Uneasy Tales
What can you tell us about Quiet Houses, Lost Places and Uneasy Tales?

Well, they’re all by me, they’re all short story collections and they all contain mostly horror stories.
Of course, if you want more detail, I suppose I could tell you that I tend to write about ghosts and monsters (both real and imagined), and to try to use these ideas and images to explore how I feel about the world, about my relationships, about how people interact with and react to each other, and along the way I hope to provide some chills and some upset and some fun. I don’t generally write gross-out horror or gore, although I do like to use the biology of fear and won’t shy away from blood or other bodily fluids if they help the story along. I use foul language on occasion and once or twice will make reference to the act that men and women (or men and men, or women and women) do in private and that generally makes them smile.
Lost Places was my first collection, and the stories in it are not linked except by some common threads and themes, whereas Quiet Houses is a portmanteau: the stories form a larger whole, with each mostly revolving around a single character, Richard Nakata, a parapsychology researcher working in the north of England. All the stories in Quiet Houses, and most in Lost Places, are set in real locales, or slightly blurred versions of real locales, especially places in and around Lancaster and Morecambe. Both have been well-received.
Uneasy Tales is a mini-collection, and is only available as an eBook – it’s self-published, and was more an experiment in whether I could do it or not. Most of the stories in it are about bodily collapse of some form…
What attracts you to the short story form?
They’re quicker to do! And, flippancy aside, they’re an excellent way of learning to write. Creating good short stories is a craft, and good short story writers learn their craft by trying to achieve things in two or four or ten thousand words before they go on to novels. In the horror field, it’s also a good way of increasing your chances of getting into print – the small press is quite healthy and produces a fair amount of anthologies. Writers can build up a reputation by submitting to various presses, by writing to order when asked, by proving themselves capable of condensing ideas and actions and plots and characters into limited amounts of prose.
This isn’t to criticize authors who don’t write short stories, incidentally, or to try and make claims that I know everything about writing short stories – I simply know that my writing improved immeasurably when I started to concentrate on short stories (after writing a novel that, it turned out, wasn’t actually very good). Short stories forced me to focus on pretty much every word, to think through plotting and how to illustrate character and place, all within tight limits. For me, they’ve been a great way of learning how to write far, far better than I was able to previously. I think, as well, that because of their nature you can use them to explore ideas without committing to large pieces of work. Could I have written a novel about the members of a self-help group turning into animals? No, but it worked well as a story and didn’t outstay its welcome.
Besides, they’re fun.
Your story the Church on the Island was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story, so how did this make you feel as a writer?
Stunned! It was my first published story, and I was excited simply to see it in print, let alone for anyone to actually notice it. I got the email about being nominated whilst I was on a weekend away and read it on my phone, and it didn’t quite seem real at first. I remember reading the email about 5 times, each time thinking that I’d read some part of it wrong in my earlier readings, that it would suddenly make sense, or I’d realize they were talking about someone else, but each time it said the same thing. Eventually, I started to tell people and, if I’m honest, I’ve never really stopped. I went to Calgary for the awards ceremony and although I didn't win, the experience was fantastic – I met fellow authors, people who had been heroes of mine for years, and discovered that they were, in the main, lovely and down to earth. I mean, I had a Chinese meal with one of my literary heroes, and to be honest it doesn’t get much better than that!
What made you want to write contemporary fiction, when so many stories of similar ilk are set back in time?
The first part of my answer to this is, because that’s my world. My own preference is for stories set in worlds I recognise, and when I came to write my ghost stories it seemed an obvious choice to set them in places and times I know and love – every story I’ve written is set a very specific venue that I know well, and even though I may alter the geography or change their names to suit plot or character, people who know the places will, I think, recognise them. For me, it’s about getting the stories to be as scary, creepy or upsetting as possible – and what’s more frightening than something terrible lurking in a place you recognise and know well, right at this moment in time? Time is a part of place, of course – the Manchester I know now isn't the Manchester I knew ten years ago, for example – so a contemporary setting simply adds, to me, to the sense that this is a story that could be happening right now; in a place you thought you were safe… Also, if I write about the past, I have to research it to get it right; writing about the present is simpler – I just look around and there it is.
I think it’s also important to point something out here, though: classic ghost stories are set in the past so often because that’s when they were written. MR James, for example, mostly wrote about his contemporaries, about the academics he saw every day (or versions of them at any rate). His stories are usually set in what was for him the present, or at least in the near past, much like mine are set in my own present or near past. In a hundred years, my own stories will be historical ghost stories, set in a time that no longer exists…
You have featured in many other collections, such as Lovecraft e-zine so what can you tell us about these experiences?
Most of the time, especially early in a writing career, you write a story and send it off, and then you wait to see if the editor likes it. Sometimes the stories are entirely random ones, sometimes they’re written to fit the anthology guidelines, but there are no guarantees and selection is a question of trial and error, trial and more error. Appearances in anthologies are a joy because they mean someone picked your story out of their pile and placed it above other people’s work; it means that you’re getting there.
I’m lucky; the stories I wrote went down well enough for editors to start approaching me and asking me to submit to their anthologies. There’s still no guarantee, of course; what I write might not be liked, or it might be crap, and therefore still be rejected. Being asked is no promise of being accepted, but the odds tend to be slightly better. Getting an acceptance is still a joy, and rejections can be useful to remind you that just because you had a good couple of reviews, it doesn’t make you anything special.
