stoned place in winter.

While researching Oliver Cromwell and Cambridge, I read a book about King Charles’ propensity to acquire art and the whole strand of the seventeenth century artists emerged. It worked well with the aesthetics of death angle that runs through the twenty-first century sections. It was also a time of change, unrest and death – but then so is every era.

Totally frivolous interview question: if you could travel in time, what period would you most like to visit and why?

Not frivolous at all, this is serious business. Right now, on a sunny afternoon, with an east-bearing wind and a suspicious-looking panini, I’d go to late Victorian London. I’m researching the sequel to
The Beauty of Murder
and am currently lost in a world of gin palaces, spirit cabinets and cholera – that’s a fun Monday. Tomorrow, I may well want to travel to pre-dynastic Egypt. Or 1994 – that really was a great year for music. And I’d like to find my favourite fountain pen, left on the back of a bus in Dorset in June that year.

History, physics, philosophy, aesthetics are all covered in
The Beauty of Murder.
What kind of research did you undertake for the book? Did you make any discoveries that shaped the final structure of the book?

I’ve got a magpie mind so I loved researching all the shiny, disparate subjects touched on in the book. I read up on seventeenth century life and history, taxidermy, phrenology, college records, serial killers, metaphysics, myths and medical matters; found specimens and weapons in the Hunterian museum; studied maps of Cambridge; tried out magic tricks; collected interesting items including a doctor’s case containing old surgical instruments and fell in the river Cam. It all went in my brain and rearranged itself.

Reading up on free will and determinism helped me structure the book. At least I think it did, it may have gone that way without me willing it…

Central to
Beauty
is the character of Jackamore Grass, your time travelling serial killer. Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired this monster? What are the qualities that make a fictional villain memorable?

Jackamore Grass first appeared to me when I was at Cambridge. One night, when I was walking back from the bar, I stepped into an alleyway that ran behind King’s Parade and heard footsteps behind me. Looking round, I saw no one there and kept walking. The steps followed, just out of time with mine. I knew, rationally, that it must be my own footsteps, echoing against the old stone. I stopped by a tiny church, ducking out of sight. The steps continued, coming closer. I ran, through the narrow streets and the market square, the footsteps close behind me until I reached my accommodation, slammed the door behind me and sank down onto the floor, laughing at myself for being silly and susceptible. Then came a knock on the heavy metal door. I knelt up and looked through the letterbox – there was no one there. That was when I thought of a time travelling serial killer.

It took years for him to develop though. He has been following me, or I have been following him, for over fifteen years and in that time he has become the dark, twisted monster in the book.

A protagonist is only as strong and memorable as his or her antagonist. Fictional villains like Jackamore need to be beyond the established moral code of their time, acting out the darker thoughts and desires that everyone has but few act on. Their joy in this is both appalling and fascinating. A memorable villain acts out the darkness that we don’t like to remember is lurking inside us all.

Aesthetics underpin much of the story, as the book’s title suggests, or at least provide a justification for one of the characters. What are your own thoughts on the relationship between art and subject matter usually regarded as grotesque and/or criminal? Does art have the power to transform them or confer a redemptive quality?

I find great beauty in artistic subjects that are often thought of as macabre. One of my favourite artists at the moment, Rebecca Stevenson, makes exquisite sculptures of apparently dead figures and the life that bursts from them. There are none of the usual, unnerving images associated with what comes from dead bodies – flies, maggots, disintegration – instead the monochrome host blooms with technicolour flora. It is a powerful display, for me, of how life follows death and how death can be beautiful. Thinking about death makes me feel calm, centred and in the moment – I am more likely to be joyful and full of life when I am fully aware that we have little time and it is precious. Good art can find a way to transform the fear that surrounds death into celebration of the life we have now.

What are you currently working on? What can we expect to see next from the word processor of A.K. Benedict?

My second novel,
Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts
, is nearly finished – it is a dark crime novel set in ghost-locked London. Meanwhile, I’ve started the sequel to
The Beauty of Murder
and am also writing short stories, a TV script and a graphic novel.

THE BOOK(S) OF THE FILM

The Devil’s Advocate range has gone from strength to strength, with each new volume of criticism a welcome addition to the library of any aficionado of horror films. Long gone are the days when your pernickety reviewer could have a whinge about poor proofreading or the shoddy reproduction of film stills.

Time then for a quick look at some of the latest releases.

CARRIE
(Auteur Publishing pb, 100pp, £9.99) by Neil Mitchell presents a cogently argued critical analysis of the Brian De Palma film based on Stephen King’s first published novel, opening with a brief account of the film’s importance and then moving on to tell us how King came to the idea, the very real people who were the inspiration for Carrie White. Mitchell gives us an overview of the careers of both King and De Palma to that point, and discusses how
Carrie
transformed the fortunes of both (for King it was the breakthrough novel; for De Palma the film that gave him the commercial clout to pursue his creative ambitions). As well as an in-depth examination of the film and its subtext – the outsider with special abilities who seeks nothing more than acceptance but is turned into a monster by peer pressure – Mitchell places it within the context of the horror genre, showing how it tapped into the public psyche and teen trends, the influence the film has had, becoming the focal point of a whole new subgenre dealing with the kind of monsters critic Kim Newman has christened “psicopaths”.

In addition to the critical content there are also some fascinating titbits of film lore that aficionados will love, such as the fact that casting auditions for
Carrie
were held concurrently with those for
Star Wars
(Amy Irving was earmarked by Lucas for the role of Princess Leia and Carrie Fisher read for the lead role in De Palma’s film – there’s a doctoral thesis waiting to be written on how those cast substitutions would have transformed the fantasies of a generation) and that plans to shoot the opening scene from the novel, in which rocks bombard the roof of the White household, were abandoned when the conveyor belt loading them broke down. Overall what we have here is a fascinating and insightful book that is both eminently readable and for most will throw new light onto a classic of the genre.