In terms of my own history, no acceptance is any more important or special than any other, but I do particularly value my first print appearance (in the excellent Ash Tree Press anthology At Ease with the Dead), my first appearance in Stephen Jones’ The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and my acceptance for the Ellen Datlow-edited Lovecraft Unbound (because this was the first anthology I was invited to submit to, and I finally managed to get it right with the fourth story I sent Ellen who deserves an award for reading everything I emailed her without complaint). My story in the forthcoming IDW anthology Zombies Vs Robots: Diplomacy was my first acceptance at professional rates of pay (as opposed to my more usual payment of a tenner or thereabouts and a copy of the book!), which makes it kind of special. The bottom line is, any acceptance is important because it means I’m still producing work people want to read, and for an author, that’s the most important thing there is.
How difficult is it to write in your genre given that the market in both movies and books is saturated?
It’s only difficult if you worry about the market! Which may sound flippant, but it’s true – unless I’m writing for a specific anthology or magazine, I write what I feel like writing and I trust (arrogant sod that I am) that it’ll find a home eventually. When I wrote my first novel, I wrote it simply because I thought that writing the sort of thing I liked to read would be fun, and it was. Above everything I’ve learned since about writing, I still basically write what I want to read, and I can think of no better advice to give anyone wanting to write than that. If there are guidelines, work out not what you think the editor might want to read, but rather, how do you fit your own personal style, themes, interests, concerns, tones and fears into what they’ve said they want. It means you get to write what you like, within reason, and to enjoy it, and the editor hopefully gets something that fits their guidelines but is also full of your passion and feeling because it matters to you.
What is the appeal of the haunted house for you and the reader?
I could be all knowledgeable-sounding here and talk about how ghost stories give us a sense that death is not the end, that they are ultimately a way of reassuring ourselves that our lives having meaning beyond the meat and skin of ourselves, that they allow us to explore what the great beyond may be like, and all this may be true, but you know what? I think it’s simpler than that: I think we like to be scared witless and to come out the other side alive. I write what I like, and I like haunted house stories, so haunted house stories are good, scary fun for me as both author and reader. Hopefully my readers feel the same way.
Your stories are said to be terrifying, so what scares you the most in fiction and the everyday?
The ‘real’ stuff is easy: harm coming to my family and friends, particularly harm I cannot control, or fail to see and do not prevent. Most of my stories deal with life’s fragility in one sense or another; there’s a lot in my first collection about being a dad (or trying to be) and about children (or their relationships with their parents and, more specifically, their fathers) being threatened by forces that are uncontrollable, unknowable and usually unstoppable, because at the time it was written I was a relatively new father and was worrying almost constantly about the kind of parent I would turn out to be. That fear, that I’m not a good enough man, still lurks in me; I’m terrified I’ll hurt the people I love by my cowardice or inaction, or worse, by my actions. I know I’m not perfect, of course, but the question is, what level of imperfection do I contain? Can I be the magnificent boyfriend I want to be and that I think my girlfriend has a right to have? The dad I feel my son deserves? The brother or child my sister and parents expect? It’s scary stuff this real life, because I’m fallible…
Also, I don’t like wasps, the idea of someone cutting my thumbs off with scissors or the thought of being eaten by a bloody great bear.
As for fiction, that’s a tougher one. The written word rarely scares me (except for political parties’ election manifestos and my credit card bills), although I will admit to being unable to get out of bed to go to the toilet because King’s The Shining had creeped me out so much. Fiction isn’t visceral enough to cause jumps, its power is more deep-seated, the imagery and ideas it contains taking root like some weird red weed and growing without pause. The best fictions don’t frighten me so much as they do set my world off-kilter, making me look at things differently for the rest of my life. ‘Salem’s Lot made me look at towns differently, TED Klein’s novella ‘Children of the Kingdom’ made me look at the ground beneath my feet with suspicion, To Kill a Mockingbird made me cry and probably did more to ferment my social beliefs and politics than any other book, The Haunting of Hill House made me question the solidity of the walls around me, House of Leaves gave me a sleepless moment or two and most of MR James’ ghost stories cause little shivers to run down my spine. For me, writing is about the glory of the words and the worlds they create – good, bad, tilted, stable, sunlit or dark. When I write, yes I want to scare people but I also want to take my readers to new versions of the worlds they recognize, and I tend to search for authors that do that for me.
What is next for you?
Short answer: dunno. I have a novel (not the not very good one I mentioned earlier) with an agent but I have no idea if he’ll be able to sell it or not. I could write a sequel to it if there’s a request to, and I have a ghost story/possession novel I want to write that brings back Nakata from Quiet Houses. I have stories coming out in this year’s Best New Horror and Year’s Best Fantasy, which is really cool, and I’m working on a couple of story commissions for editors in UK and US. I need to put some serious time into my website at some point, because it’s a bit bare at the moment. I’m appearing at the WordFest in Cheshire in July, doing a signing at the Revenge of the UKGK (a garage/model expo kit day run by the excellent Creature Features store), also in Cheshire, and a discussion panel and possibly story reading the Association of Anomalous Phenomena’s conference in September. Past that, I have no idea: I don’t really plan, I just push and poke and wait to see what pushes or pokes back. So far, the universe has pushed and poked me in pretty much the right set of directions; good on it, I say, and long may it continue.