Jez Conolly’s
THE THING
(Auteur Publishing pb, 108pp, £9.99) opens with a very personal reminiscence about the first time he saw Carpenter’s film, memories that glow with the fervour he brings to the page. As well as the obligatory plot synopsis, there’s a section in which he looks at the film’s history, going from its initial reception (poor box office and almost universal panning by the critics) through to cult status and then, thanks to celebrity boosters such as Tarantino and critical reassessment by Anne Billson, acknowledgement as a classic of the horror genre (moral of the story: it’s not over till the monster hit bursts out of the also ran’s belly).

Conolly examines such things as the feelings evoked by the almost totally white landscape of the Antarctic setting, the claustrophobia of the men imprisoned in US Outpost 31, the original story by J.W. Campbell, and Howard Hawks’ 1951 take on the material. He doesn’t gloss over the various inconsistencies in the story, but considers them largely irrelevant, and he looks at the film’s influence, finding in its scenes of gore and physical transformation an initial appearance of what has subsequently been labelled “body horror”, with the flesh rebelling against us. There’s also a consideration of the so-called prequel from a couple of years back. And interwoven with all this is an attempt to touch on the themes of the film, not just the intimate betrayal that is representative of body horror, but also the extinction event fears that underlie so much of what takes place, the idea of men involved in an impossible struggle, one they can’t hope to win.

Writer Barry Forshaw is the editor of
Crime Time
magazine, a publication specialising in crime fiction, and this I feel gives his assessment of
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
(Auteur Publishing pb, 102pp, £9.99) a slightly different slant to the other volumes in the Devil’s Advocates series. Forshaw sets out his stall early on, declaring that “this study will attempt to contextualise the work of Thomas Harris, demonstrating how the films made of his work (most notably Demme’s
The Silence of the Lambs
) are as crucial to his success and critical standing as the original novels”. It’s an unusual opening gambit especially for a book of film criticism that is supposed to be focused on a particular work, and I can’t help wondering if something else was originally intended and then quickly revamped to fit the Devil’s Advocate template. Certainly Forshaw seems very much a Harris fanboy, though as far as that goes it’s hard to dispute the claims he makes for the author, and there’s rather more concentration on the literary forerunners to the film(s) than I would have expected. Forshaw talks a lot about how Harris has revolutionised both the horror and crime genres, but that I can see he never actually comes out and says exactly how. Regarding both Harris and star Anthony Hopkins, Forshaw seems almost combative at times – those who accuse Harris of falling standards in his later work are dismissed but not really refuted, while the preference for Brian Cox’s rendition of Lecter from the character’s first cinematic outing in
Manhunter
that you find in some circles is described as “an interesting syndrome”.

I’m possibly getting hung up on a side issue here, as certainly the book does Jonathan Demme’s film ample justice, all Harris adulation aside. It is an absorbing and worthwhile read, a volume that, if at times the structure feels slightly ramshackle, contains a wealth of fascinating material, Forshaw delineating the popularity of the serial killer in fiction and film, then going on to show why Lecter is such a formidable and distinctive example of the type. There are potted biographies of the three main contributors, Hopkins, Jonathan Demme and Jodie Foster, plus a balanced consideration of some of the controversy that surrounded the film and its sequels (e.g. the different ending to
Hannibal
in Harris’ book and the 2001 Ridley Scott film), a look at the director’s visual palette and examination of feminist themes in the way Starling is treated by her colleagues. I’d say it’s not quite on a par with other DA volumes, mainly because of Forshaw’s focus on the writer (Mitchell gets the balance right in his consideration of King and
Carrie
), but still an engaging and eminently interesting text.

As well as the Devil’s Advocate range, three times a year Auteur publish a magazine of more general film criticism, and while this would usually be outside my remit
SPLICE Vol7 #1
(Auteur Publishing pb, 84pp, £14.99), edited by John Atkinson, celebrates the twenty fifth anniversary of Tim Burton’s
Batman
by devoting a whole issue to the director’s oeuvre, and Burton is most definitely a person of interest for horror buffs.

James Rose kicks off with a critical appraisal of
Batman Returns
, discussing themes found in the film, how they recur in Burton’s work, and showing how far ahead of its time the film was. In particular he explores the theme of inversion and how this relates to the person of Selina Kyle/Catwoman, offering us a fascinating interpretation of the character. In ‘Behind the Picket Fence’ Matthew Hammond takes a look at the concept of the American family as presented in Burton’s work, contrasting the societal ideal with the director’s model in which we celebrate the camaraderie of outcasts, the family unit reified along lines that don’t hinge on a blood relationship and, ultimately, may prove more inclusive. Warren Holmes tries to pin down the appeal of
Edward Scissorhands
, identifying and discussing both its universal themes and those that are Burton’s alone, noting the Gothic fairy tale nature of the narrative and wondering if it is correctly regarded as a family film.

From Antony Mullen we have a consideration of Burton’s films for children,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and
Alice in Wonderland
, and not the least of what he discusses is whether these films contain more than their fair share of darkness and madness. After some lucid book reviews by editor Atkinson, we get back to Burton with Judith Gunn’s assessment of
Sleepy Hollow
, my personal favourite from the director’s oeuvre. Her essay touches on the historical context provided by the story, the visual look of the film and the themes that it contains. These are all elegant and informative essays, well-argued and not afraid to take an unpopular stand. You may agree or disagree with the fine print, as is your want, but there is no doubting that the authors know their stuff and will provide plenty of food for thought.

A word about the book itself – I’ve only seen a PDF, but it appears to be a well-designed package, with excellent layout and black and white film stills used generously throughout, plus the occasional colour shot. More succinctly – looks good.